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Sunday, February 28, 2010

Evidence represents

Evidence in Africa: Dance Troupe as Ambassadors
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, February 28, 2010

Dance in the Township of Joza
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, February 28, 2010

How Do You Do What You Do?
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, March 1, 2010

Friday, February 26, 2010

Highly recommended: Kyle Abraham

Yeah, I know. The weather is ridiculous. Shovel yourself out and don't miss this:

Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion in The Radio Show at Danspace Project

My review of Abraham's opening night show will be hosted by Dance Magazine. I'll let you know when.

Ilona Copen, NYIBC founder-director, 70

Ilona Copen 
February 9, 1940-February 20, 2010

It is with great sadness that the board, staff and volunteers of New York International Ballet Competition announce the passing of their inspirational founder/director Ilona Copen, who died of cancer February 20, 2010 at the age of 70. Born and raised in New York, Ms. Copen attended Juilliard, received a B. de Rothschild scholarship for her training at the Martha Graham School, and performed with numerous modern dance companies, including those directed by Jeff Duncan, Katherine Litz, and Hava Kohav.

With the founding of NYIBC in 1983, Ms. Copen profoundly changed the lives of young ballet dancers from all over the world, always guided by the principle of developing each dancer's potential through education and coaching. Her generosity was unbounded as mentor and advisor to countless organizations and artists. She was on the board of directors of the Jose Limon Dance Foundation and Neta Dance Company, and was consultant for Battleworks Dance Company. She served as Director of Dance at the 92nd Street Y, President of Dance Magazine Foundation, and President of the U.S. Chapter of the Conseil International de la Danse. She was a founding member of World Dance Alliance, an international forum for the exchange of dance ideas founded in Hong Kong in 1990, served on its Board, and was U.S. Representative and President of the International Dance Committee of the International Theatre Institute - UNESCO from 1995 to 2008, when she was named President Emerita.

Ms. Copen is survived by Jim Goldstein, her husband of 51 years, her mother, a brother and sister, two children, four grandchildren, and countless organizations and dancers whose lives she touched.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Monica Moseley memorial planned for April 5

from the Society of Dance History Scholars

Monica Moseley, recently retired Assistant Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, died on January 6, 2010.

Monica Moseley started work at the Dance Division in 1981 and was the Assistant Curator from 1983 till her retirement in February 2005. She obtained her M.S. at the School of Library Service at Columbia University in 1981. Earlier, she studied the dance techniques of Lestor Horton, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. As a founding member of Meredith Monk/The House, she created major roles and danced in many works including Recent Ruins, Chacon, Quarry and Education of the Girlchild. She was editorial assistant at Dance Magazine from 1964-1967, and was on the board of directors for many years of Congress on Research in Dance and Society of Dance History Scholars. She contributed and helped edit the seminal book on collecting dance titled: A Core Collection in Dance. After her retirement she continued to work on many dance projects that included working on the film Lucinda Childs by Patrick Bensard, director of La Cinémathèque de la Danse in Paris and coordinating research for the Leonide Massine screening for La Cinémathèque de la Danse’s program Du côté de Léonide held on 18 January 2010. She was a beloved and valued member of the Dance Division, who would generously share her great knowledge and insight about dance and dance archives with staff members and the public. She is greatly missed. 

A library memorial service is planned for April 5, 2010, Monday at 11am, Bruno Walter Auditorium, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

It's all about CLASSCLASSCLASS

LOTSLOTSLOTS happening with CLASSCLASSCLASS, from March 1 to June 12!

Too much to tell you here. You'll have to check it out yourself.

But I will drop a few names of which I am perpetually enamored: Kyle Abraham, Hilary Clark, luciana achugar, Sydney Skybetter, Walter Dundervill, Aynsley Vandenbroucke...
 CLASSCLASSCLASS nurtures a continued future of dance pedagogy in New York City by engaging and developing a new generation of dance and performance artists as they teach their craft, while simultaneously making the act of taking and teaching class affordable for all. This year CLASSCLASSCLASS is partnering with Movement Research, but will continue to be a separate entity maintaining our own mission, goals, and modus operandi. We are hoping that this relationship fosters a very fertile space for newer teachers to experiment with their craft under the umbrella of an established organization.
Sounds cool. And so do the fees: classes $10; 
workshops $15.
First come first served. No reservations.

CLASSCLASSCLASS participating studios: 

BRAZIL (Bushwick)
The Chocolate Factory (Long Island City)
lululemon athletica (SoHo)
Studio 5-2 (Flatiron District)
Get complete info here.

What time is it?

The Rubin Museum of Art presents a conversation, about time, between screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Brian Greene (physicist and foremost proponent of string theory).

