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Volume
II
Issue 11 March 2000
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Memo from the World: Victory Girl at MASS MoCA by Laurie McLeod [In August of
1999, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA,
presented dance theater performances by Victory Girl Productions. In
their publicity materials, they promised: "It's the simplest of
theatrical magic. An antidote to the contemporary flood of computer
induced images in our world. A reminder that the best technology
available is still our own imaginations." Ms. McLeod, Director
of Victory Girl, sent the following report.] MASS MoCA was a huge challenge for us as a company and came at a very challenging time for MoCA (birthing pains in such a big, brilliant organization). However, we gave three and a half sold-out performances of our Twelve Incantations / Millennium Project, wherein the audience watched the performance from both lying-down and seated positions. We created individual mats for every person and each one had a pillow. The rows and rows of mats and pillows were a sight to behold. I was really nervous about how the audience would respond, but across the board people were very game and open. The act of 170 people lying down around one another had a wonderful "informalizing" effect on all. Everyone chatted with everyone else. It bred a collectivity that was terrific. In the center front of the audience we had a person called "the sitter," who would guide the audience as to what position to watch from at any given time. It was wild just to hear the kind of noise that the audience made when shifting from lying on their right side to lying on their left. The first night I didn't know what was happening. I thought an army of squirrels had suddenly gotten loose in the theater! The piece itself was wonderfully well received. We had a talk-back at the end of every evening, and 90% of the people said they enjoyed lying down and that they had experienced a definite shift in their perspective. It was wonderful.  Photo copyright Beverly Brown 1999. Reproduced with permission. The reason we did three and a half performances is because opening night (when I was standing ten feet in the air hanging from a crane) all the lights in the room went out. After a few minutes, generator lights came back on, and we found out there had a been a blackout all over the city. Everyone had to go home and come back another night. Can you believe it? Never a dull moment at Victory Girl. Other events: I am making a new solo for the spring called One Gold Hand and will begin my next evening-length work Gling Guards the Door this summer. Later perhaps I
will write to you about the Arctic. The story of performing for 300
Russian coal miners is a wild and woolly tale (matched only by the
story of when we were on horses that went crazy out of control and
began galloping on glare ice away from the town as night was falling
and a storm was blowing in, and we had no gun to protect us from
polar bears - augh! but perhaps that's not the kind of thing that
would interest your readers....) About our Correspondent: Laurie McLeod is an independent choreographer, writer, dancer and teacher based in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She established Victory Girl Productions, an umbrella organization for her creative projects, in 1996. According to its website, "Victory Girl's mission is to create world class performance works and perform them both locally and globally; to use dance and movement as catalysts to educate people of all ages; to create a model for using dance as an agent for social change; and to act as a model for portraying the performing arts as a financially viable profession." The website is at: http://www.victorygirl.com
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