An Official Event of Conflux Festival

Tango Intervention, Brooklyn Bridge

New York, New York, 9/13/08, Noon till 2pm

Action: 40+ Tangueros intervene on the bridge with a one hour milonga at the Brooklyn Tower and another one hour milonga at the Manhattan Tower.

Dancers: Annie Von Arx, Books Von Arx, Cassandra Hume, Charlie Thomas, Elizabeth Arce, Erik Hageman, Gayle Madeira, Ilse de Bruyckere, Joseph Samaha, Joyce Diamond, Laurie Ensworth, Lee Chan, Lena Claesso, Lindsay Gorman, Ludo Decreus, Miriam Azar, Natacha Popovici, Natalia Yamrom, Ninah Beliavsky, Nora Rosansky, Patrick McShane, Paula Kay Lazrus, Peter Schosshauer, Phil Spotsey, Rebecca Pawel, Robert Lawrence, Robert Withers, Robin Bowyer, Sebastian Rolfranain, Stephanie Yang, Tak Ngan, Yolanda Hume, plus many others. If you joined us but do not find your name here please send me an email so I can add you to the list!

Documentation: Stephanie Wang, Preston Poe, Robert Lawrence, Paula Kay Lazrus, Kyle Hester, Anda Iamnitchi. If you have images or video you would like to share please email me. Visit the following links for documentation of this event:

Acknowledgements: Thanks to all the great New York dancers who made this beautiful location even more beautiful. Thanks to Paula Kay Lazrus again for her help and council with the contextual historical research for this action. Additional acknowledgements for research assistance go to the Brooklyn Historical Society, the New York Historical Society and especially to Ginny Cunningham, research librarian extraordinaire, at the University of South Florida, for locating essential and rare texts that made the historical/conceptual elements of the this project possible. Thanks to Stephanie Wang for making some great photographs and posting them online long before I finally got around to it. Preston Poe came through once more big time Ðassisted by the ever merry and helpful Kyle Hester- providing essential technical, tactical and moral (even more essential) support. And on the topic of moral support, thanks again to Adriana Pergorer, Gayle Madeira, and Lexa Rosean for continued encouragement from near and far. Thanks also to Christina Ray and the curators of Conflux for hosting Tango Intervention for two years in a row. Most significantly, thanks to my wife Anda Iamnitchi for guidance, patience, nuts-and-bolts-get-it-done-in-the-trenches-just-long-hard-pitching-in, and more, much, much more.

Context: TIBB is number 8 in my series of Tango Interventions. Each of these actions has been created specifically for its unique geographical context and then placed in a social or political context on the web. I am always intrigued by the possible congruencies and incongruencies between the experience of the intervention in physical space and the conceptual experience on the web. As far as I know this dual stream performance/web structure is an entirely new way for an artist to work. So I am enjoying experimenting with different ways of putting the physical and virtual elements of Tango Intervention into play with each other. At times it seems enough to simply do the action and then use the web to point to hidden histories of the action location. With this action the Brooklyn Bridge I felt a slightly different approach was needed.

All the other Tango Interventions have been in places where people are not generally prepared to think about histories, 'hidden' or otherwise. But the Brooklyn Bridge is recognized as a powerful symbol of American progress, democracy, and the triumph of engineering over natural barriers. Everyone knows the bridge is historic, arguably the most historic bridge in existence. In the face of the concretion of preconceived "Big Ideas" everyone carries about the bridge, I wanted to focus on a very small aspect of the building of the bridge. I wanted to change the attention from abstractions to physical specifics. So the site deals with a very specific aspect of the physical labor of building the bridge.

The tie in with tango is that, like tango, the bridge was almost exclusively the product of immigrants, from the original designer of the bridge, John A. Roebling to the great force of unskilled laborers who worked in the sometimes lethal and always hazardous underwater caissons to prepare the foundations of the two towers. Labor is generally made as invisible as possible in this late capitalist dream we are living. But the immigrants under ground, underwater, in the caissons who were doing work in caissons was literally invisible.

The page you have just seen is intended to focus on only one small aspect of the invisible work of the caisson laborers. The texts are excerpted medical notes of Dr. Andrew H. Smith, the surgeon to the New York Bridge Company, the private corporation who built the Brooklyn Bridge. Caissons disease was an extremely painful, and at times fatal, disease that effected a great number of workers. It was caused by the extreme artificial air pressure produced in the work chambers under the river. The pressure needed to be greater than the water pressure under the river to keep the caissons from being flooded. The deeper the workers went the greater the pressure had to be. The Manhattan tower was excavated to a depth of 78'. To imagine the pressure involved think of how your ears hurt if you dive down to below 10' of water while swimming. Now imagine continuing your dive for another 68'.

Amazingly, caisson disease seldom effected laborers while they were working in the pressurized caissons. Rather it was the body's inability to readjust to the decreased pressure when workers returned to normal air pressure. Dr. Smith's other writings clearly indicate that it was understood that this condition could be avoided if workers were re-pressurized more gradually (the time needed would be approximately 30 minutes). However this policy was never put into place. The workers were too eager to leave after their day at back breaking labor and the company was not willing to pay them for another 30 minutes of labor (at the rate of $2.50 a day).

This was consistent with the treatment of labor throughout 13 years of the building of the bridge, including the opening ceremony. While the general public was invite to witness some aspects of the ceremonies, they were not "included" in them at all. By order of the New York Bridge Company, and with the complicity of elected officials, the official celebrations and processions included no representatives of labor at all. The event itself was scheduled on the birthday of Queen Victoria. The Irish community (the largest immigrant contingent in the workforce) was so insulted by this that they boycotted the celebration entirely. Irish and Irish descendents were estimated to be nearly 1/4th the population of New York at this time.

It is worth noting that the bridge was built during the "Gilded Age." The industrial revolution was facilitated with a complete absence of rights and protections for the labor that built the marvels of the industrialists. One effect of this was to build an enormous gap between the rich and the poor. It is also worth noting that our current information revolution has similarly coincided with a widening gap between rich and the middle class in America. Currently our prosperity gap is wider now than at any time since the Roaring 20's. Think about this when you go to vote in November.

The Brooklyn Bridge is indeed an engineering marvel, and has become a symbol of progress and democracy for many in America and around the world. At the time of it's completion the two towers were the tallest structures in the Americas. But for the towers to reach that high, the work began by going down, below the river and into the earth beneath the river. Tango Intervention, Brooklyn Bridge is dedicated to the unseen workers who did this work, and to invisible laborers everywhere.