Dance artist Allyson Green will head NYU Tisch School of the Arts

N.Y.U. Appoints a Dean for the Tisch School of the Arts
by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, April 30, 2014

Bob Hoskins, 71

Bob Hoskins, Actor Who Combined Charm and Menace, Dies at 71

by John Anderson, The New York Times, April 30, 2014

More on the future of Lower East Side arts: Jan Hanvik speaks out

In My Opinion: Essex Crossing Should Include Local Arts Organizations
by Jan Hanvik, The Lo-Down, May 2014

A panel on creating and sustaining the arts on the Lower East Side

The Lo-Down
and Educational Alliance's Manny Cantor Center

co-presented an April 28 discussion:

The State of the Performing Arts

on the Lower East Side

Traven Rice (left) and Ed Litvak
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The two founding publisher/editors of The Lo-Down--
a print and online publication covering Lower East Side news and culture--
introduced the evening's program.

Hosted by Educational Alliance's Manny Cantor Center,
panelists from La MaMa, Abrons Arts Center, Elevator Repair Service and Dixon Place
discussed their organizations' missions and challenges
in light of the changing development and demographics of the Lower East Side and of New York City as a whole.

John Collins, founding Artistic Director, Elevator Repair Service
with Traven Rice
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Collins says his troupe "owes everything to that downtown spirit"
of venues like La MaMa where ERS maintains its office space.
"It's a willingness to take a risk, to fail,
to try things where no one knows what the outcome will be," Collins says.
"Significant careers get launched, a kind of faith gets expressed, in these venues."

Jay Wegman, Director, Abrons Arts Center
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

As part of a social service agency (Henry Street Settlement) where provision of community and youth education has always taken precedence,
Grand Street's Abrons Arts Center has struggled to effectively market its arts offerings to potential local audiences.

"80% of our audiences comes from outside this neighborhood," says Wegman.
"This is a neighborhood of families--people in the 30s and 40s who [come off work] and just want to go home and stay home."

Under Wegman's focus, though, Abrons has become an acclaimed presenter of cutting edge productions.
Artists want to be shown there, and audiences travel from all over to see them.

Ellie Covan, Founder/Artistic Director, Dixon Place
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

"It's hard to be a multi-genre space," says Covan.

That includes the usual slate of theatrical genres plus puppetry, burlesque, circus, vaudeville
and probably anything else you might or might not imagine.

 "We do it all. The funders are confused, the press is confused," she says.
"But it's part of our mission to be inclusive and cast a wide net."

Dixon Place also gets a big bang from drinkers' bucks at its popular bar.
"I wish this would catch on here like it has in London, in Europe," says Covan.
As long as patrons keep drinking, Covan's venue will keep ticket prices low and stay open as
"a place for artists to figure out what they're doing."

As for Essex Crossing, the city's glitzy, mixed-use development project
that will include, among other features, the Andy Warhol Museum,
Covan and her colleagues expressed no concern about potential competition.

"I don't feel competition with other spaces for audiences," says Covan. "Bring it on!"
And Wegman concurs, eager for more foot traffic that might help everyone's fortunes.

Nicky Paraiso, Director of Programming, The Club at La MaMa
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

With the loss of legendary founder Ellen Stewart in 2011,
La MaMa is "an older, established institution revitalizing itself without giving up its mission," says Paraiso.

Paraiso admits that he "never studied to be a curator." Instead, he took his cues from Stewart, who told him,
"Baby, you know all these people! What do you want to do, Baby?"

It was a trial by fire. Under the leadership of Stewart's successor, Mia Yoo, Paraiso continues his practice of talking and working closely with artists.
He tells them, "We will find a way to help you--like young, gay playwrights who don't find a home in more conventional Off-Broadway theater."

He cites La MaMa's intergenerational mentorship initiatives as an important part of the organization's mission, mentioning his pleasure at watching how generous Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, in particular, have been with younger artists at La MaMa.

"I'm helping artists because I am one."

For information on future events at Manny Cantor Center, click here.

RIP, Derek Lloyd

My heart goes out everyone at Performance Space 122 on the passing of Derek Lloyd, Director of Production, and to his loved ones. Please read this statement from the PS 122 organization--A note on our friend, Derek--which includes details on an informal gathering of friends and colleagues this Sunday evening.

"I'll be around...": Love and Forté transform BAX

As you move within Memory Withholdings, you might forget that you're in an arts center in Park Slope--although that ambulance wailing past BAX's Fifth Avenue windows last night did not help. For the most part, though, the "memories" successfully cast a heavy spell in this immersive performance by Love|Forté, a Collective. Nia Love and Marjani Forté, creative partners and choreographers, have imagined BAX's spaces as a memory palace filled with suspended keepsake photographs and artifacts; video imagery overlapped by shadows; and unnamed spirits from the Black American ancestral diaspora.

These two women--we first see each one creeping, sprawling or sliding over surfaces from wall to wall--are immensely free and forceful in physicality and voice. Uncontained and uncontainable, they spring from deep time and deep places parallel to our own. I think of their work here as both shamanic and clowning (in the shamanic sense). There is no separation of the heart between Love and nature, and none between Forté--who thinks nothing of dancing large with hefty kitchen knife in hand--and pure emotion. Illumined and illuminating beings, they frighten and they thrill.

And they bring it all home--to the chopping of humble vegetables around a kitchen table, to petty spats and hearty laughter and declarations of love.

with video and media design by Vincent Ballentine of Flux Innovations

Memory Withholdings runs through Sunday evening with performances at 8pm. Seating is limited. For information and tickets, click here.

BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange
421 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Daniel Anker, 50

Daniel Anker, Maker of Powerful Documentaries, Dies at 50
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, April 25, 2014

Levi Gonzalez opens "The Craft of The Father" at The Chocolate Factory

Levi Gonzalez and Eleanor Smith in
The Craft of The Father
at The Chocolate Factory
(photo by Brian Rogers)

Levi Gonzalez's The Craft of The Father--his first evening-length dance since 2007's Clusterfuck--plays out before a small audience in a single row of chairs lining one wall at The Chocolate Factory. That familiar performance space will seem smaller and closer than ever when dancing gets going in earnest. Before that, though, it becomes a night-cloaked swamp filled with sounds--minute creaks of metal chairs; a neighbor's breathing; blurts and and moans and shrieks from three dancers tucked away in all-consuming darkness--for what stretches on for an unexpected amount of time. Space seems to stretch on, too, pulling you into a simultaneously close and vast place where the human body speaks its own language, free of rational identification. Ultimately, you don't know who's who or what's what, but you might come to feel that you're an inseparable part of the whole and relax into it.

So, now that you're in, what happens to you?

Mellow light comes, revealing agitated movers. Kayvon Pourazar's hands work so frantically around his jaw and temples that he seems driven to pull his own head off. Gonzalez pants from the exertion of wide-legged twirls. Eleanor Smith, twirling too, adds a rotation of her head, churning being a common thread as well as the sometimes awkward shifting of weight--both of the men have earthy physiques--or suspending weight and stretching movement in time. Incessant, the trio is dizzying to watch, and when these dancers separate across the room's length, you must swing your head to track the imagery and activities of one or another.

But are you truly in or are you out?

A meta moment, in which the trio huddles to discuss the dance and debrief, feels both welcoming and not. You hear their friendly conversation, but they're turned inward towards one another and away from their viewers. But you do hear them, and sometimes that makes you giggle. You feel kind of an insider and kind of not.

It's like that. The dancers entangle themselves in a fleshy ball, slipping around one another quietly, easygoing, then not so easygoing and not so quiet.

Things get a little strange around a Kate Bush song, "This Woman's Work," source of Gonzalez's title. (Please try this gorgeous performance by Maxwell.) I have no idea. Just that, maybe, anything alive--anything given life in this material world, a child, a work of art--has its own logic, illogic, direction, misdirection, welcome and refusal, presence and impermanence.

(photo by Brian Rogers)

With lighting by Natalie Robin and sound collected, assembled and performed by Tatyana Tenenbaum

The Craft of The Father continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

U Win Tin, Burmese activist writer, dies

U Win Tin, Writer Jailed by Myanmar Junta, Dies
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, April 22, 2014

Claudia Rankine wins Jackson Poetry Prize

Claudia Rankine Wins $50,000 Poetry Prize
by John Williams, The New York Times, April 21, 2014

John Shirley-Quirk, 82

John Shirley-Quirk, a Bass-Baritone and Specialist in Britten, Is Dead at 82
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, April 20, 2014

Doris Pilkington Garimara, 76

Doris Pilkington Garimara, Aboriginal Novelist, Dies at 76
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, April 20, 2014

Go see "Ubu Sings Ubu" at Abrons Arts Center

Take one part Ubu Roi--translated from the satirist Alfred Jarry's French by good ol' reliable Google--and one part Pere Ubu song list. Mash that up with some dance moves and puppetry for extra flava and feed it to the hungry souls of Tony Torn (Pa Ubu) and Julie Atlas Muz (Ma Ubu) with the hallucinogenic notions of Kaz Phillips Safer (video) and Jay Ryan (lighting), and you'll get the psychotropic elixir that is Ubu Sings Ubu, now at Abrons Arts Center.

Co-directed by Torn (who adapted the work) and Witness Relocation's Dan Safer (who choreographed), the boisterous, electrifying Ubu Sings Ubu can't stay in its place. It continuously sloshes and spills past the performance area the way a storm-driven ocean barrels into a low-lying village. I like the radiant actor Torn very, very, very much--but at a distance where his mercurial performance dazzles. Pa Ubu up in the face? Not so much. A stupid man, mad for power and free of conscience, Ubu's an explosion waiting to happen, a walking id and nightmare from the heart of darkness. (In other words, stay away!) For her part, Muz's bawdy and scheming Ma Ubu might climb onto you and lock her legs and naked nether parts around your neck.

The Underground Theater at Abrons doesn't allow much wiggle room, either. It's tiny, and you'll probably find yourself packed in with a mess of folks trying to catch the final shows. Ubu sings (and plays) LOUD. Stay well away from the speakers.

You did say you relish immersive theater, right? Just checking.

Sets and costumes by Deb O; a truly amazing animal cape by Ben Rosenberg; and sound design and musical direction by Vera Beren; musicians Beren, Emmitt Joe George, Matt Butterfield and Patrick "Paddymyke" Conlon

Ubu Sings Ubu runs through April 26. Wednesday-Saturday, 8pm with late shows on April 25 and April 26 at 11pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Cynthia López to head NYC Office of Media and Entertainment

Documentary Producer to Lead City’s Film Office
by Nikita Stewart, The New York Times, April 18, 2014

Cheo Feliciano, 78

Cheo Feliciano, Debonair Salsa Singer, Dies at 78
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, April 19, 2014

Voces, NY Times Latino group, hosts Repertorio Español

Repertorio Brings Latino Theater to The New York Times
El Camerino, April 16, 2014

Gabriel García Márquez, 87

Gabriel García Márquez, Exemplar of the Fiction of Magic Realism, Dies at 87
by Jonathan Kandell, The New York Times, April 17, 2014

Another East Village loss: Incubator Arts Project

Incubator Arts Project to Close
by Patrick Healy, The New York Times, April 16, 2014

Former Yonkers jail acquired as an arts space

In Yonkers, a Shuttered Jail Becomes Part of a Budding Art Scene
by Emma G. Fitzsimmons, The New York Times, April 15, 2014

CUNY initiative for choreographers will engage all five boroughs

City University of New York Announces Dance Initiative
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, April 15, 2014

Eligibility: New York City resident choreographers

residency between June 1 and December 31, 2014

DEADLINE: APPLICATIONS MUST BE SUBMITTED 

BY 11:59PM ON APRIL 30, 2014

Visit cuny.edu/danceinitiative for complete information.

