Out There 20: Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People

Many contemporary dance artists are viewing the theater spaces in which they perform as anthropological sites open to investigation. After all, they spend a lot of time there and probably, in brief flashes of existential clarity, think, "What am I doing here, and why are all those people out there watching me?" The traditional boundaries between performers and audience, stage space and real space, individual and community have been recently violated in some startling and vigorous ways. Choreographer Sarah Michelson's 2005 dance/installation work Daylight turned the Walker Art Center's McGuire theater into a multilayered space crawling with activity that all of the audience (seated in the balcony or on the stage) could see only some of the time. This week, the Walker kicks off its 20th annual "Out There" series of boundary-busting, envelope-ripping, edge-slashing work with Miguel Gutierrez's "Everyone," in which the audience shares the stage with a terrific group of performers, dubbed the Powerful People, who dance, chant, sing, and smooch, tempering their physical ferocity with the earnest can-do spirit of an Up With People concert. Eventually the performers wind up in the empty house, checking out (or is it performing for?) the onstage audience. As Gutierrez once put it in another dance, "Everyone in this room is in this fucking dance." If you come opening night, you get a free drink with the cast.
Jan. 9-10, 8 p.m.; Jan. 11-12, 9:30 p.m., 2008