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Saturday, February 27, 2016

Harkness Dance Festival: Keely Garfield Dance in "POW"

Molly Lieber and Keely Garfield
in Garfield's POW
(photo: Julie Lemberger)

The dancing body is exposed to the golden wind and shines through.
--Keely Garfield

Keely Garfield calls POW--presented this weekend at 92Y's Harkness Dance Festival--"a 'Frankenstein' of a dance made from scraps of fear and loathing that are boldly transformed, sutured, amplified and left to run amok, creating a brave new version of events."

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein character was the creator, not his creation, the monster. Maybe, in some sense, that's relevant, too.

POW does seem, like Frankenstein's poor monster, a fragile, vulnerable construction, one with a look of intense, obsessive labor about it. The hour-long ensemble work--a trio plus pianist/singer Matthew Brookshire--might inspire the viewer to zoom out to consider every contour and suture of the whole production, observing how beauty and disturbance lie a mere thin veil away from each other. On the other hand, particular imagery and energies, here and there, might ensnare you, a valid way to respond to the too-muchness of it all.


Garfield's opening solo
(photo: Julie Lemberger)

Garfield first presents herself as a woman precariously striding about and rocking her hips in a sheer mesh unitard--a cross of white tape covering one nipple--and firetruck-red, fringed stillettos. This reads, immediately, as extravagance crossed with eccentricity, and get used to the fact of much matter-of-fact crisscrossing in POW and little by way of explanation for it.

There might be a reason for dancers Paul Hamilton and Molly Lieber to show up in matching black leotards that read "I Only Got Ice For You." Or there might not be. But molding these two bodies into the space--frequently evoking un-theatrical but full-out movements of champion athletes, frequently testing power of statuesque balance against gravity--illustrates Garfield's interest in the commitment and heroism of dance/the body in the face of ultimate extinction, exposed to the golden wind. Much of POW alludes to extremity and the eternal in ways that seem squeezed between the cornball and the genuinely moving. Just try pulling them in one direction or the other. They won't budge.


Garfield and Hamilton
(photo: Julie Lemberger)

Some things, for me, did not resolve. I resisted Brookshire's intermittent role in the performance even as I got it. But one section of the work absolutely gripped me--Garfield and Hamilton crawling, rhythmically lumbering across the floor to (and with) Rihanna's stunning reggae-pop song "No Love Allowed."
Like a bullet your love me hit me to the coreI was flying 'til you knocked me to the floorAnd it's so foolish how you keep me wanting moreI'm screaming murderer, how could you murder usI call it murder, no love allowed
No coincidence, I take it, that Hamilton is a Black Jamaican and Garfield white and British-born and that she ultimately mounts his back and presses his body to the floor. We see that and cannot un-see it, cannot un-think its implication.

Without warning, Garfield drops her audience into the mess of race, societal and domestic violence, white privilege, all of that while producing the kind of movement that, against our will, rocks our insides. As if that's not enough, the two dancers also cram their heaving bodies against the legs of a couple of people in the front row as if to say, "You think you're not part of this, but you are. Take what is yours, too."

POW continues through Sunday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan

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Thursday, February 25, 2016

Malcolm Low premieres "Speakeasy" at Gibney Dance

Mei Yamanaka (above)
Malcolm Low with Yamanaka (below)
 in Low's Speakeasy
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Malcolm Low’s new work draws upon his experience of growing up gay in a religious black family, imagining a utopian environment where the challenges of confronting race, homophobia, shame, and loss give way to clarity and candor.
--from promotion for Speakeasy, a world premiere by Malcolm Low
...you begin to discover that you are moving and you can’t stop this movement to what looks like the edge of the world. Now what is crucial, and one begins to understand it much, much later, is that if you were this hypothetical artist, if you were in fact the dreamer that everybody says you are, if in fact you were wrong not to settle for the things that you cannot for some mysterious reason settle for, if this were so, the testimony in the eyes of other people would not exist. The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not…
--from James Baldwin's The Artist's Struggle for Integrity

Malcolm Low (of Malcolm Low/Formal Structure) takes on the famously odd theater space at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center in his strange, sprawling Speakeasy.  Clocking in at less than an hour, the piece looks and sounds like one of those vivid, epic dreams splicing radically different environments and plot points that make you wake up and go, Whoa! What??

