Review: Awilda Sterling-Duprey Summons Dancing Forces of Nature

The image is all-too familiar: the pinwheel form of a hurricane on a radar map, spiraling across the Caribbean. But imagine that shape crossfaded from a similar one, a dancing woman with spiraling arms. After that juxtaposition, the familiar image doesn’t look quite the same.

This is one of the more striking moments in “Lacks Criticality,” Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s performance piece, which had its New York debut at the John Hess Family Gallery and Theater at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Friday. A weekend run of the 45-minute work coincided with “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” an exhibition exploring how artists have responded to the storm that devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.

Born in San Juan in 1947, Sterling-Duprey is as established as a painter as she is as a performance artist and dancer. In her work, those categories often blend. For last year’s Whitney Biennial, she painted blindfolded while listening to jazz. It was action painting as improvisational dance, Abstract Expressionism delightfully expressing the joy of play.

Though “Lacks Criticality” was performed in the Whitney’s small theater in front of a full house of spectators in raked seating, it is closer to an art installation than a conventional dance performance. Sterling-Duprey’s solo movement sequences, structured improvisations, alternate with video segments and musical performances by three Yoruban batá drummers: Jainardo Batista, Rafael Monteagudo and Román Diaz.

Sterling-Duprey enters the theater barefoot, wearing a headlamp, prepared for the power to go out. She scoots along the floor, as if afloat, paddling with her hands, and she clings to the theater’s walls, as if buffeted by the wind. Picking up a garbage bag, she wields it like a cape or a percussion instrument, before very carefully inserting into it one leg and then the other, converting it into a skirt.

It’s after she exits, and as the musicians enter, that we see the video of the dancing woman and the crossfade into the radar map, projected onto the walls and rear scrim. This is the dancer Ama Gora, and she represents Oya, the Yoruban deity of wind and storms. Then comes harrowing video footage of Puerto Rico inundated by the hurricane — streets turned into rivers of mud, parking lots turned into pools, cars and buildings shaking — followed by a slide show of the awful aftermath.

When Sterling-Duprey reappears onstage with her headlamp, she might be assaying the damage. But she hasn’t lost her sense of play. She wields flashlights in her hands like someone impetuously conducting an orchestra or guiding aircraft — like the painter that she is.

She also addresses the lights as though they were spirits, dropping them on the floor and going where they point. In a comic and wonderful moment on Friday, she turned back to one of the flashlights in exasperation, as if to ask it where exactly it was guiding her. Then her gaze followed the light’s beam to a wall and discovered her silhouette. As she backed away from the wall, the image of herself grew as tall as the theater.

Such poverty of means is the work’s greatest source of artistic wealth, along with Sterling-Duprey’s knowledge of Afro-Caribbean culture and, above all, spirit: capricious like Oya’s, but much less violent. As a title, “Lacks Criticality” would seem to be a pre-emptive defense against art-world judgments. Compared to many of the other works in the exhibition, the performance is less politically pointed, more about viewing forces of nature through an Afro-Caribbean lens.

It makes savvy use of the Whitney’s theater. Before it starts, the percussionists can be heard and felt under the seating: Something’s coming. At the end, after Sterling-Duprey has left and returned again, the rear scrim rises to reveal the theater’s wall of windows and the view: the Hudson River, contained for the moment within its banks.

Still, the ending is a bit of an anticlimax, as Sterling-Duprey — now festooned with colorful neckties, the ribbons of Oya — finally joins with the musicians and does a few of Oya’s steps. On Friday, she stopped to catch her breath and smile at the audience’s vocal encouragement that is her due as a septuagenarian performer. But “Lacks Criticality” is less of a physical feat than an imaginative one.

Awilda Sterling-Duprey

Through March 5 at the Whitney Museum; whitney.org.