"The Catastrophes of Charles Atlas: Fifty Years of Performance Caught on Camera" by Ramona Ngin

Around a year ago, I went to see Charles Atlas give a talk at the Dia Art Foundation in New York. He was there to speak about the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, Atlas’s most important and longstanding creative partner in a career full of collaboration. Atlas pioneered the genre of “media dance” as the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s filmmaker-in-residence from the mid-1970s until 1983, and after a period of independent work, returned to collaborate with Cunningham from 1999 until the choreographer’s death in 2009. One notable feature of the talk at the Dia was that the action didn’t only happen up front: on either side of the audience, a silent montage of clips from their collaborations unfolded at its own rhythm. Occasionally, Atlas would see something and interrupt his sequential account of their collaborations, prompting the assembled fans to crane their necks wildly.

Atlas’s presentation was punctuated by numerous video clips of his collaborations with Cunningham, and it seemed like every time he played one, the audience erupted in cheers and applause that matched (or exceeded) its duration. It was charming and funny and a little awkward: I already felt underdressed amid the genteel crowd, and began to feel that my casual interest in Atlas’s work rendered me psychologically underdressed as well. There was nothing casual about anything or anyone else in the room. I remember thinking, Who is this guy? 

Atlas’s current retrospective at the ICA, touted as his first in the United States, promises to offer a deeper understanding of who he is and why his work is important. As it turns out, it feels like a misnomer to think of the show as a retrospective at all—it is really a showcase of Atlas’s “late style,” as the scholar and film critic Erika Balsom provocatively calls it in her essay in the exhibition’s catalogue.1 The show includes nine works total; all were made in the last twenty years. Most are multichannel video installations (or “walk-through experiences,” as Atlas calls them) that sample and remix his earlier single-channel works. This strategy allows video to mimic the dynamism and complexity of live performance, and promises a more immersive encounter with Atlas’s storied collaborators and the queer performance scenes that produced them.

Read full article at bostonartreview.com.