Newly expanded Queens Museum to reopen November 9

Doubled in size and asserting a strong community-minded mission,
the Queens Museum (formerly Queens Museum of Art)
in Flushing Meadow Corona Park
will open to the public on November 9.
©2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

At the October 30 press preview
QM board chair Alan Suna described the enhanced museum as
"the house of the people for all the people of Queens"--
fully engaged with its multilingual, multicultural populace--
"and the entire city of New York."
©2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

In the light-filled atrium
©2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

©2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Queens Museum Executive Director Tom Finkelpearl
with outgoing Queens Borough President Helen Marshall
who recalled going skating with her friends
at the ice rink that is now the museum's new space.
©2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

City Council members Julissa Ferreras (above)
and Jimmy Van Bramer (below),
chair of the council's Cultural Committee,
joined a host of city officials,
arts professionals and 85 Queens schoolchildren
for this first look at the revamped museum.
©2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Details (above and below) from "Peter Schumann: The Shatterer,"
one of several exhibitions opening to the public next month.
Schumann is the founder and director of the experimental,
politically progressive Bread and Puppet Theater.
Opening Reception: Monday, November 11, 7-9pm
©2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Mayor Michael Bloomberg prepares to cut the ribbon.
In his earlier remarks, the mayor announced the
Queens Public Library's plans to open a branch
at the museum in 2015.
©2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Visit the Queens Museum's new Web site here.

Visitor information including map and directions

Related article:

King of Queens: Tom Finkelpearl’s Game-Changing Museum Gets Bigger

by Zoë Lescaze, Gallerist, Observer.com, October 29, 2013

Two Latino theaters join forces

Two Latino Theaters in New York to Merge

by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, October 30, 2013

Maura Donohue and Adam Cuthbért at Roulette

This is Maura Donohue.
Don't mess with her: She makes dances.
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Donohue and her inmixedcompany, with composer Adam Cuthbért,
presented a new work--zero...sixty--at Roulette last night.
If you're reading that title and thinking "acceleration," you're right.
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Roulette has a really nice blond wood floor
that Donohue says she loved at first sight.
You can tell by the way she has her dancers root themselves into it.
They dig in deep, plant themselves and then can do all kinds of things 
with their spines and limbs for balance and offbeat elegance.
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Donohue's sprites at play:
Timothy Edwards, center,
with Peggy Cheng at left; Reyes at right
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

They are about claiming every millimeter of space.
Roulette is theirs!
They draw power from their grounding 
and move freely within Cuthbért's thicket of music.
The sonic and physical energies are tremendous.
 Above: Donohue 
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Gilberto Reyes (left) 
with David Capps in background
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The audience gets to play along, too,
rolling in a continuous circle
that contains and generates energy for
Reyes and Cheng (in center).
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Edwards in center
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

inmixedcompany in action 
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

zero...sixty

dancing by Maura Donohue, David Capps, Peggy Cheng, Timothy Edwards and Gilbert Reyes

music composed by Adam Cuthbért and played live by Cuthbért, (trumpet/laptop), David Broome (piano) and Joe Tucker (percussion
)

video by David Gonville/Nami Studios

For programs and upcoming events at Roulette, click here.

NYC organizations launch Helix Queer Performance Network

The Helix Queer Performance Network is a collaboration between La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics, seeking to nurture emerging queer performers, unite diverse queer communities, and celebrate the legacy and lineage of queer performance in New York City.

Through educational initiatives, innovative stage productions and challenging public conversations that prioritize diversity across age, race, class and gender, Helix aims to foster an inter-generational, multi-racial, multi-gender performance community where artists can document a broad spectrum of queer experience in the context of a rich artistic history.

Each of Helix's three partner institutions hosts an HQPN flagship program, directed by performance artist Dan Fishback. With La MaMa, we present La MaMa's SQUIRTS, a series that showcases emerging performers, with guest appearances by legends of the queer performance world. With BAX, we run NEEDING IT: Performance & Queer Community, an eight-week workshop, in which students create their own original pieces while studying the history of queer performance in NYC. And with the Hemispheric Institute, we curate an ongoing series of Long Table discussions using Lois Weaver's template of informal conversation to generate dynamic new ideas to improve our communities, and to answer the perennial question, "What does queer performance want?"

For more information, visit helixqpn.tumblr.com.

Arthur C. Danto, 89

Arthur C. Danto, a Philosopher of Art, Is Dead at 89
by Ken Johnson, The New York Times, October 27, 2013

Lou Reed, 71 [UPDATE]

Lou Reed, Velvet Underground Leader and Rock Pioneer, Dead at 71
by Jon Dolan, Rolling Stone, October 27, 2013

LOU REED, 1942-2013
Outsider Whose Dark, Lyrical Vision Helped Shape Rock ’n’ Roll

by Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, October 27, 2013
 

The Apollo celebrates James Brown in dance: my review for TDE

The amazing Derick K. Grant
in Live by Otis Sallid
(photo by Shahar Azrari)

I reviewed the just-closed James Brown: Get on The Good Foot, A Celebration in Dance show at The Apollo Theater for The Dance Enthusiast, and you can find my review by clicking here.

Antonia Baehr: It is to laugh!

