At first I felt foolish when I arrived at the “Gone! Gala Happening,” which benefited the Karole Armitage Foundation—a prestigious modern dance group, in case you didn’t know. For some reason, I thought the event title “Gone!” meant the foundation’s namesake was gone for a sabbatical or retirement or something.
But there she was, standing in the reception foyer of Capitale on February 3, greeting guests, making chitchat, and being distinctly not gone. She’s impossible to miss—she’s the dance world’s Annie Lennox doppelgänger in both appearance (tall, gangly, platinum pixie) and talent (wholly original, occasionally shocking, cutting-edge with classical training).
So I started asking around. I asked the executive director, Lynn Moffat, the gala’s producer, Melissa Feldman of MF Productions, and the event’s publicist, Richard Kornberg, what was with the title.
None of them really knew, but were game about trying to answer.
“Well, she was gone—she went to Europe for a number of years.”
“Have you asked her? You need to ask her!”
“You know, I wondered too why she calls it ‘Gone!’ When you find out, will you tell me?”
She spent the cocktail hour surrounded by her art-world supporters, who walked up one by one to say hello. Salman Rushdie (with Padma’s replacement, a 30-something girl in a ribbon strappy dress that looked just as good and just as revealing as the one January Jones wore to the Golden Globes), Fran Lebowitz (in funny preppy duck boots), Ross Bleckner, and Stephanie Seymour Brant (a co-chair, reunited with her hubby, Peter, who was also there, so never you mind about all that).
But I finally got my moment. “Karole, why ‘Gone!’?”
“Oh that’s easy. Gone from the mainstream! Gone from the predictable! And also from the beatnik phrase—she’s a gone gal.”
Now that that’s settled, let me try and just break through the myriad layers of the Gone! Happening. I think that you’ll agree the name fits.
A “happening,” of course, was a specific type of event that came out of the ’60s art and music intertwining. Think Yoko and John on the bed rolling down the street. I think.
Since the event was held on Chinese New Year at Capitale, which is in Chinatown, and since this was the Year of the Pig (for me it feels like every year is the Year of the Pig) or the Rabbit—I couldn’t be sure—they had little golden animals on the hors d’oeuvre trays. The appetizers were Asian-inspired—fried lotus with a ginger dipping sauce was a standout from the house caterers.) And the dinner (the first course was like a mini pupu platter) stayed with the theme via Alba Clemente-designed centerpieces of Chinese parasols. (I love Alba Clemente, doesn’t everyone?)
Did I forget the giant inflatable piggy? How could I forget the inflatable piggy by Jeff Koons? Not since Pink Floyd’s Animals tour have I been so transfixed by an inflatable pig, this one all pink and soft and powered by an internal fan you could glimpse through its vinyl eyes that looked like an umbilical cord. It was cool and a little bit gross.
This year’s silent and live auction, “Exquisite Corpses,” was curated by artist David Salle, who serves as the foundation’s chair and who got up and explained the idea’s origin. The phrase is a translation of the Parisian 1920s parlor game invented and played by artists like Yves Tanguy and Jacques Prévert and a bunch of others whose names sounded familiar, but were not actually familiar enough to be recalled by this rube of a writer. I too invent parlor games—come over some time and we’ll play “Name that Cue Ball!” which is a game where you guess which celebrities wear a wig. (It’s more fun than it sounds.) So I was riveted.
Anyway, their idea was that they would fold up a piece of paper and pass it around the room, each player able to see only the words written by the previous player. The goal was to make a single sentence. Then they’d read it to each other and laugh and drink wine and just have a helluva time. Think of it as Mad Libs encroyable.
The name of the game comes from the first sentence it produced: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the fine bottle of bubbling wine.”
So Mr. Salle came up with the idea of challenging artists to the same conceit. Teams of three to four would draw an exquisite corpse—a human figure, top to bottom, head, upper torso, lower torso, legs. The idea is that you wouldn’t get to see the other people’s parts till it was all assembled.
I pray that my clumsy explanation makes sense, but can I just say that the end result (it took over a year to collect the art from over 200 participants) was mesmerizing. Art-world honcho and former MoMA president Agnes Gund bid $5,000 in the silent auction on a corpse that featured a head made of ceramic tiles by an artist named Invader and a lower torso by Robert Wilson, the guy who runs the Watermill Center. Another one I liked had a head by Laurie Anderson, self-identified as a “sad elf.” A few of these went unsold and are available at armitagegonedance.org.
All of this and the dinner hasn’t even started yet. Time to speed things up.
Okay, next was an entry performance by the dance troupe, which also had a few guest performers from the Dance Theatre of Harlem. They wore masks and moved spookily. Choreographer and performance artist Richard Move also wore a mask, his way more elaborate and spookier still, and acted as the M.C. It was a little confusing. His mask was a rabbit, like the one in Donnie Darko (by now, you’re all hip to this as the cult movie to watch with friends, right?), and now I think maybe last year was Year of the Pig and this year is Year of the Rabbit. Really, I need to take better notes.
There was more confusion in an announcement about a change in the order of the three separate dance pieces. Karole got up and explained that she had just come back from Moscow, where she did something with the Bolshoi, mais bien sur, and fell in love with the music of Bartók. So that was what she had her heart set on performing, but apparently getting the rights to Bartók wasn’t so easy. So anyway, the program of performances was all different from what you read in your hands, but I wouldn’t really have known had she not said anything. But I’m glad she did—it all sounded so brainy and artsy, you know.
I think the one I liked best was called “GAGA-Gaku,” and in it dancers wore plastic and fabric tunics that were very futuristic and they danced on the ledges of the building. It was neat, but I don’t really pretend to know anything about dance. Oh, yeah—the music was very loud and had a headbanging quality that made it easy to pay attention.
(By the way, the foundation’s 2011 season runs from April 26 to May 8 at the Joyce Theater.)
One of the best things that happens when you go to one of these truly interesting and artistic events is that all the people there are truly interesting and artistic themselves. I met Kristen Shaw, whose blog getoveryourselfplease.blogspot.com and whose “fascinator” (that’s the kind of hat you wear to Ascot; Kristen thinks Kate Middleton is going to bring the fascinator back) simply fascinated me, all the more so for only costing $10.
At my table there was some handsome actor whose name I forget; Countess Corinne Tatiana von Nordmann, who is on the board of the Metropolitan Opera and who kind of seemed to be with a lady who claimed to have visited 127 countries and learned to cook something from most of them; and countertenor Anthony Ross Costanzo. Anthony reminded me that countertenors are those guys who sing with really high voices. “Like the castrati!” I blurted out, glad to kind of remember the word, but then embarrassed when I recalled its meaning. But Anthony was polite, and we talked about Klaus Nomi’s (another countertenor) performance of Henry Purcell’s “The Cold Song,” and every person at the table passed around the pen so they could write down the name of the song and go look it up. I’d never sat at a table where everyone passed around the pen and wrote down the name of the song to then go look it up. It was all so—oh, it was just nice. By the way, Anthony told me he is performing at the Metropolitan Opera on New Year’s Eve, so if you are into countertenors and/or you really want to lock down your New Year’s Eve plans way in advance, well, there you are.
But then, of course, the clock struck midnight and the pig turned into the rabbit. (Or is it the other way around?) [This is the Year of the Rabbit and 2007 was the Year of the Pig, but why Jeff Koons and our columnist are still fixated on the pig is anyone’s guess. —Ed.] All was over, and I was kind of sad, but happy too, because for a moment, a brief shining moment, I was with people who didn’t talk about where they got their outfits or Sarah Palin and it was really nice.