Greene is currently working on a cantata with Philip Glass and David Henry Hwang based on his children's book Icarus at the Edge of Time. The cantata will premiere at New York's World Science Festival 2010.

What time is it? is part of the museum's wide-ranging and provocative Brainwave series. Get full schedule and ticketing details here.


What time is it?
Saturday, March 6, 3:30pm
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street (at 7th Avenue)
212-620-5000

Noh Training Project to hold workshop in PA

Joyce S. Lim sent the following interesting announcement:
There is a rare opportunity to study Noh (traditional Japanese drama-dance-music-chanting) in the USA....  Oshima Kinue, the only female professional in the Kita school of Noh, will be teaching a three-week workshop is in Bloomsburg, PA (2-1/2 hours from New York City). 
Noh is a male form, so how the voice and body is used in the female body is really amazing.  If you can't make the 3-weeks, the organizers are sometimes open to people coming for 2 weeks or so.
July 19-August 7
Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, PA

Previous experience is not required.

For full details and an application, please visit Noh Training Project.

Sehgal asks "What is progress?"

Reviewing Tino Sehgal
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

[This piece was commissioned for Barbara Ann Levy's WPB/NYC and Anything Else blog and was posted there on February 19, 2010.]

What if...?

What if I had not read an article, a couple of reviews and some promo about Tino Sehgal’s Guggenheim exhibition? What if I hadn’t spent a short time, in the winter of 2008, with a more modest Sehgal situation staged inside the Marian Goodman Gallery?

What if I didn't know that a little kid would greet me near the bottom of the Guggenheim's ramp, introduce Sehgal's conceptual--but curiously theatrical--interactive piece, This Progress, and sweetly query if it would be okay to ask me a question?

What if I didn't already know that question would be "What is progress?" and hadn't carefully planned my response?

["Who's asking?" I would say. "Progress can be defined by who benefits as well as who suffers, whose ox is being gored?" Or words to that effect. I live in the East Village and had the evils of gentrification on my mind.]

What if...?

But I get ahead of myself.

Arriving at the museum on a cold, windy Wednesday afternoon, I was chagrined to discover it bustling with visitors. The prospect of Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling ramps stripped of all visual art--like the sun-bleached ribcage of a flayed body--had sounded like a rare, not-to-be-missed experience.

I imagined myself with perhaps just a few others, viewing Sehgal's rotunda floor show--Kiss, a gorgeous, part-naturalistic/part-dancey duet--before climbing the ramps, guided by a series of people with whom I'd converse about progress. Holland Cotter, reviewing for The New York Times, had found value in this, and since I find great value in Holland Cotter on a regular basis, I felt fairly confident.

I eyed Kiss for a while. But the sight--and sound!--of people strewn along the ramps, from bottom to top, knocked me back on my heels. I parked my outerwear with the coatchecker, made a preliminary pit stop since New York magazine's Jerry Saltz had noted that he'd spent three note-scribbling hours with This Progress--and then headed for the base of the ramp.

I started up alone, keeping watch for the approach of an earnest kidling. Now and again, I gazed back at Kiss where the languid duet of lovers had now turned into a perfectly-synced double-duet. Then I saw him--or them, a small knot of little boys. I thought, at first, they were part of a school group. But no. There he was--my first guide. Peeling away from his mates, he sidled up to me and introduced himself and told me the name of Sehgal's work.

Then, the polite question: "What is progress?"

I launched into my prepared answer--and my prepared child-friendly clarification of my prepared answer. I rattled on about how neighborhoods change, not always for the better. We'd lost our wonderful shoe repair guy, any number of favorite restaurants. He led me along, saying just enough to show that he got what I was talking about before a friendly young man came up to us. I'd say he was probably in his twenties, but I'm as bad at guessing ages as I am at retaining names, especially since, unlike Saltz, I was too distracted--though self-conscious, too--to even glance at the notebook and pen clutched in my left hand.

Guide #1 told Guide #2 what we'd been talking about--well, a child's Cliff Notes version of it, good enough--and left us to continue the climb. Guide #2 and I clicked right away--especially when we realized a Lower East Side/East Village connection. Our conversation was filled with geographical, historical and artistic keystones.

Same with Guide #3--older by perhaps a couple of decades--who greeted us at some point along the way. Having kept up eye contact with the cheerful #2 for quite a bit, I had no idea what level we'd reached.

#3 seemed to know exactly what we'd been discussing. (Was there an open cellphone or walkie talkie connection involved?) He picked up the gentrification issue right away, and pretty soon, he was all "Tompkins Square Park" and "Giuliani." With him, I felt more emboldened to probe: "So, you live in Brooklyn now--like a lot of my friends and colleagues in the arts. What do you do?"

