Writers--with brush in hand

Too good for words: When great authors pick up the brush
by Kevin Murphy, Melville House, May 29, 2012

Celebrating women in dance

Jean Freebury and Brian Lawson in Femina by Pam Tanowitz (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

Reviewing a 2007 concert of work by choreographer Pam Tanowitz, I noted that,

"[Tanowitz] makes ballet-modern dance hybrids–an effort not unique to her but one that she achieves with uncommon grace and gusto. Balletic movements, performed with affectionate care and not in jest, might look exotic on the modern dance stage, but they are simply as valid as anything else in Tanowitz’s overall scheme. She is a garrulous, multilingual poet of the art of dance...."

Pam Tanowitz troupe (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

See Tanowitz's latest--the world premiere of Recorded forever in between the cracks with real passion--on the special, one-night-only presentation of Working Women at the Gotham Dance Festival at The Joyce Theater, Tuesday, June 5 (7:30pm).

Showcasing work by contemporary American women dancemakers, this concert will benefit programs of the Gotham Arts Exchange. In addition to Tanowitz, the artists include Kate Weare (The Light Has Not The Arms to Carry Us), Camille A. Brown (solo from Mr. Tol E. Rance), Carolyn Dorfman (Keystone), Loni Landon (Don’t Forget to Go Home, a world premiere), Jodie Gates (duet from Delicate Balance), Jane Comfort (excerpt from Beauty) and Monica Bill Barnes (excerpt of Love, Oh Love).

Regular tickets start at $10. Premium seating ($100 and $75) for Working Women includes center orchestra seats and a special post show reception with the artists.

For more information and ticketing, call 212-928-6517 or click here.

For information on other programs of the Gotham Dance Festival, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

Leo Dillon, 79

Leo Dillon, Illustrator of Children’s Books, Dies at 79
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, May 30, 2012

Make good art.

When life gets tough, make good art.

--Neil Gaiman 

Commencement address, University of the Arts, 2012

Sex. Real. Good. Movement Research-style.

MOVEMENT RESEARCH FESTIVAL SPRING 2012
PUSH IT. REAL. GOOD. 

presents

Let's talk about sex

Friday, June 1, 6-7:30PM

Choreographers, erotica writers, and performance artists

talk about doin' it in the 21st Century. 

Diana Cage

Aimee Herman

John Jasperse

Ishmael Houston-Jones

Antonio Ramos

Lucy Sexton

Moderated by Jillian Peña, Dean of the School of Sex Research at Movement Research and Erin Markey, Assistant Dean

$5 ($4 with Day Pass)

Location:

The Center at West Park
West Park Presbyterian Church
165 West 86th Street (corner of Amsterdam Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

For more information on this and other festival activities, click here.

Have a copasetic National Tap Dance Day!

I'm proud to say that Constance Valis Hill, author of Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History, will be the main speaker on Saturday, June 23, for Collective for Dance Writing and New Media's Writing on Tap forum for dance writers, dance artists and tap dance fans. (Get up-to-date information here.)

In the meantime, read her new article on National Tap Dance Day, Everything's Copasetic, in The Huffington Post here.

Strange characters invade Danspace Project

Michelle Ellsworth: The Pythagodress

At first, I wanted to bat Ellsworth away with a flyswatter. She talked a mile a minute and looked like she was about to jump out of her skin or fry herself from the nerves out. For god's sake, she wouldn't shut up! But how can you resist a crazy who's this brilliantly crazy--and entertaining to boot? Her solo is named for Pythagoras--yes, that Pythagoras--and for the voluminous Elizabethan dress that is far more than a dress, more like a prop, installation, fortress, way of life and numerological and metaphysical concept, designed by the equally brilliant Priscilla Cohan, Janice Lacek and Bruce Miller. I began to feel strongly protective of Ellsworth as her spindly, vulnerable fingers nervously wrangled with aluminum pipes and plastic buckles, snapping this piece to that piece, adjusting the extended dress into various functional configurations. But it became clear that she knew exactly what she was doing, had done this many times before. I detected in her a survivalist's terror beneath the wispy veneer of good cheer as the self-described problem-solver unpacked more and more of her hoarded supplies--everything from the expected (a roll of duct tape) to the bizarre ("a toilet paper roll that talks to me"--and, yes, my friends, it does--and a folding shrine to Martha Graham, complete with two white votive tapers). Her condensed, ineffectual recounting of The Odyssey, by means of a flannel board and cut-out characters, finally endeared her to me forever.

