SHERRY, ANYONE? Young shows her
character’s wild side.

Photo: Emil Horowitz

Ann Liv Young’s work is slippery. While she is an artist with a refined visual sense—her sets are astounding for their detail—she tends to receive the most attention for her approach to sex and nudity, which is simultaneously boisterous and clinical, and for her ability to create a deliberate, emotionally barren terrain. Deceptively casual and with a naturalistic edge that makes it all look easy, her work pushes audience members into a highly uncomfortable place.

But tacked onto her recent, audacious take on Snow White at the Kitchen was something less raucous, yet more surprising: the riveting, slowly paced Radio Show, a trio for Liz Santoro, Michael Guerrero and herself, which featured a seven-minute loop of the Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda.” There were walkouts.

“I thought it was great when all those people left the Kitchen,” Young recalls. “One night, it was 35 people. In Amsterdam, the same thing happened. Little did they know that we kept going. It was a radio show! It wasn’t to piss them off—it was a session that I felt needed to be seven minutes, and if it had been any shorter it wouldn’t have worked.”

The allure of Young’s work is in part its fluidity, from the way its sound, movement, visual design and costumes form a magnificent whole (the overriding green of Melissa Is a Bitch, the crass trailer-park environment in Michael and the worn, fractured fairy-tale aesthetic of Snow White). Currently in residence at Rush Arts Gallery, where Radio Show is part of the space’s In Progress series, Young has reimagined the piece with a new set; she’s holding open rehearsals on select days in addition to performances, leading up to a sort of grand finale on September 8.

While the work doesn’t venture into conventional dance, it is a demonstration of Young’s propensity for delivering detailed, rigorous choreography in the broad sense of the word. Experimental dance isn’t only about steps, after all, and just as she proved with Snow White, Young is delving deeper into what performance means—how a loop of a Brian Wilson song can create reactions as delicate or as powerful as a sweeping leg, and how design itself becomes a character.

“To me, choreography is about color and texture, and if I’m working with people it’s about emotion, one person in relation to another—their physical and mental relationships, or somebody’s skin tone, hair color and how they look in certain light,” Young explains. “Texture is a really big part of it. Just looking at, for instance, Snow White and Radio Show next to each other—I almost see them as fabric. Things are very tactile in my head, and when I put them together, I really think about them. I really care. I’m mindful, whereas I think a lot of people aren’t. They don’t realize that there is a skill in putting things together.”

The new version of Radio Show has been drastically rethought (sadly, “Help Me, Rhonda” is gone)—but then little is set in stone in Young’s universe. She still plays Sherry, the program’s host, along with Guerrero as Thomas and Isabel Lewis (replacing Santoro’s Donna) as Gloria.

Young originally created Radio Show after a presenter in Amsterdam felt that Snow White on its own wasn’t long enough. Inspired by Guerrero’s obsession with National Public Radio, she dreamed up a call-in show with musical numbers and seated choreography. Pregnant and ravaged by “horrible morning sickness,” she explains, “I think I was just sick of standing up and I needed to sit down, so I started making this thing.” Young’s due date is September 2 (her fiancé is Guerrero), and knowing the choreographer, it’s possible that the trio, at some point during the run, could turn into a quartet. “I went to the doctor today thinking he’d be like, ‘You’re dilated,’ but he said, ‘No, nothing,’ ” she relates. “I was like, ‘Am I at least dropped? Because I’m feeling so much pressure.’ He said, ‘You’re dropped, but you could be a lot more dropped.’ Jesus.”

When Rush Arts curatorial director, Derrick Adams, approached her for his summer series, Young had a grand idea to create a sound installation, in partnership with the ASPCA, using 18 pit bulls. “We were going to do contact mikes on all the dogs so there would be a narrative,” she says. “It would have been crazy. When I have more time to figure out how it should be done, we’ll do it.” And while she views mixing sound as a kind of choreographic endeavor, for now she’s satisfied by the challenges of concentrating on the notion of performance itself. “This idea that the audience can very clearly see us but we pretend like they can’t is very interesting,” she says. “There are all of these layers to this piece. Through the process of changing it a million times, it’s about just exploring it, every time, in different ways.”

Ann Liv Young is at Rush Arts Gallery & Resource Center through Sept 8.