We embarked on a pleasant chat, even though climbing and spiraling while keeping a fairly steady eye on my interlocutor/guide made me feel dizzy. But the sudden approach of Guide #4--an amiable, elderly gent--must have distracted me long enough for #3 to vanish. I was stunned--and a bit disappointed.

"Hey," I said to #4. "I've lost my friend!" Funny how real that felt, how I had totally fallen into Sehgal's artificial, art-ificial, art-official situation.

What is progress? Disappearance of the familiar, of what you value most and hold dear.

The realization of a sudden loss--or was it just dizzyiness from the climb?--left me breathless for a moment.

Happily, Guide #4 was understanding--and charming. He let me sputter. Then, with warmth, he told a story about a creek he used to visit when he was a child in Indiana. In recent years, he returned there, only to find the land developed, the creek covered over. I felt sorrow for him and told him so.

We spoke a bit longer before he indicated that This Progress had ended, shook my hand and left me on a level with Paris and the Avant-garde: Modern Masters from the Guggenheim Collection. I sat in that gallery long enough to make a few notes but realized I had absolutely no interest in looking around.

Walking back down the ramps, I glanced at people as they climbed alone or with an actual friend; others obviously with This Progress guides. I was curious about the conversations.

At ground level, I retrieved my winter gear and dressed while catching up with Kiss--a little, intimate dance filled with delicious little intimacies set against the stark, towering glory of Wright's rotunda--a still-beating heart at the center of that sun-bleached ribcage.

On the way out, I was forced to exit by carefully winding my way through the narrow gift shop, and that tapped into my emerging unease. It felt wrong, somehow. I realized that I was not only still out of sorts from the swift, spiral climb but also by a growing sense that I'd been hemmed in not only by the environment but also by the very nature of the conversations.

Surely there are other ways to approach this notion of progress, but I--it was my doing--had set course in a particularly negative, if familiar and comfortable, direction. In the midst of it all, I'd realized that, but had felt unable to break in with other valid ideas of what progress could be.

I had established the entrance to a tube--a spiraling tube--through which my succession of guides and I had
faithfully climbed, cut off from other possibilities.

It felt wrong, somehow. And it felt like a significant lesson.

This Progress, then, is more than a walk, with conversations, as a piece of ephemeral, conceptual art. It is, potentially, a work of tranformation. For me, that qualifies Sehgal's achievement as the highest art.



Reflecting on empathy

Photography Empathy: How You Feel Is What You Get
by Qiana Mestrich, Black Star Rising, November 4, 2008

Now, let's reflect on what Mestrich asks in her last paragraph--
  • Let’s discuss: Have you noticed how empathy plays a role in the way you photograph? How has it influenced your end result?
--and let's make an interesting switch: Have you noticed how empathy plays a role in the way you look at dance (and write about it, if you do)? How has it influenced your end result?

Please use this space to share. Comments, anyone?

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Some DNA discoveries

With its choreography series, OB-ject-ob-JECT, Dance New Amsterdam fosters innovative collaboration among women artists working in various disciplines. This season--which ends tomorrow with a 3pm performance--offers a few good reasons to head to DNA now and to keep watch for more notable developments from its current roster of artists.

I'm most intrigued by the Italian, Amsterdam-based choreographer Giulia Mureddu. In Bava (US premiere), Mureddu duets with a squealing, mewling, man-sized puppet with spongey, bulging cloth flesh and hard, glassy eyes that sparkle under the lights. The puppet (designed by collaborator Ulrike Quade) seems to be fused with the dancer's body and with her soul. Her precise, sensitive manipulation of this figure not only creates an poignant, at times frightening illusion that it is alive but also displays alternating facets of a relationship both tender and terribly dark in nature. Bava is a kaleidoscopic, disturbing dream--and a brilliant execution of Mureddu and Quade's concept.

Soloist Marýa Wethers and choreographer Daria Faïn have made good on the promise of a work-in-progress I saw, last December, at 92nd Street Y. TARGET::furnace (phase one) seems to have clarified its purpose as a fantasy of the iconic woman hero/superhero/martial artist--She possessed of indomitable physical and mental acuity. In the opening segment, Wethers--wrapped in an oversized, thick terry cloth robe, with matching bath towels draped over her head, an amazing, sculptural costume--strides round and around with her game face on and her arms and fists raised in the gesture of a prize fighter. In another high-energy passage, Wethers unleashes her superpowers, spinning this way and that as she throws darts at Robert Kocik's wooden "target-objects." At times, TARGET (otherwise oddly titled, but Faïn and poet Kocik are noted for intricate investigation and word play) feels a little loose-thready. But its interesting conclusion hints at breakthrough to a consciousness beyond strength and heroism. Katherine Young's luscious score--performed live by Young (bassoon), Christine Bard (percussion) and Erica Dicker (violin)--contributes a fragrant, haunting sound bouquet.