Phyllis Frelich, 70

Phyllis Frelich, Deaf Activist and Actress, Dies at 70
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, April 14, 2014

Artist Betye Saar wins 2014 Edward MacDowell Medal

L.A. artist Betye Saar wins art colony medal, joining elite club
by Mike Boehm, The Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2014

Heidi Latsky in new Montclair State U. dance film project

Choreographer Named to Montclair State Project
by Adam W. Kepler, The New York Times, April 13, 2014

Dance chose me: choreographer Stephen Petronio writes his life

Above: choreographer and Aries, Stephen Petronio
Below: Stephen Petronio Company dances
I Drink the Air Before Me (2010)
(photos by Sarah Silver)

Confessions of A Motion Addict
by Stephen Petronio (self-published, 2014; 288 pp.)
ISBN-13: 9781492736547

reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

I should not have been surprised to learn that Stephen Petronio self-published his memoir, Confessions of A Motion Addict. While the dramatic arc of this world-famous artist's life and career--not to mention the literally boldfaced names he can and does drop, sometimes scandalously--should make any publisher salivate, I can't imagine Petronio having much patience for any middleman or woman dictating how he should tell his own story. The book, all 288 pages of it, is Petronio, through and through. As Spike Lee would say, it's his joint.

The first sixty or so pages, dense and filling, plunge readers deep into childhood and teenage history: richly remembered Italian-American feasts, furtive sexual experiments, rollercoaster drug experiments, precocious insights into the personalities orbiting him, scary dreams, passion, restlessness and, always, a sense of outsider status. By page 67, his artistic fate is sealed when Contact Improvisation makes a serious pass at this newbie Hampshire College student. He subsequently forgets all about taking pre-med. "Inner motor" revved up, mind blown....

I look down my body, and I realize...it's there. I have a body and it is mine. I have a body and do not understand its power or potential or the invisible stories pressing at my skin. I desperately want to move.

Next up? Judson Dance Theater's Steve Paxton, a guest artist at Hampshire. "I am the bastard child of Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown," Petronio will tell us later on, citing his two greatest influences. Brown is, after all, the woman for whom he harnessed up and walked down the wall of a 14th Century French monastery (Man Walking Down the Side of a Building), a feat he repeated a few years ago at the Whitney Museum.

But there's still a lot of getting there until he's there. Petronio takes us along on an adventurous hitchhiking trip through Canada and the West Coast. The young man, exposed to the rigors of nature and the unpredictability of the human animal--enjoyed unexpected kindness of strangers along the way, the occasional minor bummer and one hugely, hugely major one. He's headstrong and lucky and an Aries, and maybe only an Aries would attempt this type of trip in this type of way--"Like all good Aries, I must try to try on every possible lifestyle as my next incarnation"--and get through intact.

Petronio made it through a lot of stuff intact--personal losses, the early years of the AIDS crisis, displacement, along with a lot of other artists, from a gentrifying SoHo, 9/11, a sex-and-drugs lifestyle that could make a rock star look like a rank amateur.

You see the dancer leap and bound, defy gravity and press the boundaries of human movement possibility, yet the mechanics and sensations of these efforts are for the most part concealed. In the mainstream forms of dance, artists often paint a smile over the top of Herculean efforts, but their soul is gritting and grimacing for dear life. The dancer has come to represent the ethereal, outside the law of physics, but we live on the earth and the pull of gravity is definitive. We work with it, attempt to defy it, and yes, we eat real food, pant, smoke, drink, eliminate, copulate, get married, divorced, addicted and healed. We are human. We sometimes break. And it all hurts at some point or another. And we all do something to deal with that pain. Some more than others.

He has chosen to reveal the pull of gravity and the mechanics of living, to conceal nothing, whether it be a personal lapse or a controversial opinion. And with it all, his story provides the kind of energetic rush one comes to expect from his work on the stage.

Learn more about Confessions of A Motion Addict here.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Fred Ho, 56

Fred Ho, Saxophonist, Composer and Radical Activist, Dies at 56
by Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, April 12, 2014

Jesse Winchester, 69

Jesse Winchester, Writer and Singer of Thoughtful Songs, Dies at 69
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, April 11, 2014

BAM welcomes roots musicians Carolina Chocolate Drops and Twyla Tharp

The Carolina Chocolate Drops
L to r: Hubby Jenkins, Rhiannon Giddens,
Rowan Corbett and Malcolm Parson
(photo by Michael Wilson)

The Carolina Chocolate Drops (reviewed by me here in March 2012) brought their acclaimed, rollicking rhythms to the BAM Gilman Opera House for one special evening including the world premiere of a duet choreographed by Twyla Tharp. In the spirited couplings and variations of Cornbread Duet, a contemporary ballet set to several of the Black fiddle-and-banjo band's songs, Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild of New York City Ballet infused fluid, lighter-than-air, speedy technique with accents of jazz, square dance, social dance and joyful sass. Embedded in the lavish, two-hour-plus program, this segment aptly reflected not only the historic cultural blend (the Black and Celtic lineage of the 19th to early 20th Century American South) that the Drops honor in their music but also the qualities that give American performance widespread, enduring appeal and influence. The ballet stars were dressed by Norma Kamali in bold, horizontal layers of black and white, and while I'd like to believe none of us need the possible subliminal message in those adjoined colors, there it is.