Antonia Baehr
(photo by Marc Domage)

Laughter isn't funny business. Certainly not in the hands--in the mouth?--of German choreographer Antonia Baehr who, last evening, took an audience on a one-hour, sometimes hair-raising journey along the vertiginous twists and turns of the act of laughing. Her solo show, Laugh, was presented at Abrons Arts Center's Experimental Theater as part of the multi-venued Queer New York International Arts Festival.

Structured like a concert of classical music pieces performed by a virtuoso, Laugh demonstrates laughter as multifaceted sound issuing as if from an assemblage of wind, string and percussion instruments. Elegantly dressed in men's clothes and wearing her hair slicked away from genial features, Baehr performs much of Laugh while sitting at a music stand and gazing at scores contributed by a selection of her collaborators.

Her laugh phrases--punctuated by dropping her facial muscles into a flat, neutral visage--come in snorts, whinnies, bubbles, sighs, trills, whoops, explosive shrieks and ever more fascinating manifestations, each according to the particular nature of each score. One score starts off in a minimalist vein: a spare, repeating triplet Ha!...Ha!...Ha!, illustrated by Baehr raising one index finger to three points of an imaginary triangle in the air. After a time, we notice that the once-immaculate sound is becoming corrupted and fuzzy and Baehr seems to be taking sly pleasure in it. In another segment of Laugh, Baehr stands behind a large magnifying glass that enlarges and distorts her face and terrorizes us with laughter most monstrous.

Zvonimir Dobrović, who created the Queer New York International Arts Festival with his late husband André von Ah, sees the queerness of his festival as transcending gender and sexuality and colliding with the "new, irreverent, scary, lovely (and many more adjectives)" out there in a world filled with all manner of provocative things for us to discover. For her part, Baehr does this well by drawing us deep into one human thing--one thing we give little thought to or, indeed, merely laugh off--and mining it for all its music and color and strangeness.

The 2013 Queer New York International Arts Festival runs through November 3 at various locations. For complete information and ticketing, click here.

For information on QNYIA Festival's panel discussions (Creating Queer/Curating Queer) this afternoon (2:30-5:45) at the New School, click here. Admission is free.

******

QUESTION:

Did the expression "It is to laugh!" really originate with Daffy Duck in a Bugs Bunny cartoon? If you know of earlier usages of this retort, drop a comment below!

Pauline N’Gouala paints portraits of Mandela, Fanon, Basquiat

Black Lesbian French artist paints Mandela

posted on inkanyiso, October 25, 2013

Deborah Turbeville, 81

Deborah Turbeville, Fashion Photographer, Dies at 81

by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, October 25, 2013

Juan Villoro: lessons from Mexican soccer

Mexican Writer Mines the Soccer Field for Metaphors

by Randal C. Archibold, The New York Times, October 25, 2013

Rich man, poor artist: Nobelist Stiglitz on income inequality and the arts

The Public Theater's PUBLIC FORUM

presents

JOSEPH STIGLITZ ON THE RICH AND POOR

Monday, December 9 at 7pm

Joe's Pub at The Public

Featuring Nobel Prize-winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz on income inequality and what the artistic community can do about it

Followed by a conversation between Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC, Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, and Public Works Director Lear deBessonet

The new Public Forum Solo series is designed to bring great artists and theater audiences into contact with America’s most vital thinkers. In this event, Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University gives a talk about the most pressing issue of our time, and some of New York’s most socially engaged artists respond to his ideas about what the creative community can do to help.

Tickets for this event go on sale on October 31. For tickets and information about other current Public Forum events, click here.

Joe's Pub at The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street (just below Astor Place), Manhattan
(map/directions)

********

PUBLIC FORUM presents the theater of ideas. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, this series of conversations and performances features leading voices in politics, media, and the arts. Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway, Cynthia Nixon, Sam Waterston, and former NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman have hosted its programs, which have featured the insights of Kurt Andersen, David Brooks, David Byrne, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Tony Kushner, Rachel Maddow, Wynton Marsalis, Francine Prose, Salman Rushdie, David Simon, Anna Deavere Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the culture writers of New York Magazine, and young veterans of the war in Afghanistan - plus performances by Christine Baranski, Matt Damon, Holly Hunter, Wendell Pierce, and Vanessa Redgrave, among others. Current Forum programs include Public Forum Drama Club, Public Forum Duets, Public Forum Solos, and the Public Forum Podcast.

WOW! Hey! It's Zimmerman & de Perrot at BAM!

Now that I have seen Zimmermann & de Perrot--and, by that, I mean these two Swiss guys, their whole award-winning team and their production of Hans was Heiri at the BAM Harvey Theater--I never want to not see them.

Look at these guys!

Fellow on the right is Dimitri de Perrot, a composer and DJ. From what I could tell, as the opening night audience assembled, he stealth-recorded our discordant chatter, amplified it to a grating roar, sampled it and mixed it with electronic melodies to play as an overture to the evening. He had us from gggggrrrr!!!

Fellow on the left is Martin Zimmermann, the troupe's choreographer. Why I love him is because his performing reminded me of my tuxedo cat (who has been ailing), from his character's sly, wily personality and lithe acrobatics to his black, open-toed footwear with the paw-like white socks showing. I don't know if he intended to look and behave like a tuxedo cat, but he did.

