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Friday, August 29, 2014

Brooklyn Center welcomes South Florida's Black Violin

Black Violin:
Wil B (left) and Kev Marcus
Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts

presents


Saturday, November 22, 2pm

They've played Harlem's Apollo (and won Amateur Night three times). They've played Obama's Inaugural Ball. They've collaborated with everyone from Aerosmith to Aretha Franklin. And now they this classically trained violin duo and their band return to Brooklyn with their unique blend of classical, hip-hop, jazz, blues, and R&B in a program for youth and everyone who loves irresistible music.


Recommended for ages eight and up. 
For more information and ticketing, click here.

For more information on Black Violin, click here.

Walt Whitman Theatre at Brooklyn College
2/5 trains to Brooklyn College/Flatbush Avenue
(map/directions)

Thursday, August 28, 2014

A. Nia Austin-Edwards explores the world of dance artist Nia Love

I'd like to welcome guest writer A. Nia Austin-Edwards who has contributed a fascinating profile of New York-based dance artist Nia Love. Both women demonstrate profound commitment to art in the context of culture and community. Their inspiring professionalism, generosity and creativity make it a pleasure and honor to share my space at InfiniteBody with them. Please enjoy.

Nia Love in Memory Withholdings at BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange)
(photo: Iquo Essien)
A. Nia Austin-Edwards
(photo: Gerry Eastman)
















No Lines & No Coloring Books:
Nia Love’s Polyrhythmic Existence

by A. Nia Austin-Edwards
Polyrhythm, simultaneous sounds that create an elaborate musical composition, is commonplace in music of the African diaspora—spirituals, jazz, salsa, blues, hip hop, and beyond. As my sister-friend, mentor, and artistic inspiration, Adia Tamar Whitaker says, “Cooking dinner, watching babies, planning the weekend, and talking on the phone, that’s polyrhythm too.” Indeed, many of us negotiate a plethora of rhythms—art, life, parenting, race, gender, sexuality, nation building—all at the same cadence. Nia Love is one of those phenomenal beings, and she continues to be an inspiration to us all.
As the Skype call begins, I enter a room full of shadows. Nia Love is framed by plants, and her afternoon soundtrack is her husband’s jazz band in rehearsal. The internationally-renowned band also features her 10-year-old son, Kojo, on drums. This is her world–epitomizing life as art in a way I see so infrequently that I often wonder if it’s even real.

When Nia Love was young, she always wanted a coloring book. As she and her father waited in line at the grocery store, she would ask and ask and always be told no. She remembers being four- or five-years-old and complaining to her mother that her father kept refusing to buy her a coloring book. Her father overheard her and responded:
"I'm not going to get you coloring books because it's the first oppressor. It's the first thing you have as a child that makes you conform to a line that's not yours. It's not what you make. What you make is important. So you make the line and color it in if you want. And if you want to go out the line, go out the line. But I will not give you someone else's mark and consciously oppress you."
This message has informed her life, her art, her world, and anyone who has met Love would agree that she makes her own lines and colors where she pleases. I wholeheartedly admire this commitment to identity, ideas, and self—a steadfastness that is not often easy to maintain.

Nia Love is a choreographer, mother, performer, wife, educator, grandmother, artist, doula, scholar, jazz lover, collaborator. Her story is not linear. It is one that places family and humanity at the forefront, one that challenges perceptions of art and hierarchy, one that exists outside any frame I have ever known.

Beginning at the Beginning

Nia Love has performed across the world. She has lived in Ghana, Cuba, Sweden, Harlem, and beyond. She has raised children, helped these children birth grandchildren, held hands with grandparents as they transitioned, and when I ask her where her dance begins she offers her absolute beginning. She observes:
“As dancers, when we start talking about our physical careers we start talking about training. I think you come with everything, and then we start peeling that everything away. We start with infinite numbers of things, and as soon as you take that first breath you're that many breaths closer to death. Training becomes something that can confine us based on how we manifest it.”
She remembers a letter her mother sent her from her childhood home in California to where she was working in Japan. In the letter, her mother shares a memory of a New Year’s Eve party that she attended days before Love was born. At the party, her mother couldn’t stop dancing. Her friends told her “You better sit down! You’re about to have that baby right here on this floor.” The morning after the party, her mother woke up feeling the “most freedom she had felt in her life.” Love was not born that day, but in fact four days later. Still, she was dancing well before she entered the physical world.

Portraits of Nia Love
(photo below by Antoine Roney)
With this we begin to understand the integrated life Nia Love leads. Her father was a sculptor who taught at Florida State University, New World School of the Arts, and Howard University. In his Washington, D.C. backyard, he had a welding studio with images of Malcolm X, Sojourner Truth, and Toni Morrison on the walls and John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Thelonius Monk as his creative soundtrack. The blending of art, identity, and academia is not a conscious choice for Nia Love. Rather, it is the foundation of her experience.

