Alex Smith experiences Carolyn Lazard's Long Take, an immersion in sound, poetry and dance in a darkened ICA with black screens alive with white words of poetry and the sounds of bodies moving but unseen. Alex says the show is challenging but "There’s a serenity in darkness that Long Take provides; Lazard examines race and disability through erasure, but also through dance." The exhibit is up until July 29, 2023.
The emotions evoked by Philadelphia-based artist and sound collagist Carolyn Lazard’s Long Take at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA)–an intimate reflection on the movements of a dancer through pure sound–range from the liberatory to the fragmented. While watching a pitch black screen, viewers become listeners as the dance is captured in a tumult of grunts, sighs, breaths, floor stomps, taps, and other dissonant, rhythmic sounds along with recited poetry. It’s a challenging piece. Lazard carefully strips away the visuality of dance and replaces it with poetry that is read like inscriptions on a display wall, phonetically matching the pattern of dance with angelic descriptions of each movement.
Carolyn Lazard, Leans, Reverses (still), 2022. A pitch black background. Centered in the bottom third of the image are white captions that read, “Lumbering steps in reverse.” Courtesy of the artist and Maxwell Graham/ Essex Street.
“Synchronized arm and leg; neck rolls/gathers harvest/rest/sweeps up and collapses to the ground,” the speaker, poet Joselia Rebekah Hughes, hypnotically reads. Surrounded in darkness with my senses tied gently up in a spiritual knot, I can feel the dancer push through the layers of meta-narrative disguised as simple image descriptions, which feel like elevated, ethereal versions of descriptors you find on Facebook photo posts. A flash of detail highlighted here, a poetic rumination there results in a fully illuminated vision formed through textural sound. In this central work, entitled Leans, Reverses,the dancer Jerron Herman is joined by the poet Hughes. The intent is not to bury sighted viewers in darkness, but to create communal spaces for healing and an expanded bodily understanding of what the human body and mind is capable of–Lazard made this work immersive.
Carolyn Lazard, Leans, Reverses (still), 2022. A pitch black background. Centered in the bottom third of the image are white captions that read, “Pause. Tip toe arrival.” Courtesy of the artist and Maxwell Graham/ Essex Street.
Other elements essential to Long Take are the room’s structures. A vinyl floor, reminiscent of the rehearsal room floor dancers practice on, has been added, along with reinforced padding, backrests, and height adjustments, used by Lazard to liberally outfit the ICA structures. It’s a spatial re-appropriation that transforms a potentially uninviting space on University of Pennsylvania’s campus–ICA art gallery–and augments its accessibility. These aspects of Long Take represent a radical healing that starts with community and combats body-elitist notions of temporal reality.
Carolyn Lazard, Leans, Reverses (still), 2022. A pitch black background. Centered in the bottom third of the image are white captions that read, “[scratch, scratch].” Courtesy of the artist and Maxwell Graham/ Essex Street.On display until July 29, Long Take may seem like an austere, haunting experiment in comparison to its color-burst gallery neighbor–Terrance Nance’s film series SWARM, which offers a vivid exploration on healing and love in the African diaspora. However, Lazard’s approach is less cynical despite the inclination in Lazard’s work towards subtlety. There’s a serenity in darkness that Long Take provides; Lazard examines race and disability through erasure, but also through dance. Indeed, it’s an erasure that is voluntary–removing oneself, as a Black, disabled body from the dangers of visibility and exploitation–while still commenting on the violence of societal erasure and institutional racism. “Start slow/Jerron a dark-skinned Black man with a visible disability, faces the wall and begins to move,” Hughes intones. The lack of visual confirmation is stunning, the blank black screen and Herman’s audible floor stamps, breathing, his limbs cutting through the air like a sickle through wheat–are all a weight on our chest. With Long Take, the viewer, the listener begs for motion and receives a new kind of immersion.
![A pitch black rectangle, which is taken from a video by Carolyn Lazard, holds white text on the bottom that says, “[scratch, scratch].”](https://www.theartblog.org/wp-content/uploaded/2023/04/Artblog_Long-Take-3_Lazard_leans-reverses_Smith-04.2023.jpg "Carolyn Lazard’s Long Take at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art 3")
