Crack addict

BREAKING AWAY Sigman stars in RUPTURE.

Photograph: Aleksandar Muharemovic

Jill Sigman’s latest choreographic journey began with an acute calf injury a week before her 2004 show, Pulling the Wool, and took her around the world—to India, New Orleans, Berlin and Croatia. “I used my injury as seed crystal for the piece,” she said recently over tea in Chelsea, “but it’s gathered so many layers.”

Nearly three years’ worth, in fact, including a residency at the Kri Foundation in New Delhi—where Sigman, starting a week after the 2004 tsunami struck, studied the Indian forms kathak and bharata natyam—as well as performing in an ongoing installation piece at Takt Kunstprojektraum in Berlin. The culmination of it all is RUPTURE, a multimedia work for five dancers and hundreds of broken eggshells, which Sigman hopes will transform Danspace Project into a landscape similar, in part, to some of the abandoned sites she visited. “It’s been an interesting trail of places, disasters and strange energies,” she says. “The work may have started with my injury, but it’s a big stew of stuff now. RUPTURE jumps among different energies and movement styles and places—there might be a way in which that fragmentation is confusing, but it also feels like it’s part of the statement.”

Sigman has integrated the idea of fracturing in both the work’s form and its subject matter. RUPTURE opens with a preshow installation, inspired by the choreographer’s time in Germany, in which footage of the Berlin Wall is screened, like a corset, onto a performer’s torso. “There’s a crack in the wall, and it’s set up to look like the torso is cracking open,” she explains. “In Berlin, evidence of that rupture is everywhere. Even when you’re not seeing the wall or ruins anymore, you’re feeling the invisible presence of those devastations. There are holes in things. It’s scarred, and to me all of the new construction feels like scar tissue.”

The only color highlighted in the otherwise black-and-white production is the red worn by Sigman, who appears as “a kind of weird, runaway Girl Scout. I want to look like the child who is lost in a forest,” she continues, “someone who’s low on the scale of forces and furies and powers and has run away and is trying to navigate through that world. The whole piece has the feel of an odyssey.”

Broken eggshells, which will form a rim around the stage’s perimeter, are inspired by a project Sigman initiated as a way to extend the work’s roots past its theatrical presentation. Since October, she has distributed 10,000 cards requesting strangers to respond by e-mail to three questions: What have you broken? What have you lost? How do you want to die? (She’s left the cards in freezers at supermarkets, on subways, in phone booths and even wedged in between the pages of books at bookstores.) Answers will be written in red ink by volunteers on those eggshells, symbolizing a ruin or a place of some unexplained devastation.

Sigman suspects that in the end, she’ll require more than 3,000 shells for the set. “My apartment, which is not large, is an eggshell storage room right now,” she says, laughing. “I do brunch pickups on Sunday from three restaurants. When I’m up at 3am washing eggshells in my bathtub, I’m like, Why am I doing this? What was I thinking? But everyone I know saves eggshells for me. I get bags left in random places. I’m like a drug dealer or something.”

For Sigman, the difficult side of RUPTURE will occur during the performance when, after all the 3am washings and painstaking writing, many of the shells will be crushed. “At some point I will walk on them,” she explains. “In some ways it disturbs me. But I have to keep reminding myself that this is what this piece is about and in many ways what dance is about: I’ve worked on this show for so long and we’re going to do it for four nights and then it’s gone. It’s the opposite of good, capitalistic behavior where you do minimal work and time for maximal product. It’s about getting people together in a dark room and having them sit there to have an experience, and then they leave. And that’s what is beautiful.”

RUPTURE at Danspace Project Thu 8–Sun 11.