From California to Cuba

An avid young reader, Nia Love spent days sitting on the floor covered by books in the now-forgotten space known as the library. After seeing a movie that featured fairies whose costumes she liked, Love decided she wanted to study ballet. It was the only dance she saw that had similar costumes. Through her reading she came to understand that the Russians were the gatekeepers of ballet technique, so she searched California’s phone book for a Russian ballet teacher. Yes, the good old Yellow Pages directed her to her first ballet teacher, Olga Fricker. No YouTube videos or Facebook pages, just a name and a phone number.

After six years of study in California, Love asked to join her father in D.C. so she could be as close to New York as possible to further her dance career. She received a scholarship to train at the Washington School of Ballet (WSB) where she experienced struggles that I found all too familiar. No matter how good she felt about her technique, she was constantly challenged by a body type that was not “ideal” and racism that would always define her as “second best.”

Nia Love was about twelve years old when Ballet Nacional de Cuba was rehearsing in WSB’s studios. While watching a rehearsal, Love found herself enthralled by artists who looked like her, “from my skin to my hair to my body and my hips and they were KILLING IT!” Seeing herself reflected in these artists was life changing. They were not only technically sound, but “completely driven spiritually, completely present in their emotion and love and passion.”

Alicia Alonso, the company’s co-founder and one of the dancers she had studied in those library books, came to watch Love’s class one afternoon. As the other students left class, Nia Love sat with Alonso and her translator discussing her dance training and the experience of being the only Black body in the room. Alonso invited her to study with the company. The ecstatic teenager spent almost two years in Cuba before her mother made her return. She learned Spanish, developed global friendships, and was introduced to the world of Afro-Cuban rhythms that have become integral to her movement vocabulary. Danza Nacional de Cuba, the contemporary wing of the company at the time, taught Love about “being present, powerful, loving, caring, about putting it all on the line.” They understood that dance was her spiritual commitment, her “priesthood.”

Love returned to the States and continued her dance training at Duke Ellington School of the Arts with new tools in her toolbox. She broadened her international lifestyle as an exchange student, and went on to attend Howard University and Florida State University, beginning her family along the way. She then became a second generation Fulbright Scholar, following in the footsteps of her father who had spent two years in Sweden and took her all over Europe between the tender ages of four and six.

A Polyrhythmic Existence

In 2001, Nia Love’s Fulbright brought her and her family to Ghana. She was supposed to arrive on September 11 but instead departed two weeks later on her late father’s birthday. As Love says, “My daddy was with me that whole trip!”

She went to Ghana as a research lecturer, but did not get much written research done. Bringing her family shifted her focus. She spent her days teaching and her evenings mothering--cooking dinner, cleaning clothes, fighting malaria, and everything in between. “That trip was more an experience for my children than for me,” Love reflects.

This role of mother is one that Love cherishes and respects, not only as a doula who has helped birth at least 40 children, but also as a mother-artist herself. When pregnant women, mothers, or single parents come to take her class, she offers them the flexibility of paying what they can because she understands the priorities of parenting. Love observes, “As mother artists, we live in the world differently. We can’t follow the prescribed way of doing things.” And her journey to Ghana shifted her own lines of priorities and risk-taking.

Traveling with family, particularly with children, there is no space to indulge selfish desires or fears. “I had to exercise my ability to show them my liberating mind so they don't have inhibitions built up by seeing me have an inhibition,” she says. When the children asked where to go to the bathroom, Love had to show them how to squat and relieve themselves in the dirt. “I had to be really open and really careful at the same time.”

With her children’s lives in her hands, she had to make immediate decisions about what risks she would take based on whatever information was in front of her. This is what choreographer Adia Whitaker calls a polyrhythmic lifestyle, balancing the risk-taking with the openness. And this polyrhythmic existence has colored Nia Love’s art-making as well.

Each Process is A Process

As her son Kojo gets livelier on his drums in the background, Nia Love shares painful tales of her early struggles as a choreographer. However, Love’s lessons have allowed her to integrate her upbringing among “Garvey-ites” (followers of the teachings and philosophies of Marcus Garvey), who examined race at every intersection, into art that exists in a so-called “post-racial America.” She developed an artistic practice that mines movement through a constantly evolving choreographic voice, informed by whatever is in front of her. Her polyrhythmic existence manifests in her polyrhythmic creations. She acknowledges:
“I never stopped talking about race, but I started being really smart about how to look at the paradigm and intersections of race. And because I started looking deeper into those intersections I was also able to look deeper into the intersection of composition, the way in which I mine material. How I get in it, open it, shift the lens of it. It made me rethink my own intersections, about the way I deal with a pervasive, very oppressive system–mentally, physically, spiritually. How I deal with it with my children and how I prepare them for a system that targets them, particularly my Black boy, how it targets him and his life. It's not dance for me. It's life.”
Love visits Kara Walker's A Subtlety
(photo: Onye Ozuzu)
Love continues to investigate these intersections through a worldview in her newest work, a five-lens project called “The Agricultural Body for the Post-colonized Body.” She began by traveling Tanzania where she worked with farmers and dancers in the rural and urban areas of Dar es Salaam, the country’s largest and richest city. That exploration equipped her with gestures and movements based on the swinging, throwing, and shoveling of agricultural tools.
Love and students of Fordham-Ailey's New Directions Choreography Lab
prepare for their January showing (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
See InfiniteBody post.
Those movements informed her development of the second lens with Fordham-Ailey BFA students in the New Directions Choreographic Lab. She wanted to see how this agricultural movement filtered in a “technicalized body.” For five weeks she investigated who could color outside the lines and just how far they would go. She interviewed them about the communities they grew up in and looked at how their experiences aligned with their exploration and mining of the movement. And sometimes, she had return to “contemporary mode” to then break the lines:
“I would come into a phrase of African cultural movement, then I would swing it into another contemporary motif so they could edge it off. And then they could understand the intersection. Then they would bring to their mouth the question of how does that start, ‘because I got the swing out part, but what is that in between’?”
Then Love deepened the exploration by bringing soil into the studio. As they rolled around, ran their fingers through, and literally got down and dirty, she was able to further delve the lines and frames of every student in the studio.