In Mariangela Lopez's Accidental #5 (world premiere), a lone woman holding a pose I'd readily call "the kneeling Isadora Duncan" eventually gives way to a floor-full of women and men in weird-ass costumes, no two alike, who flail and jerk their bodies long and hard. Suddenly stopping, they pant, looking around in that way that you do when you're standing still and managing to hold yourself up but your brain seems to spinning in its skull. If Accidental #5, as it progresses, comes off looking like amateurish good-time romping--hey, let's all mass together and boogie down and hoot and holler!--I guess we can trace that back this ecstatic opening. There's a hella lotta energy here, which clearly sparked the audience around me last night; rousing hoots greeted the sixteen dancers and Lopez as they lined up for their bows. Hella lotta energy doesn't quite substitute for innovation, but Lopez does introduce a few unexpected ways of addressing space--by tucking a pocket of hot activity in a far corner, partly obscured by the wings or having her sixteen dancers form a many-headed, multi-faceted organism slowly crawling the rear of the space. A marvelous dancer herself, she's got an interesting eye for visual effects and a playful spirit bordering on the rebellious, and I just want her to totally cross that border and go there.

For more information on OB-ject-ob-JECT and ticketing for tonight (8pm) or tomorrow (3pm), click here.

Call for film/video submissions for SEEDS 2010

SEEDS requests submissions of films and videos of any length, focused on ecology, social ecology, movement and/or science for SEEDS 2010. Wanted: dance and moving image films, environmental documentaries and related short experimental works. All work must be in NTSC dvd format. Please send dvds, promotional images and directors biography.

All submissions should be sent by April 16th to:

Olive Bieringa
3528 10th Ave South
Minneapolis, MN 5540

If you have questions or suggestions, please email olive@bodycartography.org

Thanks!

SEEDS Web site

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Through thick or thin ice

What real dancers think of figure skating
Insiders reveal what they love and loathe about their balletic cousins on ice 
by Margaret Eby, Salon.com, February 16, 2010

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

651 Arts is LIVE AND OUTSPOKEN

Brooklyn's 651 Arts--dedicated to performance of the African diaspora--launches LIVE AND OUTSPOKEN, its new series of arts conversations, this spring with an exciting line-up:

Tuesday, April 27
Award-winning choreographer Ralph Lemon interviews Mississippi bluesman Jimmy “Duck” Holmes in the home of Emmy Award-winning producer, Tom Fontana
Tuesday, May 4
Poet/playwright/activist Sonia Sanchez interviews choreographer Ron BrownMark Morris Dance Studio at , Brooklyn

Tuesday, May 11
South African composer Hugh Masekela interviews musician/performer Somi at the Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts, Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus

Tuesday, May 18
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage interviews actress/writer April Yvette Thompson at BRICstudio, Brooklyn

Tickets go on sale on March 1.

For further information about this and other activities of 651 Arts, click here.

Anne Bogart: the effort of balance

In connection with attending last night's conversation among director Anne Bogart, playwright Charles L. Mee, Jr. and other members of Bogart's SITI Company at Dance Theater Workshop, I discovered Bogart's interesting blog. Here's some of wonderful ruminating...

Instinct vs. Impulse
by Anne Bogart, SEE (SITI Extended Ensemble), February 2010

Last in the SITI Company Mondays@DTW series:

March 8 (7pm) SITI's devised creations--the why, what and how. Tickets: $10. Call 212-924-0077 or click here.

And coming up at The Joyce in June: 

American Document, by visionary choreographer Martha Graham, premiered during the summer of 1938. Her most theatrical ballet at the time of its creation, Graham’s piece incorporated vaudevillian structures, folk rhythms, and spoken text to examine Americana and the continual conflict between the rights of the individual and society. Although there is no complete record of Graham’s first
popular work, the Martha Graham Dance Company has enlisted director Anne Bogart, playwright Charles L. Mee Jr. and SITI Company to reinvent 
American Document using filmed excerpts, written descriptions and Graham’s handwritten notes. This stirring new theatrical work will feature a groundbreaking collaboration between SITI Company actors and Martha Graham Company dancers. American Document reflects our current cultural concerns by answering the same questions Martha Graham asked over seventy years ago: What is an American? And, what is America?

American Document (World Premiere)
June 8-13
The Joyce Theater
175 8th Avenue (19th Street), Manhattan
Box office at 212-242-0800 or purchase online

Monday, February 15, 2010

Toshi Reagon and Friends to play at Schomburg Center

Brooklyn singer/songwriter/musician Toshi Reagon comes to Harlem with a special evening of collaboration and music at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on Monday, March 1, 7pm.

