Gayadas de Caliman13

caught my eye surfing.....

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Ella solo dipone de 72 horas para estar lista.....


ARTS
She's Got a Date and Only 72 Hours to Prepare
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: July 9, 2007



Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times
Lián Amaris Sifuentes on the set of her performance piece "Fashionably Late for the Relationship," which was being filmed and will be compressed into a 72-minute work.

It was 9 p.m. on Saturday, and Lián Amaris Sifuentes was taking her time getting ready for a date, doing the usual things: looking in the mirror, taking a disco nap, drinking a glass of wine.

Sure, as Yeats said, women must labor to be beautiful, but you would think Ms. Sifuentes would labor a little more quickly, considering that she was doing all of this on a traffic island at the southeast corner of Union Square. Ms. Sifuentes, a performance artist and professor at Colorado College, said that was one of the ideas behind this piece, "Fashionably Late for the Relationship": drawing attention to the private feminine ritual not only by performing it in full view of the Manhattan public, but also by performing it deliberately.

Very deliberately.

On a set resembling an old-fashioned boudoir, containing a chaise and a vanity and strewn with dresses and shoes, Ms. Sifuentes is going through the predate exercises, only she is stretching them out, by moving very, very slowly, which is to say not moving much at all. To prepare for a date it will take her 72 hours, from midnight Friday to midnight tonight. On Saturday afternoon she had a single glass of wine. It took seven hours.

All this is being filmed by R. Luke DuBois, who teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia and New York University. He will compress his film into 72 minutes, compression being a digital process that is neither simply speeding up the images nor jittery time-lapse photography. (Mr. DuBois, 31, did that with "Academy," a 76-minute piece in which each movie that has won the Academy Award for best picture is squeezed down to a minute; it was shown at Sundance this year and excerpts can be seen at music.columbia.edu/~luke/artwork/academy.html)

A few days before the performance Ms. Sifuentes, 26, said she thought it was intriguing that there would be two different works — a performance piece and a film — each with a completely different effect. During the live performance, people will see a woman prolongedly performing a ritual while surrounded by people moving at normal speed. That's Ms. Sifuentes's work, and it stands by itself, she said.

But the film, if all goes well, will show a woman moving at normal speed while surrounded by people and cars moving so quickly that they are ghostly blurs.

"They exist in perfect opposition," she said.

On Saturday the film part seemed to have the upper hand, at least in terms of scale. About five feet from Ms. Sifuentes's boudoir stood a jungle of light poles and reflectors and an enormous red tent where the three dozen people on the production crew came and went. Add the security guards, metal barricades and traffic cones, and it was hard to distinguish the work, at a distance, from your average New York City movie shoot.

Generally people stayed clear, whether out of courtesy or affected indifference. It didn't help that in Union Square on Saturday "Fashionably" was competing for attention with the usual drum circles, art vendors, "Free Palestine" people, "Free Hugs" people, skateboarders and the farmers' market.



Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times
Ms. Sifuentes during her 72-hour performance.

Mr. DuBois, who had not anticipated such a big, intimidating production, was a little frustrated, knowing that spectators lingering in front of the camera both would make a more interesting effect in the film and be good for the performance. Production assistants encouraged people to walk through.

Those who did, who would become part of the flickery supporting cast, peppered the assistants with questions: Is this going to be on television? When is she going to do something? Is she going to strip? Do you really think there's a market for this movie?

"There are a lot of people with specific directorial advice," said Gabriel Winer, an owner of Wika, the production that was managing the shoot.

Despite the circus around her, Ms. Sifuentes was more or less isolated, reclining on her chaise, which she described during one of her sporadic, 10-minute breaks as "ridiculously uncomfortable." Occasionally Mr. DuBois read books to her over a headset.

The piece was supposed to begin with her napping for a few hours, but at 2 a.m. on Saturday sleep was hard to find; lying there with her eyes closed, she said, hearing strange people and smelling cologne and cigarettes only a couple of feet away, was too nerve-racking.

She had a chance to rest a bit early on Sunday morning and as of Sunday afternoon, the halfway point, when she was in the middle of a 15-hour run of trying on dresses, she was still going and convinced she could make it to the end.

Ms. Sifuentes studied under Mr. DuBois at N.Y.U.'s interactive telecommunications program, in which she earned a master's degree.

They began working together on projects, including "Corpus Projecti," a performance piece in which viewers, by touching parts of her body, could change projections in a room.

For a year or so she had been interested in a performance that would test her endurance. Mr. DuBois had been experimenting with digital compression. It did not take long for them to come up with concept for "Fashionably." There is a quite a distance between concept and execution, however.



Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times
It took Ms. Sifuentes seven hours to drink a glass of wine.

A few days before the performance Ms. Sifuentes was blunt: "I am totally unprepared."

Asked what she might be doing during the performance, she thought for a few seconds. She would probably start out by washing her face, she said. Then she got out a notebook and wrote a note to herself to buy a washbasin.

As for paying for the project, well, Ms. Sifuentes and Mr. DuBois were working on that part. He said the budget was originally projected at $100,000, then slashed to $75,000. On Friday he said the budget had sunk to about $45,000.

"We're basically pulling in a massive amount of favors," he said.

Most of those in the production crew are working for nominal fees or volunteering, he said. Tekserve, the Apple computer service center where Ms. Sifuentes used to work, sold them equipment but is letting them use some hardware free.

But there are unavoidable costs, outside the insurance and permit fees. The cameras and lighting equipment are running on gas-guzzling generators. (On Sunday the crew rented another generator so Ms. Sifuentes could have an air-conditioner on the set.) A hotel room has been booked to store the stacks of hard drives. (The disk space needed for a 72-hour shoot on three high-definition cameras is 10 terabytes or roughly 10,000 gigabytes, or more roughly, a whole lot.)

These were the details that grabbed the attention of the passers-by. Though the production assistants eagerly explained some of the work's themes — playing with conceptions of time, femininity and intimacy — most people were more interested in logistics.

But one burly man, who said he happened to spend all of his nights sleeping at this particular traffic triangle, was more interested in the concept.

"So she's getting ready for a date?" he asked an assistant.

"Yes", the assistant said.

"And it takes her three days to get ready."

"Yes", the assistant said.

The man sniffed. "Typical."