Tiler Peck
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Robert Fairchild
(photo courtesy of the artist)

From Tharp's Cornbread Duet
(photo by Rahav Segev)

By now, I'd imagine, smart Tharp fans would also be hip to the Drops. But if any turned up last night just for Tharp and the NYCB principals, never having encountered the band, they were probably won over by Rhiannon Giddens' ebullient personality and valiant singing and the band's rousing performance. Welcome to what the rest of us have been loving for some time now, Grammy-winners for their 2010 Nonesuch debut, Genuine Negro Jig.

Certainly, the Drops warmly welcome you, too, with a set list ranging across revival church music, some soul-seeking Odetta blues, Joe Thompson fiddle tunes, Hank Williams's "Please Don't Let Me Love You"--this last delivered with Giddens's near-yodeling voice bending notes before kicking everything into high, trotting speed. Fan faves like "Country Girl" (written by Giddens and her sister) and the countrified version of Blu Cantrell's "Hit 'Em Up Style" were given fresh, full-on performances. The only problem was that Giddens got to slip off her shoes and stomp and twirl, while the audience had to sit still watching from the theater's "Line 'Em Up Sardine Style" rows.

As Giddens noted, with typical generosity, two former members of the band have split off into solo careers--the charismatic Don Flemons, a founding member, and cellist Leyla McCalla, who appeared with the band on tour and on their Grammy-nominated Leaving Eden (2012). Flemons and McCalla are out there doing their thing and spreading the goodness, and if you miss them, you can support their new moves by checking up on Flemons here and McCalla here.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for Giddens's own solo album, which she's working on for the band's label, Nonesuch Records.

For more Spring events at BAM, click here.

Leee Black Childers, 68

Leee Black Childers, Photographer of Counterculture, Dies at 68
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, April 11, 2014

Kazu Kumagai: Catalyst of Tap [UPDATE]

Kazu Kumagai
(photo by Leslie Kee)

Kazu Kumagai: Catalyst of Tap

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

It’s no small matter when a tap expert like Tony Waag, American Tap Dance Foundation’s Artistic and Executive Director, feels comfortable agreeing with The Village Voice who hailed you as “the Gregory Hines of Japan.”

“Kazu Kumagai is not just a great tap dancer,” Waag says. “He is also a very kind, conscientious and devoted advocate for tap dance and knows how important the art form is internationally.”

Kumagai--who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn with his wife Mari, a singer, and his four-year old daughter--happens to be one of my favorite dancers of any kind. After last year’s Tap City festival, where he appeared in Waag’s popular Tap Internationals evening at Symphony Space, I noted that Kumagai “channels dissonance and passion, taking tap to a stormy place beyond the familiar sunshine,” and I included that solo performance, Journey to the Soundscape, in my list of “most memorable arts experiences of 2013” (InfiniteBody, December 24, 2013).

Born and raised with his older sister in Sendai–a moderate-sized coastal town, a little less than 190 miles north of Tokyo–Kumagai took an early interest in the arts. His parents owned what was then a rarity in Japan–a coffee shop, serving a Japanese clientele–and he played there, as a youngster, around what he calls “unusual people.” These were mainly artists, poets and musicians. But, then again, his parents were also, he says, “kind of unusual.”

“My father was the first person who started roasting coffee in Sendai, a pioneer in the café business, about 40 years ago.”

Kumagai saw his first film footage of tap dancers thanks to jazz musicians he met at the café. He started tap dancing himself at 15 but, he says, didn't have a session with a live musician until he came to New York at age 19.

Of all the arts, what drew him to dance?

“I think I liked physical movement. When I was 5 or 6, I saw Michael Jackson on TV, and that had a great impact on me. I loved how he expressed himself–not just singing but the whole energy. When he got the Grammy, he mentioned the great dancers that he was influenced by--Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis, Jr., and that was a first, small introduction for me. I wanted to tap, but I couldn’t find any tap class in my hometown. My mother called several schools, but there was no tap class. I kind of gave up.

“Then I started doing some martial arts and soccer, football. I was serious about those things. But when I became 15, I saw Gregory Hines's movie, Tap, on TV.

“I carried my passion for tap dancing since I was little and started looking again and finally found one school that included tap. It was impressive. Every student was older–maybe thirties or forties, most of them women.

“I was fortunate to meet a good teacher, in his twenties, who had studied in Tokyo and come back to Sendai. He also loved the style of Gregory Hines, but he couldn’t teach that style because no one wanted to do it at that time.”

Theatrical tap, such as we would see on Broadway, was more readily accepted.

“Students went for exercise but were not really serious about it. I was really serious from the beginning, and he saw that. We became close. I went there all the time, even when I had regular school. I just went to dance school!”

A new home

“My hometown was like.... Have you seen the movie Billy Elliott? A man was supposed to be a banker. Or you have to go to university. Now it’s looser. But when I was growing up, you had to have a certain image. Tokyo was more open, but Sendai was more suburban with an intense social pressure within neighborhoods. My sister went through a tougher time, being compared with other kids. But, somehow, I grew up more open. I was kind of lucky.

