Phil Woods, 83

Phil Woods, Saxophonist Revered in Jazz, Dies at 83
by Nate Chinen, The New York Times, September 29, 2015

Catherine Coulson, 71

Catherine Coulson, Log Lady of ‘Twin Peaks,’ Dies at 71
by Katie Rogers, The New York Times, September 29, 2015

Sheri M. Goldhirsch, 55

Sheri M. Goldhirsch, Who Nurtured Young Playwrights, Dies at 55
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, September 28, 2015

MacArthurs for Michelle Dorrance,Ta-Nehisi Coates, Basil Twist

MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ Winners for 2015 Are Announced
by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, September 29, 2015

A bench for Blondell in Central Park

Blondell Cummings (1944-2015)

The family of Blondell Cummings has announced that the late dance artist wished to have bench named for her in Central Park.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to her sister, Gaynell Cummings, for Blondell's bench:

Gaynell Cummings
201 Washington Park
Brooklyn, NY 11205

Thank you!

The maximal A.O. Movement Collective

Above, Lillie De and below, Ariel Speedwagon
in scenes from ETLE and the Anders
(photos: Alex Escalante)

You know how it is when you first open a sci-fi or fantasy novel and, right away, you're plunged into a world teeming with characters, creatures, exotic place names, complicated back stories, unfamiliar languages, ideas and values? It can be jarring, overwhelming. You need a little time to acclimate.

The ETLE Universe--a massive project shaped by feminist and queer thought, three years in the making by Sarah A.O. Rosner and her A.O. Movement Collective--reminds me of that experience. I have dipped into just one portion of it--ETLE and the Anders, a performance set in Clinton Hill's Loft 172. To use a Rosner term of choice, it is maximalist.

My best guess is that ETLE and the Anders is a schematic of what it might look like, sound like and feel like to have any number of universes rushing at you all at once. And I believe Rosner and her collaborators take this to be necessary training for a coming world that awaits our evolution--or maybe a world that's already here, waiting to be noticed.

I don't feel moved to describe most of what happens in this piece. Go have your own experience, please. But here are some things I'm still thinking about.

It would be limiting to call ETLE and the Anders a dance work, just as it would be limiting to ignore the way ETLE universality encompasses everything from dance to gaming to fashion to photography to shopping to porn. (That's right, thanks to ETLE, Rosner's bio now reads: "choreographer, pornographer, and radical arts businessman....") Nevertheless, bodies and movement carry the main charge and main interest in ETLE and the Anders--some of the most diverse, unconventional, in-your-face bodies in professional dance and some of the most prodigious energy. Rosner thrills us with the momentum and sound of these bodies rushing through air and making contact with the floor. When her dancers run the ring of their space, the breeze hitting the audience is pretty damn maximal.

They execute movements and movement patterns in a big, open way. Heroic. Also somewhat predatory. Not afraid of being large and in charge. Not afraid of the body. Not afraid of any body. They jabber and shout. They build and deconstruct imagery with a speed that will make you question whether you saw what you just saw, and they fracture your ability to attend to any one thing at any one time. Destructive of boundaries, expressive of multiplicity, they require that you release your own hold on form and focus and certainty.

The mysterious ETLE--unseen but referenced as "she" and "her," and maybe those pronouns should be capitalized--appears to be driving what will turn into sacred erotic ceremony, centered in the stately Anna Adams Stark. Coordinating Anders efficiently arranged the audience closer to peer through the transparent windows of a vinyl enclosure.

Here, performer Lillie De--who also serves as the collective's manager, we're told--guided our way. With De in the spotlight, I felt the tone shift, and a handle present itself to me. I needed a handle, a way into this work. It seemed to come in the note of irony she introduced.

But even that irony quickly fell apart. No sooner did De draw chuckles from some of us than orgasmic ecstasy buffeted and wrenched her.

Each time we hurl our bodies through space, we have shifted the universe.... Our bodies are time machines...."

Let yourself go! Let your Future Self in!

Suddenly, dancers sailed past us, naked or nearly so. Inside the clear vinyl enclosure, Ariel Speedwagon--dressed in a long, medieval tunic, arms stretched out from her sides--revolved and whirled to the martial cadence of Idgy Dean's live percussion. For a brief moment--everything ETLE flares, shimmers and becomes something else--wary dancers patrolled the enclosure, baseball bats in hand, tough attitudes in place. Baseball bats seem kind of old school for sci-fi, don't they? But the sight of them was both amusing and entirely convincing. We get the message. I have never seen a better protected ceremonial site.

ETLE and the Anders is a fascinating experience, but I won't pass judgment on it in isolation from a web of manifestations that I won't have the chance to experience. See for yourself. The ETLE Universe continues, through October 10, with three weeks of performances, parties, screenings, workshops and much more. For a schedule of ETLE and the Anders performances and a guide to the entire ETLE universe of events and resources, click here.

*****

ETLE and the Anders performers: Lillie De, Anna Adams Stark, Aya Wilson, Ariel Speedwagon, Eli Steffen and Tara Aisha Willis with Tony Carlson, massima selene desire, Benedict Nguyen, and Jax Jackson. Music by Idgy Dean. Costumes by Walter Dundervill and Jeff Poulin. Lighting by Vincent Vigilante. Video and installation by Andre Azevedo + Caitlin Rose Sweet. Set designed by Sarah A.O. Rosner and created by Abigail Lloyd

Loft 172
166 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Adrienne Truscott: a fool in the king's court

Dance/performance artist Adrienne Truscott writes that when, in the early stages of exploring stand-up comedy, she booked her fledgling act on a lesbian cruise, she ran into a little trouble. A feminist telling jokes about rape to a staunchly feminist audience? What could possibly go wrong?

