Nareeporn Vachananda
Jonathan Marshall
Nareeporn Vachananda’s Konstantinos Tsetsonis
Nareeporn Vachananda’s choreographic development is striking not only because of various performance opportunities—Dancehouse’s open seasons, Great Escapes (1998-9), curator/performer Stephanie Glickman’s Focus 4 (2002), but also from initiating her own, small-scale program of works–in-development: the Inspiration Series 1 and 2 (2003). This series showed her solo work-in-progress Opposite My House Is a Funeral Parlour and studies by Ashley May Mariani (Program) and Ilan Abrahams (Ritual For ReInhabitation). Vachananda has a slight, thin form, which she employs with considerable grace and poise in performance. She worked with the Grotowski-inspired dance-maker Tony Yap in director Michael Kantor’s production of Meat Party (2000). Yap’s often violently ecstatic technique has imparted a radical darkness and ambiguity to Vachananda’s choreography, distancing it from Western cliches of grace in the female Eastern dancer and rearticulating those qualities already embedded within Vachananda’s movement and physique, into a more progressive, avant-garde context. Vachananda’s current project is an ambivalent study of the twisted psychokinesis generated by the meditation of the individual on death and absolute negativity and how this can act in some contexts as a positive journey with an uncertain and potentially revelatory significance for the living subject. The Inspiration showings indicate that Vachananda’s solo is already an arrestingly layered, minimalist work; a style she seems likely to continue to investigate, building on her formalistic study mounted within Focus 4.
RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 14
