Clare Byrne Mayfair

Witch Night, May 9
Just in time for Mother’s Day, Clare Byrne lays out a feast of female possibilities. Her Witch Night is a weaving together of five short pieces, each of which explores wild and playful depths of femininity. Characters, costumes, and voices come and go while inviting rich questions about the nature of performance, onstage and off.

We first meet the white witch. She enters the intimate performance space and, talking in a hilariously shrill voice, sacrifices a baguette. She passes around pieces of the bread and we eat together. It is a sacrament and a thanksgiving, an acknowlegement of the community that is created within the audience of every performance.

The white witch invokes feelings of mystery, fear, and support. She implies that, this evening, we will not know what is real and what is pretend. She feeds us like a grandmother, a priest, and a prostitute.

Byrne adds other ingredients, dances and short films, into her witch’s brew. We see an MTV-type dance complete with fierce back-up-booty-dancers. Byrne performs Martha Graham’s Lamentation. She uses leaves on the floor to dance an audience member’s fortune. The white witch returns and, while speaking lyrics from Camelot, sexually squeezes white icing out of tubes and onto cupcakes. We eat again.

One of the films, Morgan, Child Goddess, stars a beautifully awkward and open young girl romping through the woods. Union of the Fishes stars a naked Byrne and Sharon Estacio. Pubic hair not concealed, they make body sounds and move close together.

Like Martha Graham, Byrne explores raw and powerful female energy in her work. It is not limited to this, but it is unusual in this. She looks at the roles that women play and the ones open to us. She also looks beyond the roles. Witch Night feels inspired by the ten-year-old girl in Morgan, Child Goddess. The evening seems to come from that age before cynicism and cool have hit. It is as if we have joined a girl’s unhindered imagination. We are free to be anything.

Will Rawls kneeling, photo by Stefan Jacobs

Kneelings, May 10
Byrne finishes her Mayfair with Kneelings. From 8:10 until 10:00 am, four dancers make their way across Manhattan’s 23rd Street. On the sidewalk, in the middle of each block, one of them kneels. They sit still while New York City walks, and drives, by. It is aesthetic and religious. (Are the two different?) Simple, grateful, gentle, subtle and bold.

Endgame (an essay)

I first saw Beckett’s Endgame twelve years ago at the conservatory I was attending. I loved it.

I sat close to the stage, next to the boy I liked. I was blown away by the crafted laughter about things that, ultimately, were very serious. The play offered me intellectual and spiritual respite from technical dance training.

In the twelve years that have since passed, both of my grandmothers died. I moved five times. I got married. I was pregnant and lost the pregnancy. There have been many beginnings and endings.

In short, life has happened.

Tonight, I brought life with me to BAM and a new performance of Endgame. I connected with Beckett’s play and his characters in many new ways.

Nagg and Nell, talking from their solitary trashcans, became the nursing home patients with whom I’ve worked. Trapped and protected by their claustrophobic metal homes, they search for a way to connect. They eat dry biscuits and try to tell jokes like they used to. They itch, they fall asleep, they die.

Clov and Hamm’s stuffed dog became the teddy bear of my friend’s six year old son. The bear he put down just long enough to open his arms wide and, leading with his little chest, give me an enormous, open hug.

Hamm’s failed search for painkillers brought me to friends’ diagnoses that are unbearable -- and the raw aliveness of bearing. I felt the hopelessness of the set’s nearly windowless walls.

Tonight, Nagg and Nell, Clov and Hamm became the partnerships I have known. We stumble through repetition and annoyance, power, deception, love and need. We see one another and also avoid seeing.

Beckett, through his meticulously choreographed stage directions and script, gives me a lot to see. He points me to murky and meaningful areas of my life. Tonight, as with the first time I saw Endgame, I felt the audience around me laugh while I did not. I felt the tension, or connection, between being entertained and being real.