Bridgman/Packer Dance

"ingenious...magical and fascinating" -Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times

Excerpted Press Quotes

"The most thrilling dance work this reviewer has seen in recent memory...flat-out exhilarating."
The Boston Globe Full Article

"An ingenious trompe l'oeil fusion of physical and video-image bodies...merged and then disappeared with magical and fascinating suddenness"
The New York TimesFull Article

"in an age overrun with virtual dancing, the team of Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer stands out...by turns, witty, sexy, and surreal."
The New Yorker Full Article

"you may marvel at the effects achieved through technological wizardry, but you're also amused, charmed, or disturbed by the ways in which two people's images and dreams and memories of each other fly around like shadows in the wind."
The Village Voice Full Article

"Packer and Bridgman never cease expanding, vanishing and defying the laws of gravity under our astounded eyes."
La Presse, Montreal Full Article

"Their timing is so astute, their on-stage intimacy so potent that everything they do rings true."
The Village Voice

"Video projections have seldom been used so adroitly or with such profligate imagination."
The New York Times Full Article

"an astonishing dance/video experience, merging the real and unreal into the surreal."
Philadelphia City Paper Full Article

"Bridgman and Packer challenge the boundaries of our perception with works that are truly visionary."
Elfaro.net, el primer periodico digital latinoamericana

"an amazing visual spectacle, a fantastic and seamless blend of video projection and live dancing...in which profound artistry and dazzling technique were perfectly matched...They call that genius."
The Birmingham News Full Article

"Both are lean and long-limbed and radiate fresh openness undercut by hints of the offbeat and surprising. He could be the dance world's version of the actor Jeff Daniels-rangy, wholesome and Midwestern in his appearance. With her auburn pre-Raphaelite hair and legs for days, Packer can veer from sunny to sultry. They have been consistently productive mainstays of the city's dance scene for decades, but the direction in which they began going eight years ago opened new paths that they continue to explore with rich results."
New York Press Full Article

"Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer have raised the duet to a pinnacle of clarity and craft."
The Village Voice

"genuinely bewitching...thoroughly disorienting, and never less than gorgeous."
The New York Sun

"Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer opened the Festival Centroamericana de Teatro with a performance that in my memory sense is still a jewel...the stimulating elements of this program are the extreme technical precision, expressive clarity, and, above all, the poetic air that permeates all their creations."
La Prensa Gráfica, San Salvador

"Supported by multiple simultaneous video projections that magnify and skew their fluid, dramatic choreography, bodies leap out of themselves in surprising personae."
New York Press

"now sinuous, now catapulting, impeccably timed compositions for two that--through sleight of hand and manipulation of media--cast entire worlds on stage."
The Boston Globe

"Packer and Bridgman are remarkable artists. Their work appeals on an animal, visceral level. Yet at the same time it soars with an intellectual richness that is truly extraordinary."
The Cincinnati Enquirer

"This is emotionally, intellectually and visually rich dance theatre."
Chicago Reader

"In addition to formidable dance technique, they possess the sensibility of a major poet...that takes one off guard with its quiet and surprising power."
KWMU, St. Louis, Missouri

Full Articles

Bridgman/Packer Dance Split Themselves in Three

By Deborah Jowitt

March 30, 2010

A man's feet suddenly point 180 degrees away from the direction he's facing. Both this man and a woman standing a short distance away wear white net hoopskirts; later his double seems to be under her clothes. Another time, her body appears where his legs should be. These are just some of the startling images in Under the Skin, the 2005 work by the husband and wife team of Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer that opened their performance in the Baryshnikov Art Center's Howard Gilman Performance Space.

For people who, like Packer and Bridgman, have been together for more than 20 years, getting under another's skin has more than one meaning. You finish each other's sentences, wear each other’s socks, fall in love with the same antique-shop object you can't really afford and probably shouldn't buy. What keeps the sophisticated video projections that are integral to every Bridgman-Packer duet from seeming gimmicky are the human implications they explore. You may marvel at the effects achieved through technological wizardry, but you're also amused, charmed, or disturbed by the ways in which two people's images and dreams and memories of each other fly around like shadows in the wind.

Like Under the Skin, the pair's dizzying new Double Expose is performed to an excellent jazz score by Ken Field, who also adds his live sax to the recorded music. The piece is, of course, rife with doppelgä ngers. It begins like a film noir, with the two wearing trench coats and hats (his a fedora) and prowling in narrow paths of light (design by Frank DenDanto III) beneath their own large shadows. Behind them, Peter Bobrow and Jim Monroe's video shows busy New York streets and mysterious abandoned spaces. In the most exciting segments of the piece, Bridgman–live and on video–is searching for Packer; she's perhaps frightened of him, angry too.

Their wariness is accentuated by their brilliantly timed video interactions. The fact that each live performer has a life-sized film double makes us see their situation as especially unnerving, and we have to track not just two performers but four. Their images can dissolve unexpectedly or pop up in doorways that were empty a moment ago. He sees her; she disappears; he wheels around and races out of our sight. She walks into view and stands in front of a building, watching the street. Suddenly he's beside her; she gasps and hits him; he falls; she vanishes.

