TBA festival: Maria Hassabi's power is in the pain

By Barry Johnson

The seconds ticked by and Maria Hassabi was spending a lot of them in the most uncomfortable positions -- weight on one hip and one elbow, say, as her legs splayed in different directions, toes pointed, and her head was thrown back, exposing her neck. Sometimes she stayed there for a long count -- of 20, say, even 24, and then she would stretch in that position, making it even more uncomfortable, legs quivering and neck muscles bulging, before she slowly started moving out of it, rolling her torso inch by inch or pulling a leg over, which led her into a new position.  As I watched, I thought of it as the anti-yoga.

The positions were often obviously connected to runway model conventions, it seemed to me, or the way the ballerina holds her hands, limpidly but deliberately, just taken to an extreme, a painful extreme. At one point, toward the end, I though I recognized the pose of the young woman in Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World." Hassabi's expression alternated among sad, concerned and emotionless.

Sometimes press materials don't provide very useful descriptions of performances, but in this case the Time-Based Art festival catalog copy was accurate:

"SoloShow extends choreographer Maria Hassabi’s interest in representations of the female body embedded within art history and pop culture. Staging the movement between sensation and its display, the performer moves beyond rhythm, ideal postures, and coherence as hundreds of images are seamlessly, physically collaged."

Although the next sentence mentions "duration," it still doesn't prepare us for the intensity of the experience, of course, or the series of tortured positions attained after great effort and then left behind at a glacial pace.