"We call it theater because we haven’t found a better word," the partners write in their wonderful manifesto, "Our Theater."* This phenomenon combines theater, dance, circus and music, blending it all to a rich consistency presented with panache. They came to my attention when I became interested in learning more about contemporary circus--a performance genre that is all about dissolving boundaries between artistic disciplines and blowing minds.

The troupe is so good--particularly in their acrobatic and contortion skills, but also in the freedom with which they establish their individual, endearing characters and present scenarios that make sense in their fantastical senselessness because they have disarmed us.

Scenes from Hans was Heiri
top, left: Tarek Halaby
top, right: Mélissa von Vépy
with Martin Zimmermann
(photos by Mario del Curto/Strates)

In the central showpiece of Hans was Heiri, the cast occupies a quartet of room-like boxes that fit together, open side facing us. This structure frequently tilts and turns at varying speeds, challenging its human cargo. You know how you discover just how much nerve and muscular specificity it takes to merely walk from one side of a room to the other if you slooooooowww down every movement? Imagine the extraordinary fluidity and agility these performers must have, the precise adjustments they must make when they're sloshing around inside this contraption or poetically dangling from it or acting like they're just sitting around at a table as the box bucks upward or moving through doors in the walls as if they're right at home. Throw in a terrifying power yoga class with the cast stuffed into one of the "rooms" by an out-of-control instructor who has worked with Miguel Gutierrez (that would be American ex-pat Tarek Halaby), and you get a sense of why the creative spunk of this troupe is completely irresistible.

With performances by Dimitri de Perrot, Martin Zimmermann, Tarek Halaby, Dimitri Jourde, Gaël Santisteva, Mélissa von Vépy, Methinee Wongtrakoon

Hans was Heiri continues at BAM Harvey Theater through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. Click here for more information and ticketing.

BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

******

*OUR THEATER

We build our pieces from little things, everyday things, things that happen when a person feels unobserved—we hunt them out and gather them together. And that’s where we go to discover characters, spaces, sounds—a small gasp, a moment of distractedness, a constriction of the heart.

For our pieces we use everything that comes our way, and let it work its way through the meat grinder.

We call it theater because we haven’t found a better word.

We like distortion, we turn everything upside down.

We seek the possible in the impossible.

We risk and we fail.

We like little things. For us, objects are living beings.

We are little wannabe greats who are suddenly in over our heads.

We fool around at the edge of the abyss.

We laugh our heads off and are deadly serious.

We ride roughshod over physical pain.

We are extremely diligent and quite painstaking.

We let it rip.

Sweat and tears, good luck and bad.

Dimitri de Perrot and Martin Zimmermann 
from program notes for BAM Next Wave Festival production of Hans was Heiri

Emily Dickinson goes online today. Really!

Enigmatic Dickinson Revealed Online
by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, October 22, 2013

New Bronx digs for BAAD!

Dance artist Arthur Aviles, artistic director of BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance) sent this update on the the organization's move from its longtime Hunts Point location to a new home at Westchester Square.

Charles Rice-Gonzalez and Arthur Aviles
in front of their new arts building
on the grounds of St. Peter's Episcopal Church
(photo courtesy of Arthur Aviles)

BAAD! has been through a beautiful storm this summer.

First, I want to share that we have officially moved from our beloved Hunts Point. Through all the challenges this has posed for our organization, one of the shining silver linings has been the people and organizations who have stepped up, and in, to help us.

Since, Taconic/Denham, Wolf our current landlord, let us know about a year ago that they wouldn't be giving us a long term lease, and would only consider a one year extension at twice the rate of our current lease, we began our quest to find a new home. We have been humbled and uplifted by the support that has come our way.

After Taconic/Denham, Wolf created the conditions that forced us to leave, the Banknote. Denham, Wolf showed us a space and led us to believe that we'd be let out of our lease, we entered into a lease negotiation with St. Peter's Episcopal Church. As I sought help to raise money for a move that was not in my budget, St. Peter's offered a month of free rent and I asked Taconic for help with a free month or two. Instead, Taconic co-CEO, Charles Bendit, stated that since two years were on the lease, we needed to pay them to let us out. After being clear on our financial position he then brought that down to one year. (There is also precedence of Taconic/Denham Wolf paying a tenant to leave and finding them a space with Bronxworks led by Carolyn McLaughlin at that time, but for reasons I'm sure they have, they didn't extend that to Charles and me.)

Although being a small ($300,000) arts organization we would have preferred to be let out of our lease and paying double rent will be crippling to us (and they have a full understanding of that), they have the law on their side, and since we want to abide by the law, they have agreed to give us a lease termination with the conditions of paying them a maximum of 6 months rent, on a month by month basis, unless they find a tenant for our space before the six months are up.

There are many aspects to our story, including the classic David and Goliath one, with BAAD! being a small budget arts organization and essentially grappling with the multi-billion dollar Taconic Titans, as the media has called them, and although moving from Hunts Point and leaving the space we've built over 14 years has been difficult, to say the least, we decided to be as strategic as possible to keep providing a space to serve our artists and audiences.

We will be located at 2474 Westchester Avenue in Westchester Square in a gothic revivalist building on the grounds of St. Peter's Episcopal Church. It's a fully equipped theater.

As you know in the Bronx, several other groups have lost their spaces including the Rebel Diaz Art Collective and Casa Atabex, it's one of the ways progress in the borough is manifesting itself.

