CIVIC MANAGEMENT and CROWD CONTROL

New York City is a dynamic instance of how large groups of people circulate in efficient networks of flows without feeling entirely managed. On a given weekend, crowds swell and receede in neighborhoods for a variety of public events. This is a city of parades, demonstrations, carnivals, unrests, protests, festivals and fairs. What is remarkable is the strategic shift in flux and flows of people from borough to borough and from district to district within boroughs, despite local strangle holds of crowds and densities.  The infrastructural contractions and expansions of the city's crowd management and surveillance personnel is large and remarkable to watch. On the one hand, one objects to the excessive policing and heavy handed presence of the police that is so customary to New Yorkers, but still very disconcerting. This heavy militarized presence around protests for Amadou Diallo at Dag Skarmahold Plaza a few years ago was shocking in its over reaching presence.  The more recent scaling back of the heavy militarized presence around public events and a visible easing of attitudes between civilians and the police in large public events is tangible.  The NYPD have a tough job on their hands, but their more recent restraint in volatile public situations has eased the register of anxiety between the police and the public a little, since the overt confrontation during the Diallo protests and the more recent Sean Bell non violent protests by Sharpton and other activists.

UTOPIA on HUDSON STREET, NYC

It is June 28, 2009 and Hudson Street below me is packed with vendors marketing gay paraphernelia.  The air is thick with anticipation celebrating 40 years of Stonewall.  It is the biggest carnival day for this part of town, and this is a big anniversary.  The whole West Village is in hyper active mode the entire weekend every end of June for this utopian festival. The pulse of energy is infectious.  Sometimes, the utopia gets buried under the commercialism, the crowds, the anxiety and excessive production of identities.  It is a time of extraordinary costuming, magnificent adornment and cliches. The carnivalesque state of the inversion of power and the playfulness of sexual identities is momentarily relieving. The hyperbole of the weekend contrasts with the discretion of daily life in New York City. New Yorkers are less inclined to be limited by race, gender or sexuality as defining markers.  Self fashioning in the metropolis is more toned down in its daily identifications- more negotiated and cosmopolitan. People have to work across heterogeneities, differences, geographies, religious beliefs.  So the mass influx of more provincially attired social identities is both visually interesting, and somewhat predictable.  It foregrounds the play of urban and suburban styles of self production.  This is a big year: Gay Marriage is the big agenda this carnival season, and the determination to make the next big jump to normalize Gay Rights is tangible. It is shocking that New York State has not achieved this goal in the 21st century.  This undermines our claims to being the metropolitan center of the world, whose radical ideas of urban life and social living have impacted how other cities imagine their futures.  We cannot move forward without resolving this untenable contradiction: legalizing gay rights is a neccessary part of American's urban futures.

DREAMING ON THE HIGHLINE

Yesterday, Harmattan Theater's proposal to the Highline to stage Henry Hudson's Forgotten Maps was rejected.  It is only the second week since the Highline opened its elevated thoroughfares to the world, and the rejection is an invitation to keep dreaming of projects on the Highline.  I began to dream images of what I would like to stage on the Highline after I saw the spectacular exhibit on the 750 designs that were submitted for the competition to design the Highline in early 2003.  The Highline invites people to dream.  It is a place of dreaming- surrounded by the light of the river and the refracted light of buildings-  the Highline allows people to float beyond the city for a moment.  The 750 dreams of that landmark competition was revealing- as they opened out the possibility of New York City's potential for adaptive reuse on a scale never imagined before.  Instead of soaring wings that continue to have to be scaled back as has been the case of Santiago Calatrava's design for the Ground Zero terminal, the people of New York literally float above the city, dreaming new dreams about impossible theater on the Highline.

GLOBAL POLIS

The AIA New York Chapter had a panel session titled Global Polis, with closing remarks by Ron Schiffman.  The session raised some of the concerns about human activity that Harmattan Theater is very interested in.  Place still matters in the age of virtual space.  How do people occupy space in their daily lives.  The panel took the metaphor of 311 as an overarching set of networks linking communities A, B, and C over a broad cross section of concerns that intersect between individuals and the locality.  What emerged in the discussion is the realisation that biopower is still the most powerful antidote to apathy.  People still matter and space still evokes tactile responses that are physical and communal, in an age of dispersal and fragmentation.  The question is what are some of the linkages drawing disparate heterogenous constituencies to dialogue about issues that they would otherwise not connect on any grounds about.  The level of the neighborhood is one level.  The level of the integrated block with the eyes on the street continues to mean distinct things in ways that other ideas of community have long moved away from. In the junctures between habitation and dailiness lie the sparks of dramatic action.  What moves people to act, to care about cities?  This remains an unpredictable arrangement that alters from city to city. 

