Filament: "Wilderness" Review

“Wilderness” was the only show that I could see during the Filament festival. I don’t understand much about choreography and dancing. I cannot easily evaluate the performance or the choreography, but it seemed like an outstanding performance to me and the meaning of space in the work was of particular interest to me.

“Wilderness” is created by Yanira Castro and her team, a carnary torsi. Yanira Castro is a New York city based director and choreographer. Her works can be called “hybrid performances” which are performances composed of a variety of visual and aural media elements (www.filament.empac.rpi.edu, www.yaniracastrocompany.org).
A canari torsi, which Yanira Castro is the director and instigator of, is a New York city based, dance focused, media collaboration performance project group. (www.filament.empac.rpi.edu, www.acanarytorsi.org)

The work, “Wilderness”, is a performance. The venue was the lobby of EMPAC, and the stage was an oval floor surrounded by 16 lights and 8 speakers. The floor was covered with pieces of black rubber made from shredded tires. The performance basically had two parts. The first part was an old man’s solo performance. The second part was four dancers’ performance. The performance itself was a little bit strange and difficult to me. Personally, after a few readings about the director and performers, I expected a multimedia collaborative performance, but I couldn’t find significant use of media and technology in the performance. Also, I couldn’t actually understand the meaning of the gestures and sounds they made. However, the way they created and used the space to create new meaning of the space was very interesting.


The multiplicity of spaces is the performance group’s basic interest. On their website, they say, “We work in a multiplicity of spaces, from warehouses to tiny restrooms to the stage, inviting audiences to make it personal”(http://acanarytorsi.org). For the “Wilderness” of Filament, they changed the space of the lobby to the stage for the performance. This made the audience have strange feelings, and made them think about the meaning and function of stage and see the space itself, the lobby of the theater, in a different point of view.

In the first part of the performance, an old man in black cloth performed a kind of dance, making noise. He started to perform around the center of the stage, which was surrounded with chairs for the audience. The space the old man initially used looked like a space for a performer. But after some time, he started to invade the audience’s space. He approached me, and talked to me and went around between chairs, making the audience confused where the stage was and where they had to watch. After a staff moved the chairs out of the stage, the audience became more confused and somewhat uncomfortable. Where is the place for audience? The audience just sat or stood somewhere in the stage in somewhat unsettled posture.

When the four dancers performed, the dancer’s performance tangled the space between them and the audience. The performers threw themselves around the stage and between people in the audience, sometimes making people in the audience move back and forth. The performers also asked questions which audience members were expected to answer and sometimes involved audiences in small tasks as a part of their performance. This made the audience feel more engaged and involved in the performance space. The audience occupied part of the stage and interacted with performers and became part of a group of performers. Finally, the people who were left on the stage at the end of the performance were audience members. The traditionally divided two spaces, stage and auditorium, were mingled in the performance and made me think about what the stage is, what the roles of performer and audience are, and what the meaning of space in this performance was.