“I was in a strict school. One time I was in a meeting with my teacher, and I wrote which school I wanted to attend, and I wrote tap dancing as my hobby. The teacher really couldn’t understand what I was doing. ‘You’re not supposed to dance; you’re supposed to study.’”

The teacher gave him an ultimatum: quit dance or quit school. But then he asked him to dance “right now.” Kumagai did as he was told.

“He looked impressed, but he was a stubborn man. ‘You have to go to college, but maybe you can dance as a hobby because you can’t make a living as a dancer.”

Kumagai lacked role models for his dream. But through his determination, he would go on to serve as a role model for many up-and-coming dancers in Japan. The key? A decision to come to New York despite lack of any connections to the dance world here or much information about how he could get hooked up. He discussed the matter with his parents and told them that he felt ready to search for what he needed.

Acknowledging his love of tap, Kumagai's parents knew that Sendai could not support his goals. “I told them, ‘I’m going to college in the states.’”

He started with learning English in a language school on Long Island, not quite the New York City of his imagining. “Totally different from what I expected,” he says, laughing.

Moving into the city, then, and beginning studies at New York University, he started looking around for a tap school, finding ads for Steps and Broadway Dance Center, still not exactly what he had in mind. Little by little, he began to find his way.

“Charles Goddertz and Barbara Duffy showed me rhythm tap. I met Buster Brown--a legend in the field--when I was hanging out with other tap dancers in a restaurant, and we talked." At the time, Brown was launching his Sunday night tap jam at Swing 46, a jazz and supper club on Manhattan's West 46th Street.

"Gradually, I started finding the community," he says. "I went to National Tap Day and met Peg Leg Bates," who had been a celebrated tap dancer and Catskills resort owner. "I met Savion [Glover] on the street when Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk was running.  1996 was a great year. I was very lucky, a lot of things started to happen, an era of the rise of a new style of tap.

"Gregory Hines was doing a workshop, and I studied with him. I had met him at Fazil’s, a home for tap dancing, and he invited me to practice with him. That was amazing, and we became close. It was an adventure, discovering something new every day. We didn’t have cellphones or Internet back then, but it was much better!”

Young Kumagai's immersion in the New York scene did not permit time for much homesickness. He does remember crying for hours upon leaving Japan but, as soon as he landed in our city, he was ready for a new life. And, it seems, that new life was ready for him.

Kazu Kumagai
(photo courtesy of Kaz Tap Studio)

“There was a workshop called Funk University, a workshop for new dancers for Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk. Ted Levy was teaching, and he was amazing. It was basically for African American dancers because it was their history. But I went there because,” he says, laughing, “I didn’t know!”

“They were young African American dancers, but Ted saw me and gave me an opportunity to study. I started working with them at Fazil’s for three months, every day for seven hours, in the summer without any air-conditioning. But it was great education because it was so different from other schools. He showed not only steps but also history and culture. He spent so much time talking about how tap dancers carry years of struggle, and he sometimes cried because of the prejudice and the painful history.

“That’s when I discovered the meaning of the tap dancer. They danced from their own roots, and I am not from here. I felt a little distant, a little different, but they treated me the same, as a brother. Ted called me Sole Brother. S-O-L-E!"

Although one of the show's producers felt it wasn't appropriate for Kumagai to be in the school and asked him to leave, Levy invited him to continue taking classes.

Kazu Kumagai
(photo courtesy of Kaz Tap Studio)

"Kazu is an amazing musician," says Derick K. Grant, famed tap artist and one of Kumagai's early teachers in New York. "He tends to work twice as hard to be accepted and taken seriously, and it has paid off. He learned as much about us--African Americans--as a people as he did about us as dancers, and that gave him a level of respect for our people and our journey that is unique."

In return, Kumagai was so warmly accepted by Grant and his colleagues that they bestowed a "Black" nickname upon him: Kenyon.

Kumagai, Grant says, took what he learned back to Japan and offered his homeland's dance students an alternative based in authenticity.

"Following his return to Japan in 2002, we started to get an influx of students coming from there who were well prepared and already sound in their foundation." Grant says. "There were a lot of them, which led me to believe that he was inspiring many. That was great for us in tap. He was also very gracious in pointing students in our direction. I, and others like myself, had a great hand in the development of tap dance in Japan--something we are very proud of. Today, they are some of the strongest, most technically sound dancers in the world."

The artist who had persevered despite the lack of local role models not only became a brilliant one for his compatriots; he opened a pathway for them to get the kind of excellent training he had found in the US. Grant acknowledges that Kumagai's "new" style, while exciting the youth of Japan, put him at odds with established teachers there still promoting a lightweight, musical theater approach to the art.

Hank Smith, a tap performer-choreographer and educator, remembers Kumagai from the late 1990s as one of a number of Japanese dancers coming to Brown's jam at Swing 46. Something shifted, though, during the subsequent time Kumagai spent back home in Japan.

"I could tell he'd really developed, not only as a dancer but as a person," Smith recalls. "There was a maturity in his presence. Kazu just seems to be a committed artist and human being who uses his gifts to try and make a difference."

"Tap can be more than just hitting the wood as loud or as fast as possible," Smith says, citing Kumagai's solo work last year in Journey to the Soundscape, an intense, expressive piece that embodied his feelings for his hometown and the Tohoku region where, in March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami caused devastation and massive loss of life.

Devastation in Sendai, Japan, March 2011
Photo: Reuters/Yumiori

When Michelle Dorrance--Bessie Award winning tap artist who also won a 2014 Alpert Award in the Arts--recently danced with Kumagai in Japan, he took her to visit Sendai. It was his way to share with a friend what he had seen and experienced at the time of Japan's disaster.