"It was an incredibly 'safe' space as a woman and an unpredictably conservative space for a comedian," she writes in her "Creator's Note" for Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else.

No comic or anyone else for that matter wants to be told what they can or can't say, nor should they be. It is often a comic's job to utter the unutterable; that doesn't mean that they (we?) are beyond rebuke. Comedy is bold, powerful and supple but not unassailable. There is a difference between a fool and the fool in the king's court....

Now through October 3, you can watch this court fool perform a show that gives new meaning to the word chatterbox, a show where Truscott manages to be, at once, giddy and spot-on.

Hosted by Brooklyn eatery and comedy club The Creek and The Cave, co-presenting with The Chocolate Factory and Performance Space 122, Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It gives Truscott a platform to land important points about rape culture, victim shaming and right-wing hypocrisy while dissolving her audience in laughter. And there's even more educational value! Science nerds will enjoy detailed lessons in duck anatomy and gerbil crisis management. It all works, and while I'm still baffled by the gears in this machine, I'll note that if I told you a single joke out of context, that funniness might fall apart. The wholeness of Truscott's performance is the thing that works.

Truscott's exuberant persona is wildly nonstop, relentless, irresistible and, famously, naked in the netherparts region. Yikes! No wonder she likens this stand-up act to an act of rape!

The most real danger you'll face from Truscott, though, is the likelihood of getting smacked by a denim jacket ripped off and hurled from the stage--my face stung from a slight graze--in one of her acts of divestment. Let's just say, if Trickster Truscott were Salome dancing for Herod, she'd be working 70 veils, not seven.

What she's stripping at, though, is our tendency to avert our eyes and stay silent about things that upset the state of order. (It took a long time for some people to snap out of the Cosby Show trance, didn't it?) But there's absolutely no escaping when pussy's got something to say, damn it, and she will not be denied!

Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It runs tonight at 8pm and this Saturday at 7pm. It continues Wednesday-Saturday, September 30-October 3 at 8pm. For information, visit The Creek and The Cave's Web site here.  To purchase tickets, click here.

The Creek and The Cave
10-93 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions: scroll to bottom of page)

TONY review: Camille A. Brown's BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play

Here's the link for my review of this remarkable new production from Camille A. Brown & Dancers, which opened the 2015-16 Joyce Theater season!

Click here!

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko: #negrophobia in brief

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
(photo: Scott Shaw)

I like the odd little Studio A at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. You know, that room, right off the Gibney lobby, that you mostly ignore as you sign in with the guard and climb the stairs. It's 15 x 30 (got that off the Gibney Web site), suitable for, say, a sleepover with a small bunch of girlfriends. It's also the space of choice for Nigerian-American performance artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, presenting his new work, #negrophobia as part of Gibney's Fall 2015 Making Space season.

The experience of being physically drawn inside a work of art, and one that's alive with change, cannot be called new. But there are times when it seems particularly apropos. #negrophobia qualifies.

Studio A, transformed by Kosoko, looks like a Pinterest board. Prints of photos snake along the floor. Looking around, I recognize, for instance, James Baldwin, Forest Whitaker, an arrested Tiger Woods. Iconic books like The Bluest Eye and PUSH take talismanic places of honor. Mounds of tangled celluloid stand in, I suspect, for the murky history of Hollywood's relationship to the Black body and Black talent. On one table rests a memorial card for Kosoko's deceased brother. (There's a story there, which I don't know, but Kosoko will later show us "my dead brother's shoes" and we will hear clink of chains running through his hands.) A lithe, incredibly model-slender dancer (Kentrell/IMMA MESS), wearing only a cloth mask, blonde wig and tomato-red thong, slinks and slithers around taking selfies and live video, sometimes interacting closely with the bling-spangled Kosoko. One wall features video projections, and music pumps through the space. Kosoko is a little bit Olivia Newton-John ("Magic") and a little bit Seal ("Crazy").

The audience can sit on slick white floor runners, stand on the sidelines or, within considerable limits, move around to view things from different angles. What we cannot do is leave.

There's one door, and it's largely--I sense, deliberately--obstructed by Kosoko's stool and microphone and Afrofuturistically golden being. Tiny Studio A becomes all about airless confinement, blockage and, through the Kosoko's text, the toxic detritus of other people's sick thinking about the Black body, specifically Black masculinity.

God, I wanted a Cosby Show life, and you gave me a reality show life.

You ain't shit...You ain't even gonna be shit.... From the moment you're out of your mama's womb, you are being told [this]. What does this do to childhood? How do you build your dream? I'm obsessed with this question.... How do you push against this to realize yourself?

Kosoko points and picks at the source of this devastation, although I do not think he disrupts it much in #negrophobia. That may be impossible, and fruitlessness might be the point. But as I looked around the room, I wondered if even the young white people in attendance--clued-in at least enough to go to something called #negrophobia--found anything here unfamiliar enough to be urgent, eye-opening news.

One interesting feature is the ending that isn't. Kosoko gets to a point where it looks as if he has completely lost it and wants to throw in the towel. Over and over, he seems to dismiss us: "It's over. You can go now." He insists, wearily and somewhat testily. "You can go home to your Manhattan apartments. You don't have to watch it anymore."