From the beginning, other images of them are sighted in the distance, and these grow larger and more prominent. As part of a second couple, Packer wears a blonde wig and is sportily dressed; she's a blonde in her third-couple appearance too, but now she's clad in a skimpy white satin shift. Couple #2 Bridgman has a baseball cap, and his Couple #3 self is bareheaded with glasses. They have their own fleetingly glimpsed scenarios–the #2 pair seen kissing in a park, Bridgman #3 groping for something on the ground, Packer #3 pushing him away and laughing every time he importunes her.

Real and virtual entangle the way they do in our imaginations. A few aspects of the production are puzzling. I have no idea, for instance, as to the relevance of the brief sequence of highly stylized animated beasts (by Karen Aqua) that floats across the scrim at the back. However, although I'm not entirely sure why the man in the coat is searching for the woman and why she wants to avoid him, their interactions are compelling. Perhaps the other couples represent them at other stages of their lives. That certainly is suggested by a sequence at the end, when the live dancers lie on separate mattresses and images of their other selves are projected from overhead to snuggle up to them spoon-fashion. (It's staggering to imagine the split-second timing and spatial awareness needed in the backstage and onstage activities, as well as in the triggering of the bank of projectors at the feet of the front-row spectators.)

I haven't mentioned the dance element. As in all Bridgman and Packer's pieces, it's there but only occasionally featured. They tend to move together like people having fun on a ballroom floor or showing a little flair to impress each other. But their ability as dancers infuses the gestural and physical activity necessary to power all those rendezvous with their multiple selves, some of them tattooed in light with the imprint of a partner's watchful face.

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Twice As Nice: Dancing couple Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer are more than just a pair

By Susan Reiter

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer may be the only dancers listed in the program for their Double Expose, but theirs is far more than a duet performance, thanks to the imaginative and exploratory video imagery they incorporate into the piece. Venturing further in a direction that has proven most inspirational and fruitful for them since 2003, they have collaborated again with video artist Peter Bobrow to explore ideas about identity, intimacy and reality versus illusion.

Partners offstage as well as on, Bridgman and Packer have been collaborating as dancer-choreographers since 1978. Both are lean and long-limbed and radiate fresh openness undercut by hints of the offbeat and surprising. He could be the dance world's version of the actor Jeff Daniels—rangy, wholesome and Midwestern in his appearance. With her auburn pre-Raphaelite hair and legs for days, Packer can veer from sunny to sultry. They have been consistently productive mainstays of the city's dance scene for decades, but the direction in which they began going eight years ago opened new paths that they continue to explore with rich results.

"Since we've gotten into this video work, it's been like an explosion for us," Packer said during a recent rehearsal break from their technical residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where Double Expose is having its world premiere. (Bridgman remained in the studio, which was filled with monitors, projectors and cables, busily fine-tuning a section of the piece.) "We've been working with certain themes over the years–relationship, identity–and when we hit on working with our own video image, there was the metaphor right in front of us: being able to fracture into different sides of ourselves, to confront ourselves and then each other." In the trilogy of works they have made using this process, they have cultivated a flair for ingenious, often mind-bending stage pictures in which it becomes hard to decipher the live performer from the multiple, inventively projected images. Reviewing one of those works, a local dance critic referred to the "dazzling virtual rush hour" the two performers created on stage.

"We're working not only in the flesh and blood with each other, but with each other's images as well," Packer continued. "You never really know when you're relating to the person in your mind that you're imagining, or you're dreaming of, or you're remembering. I think if there's one framework for all this work, it's 'What is reality?' I think this work questions that. But it doesn't answer it! We play with what is real and what isn't.

"The departure for this new piece is that in two of the sections, we're working with full cinema. We did on-site shoots–so that it's not only images of us, but within an environment. We filmed ourselves in the locations, and then we placed ourselves in the scenes in various ways."

For Double Expose, in addition to further expanding the possibilities they and Bobrow have developed for layering, overlapping and morphing projected images with their actual figures on stage, Bridgman and Packer are specifically referencing cinematic archetypes. "We transform into various characters that all have some reference to cinema. I think that all of us who've grown up with cinema have absorbed those images into ourselves," Packer said. "There are characters and scenes in films that we either really identify with, or we dream of being. All those images resonate, somehow, in who we are in the Jungian sense that we all have these various archetypes inside ourselves."

Among the scenes within the 45-minute work is one in which they take on the personas, and perform within the moody lighting, of film noir. "It's not about specific films, specific actors and actresses or specific characters, but it's genre. We're taking our ongoing exploration about our multiple selves–and multiple sides of ourselves–a step further, in that we're transforming into these various characters. We introduce each set of characters in their own sections, and then they all start mixing and matching, rolling in and out of bed with each other, multiplying, They meld into us and out of us."

When one suggests that the recent direction of their work must have involved a great deal of high-tech self-education, Packer described herself as "technologically challenged," and said Bridgman is the more advanced in terms of technology. "When we bring Peter in, that is when things really take off. He brings such skill and expertise, his talent and vision. It's a really fabulous collaboration with him."