Toshi is one of the featured artists for the Schomburg's Women In Jazz series that runs every Monday during the month of March. She has invited some of her favorite New York women singers to join her--Helga Davis, Morley, Stephanie Battle, Judith Casselbery, Josette Marshach, Karma Mayet Johnson, Marcelle Davies Lashley and musicians Fred Cash, Robert Burke and Adam Widoff.

Tickets: (212) 491-2206

Women’s Jazz Festival
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Boulevard, Manhattan
Map and directions

Fela!: Stephen Petronio responds

'Fela!' -- Dance Tells a Story
The New York Times, February 10, 2010

an excellent letter from choreographer Stephen Petronio

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Jill Sigman investigating (with you) at DNA

Dancer-choreographer Jill Sigman's new composition course--Choreography: Solidifying Presence--meets on Fridays, February 12-April 2 (12-3pm), at Dance New Amsterdam. 

This workshop will investigate how improvisational structures can be used as tools for choreography and how they can lead to increased theatrical presence in choreographed movement. 

How does improvisation allow us to find moments of movement innovation and heightened presence? How can we capture those in fixed choreographic work? 

We will explore a wide range of improv tools that span different physical scales— from micro improvisations that realign the skeleton to create theatrical characters to macro improvisations that compose large spaces through the movement of bodies and objects. 

We will use cinematic devices to create movement, capture source material from YouTube, and experiment with gesture. We will also explore various strategies to increase focus and awareness, lead to a more present state of performing, and retain that state when repeating choreographed work. 

Register for the entire course or just drop-in

Choreographic Investigation Course fee information

For complete information or to sign up for Jill Sigman's Choreography: Solidifying Presence, contact DNA.

Got The Big Picture?

I was delighted to find out about these two Boston.com Big Picture links via Twitter:

Dance around the world -- Part I and Part II

The 2010 NYC Dance Parade wants you!

Dance, donate, volunteer, make history! Learn more and get involved here.

And check out my slide show from last year's parade here.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Lee's LEAR: Beyond Shakespeare

A lot of critics have weighed in on Young Jean Lee's LEAR--closing Sunday at SoHo Rep--in which the controversial playwright has cherry-picked the younger characters from King Lear as a springboard for her own purposes, a matter of staring, with diminishing distractions and buffers, at unavoidable realities of conscience, aging and dying. Sold out now even into its extension, LEAR is a tantalizing dish, neither faithful to Shakespeare in its fashion nor an absolutely clean break. Some people are getting tripped up in the in-between and suggesting that Lee has tripped up there, too. But I think LEAR is sold out because people have heard that SoHo Rep's production really rocks. This meta-banal-Buddhist-absurdist piece with a bruised heart at its core boasts absorbing, skilled performances from the three women in the cast--April Matthis (Regan), Okwui Okpokwasili (Goneril) and especially, super-clever Amelia Workman (Cordelia), King Lear's daughters. The look of the show rocks, too--a depiction of constricted people appropriately encased on a narrow stage that is, nevertheless, decked out in Elizabethan finery (as are the characters in smashing costumes and jewelry), a lush setting that looks simultaneously plausible and fake. The 80-minute production includes excellent work by Raquel Davis (lighting), David Evans Morris (set), Roxana Ramseur (costumes) and Dean Moss (choreography and stage movement).

More on LEAR here

Hear Young Jean Lee discuss LEAR with SoHo Rep's Sarah Benson.

Speak up!

Speak well and be heard -- a workshop offered by The Field
 
Instructor: Michaela Hall
 
Tuesday, March 9 (6:30-9pm)
$40 ($25 Field members)

Speaking well and being heard is fundamental for professional advancement. From a post-performance discussion, to cocktail hour, to a chance encounter in the elevator, we will explore myriad formal and informal situations to put your best foot forward; to speak about your work with enthusiasm and precision when the opportunity presents itself.

Information and registration at TheField.org or (212) 691-6969

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Moradian: abstraction, emptiness and the essence of life

ABSTRACTION: The Empty Space

by Ann Moradian, Perspectives in Motion, January 24, 2010

a paper presented by Ann Moradian for The 21st Natya Kala Conference -- "Choreography: The Art of Making Dances" December 15-21, 2001, Shri Krishna Gana Sabha, Chennai, India

Moved by what she discovers

Returning to dance: what moves us?
by Ann Moradian, Perspectives in Motion, January 26, 2010

a paper presented by Ann Moradian at The World Dance Alliance Americas Congress -- "What Moves Us?" May 28-31, 2009, University of Wisconsin/Madison, USA

Monday, February 8, 2010

PS 122 urges action for the arts

Performance Space 122 and Advocacy

Performance Space 122 is on the case!

Here's what you need to know to contact and advocate for arts funding with your elected officials and governmental agencies.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Getting "Got Zulu!"