Andrew Dinwiddie: Farewell Tour

With neither the ancient KISS nor its Starchild frontman Paul Stanley on my radar, I had to do some Wikipedaling to remember exactly who Stanley was/is. If you don't know or don't remember, Dinwiddie's part-lipsynced, part-unplugged solo--another virtuosic impersonation from the man who gave us the supercharged Get Mad at Sin! in 2010--will remind you. Dinwiddie's character--a prancing id decked out in a thick, black, shoulder-length wig and facial hair and mask--utilizes and acts out the 2005 bootleg CD, People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest: The Very Best of Paul Stanley's On Stage Banter. Wielding his skull-topped wireless mic like a jester's baton and surrogate phallus, Dinwiddie manages to suggest both unbridled, expansive physicality and, because of the distant and distancing effect of the rock star's recorded voice and crowd noise, a certain ghostliness. (Stanley, like KISS itself, is still around, mind you, and even preparing to tour with Motley Crue, though the Wikipedia page notes hip replacement and vocal cord surgeries.) In the second, and rambling, half of this piece, set to a Chopin sonata, Stanley appears to go on mental walkabout. While I'm not sure what we're meant to make of this delicate passage, it's an interesting development, perhaps a spiritual one, and danced with care.

Andrew Dinwiddie and Michelle Ellsworth continue their shared evening at Danspace Project tonight and Saturday night, 8pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

More ways to share: dancers bartering

Connect the Blocks: Resource Sharing in NYC Dance
Monday, June 11 (6-8:30pm)

at Performance Space 122 (Downstairs Theater)
150 1st Avenue (entrance on East 9th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

RSVP: https://dancenyc.secure.force.com/ticket

Join Dance/NYC, Fourth Arts Block, OurGoods, and the wider dance community to discuss resource sharing in NYC dance. Money for dance making is scarce. What happens when we make dance using resources other than dollars? What are our opportunities for creating economies of collaboration and combination? New Yorkers are responding to these questions with innovative models for identifying, leveraging and sharing resources to make their work and achieve their missions. This Town Hall will showcase some of those solutions, instigate a larger conversation about strategies and tactics for sharing, and close with a live barter meetup, including a crash course on the fundamentals of bartering and a mapping of the needs and haves in the room.

Intended to advance economies of collaboration and combination in NYC dance, the Town Hall will launch Connect the Blocks, a joint Fourth Arts Block and OurGoods initiative to strengthen the resource sharing culture for independent dance makers across the City. Made possible with leadership support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Connect the Blocks will offer a suite of workshops, events and online resources to advance resource- and capacity-sharing as a replicable and sustainable model for cultural production.

Featured Speakers

Jen Abrams, Co-Founder, OurGoods
Tamara Greenfield, Executive Director, Fourth Arts Block
Alexa Bradley, Program Director, On the Commons
Rob Handel, Managing Director, 13P

Please share your thoughts on resource sharing on DanceNYC.org. What happens when we make dance using resources other than dollars?

Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc) was founded in 2001 as the nonprofit leadership organization for the East 4th Street Cultural District, a historic and vibrant arts corridor in Manhattan between Second Avenue and Bowery. Now a neighborhood-wide coalition of 26 arts and community groups, FABnyc drives cultural and community development, while preserving the Lower East Side's rich heritage and creative energy.

OurGoods.org is a barter network for creative people. Online and in person, we facilitate the barter of skills, space, labor, and objects. The site matches barter partners, provides accountability tools, and offers technical assistance resources. It is an instigator for generosity, a locus of empowerment, and an innovative model for supporting the work of artists.

On the Commons (OTC) is a commons movement strategy center founded in 2001. Our purpose is to activate the emergence of a commons-based society by: building and bringing visibility to the commons movement; initiating and catalyzing commons work that focuses on Commons-based solutions; and developing and encouraging commons leadership.

13P (Thirteen Playwrights, Inc.) is a collective of playwrights that realizes full productions of new plays. The resources of the company are placed at the disposal of the playwright at work, who serves as the company's artistic director during the production of her play. The mission calls for the company to produce 13 plays, one by each founding member, before the organization's planned implosion in 2012. The production model created by 13P has been replicated around the world with its encouragement.

