You Could Learn A Lot From a Bunny*

Chashama’s Dance Festival Presents the Finance Set With Options…(but not that kind)

*with all due respect to Vince and Larry

What: Oasis Festival 2006
Location: Chashama at 217 E. 42nd Street
Date July 10-July 21, 2006
Cost: FREE
Bohemian Factor: Performers: High; Audience: Low (This IS midtown, after all…)
Geek Factor: Low

Audiences, especially I-need-my-wireless-device-stapled-to-my-person New Yorkers, are used to getting instructions before performances. However, at Chashama, when a woman in a red dress tells her audience to turn on their cell phones, and in fact, make a phone call during the piece, nobody seems concerned.

It turns out that choreographer Erin Malley is counting on the audience to dictate what her dancers are going to do next, based on phone calls, a deck of cards, and doorbell-like buttons on the window that produce WB cartoon-like sound effects.

Of course, the fact that the MC for this event is a tall and aggressive man in a giant blue bunny costume is already a pretty good indicator that the work presented as Chashama’s Oasis 2006 Festival is going to be, say, a tad different from a night at The Joyce.

Oasis is a festival of modern dance, now in its ninth season, presenting 20-minute pieces by a roster of 40 choreographers for free between July 10 and July 21. They are performed on the stage in front of Chashama’s window onto 42nd Street, so that those already in attendance have the additional entertainment of watching not just the dances, but the evolving facial expressions and body language of briefcase-carrying midtown wheelers and dealers who stop, look up from their cell phone head sets, and become confused, revolted, excited, or all of the above, by the performance just inside the window. Many of them, wrested out the crowd by our Bunny-Man, walk in through the open door and add themselves to the audience, while others hesitate for a minute and resist the weirdness. At any rate, the decision-making moment is always fun to watch.

Did I mention there was dancing?

Malley’s piece features several dancers embodying different florescent colors (with their wigs, they could double as the Color Kids). But this is no “Choose Your Own Adventure” style improvised dance- (e.g. I wouldn’t recommend shouting “Do the Macarena!”). Each dancer has a cell phone whose ring sends them off on a mini-solo (the numbers for each are displayed on posters on the window). Movement phrases correspond to a series of large mysterious cards with words written on them, picked out by audience members/passers by. (The cards have the phrased “Play the Dance” written on them, with pictures of – mysteriously – dollar bills). This is not the place to be if you want to shun the limelight. Ms. Malley will see you trying to blend in with the crowd and thrust the deck of cards your way.

Despite the horrific humidity, at least half of the audience is persuaded by Malley to watch the piece from the Chashama’s window outside, where the four noise-making buttons have been suctioned-cupped to the windows (“Go ahead and PUSH our buttons!” she yells out authoritatively.) Some were less shy about this than others: one of the very well-groomed, youngish executive types is particularly zealous about pushing all the buttons, which we are advised not to do as it would be difficult for the dancers to follow all the "requests" simultaneously. While the theme song of Green Acres sends the Dancer Dressed in Green into motion, Bunny Man comes out and announces he needs a cigarette.

“You came outside to tell us THAT?” Malley asks in mock horror.

Later on, Malley is shadowed, inside the window, by another dancer in a similar red dress and blond wig, who tempts her with an apple. The choreographer seems to think about eating fruit a lot (a banana shows up later on), but of course, who doesn’t?

Malley’s show is just one of the 40, of what is sure to be a varied program (the preceding number featured two women locked into mortal combat; intense and intimate, though not gratuitous, it did lure a large number of male spectators inside).

What Bunny-Man has announced to potential viewers is also articulated to me by one of the dancers (in a slightly less confrontational way, of course): that the purpose is to make modern dance accessible to those who never would never consider heading to the Joyce or City Center, who view it as too esoteric. By plopping a visceral, interactive experience practically on their laps as they head to and from work, Malley’s piece and the Oasis Festival could entice those in the Charles Schwab set to slow down and push the buttons.