"It was important for me to share this feeling with her. I hope she will talk to other people about it. My goal is to make a bridge from New York to Japan, to Tokyo and Sendai. People are still suffering in Tohoku district, and I want more people abroad to know this fact."

His parents stayed on in Sendai during the crisis and, like many people who have made a home in a risky environment, want to remain there. Luckily, they live in Sendai's inner city, away from the heavily impacted coast, although they did have to go several months without gas. Another ongoing concern for the region and nation--the only country that has ever suffered the devastation of atomic bombing--is radiation leakage from damaged nuclear power plants.

"And still they want to keep the nuclear plants," he says. "It's hard to understand."

Kumagai, present in New York during our own crisis, 9/11, draws a saddening comparison between Japan and the US, noting that disasters can swiftly turn people and their governments away from the ideals of peace. Japan's historic non-nuclear weapons policy, imposed by the US after World War II, could end soon, he says, as tensions grow between the nation and its regional rivals in Asia. There isn't yet enough of a vocal, coherent movement to divert Japan's conservative government from a proactive buildup of nuclear arms.

Kumagai, as his career unfolds, chooses to remain mindful of his homeland and hometown. "A lot changed [for me] after March 2011," he says. "What happened in Sendai, it has become myself. As an artist, everything I do becomes dedicated to my hometown--also dedicated to the [tap] masters. These two things are now the most important to me, and I want to keep doing positive things."

The challenges of coming home

After Kumagai's initial, life-opening training in New York, the return in 2002 to Japan's limited scene did not flow easily.

"When I went back, not much was happening in the tap community. However, a conflict between old and new was happening both in the tap community and in Japan in general. They didn’t know what tap really was. It was difficult to readjust. There was no place to practice."

"I had to start from the beginning. I had a part-time job and did street performances. There were some good small jazz clubs, and I started dancing there, a small community in Tokyo where musicians get together. It’s growing in popularity. People hear a rumor and come to see us. At first, many artists were interested in tap: musicians, DJs who liked to have tap dance at their parties or in their performances."

Japan's great jazz trumpeter Terumasa Hino, who had learned tap from his musician/dancer father, caught one of Kumagai's performances and invited him to appear in his shows.

"He saw that, in the past, most Japanese tap dancers couldn’t work with jazz musicians because the style was different. However, he felt a connection with me and knew that jazz musicians and tap dancers share a culture. We toured together in 2004 and 2005."

The exposure from touring with a star of Hino's magnitude drew attention and offers from others in Japan’s music industry.

“I began dancing everywhere–from small hip-hop clubs to concert halls," says Kumagai. "I collaborated with many different kinds of artists.”

A growing appreciation for the intricacies of music affected how Kumagai saw himself as an artist.

"Jimmy Slyde, Buster Brown, Savion Glover, Dianne Walker, they all have their own sound," he says. "I was inspired by their sound, not so much by the visual. Image is important, but always I connect to the sound. For me, that is the greatness of this art form.

"The first time I saw Gregory in Tap, dancing in the jail, he danced for himself. Not so much for performance. And that particular scene still influences me a lot.

"I've heard criticism that the way Gregory danced is not really beautiful, but to me, it’s so beautiful. Jazz musicians, when they play, it’s beautiful. Same as athletes like Michael Jordan. They don’t try to look nice. It’s not about their looks. They devote themselves to their art, and that’s a beautiful thing. I don’t try to impress with how I look. What I love about tap is that a lot of masters can show what’s inside through their dance.

"Tap is a language. When I go to Europe, I don’t speak to the audience, but they can understand. When I went to Senegal, we could communicate."

How to stay serene amid the busyness of business

"I tour a lot...Japan, Singapore. This month, I’m going to Milan. When I’m in Japan, I go to my studio [KAZ Tap Studio] everyday and practice and teach classes. Here in New York, I go to American Tap Dance Center and practice. But before I do, I take my daughter to school, and that becomes my ritual–an everyday morning walk with her. It gives me a peaceful moment. So many things I can learn from my daughter.

"She dances a lot. She was in my most recent performance. The last night (of a three-night performance), I wanted her to be on stage somehow, because I was showing my life. I just wanted her to walk around, but she started dancing!" Kumagai chuckles at the memory. "It was real nice!"

Perhaps she'll join in again when he finally manifests his next big dream, an evening-length show for New York, his first--to which I say:

Right on, S-O-L-E brother! It's time!

SPECIAL UPDATE

I have just received the following announcement from Traci Mann, Co-Chair of The New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day:

The New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day is proud to Honor Kazu for his talent and his contribution to the health and welfare of his tap community in Japan. Much like the late great Bill Bojangles Robinson, Kazu is helping people with his talent. He is helping them to over come the Fukashima Disaster with his tap dancing and teaching. I can't think of a more noble thing to do on his part and we hope that he gets the recognition he needs as it will up build what he has accomplished and continues to work at. 

Tap Extravaganza 

Norman Thomas Auditorium

Park Avenue

New York City

May 24th, 2014

7 pm - 9 pm

BIO

Kazu Kumagai was born in Sendai City, Japan. He started tap dancing at the age of 15 and came to NY at the age of 19. He trained in FUNK UNIVERSITY, the training workshop for the big hit Broadway musical Bring in da' Noise, Bring in 'da Funk. He studied with Ted Levy, Buster Brown, Gregory Hines, Barbara Duffy, and Derick K. Grant.

Since then, he has performed in many New York City downtown clubs, such as The Knitting Factory, Tonic, and the Puppet Jazz Club.