Dance/NYC is a branch of Dance/USA, the national service organization for professional dance. Dance/NYC's mission is to sustain and advance the professional dance field in New York City-serving as the voice, guide and infrastructure architect for all local dance artists and managers. The organization achieves this mission through: advocacy, research and convening.

SHOW/SHARE: They showed. We shared.

Congratulations to the six independent choreographers (and their performers) who showed work at last night's SHOW/SHARE event at Gibney Dance Center:

Melissa Riker (Kinesis Project Dance Theatre)

Kathleen Dyer (KDNY Dance Company)

Carmella Ollero

Cori Olinghouse (Ghost Lines Project*)

Ashley A. Friend (The Contemporary Dance Core)

Amanda Hunt

It was a pleasure to sample your projects and to hear about your ideas, values and process. I wish you all the very best!

Thanks, too, to our audience for sharing what you saw, felt and imagined. Your feedback will give these artists encouragement for the future.

SHOW/SHARE is a comfortable, informal, two-hour "open mic" for choreography. For more information about future SHOW/SHARE evenings, click here (and scroll down). For information on other programs and services of Gibney Dance Center, click here.



*UPDATE:

And do check out this Kickstarter campaign for Ghost line--an intriguing film/dance collaboration between Cori Olinghouse and Shona Masarin.

Met Opera won't ban reviews by Opera News

Met Reverses Itself on Ban of Reviews by Opera News
by Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, May 22, 2012

Panel: In praise of praise dance

Praisedance

a panel exploring the role of Black dance in Black spirituality

Thursday, May 24 (6:30-8:30pm)

Rashida Bumbray, Nafissa Shariff, Brian Polite and Michael Manswell wax kinetic as they explore the role of black dance forms, including ring shouts, traditional Old Mali folk dance, House Music dance, and Afro-Caribbean dance in Black worship and everyday transcendence. This salon is part of “Roots and Stars”, the Caribbean Cultural Center’s (CCCADI) newest program series exploring African Traditional Religions while illuminating Black spiritual practices.

Presented by Caribbean Cultural Center in association with International Communications Association

Admission: $10 at the door

Location:

Dwyer Cultural Arts Center
258 St. Nicholas Avenue, Manhattan
(Enter on 123rd Street between St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard)
(directions)

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet at The Joyce Theater

Read my Dance Magazine review of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet here.

It Gets Better: NYC Dance Community Edition

I'm going to record my It Gets Better video on Tuesday, June 5 with other members of New York City's dance community! Are you?

Join us in offering hope to LGBT youth.

Find out more and sign up (free!) here:

It Gets Better: NYC Dance Community Edition

Wellfleet, MA set to welcome new dance fest

Fleet Moves Dance Festival by The Movement Party

Pioneering dancers Zena Bibler and Katie Schetlick plan to bring a new dance festival to the little fishing town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Bibler writes, "We are serving a community that has little to no dance programming, but we are also benefiting from the opportunity to create singular dance experiences out in nature--dunes, kettle ponds, broken down railroad bridges...."

We are bringing a really great team of dancers (mostly from New York City) to engage in a residency for the first four days in order to create new work and class structures for the festival over the following four days. Some collaborators include Brandin Steffensen, Jeremy Finch, Abigail Levine, Stephanie Fungsang, members of the Yaa Samar Dance Company, and more. Plus we'll be teaming up with local teachers and performers to create a festival that really is in, around, and for the town of Wellfleet.

Fleet Moves, the co-directors promise, will "set the town in motion with all-day programming that includes daily classes, indoor and outdoor performances, a visual art exhibition, film screenings, and a closing night dance party."

To learn more about Fleet Moves and to support its Kickstarter campaign, click here and here.

Incomparable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Incomparable Voice
by Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, May 19, 2012

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, 1925-2012
Lyrical and Powerful Baritone, and the Master of the Art Song
by Daniel Lewis, The New York Times, May 18, 2012

Our Summer of Love

Donna Summer: The sonic seduction lives on in today's beats
by Randall Roberts, The Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2012

luciana achugar at Abrons Arts Center

I read Gia Kourlas's interview with dance artist luciana achugar (Time Out New York) in which the two discuss the resurging interest in real theaters, as opposed to alternative spaces, as sites for performance. This fits with what I perceive to be achugar's distinctive focus on a sensory opulence that achieves theatricality without being conventional in any sense. The new--and intentionally self-descriptive-- FEELingpleasuresatisfactioncelebrationholyFORM continues her exploration of visceral resonance. She hypnotizes her audience over lengthy stretches in which otherwise bare women--achugar with her dance collaborators Rebecca Brooks, Jennifer Kjos and Melinda Lee--gently dip, bob, twist or sway heads and upper bodies obscured by long, thick hair, sometimes pushing towards and against one another as if sightlessly playing with mirror images.

