Seen Performance at Rèst-âü-Ránt in Long Island City / Astoria

Seen Performance performs ‘Box Shy’ at LIC/Astoria’s new Rèst-âü-Ránt

Last week, liQcity attended a fundraiser for Seen Performance, an Astoria-based modern-dance/interdisciplinary performance collective headed by Esther Palmer, held at a relatively new wine and beer bar, Rèst-âü-Ránt, on the border of Long Island City and Astoria at 30th St and 35th Ave.

As for Rèst-âü-Ránt itself: the atmosphere was cozy, with lots of dark wood on the walls; the sandwiches were tasty (the menu consisted mostly of Paninis, salads, and appetizers); but the beer and wine flights were exceptional. And Rèst-âü-Ránt has also started a series of “Live Music Thursdays,” featuring “diverse and talented musicians from across the globe,” FREE starting at 8:30 pm on Thursday nights. In lieu of a website, you can call them at 718.729.9009.

Palmer has taken a web 2.0 approach to defining community and its interaction with a work of art, opening up her works-in-progress to commentary on her blog, especially with a new work she’s developing this year called “Find Me in Here”. Palmer has also started a group called Astoria Artists are Awesome, which holds regular meetings open to all artists and enthusiasts in Western Queens, to help build presence and community involvement. The next meeting is this Saturday, March 21st 2:30pm at CafeBar.

At Rèst-âü-Ránt last week Palmer performed a work called Box Shy co-developed by composer David Morneau and designer Shana McKay, from a collection she calls “The Party Project,” a series of performances meant to take place in party situations and other social gatherings.

Esther’s goal seems to be to create a slight disturbance in social space, without a major disruption. At some point she got up and cleared a small space in a corner of the (already quite cozy!) bar, and started talking about “The Party Project,” while David Morneau sat in the middle of the space generating some ambient electronic sounds. She asked people to stand in a square around the space, and gradually unwound a clear plastic banner on which she’d painted abstract sketches, handing the rods that had been attached to the banner to people standing in the corners, gradually creating a box, outside of which we, the audience/participants were standing. She performed some very subtle gestures inside the box, looking-but-not-looking at some of us outside, moving around gently… and the performance was over, and we re-wound the banner. The whole experience hadn’t lasted more than 6 or 7 minutes.

It’s hard to know if anything actually happened… for decades, artists have made a big deal about dissolving the boundary between performers and audience, between the inside and outside of a work of art or performance–and the whole subject has gotten quite stale. But there was something engaging about “Box Shy,” possibly because Esther didn’t hit you over the head with it, or throw around any deep conceptualizations.

–posted by Sami Shumays, Arts Contributor at liQcity. If you have a LIC arts event you’d like covered on liQcity, please email info to arts [at] liQcity [dot] com.