Not a single person moves, because you can't really, and you can see this is just the exhaustion talking. The exhaustion of breathing in decades of toxic fumes and struggling to stand. Besides, there's some more costume foolery up ahead to watch and now--possibly forever--a perky KKK song to listen to. As Yogi Berra would have said, "It ain't over 'til it's over." And it ain't.

Nightly through Saturday, September 26, at 7:30pm* with limited ticketing. Friday night's performance will be followed by a discussion with George Sanchez. For information and tickets, click here.

*UPDATE: A show has been added for Saturday at 5pm, but hurry!

Learn more about Jaamil Olawale Kosoko|anonymous bodies here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (entrance: 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Daniel Levins, 62

Daniel Levins teaching at Ballet Tech
(photo: Jim Varriale)

My gratitude to Audrey Ross for sharing this sad news on the passing of the multifaceted dance artist Daniel Levins.

***

DANIEL LEVINS (1953-2015)

It is with great sadness that I report the passing of Daniel Levins of a lung infection on September 15, 2015 in New York City.   Raised in the Adirondack Mountain area of New York State, Daniel began Irish and tap dancing lessons at age five, and initiated his performing career with a touring carnival at age nine.   His dance studies continued in the Vaganova and Graham traditions at the High School of Performing Arts, and in the Cecchetti and Imperial Russian Ballet School traditions with Vincenzo Celli, Barbara Fallis, Vera Nemchinova, and Richard Thomas in NYC.

 In 1969, at age fifteen, Levins became a charter member of Eliot Feld's American Ballet Company for its debut at the Spoleto Festival in Italy.  He joined American Ballet Theatre in 1971, where his versatility actuated leading roles in works by Tudor, Balanchine, de Mille, Robbins, Fokine, Ailey, Neumier and others, as well as the classics.  Noted for his performances within the dramatic repertory, Mr. Levins rose to the rank of Principal Dancer at age eighteen.

Joining New York City Ballet in 1975, Levins danced under Balanchine and Robbins until a chronic knee condition forced his retirement from the ballet stage one year later.

 Mr. Levins also appeared in films, TV and stage productions, including Turning Point, Grease, Red Badge of Courage, Goodbye Girl, The Waltons, and Street Scene with New York City Opera.   He choreographed musical theater productions of Miss Liberty and Bloomer Girl for Goodspeed Opera House, Brimstone for Stockbridge Theater and the workshops of Hal Prince and Musical Theater Works, and directed and choreographed productions for the Smithsonian Institute, the King Cole Loves Broadway series at the St. Regis hotel as well as Off-Broadway productions of Oh Boy!, The Gorey Details and Amphigorey, which received an Obie nomination for best musical.
 His ballets have appeared in the repertories of American Ballet Theater, Cincinnati Ballet, Ballet Oklahoma, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre Universal Ballet, Seoul Ballet Theatre, Miami City Ballet, and Ballet's Galaxy of Stars.

 Mr. Levins began his teaching career in 1974 at Barbara Fallis and Richard Thomas' New York School of Ballet, and has taught and coached for ballet companies and schools, universities and colleges, as well as Broadway music theatre productions.  He was a longtime master teacher at Eliot Feld's Ballet Tech, which remarked that "he imbued generations of students with his passion for the rigor, technique, epaulement, elegance and continuity of classical ballet.  Yes, part of him goes on in those he trained."

--Audrey Ross

South Africa's Mmakgosi Kgabi finds her light

Mmakgosi Kgabi, above and below,
in Shades of a Queen
(photos: Thomas Aurin)

For New York--a city that (thinks it) has seen it all and many times over--Johannesburg's Mmakgosi Kgabi is an startling original. Sad to say, her solo performance of Shades of a Queen--curated by Marýa Wethers for Queer New York International Arts Festival--ran only one evening. You really ought to catch this performance artist and, perhaps, some smart programmer will bring her back to New York.

Performed last night at Abrons Arts Center's Experimental Theater, Shades of a Queen imagines the complications of coming out queer while African. Or, at least, in Kgabi's uncommon mind, coming out queer when the name your Botswanan mother gave you implies a singular status. Mmakgosi translates to "The Mother of the Chief," and, for the purposes of this piece, Kgabi's dramatic persona rocks a pinched, high-pitched British accent with the Cockney tag innit lashed to the end of sentences like a subversive tic. Who is this creature? Well, she calls herself Her Majesty the Queen.

When we first meet Her Majesty, a mysterious figure dressed in black tights and a diaphanous black cape, she's singing softly to herself and drifting around the sparse furnishings of the darkened space. A white couch faces away from the audience, and occasionally Kgabi will take a moment to comfortably settle there, still singing. A matching armchair, at a short distance, is toppled onto its side and remains so. We have no idea why. An open notebook rests on a small white table with several e-devices lining its shelf. These will play an amusing role in the proceedings as Her Majesty carries on several improvised conversations with "callers"--some clear, some clueless, some creepy--each successive call detaining her from carrying out her stated intention to leave the apartment and go to the thee-AY-tah!

Her voice. A harsh, stringently pretentious one matched by precise, insistent, increasingly impatient physicality. A finely-trained Kgabi masters it all.

"We're going to the thee-AY-tah, darling!"

"You have to put your best foot forward."

"You have to relax, speak properly...."

"You bless them with the knowledge of who you are, darling!"

"Where's that spot? Where is my light?"

"You find your light, dear. You find your presence."

