Bridgman | Packer Dance gives Ghost Factory, its latest blend of live dance and film, its New York City premiere at 92NY on November 20 and 21, with tickets from $45.
There are two performances only, both at 7 p.m. in Buttenwieser Hall at the Arnhold Center. Tickets are sold through the 92NY website.
Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer have worked as a duo for more than four decades. Their pieces put just the two of them on stage alongside projected film, so the live bodies and the recorded images share the same space.
The new work starts in Johnson City, in upstate New York, with its empty factory buildings and the people who live around them. The performers dance into, across and against video of those spaces, which splits apart, multiplies and fades as the piece goes on.
The creative team are longtime collaborators: filmmaker Peter Bobrow, lighting designer Frank DenDanto III, costume designer Anna-Alisa Belous and composer and sound designer Ansel Bobrow.
A companion installation, Places with Hidden Stories, runs through the building’s Harkness Dance Center. It gathers audio and video accounts from Johnson City residents, factory stories from other towns where Ghost Factory has played, and one from Manhattan: the Lower East Side tenement apartment where Packer’s father was born, at a time when her grandfather worked in the fur factories. The installation opens an hour before the performance and stays open for an hour after it.
The engagement belongs to 92NY’s Home season, which also brings Christopher Williams’s Spectre de la Rose to the same hall on October 29 and 30.
