Protest art, sideshow to political circus

NEW YORK â€”  No one knows exactly what the Republican National Convention will mean for New York. Trouble? Money? A rousing good time? Two things, however, are certain. The Republicans will do their best to inflame political passions. And, on the other side, so will protesters and artists.

And what about that art? Seduction and sedition are historically part of an artist’s arsenal. That was true of Mozart, and it will surely be true of the hundreds of practitioners from all disciplines who intend to turn this week into a nonstop festival of protest art.

But let’s start with Mozart -- who in fact provided one jumping-off point for the protest-art extravaganza. That’s because Lincoln Center’s summertime Mostly Mozart series ended over the weekend, and with it much of the mainstream high art in this city, until the fall season starts up.

More to the point, Mostly Mozart concluded with the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s “Mozart/Concert Arias,� a two-hour sequence of arias and short instrumental pieces in which playful, sexy dancers poke fun at the composer whose heavenly music, for many, transcends earthly conflicts.

At one typical point, a singer earnestly attempts her aria while a flighty dancer steals little kisses, flirts, kicks the sheet music from her hands, wins her.

Even more to the point, De Keersmaeker’s wildly inventive choreography and her stunning company, Rosas, demonstrated Friday night the complexity of role-playing, be it in the erotic interaction between male and female dancers or the larger sense of a fluid and unpredictable interaction between dancer and music.

Mozart was ever the subversive artist, finding ways to undercut musical norms, the norms of court life and of social strictures. Meanwhile, Rosas, on its toes, keeps us on ours, never allowing us to be too strict in our own expectations of Mozart.

Step by step

The relationship between actors and onlookers is at the center of much modern art and protest art. Protesters need witnesses. “Peace Piece� by Adelle Lutz, at a storefront gallery near Madison Square Garden, the site of the convention, is a video document of six women in burkas who slowly walked the streets of Manhattan last year on March 20, the first day of spring, the first day of the Persian New Year and the day bombing began in Iraq. The burkas are provocative. One has “90% of War Casualties Are Civilians� painted on the front. On video, the stately walk is slowed to the glacial speed of a Robert Wilson production, which gives the women an almost alien nobility. Onlookers seem startled, moved, bewildered, outraged. We who view the video become the onlookers’ onlookers, and it is hard to know the real audience -- those on the street or us in the gallery.

Peal to heal

Saturday afternoon, media, protesters, police, legal eagles, librarians and street performers are all in force at ground zero for “Ringing for Healing.� This is a composition by the avant-garde composer Pauline Oliveros, and anyone can participate. Bells are handed out along with a score that tells people stationed at different points surrounding the site when to ring theirs and for how long.

Oliveros asks participants to try to time their rings to their heartbeats and then listen intently to that pulse. The aim is for a ringer to tune into higher vibrations and send a healing message to victims everywhere.

But this is New York, and it doesn’t quite work that way, at least not at first. Once given bells, people begin to ring them, not waiting for the pile-driver signal at 5:30. Nor do the ringers seem interested in branching out around ground zero, and most congregate in front of the new New Jersey transit center.

The ringing itself is more merry than mystical, and there isn’t the slightest threat of trouble.

The first half an hour’s worth of the two-hour ringing, at least to a listener who ordinarily finds Oliveros a transcendent composer, is pure sonic delight.

Making amends

Uptown in the early evening at the Asia Society, the Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng (whose “Peach Blossom Fan� was the highlight of the first season at REDCAT) presents three short excerpts from “Forgiveness,� a work he created four years ago. It is a highly stylized study of Asian conflict, of fighting among China, Japan and Korea. Through mournful, minimalist imagery, the director asks questions about the possibility of forgiveness.

Again role-playing is central. Each performer espouses a different tradition. A pipa, the Chinese lute, represents Chinese classical music, though the music was written by an inspired modern musician, Wu Man.

A Western flute provides traditional Japanese music. Actors portray a Korean “comfort woman,� a samurai and a warrior. Eve Beglarian, the feisty downtown New York composer, supplies more original music.

There is no interaction between performers. Each operates independently on his or her small bit of square footage, mapped out by elegant lighting. Forgiveness comes through focus, through the finding of space for individual personalities to coexist without stealing the spotlight from one another.

The evening provides the perfect model for the week ahead. But what a challenge it will be for everyone on the streets of New York, where limelight theft threatens to run rampant, to live up to it.