Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – The stimulating, often trailblazing COIL, in its 13th iteration, closes shop

• By drediman
• January 30, 2018
• No Comments

2018 marks the 13^th and, sadly, final iteration of the Coil Festival. Over the years, Coil has provided stimulating, often trailblazing, performances across theater, dance, performance art, everything in between, and sometimes beyond. Despite a somewhat truncated number of offerings (I caught three out of six), this year’s lineup was no exception. Coil 2018, which wraps up on February 4^th, also inaugurated the wonderfully renovated Performance Space in the East Village, which served as the home base for this year’s festival. Here are my thoughts.

visions of beauty

Heather Kravas’s “visions of beauty”

Heather Kravas

Heather Kravas is a contemporary choreographer who demands us to engage with and lean into her works. Her latest, visions of beauty, for this year’s Coil, maintains layers of fleeting suggestion and challenges our notions on a variety of topics – dance, our role in perceiving dance, friction/momentum, human relationships, our bodies, and of course, beauty. Even if the whole thing struck me as a messy, albeit irresistible, collage of ideas that barely hung together, visions of beauty is the work of a fiercely intelligent artist unafraid to express herself in exciting new ways. The company of nine – Andrew Champlin, Tarek Halaby, Michael Helland, John Hoobyar, Michael Ingle, Joey Kipp, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Kayvon Pourazar and Saúl Ulerio – were each fearless, idiosyncratic. As an ensemble, they were magnetic.

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Jupiter’s Lifeless Moons

Dane Terry’s “Jupiter’s Lifeless Moons”

Dane Terry

I had a wicked good time at Dane Terry’s hallucinatory monologue-with-backup Jupiter’s Lifeless Moons. When it comes to storytelling, Mr. Terry is like a mad scientist. He creates surreal dreamscapes that are like intoxicating brainchildren of filmmaker David Lynch and cabaret and performance artist Erin Markey. I won’t bother summarizing Jupiter’s Lifeless Moons‘ plot, except to say that it’s a wild ride – sexy, and just on this side of coherent (I leave it up to you to decide which side). As a performer, Mr. Terry is seductive, deadpan, and very funny. His backup performers, Avery Leigh Draut, Morgan Meadows, Saretta Wesley, shared the same sensibility.

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Petra

Dean Moss’s “Petra”

Dean Moss

Alas, Dean Moss’s Petra marked my final Coil performance, ever. It’s a fitting piece to commemorate the entirety of my relationship with the festival. Petra straddles performance art, theater, and dance in a way that’s also a self-referential commentary on contemporary performance itself. Even if Mr. Moss’s work, which uses Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as a launching point and stars an array of recognizable faces from the world of downtown avant-garde performance (Kaneza Schaal, Samita Sinha, Mina Nishimura, Sari Nordman, and Paz Tanjuaquio), seems more an intellectual and performative exercise than a visceral theatrical experience, it’s a nonetheless a fitting farewell to a festival that has played an integral, formative, and eye-opening role in my many years of theatergoing.

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COIL FESTIVAL
Theater/Dance/Performance
Performance Space 122
Through February 4