Charles and I know we can call on the Bronx Dance coalition community for help.  So we count you among our champions here in the Bronx. We have also gotten great support from other community members and audience who have said where you go, we will follow.

So, off we go to Westchester Square, to build a new temple for dance and the arts, and to expand our audience and make new inroads, and help make Westchester Square a cultural district (along with BCA and it's new building).  Although, we didn't wake up one day and decide to move, finding a wonderful new place to land has been exciting.

Charles and I hope you can visit our new home soon.  We are having an open house on Sunday, October 27 from 1pm to 6pm and will kick off our BlakTina Performance series on Saturday, November 2 at 8pm with a dance tribute to Whitney Houston called Love Will Save the Day.

We will have a few more events to invite folks into the new space and will keep you posted.

With respect, admiration and deep appreciation,
Arthur

Meet "Flo," New York City street photographer

Op-Docs: "Flo"
by Riley Hooper, The New York Times, October 21, 2013

Theater for a New Audience joins downtown Brooklyn arts district

A Vagabond Troupe Gets Its First Home
Theater for a New Audience Opens New Quarters in Brooklyn

by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, October 21, 2013

Get a sneak peek at new work by Souleymane Badolo

Souleymane Badolo
(photo by Vaughn Brown)

Bessie Award-winning dancer-choreographer Souleymane Badolo will hold an Open Studio/Work-in-Process showing of his upcoming dance work, BENON, a new piece inspired by the Burkinabé tradition of dancing to celebrate the harvest. In BENON, which roughly translates to "harvest," Badolo explores the essential nature of food, sharing, and giving thanks. This new work premieres at Danspace Project, February 13–15, 2014.

Where: Building 110: LMCC's Arts Center at Governors Island

When: Monday, November 4, (2pm–4pm)

Free and open to the public, RSVP required

Info: www.lmcc.net/calendar/event/open_studios_-_souleymane_badolo/

RSVP: http://www.tfaforms.com/303316

Souleymane “Solo” Badolo is a choreographer and dancer originating from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In 1993, Badolo founded the Burkina Faso-based troupe, Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dances with western contemporary dance. He has choreographed for Company Phoénix de Yaoundé (Cameroon), Cie Gabero de Niamey Company (Nigeria), and The National Ballet of Burkina Faso, among others. Souleymane developed a dance program at The Center of Dance, Music and Theatre in Rome that focused on the fusion of theatre and dance in contemporary performance and participated in a trans-African program initiative that set up creative collaborations for dancers from multiple African countries. He and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the widely-screened documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa which documents the continent’s emergent experimental dance scene.

Gloria Lynne, 83

Gloria Lynne, singer of ‘I Wish You Love,’ dies at 83

by Lilly Workneh, The Grio, October 20, 2013

Waiting at BAM: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's "En Atendant"

So, yesterday afternoon, this malcontented woman in the audience--loud enough for people on at least one side of BAM's Gilman Opera House to overhear--leaned over to her date and said, "It doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense." And as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's often unusually silent and exposed En Atendant continued for ninety-plus minutes, the critic-at-large found any number of thoughts to share with us all, culminating with "It's over, I hope!" as gloomy darkness closed in on the final dancer.

Michael Schmid opens a performance of En Atendant

The rest of us, far better behaved, had waited patiently through what seemed to be at least five--possibly as much as ten--minutes of dry, flat sound issuing from Michael Schmid's flute as as he stood alone at the lit edge of an otherwise bare, darkened stage at the opening of En Atendant. The houselights, still up, united audience with one another and with the flutist and--at least for those of us who chose to listen--made us collaborators in the creation of a disquieting place in the mind, a void into which Schmid poured raspy breath, a foreshadow of death.

The bleak, intense 2010 ensemble, En Atendant ("While waiting, I must suffer grievous pain/and languishing live; such is my fate, for I cannot reach the fountain....") is one of two works, premiered at Festival d'Avignon, that the Belgian troupe Rosas has brought to New York for this fall's BAM Next Wave Festival. The other, Cesena (2011), which I will not get a chance to see, represents the flip side--the coming of dawn's light. De Keersmaeker steeped both pieces in the atmosphere of western Europe's 14th century--a time of plague and massacre--while highlighting the exquisite polyphonic music also characteristic of that violent age. The ensemble Cour et Coeur, featuring the sublime vocalist Annelies Van Gramberen, performs live as part of the stage scene.

Above and below: Dancers of Rosas perform En Atendant
at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Gilman Opera House
(photos courtesy of BAM)

In En Atendant, De Keersmaeker resists easy theatricality and obvious narrative while going for the primal essence of drama. You know that when any dancer touches another, a relationship is forged there and registered in your mind, although you might not clearly identify the nature of it. It lives. It resonates. Each of these brilliant dancers transmits a specific and memorable human sense of himself or herself. There is nothing cookie-cutter about these presences--from the severity of Chrysa Parkinson to the frenetic, bull-like thrashings of Boštjan Antončič. De Keersmaeker makes sure of that, just as she makes vivid movement that genuinely breathes like music even when--as in long, long, long stretches of this dance--there's no music to be heard.