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Goings On About Town: BRIDGMAN/PACKER DANCE

March 29, 2010

In an age overrun with virtual dancing, the team of Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer stands out. They succeed by keeping things simple–just the two of them and their video clones, doing not much more than basic social dancing. The art is in the synching. In "Under the Skin," husband and wife both wear white hoop skirts, screens on which to swap body parts. Such intimate merging–by turns witty, sexy, and surreal–progresses in the new "Double Expose," while the multiplication of selves goes noir, as the pair and their doppelgängers skulk and slink to Ken Field's appropriately jazzy score.

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Dancers trick the eye in virtual reality

By Robert Johnson

March 26, 2010

NEW YORK – Cult status surely awaits choreographers Myrna Packer and Art Bridgman, a playful couple of dance artists who have parlayed their familiarity with video technology into a reputation for dazzling illusionism.

"Under the Skin," their wildly imaginative piece from 2005, returned on Wednesday at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, joined by the premiere of "Double Expose," an even more elaborate adventure into virtual reality that is sure to delight their fans. With the help of videographers Peter Bobrow and Jim Monroe, and composer Ken Field, they create a fantasy world that must be seen to be disbelieved.

Like skilled prestidigitators, Bridgman and Packer begin by denying everything. A manifestly empty space ringed by black curtains confronts the audience – nothing up our sleeves, see? Then the music insinuates itself, conjuring images out of the darkness. Can a saxophone have sexy hips? It certainly feels that way, in a score where the melody swishes and seems to turn beneath a partner's arm.

Beams of light shoot from projectors, and Bridgman and Packer slip in through the upstage curtains, performing a contemporary jitterbug, or hiding behind cascading showers of typeface. Later they turn their own figures into screens. They seem to become transparent, revealing shadowy legs beneath hoop skirts, or their bodies remain opaque reflecting images of themselves dressing and undressing – a metaphor for the projections that they wear in layers. Their solid flesh shares the space with shining replicas.

"Under the Skin" is a wonderful tease. Intentionally, it does not fool the eye until the party scene near the end, when Bridgman and Packer seem to invite their friends over but actually just multiply themselves. Then it isn't clear, at first, which of the people crossing the backdrop are real, and which are fake.

This game of hide-and-seek lends itself naturally to a Sam-Spadish detective story in "Double Expose," a terrific new piece that adds animations by Karen Aqua to the virtual mix along with colorful outdoor locations. Here Field's saxophone becomes a foghorn on a dark and stormy night, and we see Bridgman from two angles at once, as a Private Eye stooping to retrieve a clue. He pursues Packer, a mysterious woman in a pillbox hat, through an urban labyrinth of bridges, underpasses, and crowded streets.

The mystery cannot be solved, because this dance's subject is romantic obsession. Packer, the auburn-haired temptress with a tart, knowing look, and Bridgman, her stolid companion, transform themselves into the gumshoe and his quarry; into a pair of teenage club-goers whose only physical contact is an on-screen fantasy; and into yet another pair of lovers whom we first spot necking on the street in the filmed background of a detective scene. When this "make-out" couple take center stage, her image doubles vaguely, and she appears as a tiny projection inside him like a memory he can't shake.

Because of its rectangular frames, the scene where all the characters end up in bed together owes perhaps too much to the sandbox in Susan Marshall's "Cloudless." Technical glitches are a definite possibility. Yet by strolling past the intersection of life and technology, "Double Expose" offers an evening of delights.

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Bridgman/Packer Dance Fools the Senses

By Wendy Liberatore

Sunday, October 26, 2008

ALBANY - Watching Bridgman/Packer Dance is an exercise in questioning reality. There are dancers and musicians on stage, yes. But are the dancers real or are they video images? Is the music live or is it recorded? The answer is both. But the recorded and the live are so beautifully wedded that distinguishing the difference borders on impossible.

Actually, it's irrelevant, too. What's not immaterial, however, is the teeming artistry Bridgman/Packer Dance pour into creating their mind-bending worlds. Dancers/choreographers Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, as seen at the University at Albany on Saturday night, share their strange universe in their evening-length "Trilogy." The three-part work took five years to make. That's not surprising, as the pieces are steeped in exacting video technology.

These two eschewed what most choreographers do with video - create a decorative backdrop. Bridgman/Packer, on the other hand, shape video to expand their ensemble of dancers. They pretaped themselves and then, for the actual dance, interact with their video images in ways that are funny, spooky and bewitching. Ultimately, all this interplay between real and unreal brings up issues of identity and relationship, all in a keenly psychedelic way.

Of course, Bridgman/Packer had plenty of help from some accomplished artists. On the video side, Jim Monroe and Peter Bobrow tinkered with live cams and time-delays to dilate the duo's explorations. And at the university, Bridgman/Packer performed with a trio of outstanding musicians - cellist Robert Een, saxophonist Ken Field and percussionist Glen Velez. Een and his cello started the evening off with some haunting bowing layered with soothing chanting. His voice vibrations were similar to the healing emanations uttered by a Tibetan monk.