With the knowledge that Shades of a Queen is riffing on the idea of coming out as queer, we begin to hear Kgabi's dialogues and actions as internal exhortations, disturbances and, ultimately, diversions. The interfering shades are a Shadow Self not easily laid to rest. Her rumblings with the external world trigger rumbling within, upending the familiar comforts and confines of home. Luckily for us, they also bring about an entertaining evening and the introduction of a confident and fascinating artist. More, please!

Kgabi is a member of South Africa's multidisciplinary Stash the Suitcase Performance Arts Collective. Follow the collective's work here.

Queer New York International Arts Festival continues events at Abrons through September 26. For information and tickets for other QNYIAF events, click here.

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

TONY Review: Mark Dendy Project at Dixon Place

I'm delighted to bring you the link to my first Time Out New York dance review--Mark Dendy Project's Whistleblower at Dixon Place.

Coming up soon: Camille A. Brown & Dancers at The Joyce Theater in BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play

Jack Larson, 87

Jack Larson, a Playwright Better Known as Jimmy Olsen in ‘Superman,’ Dies at 87
by Anita Gates, The New York Times, September 21, 2015

Jackie Collins, 77

Jackie Collins, Novelist Who Wrote of Hollywood’s Glamorous Side, Dies at 77
by David Stout, The New York Times, September 19, 2015

C.K. Williams, 78

C. K. Williams, Poet Who Tackled Moral Issues, Dies at 78
by William Grimes, The New York Times, September 20, 2015

Marcin Wrona, 42

Marcin Wrona, Polish Film Director, Dies at 42
by The Associated Press, September 20, 2015

Writing for Time Out New York!

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: D. Feller)

Hey there, gang!

A quick note to announce that I have been invited to write dance reviews for Time Out New York (online) a few times per month. My first will be a piece on Mark Dendy's Whistleblower (now through September 26), a Dixon Place dance commission. I'll post links to the TONY reviews here, as well as on Facebook and Twitter, as they become available.

Otherwise, I'll continue reviewing dance and other arts here on InfiniteBody.

I hope you're enjoying the new arts season! See you around town!

Eva :-)

Ecosexuals Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens marry that mountain

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
remake environmental activism for a sexy new era.

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle stand before all the world--tall in their funky platform boots--as proud, passionate ecosexuals. And they recruit. With those two, you're well aware, surely, of the sexual part. But what's with that eco prefix?

The couple answered that question--and more--last night at the New York City premiere screening of Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story, their 2014 documentary film about mountain-top removal mining in the Appalachians where Stephens was born and raised and has family. That's the eco part. We'll get to sex in a minute.

Hosted by Abrons Arts Center, the event helped launch the 2015 Queer New York International Arts Festival in partnership with MixNYC, the queer experimental film festival. The cheerful pair greeted the audience after having led an EcoSex walking tour of Central Park earlier in the day. They shared a list of "25 Ways to Make Love to the Earth."

"Talk dirty to her plants" and "Love her unconditionally even when she's angry and cruel" were two standout suggestions. So, if you have not pieced it together already, ecosexuality--a state of mind, identity and practice open to anyone regardless of gender or orientation--derives from the notion that Earth is not Earth, Our Mother but Earth, Our Lover.

"Mommy's not going to take care of us," Stephens warns. "Mommy's tired." We have much work to do.

Through giddy imagination and wit, Sprinkle and Stephens shift the balance of power to inspire us to take a more direct role in the well-being of our planet. As they see it, the key to this new form of activism is bonding with nature through enlivened senses and pleasure--the sensation of slippery mud and gnarly tree bark and chlorophyll on one's skin. The pair have traveled around, staging weddings in which they get married to mountains and snow and the moon and what have you. And, you know what? I have no idea what "cloud sex" is, but I'm all for it.

In Spain, they married coal. In Stephens's West Virginia, they married a mountain and helped local activists draw awareness to the coal mining technique that imperils natural beauty, biodiversity, health, community and heritage. Goodbye Gauley Mountain shows what they're up against--a powerful industry holding the whip hand of steady employment over many workers who envision no other way to feed their families. But Stephens interviews others who know all too well what's going on, and their intellectual resistance--and deep love of the land--is most clear and ultimately moving.

To learn how you can see Goodbye Gauley Mountain, contact Stephens and Sprinkle here.

Closed.

Queer New York International Arts Festival continues events at Abrons through September 26. For information and tickets for other QNYIAF events, click here.

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

Company Cypher to open Katrina-themed play, September 24

Company Cypher announces the New York City premiere of award-winning Gutting, written by Jeremy J. Kamps and directed by Zoey Martinson. The play, inspired by events in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, addresses issues of gentrification and displacement.

When fourteen-year-old Kali returns home to New Orleans after spending two years as a Katrina refugee in Baton Rouge, she finds the neighborhood where she grew up to be changed almost beyond recognition.

Company Cypher’s non-profit work, dedicated to transforming the conversation about skin tone prejudice and race, goes beyond producing theater. Just as important as the show, our aim is to engage communities in conversation and direct action inspired by the production. To that end, Company Cypher’s Gutting and The Center for the Living City’s ‘Jane Jacobs Walk’ have launched an initiative that will engage community stakeholders in a conversation around urban development, displacement and the growing changes of local communities through a series of free neighborhood walking tours that help to put people in touch with their environment. 

See Gutting, September 24-26 and October 1-3: Thursdays-Saturdays at 7pm with additional afternoon matinees on Saturdays at 2pm.

Selected performances are followed by talkbacks with creative team and invited community leaders. Please check out the website for the full schedule. 

