Collaborative Vision on Display in Powerful ‘Tie/Earthbeat 2001’

Enormous bamboo poles hanging in clusters at various angles or lying on the floor created a striking environment for “Tie/Earthbeat 2001,” a stark yet atmospheric collaboration between sculptor Stephen Glassman, dancer-choreographer Oguri and sound designer Robert Scott at the Electric Lodge arts center in Venice on Friday.

As Glassman manipulated the height and tilt of the poles with ropes and pulleys, Oguri adjusted his actions to the changing spatial conditions and Scott supplied live accompaniments, ranging from rippling wooden percussion to unusual sounds of great delicacy: the click of a spinning bicycle wheel, for example.

Naked except for a genital sock, Oguri seemed to feel his way across and through the bamboo clusters, sustaining his inner focus and slow-motion style over the piece’s 55-minute length and making the horizontal emphasis of his movement a challenge to both conventional concepts of dance and his own stamina.

Crawling under a massive hanging clump of poles near the end, he rose and wedged himself against them as if bearing all their weight on his shoulders and head.

A program note explained “Tie/Earthbeat 2001” in terms of man’s accommodation to nature (“the relationship between the body and the earth”), but here Oguri evoked the endless, crushing toil of workers forced to the edge of their endurance not by nature but by other men. His environmental dance statement thus proved powerfully political.