Een's mesmerizing sound set the tone for "Seductive Reasoning," in which the dancers, their shadows and their virtual selves combine and multiply in delightful ways. Packer, who is a long and gorgeous dancer, steps out, and so, too, does her virtual self. As she spins, her image, shot from above, does, too. As her video image flies and swirls, it conjures visions of an MGM extravaganza with hundreds of dancers moving in precision. Bridgman, who then appears, stands against a white backdrop. He stays still while images of him break off from his real self. Each time his virtual self reels away, he is dressed in different outfits, including, at one point, a skirt. He finally turns into Packer.

Even more fascinating is "Memory Bank," in which the marvelous Velez creates miraculous sounds on the tamborine. His fingers articulate over the skin while giving a little rattle, creating music that is pulsating and compelling. As the rhythm throbs, Bridgman and Packer and their images collide. They sway and embrace behind a screen. And with several video images projected on the screen, their world becomes so crowded that the real and unreal are a blur.

In the final section, "Under the Skin," with Field on saxophone, the dancers' bodies become the screen. Thus, the top half of Packer's body is carried along by Bridgman's legs and vice versa. It is clever and amusing.

Bridgman/Packer Dance has discovered the endless possibilities of partnering with technology. They are tapping into its promises like no others. What they come up with next is anyone's guess. Certainly, it will be worth watching and waiting for.

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It Takes Two to do 'Trilogy' Well

By Tresca Weinstein, Special to the Times Union, Albany, New York

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

ALBANY: In "Trilogy," their collection of three dance works, choreographers and performers Myrna Packer and Art Bridgman use quintessentially modern media, high-tech video footage and custom-designed software to explore the oldest human experience: a relationship between two people.

"Seductive Reasoning," "Memory Bank" and "Under the Skin," which Bridgman/Packer Dance performed Saturday evening at the University at Albany Performing Arts Center, bring together eye-popping imagery, thought-provoking metaphor and unvarnished dancing in a brilliant, seemingly effortless union. While countless choreographers have experimented with integrating video and dance, Packer and Bridgman are among the few who manage to weave the technology into the theme and flow of their work.

In each of the three pieces, the pair creates multiple versions of themselves, using a combination of live dancing, shadow play, pre-recorded video and time-delay software that records the dancers' images and plays them back at intervals. Bridgman and Packer dance with each other and then with each other's images, performing identical duets. They grow bigger and smaller, replicate like amoebas and step in and out of their own images.

Often it's difficult to distinguish between the virtual dancers and the real ones, a clever confusion that points to the ways in which we project our own images onto our partners. In one sequence of "Under the Skin," Packer and Bridgman appear to be sharing and trading body parts, in essence, becoming one another as the other's image is projected onto them. It's an intriguing and beautiful visual effect, and also a lovely reflection on intimacy.

In fusing 21st-century technology with live music and the reassuring press of body against body, Bridgman and Packer offer an inventive statement about where we came from, where we're going and those things that will always stay the same.

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Bridgman/Packer's Birmingham program a dazzling mix of dance and tech

Saturday, January 19, 2008
PHILLIP RATLIFF
For the Birmingham News
5 stars out of 5

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, two lean, mean, 40-something dancers from New York City, presented an amazing visual spectacle, a fantastic and seamless blend of video projection and live dancing Thursday at the Alys Stephens Center.

The title of their masterpiece is, simply, "A Trilogy." Beneath the simple title lay a profound, potentially perilous concept -- that people are layered, complex creatures capable of projecting multiple personas and harboring deep, shadowy inner selves. Bridgman/Packer relentlessly explored this theme throughout their 90-minute performance.

While the technical dimensions of the concert were jaw-dropping, it was this relentless, ever-searching quality that was so moving. The first installment of the trilogy, "Seductive Reasoning," started simple, with Bridgman and Packer dancing alongside projected and filtered live images of themselves. Surely that bit of sleight of hand was enough to wow the audience, but Bridgman/Packer would go on to much, much more. In a blink, pre-recorded images would morph from Bridgman in suit and tie to him completely (yet obliquely) nude. (After all, what are we beneath our business attire?) Streams of numbers and symbols poured across video screens and engulfed their bodies. The dancers used scrims to create collages of human forms, projected images of one member onto the other for comical moments of gender-bending, and turned white hoop skirts into billowy screens.

The inventiveness never ceased. There wasn't an image or a gesture that wasn't both meaningful and technically marvelous. At the question and answer session, the audience would hear that the dance trilogy took five years to complete, through a painstaking process of trial and error with the duo's brilliant collaborators, musicians Robert Een, Ken Field and Glen Velez and video artists Peter Bobrow and Jim Monroe.

"A Trilogy" was surely one of the finest artistic collaborations to come to Birmingham in recent years. If ever there was a work in which profound artistry and dazzling technique were perfectly matched, "A Trilogy" is it. They call that genius. "A Trilogy" is certainly a work worthy of the term.

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Couple's 'Trilogy' Reflects on Life, Love, and Art

Thea Singer, Globe Correspondent / December 8, 2007

Choreographers Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer don't so much mix dance with video as meld the two to forge a whole new compound. They posit onstage a kind of hall of endless mirrors, in which the reflections are as much theirs as they are of central truths about ourselves. In the "Trilogy" of pieces that CrashArts presented at the ICA last night, the questions raised ran the gamut: What separates the self from the other - and art from arbitrary motion? How do our memories affect our everyday actions? And simply, how, mechanically speaking, does a partner lift his mate?

