gmbcorp today: Physical Graffiti

Physical Graffiti

by Steve Dollar

Anne Marsen claims she's an introvert. She's petite, and although she makes her living as a dancer, there's nothing of that fragile, aesthetically tortured, swan-like artiste about her. You might not pick her out in a crowd. Which makes her performance in Girl Walk // All Day even more of a marvel. Over the course of 72 minutes she rockets across the five boroughs, from the docks of Red Hook to the bleachers of Yankee Stadium, a Terpsichore in sneakers compulsively leaping in the faces of hundreds of New Yorkers going about their business. That they are largely impervious to this pint-sized maniac, an abstract canvas of humanity nonplussed or, at best, bemused, by Marsen's adrenalized, freestyle bugging-out-athon, is part of the joke. People are always going crazy in the city. But that doesn't mean something amazing isn't happening right in front of your eyes. If she had the chance, she'd teach the world to dance, and she won't stop until she does.

The exhilarating video, which premiered last week at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple and will be screening here, there and everywhere in the coming months, is genius in another way: the whole schmear is cued to Girl Talk's All Day. Released in 2010, the album from master mixologist Greg Gillis is a subversive, giddy mash-up of some 373 separate bits of music: samples of seemingly contradictory tracks spliced together like some absurd, surrealist collage that reveals uncanny congruences. From the opening salvo that grafts Ludacris's "Move Bitch" onto Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," it never looks back, lifting the aggressive declamations of (mostly crunky) hip-hop vocals to the rhythms of, well, everything else, leaving listeners breathless with the shock of recognition. Who knew that Missy Elliot and the Ramones went together like chocolate and peanut butter?

Director Jacob Krupnick, a photographer and filmmaker, had been looking for a longform dance production after meeting Marsen and another dancer, John Doyle, on a 2009 commerical project. The idea was to exploit their seamless command of various street dance styles?influenced by hip-hop and Bollywood?and more classic, formal tropes against the urban landscape that?s provided a stage for everything from West Side Story to NY Export: Opus Jazz. When he heard All Day, everything clicked.

"The energy of Girl Talk's music is so extremely high, one of the challenges is to figure out how to find lulls and variations amid this album that's so maximalist for 72 minutes," he said. The concept seemed simple enough: a ballet dancer flips out during a rehearsal under the stern gaze of a prim instructor, then begins a day-long journey on the Staten Island Ferry, working her way from Wall Street to Union Square to Central Park and beyond, with transformations and encounters occurring across 20 separate locations. "She's impertinent and a little bratty but also really curious and good natured and she's constantly trying to encourage people around her to dance."

It usually doesn't work, if hilariously so. At once point, Marsen marks up a sandwich-board style sign that begs "DANCE WITH ME" and hangs it around her neck. She approaches a stranger in the middle of Grand Central Station, wildly gesticulating. He never glances up from the cell phone he's busily typing into. There are preordained moments, such as a choreographic face-off on the Williamsburg Bridge with the Beat Club Crew, a team of young street dancers. But also occasions where people actually do jump in front of the camera and learn a routine, as three Egyptian tourists gamely do, following Marsen's lead as their anchor a line of women dancing to Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" right in the middle of the Financial District.

"I tried to add some deeper elements to the story instead of dancing like a maniac the whole time. I tried to find some purpose for this girl to be going bonkers all over the place," said Marsen, who found herself playing a version of the character?the "weirdo dancing-tutor"?on the CBS drama The Good Wife. [Clips here, here (two minutes in), and here.] Indeed, there is the obvious theme concerning the virtues of good, old-fashioned American individualism pushing against the surging gray tide of conformity and commodification. At one point, Marsen's character "sells out" and goes on a shopping binge in Midtown, pausing in the middle of an empty side street to bump and grind like a booty girl in rap video while the skeezy power chords of "Twentieth Century Boy" glam up the soundtrack. But after an exhibit of grossly conspicuous consumption before the agog placard-holders of Occupy Wall Street she comes across a little girl who blinks her back to "normal"?thrift-shop garb ringed by a tutu the shade of melted orange sherbet. Meanwhile, her indefatigable, skeleton-suited suitor The Creep (Doyle) dukes it out with a third dancer, The Gentleman (Daisuke Omiya), and gradually learns how to be a nice guy.

The formal rhymes between Gillis' sonic cut-ups and the dancers' genre-smashed physical graffiti are self-evident, but the project also emulated the source music in another way. Krupnick never got any permits, staging five months of shoots in pure guerrilla style. As you'll see in the finished version of Girl Walk, this works pretty well until Marsen lays siege to Yankee Stadium during a baseball game. As she rallies the crowd, stadium security rushes to give her the heave-ho, escorting Marsen to the street, orange sherbet tutu and all.

"I guess," she said, "you're not allowed to dance on the railings between the field and the seats."

Who knew?