As she approaches the third lens, she will return to Tanzania to learn to craft tools with farmers. And after that, well, she doesn’t know. Every process is a new experience. Love lets each process inform the next but also seeks to fully explore what’s in front of her. She describes:
“If I were to work with you, then you're bringing something else to my process. So now I have to meld my process into your process, because if I deny the process that's in front of me then I deny the information. So I can't think that it’s MY process, I have to think it’s A process, and each process is different.” 
And with that, Kojo offers a high-hitting, intricate drum solo. CRASH!

BIOS

Nia Love is an established choreographer who has taught at educational institutions, universities and festivals throughout the USA, Africa and Asia. An American Fulbright fellow, Nia has worked in England, West Africa, Japan, France, Colombia, Cuba, USA, and most recently Tanzania. Nia is the Artistic Advisor for Tanzania's prominent dance institution, MuDa Africa, and has recently created work for the nationally acclaimed Ailey|Fordham BFA program along with creating and presenting numerous dance works throughout the world. She was also awarded two consecutive Suitcase Fund grants, an initiative if New York Live Arts. Nia has been creating work over the past 2-½ decades with at least 20 works under her belt and continues to conducts annual research in Tanzania, East Africa on Agriculture and Dance. Nia Love has joined forces with Marjani Forté to form Love|Forté a collective. They have received their 2nd year AIR at BAX and are proud recipients of the Mertz Gilmore Grant 2014. Love|Forté will be presenting their premiere evening-length performance/installation, Memory Withholdings, at the Pillsbury House Theater in Minneapolis, MN, this fall. Most recently, Nia is the proud recipient of the CUNY-Hunter College Dance Initiative 2014-15, a selected adjunct position at Queens College Dance Department, and Texas Women's University’s 2014-15 winter Guest Choreographer.

A. Nia Austin-Edwards (ANAE) began her dance training in Atlanta, GA, at Total Dance / Dancical Productions, Inc. She went on to major in dance at Tri-Cities Visual and Performing Arts Magnet High School and received a B.F.A. in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Nia currently performs with Brooklyn-based ASE Dance Theatre Collective and remains an associate member of Atlanta's Total Dance Company and Axam Dance Theatre Experience. In 2013, she started PURPOSE Productions--a company that supports artists and activists in the manifestation of PURPOSE-full work that seeks to unify and develop our world community. She serves as an editor and correspondent to The Dance Enthusiast, and shares more personal thoughts on her blog, nocurtains.wordpress.com. Nia is enthusiastic about opportunities for movement to be a lens for viewing, redefining, questioning, challenging, living, loving, and anything else.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Big news: More chances to take my Through the Portal workshop! [ADDED DATES!]

UPDATE:

Now you can download a short audio announcement about my Image and Psyche: Through the Portal workshop here.

And, wonderful news! We'll be holding a repeat of Through the Portal on Saturday, October 4 (same time) and November 8 (same time), both in great Brooklyn locations. Please feel free to pass this along to your friends and give them the link to my Contact form here.

USDAC: Imagine and activate the arts for justice

U.S. Department of Arts and Culture

The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC)* is the nation's newest people-powered department, founded on the truth that art and culture are our most powerful and under-tapped resources for social change. Radically inclusive, useful and sustainable, and vibrantly playful, the USDAC aims to spark a grassroots, creative change movement, engaging millions in performing and creating a world rooted in empathy, equity, and social imagination.
CALL TO ACTION: The USDAC calls on all artists and creative activists to use our gifts for peace and justice, sharing images, performances, experiences, writings, and other works of art that raise awareness, build connection, cultivate empathy, and inspire action.
The murder of Michael Brown (and Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, Jonathan Ferrell, Jordan Davis, Sean Bell, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, and so many others) and the suppression of basic rights in Ferguson, MO (and so many other places) compel us to ask these questions:
Who are we as a people?
What do we stand for?
How do we want to be remembered?
As a culture of punishment? Or a culture that values every human life, promoting true public safety grounded in justice and love?
You are invited to answer USDAC's call for action on equity and justice as a Citizen Artist. Click here for more information on this initiative and how you can participate.

(*Not an actual US federal department...and more's the pity.)

