Wooster creative forces have really outdone themselves. No less a renowned figure than Andy Warhol is showcased at the Ebert Art Center, and Wooster students have found away to make Warhol’s art their own.
This alchemy was the result of an inspired meeting. The current Ebert exhibition features Warhol photographs of celebrities and socialites, taken during the last decade of the artist’s life, many of them simple point-and-shoot or Polaroid snapshots. Continuing their tradition of featuring student work alongside gallery installations, the art museum invited students of Kim Tritt’s choreography class to create their own interpretations of Warhol’s photography for performance in the gallery. Each of the student choreographers rose to the occasion, creating dance pieces that capitalized (and expanded) on the wealth of concept that lies within Warhol’s artwork.
Of course, that the photographs themselves were merely a springboard (and arguably outshone by the dancing) is exactly the sort of thing that would have pleased Warhol, obsessed as he was with the infinite production and reproduction of art, imitation and variation. The student choreographers effectively ran Warhol’s creative logic in reverse. Warhol’s art so boldly admits that it’s just a commercialized repackaging of the Real Thing; these dances were an attempt at reasserting the human dimension of Warhol’s subjects (at a critical two degrees of separationóthe subject isn’t just people but art itself). While Warhol’s art is endlessly provocative, both escapist and confrontational, these dances were firmly located in human drama.
The program opened with choreography by Kathleen Metcalfe ’10, based on a photograph of Margaret Hamilton, who famously portrayed the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.” Drawing on a quote from Warhol on the real versus perceived self, the dance was playful and free-spirited, an apt contrast to the role for which the world would remember were. Small nuggets of the Wicked Witch, when they surfaced, were therefore given a new resonance, and the drama of the dance played out as an ingenious struggle against these witch motifs.
Ellie Lawrence ’11, took upon herself arguably the most difficult photographic subject, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Making dance out of an athlete poses unique difficulties, as translating movement to unlike movement carries more pitfalls than translating something less active, perhaps because it carries the temptation to be constrained too much by the movements of sports. This dance, for the most part, avoided these hazards, and while it was muscular it managed also to be contemplative, affirming the activities of the body and the activities of the mind as inseparable. Lawrence was not afraid to acknowledge the difficulty of this translation, either: she wore basketball shoes during her performance, both comical and entirely apt as they squeaked against the gallery floor.
Kaitlin Yankello ’11, whose work as a choreographer I’ve really enjoyed in the past, did not disappoint in her creation of BillyBoy*. Taking as its inspiration a quote by the subject about opposites meeting, the tightly woven piece framed economical but fully realized images of attraction and repulsion, animated by the sway between the two.
Adriana Maxton’s (’13) Ashraf Pahlavi piece carried a regal quality befitting the sister of the late Shah of Iran. The dance also incorporated Eastern motifs which intriguingly opposed the Americanness associated with Andy Warhol (and the Velvet Underground songs playing in the background throughout the performance).
The choreography of Brandelle Knights ’12, based on a photograph of Phyllis Diller, closed the evening in appropriately Warholian fashion. The central Warhol quote, concerning his love for plastic and Hollywood, called attention to the artificiality of dance itself, easing the audience back into Warhol’s world of glamor and pop culture after a performance which, though Warholian in origin, transcended both.