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PICTURE REDHOOK
August 27, 2002 - Tuesday
A Little Night Magic For The Past
By JENNIFER DUNNING
Dancing in the Streets has produced site-specific programs in areas throughout New York City for 19 years. Many of the programs have been devoted to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and to Red Hook's vivid, checkered history. Joanna Haigood is the latest artist to respond to the neighborhood's haunting allure. And her "Picture Red Hook," performed on Saturday night by her Zaccho Dance Theater, based in San Francisco, is a beauty.
Ms. Haigood has a special gift for revisiting history and bringing it alive in unexpected ways. For "Picture Red Hook" she settled on an abandoned 12-story grain terminal, the last in New York, that rises in isolated splendor from a site now known as the Gowanus Industrial Park.
The evening began with a welcome by a juggling stilt walker, David Sharps, who left behind him darkness and a silence that slowly filled with humming industrial sounds. Then one performer ascended in a spot of light to the facade of the terminal, followed gradually by others, pin pricks of light that appeared and disappeared in the vast night.
Eventually seven performers (Ms. Haigood and Paul Benney, Suzanne Gallo, Sheila Lopez, Jose Navarrete, Shakiri and Kimm E. Ward) swung through the air from the terminal's silvery, mottled surface and rounded, joined silos, dangling high from ropes and small plank platforms. Tiny specks of body and shadow, they negotiated the quick-shifting images that played across the surface in a 100-foot-high video installation by Mary Ellen Strom. Ms. Strom smoothly wove in clips from the 1940's, when the busy port of Red Hook came into its own as an industrial area only to fold a decade or so later when New Jersey container ports diverted business from the waterfront. Fascinating views of the inner workings of the grain terminal flowed by, along with views of the neighborhood at various times in its history.
Neither Ms. Strom nor Ms. Haigood touched on the wilder aspects of that history, times of waterfront barroom brawls and gang activities. (That was covered in Ms. Haigood's customary detailed history of her subjects, tucked into the program in the form of a news sheet.) Instead Ms. Haigood distilled history in this visually dazzling piece, with love and sadness.
Proud residents talk on video of their dreams for the community. They are ordinary dreams of decent housing, local commerce and more jobs. But the development that has already begun in the area clearly threatens the spectral beauty of the place, a vision that might have been painted by Charles Sheeler in a post-apocalyptic mood. Fields of grain blowing in a strong wind across the terminal at the end suggest a larger but turbulent vision of the nation as a whole.
But Ms. Haigood and her collaborators, who also included the composer Lauren Weinger, the lighting designer Jack Carpenter and the set designer Wayne Campbell, celebrate a wrecked beauty that is still largely intact. Magically she suspends the viewer in a timeless world. The present was alive in the glowing red chimney tower and the full moon drifting into view from behind the terminal. But figures glimpsed through empty windows in small abandoned buildings seemed to inhabit several centuries, as did the misty distant industrial cityscape beyond the water that rings the industrial park.
Ms. Haigood, seen at the end cooking and washing dishes and gazing out from a faraway ruined and empty room, embodied the everyday. A small discrete focal point, she proclaimed that history is nothing more than the individual lives lived through it. "Picture Red Hook" is an impressive accomplishment.
