Images by Gwendolyn Poirot
As recently as last week, writing in this publication, Alec Coiro attached his typically puerile, vaguely literate prose to the excellent Sam Falls and Hart of Gold collaboration set to the music of Oldd News currently up at The Kitchen. Through the haze of Coiro’s verbosity, one does manage to stumble on an interesting insight, no doubt arrived at accidentally: The emergence of raw, urgently humanistic rock music paired with dance.
However, typical of his cluelessness, Coiro fails to mention bands like L’Amour Blue, who are also engaging in much the same practice in an art world context similar to the Sam Fall’s/Hart of Gold piece.
Not one week ago, L’Amour Blue collaborated with senior statesman of New York City dance scene, Stanley Love, for a captivating half-an-hour at Zieher, Smith + Horton Gallery in Chelsea. The show was stripped down, often furious rock featuring Ryan Schaeffer on guitar and lead vocals, culminating in semi-nudity. The baring of the flesh, to me, was an assertion of the band’s personhood against the digitization that characterizes the hegemony of modern music. This assertion of personhood is made all the more present by their consistent collaboration with dancers. Last week that dancer was Stanley Love, whose frenetic, vernacular, captivating, beautiful movements could not have underscored his and all of our humanities any more effectively.
Attending with my sister Gwendolyn, this was my first time seeing L’Amour Blue, for they are a relatively recently formed, and have played exclusively in art galleries thus far; typically, the art world accepts what the rest of the world cannot yet conceive.
Surely, groups like L’Amour Blue represent a vanguard of humans, asserting their analog, organic, flesh over the cyber pop and laptop electro that has become the status quo.
Dance
Movement
Pose