Tickets may be purchased at the door as well as online at gutting2015.org. Presales are highly recommended. For more information please email guttinginfo@gmail.com

Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre

2031 Fifth Avenue (between 125th and 126th Streets), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Melvin Bernhardt, 84

Melvin Bernhardt, Tony-Winning Director, Dies at 84
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, September 16, 2015

Frederick M. Winship, 90

FREDERICK M. WINSHIP (1924-2015)
UPI REPORTER, EDITOR AND CRITIC

Fred Winship, long time theater reviewer for UPI, died peacefully at 90 in his apartment on E. 57th Street in NYC on September 3, 2015. No cause of death was given; it was probably a sudden heart attack. He was writing a review of a play he had just seen when he died.

He was born on September 24th 1924 in Franklin Ohio, son of Wilbur William Winship and Edna Moery Winship.  He was the son of a paper manufacturing executive and member of a family active in journalism in Massachusetts, West Virginia, Indiana, and Ohio since the 1790s. He received a bachelor's degree in 1945 from DePauw University, where he was president of the founding chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalism fraternity.  He graduated in 1946 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and started his career on UPI's New York news desk.  He was a reporter, editor and critic for the wireservice for nearly 70 years.

He was known as one of UPI's most versatile writers, having covered, as he once said, "everything but sports." H. L. Stevenson, a longtime managing editor of UPI, called Winship "our triple threat man."  One of his first assignments was as correspondent at the new United Nations in its temporary headquarters in Lake Success, N. Y., and later at is permanent headquarters in Manhattan. There he covered one of the major stories of the day, the lengthy debate on the establishment of the State of Israel.

Winship later covered politics, the courts, social events, and cultural affairs in New York. A personal interest in the arts led him to expand UPI's coverage in this area and took him to many cities in the United States and abroad to cover museum exhibitions and to critique operatic, symphonic, and dance performances and theatrical events.

In 1958 he was named an Ogden Reid Journalism Fellow and spent a year studying the second five-year economic development program in India, where he already had traveled extensively on tours of the Far East. Other assignments took him to Europe, Africa. South America, and Australia, so that he had filed stories from six of the seven continents.

He wrote some of the earliest reports on the controversial planned city of Brasilia, now Brazil's capital; the discovery of Cheop's Solar Ship at the foot of the pharaoh's pyramid in Egypt; and the opening of the Soviet Union and China to tourism. He reported extensively on the glamorous marriage of American socialite Hope Cooke to the future king of Sikkim.

His interviews ranged from Sir Winston Churchill, President Harry S. Truman, hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to the pope of Cao Daiism - a politically powerful religious sect in pre-war Viet Nam, the Dalai Lama and Norgay Tenzing, co-conqueror of Mt. Everest.

He considered an interview with crusty architect Frank Lloyd Wright on the occasion of the completion of the Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum in New York as one of his most interesting encounters. Another was his exclusive interview with notorious murderer Nathan Leopold after his release from prison about his work as a scientific guinea pig in Puerto Rico.

He also was credited with inventing the word "smaze" to describe a combination of smoke and haze. He used it in reporting on a strange atmospheric condition caused by forest fires in 1950 and it was picked up by the U.S. Weather Service and later by the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's.

Winship was named UPI's assistant managing editor in charge of the new service's worldwide news feature and enterprise report in 1975.  In 1983 he was named senior editor for arts and theater and became UPI's Broadway drama critic, reviewing literally thousands of productions. Since 2000 he held the title Critic-at-Large for the Arts and Theater.

Winship was active in cultural and community affairs, and served as chairman of the Easter Seal Society of Greater New York, initiating its annual fund-raising telethon. For many years he was president of Letters Abroad, an affiliate of the U.S. Information Service's People-to-People Program. He was also chairman of The Oratorio Society of New York, the city's oldest choral group, president of the New York Conference of Patriotic Societies, and a member of the boards of the New York State Easter Seal Society, Museum of the City of New York, and Friends of the American Theater Wing.  He was a member of The Society of the Cincinnati and he was listed in The Social Register.  Since 1957, Winship was listed in Who's Who in America.

In 1967 he was married to Joanne Tree Thompson, a former screen, stage, and television actress who turned journalist, reporting on fashion and life style for UPI, AP and the New York Post. She died in 1997.

At his request he was cremated and his ashes are to be interred in his family plot at Woodhill Cemetery in Franklin, Ohio next to his beloved wife Joanne.

Survivors include: nieces Anna Hudson of NYC; Elizabeth Tannenbaum of Brattleboro,Vt; Randi Jane Lambert of  Punta Gorda, FL; Marguerite Ulrich of Alexandra, OH; and nephew William R. Knutson of Franklin, OH and 5 great nieces and four nephews.

#  #  #

For further information contact his niece, Anna Hudson, 615-975-1583, nanthudson@gmail.com.

Frank D. Gilroy,89

Frank D. Gilroy, Playwright Behind ‘The Subject Was Roses,’ Dies at 89
by Robert D. McFadden, The New York Times, September 13, 2015

Taking a chance on Carol Mendes at La MaMa

Verso
Carol Mendes & Artists
(photo: Nicolas Pirata)

Carol Mendes & Artists--the young company premiering LANOTTE+VERSO at La MaMa--is new to me, a happy discovery. Brazil-born Mendes, a Tisch grad, has promising talent and self-assurance. Moreover, she's blessed with dancers who completely get her.