The dreaminess begins in the way Low shifts the audience's gaze from the conventional front and, for a long stretch, rigidly angles that gaze far to the right into the dimly-lit, mirror-lined area recessed beyond a stand of columns. Dancer Simone Sobers, dressed in glitter short-shorts, grooves to spooky atmosphere and click-clack beats DJ'ed by composer Ben Coleman on his laptop.  She's pumping hips, softly flinging arms to the repetitions. After a while, Low joins her in her private dancehall, throwing out similar moves, giving off a timeless feeling.

The words "nothing special" came to mind, but I don't mean it as an insult. Rather it felt like a familiar, common response to dance music, just ordinary people doing a most-basic social dance and not really caring that they were being watched--one of three ways of movement you'll find in Speakeasy. Likely, it tells one story about Low. And so does the second way of movement, developing a little later in the central part of the theater. This involves Low's spongey, rubbery response to space and other beings in space with notable lack of affectation or arrogance or aggression.

The third, exemplified in Mei Yamanaka and Erick Montes-Chavero's breathtaking duet, brought to mind another unexpected phrase--"anti-togetherness togetherness." I have no idea if these words fit the intent, or who these two people might be to each other. However, individually and as partners, they pack tons of surprise and dynamism. Here's the hotspot of the dream, the place you yearn to revisit, if you can, and mine for meaning.

A speakeasy is where you are when you're not supposed to be there. A place of self-indulgence and pleasure and risk. Do and say what you will while under threat of discovery. Low's establishment at Gibney creates space(s) for everything from voiceover porn narratives to Voice-of-God declarations from James Baldwin. (Baldwin. Now there's some "clarity and candor" for ya). Resounding with Coleman's bold textures, Low's speakeasy affords compartmentalized spaces and elements that don't stay compartmentalized; they collide, wash over, overlap even as you think, Is this supposed to be happening? His artist's head roils with imagery, characters, forbidden, inflammatory words, ideas, preoccupations, histories, mysteries and selves.

Text: James Salter
Video: Onome Ekeh
Lighting: Asami Morita

Speakeasy continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Monday, February 22, 2016

Panelists announced for April's Not The Master's Tools

Katy Pyle will discuss how The Ballez
"inserts the herstory of lesbian, queer and transgender lives"
and "disrupts the exclusionary form of ballet."
(photo courtesy of Katy Pyle)

I'm delighted 
to announce my next panel:

Not The Master's Tools IV

with presentations by


Benjamin Kimitch
Katy Pyle
Kazu Kumagai
Nia Love

sharing their experiences, discoveries, 
alternative strategies and philosophies 
as dance artists in New York

moderated by
Eva Yaa Asantewaa


Tuesday
Help us spread the news,


"The Master’s Tools 
Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
– essay by Audre Lorde, 1984


If you like what you're reading,
subscribe to InfiniteBody!

Panelists announced for April's Not The Master's Tools

Katy Pyle will discuss how The Ballez
"inserts the herstory of lesbian, queer and transgender lives"
and "disrupts the exclusionary form of ballet."
(photo courtesy of Katy Pyle)


Not The Master's Tools IV

with presentations by


Benjamin Kimitch
Katy Pyle
Kazu Kumagai
Nia Love

sharing their experiences, discoveries, 
alternative strategies and philosophies 
as dance artists in New York

moderated by
Eva Yaa Asantewaa



It's free!

Help us spread the news,


"The Master’s Tools 
Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
– essay by Audre Lorde, 1984


If you like what you're reading,
subscribe to InfiniteBody!

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Setterfield and Scott ask "Who is Lear?"

Valda Setterfield's sublimity (there's no other word for it) and her postmodern cred--dancing for Merce Cunningham and husband David Gordon--place her in the highest echelon of "downtown" royalty. Now, in Lear--a collaboration with Irish dancemaker John Scott at New York Live Arts--she plays a king, sort of. But if you're looking for Shakespeare's King Lear, go curl up with a copy.

At first sight, Setterfield reflects the true nature of her kingship and of this dance-theater piece. Her crown: a childish, white paper cutout flattened around her head. Her stride: direct but understated, drama-free. When was the last time a monarch tossed little wrapped candies at you?

You will wisely note the title--Lear, not King Lear--and contemplate the possibility that, for this character, status is already beside the point, a thing of the past or no longer of consequence.

