sarma

I like walking around New York looking up at old loft buildings and office buildings and warehouses. Sometimes way up there above the racks, trucks, crates and new foyers, sprout Medusa heads, cherubs, improbable beasts, wreaths of sooty fruit and flowers. Cruder, but still fascinating, the roofs are often grotesque playgrounds. Girders, water towers, steps that lead to nowhere, little buildings housing mysteriously clicking equipment, railings, skylights, chimneys.

I walked, rode, hauled myself up to the roof of some ante-everything building at Broadway and 12th Street to see a preview of Elizabeth Keen's roof dance, "On Edge". We emerged from a dirty hell of a stairway into the air to be confronted by Laura Pawel, Davidson Lloyd, Ted Striggles -open-mouthed gargoyles tangled up on a higher level of roof. Snarling and hissing and clawing they descend a ladder, while Keen perilously shinnies down from the high water tower. They canter off to arched brick interstices in a beautiful and meaningless wall hanging up over Union Square. Three girls in jeans climb off girders and sit in chairs; we follow. They turn out to be a Baroque trio; we turn out to be the audience.

Keen and her gang swing out into individual arches. Together, they stretch into the little spaces -feeling how the body feels good there. They wedge themselves in -feet off the ground- like nocturnal animals in the crotches of trees. What are they anyway? People, I know. But also like gargoyles, cats, monkeys that gibber antagonism and the next minute stroke and groom each other. These days, Keen is playing around with the face as a part of the dance instrument, twisting it into hideously virtuosic positions. At first, the four of them in their bright multi-colored shirts and their crazy energy look out of place on the stern old roof. After a while, I accept them: this is where they live, these are the things they do.

Their snarling faces and their hostility are wild and funny. The reckless way they run up walls, throw legs over parapets 16 floors above death is insanely lovely. A couple of times Striggles and Pawel begin a friendly mating duet, and both times Lloyd lurches between them with an apple in his mouth.

Keen is enamoured of the special shapes and spaces on this roof - I can see that. It's the girders, ledges, ladders, arches that she likes. The plain old open space that all roofs have interests her less. It becomes mainly a neutral crouching place, or an area to chase each other through. I find myself wishing she'd use it more.

Finally the dancers begin to move slowly, one by one, onto the slanting girders and crossbeams under the water tower. We have to turn to the West to see them. The musicians, who have been playing all along, move on to a particularly affecting Baroque suite. The dancers, quietly helpful to each other now, climb under, over, and through the structure. They walk smoothly down the perilous slant of the girders. Why is it suddenly so moving? The sun begins to set behind them. They curl up in the iron branches and sleep.