The answers came not from the team of Bridgman/Packer alone but from their intense collaboration with filmmakers Peter Bobrow and Jim Monroe.

"Memory Bank" (2007), a Boston premiere with live music by percussionist Glen Velez, examines how the past intersects with the present. Video time-delay software allows the performers' images to be recorded and then projected back at delayed intervals. Hence Packer, lanky and sinuous, pushes a leg open and her image, projected on one of three screens, follows suit a moment after. Or Bridgman, sinewy on all fours, crawls between a table's legs, only seconds before his afterimage does the same. Tiny versions of the two dancers intermittently float down floor-to-ceiling screens. They're marionettes cut loose from their strings. Wait. Was that Bridgman the man or Bridgman the image who just flashed by? The question hangs in the air: Are we nothing more than, in the Borgesian sense, the projection of someone else's dream?

Also a Boston premiere, "Seductive Reasoning" (2003), to music by cellist Robert Een, brings to life (and the small screen) the ties that bind and sometimes fray between a longtime couple like Bridgman/Packer. Images of Packer now circle her like a conch shell, now draw a pentagon around her head. Bridgman joins her, and then their coupledom replicates, populating the stage. She dances with his virtual self, he with hers. The piece is a testament to how a partner can be enhanced as well as distorted in the other's eyes.

"Under the Skin" (2005), to music composed and performed by saxophonist Ken Field, is just that: A journey of Bridgman and Packer inside one another's skin. The two wear fabulous white hoop skirts. In turn, each raises the fabric over his or her head, and they magically interchange torsos and legs. The result veers between the freaky and the beautiful. In the background, elements rain down a scrim: ATGC, the nucleotides that make up our DNA. The 1's and 0's that made up early computerese. They comprise the languages of our bodies and our minds.

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REVIEW: Jaw-dropping dance by Bridgman, Packer and a host of themselves
Bridgman Packer: Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer in "Under the Skin."
By Dawnell Smith

If you like saturating your senses, then scramble over to Alaska Dance Theatre for a jaw-dropping marvel of sound, film, movement and light. Don't second guess yourself. Just go, even if your idea of the perfect weekend means watching "Knocked Up" outtakes over a bag of chips.

What Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer accomplish through multi-media dance is dynamic, stunning, provocative and occasionally startling. Screens and lighting create shadows while video projections sustain a virtual counterpoint to the actual dancers, each piece teetering between moment and memory, body and illusion.

Video images appear on everything from black curtains and veils of tulle and satin to their clothing. The dancers interact with these images in exacting ways, so precision counts. They execute their work fluidly after nearly 30 years together.

At times playful or vulnerable, chaotic or still, each and every piece poses questions of identity and reality. Excerpts from "Memory Bank" create a mesmerizing, sensual puzzle of limbs and torsos as the dancers mingle with each other as well as with recordings of themselves projected back at delayed intervals.

Another pieces, "Under the Skin," plunges into an exhilarating blast of images as the two dancers move in and out of hidden gaps in the curtain while a wily sax-soaked kind of keeps up the flow. Just when you think you know where the real Bridgman or Packer is, the image floats away on a field of text.

Sound confusing? Don�t worry. The intrigue of each layer builds rather than distorts visual appeal and understanding. They clearly welcome the somber and thoughtful as well as the clownish. Packer and Bridgman know how to put on a show that dazzles in the moment and lingers long afterwards.

Thursday night, the audience looked riveted.

"What a trip," one woman said earnestly to a friend at intermission. "Wow, I don't know what to say," said another after the show. Indeed, how does one express a sensory experience so rich in just a few words?

I haven't even mentioned the music, for one thing. Grammy Award winning percussionist Glen Velez composed the music for "Carried Away" and "Memory Bank," and played from a handful of frame drums in those pieces too. He looked unflappable as his hand and fingers blurred around each drum's skin.

Robert Een composed and played cello for "Seductive Reasoning," but caught my attention through song. He sounded at times like the voice of clarity amid visual turmoil.

Bridgman and Packer (www.bridgmanpacker.org) clearly pick their collaborators carefully, for the lighting and video were equally up to the task.

So go. Immerse yourself in images, questions and illuminations. While movies like "Knocked Up" aren't going anywhere anytime soon, these dancers might not return for a long, long time.

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April 24, 2006
DANCE REVIEW
When movement meets technology, the results can be thrilling.
By Karen Campbell, Globe Correspondent

CAMBRIDGE -- Dance and technology are often uneasy bedfellows. One form can distract from the other or have that pasted-on quality, and pieces can get mired in gimmickry. Myrna Packer and Art Bridgman have brilliantly transcended those issues in "Under the Skin," presented as part of ''Ideas in Motion 2006," Boston Cyberarts' showcase of dance and technology. The most thrilling dance work this reviewer has seen in recent memory, "Under the Skin" fluidly blends the real and virtual worlds into an eye-popping experience that is imaginative and clever yet very funny and occasionally quite touching.