Juel D. Lane's dance on camera series launches September 8


How to Kill A Ghost
a two-part dance film series by Juel D. Lane
premieres on Monday, September 8 at 9pm on YouTube.

Subscribe to Lane's YouTube Channel here.

William Greaves, 87

William Greaves, a Documentarian and Pioneering Journalist, Dies at 87
by Mel Watkins, The New York Times, August 26, 2014

Falling for "Then She Fell"

Rebekah Morin as Red Queen in Then She Fell
(photo: Adam Jason Photography)

Life, what is it but a dream? 
--Lewis Carroll, from Through The Looking Glass

Then She Fell by Third Rail Projects--that critically-acclaimed, Bessie-winning work of site-specific, immersive theater--has had its run extended through December 28. I almost missed this captivating experience but made up for that unfortunate lapse last night on the occasion of my birthday. What better way to acknowledge the thrill and scariness of a time of transition than to tumble down the rabbit hole with Alice and wander a dreamy looking-glass realm of atmospheres, by turns, sensuous, spooky, troubling and volatile.

Written, directed, designed and choreographed by TRP's artistic directors--Zach Morris, Tom Pearson and Jennine Willett--Then She Fell boasts a brilliant team of collaborators and cast members. And you. If you will.

Space is extremely limited. For schedule information, instructions (read them carefully) and ticket reservations, click here.

The Kingsland Ward @St. John's
195 Maujer Street (between Graham Avenue and Humboldt Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two blocks from the L train/Grand Street station
(map/directions)

Young dancers making noise for Gaza


While everyone else is distracted by Taylor Swift...

Young Palestinian dancers from El-Funoun Dance Troupe فرقة الفنون الشعبية الفلسطينية in Let's Make Noise for Gaza, a film by Nicholas Rowe

Caribbean Cultural Center to break ground for new home in El Barrio

The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute invites you to celebrate the groundbreaking for its new home in East Harlem, planned to open in 2016 at 120 East 125th Street, a four-story, landmark Romanesque Revival-style firehouse completed in 1889. CCCADI, founded by Marta Moreno Vega in 1976, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to honoring and documenting the cultures of Africa in the New World and to connecting Diaspora communities to their root cultures.

Special events will be held on Tuesday, September 16:

10am-11:45am (BY INVITATION ONLY)
Groundbreaking Ceremony
                                         
11:46am-2pm (open to the public, free with RSVP*)
Launch and demonstration of new CCCADI mobile app
Live musical presentation

For more information, click here.

Directions to 120 East 125th Street (MAP):

Subways: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 to 125th Street. Walk to Lexington Avenue.
Buses: M15, 101,100 to 125th Street
Metro North to 125th Street

*RSVP to: www.rsvpcccadigroundbreaking.eventbrite.com

For information: Contact event coordinator, Lisa Banks at (516) 353-8048/email at banks244@hotmail.com

Learn more about the CCCADI's cultural, educational and advocacy activities here.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Journey through Tarot's portals with Eva Yaa Asantewaa [UPDATE]

I'm teaching a new Image and Psyche workshop, Through the Portal, on Saturday, September 20 (1:30-4pm), hosted again in convenient downtown Brooklyn.

Archetypal symbols in Tarot and other imagery oracles are not just beautiful pictures. They are portals to spaces for creativity, wisdom and healing. Where do they lead YOU

Journey with me and find out at my next Image and Psyche workshop!

Admission fee: $30 
(pre-registration required by Saturday, 9/13)

Space is limited, and I don't want you to miss out. If you're interested, scroll down to my Contact Form here, and get in touch soon. I will reply with new registration details.

I look forward to journeying with you on September 20!

******

UPDATE: Now you can download a short audio announcement about my Through the Portal workshop here. And, wonderful news! We'll be holding a repeat of Through the Portal on Saturday, October 4 (same time) and November 8 (same time), both in great Brooklyn locations. Please feel free to pass this along to your friends and give them the link to my Contact form here.

Richard Attenborough, 90

Richard Attenborough, Actor, Director and Giant of British Cinema, Dies at 90
by Benedict Nightingale, The New York Times, August 24, 2014

Saturday, August 23, 2014

What's current with The CURRENT SESSIONS?

Gearing up for the upcoming dance season? Flex your dance-viewing muscles now at the latest edition of The CURRENT SESSIONS's choreographer showcase, running this weekend at The Wild Project. That small East Village house offers good looks at some new visions by early and mid-career choreographers and movement-based artists.

Like any omnibus presentation, The CURRENT SESSIONS's VOLUME IV, ISSUE II program can be an uneven mixed bag. You'll likely find some works in these 90 minutes more absorbing than others. Go for the variety and the possibility of discovery.
EmmaGrace Skove-Epes (photo: Ian Douglas)

Check the weekend schedule for EmmaGrace Skove-Epes's of milk, of fresh snow, of the margins of this page, an edgy, strongly-performed solo arising from "the place of angst in art-making within a context of white female sexuality, white privilege, narcissism, and examining the dilutive qualities of whiteness." (Her title and blurb alone are works of art.) of milk seems an invitation to look at covert discomfort with and dissociation from a body that, despite all that, is going right on asserting itself--at least, that's what I, a Black female, took away.