From 2002 to 2010, he performed in Tony Waag’s Tap City, the New York City Tap Festival nine times and was dubbed by The Village Voice as the "Japanese Gregory Hines." In 2006, he was selected as one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch."

After Kaz went back to Japan in 2002, he made numerous solo appearances all over the country and collaborated with many artists and musicians, and appeared in several television commercials, such as SONY CYBERSHOT. He also performed in a MIHARAYASUHIRO fashion show in Milan, Italy, where he succeeded in opening up a new field of the arts. In 2008, he opened his first tap dance studio--KAZ TAP STUDIO--in Japan, and has subsequently taught throughout Japan including in his hometown of Sendai City, site of severe damage in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Kaz dedicates his passion and love for the art of tap dance to the great masters such as his mentor Buster Brown, Jimmy Slyde, Gregory Hines and others, as well as to the people of Sendai and the Tohoku region where his family and friends live.

Visit Kazu Kumagai's Web site here.

Wayne Henderson, 74

Wayne Henderson, a Founder of the Jazz Crusaders, Dies at 74
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, April 9, 2014

Audition: Pro, non-pro performers wanted for Thierry Niang's "Spring"

The Invisible Dog will bring French director and choreographer Thierry Niang to Brooklyn for two weeks to create a production of SPRING, inspired by Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, working with fifteen local participants, aged 60 to 100.

Niang is looking for 15 local professional and non-professional seniors (ages 60 to 100) of all backgrounds and levels of ability to comprise the ensemble.

This will be a very special, one-time only performance--and a meaningful
experience for all involved.

All performers are paid and provided a meal the day of the show.

If you are interested, please email richard@600highwaymen.org with the time slot when you would be available to meet with Thierry Niang at The Invisible Dog:

Wednesday, April 30, 4:30-6pm (arrive at 4:30pm)

-or-

Wednesday, April 30, 6:30-8pm (arrive at 6:30pm)

Rehearsals: May 1-10, 10am to 1pm at The Invisibie Dog

Public performance: May 11, 5pm

Third Rail Projects and two good eggs in midtown

Third Rail Projects presents Yolk
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The egg--the pre-Christian, springtime symbol of regenerated life and hidden goodies--gets a new twist in Yolk. The sensuous, mysterious dance installation, unfolding over just one half hour, is the latest site-specific piece by Third Rail Projects, the award-winning team of Zach Morris, Tom Pearson, Jennine Willett (Looking Glass; Then She Fell). 

View from midtown's Grace Plaza
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

It's nearly Easter, sure. But those eggs?
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Go to midtown's Grace Plaza (1114 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street) at either 12:30pm or 1:10pm tomorrow, and you'll find two large, gleaming white eggs set atop elegant black-draped pedestals. Inside the eggs, dancers Roxanne Kidd and Jessy Smith move slowly, dreamily tumbling and undulating as if protected by an amniotic sac, and run their hands over the eggs' red felt lining. No Easter bunny in sight, but keep watch for a few surprises along the way. A meditative and beguiling way to spend your lunch hour!

Google Map/Directions

Roxanne Kidd in Yolk
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Jessy Smith in Yolk
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

For news of other free events presented by ArtsBrookfield, click here.

Play the floor: ATDF's "Rhythm in Motion"

Well, Tony Waag did say that American Tap Dance Foundation's spring series, Rhythm in Motion--at least, Program A of it--would be edgy. And edgy, it was. Also, the rest of what he said: "hopeful, passionate, experimental, lovely...."

"[Tap dancing] can take us somewhere we don't expect," he said. "It's no longer nostal-gyah--though we do love that."

ATDF's Tony Waag at Tap It Out 2012
(c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

At the modest Theater at the 14th Street Y, the first performance of Program A opened with a clever behind-the-scenes film by Waag, featuring a montage of breathless, high-powered tapping overlaid with "Synchronicity" by The Police. That led to an hour or more of all-the-way live tap designed with 21st Century tastes in mind--works by Nicholas Young, Michelle Dorrance, Chloe Arnold, Jason Samuels Smith, Lisa La Touche and Derick K. Grant, each making a case for tap's continued relevance as hardcore skill and art.

You might mistake Young, a tall, strapping Texan, for a country-western star, but he's a tapper through and through and, as shown here, an emerging choreographer of growing confidence. Thank you Forest, dedicated to the sound technology inventor, employs an array of tap surfaces wired for sound as he and an all-women crew--Elizabeth Burke, Michela Marino Lerman, Carson Murphy, Demi Remick and Samara Seligsohn--fire up the feet to play the floor with impressive accuracy, speed, force and assertive design.

Dorrance's bluesy improvisatory solo with guitarist Darwin Deez, Deez and Deez, is pure magic in all the little framed moments of wonder. The dancer holding firm as she drags the silver blade of her heel against the floor; catching the guitar's spare lines of sound at odd angles and whipping her lines all around and around them; pulsing waves of movement through the length of her lanky body; dazzling us with her killer feet then looking straight at the guitarist as if to say, "What you got now?" As an ensemble choreographer and director, too, she's the genuine article, able to transfer what's great about her personal style--loose, earthy, full-bodied insouciance--onto others with no artificial aftertaste. Last night's superb cast of She's Alright included Burke, Murphy, Remick, Young, Megan Bartula and Caleb Teicher, and you can tell she has inspired them.

Arnold's two pieces for her exuberant troupe Apt 33 emphasized hard-charging, tight arrangements to popular urban music ("So Fine" by Jamaican reggae star Sean Paul and "Not Afraid" by Eminem). Samuels Smith's solo + ensemble, Acasmellyah--its title, a tapper's play on the word acapella--is so masterfully sharp, finely complex, roaring in sound and mesmeric in effect that it's hard to believe that Rhythm in Motion wouldn't just stop there and let us stagger home.