The two dancers perform in front of a curtain screen that allows them to emerge and disappear through hidden openings. Video by the dancers, in collaboration with Jim Monroe and Peter Bobrow, plays over their bodies, creating a range of effects. Initially, letters and symbols scroll with dizzying speed over a duet of partnered lifts and high-energy swing turns, like a commentary on information overload. Gradually images of their own bodies begin to people the film, converging, then flying away. As the performers slowly embrace or exchange weight, green screen technology allows imagery to be cast only on their bodies or the hoop skirts they don. At one miraculous moment, the dancers seem to merge into one.

By the end, a whole cast of virtual alter egos has emerged for a jazzy romp with the dancers that is flat-out exhilarating. Cambridge composer/saxophonist Ken Field's dynamite jazz/funk score pops with an infectious groove as he plays live with a prerecorded tape in a way that echoes the dancers' fusion of the real and virtual.

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September 9, 2006
Bridgman/Packer Dance, Dance Review: DanceNow/NYC Festival at Dance Theater Workshop (shared program)
By Roslyn Sulcas

The evening opened with an excerpt from Memory Bank by Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, who created an ingenious trompe l'oeil fusion of physical and video-image bodies. Mr. Bridgman and Ms. Packer worked in front of a screen hung with white satin and gauze cloths, and their bodies (and video doubles) appeared, merged and then disappeared with magical and fascinating suddenness.

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Thursday, March 3, 2005
Bridgman/Packer Dance
Sharing a Stage With Their Video Selves
By Jennifer Dunning

There was nothing new about the video techniques and effects that Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer used in their new work "Under the Skin," performed on Wednesday night as part of the 92 on 42 series. But video projections have seldom been used so adroitly or with such profligate imagination.

An installment in a trilogy that began in 2003 with "Seductive Reasoning," which opened the program, "Under the Skin" was, like its predecessor, a suite of short, fast-flowing numbers that created a wild carnival of images as magical as nonexistent rabbits being rapidly pulled from and tossed back into a real top hat or two. All that was missing was the infectious laughter of children welling up from the enthusiastic audience.

The central idea of the new work is that the actual live figures of Mr. Bridgman and Ms. Packer, modern dancers and choreographers who have performed together for 27 years, blend seamlessly with video selves, elements of projected costuming and, in the first number, a rainstorm of white letters on a black screen. In one early solo, Mr. Bridgman moves through that storm, letters dappling his body, too, as if he were buffeted by a terrific wind.

The two are dressed for the most part in street clothes and white diaphanous hoop skirts. In the most beautiful-looking of the numbers, the skirts appear to drape together into one large, rippling ball gown of luxuriant grey velvet. In a slightly creepy segment, Mr. Bridgman echoes the movements of Ms. Packer, who kneels to his left, and here as in other numbers, he dresses and undresses himself in garments that seem real but are actually projected on his body. He also assumes the guise of a man-woman, courtesy, again, of the projections, for a look that has nothing to do with "La Cage aux Folles."

The finale is a party with dozens of life-sized Bridgmans and Packers who appear and disappear as if by magic through slits in the back curtain. They dance together, cut in on one another and amble through a crowd that also includes an eerie bleached figure of a woman that looks like a paper cutout as it floats upward.

The two are fortunate in their collaborators. The lighting by Frank DenDanto III creates the perfect insubstantial world. Ken Field accompanies his own jaunty, jazzy taped score in a sly approximation of the dance. Most of all, the video by Mr. Bridgman, Ms. Packer, Jim Monroe and Peter Bobrow is a central but surprisingly unobtrusive element in the piece. The program also included a duet by Mr. Field, playing saxophone, and Robert Een, who composed the score for "Seductive Reasoning" and played cello.

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March 21, 2007

Me, Myself, and I
Technology creates multiple dance partners
by Deborah Jowitt

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer
photo: Steven Schreiber

For some time now Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer have been touring with a very compact company: the two of them, their video images, and set pieces to project these on. Their equipment may occupy many pieces of luggage, but they don't have a lot of mouths to feed or egos to soothe. At the end of their Seductive Reasoning, they multiply themselves into a horde�their life-sized projected selves striding out in different directions from openings in a white rear curtain, exiting, and reappearing (occasionally wearing new outfits), while we play guess-the-real-dancers. It's a dazzling virtual rush hour.

Each part of their just-completed trilogy, Seductive Reasoning, Under the Skin, and now Memory Bank, is accompanied by an impressive live musician, plus pre-recorded tracks. Composer-cellist Robert Een plays his instrument for Seductive Reasoning, as does saxophonist-composer Ken Field for Under the Skin. Grammy-Award-winning percussionist Glen Velez does a dazzling turn on the tambourine before his score for Memory Bank begins. The music, like the dances, teases us-in this case, the seen and the unseen uniting in what's heard.

The three pieces' multiple images and shadows serve one main idea: the relationship of a couple, such this real-life pair who've been collaborating for 29 years. Although Bridgman and Packer are charming and persuasive performers, they don't act out marital life, aside from dancing affectionately together�sometimes as if on a Saturday night out. With the collaboration of Jim Monroe and Peter Bobrow, they employ video to suggest aspects of role-playing, amorousness, struggle, and the day-to-day intimacies born of their long association.