It's too bad that reviews can now be considered one of the barriers to attendance, comprehension and enjoyment of dance in New York City. Sometimes you just have to take the initiative and navigate your way around them, as I did, last evening, when I went to Dance New Amsterdam.

Watching Got Zulu!, I found myself considerably less offended than one of my Times-ward colleagues about a travel video that popped up in the middle of the production, the South African version of Riverdance. (Yes, there is one of these--a South African equivalent of Riverdance--and it's brought to us by the righteously talented Sduduzo Ka-Mbili/JUXTAPOWER, a dance-and music troupe based in New York.) Amid all of the hearty gumboot dancing, outrageous pantsula street dances, out-of-this-world hoofing by tap master Omar Edwards, heavenly choral call-and-response, and mindblowing drumming by Joshua Endlich, there comes a moment when the live proceedings pause for what could be read as a commercial break--except that the expected hard sell never actually arrives.

Yes, we're treated to tempting video images and captions that make South Africa look like the planet's most colorful, resourceful and rewarding place for visitors--neatly gliding over some of the lingering social problems to which the concert itself briefly alludes--but, unless I missed something, we're never hit with the travel firm's name, URL or phone number. And, after reading the Times review, I was kind of bracing myself for that hit.

In JUXTAPOWER's program notes and promotional materials, RA Travel--along with other supporters--is credited and thanked. But this does not seem to me terribly different than most credit and thank you notes (and is considerably less jarring than most New York Times ads, for that matter). And, frankly, if founder Sduduzo Ka-Mbili has secured a reliable source of funding to uplift his crew and keep their bodies and souls together, then good on him. The show gives a lot back, and most people will find that the short video break neither distracts from nor compromises that achievement.

I'm writing and posting this less than a half-hour away from the troupe's last performance at DNA (3pm). So, it's too late to urge you to get there. But keep eyes peeled for your next opportunity.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

casebolt and smith are INBOUND at Joyce SoHo

casebolt and smith, an emerging dance duo out of LA, launched their first full-fledged New York season last night at Joyce SoHo, offering something that has become a rarity here in contemporary dance--an assemblage of several short works, old and new, with an actual 15-minute intermission!  

Liz Casebolt and Joel Smith are awfully skilled and cute, and they seem to have carved out a highly personal niche: vest-pocket dance theater filled with quick-on-the draw gestural movement, self-revealing talk and quirky humor with a sense of urgency. Relative to LA, NYC might be perceived as "a serious city"--per Smith's remark in the team's video self-interview here--but The Big Apple, historically and demonstrably, can more than hold its own in the humor, especially transgressive humor, department. So, much as I enjoyed the pair's talents and versatility--particularly Smith's substantial technique, investment, sauciness and heart--I'm a little underwhelmed by c&s's claim to riskiness. "...a risky undressing of the politics of performing race," reads one of their promo materials. The company bio refers to a goal of using their collaborative process to "complicate, question and illuminate gender and sexuality dynamics and the cultural politics embedded in the ways bodies are traditionally represented in dance." But maybe the issue is with rhetoric. If so, these two should consider getting out from under.

In their show, Casebolt identifies herself as married to a man; Smith, as gay and it's complicated. I guess the most offbeat thing about watching them work together is not all the slapsticky grabbing and referencing of private parts that goes on, not the joking around about farts nor the image of Casebolt struggling to keep fruit from toppling out of her Carmen Miranda turban as she sings "I Feel Pretty" in a Spanish accent. Rather it's their acknowledgement that the intimacy and chemistry between hardworking creative partners who adore each other as much as they clearly do could be read by outsiders as sexual.

Happily, most of their material does not strain for significance, and perhaps significance arrives. They are fine when they allow subtlety and feeling and original ideas to surface. In the brand-new O(h), there's a section that tickles me, where the pair physically demonstrate how hard it is to overcome the creative limitations of a two-person company and how hard it would be even to adopt works by other companies. (Charles Weidman? Two people cannot form a mob. A typical Ailey wedge of dancers? Not enough arms. A corps de ballet with just two swans? Pitiful.) This passage offers a fresh look and one well-rooted in dance.

Presented as part of Joyce SoHo's international INBOUND Festival, casebolt and smith continue their series tonight and Sunday. For more information and ticketing for this and other INBOUND programs, click here.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Advocate for the arts now!

New York City Arts Coalition and Center for Arts Education

welcome you to an ARTS ADVOCACY WORKSHOP

Thursday, February 11 (9am-11am) 

Location:

Center for Arts Education
225 West 34 Street, Suite 1112, Manhattan 

Presenters:

Norma Munn--Chair, New York City Arts Coalition 
Doug Israel--Director of Research & Policy, The Center for Arts Education 

This workshop is aimed at those who have not taken part in advocacy or feel they need to improve or refresh their skills and information. It will focus on the City and State processes, and will also provide current information about both the City and State budgets and legislative issues impacting on the cultural sector.