LIQUIDITY, HISTORY, EPHEMERAL ART

Creating art in the public spaces of metropolitan centers raises peculiar challenges.  In the context of Harmattan Theater's Governor's Island project involving Hudson River water and the waterline of the island, the question of liquidity posed itself as a tool of history.  The text of the piece titled Henry Hudson's Forgotten Maps takes the 16th century maritime economies as the moment of departure.  Liquidity forged a new idea of the world in the sixteenth century.  Oceans opened up avenues of flows, geographies were no longer terrestrially bound- the imagination wandered beyond the open sea's curve.  Using this idea of liquidity as a historic linkage, the performance opened up the question of new york's water traces: the rivers, lakes, ponds, rivulets that have been buried over.  The beaches that were built over.  The question we asked was how do contemporary landscapes evoke older cartographies of knowing and world making.  The company chose to work with edible materials: milk, hudson river water, sugar mixed with water to add texture and glaze, egg whites mixed with water and milk to add viscosity- on the bitumen of the former military outpost.  The challenge of trying to inscribe on bitumen with biodegradable materials that are sucked into the harsh elements of the bitumen alone was mesmerizing.  The impact of human contact making lyrical and beautiful images on hard and unused landscapes, was one objective of the performance.  This tradition of inscribing on the public faces of transit is not new.  It is a venerable new york tradition made popular by the Graffiti artists of NYC.  What the performance achieves is a certain relationality between toxicity and biodegradable logics, between the permanence of military architectures and the fluidity of artistic improvisations that foreground otherwise dead sites of habitation.  Fulfilling the Governors Island debate about what to do with Governors Island, the Harmattan Theater project opened up the island's potential to make livable and stimulating what has for too long been viewed as largely a penitentiary and abandoned military outpost.  Through the performance of Henry Hudson's Forgotten Maps, the notion of a liquid history and the island's ephemerality is underscored.  The interdependency of this island city to the global economy, as well as its image as a tenuous place in its own imaginary is solidified. 

EVAPORATION

The interdiscplinary group of artists spearheading the Harmattan Theater company's investigation into the relationship between New York City's rivers and estuaries and its land mass are intrinsically preoccupied with the present ecology of New York City and its historic pasts embedded in the landfills, macadam, slants and slopes of the city.  Evaporation is a key concept we have been working with in relating the impact of the Hudson River water to its rocky surroundings.  In the Soho project of Living Lines, we started with the topography of the area presented by the Viele Map of the 1800's.  The question of how to relate the historicity of the area to its current usage influenced our choice of materials, visual metaphors and aesthetic categories of scaling.  SoHo's industrial past and italian american cultural roots accentuated the visual signals of the final shape the Living Lines installation took, of factory lines, clotheslines, exposed materiality, layered perceptions of how things are seen.  Here the idea of evaporation became a visual cue layered through the mylar and acetate drawings, so the images of human movement achieved a certain translucency, a spectral quality of multiple realities unfolding, the past and the present, through the lens of embodied time.

The Henry Hudson Project on Governors Island in June 2009 worked expressly with evaporation as a physical principle of marking, reclamation, healing, contamination, forgetting, and trace.  The site chosen was at a forceful point of water contact- waves spraying onto the pavement at high tide and exposing a splendid stretch of beach at low tide.  This stretch of beach became a focal point of our show as we used the Hudson River water as a key element of imprinting images on the landscape.  The residual outlines of human movement, flowers, feet, leaves, milk and sugar, left by the Hudson River's overflow, raised tactile questions about the relationship of human activity to waterfronts, the cleanliness of the river's water for human consumption, and its continuing abundance and generosity as an energey resource.  Evaporation in this performance became a mnemonic marker as well as a visual metaphor for the future of thinking about human demands on water resources.  And the river's power to impact our life.

HENRY HUDSON'S FORGOTTEN MAPS June 12/14, 2009

The Henry Hudsons Forgotten Maps project performed by Harmattan Theater June 12 and 14, 2009 is a site specific installation/performance performed on the Eastern shore of Governor's Island.  The dramatic panoramic backdrop of a spectacular stretch of beach, the Brooklyn Bridge, the cityscape of Brooklyn dockyards, and the crescendo of pounding waves provided the mise en scene for this piece about history, maps, ghosts and indigenous rights.  Using the historic archives of the Dutch East India Company and the ethnographic implications of the sale of Governors Island for the price of 2 axeheads, a handful of nails and some white beads, the piece explores the connections between the historic past and our urban future.  Drawing upon traditions of Odissi dancing and Tango concertina, as well as the ecstatic carnatic vocal traditions of bhakti music, the performance opened up the striations of time and space through the poetry of Dante Aligheri's Fifth Canto from The Divine Comedy.  The ghost of Henry Hudson threads through the performance as a mournful presence in search of arrival, haunting the shores of New York City with his ghostly travels.  Grounding the movements of long duration strung across the long boundaries of the island, were the drawings on the ground in milk, sugar, and egg whites, done by Victoria Marshall and Jose De Jesus.  The performance involved 10 cast members including Adam Lelyveld, Carol Mathews-Nicoli, Lisabeth During, Martine Gak, James Cascaito, Puma Perl, Latha Ramprasad, Nandini Sikand.  Directed by May Joseph.