It’s dance without music, acting without a script and theater without a stage. Today, the Fowler Museum at UCLA will showcase “Unruly Bits: Improvisational Dances,” a creative collaboration by two UCLA students as a part of the museum’s Fowler Out Loud series.
The performance will forgo traditional elements of theater while attempting to provoke contemplation of beauty and the human body.
“Unruly Bits” was created by second-year world arts and cultures graduate students Allison Wyper and Maria Gillespie exclusively for Fowler Out Loud, combining improvisational dance with audience interaction.
“It’s really going to take what Fowler Out Loud does and almost make it Fowler Alive,” said Sara Stranovsky, coordinator for Fowler Out Loud. “They’re going to be animating the entire museum. We’ve had a lot of musicians and dancers, so it will be fun to have something that may be more difficult to classify.”
A far cry from a typical dance recital, 10 male and female dancers from the Los Angeles area will utilize the courtyard, hallways and galleries of the Fowler Museum.
Using contemporary body movements and elaborate costumes, they will attempt to corrupt the traditional view of an acceptable body.
“The title “˜Unruly Bits’ refers to the unmentionables of the body,” Gillespie said. “There are so many rules and regulations we construct around the body. We are interested in removing that boundary and looking at the body in a different way ““ in particular, figuring out what is in between the grotesque and the sublime.”
The grotesque-sublime body dichotomy was a central concern for both Wyper and Gillespie, eventually inspiring the theme of their Fowler Out Loud performance.
“We’re using this performance as a way to destabilize the idea of a classical body or a grotesque body,” Wyper said. “And we’re doing that by bringing dance into a museum setting, to play with how we look at the body.”
Along with body movement, the performers will employ several symbolic elements such as plastic, representing a barrier for intimacy between bodies. Lighting will be manipulated to illuminate the body in beautiful or unflattering ways.
“Some of what you will see will be very bizarre,” Wyper said. “We’re interrogating the beauty on display. So a lot of the pieces question what is beautiful and also cause the audience to question what is on exhibit, what’s beautiful and what’s worthy of being in a museum.”
For many of the performers, the message resonates on a deeper level. Wyper said she believes the performance is a way to respond to the narrow view of how her body should look as a performer.
“I think that being a woman performer, I’m always confronting beauty and my body on stage, literally, and what it means to be a woman ““ what kind of body is traditionally allowed or expected on stage,” Wyper said. “Within the expectations of the female body on stage, there’s the ability to counteract that. It gives me the opportunity to play with theatrical convention and upset people’s expectations.”
Being improvisational, the performance has only a basic outline of tasks for each performer to complete, with scores written by Wyper and Gillespie. Plans were only solidified over winter break, and the dancers all merged for the first time just one week ago.
“I hope that seeing improvisational scores in an outdoor museum will allow the audience to see that dance can engage with other kinds of ideas besides those of performing in a (theater),” Gillespie said.
“Unruly Bits” will also seek to remove the barrier between performers and their audience by dispersing among the viewers and engaging with them in the performance.
“The performers hope to break down this expectation … where viewers are supposed to have one perspective … a silent, unmoving perspective … and actually feel engaged to move, speak and mingle with the performance and the art,” Gillespie said.
Though Stranovsky, like the performers themselves, is not quite sure what will happen during the improvised scores, she anticipates the performance to be a unique, enlightening addition to the Fowler Out Loud series and the UCLA community.
“I think (the audience) will find it a journey, not just a performance,” Stranovsky said. “Once it’s over they are going to think, “˜Wow, what just happened?’ But in a good way.”