Ellis Wood's Fire on Wall Street is creating quite a fire in the hearts of dance critics. Look out, Venus can burn.

Field Notes: Dance, Performance & Theater Commentary by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The Ladies Who Lurch

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

John Rockwell--taste arbiter for the affluent and powerful in his position as Senior Dance Critic of The New York Times--seemed highly incensed at the notion of the all-female Ellis Wood Dance using the balconies of a building just a few blocks away from Ground Zero for a Sitelines site-specific show called Fire on Wall Street. "Insensitive," he deemed it in his review today. "Tasteless." "Rude." "Silliness." But from the look of things, neither stockbrokers nor tourists seemed to mind it much, which might say more about the sorry state of public engagement with the art of dance than about Ellis Wood’s own ability to get a rise out of people.

The title--Fire on Wall Street–works either as a news headline or a command. Twenty fiery women dressed in "flesh"-toned underwear and haphazardly wrapped in wisps of scarlet tulle dangle over the balcony railings and around the Corinthian colonnade of 55 Wall Street, a financial and architectural landmark, and home of the ritzy Cipriani Wall Street restaurant. Wood has created a deliberately over-the-top vision, splashing a prime icon of white male dominion with the red of women’s blood. She has summoned Venus in the person of Cheryl Cochran, a black actress whose electronically-amplified voice breathes fire down upon our heads as she recites inflammatory text by Bil Wright, a noted black gay poet and novelist.

This Venus is no inoffensively sweet love goddess but the original fierce Aphrodite come back to reclaim her throne. She’s flanked by a militant chorus of sirens, banshees, and bacchantes who coyly beckon us forward then wave us away, writhe around and over the rails, rotate their heads as if in trance, and lash the air with their streaming or spiky tresses. There’s music, too--by Daniel Bernard Roumain--but maybe Wood should have hooked up with Diamanda Galas.

If you still own a sense of humor–or at least a rebellious nature--try to catch Fire on Wall Street, which runs again August 28-30 at noon and 12:30pm. It’s free, just short of fifteen minutes, and a hoot.

Fire on Wall Street is a production of Sitelines, curated by Nolini Barretto and presented by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and in association with the River to River® Festival. For more information, visit www.lmcc.net/sitelines and www.RiverToRiverNYC.com. For information on Ellis Wood Dance, visit www.wooddance.net.

©2006, Eva Yaa Asantewaa