A Moving Performance
The Winter Garden Is Turned Into Star And Stage

By Matt Dunning
POSTED MAY 14, 2008

Standing shoulder to shoulder, a seemingly random assortment of nearly 50 New Yorkers swayed side to side in broken rhythm. Gradually, the swaying quickened, and soon gave way to a frenetic hopping in place. Building speed, the sound of their heels smacking marble floor filled the empty space inside the cavernous atrium of the Winter Garden. Suddenly, the huddled pack began to break apart, sending one body after another scurrying into the far reaches of the garden.

To an unwitting passerby, it might have looked a bit odd, if not downright silly. But to an audience of about 100 gathered on the Winter Garden’s second floor balcony recently, it was just one of dozens of rehearsed vignettes that comprised artist Joshua Bisset’s living, breathing commentary on movement, space and man’s daily trajectory through the physical world.

“I want to have a connection to the function of movement in everyday life,” said Bisset, a choreographer for the Jersey City-based SHUA Group performance company. From May 8-10, he tried to highlight that connection through a mixed media performance at the Winter Garden entitled “Giant Place Detail.” Each evening, Bisset and company set out into the garden’s vastness in a rehearsed series of movements; a dance, in only the loosest of definitions.

During each hour-long performance, Bisset’s “dancers”—40 untrained volunteers, ages 10 to 75 and frequent visitors to the garden—moved both singly and in packs, walking in circles or bee-lining from one side of the space to the other. A soundtrack of mechanical clatter, muffled shouts across crowded rooms and other sonic scraps accompanied the performers as they sprinted, crawled, traipsed or marched their way around the garden. For stretches lasting minutes at a time, they were still; for others, they were frantic, and always as though this is how they get where they’re going.

“I’ve tried to point out the simplicity and loveliness of just watching people be who they are as movers,” Bisset said, “whether they’re sitting or passing through the space, or kids rolling around on the floor or walking sideways up the stairs.”

Janet Berka, one of Bisset’s performers and a Battery Park City resident, said it was only during the three weeks of rehearsals that she came to understand the breadth of traffic and travel to which the garden plays host.

“I think I have a better appreciation of all of the motion and movement that goes on here,” Berka said. “I really wasn’t aware of how active this place is, probably close to twenty hours a day.”

Apart from the performers, Bisset said the star of the show is the Winter Garden itself, a place of congregation and transit; of commerce and culture that is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month. And Debra Simon, executive director of Arts World Financial Center, agreed.

“We were looking for people to work with us not only to celebrate the milestone, but also what a glorious building the garden is and diversity of the people who populate it,” she said.

Bisset said he hopes “Giant Place Detail” will have had some hand in shaping the history of the Winter Garden and, if by only a single thread in a colossal patchwork quilt, strengthening the community that inhabits it.

 “When a group of people comes together to do something focused in a public space, that becomes an event in and of itself,” Bisset said. “Some moment of common action happens, and that goes back to much deeper things about ritual, and a community defining itself and realizing itself in a moment.”

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