achugar's imagery suggests a perverse conflation of a Christian penitent's self-punishing hairshirt (but with bothersome hair turned outward), Muslim burqas ironically made of women's hair and, unavoidably--since they are, after all, faceless, nearly nude women rocking nothing but voluminous hair--animated vaginas. An eerie, lulling score performed live by Michael Mahalchick, James Galbraith and Marisol Limon Martinez seeps into your head until the music gradually builds to thrilling, rock-show intensity for FEEL...FORM's final moments.

I think achugar, for the most part, makes the odd environmental stagings and Carrie Wood's manic-depressive lighting design work on her own terms up until that finale when the women--now dressed in jeans, faces visible and eyes smeared by colorful makeup--form a tight circle of heightened, ritualistic action. That finale, though, has neither the strangeness nor the excess nor the pull of the earlier material. As an ending, it seems more functional than meaningful, leading less to "celebration of experience" and "consummation of experience" than, simply, the end of the hour-long trip.

luciana achugar concludes her run at Abrons Arts Center--a co-presentation with The Chocolate Factory--with a performance tonight and Saturday, both at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Big Dance Theater, as always

The week is finally winding down with some glorious weather. But, hey, I still think you should spend at least some of it in a theater!

If you can manage to get a ticket, do check out Big Dance Theater's Comme Toujours Here I Stand--now at New York Live Arts--a 2009 work sourced in filmmaker Αgחès Varda's Çléο de 5 à 7 (1961). With its cheeky narrative fragmentation and visual splintering, Comme Toujours deals less with how things go in life than how they go in our heads when the world presses forward while we stress out and grasp at anything that could make momentary sense or soothe or distract. BDT founding member Molly Hickok is stellar as the central character who--like Varda's beautiful, vapid Parisian pop star, set adrift by a scary Tarot reading and impending medical test results--becomes a magnetic hub for phenomena that continuously remind us that we're watching a movie, an entertainment, something artificial that we construct and control and invest with a power not necessarily intrinsic to it.

Directed and choreographed by Annie-B Parson, co-directed by Paul Lazar. With Hickok, the cast includes Tymberly Canale, Chris Giarmo, Jeff Larson, Aaron Mattocks, Ryutaro Mishima, Aaron Rosenblum and Kourtney Rutherford.

Now through Saturday at 7:30pm. For more information and ticketing, click here.

And take in a screening of Varda's Çléο de 5 à 7 at NYLA on Saturday, May 19 at 3pm. Details here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Carlos Fuentes, 83 [UPDATED]

Carlos Fuentes, Mexican Writer, Dies at 83
by The Associated Press, May 15, 2012

Carlos Fuentes, Mexican Man of Letter, Dies at 83
by Anthony DePalma, The New York Times, May 15, 2012

Yoshiko Chuma's "Love Story, Palestine"

To read my Dance Magazine review of Yoshiko Chuma's Love Story, Palestine--running now at the La MaMa Moves! festival--click here.

Alonzo King LINES Ballet at The Joyce Theater

Click here to read my Dance Magazine review of Alonzo King LINES Ballet at The Joyce Theater.

Writers on the march in Moscow

Russian Writers Demonstrate the Might of a March
by Ellen Barry, The New York Times, May 13, 2012

Dance Heginbotham at BAC

I like Dance Heginbotham very much--meaning that I respect John Heginbotham's new ensemble, take strong interest in how this promising troupe will grow, and tip my hat to the enormous effort and skill the dancers showed last night at Baryshnikov Arts Center. But that program--featuring the New York premiere of Closing Bell and the world premiere of Twin--simply wore me out!

In a way, these two works belong together because of similarities in movement texture. But the mechanistic, blistering nature of that texture (and, often, the music driving it) is tough to hang out with and absorb over time. Watching it feels like a solid hour of walking against gale-force wind. As my introduction to Heginbotham as choreographer, it leaves me hoping that the guy has other tricks up those roomy, rather bizarre mental sleeves of his.