Attendees will be given opportunities to ask questions, and explore their concerns.

If you, or your organization has not been actively involved in advocating for more public funding, or addressing legislative issues, in the past few years, this is an opportunity to quickly learn how to do so both effectively and credibly. Remember, you are your own best lobbyist when it comes to what you want legislators to hear. No one knows better than you what you do and its value.

You, or another staff member, are welcome, but you must RSVP by email to information@nycityartscoalition.org no later than March 9. If you have questions, or need additional information, please contact Norma Munn at npmunn@nycityartscoalition.org or call 212-246-3788.

New York City Arts Coalition
212-246-3788

Lost and found at Danspace

Hello, out there! Yes, it's me again, wearing my dance blogger hat and getting pushy with you.

Today, I'm pointing you in the direction of Danspace Project and hoping you'll get there tonight or tomorrow night for the latest offering in the Platforms 2010: i get lost series, curated by Ralph Lemon.

i get lost: An Evening of Solos presents two 30-minute works by Judith Sánchez Ruíz (And They Forgot to Love) and Souleymane Badolo (Yaado), and if you crave the chance to spend time with singular, compelling performers, you'll want to make tracks.

Also, watching Sánchez Ruíz and Badolo last night, I came away with a much clearer idea of what Judy Hussie-Taylor (Danspace's Executive Director) intends to do with her Platforms initiative. From what I've seen thus far (David Zambrano, Sánchez Ruíz and Badolo, even the recent screening of Maya Deren's raw footage of voudon dancing in Haiti), it's evident that Lemon and Hussie-Taylor want to open out the way we look at mediated dancing, dance presented in a concert space or via media. Platforms proposes a shift of the paradigm that demands and privileges well-made, finished product--every detail of it stamped and controlled and often blown up to impress funders, presenters and a dazzlement-craving market.

But there's no flashback to Judson in this. Yes, we can have glamour, glitter, the drama of real human context and humanity in its splendid diversity. But we can also, in the instance of Sánchez Ruíz and Badolo, have soloists who don't seek to dominate the space--and, as a performance venue, St. Mark's sanctuary is, oddly, both intimate and formidable--but, rather, seek to draw you into the luminous physical and mental sectors that they occupy. They experiment with ways to make us look more closely, see more and see it more sharply.

A work of art is an invitation to a conversation. A conversation can start anywhere and go anywhere--live, unscripted, responsive in the moment. I understand that more now through i get lost. Badolo's solo, Yaado, underscores these truths by starting out with the dancer standing before us, in utmost simplicity and dignity, saying "Je suis Souleymane Badolo..." If someone introduces himself to you, unless there's something wrong, you're going to step into that space he's offering, open up and respond in kind. Can we get that that's what could/should be going on when we encounter a work of art?

Both solos here remind me of that (sometimes annoying) question: Would you rather be right or happy? As I see it, neither choreographer has put forth a piece meant to be earthshaking or satisfying in that mind-fattening way that makes dance critics snap their pens and notebooks closed and declare that it has met all the right requirements for being good. i get lost--as I see it--is not about being right but about being willingly and happily engaged in sharing something interesting in conversation. There's no need to be right--to snap a statement and tuck it away.

Now, let's see if critics can get that.

The conversation continues. Click here.

Hajdu profiles Hersh

This is a superb profile of an exemplary artist and man. I just got caught up with it a day or two ago but wanted to be sure to post it here for your enjoyment.

Giant Steps--The Survival of a Great Jazz Pianist
by David Hajdu, The New York Times, January 28, 2010

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Bush and Helstroffer: To dream without cease

The Himalayan imagery on display in Chelsea's classy Rubin Museum of Art has found a champion in Nadine Helstroffer, a French-born dancer-choreographer with a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Helstroffer's commissioned solo, Absence Presence, was premiered in the Rubin's special exhibition gallery, surrounded by Eternal Presence: Handprints and Footprints in Buddhist Art. The record of that performance--filmed by John Bush, edited with exquisite sensitivity by Brent Felker--received its world premiere last night at the Rubin along with another Bush film scored by Felker, the quite enchanting Dream on Me.

Helstroffer's snaky dancing evokes the couple's shared spirituality and pleasure in nature; her perpetually inward expression gives a poetic, even solemn flavor to her work. But she is not just Bush's ethereal muse but also his anchor. Like the hyper-energized, exalted beings at the center of the Tibetan images that flicker through Absence Presence, Helstroffer acts as the radiant core from which Bush's loveliest light can flow in the dream-inspired Dream on Me. The ripples of reflections in water; the deep, resonant clang of super-saturated color; the languorous bobbing of blossom-laden trees in lingering moments of drowsy beauty and gentle humor: They all seem sourced and grounded in this iconic performer.

