bridgman packer dance, ghost factory @ sloan performing arts center, university of rochester performing arts institute, 25 october 2024.
Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer’s dance work, Ghost Factory, uses a combination of live performance and recorded video to explore the vast, vacant spaces of a shut-down shoe factory in Johnson City, New York, near Binghamton. More crucially, the two-person dance work seeks to evoke the spectral stories of those who once labored in the factory. Blending bodies and machines, the hour-long piece strives to summon the vanished lifeworld of working-class activities in the shoe factory, which of course come from an earlier era when bodies and machines also interacted. The interplay of stage and screen thus becomes a meditation on the past interplay of workerly embodiment and industrial production. We are watching, in the present, bodies and machines as they interact in a performance about a now-historical moment of bodies and machines interacting. In this sense, Ghost Factory also becomes an investigation of the contemporaneous and the historical, the present and the past, now and then.
Within, behind, sometimes right through video projections on scrims and sometimes on large, rectangular, moveable blocks of fabric, the two dancers, dressed elegantly in dress and black shirt and pants, elegantly paced, twirled, bent down, raised up hands to the sides or ceiling. Sometimes they seemed to be stitching shoes, particularly in a wonderful solo by Bridgman in which he sat sideways to the audience in a chair and repeated the motion as four duplicates of him appeared on the screen doing the same thing. At another point, filmed from above on the screen, Packer rolled across the floor of the factory. Then she also rolled out from below the scrim across the floor of the stage, tipping the sense of orientation into a dizzying displacement of space. Where were we exactly? In the factory? In the theater? In the past? In the present? We found ourselves increasingly somewhere liminal, maybe in a corridor or tunnel of memory, in transition.
Overall, by appearing in the video and on stage, by playing with space both in the filmed sequences and in the theater itself, Bridgman and Packer strived, calmly, to bring to the present bygone times and peoples. There was a sense of dignity to the affair in the portrayals of bodies at work, bodies remembering old motions and movements and feelings. It culminated in a lovely couple dance scene to jazz. As the video seemed to transform into an abandoned basement music club stripped to the crumbling concrete walls, on stage Bridgman and Packer clutched and held each other, spun and swayed. They leaned on each others’ shoulders before parting ways.
The dynamic of screen and stage, video and embodiment, renders a layered and textured work about absence and presence, about things vanishing and things persisting, about memory and immediacy and how they might, possibly, relate to each other. Screen and stage even blur in Ghost Factory until you sometimes cannot tell the difference between the two. A real body dancing in the theater arises out of the shadow of the same body in the factory space of the video. An interior space of pipes and peeling paint and dripping pools of water sometimes seemed bigger than the theater itself. It threatened to absorb the stage into its epic emptiness. At one point, a pond of water in the video rippled across the two dancers on screen in the factory and it almost felt as if the stage itself was getting wet. Displaced multiple times over, from embodiment on stage to video to abandoned factory to the life that used to inhabit the filmed spaces, everything began almost to dissolve into, or at least ripple across, the theatrical space of the now. What was real and what was projected, what was embodied and what was ghostly, what was being brought to life before your eyes and what was long gone became almost indistinguishable.
Ghost Factory seemed to want to go back, to bring life to the past and the past to life; but ultimately, however, the sense was that this might be impossible. “All gone,” a woman’s voice from an oral history interview rang out through the theater sound system, taken from an oral history recording of a former worker at the shoe factory, “All gone.” Ghosts leapt up before us, both in bodies and in pixels, but eventually they both exhausted themselves and flickered away. We were left with a sense of sad abandonment, of forlorn loss. It wasn’t tumultuous so much as peaceful, mournful, a kind of service, an acknowledgment. One could even say that the performance entailed an unburdening. It did not excavate the past so much as summon it up to say goodbye to it. At the same time, if you wanted to notice, there were invisible spirits all around, their phantasmic fading hands trying to hang on, still stitching, with shoes whose orders remained to be completed.
Toward the end of the performance, Packer stopped suddenly and bent over, letting one arm swing back and forth, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Time was ticking, and there was really no strategy of screen or body, video or dance, that could stop it. The more the dancers tried, with elegance and grace, to resuscitate the world of the factory and its working people, the more forcefully the sense of emptiness and lostness intensified. The video was high definition, but the memories grew oddly more grainy, indefinite, shadowy. The screen was bright, but eventually the bodies disappeared into the dark. History had its way. In a ghost factory, some shoes you cannot fill, some scrims you cannot cross.