Closing Bell's playful people, rising from discrete circles--I saw them as pods--of light, go through exacting, if cartoonish, paces with robotic intensity. The unsparing music (excerpts from Tyondai Braxton's Central Market) pumps them up, and Heginbotham--a Mark Morris alumnus among other things--is nothing if not musical to a sly and fastidious degree and fascinated by the precise mathematics of design. It's the folk dance of the pod people!

Fair enough, but I can watch dancers being deployed like an army of kooky wind-up toys only so much before my nerves start going on me. Twin, which shares some of that relentless energy, redeems itself with its gathering atmosphere of horror laced with absurdity. Heginbotham does both subtle, spooky menace and absurdity very well--yes, those "bizarre mental sleeves" of his--and his dancers get a chance to show off effective drama in interactions that allude to cinematic scenarios without being obvious. John Eirich--the only guy not wearing Maile Okamura's Op Art costumes, because he's wearing a diaphanous skirt instead--is a wonderful iconic figure of mystery and resonance. And Lindsey Jones has just the right whippet look and directness to be both exhilarating and slightly chilling to watch.

Dance Heginbotham--which also includes Allysen Hooks, BJ Randolph, Evan Teitelbaum and Kristen Foote--concludes its run with an 8pm performance tonight. Click here for information and tickets.

Baryshnikov Arts Center
Jerome Robbins Theater
450 West 37th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Music break: Sheeler on "The New Back Alley"

www.reverbnation.com/jackiesheeler

Rashaun Mitchell brings "NOX" to Danspace Project

Anne Carson

Rashaun Mitchell

When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get. -- Anne Carson

Rashaun Mitchell, by and large, is a quiet presence in NOX, his lovely, site-adjustable collaboration with poet Anne Carson, running now at Danspace Project, based on a book Carson wrote about the elusive brother she lost twice--the second time to death. My strongest memories of Mitchell find him striding the perimeter of the performance space, his entire body an icon of clarity and cool, or resting on the floor with his legs tucked around like a cat's tail or standing at a distance with a calm gaze fixed on Silas Riener.

Reiner carries the oddness, the frenzy, the passion of NOX--hurtling from one doorway to another, writhing and melting around columns, crawling down steps on his elbows and creating arresting sculpture out of his human body.

This night veers from cool to electric, from absence to presence, from safety to emergency, always with the possibility that these things will intermingle. Everything is painted in light and shadows (breathtaking painterly effects by Davison Scandrett), especially the doors and stained-glass windows of St. Mark's Church's balcony. Scandrett's lighting can imitate time's subtle passage, build anticipation of an arrive, make the immaterial visible and exalted. It is an extraordinary gift to these beautiful master dancers and exquisite poet.

With live performances by Carson (text), Benjamin Miller (music) and Robert Currie.

Rashaun Mitchell's Nox at Danspace Project now through Saturday, 8pm. Seating is limited, specially arranged for this production and, as you might expect, tickets are pfffttt! gone! Try the waiting list, though. For information, click here.

Danspace Project
East 10th Street at Second Avenue, Manhattan
(directions)

Eisa Davis and Nora Chipaumire among Alpert winners

Dancer-choreographer Nora Chipaumire (c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

 

How exciting to see two of my favorite New York artists--Nora Chipaumire (choreography) and multi-talented Eisa Davis (theater) among the winners of this year's Alpert Award in the Arts.

The Alpert Award in the Arts is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 given annually to five risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre and the visual arts.

The prize was initiated and funded by the Herb Alpert Foundation and has been administered by California Institute of the Arts since 1994. The Alpert Award honors and supports artists respected for their creativity, ingenuity, and bodies of work, at a moment in their lives when they are poised to propel their art in new and unpredictable directions. The Alpert recognizes experimenters who are making something that matters within and beyond their field.

Read more about the Alpert Award.

