At a Brooklyn Gallery, Dancers Bring a Sweeping Textile Installation to Life

What can be achieved when you break down the boundaries between creative disciplines?

Last month, East Williamsburg gallery Carvalho Park inaugurated a new biannual performance series with a project that approached just such a question. The current performances present a commissioned, multi-disciplinary installation that combines textile art with dance, and speaks to the gallery’s ethos, centered on presenting projects and exhibitions that forge a path toward a post-medium art world liberated from material hierarchies.

At the gallery, Swedish textile artist Diana Orving has created a large-scale installation piece, comprising hanging and twisting swathes of monochrome silk organza and jute, amid which the performances occur. Entitled , the installation took more than 1,600 square feet of fabric to construct, with Orving ultimately creating the final piece in situ, garnering it a distinctively organic sensibility. Activating the work is the performance by choreographer and dancer Jodi Melnick and New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns, who, in the week leading up to the presentation’s debut, worked within Orving’s installation to create a piece engaged with themes that parallel those of “Spirit Playground,” among them ideas around doubt, volatility, and the type of interconnectedness that can be found in everything from nature to the human body.

The two performers’ work is accompanied by an evolving soundtrack, which at times is eerie and even a bit jarring, at others inducing a lulling sensation mirrored by Mearns’s and Melnick’s rhythmic movements. As the dancers move through the installation, parts or all of their bodies are obscured by the diaphanous swathes of suspended fabric, depending on vantage points.  The duo’s performances remain in dialogue with the work throughout the performance, highlighting the emphasis on interconnectedness at both a micro and macro scale.

Carvalho Park entered the Brooklyn gallery scene in 2019, helmed by Jennifer Carvalho and Se Yoon Park. Since its inception, Carvalho Park has staged increasingly experimental and immersive shows that seek to activate the space itself—as well as viewers’ experiences. The present performance series follows on the heels of a major renovation, completed late last year, which resulted in the doubling of the available exhibition space and made intensive projects such as the present, cross-disciplinary work possible.

The final performance in the series is slated to take place this Thursday, August 8, and while it is free and open to the public, RSVP through the gallery’s website is required (there will be two performances at 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. respectively, and at the time of writing the former has already reached capacity). though will remain on view through August 17.

In the adjacent space is a solo exhibition of new work by Stan Van Steendam, “Thoroughfare,” also on view through August 17. Marking the artist’s debut with the gallery, it is certainly worth getting to the gallery a bit early to see Van Steendam’s three-dimensional and chromatically symbolic works before the performance.