In LANOTTE, Liszt is the jam for a trio of corvid-like women--Frankie Fernandes, Lauren Elise Kravitz and Erika Wuhrer--winged in black evening dresses. With a few winks and a silent scream to boot, they invoke the likes of Isadora and all Romantic, emotion-laden impulse in modern dance. And that's fun. But I think what Mendes means to get at here is the double-edged stuff that lies beneath her own surface and the art she's making. She hints at that again in her Interlude|Intermission, interjected between the program's two works, where she dances with and for a volunteer from the audience. A little awkward in its setup, this segment nevertheless shimmers with strangeness and command of the moment.

Opening the evening, LANOTTE might be a fair enough intro to the troupe, at once highlighting the dancers' formal technique and their madcap, go-for-it! drive. But Mendes's real calling card is VERSO, a clearer representation of her eccentricities and a proving ground for her dancers. Pantherish and punkish, their whimsy alternates with intrigue.

LANOTTE+VERSO continues through tomorrow, September 13, with performances tonight at 7:30pm and tomorrow at 3:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The First Floor Theatre @ La MaMa
74A East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

born of capitalism: koosil-ja at The Kitchen

In i am capitalism, her new project with collaborator Geoff Matters, dancer koosil-ja channels the soul-absent soul of capitalism while nicking movement from The Rite of Spring and Brazilian Candomblé ritual. Four modest-sized video monitors, showing samples of this source material, anchor the corners of a barren, white rectangle of performance space. These monitors face inward towards the dancer, tilted slightly upward. From their distance and particular angles, audience members might discern little more than the general, outward relationship of source to koosil-ja's movements. One appreciates being in the same room with a living body performing this dancing. Technology is not everything. But these samples do serve to establish the dancer's authority: you see she has worked hard to get things right.

i am capitalism could be, among other things, an exorcism for self and others. By the end, though, you might not feel all that cleansed.

The piece--let me warn you--lasts a bit over two hours without pause. You will feel the entire trapping weight of that time, especially deep into the second hour when several potential--and desired--endings only serve to open up new stretches of material. koosil-ja insists in showing you--and showing you and showing you--how one person's world narrows, how darkness gets mistaken and substituted, in the mind, for light. She's brilliantly right, and we get it...and get it...and get it.

i am capitalism inspired, in me, a love-hate relationship. The love is for koosil-ja whose clear maneuvers in space command interest. Initially dressed like someone assaulted by her own asymmetrical costume, she seems less the sacrificial victim of the Rite or the anxious speaker of her voiceover text than a capable body rising above any circumstance.  She has beautiful carriage, and her churning propulsion from or shaping and rotation around this reliable axis is bracing to witness.

This is, however, the same person who eventually makes us want i am capitalism to shut down already. Or maybe it's the "psyche of capitalism"--irrational, delirious, at the crossroads of desire--that she makes us want to see crash to its finish. In any case, she works up to drawing the hate part of love-hate to herself like heat draws a heat-seeking missile. She's taking it on--victim and victimizer all in one, just as she says in her voiceover, how we become both.

How else to explain the completely maddening final passage? Here the choreographer, along with Matters and Melissa Guerrero, show up in over-sized, thin white hoodies with large paper iPod scroll wheels afixed to their solar plexus. It's like something a really bright kid might dream up for Halloween--the ghostees of legacy-model iPods. (Capitalism. Get it?) Obsessively tracing, eventually altering geometric tracks, the hunched-over hulks crisscross the floor--back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and--almost without cease as the clock ticks closer and closer to 10:20.

On opening night, some audience members made a run for it, taking unauthorized restroom breaks or simply heading out into the rain. And who could blame them for taking excellent care of themselves? Art can pull us into the artist's head. Hauled deep into koosil-ja's recurring nightmare of capitalism, which she insists in making our own, the viewer wants out--now!

With music by koosil-ja and Geoff Matters, percussion by Brian Chase. Video by Geoff Matters. Lighting by Ryan Seelig.

koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO's i am capitalism continues through Saturday, September 12, with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Candida Royalle, 64

Candida Royalle, Maker of X-Rated Films, Dies at 64
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, September 10, 2015

Won't stop: Jeanine Durning's new "To Being"

Jeanine Durning, Julian Barnett and Molly Poerstel
(photo: Ian Douglas)

With To Being we are asking: What is at stake? Where is the end? What does it take to stay in action? And how can we give more when we feel that we’ve met our limit? 

-- Jeanine Durning

When you're about to do what Jeanine Durning and her partners do in To Being, it's more than reasonable to ease your way into it. After all, what you plan to do will take force and stamina to a maniacal degree and, in excess of an hour, demand your complete mental and physical will. To Being--which just opened at The Chocolate Factory--requires something of the same from the empathic viewer. In the presence of these dancers, you might flip from feeling startled to feeling tickled to feeling absolutely spent.

Durning calls her process "nonstopping," and she first gave audiences a taste in her solo, inging (2010), where it was largely a phenomenon of the voice or "unscripted nonstop languaging," as she would have it. In the new work, To Being, Durning, Julian Barnett and an impish Molly Poerstel--accompanied by sound designer Tian Rotteveel--bring us nonstopping as disruptive acts of the body.

Audience seating is scarce and widely scattered around the edges of the theater's bright white space. You come in and take any chair. One or more of the performers might drift through, sometimes ambling by to say hello or give a hug to an audience member. And this amiable, apparent nothing-ing goes on for a while until the performers suddenly vacate the space, and one theater light fires up, signaling...what exactly?

