Dance, Performance Art : Tanya Hinkel’s ‘Troy’ Exploits Its Post-Industrial Setting

Imagine being part of a scene that looks like a surreal Edward Hopper painting: a balmy summer night in old, industrial, downtown L.A., with cars from a freight yard softly rumbling by, just feet away from an artfully lit abandoned structure with doorless portals and iron fire escapes.

Next to it stands the shell of an historic meatpacking plant, the Bingo Building, where the main event takes place. A cavernous rectangle, easily four stories high, it has open rafters, luminous window panes near its pitched roof and a dirt floor.

Any visual dramaturg would have to be intrigued by the possibilities here--which was exactly the case with Tanya Hinkel, a performance artist specializing in site-specific creations.

Her latest, “Troy,” a loose retelling of the ancient city’s legendary siege and subsequent decimation of its male population, had its premiere Friday and exploited this locale’s natural elements.

Striking images were effected by backlighting and long shadows cast on silent figures suddenly appearing at the building’s far end. The best of these involved six Trojan women, who formed a phalanx and, in their prim ‘30s street wear, came forward in a slow, trance-like procession.

But even in this most substantive episode--the women undress and repeatedly stick themselves with their hatpins in symbolic punishment--the means fell below the stated message: “to explore the loss of self-worth in a devastated culture.”

Too little came too late. The audience, made to wait 40 minutes for a delayed performance beginning at 9:40, sat in backless bleachers and watched various, desultory, poorly dispatched visual stunts that were hardly worth the effort--either in themselves or as touchstones of the purported theme.