Setterfield first breathes a few simple words: "Family. Love. Children...." Her arms and hands flutter but without fuss, merely hinting at tradition or story. "Daughters. Kingdom. Death." She seems to summon these things from within herself and, before long, "daughters" do indeed appear.

Solemnly pacing or pelting back and forth, three male dancers embody daughters Goneril (Marcus Bellamy), Regan (Ryan O'Neill) and Cordelia (Keven Coquelard), presenting a dilemma to Lear. Who truly loves Lear? Clever, seductive declarations ensue, as do conflicts, elaborately imagined in language and movement. The daughters appear to be devices that--irritating and irritable--rock Lear back to something resembling life.

Setterfield and Scott took the inspiration for Lear from shared experience--their dying fathers. They sample Shakespeare but keep us constantly aware of the today-ness of their personal investment in the themes and outline of the source material. And they do so with a light hand, humor, modest ambition and the reliability of Setterfield's clarity and restraint.

At the end, alone in the space, she revisits some of her earliest, and most mysterious, gestures as if re-folding the energy of the three conjured, now-vanished daughters into her body.

The John Scott Dance production of Lear concludes this evening with a 7:30pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Friday, February 19, 2016

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Hooray! We've got another NTMT panel in the works!

Friends, I have a blessed life. Not a perfect life but blessed. And one of the strongest blessings is being almost constantly surrounded by artists and getting to experience and think about their work. It has been a saving grace in times of personal and societal struggle. I have learned so much from artists, and that is one reason I love the opportunity to invite artists to speak at my Not The Master's Tools panels at Gibney Dance Center so that they can share what they know. Last evening's session, our third, was HIGH ENERGY, and I thank Ali Rosa-Salas, Dan Safer, Maria Bauman and Jack Ferver for their forthright and motivating contributions. Thanks also to Craig Thomas Peterson, Margaret Tudor and Nora Alami at Gibney for their welcome and support.

If you haven't yet attended a NTMT panel, know that we already have another one in the works. You will get a lot from listening to these artists.

Save Tuesday, April 5 (6-8pm)!

All of the artists on my wishlist for this panel have said yes, and I can barely wait to bring them to you. So hold April 5, tell your friends and colleagues and watch for the announcement and RSVP link. Thanks!

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Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Monday, February 15, 2016

Join us on Wednesday for "Not The Master's Tools Part III"

Ali Rosa-Salas
Jack Ferver


Maria Bauman
Dan Safer

We're all expecting you! So, join us this Wednesday, February 17 (6-8pm) for the third edition of Not The Master's Tools at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center.

I'm excited to be moderating a new panel including:

Maria Bauman
Jack Ferver
Ali Rosa-Salas
and
Dan Safer

sharing their experiences, discoveries, alternative strategies and philosophies as artists, arts advocates and activists in New York.

If you've joined us for previous editions of NTMT at Gibney, you know how full and valuable these discussions have been. Please don't miss your opportunity to meet and learn from our speakers, and bring your own thoughts and questions for our Q&A period.

NTMT is FREE. Please pass this announcement along to your friends and colleagues in dance and performance.


We look forward to seeing you!

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Friday, February 12, 2016

"Atlantic Terminus": Jon Kinzel's residency at Invisible Dog

ATLANTIC TERMINUS – JON KINZEL
Jon Kinzel
(photo: Erica Freudenstein)

Out of the blustery night, I arrived at The Invisible Dog Art Center around 7:15 only to find the space behind its streetfront windows pitch-dark. Puzzled, I reached for the doorknob anyway. It yielded to me.

For some reason, I'd had the start time for Atlantic Terminus, Jon Kinzel's performance, as 7:30, not 7pm. Even so, as I peered around the ground-floor space, it looked as it nothing was shaking. A faint glow emanated from something on the floor, but where was the audience? Had I made the trip from Manhattan in vain?

As it turned out, people were standing in random spots around the space, but it was a while before Kinzel lit a small light revealing himself, guest artist Jodi Melnick and a smattering of watchers.  I felt much relieved to see them but dismayed that I'd clearly arrived late.

