Fluid Measure Performance Company
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I haven’t always loved everything I’ve seen of theirs. In fact, by the mid-80s, after seeing a piece by Pelletier at MoMing, I feared her work had run aground in concept, dialogue, and heavy-handed drama. And I thought Mandel’s work in the mid-80s, though beautifully executed, was just so-so. So what’s happened? It seems to me this sea change must be due in part to the way Fluid Measure members have influenced one another, bringing their considerable talents in dance, contact improvisation, visual art, voice, and writing together. Part of their success too may be that since the late 70s they’ve continued to work and to develop their individual artistic voices and practice has indeed made perfect. And since the three of them began working together, in 1987, they’ve influenced one another in a wondrous way. A subtlety and beauty have emerged that transform their stark, painful, at times bleak subject matter into powerful, even funny stuff–what can only be called great performance in the tradition of Chicago narrative art.
Part of the magic has to do with the way they work together. Though the concept for each piece at the Dance Center may have originated with any one of them, each was ultimately created by all three in rehearsal. As anyone who’s worked by committee knows, this is a difficult process with far from surefire results, but here it’s had the effect of honing these concepts into works of real weight and beauty, of truth and authenticity, each standing on its own as a fully developed piece. When people tell me they neither understand nor like performance, this is the sort of work I wish I could pull out of my pocket and show them.
In Whyoming, written by Pelletier, a woman seems to confront the dichotomy between desire and reality, the everyday and the transcendent–she’s caught somewhere between a wish and a lie. Wondering at unfulfilled desires (a handsome park ranger is the object of a momentary heart flutter) and the reality of her life as a wife and mother, the woman (played by Pelletier) despairs when a glass of wine tips over and crashes to the floor.