In Seductive Reasoning, they dance both with each other and with their dream partners in a dizzying foursome. Bridgman walks in profile, accompanied by an alter ego capable slipping out of synch with him and re-clothing itself in different outfits every few seconds. In one remarkable section of Under the Skin, the two wear white hoopskirts that act as screens. His image can appear to creep under garment. She can acquire his legs and vice versa. As they embrace, so do their projected selves, but in different ways.

Memory Bank employs a new strategy. Enabled by Video Time Delay Software by Matthias Oostrik, they can dance with their own past, that is, interact with projections of movements performed seconds ago. They also allude to the veiling effects of memory by entering tall transparent "cases" that are shallower than they are wide. Semi-transparent curtains in the structures further blur what we see, and partially concealing satin ones add further layers to these compartmentalized recollections. When Bridgman and Packer, wearing only flesh-colored trunks, embrace in a blue haze (lighting design by Frank DeDanto III), joined by their other selves, they remind us how many hands and mouths often seem to inhabit a single couple's lovemaking. When the live performers struggle, the curtains billow in emphasis.

As the two, alone or together, move in and out of the structures or vanish temporarily behind a white panel, they seem to be chasing each other and their earlier selves. Even when she confronts him briefly across a table, their clones continue the imaginative pursuit onscreen.

The way Bridgman and Packer use media subtly distances them from their feelings. At one point in Memory Bank, Bridgman watches two tiny images of himself and Packer float down, as if recollection has diminished them. When their living bodies become screens for projections, the mingled elements imply almost more than they reveal. That powerful, strangely intimate disconnect is at the heart of the trilogy's seductive duets.

Bridgman and Packer's alluring work throws out provocative ideas. We pursue the past and the future without understanding exactly what we're chasing or how we'd feel if we caught up with it. And, given the possible future of cloning, how would you react if you met yourself coming around the bend?

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Philadelphia City Paper, June 12, 2007
Dance Review
Illusions of Space, DanceBOOM!, Wilma Theater (shared program)
by Janet Anderson

Bridgman/Packer Dance (Myrna and Art) started the evening with Under the Skin, an astonishing dance/video experience, merging the real and unreal into the surreal. With wailing jazz sounds and saxophone of Ken Field as accompaniment, the twosome danced in front of moving graphics that they simultaneously disappeared into, floated above and almost always had superimposed on their bodies. They transformed into each other with their white petticoats serving as projection screens. Images distorted, body parts passed between Bridgman and Packer. It was fabulous.

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December 31, 2006
The Best of 2006 Boston Arts and Entertainment
DANCE
By Karen Campbell, Globe Correspondent

The Boston Cyberarts Festival came up with a spectacular find this year in the thrilling Myrna Packer/Art Bridgman collaboration "Under the Skin", a fluid blend of the real and virtual worlds in an eye-popping experience that was technologically clever, imaginative, and emotionally resonant.

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September 12, 2006
By Helen Shaw

Topping my list was the show's opener, a snippet of the upcoming "Memory Bank" by Bridgman/Packer Dance. Video projection has gotten so common, and is so frequently subpar, that the hum of a projector is almost enough to make a theatergoer cringe in anticipation. But Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, along with collaborator Peter Bobrow, have created a genuinely bewitching mini-landscape out of a layered projection screen and simple, life-size images.What seems to be a king-size sheet hangs in the middle of the stage, with a king-size piece of gauze hanging just a few inches in front of it. As the image of Mr. Bridgman appears on the gauze, we gradually realize that the man himself is standing just behind his reflection. As he and Ms. Packer slip around their screen, their floating projections seem more real than they do. It's thoroughly disorienting, and never less than gorgeous.

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Montréal Le dimanche 03 avril 2005
Illusion et passion
Stéphanie Brody
(English translation)

This afternoon at Tangente is the last chance to discover the fascinating work of the New York duo composed of Myrna Packer and Art Bridgman. Slightly illusionist, this pair of choreographer-dancers skillfully uses projections and video in order to create works that are dynamic, with all the movement you could wish for and filled with humorous moments of magic. In Under the Skin, the piece shown at Tangente during the first week of the series Corps electronique, the dancers' body movements, already highly physical, explode into a multitude of layers and textures, taking us to the most unexpected places. When their bodies, entwined in a kind of wild tango/jitter bug, are superimposed over a huge serial matrix made up of letters and symbols which are constantly shifting in density, speed and direction, the natural intensity of their movements are seen as perpetually altered and expanded. The effect is hallucinating!Later, the lovely white crinolines worn by Bridgman and Packer become screens, allowing them, through their uncanny accuracy and a live feed video system, to mischievously switch between them their upper and lower body parts. And, thanks to this amusing knack for ubiquity, it is almost impossible to tell whether the tender caresses they are exchanging are virtual or real. Their screen-dresses, which at times remind us�those of us who can remember�of the dresses that Catherine Deneuve wore in the film Peau d�Ane that were the color of the moon and the color of time, then become the stage for all sorts of magical apparitions, some that are better that others. Packer and Bridgman are skilled duettists who never cease expanding, vanishing and defying the laws of gravity under our astounded eyes.