Derick K. Grant
(c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

But there was more to come. La Touche with musical collaborator/dancer Sean Jackson and fellow dancers Brittany DeStefano and Karissa Royster brought We Used to Hold, partly set to an Erykah Badu song, innovative in staging and sound and with occasional subtlety and sexiness. Grant's Buzzcut Season, using the Lorde song, scatters a roiling mess of dancers in school uniforms around the space. Now and again, the galloping, spinning crowd briefly, ingeniously parts to throw focus on one or a few of its members in a floating narrative of high school life and love.

Program B will include works by Gregory Hines (staged by Barbara Duffy), Brenda Bufalino, Cartier Williams, Michela Marino Lerman, Max Pollak, Susan Hebach, and the capoeira-inspired Fuga by Felipe Galganni.

Rhythm in Motion continues through Saturday. Remaining shows include tonight (Program A at 7pm and 9:30pm), Thursday (Program A at 7pm), Thursday (Program B at 9:30pm), Friday (Program B at 7pm and 9:30pm) and Saturday (Program B at 3pm with a Tap Talk Back and 7pm).

For Rhythm in Motion tickets, click here.

For information on Sunday's Celebrating Gregory! fundraiser with guest host Bill Irwin, click here.

The Theater at 14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street (at 1st Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Zuni press case for return of sacred objects

Zuni Ask Europe To Return Sacred Art
by Rachel Donadio, The New York Times, April 8, 2014

Rescue coming for Pittsburgh's August Wilson Center?

Consortium of foundations bids to buy August Wilson Center
by Mark Belko, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 8, 2014

Kaneza Schaal and the feather of the goddess Maat

Meet PS 122 RAMP resident theater artist Kaneza Schaal.

Kaneza Schaal is a New York City based theater artist. Best known for her work as an actor with The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, and Richard Maxwell, Kaneza will use RAMP to begin work on her first evening length piece using the Egyptian Book of the Dead as inspiration–seeking to cultivate performance that uses text as a jumping off point and equally values visual, physical, sonic and abstract expression.

“Drawing inspiration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a text originally intended to provide the living with a blueprint to the afterlife, we will explore light and shadow as a physical and metaphorical architecture. Using analogue projection, sound, text, and dance to animate a series of burial vignettes we will excavate this ancient text to create a new translation. Our inquiry will focus on the scroll’s central metaphor: the weighing of the heart against a feather of the goddess Maat on her divine scale of truth to test its moral worth. The performance proposes burial not as erasure but as offering restitution, performing rites, and creating space for the presence of the absent, the imagined and the longed-for.”

– Kaneza Schaal

Public Showings: April 11 and 12, 8pm

The Chain Theatre
21-28 45th Road, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

For complete information and ticketing, click here.

Alexandra Damiani named new Cedar Lake AD

Artistic Director Named for Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, April 7. 2014

We twerk to resist!

source

Hugh Masekela celebrates birthday in song at Rose Theater

Proclaiming Joy, in Concert, on His 75th Birthday
Hugh Masekela Played His Horn and Sang at Rose Theater
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, April 7, 2014

Queens Museum's Finkelpearl gets NYC Cultural Affairs top post

Museum Director to Be Commissioner of Cultural Affairs
Mayor de Blasio Names Tom Finkelpearl of the Queens Museum
by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, April 6, 2014

City Comptroller report: NYC's low-income students lack arts education

Arts Education Lacking in Low-Income Areas of New York City, Report Says
by Vivian Yee, The New York Times, April 7, 2014

Mickey Rooney, 93

Mickey Rooney, Master of Putting On a Show, Dies at 93
by Aljean Harmetz, The New York Times, April 7, 2014

Creatively angry: J Dellecave at HERE

Scenes from J Dellacave's Angry Women REvisited
(photos by Benjamin Lundberg)

In Angry Women REvisted, J Dellecave (director/sound designer) and a host of collaborator/performers create a fantasia from an illustrious source text, Angry Women, Andrea Juno's 1991 book of interviews with Diamanda Galás, Holly Hughes, Annie Sprinkle, Lydia Lunch and twelve other radical women performance artists.

The theater piece, now at HERE Arts Center through Sunday evening, seems deliberate and idealistic in its nostalgic, unsophisticated roughness--picking up tools and trying out a palette of styles out of the past. It can feel draggy, longer than its 70-minute running time, but it's a pleasure whenever a coherent, communal energy radiates from it, mainly through an effective and affecting use of music (Röyksopp's catchy, if eerie, "What Else Is There?" animating each performer in increasingly intense, individual ways while uniting them all across a range of cultures and genders) and a poetic imagery of movement (a solemn procession of people, some of whom turn out of line like pages in a volume; a Shiva-like stack of dancers with snaking arms and wine tumblers). If nothing else, I'm motivated to pick up the book. Reason for anger remains; reason for questioning what community is, who it includes or empowers, excludes and silences, and how it does or does not move forward remains, too.

With performers Avi-Rose, Angela Beallor, Joshua Bastian Cole, Kate Conroy, Gaby Cryan, lizxnn disaster, Roo Khan, daniel rosza lang/levitsky, Sloan Lesbowitz, zavé martohardjono, niknaz, Azure D. Osborne-Lee, Jenny Romaine, Zachary Wager Scholl and Alma Sheppard-Matsuo

Performances at 7pm through Sunday with an additional 2pm matinee on Saturday

For ticket information, click here.

HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan
(entrance on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street)
(map/directions)