Danced by Boštjan Antončič, Carlos Garbin, Cynthia Loemij, Mark Lorimer, Mikael Marklund, Chrysa Parkinson, Sandy Williams and Sue-Yeon Youn

Music performed by Michael Schmid, Bart Coen, Thomas Baeté and Annelies Van Gramberen

En Atendant will be repeated today at 2pm. Cesena will be performed this evening at 7:30pm, concluding Rosas' BAM season. For information on Cesena, click here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Loretta Abbott on Clark Center legacy and Black artists in dance

Clark Center NYC

and

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
 present

Before 5: Loretta Abbott

Wednesday, December 4

(2pm to 3:30pm)

Join Loretta Abbott, distinguished dancer and choreographer, for an afternoon Q&A on her enduring career in theater, her connections to Clark Center for the Performing Arts, and the legacy of Black performers and dance companies. Abbott will be in conversation with Clark Center alumni, Sheila Rohan and Jill Williams. Materials from the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will be displayed.

Abbott, an accomplished dancer, actress, singer and choreographer was an early member of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, performed on Broadway, in film and television, and in concert in partnership with Al Perryman and her own solo program, Woman of Color.

This event is the initial presentation of Clark Center NYC as part of its mission to preserve the history and legacy of the Clark Center for the Performing Arts, a distinguished arts organization in New York City from 1959-1989.

Admission: Free with required RSVP at Eventbrite

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Blvd, Manhattan

(map/directions)

Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton conclude their Dia:Chelsea season

At Dia:Chelsea, Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton unfold a lovely-mysterious environment right before your eyes in Night Stand, a 2004 duet first shown in the US on October 10. Mottled light pools in a spiral in the middle of the space. Two panels, erected and braced by the hidden dancers, host a spray of lights in the pattern of roe or tear-shaped bubbles that spill over their surface. These initial images slow the viewer's eye and breath. What transpires afterwards pulls us into a state both playful and prayerful with a mixture of liberating whimsy and empowering discipline. Both of these master artists of contact improvisation, especially the pixie-ish Nelson in her firetruck red socks and black watch cap, move with a consistent, exacting control of effort and an exquisite sense of shape. It is pleasing, and instructive, to witness the fragmented games they share on their playground.

With set and sound compilation by Nelson and Paxton. Lighting by Carol Mullins.

The final performance of Night Stand--tonight at 8pm--is sold out. For information on future Dia:Chelsea events, click here.

In the meantime, please enjoy this video interview with Lisa Nelson, conducted in 2008 in New York by Marlon Barrios Solano of dance-tech.net, edited by Ashley A. Friend.

On lighting Black skin in film

‘12 Years a Slave,’ ‘Mother of George,’ and the aesthetic politics of filming black skin

by Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post, October 17, 2013

Melanie Maar premieres "Our Other" at Danspace Project

The resonance body of this space holds light, sound, visitors, inhabitants and our time spent together.

--Melanie Maar, from program notes for Our Other

Although, on occasion, I have held back descriptive details that might spoil the freshness of experience for new viewers, I have never felt the need to stay mum about almost everything I witnessed. But here we are--with Melanie Maar's Our Other, an arresting vision of alternate selves and Otherness itself within the environs of St. Mark's Church, home of Danspace Project.

What dare I tell you about Our Other so that Maar can share it with you without my interference? A few things.

When you enter, you may sit anywhere around three sides of the performance space and--although, on opening night, few people took the choreographer's invitation--you're free to move to alternate viewing locations at will. Maar, Laurel Atwell and Marilyn Maywald perform the 45-minute piece but, in a way, the church space performs it, too, in unexpected dances of light and shadow. Manipulation of lighting, at times, brings out the beauty and potential drama of a venue that might have become, for most of us dance fans, familiar in an obscuring way.

Its quirky drama perches on a fence between elusiveness and specificity, between repetitive tedium and subtlety. Our Other leads you to question: Am I sure that what I'm looking at is ordinary or as artificial as it sometimes appears to be? Does it become more real with the performers' distance or with their closeness? Is there something here that I recognize, that I remember, that seduces?

I am seduced by Maywald's "flight"--you will see what I mean--because it is well-observed and true, the truest thing about something that could be, and usually is, rendered with lazy banality.

With lighting by Carrie Wood and Maar; costumes by Maar with assistance from Ede Thurwell; composition by Maar with additional live sound compositions by Abraham Gomez-Delgado

See Our Other tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 8pm. Click here for information and tickets.

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

Afrofuturism: Black to the future!

[BLACK ALT] What Is Afrofuturism?
Has Janelle Monae become the poster girl to a movement that started way back with Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney and Lt. Uhura?
by Michael A. Gonzales, Ebony, October 1, 2013

See also:

Black in the future 
Announcement of Studio Museum in Harlem's Afrofuturism exhibition, The Shadows Took Shape (Nov 14, 2013 - Mar 9, 2014)
InfiniteBody, July 10, 2013

Neil Gaiman: why reading is fundamental

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens
by Neil Gaiman, The Guardian, October 15, 2013

Sherman Alexie: writing on and off the reservation of your mind

The Poem That Made Sherman Alexie Want to 'Drop Everything and Be a Poet'

Alexie never thought he could leave his reservation to pursue a writing career—but a line written by Adrian C. Louis taught him to venture outside the "reservation of his mind."

by Joe Fassle, The Atlantic, October 16, 2013

The anatomy of change: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and LIz Lerman at Harlem Stage

Impressions of: Blood, Muscle, Bone: the anatomy of wealth and poverty

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, The Dance Enthusiast, October 14, 2013

Abe Abraham's "Wind and Tree" screened tonight and Wednesday

Someone please come right now and rescue me from JT Bullitt's Web site! I am lost in falling glass, the sound of a wild snail eating, and oceanic ambience.