Read about and hear from the 2012 winners:

Nora Chipaumire

Kevin Everson (film)

Myra Melford (music)

Eisa Davis

Michael Smith (visual arts)

Three children's books on ballet

‘Ballerina Swan,’ ‘Bea at Ballet’ and ‘Invitation to Ballet
by Jennifer B. McDonald, The New York Times, May 9, 2012

Spring Gaga

Saar Harari 

of LeeSaar The Company 

announces

Gaga Classes in New York

Starting on May 12, we will have new Gaga/people and Gaga/dancers classes at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn:

Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE) (Brooklyn):Gaga/people (starting 5/12). Saturdays, 11am-Noon – taught by Lee Sher

Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE) (Brooklyn) – Gaga/dancers (starting 5/12). Tuesdays, 8pm-9:15pm – taught by Jye-Hwei Lin; Thursdays, 3pm-4:15pm – taught by Candice Schnurr; Sundays, 12:30pm-1:45pm – taught by Hsin-Yi Hsiang

Mark Morris Dance Center (Brooklyn) – Gaga/people (ongoing). Wednesdays, 8pm-9pm

Classes at Mark Morris in May will be taught by Navarra Novy-Williams and Lee Sher.

The Gaga Summer intensive will be led by Adi Salant, Associate Artistic Director of the Bat Sheva Dance Company. August 18-24, 10am-5pm, in our studio in Park Slope.

For registration for the Summer Intensive, click here.

What's moving downtown, moving the Bronx

Look sharp!

There's dance moving all over town... 

La MaMa Moves Dance Festival

Chamber Works 1--featuring Dark Matter by Juliette Mapp; present.tense (progressive) by Maura Donohue; and So be it--not a piece--miniatures for five by Vicky Shick. May 11-13. La MaMa’s The Club, 74A East 4th Street, 2nd Floor.[information and tickets]

Beauty--Jane Comfort and Company. "...a gimlet-eyed look at the extremes women go to achieve impossible beauty." May 17-20, 7:30pm La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor. [information and tickets]

La MaMa
[map/directions]

Dancing While Black: Voices from the Bush
a presentation of BAAD!'s 2012 Boogie Down Dance Series

Thursday, May 17, 8pm

Featuring current and former dancers from Urban Bush Women--Maria Bauman, LoveForte (Marjani Forte and Nia Love), Paloma McGregor and Samantha Speis--who present their own brazen dance works as part of Dancing While Black, "an artist-led project/initiative that explores many questions including what does it mean to be a Black artist today in order to shift the power of contextualizing work and articulating aesthetic values into the hands, and bodies, of black dancers themselves."

For more information on this and all Boogie Down festival events and to purchase tickets, click here or call 718-842-5223.

BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance
841 Barretto Street, 2nd Floor, Bronx
(map/directions)

Music break with Hazmat Modine

Official music video for the song "Mockingbird" from the album Cicada by Hazmat Modine
Film made by Mattias Gordon

HAZMAT MODINE
with special guest JIM CAMPILONGO
Saturday, May 12th, 7pm-10pm

@TERRA BLUES
149 Bleecker Street, NYC  212-777-7776

Maurice Sendak, 83

Maurice Sendak, Children’s Author, Dies at 83
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, May 8, 2012

May is tapping out all over!

La MaMa e.t.c presents

Tap Gallery: Space, Time, Tempo

a tap salon curated by 

Laraine Goodman and Allison Plamondon

Wednesday, May 23

7:30-10:30pm

New York City's first Tap Gallery Salon presenting works and riffs on space, time and tempo. Variations on vaudeville, jazz tap, funk and more.

Tap dancers: Baakari Wilder, Hank Smith, Chikako Iwahori, Eric Robertson, Megan Haungs, Toes Tiranoff and more. Indian/Contemporary dancer Noah Damer. Robert Galinsky and Susan Justice, Mary Jo Lombardo, Susan Sherman and Maggie Craig

Musicians: Akayko Shirasaki, Debbie Kennedy, Bernice "Boom Boom" Brooks, Heather Paauwe, Rachelle Garniez, David Conrad

La MaMa La Galleria
6 East 1st Street (between Second Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan

F train to Second Avenue or Broadway-Lafayette
N or R Broadway/Astor Pl
6 train Astor Place

Suggested donation: $15

For information and reservations, email: lamamatapgallery@gmail.com

Laraine Goodman: 646-263-7926

*****

And don't miss American Tap Dance Foundation's numerous 25th Anniversary youth program events and adult student showcase (May through June) leading up to this year's Tap City festivities in July. Information here.

For information on Writing on Tap (Saturday, June 23)--a special presentation of Collective for Dance Writing and New Media co-sponsored with American Tap Dance Foundation--click here. RSVP early!

