Men in motion at Dixon Place

Walking down to Dixon Place last night to see this week's Moving Men program--curated by the amiable Michael Cross Burke--I really absorbed how the Bowery area has changed. (Oh, please! Even I shop at that Whole Foods! But I spent probably no more than fifteen minutes at the New Museum's Open House, drifting past sculpture that looked exactly like the assemblages of homeless people.) Someday, we'll have to say goodbye to the impossible little haven that has been Dixon Place as we've known it and hello to a state-of-the-art performance center--"complete with a bar!"--on Chrystie Street. I'll assume I'll have a real theater seat then (sigh), a printed program so I can follow stuff and identify people (yay!) and a more conventional amount of distance between me and whoever is dancing (oh, well...).

Being extremely close to dancers in action has its charms, and I often wonder how radical audience proximity might change specific types of companies and individual dancers and pieces of choreography for the better. In any case, I loved watching Gabriel Forestieri and Ted Johnson up close, especially to savor how gracefully the tall, imposing, superbly controlled Johnson can move. Up close, you can see the origin of each movement and you think you can even feel his thoughts fire up. Gabe and Ted move like dolphins--the kind of fish trained in contact improv, perhaps--and have an original, niftily-calibrated range of vulnerability and humor in their interactions. I could have watched a whole show of these two men.

Dancing Fish Productions/Megan Sipe offered a triplet of male solos, the last of which--an electric, full-bodied shimmier--was the guy to see. Next time, Megan, make sure your dancers are individually identified.

Miri Park--in the guise of someone named "Stella Ho"--had her cheering section working overtime, but I think a Korean-American woman portraying a flamboyant Black woman pop singer wearing a skintight, spangled dress and flipping her store-bought hair is only notable because--woowee!--it's a Korean-American woman doing it and not, you know, some drag queen. Her act was cute, nothing more.

I had a little concern for Nicky Paraiso whose solo, Song for Bill, quietly followed all the hooting and hollering for "Stella Ho." The piece opened in the dark with the sounds of Nicky playing a piano and, as the lights came up, continued as he sat there with his back to us, tenderly singing a love song. He then danced something by Chris Yon which I will forever think of as the "Chris Yon Postmodern Sort-of-Hula Mime Dance." Visualize Nicky Paraiso looking as much like Chris Yon dancing as a Filipino man can. Kind of strange. But what really got me was Nicky's New York apartment/landlord story with its exploding sink and its downstairs neighbor who lives like a princess and Nicky singing the love song to Bill in his hospital bed. This tale was surprisingly suspenseful, absorbing and, yes, moving. Nicky Paraiso: a moving man, indeed.

The next Moving Men show--featuring works by David Appel, Ojay Morgan, Leslie Guyton and
Kristen Shifferdecker--will be on Wednesday, February 20 at 8pm. For further information and reservations, call 212-219-0736 or click here.