Ombre by HoverBound, performed at Chez Bushwick during SITE Fest. — Photos by Paul Cox

With three core venues and twenty-five satellite events packed into a weekend, Arts in Bushwick‘s SITE Fest provides no clear choices. While the performing arts festival was handily scheduled in 90-minute blocks last Saturday and Sunday to allow circulation between 3rd Ward, Chez Bushwick and Grace Exhibition Space, the decision between these spaces and many others based on minimal program descriptions made for a game of artistic Chatroulette. Choosing our path with resolve, we found it was hard to go too far wrong.

Quite fortuitously, it was the first bike-friendly weekend of the year, allowing for a more forgiving process of trial and error. We struck out with several events listed at seemingly imaginary addresses, but only once – faced with Wanda Gala and Bob Bellerue’s detext, an interminable video-and-free-improv-music combo – did we skip out mid-program.

Colonial Bushwick, reminiscent of the other Williamsburg.

Sun-washed Chez Bushwick was the ostensible dance hub, though the weekend did more to highlight the grey areas between art forms than the distinctions among them. We enjoyed the early evening segment on Sunday, where SITE co-organizer Lee Mandell was showing signs of wear but still gamely tackling tech setup. The program began with Creature Theater’s Grendel’s Mom Has Got It Going On, a character sketch of the legendary matron. This suffered from over-hyping in the program listing: the "world-premiere burgeoning exploration of burlesque grotesque" was really just a competent solo dance interpretation without any of the theatricality we were led to imagine. 

What followed, to our dismay, was another video piece, Canary and The Coalmine. But the haunting work won us over from the first shot, a dance in yellow filmed on the streets of grimy, beautiful DUMBO. The collaboration between choreographer Adam Weinert, dancer Naomi Reid-Davis, musician Roarke Menzies and other assorted neighbors captured the seductive grit of industrial Brooklyn in the way that every edgy fashion shoot tries, and fails, to do. With any luck Weinert will post the video online soon. 

The final piece of the set was Ombre by HoverBound, aka Emily Pope Blackman, who kept the projector running as a backdrop to the first half of her dance. Commanding the theatrical touch we were still craving from the beginning of the segment, she threw herself about maniacally in a hospital gown and surgical mask. The harsh soundtrack and J-horror theme framed, but were ultimately subservient to, a confident and athletic performance – exactly the sort of thing we came out to see. 

Meanwhile, far east of the festival’s axis on the Queensward end of Stanhope Street, the ladies of BabySkinGlove were putting on an unexpected blowout of a performance as Colonial Bushwick. Modeled on the other Williamsburg, this house tour disoriented and unnerved visitors with a peek into an imagined colonial household with poorly concealed skeletons in the closet. The elaborate live-in performance was carried off with straight faces and a personal touch – too personal, really – and proved that the far corners of the festival had just as much to offer the intrepid.

May Sherit’s Puppet at 3rd Ward.

We finished up at 3rd Ward, less sure than ever of what to expect. We were nonetheless saddened to learn that Crystal D. Lite’s Who’s The Boss: A XXX Parody had been canceled. This left us with the venue’s next-to-last act of the festival, May Sherit’s Puppet. The vaguely described piece ("an intimate act that repeats itself and changes its meaning…") turned out to be a simple one. The artist stood before the audience in 3rd Ward’s cornerless white performance nook, wearing some two dozen pairs of pantyhose. She peeled these off one by one until there were none, then hurriedly vacated the stage, the room, and 3rd Ward while the audience wondered when to applaud. A sexless and meditative twist on striptease, with no music or superfluous movement or so much as a smile, the act sowed an artistically fertile sort of confusion that justified its place on the festival stage. 

Hosiery cleared from the floor, the final team confounded the stage with strands of tape in preparation for their experiment. Centaurix’s Falling Moments was conceived as a human video game, making use of audience participants with specific scripted instructions. Not, alas, a live action Half-Life through the halls of 3rd Ward, but a simpler (Atari-era, or possibly iPhone-era?) game of keeping the dancer away from a roving lantern with a long tarp of plastic. The game of hi-tech-lo-tech keepaway was solid in concept but wasn’t helped by the cramped space or the dancer’s lack of competitive spirit. Sure, a win in 30 seconds would have been an anticlimax, but the dancer’s slow feints killed any potential for real tension. 

Mixed experiences drove home the fact that the SITE weekend is all about works in progress, and ultimately all performance is just that. As a testing bed, the festival is a success.