Troy Ogilvie's solo, performed by Andrea Murillo, makes me wonder anew how to tell the dancer from the dance--both are mighty and slick, stretched to distortion but always in control. It's a dance/dancing with size and attitude. (Imagined conversation, Murillo to Ogilvie: "I got this.") The Gil Scott-Heron recording that accompanies the piece adds an intriguing layer of texture and tension.

Oh, one more thing: Since you'll be dressed for summer, take a wrap. The Wild Project's A/C was strong enough to defeat even the trusty sweatshirt I had slipped over my shoulders.

Check here for more information about The CURRENT SESSIONS's VOLUME IV, ISSUE II and a schedule of performances 7:30pm tonight and tomorrow at 3pm and 7pm.

The Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map)

Jean Redpath, 77

Jean Redpath, Prolific Scottish Folk Singer, Dies at 77
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, August 22, 2014

Thursday, August 21, 2014

La MaMa to host anti-racism training for cultural workers

Understanding & Undoing Racism / Community Organizing Training for Cultural Workers

September 12-14

Equity.
Solidarity.
Diversity.

This training "focuses on understanding what racism is, where it comes from, how it functions, why it persists and how it can be undone" and "is tailored specifically to cultural organizers, artists of all kinds, and arts administrators."

For further information, including registration fees (with sliding scale for individuals and organizations), click here.

La MaMa Rehearsal Studios
47 Great Jones Street (between Bowery and Lafayette), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Robert Glasper on collaborating with choreographer Kyle Abraham


Jazz composer/musician Robert Glasper discusses his latest collaboration with dance artist Kyle Abraham on When the Wolves Came In which will premiere at New York Live Arts on September 25.

For information on When the Wolves Came In, click here.

Abraham will also present The Watershed in a separate program. For information, click here.

Afropunk = freedom

Rebellious Diversity in Song
Afropunk Festival Hosts 60 Acts Over Two Days in Brooklyn
by Stacey Anderson, The New York Times, August 20, 2014

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

FringeNYC benefits: "La Donna Improvvisata"

Lisa Flanagan (photo: Michael Kroll)
Improvised by Lisa Flanagan
Improvised Music by Frank Spitznagel
Directed by T.J. Mannix

"A witch!" cries a man to my rear, without hesitation, choosing one of fifteen possible operatic roles. "A condescending witch," another audience member quickly elaborates. Similarly, four specific musical notes are selected my fellow viewers. 

And so begins an hour of opera improvised, from start to triumphant finish, by soprano Lisa Flanagan and pianist Frank Spitznagel. It might sound like a gimmick--and one with no guarantee of success--but it turns out to be one of FringeNYC 2014's most innovative theatrical formats. 

When you see La Donna Improvvisata this Friday or Sunday, it will be completely different. Spitznagel's thunderous, threatening opening from this afternoon will be replaced by something new. Casually-dressed and ponytailed Flanagan will embody a different central archetype--perhaps Sorcerer or Maiden, Soldier or Temptress--crafting a plot that arcs from problem to resolution with a whole lot of song and physical action in between. She will move from character to character, mood to mood, cleverly rhyming lyrics on the fly. She will do this with nothing but her agile imagination and a trio of plain black boxes for a set.

This woman's opera auditions must be interesting. (Er...what's that she's singing?) If her voice gets a little tiring after about a half-hour or so, her chipper, sunny smile and undeniable gutsiness maintain their appeal. And that melodic, Broadway-ish number she whipped up late in today's show--call it "Quiet Little Street," perhaps--could be a viable thing. Lisa, I hope you remember what you made up there. It's good.

Remaining shows:

Friday, August 22, 7:30pm
Sunday, August 24, 3:30pm


The White Box
440 Lafayette St, 3rd Floor (Astor Place and East 4th Street), Manhattan

For all things FringeNYC, click below.

Performing artist and student Daniel Foner interviews...me!

Thank you, Daniel!
Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Getting to Know Eva Yaa Asantewaa
by Daniel Foner, Monkeyhouse: Connect 2 Choreography, August 15, 2014

John Blake, Jr., 67

John Blake Jr., Versatile Jazz Violinist, Dies at 67
by Nate Chinen, The New York Times, August 19, 2014

FringeNYC benefits: "Cortez"

Heather Holmes
in Milkwood Theater's Cortez
(photo: Cortney van Jahnke)
Presented by Milkwood Theater
Written by Judith Goudsmit
Directed by David Riley

I'll be upfront about it: A large part of the reason I chose Milkwood Theater's Cortez out of numerous Fringe fest offerings was a photo (seen above) that showed a woman of color (Heather Holmes) in what would appear to be a significant role as a marine biologist. Of course, I hoped I'd also take interest in the rest of Judith Goudsmit's characters, played by David Riley, who also directs, Cory Lawson and Peter Waluk--three white male actors. Kudos to Milkwood for casting Holmes for a (sort of, really, really sort of) romantic role unspecified by race. But, sorry to say, I ended up not caring, one way or another, about anyone here. 

