This is a piece I wrote for the current issue of Our Town magazine. Reposting it here in case anybody missed it. Thanks to Warren Nielsen for taking some of the photos.
Portrait of a ballerina at the end of her career: Splayed on the floor, spent. Hands, vice-like, squeezing head. Mouth frozen in mid-primal scream. And those feet…
Oh, those feet. Black and blue with dirt and bruising.
Ballerinas know all about suffering for their art.
“Once a dancer, always a dancer, but the body does not keep up with the wants,” muses Ani Collier, who trained in ballet as a girl in then-communist Bulgaria. “But once an artist, you cannot stop creating.”
She believes that all art is experimental. And experimentation has enabled Collier to reinvent herself as an artist time and again: From dancer to choreographer, to photographer to creator of – and creative force behind – downtown Gainesville’s Black C Art.
Oh, and don’t call it an art gallery. It is so much more: Performing arts and music hall, experimental theater, and sometimes messy black box lab for learning what works…and what doesn’t.
Which is to say that Black C is anything but static.
Once, viewers walked in to find a room white as driven snow for an photo exhibit of Antarctica. In a later revival, however, the purity is despoiled by an avalanche of cascading plastic bottles. And, in yet a third iteration, by dummies stuffed with plastic wastes.
All this to make the connection between polar melting, a world awash in disposables, and the infiltration of micro-plastics into our very bodies.
“It was a multi-year project meant to mirror our world,” Collier said. “Antarctica is melting, the plastic came in, and then the plastic took us.”
On another evening Black C may reveal itself to the world black as night, its darkness broken only by dim lights reflecting on rose petals scattered about to accentuate a dance performance.
“Things here happen in a very organic way,” says Black C creative consultant Tom Miller. “Ani will walk in one day and throw a rose petal on the floor. And the next day there are rose petals everywhere.”
Black C partially derives its name from the Black Sea, on which Collier’s native Bulgaria sits.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall enabled Collier to come to America. But over the decades, her homeland ties have only strengthened. Today she maintains a small gallery in Sofia and brings Bulgarian artists, musicians and dancers to Gainesville to perform at the Black C.
“Bulgarians can be very creative, but they don’t have much money so they have to find ways to do things without resources,” she said. “When I go back in the summer they’re having performances for 15-20 people in half the space we have here. I’ve been blown away by what they can accomplish.”
Collier’s meandering path from Bulgaria to Gainesville happened as much by serendipity as design. Originally working in New York City, she intended a quick visit with an acquaintance here – only to end up accepting a position with Gainesville’s Dance Alive National Ballet Company.
That would likely have been a temporary gig if she hadn’t met, and married, Gainesville apartment developer Nathan Collier, with whom she has a son.
Her dancing days largely behind her, Collier honed her skills as a photographer. Her images – among them fantastical urban landscapes – have been exhibited in New York, Italy, France, Cuba, Canada and, of course, Bulgaria.
That artistic reinvention “started with me wanting a good picture of myself in a performance,” she recalls. “To be a good dance photographer, you have to anticipate what’s coming, because if you click when you see it, it’s too late.”
Black C’s evolution began in earnest when Collier lured Lauren Warhol Caldwell – long time creative director for the Hippodrome – across the street to work in a much more intimate (read smaller) environment.
“It was an easy path to take,” Caldwell reflected. “There was something seductive about it. I was allowed to let everything go and create work that has never been seen before.”
Their first collaboration was “About A Girl,” a short play written by Caldwell and performed by Collier.
Like Black C itself “There Was A Girl” evolved over subsequent performances. Caldwell said “I’m not sure I had a clear idea of what it was at first. Ani is the girl in the window and she’s wearing a mask.”
“People wear masks in life. To hide? To protect? To present a false face?”
People who have seen it have “told me it speaks to them about what can happen to many women that they do not speak about, it just gets buried.”
But all is not somber introspection at the Black C. Once, Collier brought in a player piano and invited an audience to witness the performance of an invisible pianist named Morine French.
“People came, sat and watched the piano,” said Miller. “They played along and gave her a standing ovation.”
“I believe Morine French is on world tour now,” he added.
And then there’s the recurring adventures of Jack and Jill, a decidedly facile couple played by Miller and Caldwell. The first episode was a griping session about downtown parking. But episode two upped their game – with Jack and Jill being confronted by the sinister forces of artificial intelligence.
Incidentally, don’t get Collier started on the subject of downtown parking. It makes her furious.
Since the City began charging for on-street parking “people are apprehensive about even stopping in for coffee.”
“The Mayor does not listen to the business and it’s hurting downtown,” she said.
While Collier and Mayor Harvey Ward clearly have their disagreements, that didn’t stop Hizzoner from participating in a risky (for a politician) Black C reading of “White Rabbit/Red Rabbit,” an experimental theater piece by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour.
And talk about taking a leap of faith. Ward agreed to read lines that were only revealed to him at the instant he was to speak them in front of a live audience.
“Nobody told me this was poison,” Ward recited while laying prone on the floor after ingesting a suspect substance.
“He was a good sport about that,” Miller allowed.
All of which goes to show that, when entering Black C performers and audiences alike are advised to throw caution to the winds, suspend all preconceptions, give credulity a break…and just go with it.
“All I wanted to do was crawl inside Ani’s brain and figure out what she wanted to do next,” said Caldwell. “Still, every time we do something, it’s unexpected to me. So I know it is to the audience.”
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