redevelop (death valley)

FEAR OF PROJECTION Actors share space with video.

Photograph: Paula Court

It takes only a stroll past the hip bars and chic Thai noodle houses of Vernon Boulevard to see that Long Island City isn’t the low-rent bargain it once was. Luxury condos and real-estate moguls have displaced many longtime residents of this once-sleepy Queens neighborhood, and given Brian Rogers ample fodder for redevelop (death valley), his unsatisfying meditation on our ever-changing urban landscape.

Part multimedia installation, part case study, Rogers’s work is a collage of live-feed video, lackluster gestural dance, and murmured text (was that a line from Glengarry Glen Ross?) combined to create a fractured diptych about the paradoxical impermanence of home. Reticent ensemble members go about their private choreography obscured by walls of frosted plastic panels, gradually removing them to reveal the Chocolate Factory’s expansive loft space. Like in an archeological excavation, these spatial layers are slowly peeled away as short films and a hypnotic soundscape juxtapose industrial progress with barren desolation.

Unfortunately, this all makes redevelop sound more interesting than it actually is. While Rogers and company create a few moments of evocative beauty—water magically trickles onto an antique tea set as wind chimes tinkle—they never add up to much. Rogers can’t seem to rein in the urban sprawl of redevelop’s disparate and, at times, self-indulgent elements before these musings are sequestered to the realm of private performance. Like an abandoned LIC warehouse, this piece may have interesting architectural adornments, but its flimsy structure needs to be shored up.

—Paul Menard

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