None of this would have happened had I not attended a screening of Wind and Tree--a powerful, disturbing dance video installation by Abe Abraham, which features Bullitt's seismographic recordings of Earth vibrations. These good vibrations, much amplified, create a sonic background for Abraham's choreography overlaid with uneven, ragged, violent breath of Earth--grinding and clanging, wheezing and gasping--often synchronized with the thrashing images of dancers.

Inspired by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon (see below), Wind and Tree's images appear, at first, fleeting and ghostly as they come and go across a trio of video screens. (Abraham's first iteration of this work, premiered in 2011, involved only one screen.) The photography, directed by Peter Masterson, and editing by Abraham and François Bernadi are superb. 

We make out tangled limbs interspersed with the domes of heads. Eyes glint from out of the haphazard, angular frames of arms. Light streams across flesh that takes on the texture of marble or mahogany or pumpernickel bread or rugged landscape or...strangely enough...bare human skin.

Dancers seem desperate to wrest free of arms clamped over their heads--arms that are their own. Self-protection? Or self-imprisonment?

Punishing sounds and images suggest bodies recoiling from the blows of invisible opponents but, really, the dancers appear to box with themselves. This becomes particularly frenetic--as well as beautiful, as well as frightening--in a segment featuring Abraham and Megumi Eda, a 2004 Bessie Award winner. 

By the time Wind and Tree delivers us to the gorgeous "Wa Habibi" ("O Beloved") sung by Lebanon's great Fairuz, our hearts have already been pummeled open.

See Wind and Tree tonight and tomorrow, Wednesday, at 8pm at Theatre 80 St. Marks. 212-388-0388. Admission: $15 cash only.

A Q&A with Abe Abraham follows each screening.

Theatre 80 St. Marks

80 St. Marks Place (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan

(map/directions)

For more information on Abe Abraham's work, visit the Abanar Web site here.

*****

WIND AND TREE

In the way that most of the wind
Happens where there are trees,
Most of the world is centred
About ourselves.
Often where the wind has gathered
The trees together and together,
One tree will take
Another in her arms and hold.
Their branches that are grinding
Madly together and together,
It is no real fire.
They are breaking each other.
Often I think I should be like
The single tree, going nowhere,
Since my own arm cannot and will not
Break the other. Yet by my broken bones
I tell new weather.

Paul Muldoon (from New Weather, 1973)

Small theater spaces coming to Manhattan's midtown west

New Off Broadway Theaters Planned for West Midtown

by Patrick Healy, The New York Times, October 14, 2013

Kimerer La Mothe, Ph.D.: Dancing is radical

To Dance Is a Radical Act
The practice of dancing is vital to our survival as humans on earth.
by Kimerer LaMothe, Ph.D., Psychology Today, November 29, 2011

Part Two: To Dance Is (More than Just) a Radical Act
What one who dances knows about nature in us and around us
by Kimerer LaMothe, Ph.D., Psychology Today, December 31, 2011

Oscar Hijuelos, 62

Oscar Hijuelos, Who Won Pulitzer for Tale of Cuban-American Life, Dies at 62

by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, October 13, 2013

Shared space: Rebecca Davis and taisha paggett at Danspace Project

Every form of dance--no matter its purpose--presses into service the large and small mechanisms of the human body. A wonderful machine, and certainly much more than that. Choreographers Rebecca Davis and taisha paggett--now sharing a season at Danspace Project--both bring that machinery to the foreground.

Davis's quartet, will however happen, opens with two women posed on all fours, side by side, with their heads and cascading tresses hung low over the floor. In time, they retract their heads in perfect start-stop motion and make hydaulic sounds like backhoes or other equipment. It's startling, but not nearly as startling as dancer Erin Cairns Cella's ability to rapidly crawl around the space belly-up with her delicate-looking hands directing and propelling her--which looks tough on those wrists. For her part, Carolyn Hall might remind you of the agitator of a washing machine as she turns with one fist raised, the other arm resting atop her head. Existing in some hazy space between object and humanity, these performers disturb the expectations of their viewers.

paggett's quartet, a right-angled object who lost her faith in being upright--tantalizing title, that--features herself and others skittering around like identical wound-up toys. Their costumes, which otherwise resemble a kind of chaste sleepwear, include white earphones and clear plastic capelets. The protective capelets, that little detail--like the way paggett opens proceedings by ringing a triangle--fits the M.O. of this artist as a highly creative scavenger.

Davis's collaborating dancers (who also include Lydia Christman and Kay Ottinger) give admirable physical performances in will however happen. paggett with her crew (Rebecca Bruno, Willy Souly and Anna Martine Whitehead), though, took me the extra mile.

There's the realization that this artist is capable of taking anything she can get her hands on--object, person, space, idea--and turning it into something else, simply because she can. A clear sense of agency, of knowing her own mind. That hits hard, and that makes paggett someone who will be interesting to continue to watch as she develops.