In the absence of an immediate something, the audience's coughs and rustling amplify, and that stretches on for another awkward while. Then: a loud bustle from beyond the entrance, from the metal staircase. What?

From the moment the dancers burst through the entrance, they're on, violently, with little transition or drop in energy. If they were sounds--aside from their audible gasps--they would be blaring dissonance. They disturb the atmosphere with their jutting, threshing arms, lashing torsos, jabbing elbows. Being that refuses to stop.

One gets why Durning rejects the word "continuous" as a description of her movement qualities. That word indeed sounds too soft and flow-y. Nonstopping looks--feels, to the empath--like battle, like resistance to the very idea that you cannot do what you will to do.

As Durning wrote in her program notes, "nonstop points to the critical nature of what it takes to keep going in the midst of, and despite, questions, doubts, limitations, and, of course, inevitable failures." She came to this practice after many questions, some of them regarding why she continues to make work and if she should.

Objects in the way--a speaker, a tangle of electric cords, a radiator, a wall--are commandeered and roughly used, often to create flashes of sound. You sometimes worry for a dancer's safety; you always admire the currency of thought and commitment.

With lighting by Joe Levasseur

To Being runs through September 19 with remaining shows this week tonight through Saturday and September 16-19, all at 8pm. Durning will reprise inging Wednesday through Saturday, September 23-26 with 8pm performances. Remember, seating is very limited.

For information on both productions and ticket availability, click here.

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

Memorial gathering planned for Blondell Cummings

Blondell Cummings
(photo: Jack Mitchell)

The life of Blondell Cummings--dance artist, activist, friend and inspiration to many--will be celebrated on Sunday, October 4 (5-7pm) in a gathering at New York Live Arts.

Facebook event page

New York Live Arts

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Dennis Greene, 66

Dennis Greene, a Singer With Sha Na Na, Dies at 66
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, September 9, 2015

Gabrielle Burton, 76

Gabrielle Burton, Feminist Novelist and Screenwriter, Dies at 76
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, September 9, 2015

Simon Dove will succeed Davidson at Dancing in the Streets

Simon Dove
(photo: Simon Dove)

Aviva Davidson, outgoing Executive and Artistic Director of Dancing in the Streets, has announced her successor--Simon Dove, former Director of the School of Dance at Arizona State University. Dove will take the helm of the South Bronx-based organization on January 1, 2016.

Davidson calls Dove "a visionary arts leader," one well-positioned to continue and build upon the relationships and collaborative projects she has established--such as the South Bronx Culture Trail with Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education--while forging new local and international collaborations.

Founded in 1984 by Elise Bernhardt and noted for site-specific and community-oriented projects, Dancing in the Streets moved its headquarters to the South Bronx in 2011.

“The organization has an impeccable history of creating compelling performance work in vibrant community settings around New York City, as well as providing important platforms for many of the city’s own Urban art forms," says Dove. "I look forward to broadening and deepening this work; developing new projects that can engage the diversity of New York’s communities, further artists’ creative practices in community contexts, and showcase the power, vitality and importance of urban cultures.”

Simon Dove is an experienced arts leader, curator and educator, and currently co-curator of Crossing the Line, the annual trans-disciplinary fall festival in New York City. He was Professor of Practice and Director of the School of Dance at Arizona State University from 2007 to 2012. Simon Dove was Artistic and Executive Director of Springdance, the international festival of new developments in dance and performance in the Netherlands from 2000 to 2007. Prior to that he ran one of the first National Dance Agencies in the U.K, the Yorkshire Dance Centre in Leeds, was the founder and Artistic Director of Vivarta – the first contemporary South Asian performance festival in the U.K. He contributed
to national dance policy development with the Arts Council of Great Britain, and programmed an innovative arts centre in London. He has also written for the Performance and South Asian press, devised and presented a series for BBC Radio 3 on Dance and Music, and extensively mentored students and professional artists from many countries in developing their creative practice.

For more information on Dancing in the Streets, click here.

Brad Anderson, 91

Brad Anderson, Creator of ‘Marmaduke,’ Dies at 91
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, September 8, 2015

John Perreault, 78

John Perreault, Critic, Artist and Poet, Dies at 78
by William Grimes, The New York Times, September 8, 2015

Rutgers seeks applicants for new Dance MFA program

 Choreography by LeeSaar The Company, Blood (2015)
(photo: Jaqlin Medlock)

Applications are now being accepted for the new MFA in Dance at Rutgers University--a program full of vision, goals and flexible scheduling, including off-campus thesis research. First required audition will take place in Philadelphia on Sunday, October 25, 2015.

For more information, click here.
Email: admissions@masongross.rutgers.edu
Call: 848-932-5269

Martin Milner, 83

Martin Milner Dies at 83; Actor Made His Name on ‘Route 66’
by Anita Gates, The New York Times, September 7, 2015

Judy Carne, 76

Judy Carne, ‘Sock It to Me’ Girl on ‘Laugh-In,’ Dies at 76
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, September 7, 2015

These days, we need some (funny) standup people! Free!

Need a laugh or two...or three?

OMG, why wouldn't you?

Free Standup Festival 2015
September 5-11

Various locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens--from The Knitting Factory to Creek and the Cave

Co-producers Joe Gerics and Andrew Bayroff promise "some of the top comics seen on Late Night with David Letterman, Craig Ferguson, Comedy Central, Inside Amy Schumer, Last Comic Standing, and much more!"

And did I mention that it's all free?

Check out the full calendar of events here.

Let's go see some dance...at the movies!