Zuštiak's "Strange Cargo"

Sitting in the darkened, looming Synod House--a side building of the world's largest cathedral, St. John the Divine, rarely opened to the public--you're left with the bluish glow from narrow, distant stained-glass windows. The blue emits a vague comfort, but the lead strips crossing, connecting, restraining the blue snatches that meager comfort away. You shrink back, feeling small, a bit threatened. A man creeps across the floor on his knees, passes a table, pivots, hesitates, gingerly touches the heel of one hand to the floor before skittering around. Other people creep in, one by one, building into a quintet of loners who make actions and sounds of motorized, robotic toys or figures from violent video games. Don't look for the remote control; there is none--and no controller--in sight. There is no God. Only the body and the impossibility of two or more bodies occupying the same space at the same time. And, as we will see, the inevitability of trouble.

Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo concludes Zuštiak's Painted Bird Trilogy with Strange Cargo--a interdisciplinary production presented by the currently, and interestingly, nomadic Performance Space 122. (The entire trilogy will play out, in September, at Ohio's Wexner Center for the Arts.) Those who have followed this journey, from La MaMa (Bastard, 2010) to Baryshnikov Arts Center (Amidst, 2011) to this ecclesiastical assembly hall, might agree with me that what unfolds here now bumps the dark intensity up several notches and calls up the most grueling and risk-taking performances from its extraordinary crew. At one point, sweat pours down dancer Jeremy Xido's face, but Zuštiak sweats not only body but mind and soul, too.

Aside from Xido and his quietly-menaced prey Luke Murphy, Strange Cargo boasts astonishing work from Lindsey Dietz-Marchant (the most memorable presence in Amidst), Giulia Carotenuto and Denisa Musilova. The rest of Zuštiak's team of collaborators are also tight, and they once again include Joe Levasseur (innovative lighting techniques) and Christian Frederickson and Ryan Rumery (superb original music, performed live). You must see this one.

Strange Cargo continues at Synod House through May 13: Thursday and Sunday at 8pm, Friday and Saturday at 8pm and 9:30pm. Space is limited, and there will be no late seating. For program and ticket information, click here.

Synod House
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue at West 110th Street, Manhattan
(map and directions)

Festival to screen Barredo's "The Table"

Here's a note from the delightful Ana Barredo, filmmaker:

Remember me? I made the documentary The Table which you wrote a wonderful blog about a few months ago. Anyway, our doc will be screening in NY again on May 16th. Would you mind spreading the word on this upcoming screening? I'd really appreciate it! Thanks in advance! 

You got it, Ana!

Wednesday, May 16, 7pm

Admission: $10 

United Film Festival New York
Cobble Hill Cinemas
265 Court Street, Brooklyn

To read my original post on The Table, click here.

Limon troupe: free classes for all!

Members of the Limón Dance Company will return to Bryant Park for free Saturday morning classes, with live musical accompaniment, for movers of all ages.  

Formal technique is not stressed--rather an exhilarating freeform style of movement that requires only comfortable clothes and a love of dance.

Saturdays, 10-11am, May 19 through September

Bryant Park
42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas, Manhattan

Absolutely free!

Information at Limón Dance Company or 212-777-3353

Love tap dance? Join CDWNM & ATDF on 6/23

Love tap dance?

Hold this date:
Saturday, June 23 (Noon to 4pm)

Here’s your chance to hear more about the international tap dance phenomenon directly from its top professionals and experts!

Collective for Dance Writing and New Media and American Tap Dance Foundation invite you to Writing on Tap: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Tap But Were Afraid to Ask on Saturday, June 23, Noon to 4pm.

Hosted by Tony Waag’s ATDF at New York’s American Tap Dance Center, Writing on Tap will offer a provocative, interactive forum featuring talks by Constance Valis Hill, dancer and author of the essential and lively tap history, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History, and the multitalented Brenda Bufalino, internationally acclaimed for her singular style and innovation in dance and choreography, among other special guests to be named later. Fans, performers and dance writers are all warmly welcome to this afternoon of informative talks and small group discussions on issues in tap.

American Tap Dance Center
154 Christopher Street, #2B, Manhattan
(between Greenwich and Washington Streets)

Admission: $10 (cash at door). Space is limited. Reservations are required. Please RSVP to collectiveDWNM@gmail.com.

For more information, download a copy of our Writing on Tap press release here.

