PRIVATE COLLECTION is a phrase charged by museum tombstones, which display information about an artwork that is otherwise inaccessible to anyone beyond the “private” owner. It connotes a kind of exclusivity, a proprietary right to viewership, a generosity in extending that privilege to the viewer. The term also echoes private recollection, memories and personal experiences replaying in fragmented form. As the title of Lauren Bakst’s recent performance at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, the phrase and all of its associations formed a framework for something that, as Bakst declared, was “not a performance” and “not a dance” either, choreographed by an artist interested in challenging the complexities of “the live.” Sifting through past experiences, movements, conversations, and performances, Private Collectionwove real and fabricated histories into rehearsal-like re-enactments in the present.

The evening began at 6 PM, when the two dancers (Chanterelle Menashe Ribes and Bakst) could be overheard talking to each other in another room of the gallery separated by long hallway from the larger space, where the audience sat on folding red metal chairs before an L-shaped plywood stage designed by Yuri Masnyj. Some twenty minutes later, Ribes came into view, edging into the hallway by sliding along the wall as if rock climbing across a horizontal face. Although this was her entrance, it was not the beginning, for the three parts of Bakst’s performance were staggered and shuffled in a predetermined order: Part three was followed by part one, then parts two and three, then part one again, and finally part two. Segues were not clearly marked. The performers might begin to change clothes, a chair might be moved, or the lights might flicker, but these signals were interspersed with other false starts: Ribes or Bakst miming cigarette breaks; Ribes calling out “Lauren? … Lauren, could you… go back to the beginning?”; Bakst feigning defeat (“I forgot what came next. Shit. I’m going to start over, okay?”). All of this triggered not a replay of past actions, but a new constellation of movements. I was reminded of a concept Bakst had been working through over the past few years: “There are an infinite number of ways to get down and get back up again.” Here, repetitions were not failures but trials, reenacted so as to become recognizable by the audience and therefore significant for their invocation, formation, and embodiment of memory—as well as its imperfection. Read More