At the center of this hour-long physical theater piece about scientists Mike (Riley) and Heather (Holmes) and their research expedition to the Sea of Cortez is a deteriorating relationship. Since we do not get to see this couple at its best, we build no investment in their lives, together or apart, and it's irritating, and more than a little confusing, to witness how their personal failure impacts the innocents they're studying--the poor, nearly-extinct tomatians. 

What? You've never heard of tomatians? Think squishy, tomato-red ball with little knobby protrusions all over it. Tomatians are losing their ability to reproduce. (Shhhh! They don't really exist at all. But you'll end up giving more of a damn about them than about....)

All of this floats in the dreamy absurdity of some well-done movement-oriented segments and gestural characterizations (the physical in "physical theater") as well as Matthew Keff's fanciful, ghostly-white projections--a drifting full moon, a boat's revolving steering wheel, slowly-twirling candelabra, marine creatures flashing through the sea's inky darkness. There's charm and diversion in these aspects of Cortez.

The show opens with Riley giving a glitchy, harried presentation for the fictitious Monterey Research Institute, his funding source. He starts off by suggesting a better name for Planet Earth--Planet Water--since our planet has far more of that element. After watching the behavior of humans in Cortez, I'd have to agree. Yes, let's focus on the sea creatures.

Remaining shows:

Thursday, August 21, 2pm
Saturday, August 23, 8pm


Theater at the 14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street (at 1st Avenue), Manhattan

For all things FringeNYC, click below.

Monday, August 18, 2014

FringeNYC benefits: "I'll Say She Is"

Four members of the cast of Noah Diamond's I'll Say She Is, left to right:
Seth Shelden (Harpo), Robert Pinnock (Chico),
Melody Jane (Beauty) and Diamond (Groucho)

Written by Will B. Johnstone
Adapted by Noah Diamond
Music by Tom Johnstone (additional music by Alexander Johnstone)
Directed by Trav S.D.

At times, I'll Say She Is--Noah Diamond's adaptation of Will B. Johnstone's book and lyrics for the Marx Brothers' first and forgotten Broadway show--really does seem like something shut away from the world for 90 years. Early on, the cute jokes in this musical comedy revue--starring Diamond as Groucho and directed by Trav S.D.--can land flat and sound musty, even if you're a card-carrying Marxist. Maybe especially if you are. But hang on.

I'll say it: The ambitious I'll Say She Is becomes a sure contender for Fringe Hit of 2014.

It opens with a chorus line of Kewpie Dolls in spangles and feathers and some quick-rhyming patter between the young lover-to-be character played by Zeppo Marx (played, in turn, by Aristotle Stamat) and a Broadway talent agent (Bob Homeyer). Groucho and Chico (Robert Pinnock) soon stumble into the scene. But it is the arrival of Harpo (wonderful Seth Shelden) with his smooth, childish face, wayward eyes, red curls and boisterous physicality, that suddenly injects exuberance into things. Now the "Four Horsemen of the Apoplexy," as Groucho calls himself and his kin, are complete, ready to trade barbs and flirtation with a thrill-seeking socialite (Melody Jane) and her well-meaning, Margaret Dumont-like aunt (Kathy Biehl). Up ahead? A world of trouble.

I'll Say She Is works best when when it leaves behind its one-off zinger-wannabes and busts out bizarre, 360° farce like the suspicious-Napoleon/faithless Josephine skit led with great verve by Diamond and Jane. Or the opium den scene that eventually draws everyone into a courtroom drama where the puns flow free. These are sparkling moments with the cast at its best.

Today's show was sold out, drawing an older crowd that seemed much more Broadway-oriented than Fringe-y. The Sheen Center's Loretto Auditorium is not big, and seating is by general admission. So, if you want a shot at a good seat--or any seat at all--hit that Fringe Web site now and don't dawdle.

Remaining shows:

Wednesday, August 20, 8:45pm
Friday, August 22, 9:30pm


Loretto Auditorium at the Sheen Center
18 Bleecker Street (at Elizabeth Street), Manhattan

For all things FringeNYC, click below.

Join HANDS UP DON'T SHOOT: a community conversation at JACK

HANDS UP DON'T SHOOT: a community conversation

at JACK

Thursday, August 21, 7pm
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JACK, in partnership with The Fire This Time Festival, offers its space for an open conversation about the recent epidemic of violence against unarmed black and brown men. Unmediated. Unmoderated.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

FringeNYC benefits: "Forgetting The Details"

Nicole Maxali (photo: Paciano Triunfo)

Forgetting The Details
Written and performed by Nicole Maxali
Directed by Paul Stein

No, I'm not really picking only solo shows at the Fringe on purpose. But, if you want to see an expert and thoroughly enjoyable one, pick this: Nicole Maxali's Forgetting The Details at Studio 440's White Box. California born-and-raised, this Filipina-American performer gets it all right, quickly dunking us into the flow of things as she draws canny portraits of her family members--divorced mom gleefully knocking back tequilas as she joins Maxali in a San Francisco bar to watch the Giants win World Series 2010; musician dad, with his history of drug addiction, surreptitiously offering her pot so she doesn't experiment out on the street; and, most of all, her adored "Lola" (Tagalog for grandma) endlessly serving up ice cream and meddlesome, loving advice.

