Kim Brandt hasn’t made a dance for a theater since 2014, when her “Untitled” was at the Kitchen. It was over before you knew it. I’ll never forget it.
Twenty-four performers formed a pile, a mountain of bodies, and stayed that way for as long as they could manage. It made for a spellbinding five or six minutes (the length depended on the performance) of strength, control and physicality, bound by silent, internal communication. No one was in charge. How did they know when to collapse?
“It’s like hive minds,” Brandt said. “They feel each other, and then they all together dissolve the structure across the space.”
In the more than 10 years since, Brandt, 46, has presented works in cemeteries, in galleries and at the dome at MoMA PS1, earning a reputation as a serious, enterprising site-specific artist. She danced as a child and always knew she wanted to be a choreographer, but it took, she said, “a long time for me to figure out how I wanted to do it.”
Brandt has a master’s degree in sculpture and that training shapes how she sees dance and its environments.
Now she has a new challenge: Rockaway Beach. “I’ve been thinking about how the beach is so feral,” she said, with a laugh. “There’s so much you cannot control, and not that I want to at all, ever — I’m not interested in that as a choreographer. But there’s just so many elements to deal with.”
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post At First, It Was Beachy. Then It Became a New York City Dance. appeared first on New York Times.
