Finding ‘Ghost Collaborators’ for an All-American Ballet
In American dance history, the 1938 ballet “Filling Station” is something between a milestone and a footnote. Made for American dancers by an American choreographer with a score by an American composer — a rare combination then — it was also novel in theme, about the interactions of local characters at a gas station.
It was a pioneering work, and a popular one, that has become an infrequently revived curio. The multidisciplinary artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy discovered “Filling Station” through a fragment of it: Paul Cadmus’s original costume design for Mac, the station attendant, as recreated in the artist Nick Mauss’s 2018 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
That costume looks like the coveralls that a 1930s filling station attendant might have worn, except that it’s see-through. “It was a glimmer of queer liberation,” Lutz-Kinoy said recently. “To see this historical representation of queer expression bursting out of a rigid structure like narrative ballet was very moving.” That glimmer led Lutz-Kinoy to create his own version of “Filling Station.” Commissioned by the avant-garde art center the Kitchen, it will have its debut on Thursday — at an actual filling station: the Mobil station on Eighth Avenue and Horatio Street in the West Village.
Lutz-Kinoy has retained some of the characters — Mac and the truck drivers Ray and Roy — but has altered and updated the scenario.
