They’ll Take the Stairs and Defy Some Gravity

<First published on line in the New York Times on August 22, 2007>

The great impresario Florenz Ziegfeld was famous for his use of stairs. As in the films of Busby Berkeley (a onetime colleague of Ziegfeld), legions of girls, girls, girls would line the many staircases in his spectacular productions. Yet even Ziegfeld can never have had stairs as impressive as those that front the United States Custom House in Lower Manhattan: stone, 37 of them, widening as they descend.

They are the location for “Accounting for Customs” by Reggie Wilson and Andréya Ouamba, one of the most memorable — though brief (15 minutes) — site-specific pieces I have seen. A program note advises that its ideas arise from the Custom House’s history, and that it “wrestles with questions of memory and loss and how people innovate within and against traditions.”

There is further stuff about “displaced and exiled communities,” cultural memory and loss, and the African diaspora. But such words, though apposite, belong on grant applications. It would be a pity to watch this work more for socio-historic meaning than for sheer sensuous pleasure.

Surely neither Ziegfeld nor Berkeley ever tried the masterstroke that occurs soon after the start of this work: The nine dancers lie full length on the steps and roll horizontally up, up both sides of the stairs, up either side of the central rail. This isn’t the only image that contradicts your every expectation of the kind of dancing that might be done on a staircase. One man does the splits diagonally across several steps and folds forward.

The expanding triangle of the staircase also prompts Mr. Wilson and Mr. Ouamba to a marvelous image of accumulation: One dancer starts a sideways cross-kicking phrase, then another, until we see the whole staircase animated by canonic utterances of this basic phrase.

A similar format occurs later with a one-legged balancing sequence. One dancer after another, each at a different point on the staircase, stands on one leg, the raised leg forming the tail end of a single diagonal through-the-body gestural line, and then sways or begins to rotate, like a mobile. The image might easily look childish on a single dancer on a conventional stage; seen across the spread of these stairs, it becomes gorgeous.

In another seemingly simple image we see some dancers processing down and others up. On these stairs this looks like history in motion. Some of the movement is done with individual dancers stretching along the stair walls, even stroking the giant pedestals beneath the statues on either side.

The two choreographers never become stuck in a movement rut. “Accounting for Customs” must leave any observer wishing it were longer. Often the dancers are moving at different speeds and in separate phrases. We’re never watching an ensemble of synchronized uniformity.

The program lists more than nine performers: Mr. Wilson, four others from his Fist & Heel Performance Group and six guest artists. The nine dancers in Wednesday’s 12:30 performance — wearing sneakers and a motley range of clothes, including skirts, shorts, a cap and shorts, but almost all in various shades of brown — ranged from Euro to Afro in racial look, from full-breasted women to skinny boys, and the thoroughly inexperienced look some had contributed to the sense that this was indeed a work about history and the passage of humanity.

The selection of music, ranging from traditional African to old jazz, did much to suggest different layers of African-American cultural memory. Similarly, the range of movement — some of it spasmodic, gestural, driven — made its expressive point. But the main spell of “Accounting for Customs” is of a beauty that transcends any socio-cultural message. Eat your heart out, Flo Ziegfeld: You never used stairs like this.

@New York Times, 2007