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Yara in lands of dreamy dreams

L-R: Andrew Colteaux, Ainura Kachkynbek kyzy, Christopher Ignacio and Kat Yew     
(Photo: Margaret Morton)

Virlana Tkacz's Yara Arts Group, a longtime, beloved resident troupe at La MaMa, already serves as a visible, tangible "collective unconscious" for us, a gossamer repository of sound, imagery and story from the far reaches of human culture. The company's new piece, Dream Bridge--a multidisciplinary and polyglot collaboration with artists from Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan--offers sensory pleasures as might be expected from a reimagining of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream as well as some jarring elements. In other words, it is the stuff that dreams are made on.

The piece basically visualizes two works by celebrated Ukrainian poet Oleh Lysheha. It's a bit awkward that, as part of the program, the audience must be instructed to take time to read the translated poems right before the piece starts, while Kyrgyz musician Nurbek Serkebaev plucks spare notes from a stringed instrument. I happened to finished reading just in time but still felt that I had not completely absorbed and processed the poetry. Worse still, I was still in the grip of jet lag--which feels like, at a certain hour, an invisible hand reaches out and gives my dimmer switch a decisive downward turn--and felt myself drifting in and out of awareness as the gentle-toned, lulling Dream Bridge and its fairytale-like plot moved swiftly along. I was lost, and I feel pretty bad about that. 

I most clearly recall a pristine cluster of drifty, floaty characters, a man (Andrew Colteaux) trying in vain to sleep while curved over a rigid arch and, most impressively, a truly enchanting emergence of shadow puppets which I won't spoil by describing. I wanted more time with those puppets, but the piece was over, and it was time to go out into the jarring streets--East Village on a Thursday night? OMG--where a sudden, completely irrational craving for potato chips led me to the less-soothing sensory overload of St. Mark's Place.

Tkacz's productions have sometimes deeply moved me. While I suspect that Dream Bridge would probably never have as profound an effect on me as, say, Howling--her 2002 piece inspired by ancient shamanic legends about wolves and a Wolf clan from Siberia--her projects are always worth a look. You can catch Dream Bridge now through May 13, Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 PM, Sundays at 2:30 PM. Get more information, ticketing and directions here.

Created by Virlana Tkacz. Kyrgyz traditional music performed live by Nurbek Serkebaev and an electronic score by Kyiv composer Alla Zahaykevych. Performed by Yara actors Andrew Colteaux, Brian Dolphin and Christopher Ignacio plus Kyrgyz actors Kenzhegul Satybaldieva, Ainura Kachynbek kyzy and Ukrainian actor Mykola Shkaraban. Designed by Watoku Ueno.

La MaMa E.T.C. (First Floor Theater)
74 East 4th Street (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

Write now: NYLA seeks Context Noters

New York Live Arts Request for Proposals
2012/13 Context Note Writer | New York Live Arts Blog

Each season New York Live Arts (Live Arts) curates three (3) writers to produce written pieces known as “Context Notes” to accompany each show on the season. Context Notes are published in Live Arts programs and are intended to frame questions, spark discussion, and explore/expand the experience of seeing work on the Live Arts stage.  This year, Live Arts seeks to include new voices and diverse perspectives by issuing an open call for writers.

For further information and application guidelines, continue reading here.

DEADLINE: May 21, 5pm. No late applications will be accepted.

QUESTIONS: Sarah A.O. Rosner, Manager of Engagement at SRosner@newyorklivearts.org

Undebatable: Arts fuel the economy

Arts Fuel the Economy
by Clyde Valentín and Kamilah Forbes, Room for Debate, The New York Times,  May 1, 2012

Newark's got 'America's Got Talent'

'America's Got Talent' Provides Boon to Newark Arts Center
by Holly Hall, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, April 12, 2012

This *dancing* American Life!

Guess who's coming to This American Life on Thursday, May 10? Monica Bill Barnes & Company!

Yeah, that's right: A dance troupe. No, not on the radio. It's a live show from New York's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, screened in select movie theaters, and here are all the details.

I saw this amazing dance performance by Monica Bill Barnes' company, and I thought - that is totally in the style of our radio show. But obviously you can't have dance on the radio. Then I realized, we have to do another cinema event! We've built this lineup of stories mixed with super visual things, including the dancers I saw, so it's going to feel like the radio show but also totally unlike anything we've done before. I really can't wait to see how it turns out.”

-- Ira Glass, Executive Producer and host, This American Life