Stage Flight

The first weekend of Out There kicks off with Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People in a piece called Everyone, which has received kudos in New York, but has yet to tour elsewhere in the United States. Everyone is a delicate hybrid of movement, text, and music that fuses audience and performer into—everyone or anyone. That's the idea, anyway.

"One of the things that comes up over and over for me," Gutierrez says, "is the different implicit and explicit rules that are at place in a theatrical context between a performer and viewer. This assumption that I [the artist] am supposed to entertain you and that you will, in turn, be entertained by me. That the performance is what constitutes who I am. I'm intrigued by the way that bodies are very ordinary, and I'm intrigued by the way a dancing body can articulate something esoteric."

The New York Times declared Everyone "an adrenaline burst, smart and moving and full of questions, the way only real art can be." This piece is literally not for everyone, however, because Gutierrez has cordoned off the McGuire Theater's 385 seats, which allows for only eighty-five attendees per performance. Says Gutierrez, "If you want something to look different, you have to change the way you look at it."

The second weekend belongs to The TEAM. The third welcomes the visual and performance artist Claude Wampler, a forty-one-year-old whose show Performance (career ender) is shrouded in secrecy. Wampler was introduced to Bither via choreographer Sarah Michelson, for whom Wampler designed the visual installations for Michelson's dance piece Daylight (for Minneapolis). "I heard about how good Claude's other pieces were," says Bither. "I've been both intrigued and put off by her ideas in the past. I admire her courage and really see her as a lone voice and an innovator, someone who's fought hard to bring the world of installation art and performance together in some of the most provocative ways that I'm aware of. The piece itself is unlike anything else I've seen. It will test people's patience. This will be the piece most people will be talking about. What she asks the audience to do is audacious, that's the only word for it."

The final weekend features feedforward, a Walker co-commission by David Neumann/advanced beginner group. This is Neumann's first time at the Walker with his own work, though he has performed here with other groups. Neumann's feedforward is a humorous, spectacle-filled movement piece that examines America's number one obsession: sports.

The Bessie award-winning "smart joker of dance" from New York is known for his exuberant and goofy, but ultimately touching work. His trick is a precise one-two punch: make 'em laugh, then ask them to contemplate the mysteries of Life, the Universe, and Everything Else. Add an animal costume and a gold bomber jacket. Pure genius. If not genius, let's say ingenious.

Because feedforward is a co-commission, Bither, as of this writing, had yet to see the finished piece. His willingness to support new work is, of course, one of the many reasons why his contemporaries admire him. "Philip is one of the few presenters in the country who really does his homework and keeps up with what's going on," says Neumann. "I'm really starting to be launched as a theater artist, and that's generated from Philip seeing something [of mine] and saying, 'I think you're onto something.' He's a trendsetter. He might not like that term, but he brings something to the Walker, and then everyone else says, 'Oh!' "

"Commissions are a risk," admits Bither. "But you have to take those risks. Funding is going away, and I worry that presenters have become risk-averse. They want to present work that people will love, naturally, but artists are very dependent upon institutions [for support]. That's where the Walker stands apart nationally.

"It can be frustrating that, locally, people aren't aware of how important the Walker has been internationally and nationally," says Bither, whose measured voice speeds up as he leans forward in his chair, palms planted calmly on the table. "But anyone who's come to Out There over the years knows that these are pieces that anyone who's interested in theater needs to see! This is the future of theater!"

Reach Jaime Kleiman at jaime@jaimekleiman.com