Tang to present experimental work by Debra Fernandez

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery will present two performances of an experimental theater-movement piece called Partying at 8 p.m Friday and Saturday, April 6 and 7. Admission is free. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis, starting at 7:30 p.m. Call the museum at 518-580-8080 for more information.

Choreographed by Skidmore dance Professor Debra Fernandez for a 1990s avant-garde theater work called "To Whom It May Concern," Partying is being recreated for the Tang, where it will be performed by 12 Skidmore students of theater and dance. "To Whom It May Concern" was originally created–for actors–by Brooklyn-based director Phil Soltanoff (formerly a Skidmore Theater artist-in-residence), in collaboration with Fernandez. First performed in 1996 by the Williamstown Theatre Festival's apprentice troupe, Act One, the piece has also had successful productions in New York City and Europe.

"To Whom It May Concern" sent an athletic cast of 12 business-suited actors through five rituals of a typical daily life: waking up, commuting, working, partying, and returning home at the end of the day. Soltanoff and Fernandez crafted a series of actions–performed to a loopy minimalist score by composer Joseph Diebes–to both track a typical workday and wryly comment on it. After its New York debut in 1996, The Village Voice called it "a lyric meditation on the fierce geometry of ambition and desire."

The "partying" section of "To Whom It May Concern" was performed on a 13-foot-square space, closely surrounded by audience members who stood at the edges like partygoers around a dance floor. In the Tang's Payne Presentation Room, the Skidmore dancers will also work in the round, performing a complex routine of stylized pedestrian movements and repeating it in four directions. Each repetition adds variations, Fernandez explains, as "the piece heats up and turns into an organized frenzy that viewers can see from all angles."

The Tang's presentation of Partying will be augmented by a 25-minute introduction that Fernandez describes as "an étude that distills the earlier sections of 'To Whom It May Concern' into set pieces that will function like installations scattered throughout the museum's galleries, among which audience members can freely wander until the start of the performance."

Three earlier dance works choreographed by Fernandez for the Tang Museum–Satie-Cage Tango (2000), Balls (2002), and Mak 3 (2004)–drew enthusiastic overflow crowds and critical acclaim. For each collaborative piece, Fernandez brings together colleagues from fields such as dance, theater, literature, music, and film to create mixed-media performances that blend and bridge the different disciplines in often surprising new ways.