Maria Kochetkova dances as Juliet
in San Francisco Ballet's Romeo & Juliet
Photo ©Erik Tomasson

Lincoln Center at the Movies: Great American Dance (GAD) series launches September 24 with San Francisco Ballet's production of Romeo & Juliet by the company's artistic director and principal choreographer, Helgi Tomasson.
 

Cast:

Maria Kochetkova (Juliet)

Davit Karapetyan (Romeo)

Pascal Molat (Mercutio)

Joseph Walsh (Benvolio)

Luke Ingham (Tybalt)

"LIVE with Kelly and Michael" stars Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan are the hosts of the new cinema series, Lincoln Center at the Movies: Great American Dance, which brings spectacular dance performances by four of America’s leading dance companies to more than 600 movie theaters throughout the US--including 22 in the New York metro area--in fall and winter of 2015.

Upcoming screenings include works by Alvin Ailey, Wayne McGregor and Ronald K. Brown.

Tickets for Romeo & Juliet and all Lincoln Center at the Movies screenings are available at FathomEvents.com and at participating theater box offices. For a complete list of theater locations visit the Fathom Events website (theaters and participating box offices are subject to change).

For more information visit LincolnCenterattheMovies.org.

Pinel and Long: Choreography and the Goldilocks Principle

A moment from Nocturne by Alexandra Pinel
(photo: Brian Austin)

Choreography can tell too little. Or it can tell too much. A show of works by Alexandra Pinel and Vanessa Long, last night at Dixon Place, left me feeling like Goldilocks looking for something that's just right.

Pinel's four light-footed dancers squiggle across Allison Ball's video backdrop of animated contours which, in the dance's opening passage, resemble nestled, mute-colored lines of a topographic map. The dancers, themselves, could be abstracted features of a shifting landscape--arching away from the floor or rolling across it, skittering sideways or twirling. There's a toggling of outlandishness--in gait, in intensity--and fashion runway coolness, giving this work some quirky interest at the outset. You do wonder what comes next.

Pinel's strength appears to lie in her easy musicality, but Nocturne's techno beat landscape fails to inspire dance ideas with roots and development. Ideas arise--have the four women face one another in a close, dynamic and then looser circle; have dancers, for some reason, make slurping sounds when they lunge or extend; pose them face down with their butts wiggling for a second before they drum their fingertips into the floor. Stringing together these momentary bits sheds no light on the purpose of the work as a whole. An unclear, awkward ending does not help.

If I read the program right, Long's work is named for her company, Vanessa Long Dance Company LLC. As such, it's fair to think of it as a calling card. And, as such, it represents its eleven-member cast extremely well--in particular, Justin Heim, a standout as sharp as one of those hypodermic needles used as a prop in the piece. But, really, all of the dancers are in good form--brave and on target--in this demanding piece.

VLDCLLC--forgive the acronym--has much on its agenda. The choreographer's skills at gestural drama--literal, often cartoonish, sometimes feverishly so--make Long's ideas quite evident, delivered with no measure of subtlety. Let's check them off: We spend too much time looking at our electronic devices. We don't spend enough time looking at one another. We are busy, hectic urbanites. We are too competitive, in a soul-gutting rat race of winners and losers. We are driving ourselves crazy and drugging ourselves to death. We are in an emergency and woefully unprepared, groping around in the dark with only LED tea lights to decorate Apocalypse.

Long's capability and drive are undeniable, but we probably don't need a dramatic dance to illustrate these observations, at least not to this degree.

Closed. For information on the upcoming fall season at Dixon Place, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Barbara Brecht-Schall, 84

Barbara Brecht-Schall, Guardian of Father’s Plays, Dies at 84
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, September 2, 2015

Dean Jones, 84

Dean Jones, Star of Disney’s ‘The Love Bug,’ Dies at 84
by Mike Flaherty, The New York Times, September 2, 2015

Isadora and more: Jucovy takes her visions to LI

Beth Jucovy (left) and Adrienne Ramm
in Morning Star
(photo courtesy of Beth Jucovy)

Beth Jucovy's Dance Visions NY--a contemporary troupe devoted to the choreography of Isadora Duncan--will present a series of free shows this fall at several Long Island locations. The program includes the full Duncan repertory to the 2nd act of Orfeo ed Euridice as well as Jucovy's new Through the Portals and works from repertory.

Oct. 11, 2pm:

West Hempstead Library

500 Hempstead Avenue, West Hempstead 

516-481-6591

Oct. 16, 7:30pm:

East Meadow Library

1886 Front Street, East Meadow

516-794-2570

Nov. 1, 1:30pm:

Universalist Unitarian Congregation Shelter Rock

48 Shelter Rock Rd, Manhasset

516-627-6560

Dec. 6, 2:30pm:

Bryant Library

2 Papermill Road, Roslyn

516-621-2240

Click here to learn more about this troupe and its upcoming projects.

Blondell Cummings, 70

Blondell Cummings, Dancer of Life’s Everyday Details, Dies at 70
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, September 1, 2015

Legendary dance artist Blondell Cummings passes

RIP, Blondell Cummings

This morning, our dance community is reeling from the news that a beloved veteran artist and advocate for social justice, Blondell Cummings, has died. Few people were aware that Blondell had pancreatic cancer.

I hope to have more information for you later today. For now, here is a recording of her most recent appearance as moderator of a roundtable discussion at 92Y's Fridays at Noon program. The event opened with a performance of Manufacturing Consent by Edisa Weeks.

Blondell Cummings--Point of Reference

March 27, 2015