So, I'm sure you can tell Forgetting The Details is not innovative, experimental theater. It's a personal performance trading in nostalgia about family and culture and takes you places that you fully expect to go--although not always when you expect to get there. It's like a short visit with a complete stranger who ends up being totally forthcoming, warm and delightfully funny. You will quickly feel that you know Maxali very well.

The show is seamless, polished, well-paced over its 75-minutes and coherent. Maxali renders it with skill and handsome discipline in storytelling and impersonations--voices, body language, gestures, facial expressions and overall energy and physicality every bit as convincing as the subtle, underlying compassion she reveals. In its intricate complexity, her monologue is a feat of prodigious memory, too--an ironic fact, considering that Forgetting The Details largely deals with how she and her family cope with her Lola's mental decline.

Maxali is an unforgettable performer, one I'd be eager to see meet any number of challenges in theater. I'm a believer.

Remaining shows:

Friday, August 15, 9:30pm
Sunday, August 17, 7:45pm
Thursday, August 21, 2pm
Friday, August 22, 5:30pm
Saturday, August 23, 3pm

The White Box
440 Lafayette St, 3rd Floor (Astor Place and East 4th Street), Manhattan


For all things FringeNYC, click below.

FringeNYC benefits: "Magical Negro Speaks"


Written and performed by Jamil Ellis

No arguing. I'm sending you over to The White Box at 440 Studios to see Magical Negro Speaks, an hour-long performance by comic Jamil Ellis. Structurally, the show's messy, but it's genuinely funny and effectively rips at that Hollywood tradition of casting Black actors in certain archetypal, stereotypical roles that, on the face of things, can seem benign.

Ellis frequently cites Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance, Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile, Morgan Freeman in almost anything. You get the picture. These "magical Negro" roles flatten talented artists into two dimensions, making them sidekicks, second fiddles, self-effacing helpmates, mystical wisemen/women, generous healers and--to be blunt--handy props for the white actors who ultimately go on to get the glory.

Ellis knows he's not the entertainment industry's idea of a leading man. Denzel, relax. But he'd certainly like to have Washington's option to play against type. Or to play a role that at least does not embarrass him and will one day inspire his adorable little daughter.

A combination of stand-up, music numbers and clever video clips, Magical Negro Speaks is flawed in a human way. Where Ellis's mind drifts to dispiriting current events, for instance, everything goes slack. By the end of the hour, though, he has more than earned his right to connect the sentimentally personal and the political, and he gets the audience rooting for him.

Remaining shows:

Friday, August 15, 7:45pm
Saturday, August 16, 5:45pm
Sunday, August 17, 1:45pm
Wednesday, August 20, 9:15pm
Sunday, August 24, 5:15pm

The White Box
440 Lafayette St, 3rd Floor (Astor Place and East 4th Street), Manhattan


For all things FringeNYC, click below.

FringeNYC benefits: "No Static At All"

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Alex Knox in No Static At All (photos: Karianne Flaathen)
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Written and performed by Alex Knox
Directed by Becca Woolff

"Have you ever listened to a song and felt like the singer was telling your story?" asks the wiry, energetic Alex Knox near the opening of his one-hour monologue at FringeNYC, No Static At All. Maybe he should ask Roberta Flack, now that I think of it. Her answer, of course, would be, Why, yes--as would most of ours.

It's a banal question that tells you much of what you need to know about Knox's musing on a couple of supposedly parallel and troubled bromances--the first, between the two Steely Dan stars, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker whose song, FM, is the source of this play's title; the second, between Knox and his old school buddy, Josh. This show, like many bite-sized Fringe numbers, doesn't really have room to stretch out, and that puts pressure on Knox to rush his stuffed narrative and try to deliver something engaging and convincing. Despite a few truly funny moments--his argument that a certain rock in northern Israel renders sacred the name of his favorite band comes to mind--Knox doesn't quite make it.

With the exception of a nearly Talmudic exegesis of "Any World (That I'm Welcome To)," we don't learn anything much about the Steely Dan songs that have come to mean a lot to Knox and exactly what they say about the twists in the lives he and Josh have lived together and apart. We have to take all that as a matter of faith--and, in this work, faith turns out to be a very big matter, indeed.

Knox at first seems an ordinary sort, a bit intimidated by the sharper Josh whom he describes as self-assured to the point of arrogance. But he's just as capable of falling heart-first into an all-consuming religious pursuit--in this case, the Church of the Dan where momentary flashes of arrogance alternate with humiliation. 

Remaining shows:

Friday, August 15, 2:30pm
Sunday, August 17, 12pm
Wednesday, August 20, 9:15pm
Sunday, August 24, 4:15PM


The Steve & Marie Sgouros Theatre
115 MacDougal Street, 3rd floor, (between West 3rd Street and Bleecker), Manhattan

For all things FringeNYC, click below.