But what really sealed the deal for me came late in the piece. The performing body becomes not just an abstract idea at a distance but something, with all of its weight and sweat and vulnerability, that depends upon you. A wonderful machine, and certainly much more than that.

See the final evening of works by Rebecca Davis and taisha paggett tonight at 8pm at Danspace Project. Click here for information and tickets.

*****

Related:

taisha paggett
(photo to Taka Yamamoto)

Be sure to read Jaime Shearn Coan's June 2013 interview with taisha paggett in my sister blog, Dancer's Turn.

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

James A. Emanuel, 92

James A. Emanuel, Poet Who Wrote of Racism, Dies at 92

by William Yardley, The New York Times, October 11, 2013

Dreaming America with Sekou Sundiata

Singer Ronnell Bey
from the 51st (dream) state

Launched in April and concluding tomorrow night, Blink Your Eyes: Sekou Sundiata Revisited festival has spanned numerous performance sites around town, paying tribute to the Black poet-griot-activist who died in 2007. A presentation of MAPP International Productions, Blink Your Eyes offers a timely retrospective of Sundiata's work and of questions that preoccupied him, such as the still unfinished business of realizing American democracy and justice.

Last evening, the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space in Soho presented Sundiata's final theatrical work, the 51st (dream) state, in an adaptation for radio broadcast before a live audience. It was directed by Arthur Yorinks and hosted by John Schaefer of WNYC's Soundcheck. The unusually close, intimate space at the Greene heightened connection between audience members and an array of wonderful performers including jazz singer La Tanya Hall (taking Sundiata's role of narrator) and the original vocalists, Ronnell Bey, Audrey Martell, Bora Yoon and Samita Sinha.

La Tanya Hall as Poet/Narrator

Vocal cast of The 51st (dream) state
L-r: Hall, Bora Yoon, Ronnell Bey, Samita Sinha and Audrey Martell

Aside from a few times when the flourish of music swallowed Yoon's or Sinha's occasionally wispy vocalizing--both otherwise shine in quieter, spirit-filled passages--the work proceeded with fearless honesty and radiance. The small band--led by musical director/trumpeter Eddie Allen and conducted by Richard Harper--was tight, authoritative, sensuous to the max. Sitting just a few feet away, we could feel, to the core, everything they set before us.

The 51st (Dream) State is a post-9/11 meditation and intervention. Although, as Schaefer chose to emphasize, this is not "a 9/11 piece," Sundiata did not shrink from vividly invoking chilling imagery from that time of horror. He did so with exceptional courage to witness reality, free of sentimentality, and to grapple with consequences. And then he urged us to move on because we must--as a nation in flux and possibility--visualize who we want to be when we grow up.

Sundiata concluded with this challenge: "Why don't we get our hopes up too high?"

The poet has gone. His irreverent question resounds.

Watch the Blink Your Eyes presentation of the 51st (dream) state in its entirety here:

Blink Your Eyes: Sekou Sundiata Revisited continues with these remaining programs:

Days of Art & Ideas: Democracy, Imagination and Peeps of Color Now, a panel discussion at Harlem Stage Gatehouse. Tonight at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Days of Art & Ideas: Blood, Muscle, Bone: the anatomy of wealth and poverty. Discussion and presentation on community-engagement by dance artists Liz Lerman and Jawole Zollar at Harlem Stage at Aaron Davis Hall. Saturday, October 12, 4pm-6pm. Free with reservation. Click here.

WeDaPeoples Cabaret: Fall 2013 at Harlem Stage at Aaron Davis Hall, Saturday, October 12, 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

A celebration of María Irene Fornés

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

The Graduate Center, CUNY

presents

Celebrating María Irene Fornés

Monday, October 28, 6:30pm

The work of Cuban-American avant-garde playwright and director María Irene Fornés (born May 14, 1930) is closely associated with the establishment of the Off-Off-Broadway movement in the 1960s. Her focus on the themes of poverty and feminism catapulted her onto the New York and international theatre scene. In 1965, she won her first of nine Distinguished Plays Obie Awards for Promenade and The Successful Life of 3. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with her play And What of the Night? Other notable works include Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, Letters from Cuba and Sarita. Fornés became one of the most influential and beloved playwriting teachers and mentors in both Hispanic-American and experimental theatre. The evening is co-curated by Morgan Jenness, Lou Moreno, and INTAR Theater, and features an excerpt from Michelle Memran’s documentary in process The Rest I Make Up.

Admission: FREE and open to the public; first come, first served

The Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street, Manhattan

(map/directions)

College seeks performers for new opera on Fannie Lou Hamer

Activist Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964

Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA) plans auditions in Boston and New York for a new opera composed by Mary D. Watkins on the life of the renowned civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Dark River, The Fannie Lou Hamer Story will premiere in April 2014 at the college to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Civil Rights. It will be conducted by Tian Hui Ng, directed by Darryl V. Jones and produced by Martha Richards.

This is a paid production.

Auditions will be held at Mount Holyoke College in the afternoon on October 20.

Available roles include:

Lead Roles

1 African-American Female Lead Soprano
1 African-American Male Lead Baritone

Ensemble Roles (Minor Characters and Chorus)

1 African-American Female Ensemble Soprano
2 African-American Female Ensemble Altos
1 White Female Ensemble Alto
2 African-American Male Ensemble Tenors
1 African-American Male Ensemble Baritone
1 African-American Male Ensemble Bass
2 White Male Ensemble Tenors
2 White Male Ensemble Baritones

Children's Roles

2 African-American Female Child Sopranos

For more information about the opera, audition requirements and schedule, and an online application form, click here.

Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize in LIterature

Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, October 10, 2013

Stanley Kauffmann, 97

Stanley Kauffmann, Critic, Dies at 97; Spent a Half-Century at the Movies

by William Grimes, The New York Times, October 9, 2013

And now...The 2013 Bessies!

Co-hosts Gus Solomons Jr.
and Martine van Hamel
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Awards presenter Renee Robinson
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Nominee Vicky Shick
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

From my vantage point as a now-outsider, the restored and refreshed Bessie Awards organization appears to be hitting its stride. This year, the New York Dance and Performance Awards (affectionately known as The Bessies) deserves its own award for exemplary professional flair. Also, its goal of increasing the range and diversity of its nominees and winners is starting to feel like the New Normal. The atmosphere at The Apollo Theater last evening was great fun--good people, marvelous talent, a sense of light and hope in difficult times. I love my city, and I love that dance is such a fierce and exhilarating part of it.

Nominee Aaron Mattocks
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Nominee Donna Uchizono
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Broadway's Donna McKechnie
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Lifetime Achievement Award winner Luigi,
the legendary master teacher of jazz dance,
greets his former student, McKechnie
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Award presenters Meredith Monk
and Rajika Puri
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Nominees Marty Beller and Ephrat Asherie
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The 29th Annual 

New York Dance and Performance Awards

Bessie winner Darrell Jones
c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Previously announced awards

Outstanding Emerging Choreographer: Joanna Kotze

Juried Bessie Award: Darrell Jones

Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance: Nancy Reynolds

Lifetime Achievement Award: Louis “Luigi” Faccuito

Announced at the ceremony

Outstanding Production: Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Rian for Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre at Lincoln Center’s White Lights Festival, for a dance of life-affirming joy that featured an extraordinary group of dancers from Nigeria, Indonesia and Europe.

Joanna Haigood's site-specific Paseo celebrated
the pride, joy and traditions of South Bronx neighborhoods
(Outstanding Production of a work stretching the boundaries of a traditional form)
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Also for Outstanding Production: Joanna Haigood’s Paseo at Dancing in the Streets & Casita Maria Center for Arts, for taking the audience on a celebratory passage through Bronx cultural life set to the Latin beats that originated in these neighborhoods.

L to r: Tom Pearson, Jennine Willett and Zach Morris
of that popular and winning team, Third Rail Projects.
Their immersive theater production, Then She Fell,
has been a critical and audience favorite.
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Also for Outstanding Production: Zach Morris, Tom Pearson and Jennine Willett’s Then She Fell for Third Rail Projects at Arts@Rennaissance and Kingsland Ward at St. Johns, for using dance and fractured text to create a dreamscape as compelling and disorienting as Alice in Wonderland’s original journey.

Also for Outstanding Production: Liz Santoro’s Watch It at Museum of Arts and Design, for blurring art and life by placing the audience in a space from which they viewed New York street life, choreography by chance and choice.

Outstanding Revival: Bill T. Jones’ D-Man in the Waters for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at the Joyce Theater for returning to a work of great joy born of a time of great loss and bringing its fierce fight for life to a new generation.

Outstanding Performance: Sebastien Ramirez and Honji Wang in their duet AP15 at the Breakin’ Convention at the Apollo Theater. This electric duet, rooted in hip hop, explored the space between the lover and the loved with delicacy, passion and agility.

Also for Outstanding Performance: Charles “Lil Buck” Riley and Ron “Prime Tyme” Myles at Poisson Rouge. This duo inhabited the space where street styles become stage artistry, catching rhythms with intricate footwork, slides, toe stands, rippling torsos and sudden freezes.

Also for Outstanding Performance: Jaro Vinarsky in Pavel Palissimo’s Bastard at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. A coiled bolt of energy capable of captivating stillness and explosive physicality, he made every moment harrowing, sharp and urgent.

ABT's outstanding principal dancer Herman Cornejo
pauses on the Bessies red carpet
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Also for Outstanding Performance: Herman Cornejo of American Ballet Theater. He combines an astonishing technical ability with an unaffected purity of movement in the works of choreographers Alexei Ratmansky, Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp.

Also for Oustanding Performance: Shantala Shivalingappa for her Shiva Ganga, for embodying the god Shiva and the spirit of the River Ganges in one riveting performance, a vibrant athletic battle of life force.

Outstanding Sound Design: Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells for The Quiet Volume at Performance Space 122 and PEN World Voices Festival. For their use of intimately whispered text in a work in libraries across the city and for a score which heightened the experience in a space at once public and private.

Outstanding Visual Design: Fleur Elise Noble for her 2 Dimensional Life of Her at Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theater. She used detailed projections onto simple paper cut-outs to create a complex, playful, visually compelling world.

ABOUT THE BESSIES

Produced in partnership with Dance/NYC, the NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work by independent dance artists in NYC for 29 years. Known as “The Bessie” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schoenberg, the awards were established in 1983 by David White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize exceptional work in choreography, performance, music composition and visual design. A 40-member Selection Committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers choose nominees. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League—members participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the Selection Committee.