TOOL IS LOOT
2011
This excerpt is approximately 24 min. into the 70 min. work
Choreography, Libretto and Performance: Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey
Original Musical Score: Jonathan Bepler
Lighting Design: Thomas Dunn
Recorded: October 2011 at The Kitchen, NYC, in front of live audience
“We would like to believe that our bodies and our brains are fantastically flexible and responsive to change, containing - at any moment - both the abstract and the specific. Well… what we’ve learned is that this is both gloriously true and frustratingly untrue. But that’s okay, really, and this dance proves it. There will be a swan, a prince, a robot, sexual behavior and two chairs. Sometimes all at once.” – Wally Cardona & Jennifer Lacey
For one year, choreographers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey worked apart, holding tandem projects, in the U.S. and France respectively. Each artist solicited weeklong encounters with non-dance experts, voluntarily subjecting their aesthetic position to a barrage of assessment, opinions and desires from the “outsiders”, including an astro-physicist, sommelier, architect, film editor, medical supply salesman, kinetic sculptor, baroque opera singer, art critic, acoustician and social activist. None of the material generated from these encounters is in TOOL IS LOOT. Rather, the work has been formed through aesthetic propositions that persisted because of their foreignness. The opinions and interpretations of composer Jonathan Bepler and lighting designer Thomas Dunn function as yet another clarification and reinterpretation of TOOL IS LOOT.