Lauren Bacall, 89

Lauren Bacall Dies at 89; in a Bygone Hollywood, She Purred Every Word
by Enid Nemy, The New York Times, August 12, 2014

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Stephan Koplowitz: new online course on creating site-specific dance and performance

Coursera and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) present a free online course, Creating Site-Specific Dance and Performance Works, taught by noted choreographer Stephan Koplowitz.
A production course geared to performers, choreographers, and other artists interested in producing site-specific work. Through three assignments, students will have the opportunity to plan and conceptualize a site-specific work.
September 29-November 14

For additional information on this course 
and to register, click here.

Film critic A. O. Scott remembers Robin Williams

Robin Williams, an Improvisational Genius, Forever Present in the Moment
by A. O. Scott, The New York Times, August 11, 2014

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Cassandra Wilson: There's enough room at the table.

Cassandra Wilson (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Wilson, Goddess of jazz without boundaries,
headlined last night at Lincoln Center Out of Doors
in an Americanafest show
presented in association with Americana Music Association.

This year marks the 20th anniversary
of Wilson's landmark Blue Light ‘til Dawn
and the 50th anniversary of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme.
Preparing the stage for Cassandra Wilson's band
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

A perfect evening at Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park Bandshell,
opened by the celebratory sacred steel of The Campbell Brothers
 who bring Pentecostal fervor and hard-charging, often deliriious funk
to shimmering pedal and lap steel guitars.

These instruments, most closely associated with Hawaiian music,
are also part of the Black gospel tradition of churches
such as Nashville's House of God (Keith Dominion),
where the talented Campbells got their start.
Top photo: Pedal steel guitarist Chuck Campbell
Below, left: Darick Campbell
Center: Phillip Campbell; Right: Carl Campbell
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The Campbells first beckoned us into healing waters ("Wade in the Water")
and encouraged us, if at all possible, to do the right thing ("Hell, no! Heaven, yes!").
But if their personal motives are deeply religious, their interpretations
of Miles Davis, Sam Cooke and especially Coltrane--
spinning and swinging "A Love Supreme" into "A Sacred Steel Love Supreme"--
come with an infinite and irresistible supply of hot sauce.
They have become my favorite party band.
Phillip Campbell and Carl Campbell
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Cassandra Wilson
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Wilson's got Spirit on the mainline, too,
taking a moment between tunes to pass this message without explanation:
"Spirit told me to tell you, 'There's enough room at the table.'"
Later in the set, she called Papa Legba and his fellow African Powers,
easily slip-sliding her chant into yet another coded message:
"I know I'll be in that number/when I study war no more."
Cassandra Wilson
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Like the Campbells, this diva unites heaven and earth,
showing us the crow, "black and ragged," "flying tree to tree"
and dipping low in search of "every shiny thing" (Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow").
She's a blues mama with a voice like warm "Tupelo Honey" (thank you, Van Morrison)
taking her sweet time all through Robert Johnson's "Hell Hound on My Trail."
Cassandra Wilson
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

In the pretty ballad "Tell Me You'll Wait for Me,"
her voice becomes slow-drifting smoke but not at all dry.
In "Come On In My Kitchen," it cuts loose,
rich and bursting with juice.
Cassandra Wilson
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Cassandra Wilson
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Despite the desperate feel of "Children of the Night,"
Wilson and her band turn the lilting Thom Bell/Linda Creed song
into a lush celebration--no doubt in anyone's mind
that the lonely soul walking the shadows late at night
often finds "someone who is just like me/looking for some company"
and makes an amazing time of it.
Cassandra Wilson
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Cassandra Wilson
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Cassandra Wilson
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
And you can have an amazing time, too. Click here for the video from Lincoln Center Out of Door's livestream.

Lincoln Center Out of Doors 2014 concludes tomorrow. For information on remaining LCOOD/AmericanaFest events--including tonight's show with Roseanne Cash--click here.

Idris Muhammad, 74

Idris Muhammad, Drummer Whose Beat Still Echoes, Dies at 74
by Nate Chinen, The New York Times, August 8, 2014

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Cool evening: my photos from Cave Canem reading, Bryant Park

Photos from Word for Word Poetry at The Bryant Park Reading Room (August 5, 2014), presented in partnership with Cave Canem, featuring poets Cornelius Eady, Derrick Weston Brown and Kyle Dargan with a special music performance by Cornelius Eady and Rough Magic

Cornelius Eady, poet and Cave Canem co-founder
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa


Cave Canem supports emerging African American poets 
through summer retreats, regional workshops, a first-book prize, 
annual anthologies, and events and readings across the country.
An English House Sparrow visits the reading.
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Eady performing with his band, Rough Magic,
which includes singer Robin Messing; guitarist Charlie Rauh; 
violinist/violist Concetta Abbate; drummer Leo Ferguson; 
and (shown here with Eady) bass player Emma Alabaster
all photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa




(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Derrick Weston Brown, author of Wisdom Teeth 
all photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Kyle Dargan, author of Logorrhea Dementia
Bouquet of Hungers and The Listening
photos above and below
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Cornelius Eady reading
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
For a schedule of future Word for Word events at Bryant Park, click here.

Bryant Park
behind New York Public Library
40th-42nd Streets, 5th-6th Avenues, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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