A flowing composite of the four seasons, Dream on Me hits a jarring, undreamy note only when surf-side passages too closely resemble slick, New Age magazine ads for yoga retreats. But, overall, strategies for overlapping color-bearing dancers with natural or manufactured environments speak to the complexity of notions of permanence and impermanence. What is eternal? What is fleeting? Rigid skyscrapers? Mounds of snow? Wafting saffron banners? Elusively drifting bodies of flesh and bone?

A Q&A followed the screening in which Helstroffer and Bush were joined on stage by Michael Vincent Miller, PhD, a Buddhist psychotherapist. Miller offered thoughtful insights--about engagement with and consideration of art, about empathetic surrender in the moment, about the similarities between wellness in health and in art--that he made me wonder if the future of really useful dance criticism might not actually lie in Buddhist psychotherapy!

For more information on the work of John Bush and Nadine Helstroffer, click here and here.

For more information on the Rubin Museum of Art and a schedule of upcoming events--including the impressive BRAINWAVE series, pairing artists with neuroscientists and astrophysicists--click here.

Do the BRAINWAVE!

BRAINWAVE at the Rubin Museum of Art: It could change your mind!

The third annual BRAINWAVE series--running from February 17 to April 14--brings thinkers from multiple disciplines to sit down with (neuro)scientists and astrophysicists to wrap our minds around the things that matter.

Wednesday, February 17 (7pm) -- "Why Does Movement Move Us?" with Mark Morris and Bevil R. Conway

Choreographer Mark Morris and neuroscientist Bevil R. Conway explore how the brain responds to dance and motion.

$30 (includes reception)

For a full schedule of BRAINWAVE events and ticketing information, click here.

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan
212-620-5000

Tappers to benefit Haiti

Hoofing For Haiti 

100% of the proceeds will go to YELE HAITI and PARTNERS IN HEALTH.

WHAT: A night of Tap Dance, Music, & Text
WHEN: Thursday, February 4 (8pm)
WHERE: Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street, Manhattan
TICKETS: $20 - Smartix

Featuring:

Garrett Bantom
DeWitt Fleming
Karida Griffith
Frank Harts
Chikako Iwahori
Lisa La Touche
Ted Louis Levy
Michela Marino-Lerman
Tony Mayes
Andrew Nemr
Claudia Rahardjanoto
Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards
and more!

Sehgal's Guggenheim: the complexity of progress

In the Naked Museum: Talking, Thinking, Encountering
by Holland Cotter, The New York Times, February 1, 2010

And here's my short commentary on a Tino Sehgal piece I witnessed in 2008 at the Marion Goodman Gallery. I'm hoping to get up to the Guggenheim soon.

For details on the Guggenheim exhibition, click here.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Music journalism explored at Unsound Festival

Fundacja Tone, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York 
and the Goethe-Institut New York present

UNSOUND FESTIVAL NEW YORK 

Since 2003, Unsound Festival, Poland's most adventurous music festival, has brought a bold and uniquely modern program of music to Kraków. Now, with seven festivals in its native city under their belt (and outpost events further east in cities like Minsk), Unsound is coming west to New York for its first ever North American edition, taking place over the course of ten days starting on Thursday, February 4, 2010.

The hub of the festival’s panel discussions, presentations, and workshops is the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building. The series of panels and workshops taking place at Unsound Festival New York will be aimed at creating a context of discussion around music and sound cultures. It is an essential, extensive part of the project, and completely free.


Sunday 02/07 (2pm) --  Panel discussion on Music Journalism

What does it mean to write well about music? A panel of working music journalists discusses issues related to the art of music-writing, as well as the changing practice of covering music in an eclectic and diversified world. When so much is available globally, how does one search for the new?

Andy Battaglia and Simon Reynolds lead a discussion with other working writers in the field. Further details on festival website.

The Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building will host other panel discussions, presentations, workshops and screenings in conjunction with Unsound Festival New York. For a complete and updated festival program please visit the Unsound website.

Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street (at Bowery), Manhattan
Free admission (for all events at the Wyoming Building)
212-439-8700

Meet DJARARA: Brooklyn's own Haitian rara band

The Other Side of the Water is a documentary on DJARARA--a Brooklyn-based rara band--directed by Jeremy Robins and co-produced by Robins with Magali (Magi) Damas.

The Other Side of the Water follows a group of young immigrants who take an ancient music from the hills of Haiti and reinvent it on the streets of Brooklyn. The journey of this unlikely band offers a unique insight into the Haitian-American experience -- a rare glimpse into a world of music, spirituality, and cultural activism.

Read more and watch a trailer and clips here.