Canal area site-photo from Peripheral City [Enlarge in New Window]

Red Dive: Peripheral City

The audience for Peripheral Cities has to be ready to go with the flow. This latest performance piece by Red Dive, a collaborative group of site-specific dance and theater artists, takes place along the banks of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, and viewers watch the piece from the decks of a riverboat as it floats along the former industrial waterway. They'll see various works performed on pontoon boats, under bridges, and beside building walls, with visuals projected against trees, earth, and other unexpected surfaces. Live narration is provided by ecologist and boat captain Bill Sheehan ("Captain Bill" to friends and ticket holders), an expert on the species renewal the canal is currently undergoing. The multisensory Peripheral Cities is both a poetic reflection of a changing city and an education on everything from the environment to the economy to gardening.

Staged by Red Dive artistic director Maureen Brennan, Peripheral Cities will be the Bessie Award-winning group's fifth and most ambitious installation since it formed in 1994. "It's our first real outdoor event," says Brennan. "I think it's our most site-specific, in the true sense of the word." Sound and video for the piece is being created in collaboration with Marylis Ernst, who recently did video for the Foundry Theater's Obie-winning play Talk, by Carl Hancock Rux. The choreography, by Red Dive co-founder Ashley Smith, will take place on and under bridges, on the riverbank, and will be revealed to viewers as the boat meanders through the canal.

But Brennan says that the dance will involve more than just bodies and video images. "We're also working with the timing of when the boat stops, when the bridge opens," she explains. "We're trying to keep all that together and synchronized." As the audience rides along, they'll be treated to Captain Bill's narrative about the inhabitants of the canal neighborhoods and the efforts to clean up and revitalize the once-polluted waterway.

Brennan says the Red Dive collaborators - including Smith, and theater artists Kerry Lowe and Ellen Baird - began developing Peripheral Cities as a way to challenge themselves. "We wanted to play with scale," Brennan says. In addition, "we knew we wanted to work with the element of surprise." As they continued researching the canal, Brennan explains, "we realized it had to be about the canal itself, not some generic water piece."

The group's method of tailoring a work to a specific location exemplifies what Red Dive does best. Their 1999 installation Inhabited, for example, used the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York as a site for evoking the buried histories of U.S. immigration. "I'm not interested in just bringing audiences to an alternative location," explains Brennan. "For me it means drawing your material from the site itself."

And Brennan, a long-time Brooklynite and member of organizations like the Brooklyn Waterfront Association, knows the canal site well. "You have people who have lived there for eons, and they have so many stories about the canal, then you have young artists who've just moved there. Then there are business owners, community gardeners, and these people who live on abandoned buses along the canal."

With so many factions at play, Brennan says, "It's easy to get caught up in the competing agendas." But she insists Red Dive's job isn't to speak for a particular group. "Ultimately we're there as artists to frame the place," she explains, "Not to tell people how to think."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Public Art | Americana | The Built Environment | Labor | Environment | New York | 2002