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Getting (It) Together
Attacking, recoiling, jabbing, trampling, collapsing, and slipping into a loved one's skin
Bridgman/Packer Dance
The Duke on 42nd Street
March 2 through 6
by Deborah Jowitt
March 14, 2005

photo: Cary Conover

Art, meet Myrna. Sorry, that's only her video image facing you; Myrna's over there dancing with another guy. Oops, no, that's you. Well, not really you, just your media clone. You two should get together. Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer make work about who they are: a husband and wife who've been collaborating for 27 years. Recently, with the creative contributions of video experts Jim Monroe and Peter Bobrow, they've begun to investigate the many selves of a couple in playful, visually delightful, sometimes moving ways. Their new Under the Skin is the second part of a projected trilogy; the first, Seductive Reasoning, premiered at Joyce Soho in 2003 and last week opened the pair's 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project season, with composer Robert Een accompanying his superb taped score with cello and vocals. Reasoning explored their fantasies about each other and themselves in wonderfully magical ways. Skin is more intently focused. With the assistance of life-size video doubles, the two indeed get into each other's skins. A suspended curtain of six panels allows the live dancers to disappear momentarily and reappear (often in different clothes) as easily as their projected images do through the openings of a projected curtain. (The minute spatial calculations involved must be hair-raising.)While Ken Field accompanies his score by playing his sax from the balcony, Bridgman and Packer merge and separate in witty ways. Words (gibberish, I think) sometimes fill the backdrop or pour down like rain over the performers. Once, Bridgman balances a pint-size Packer image on his hand; it turns into a pale pink cutout and floats up. White hoopskirts worn by either one or both become screens. His face appears under her skirt. His image's hands dress her in his clothes. She sits and watches while he acquires "her" legs. As they wait, wearing the hoopskirts, their bare backs to us, virtual black evening gowns suddenly clothe them. At times, the transformations get almost too complex: Bridgman, his back to us, dons a shirt and pants while his clone, projected on his back and facing us, does the same thing.The message is clear: Bridgman and Packer mean to show us, with immense precision, the blurring of one person into another in the day-to-day activities of an affectionately shared life. They also dance, their embraces and ballroom moves becoming additional metaphors for merging and separating with fluid ease. In the end, seeking each other through the cracks in the curtain, they acquire not just doubles but a horde of Arts and Myrnas looping dizzily into and out of sight. Do we always know which other self we're trying to hold on to?

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Good Things in Black Boxes
by Deborah Jowitt
February 19 - 25, 2003

Shadow play: Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer at Joyce Soho
photo: Hiroyuki Ito

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer explode a duet act into a dialogue with others, some of whom are themselves. Isn't technology grand? Their accomplishment seems even more magical in the intimate Joyce Soho. In excerpts from their 2000 Carried Away (score by Glen Velez), the couple dances part of the time behind a red silk hanging. In this arena, their shadows duel playfully, with a life-size Packer suddenly confronted by a gigantic Bridgman and vice versa. The resonant Point A to Point B (You Can't Get There From Here) pokes fun at the business of roadside directions-givers, with vivid video scenes of helpful people describing impossible routes and laying out streets with emphatic hands. At one point, their faces are projected onto Bridgman's bare back, even his face, as if he were turning into a map of contradictory instructions. "I think we're lost," says Packer early on, as the two dance while rubbing live mics against their bodies (I'm not sure why). Gradually, the remarkable and engaging work becomes not just a clever satire but a metaphor for a couple's life journey. Their new Seductive Reasoning uses a variety of devices and sinuous movements to suggest the disguises and personal visions that shape a relationship. This is a suite of enticing little episodes, set to a wonderful composition by Robert Een for cello, voice, guitar, and percussion (Een and his cello in the flesh, the last two on tape). For instance, Packer dances in front of a pink screen, while a video camera and a projector manipulate her rosy image into a series of smaller and smaller Myrnas that finally circle around a glowing iris, as if to be sucked into a white hole. Then Bridgman dances with Packer's life-size projected image and she with his, the two couples in perfect sync. He then stands in profile, merging and separating from a "self" that's suddenly clad in a white skirt, then in other outfits (the image keeps diving into the real Art as if he's a clothes closet). Finally, wearing a dark suit, he's ready to join his partner (now in heels and a sexy dress) for more transformative games. At some point, five Robert Eens appear on an upended mattress. Wish he could play me to sleep. Amid all the magic, it was nice, in Cups, to see Bridgman and Packer sit down to supper with their seventh-grade son, Davy Bridgman Packer, and make rhythmic family byplay with plastic cups, their hands, and the table.

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For booking and company information:

Bridgman/Packer Dance
281 Old Mill Road
Valley Cottage, NY 10989
ph/fax: 845 268-9008
info@bridgmanpacker.org

Michelle Coe, Pentacle
246 West 38th St.
New York, NY 10018
212 278-8111 x308
michellec@pentacle.org