Some context:
Atlantic Terminus rests on the pretext of using Kinzel’s own belongings as a set. Evolving over two weeks, he will sustain an onsite multi-faceted studio practice in the gallery creating new work daily. He aims to disclose his particular history of making connections between visual art and performance since 1988. Invited guests, collaborations, and set and improvised performances will contribute to the process and over all installation. Integral to the show will be the task of cataloguing and exhibiting some of his 25+ years of works on paper: drawings that informed his shows at The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, PS 122, Danspace Project, and Dixon Place among others. This will also serve to provide an unprecedented opportunity to share — a retrospective gesture — his ongoing interest in how kinesthetic and visceral sensibilities can be brought into engagement with visual thinking.

Kinzel is open-mined [sic] about ways in which a consensual relationship between audience and performer can allow both parties to engage in an atmosphere in which a very special “social” equilibrium is possible. He sees his work as collaboration between performer and audience, and as such there will always be unknown and uncontrollable elements, which provide a desirable tension to the experience on both sides.
That "open-mined" might be accurate. He's open to mining his journey and--with appropriate lighting--we could see evidence of an extensive engagement with paper and marking, including a table of supplies and tools in strict, neat arrangement. It was also nearly impossible, as an audience member, to wander about without coming into contact with drawings collaged on the floors or posted or stacked elsewhere. Much delicateness and vulnerability here in this open-mining.

Of course, for me, the performance was truncated. I only got to see both dancers vigorously swiping at taped-up drawings with wooden sticks as if whacking piñatas; Kinzel wriggling a long Mylar streamer in a kind of ribbon dance; Kinzel raising a charming paper cutout "sail" and moving a light around it; and Kinzel repairing to another part of the space to dance a bit of movement which, interestingly, made him look a bit like a charming paper cutout "sail." And, with perhaps no more than ten minutes of that, the performance was over.

Atlantic Terminus's remaining performances are tonight at 7pm and Saturday, February 13, at 7pm. Remember: 7pm, not 7:30! For information and tickets, click here.

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(directions/map link)

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Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Monday, February 8, 2016

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Seven emerging artists make tracks at New York Live Arts

Dance tends to be a highly sensory experience for me, less of a head experience. And it's my senses, my instincts, my gut that I trust first, if not exclusively. If your work comes packaged in words (for funders, for presenters, for press, for your closest colleagues), I might or might not find them useful or, ultimately, reflective of what I've experienced.

So, sometimes I just don't get it. I have to look past what you've written (or has been written about you) to see you. And maybe that means I'm not seeing you the way you want to be seen. But there it is. Think of me as that outsider from another planet who does not share your language now or yet or ever.

Case in point, the language surrounding this season's edition of Fresh Tracks--part of an extensive program for early-career choreographers at New York Live Arts--which will be repeated tonight. Some of the verbiage accompanying works from the current individual artists and duos I get and appreciate. Some of it looks hopelessly opaque to me. I just need to say that straight up.

Melanie Greene’s Performing Okay solos is described as conjuring "a curious contradiction of meaning, quality, and intention as one word sits simultaneously within competing body and language narratives. It sparks questions surrounding repetition, physicality, and language."

The solo is handsomely performed, fascinating, intermittently amusing and emotionally moving, and I suspect that descriptive language around it might speak to Greene's peers (other young choreographers) more than it does to me. What's going on in Performing Okay as I see it? I see a young woman, a Black woman, a young Black woman artist in New York literally struggling with the impulse to tell her truth--which is that she's not always okay--and the ingrained habit of hiding it. That's real and something worth dancing about. Maybe it's not a good idea for an artist to speak too clearly about such things before people have had a chance to sit their butts down in the theater, though. So, I would have been content to be completely surprised by the clear human beauty and meaning in this dance and not be searching for the abstractions dryly listed in its promotional statement.

Sarah Lifson’s i eat pancakes for dinner, we're told "is freedom, free will, and free verse. It concerns itself with consumption, and the active vs. passive infiltration of information into our cells."

In a queer way, I get the freedom part, and I like the implication of movement as free verse. (And pancakes for dinner? Girl, pass me some.) Her performance starts by taking us by surprise--a dash into and out of the space, flailing all the way. Then she leaves us to chuckle at the empty space. Next, a little bomb of music drops--splat!--then abruptly cuts off. When Lifson finally returns to the space, she's all flapping arms and hands; loose, angular body pelting here and there. With one arm rigidly restrained by the other, she zooms forward, aiming to poke a woman in the front row. She observes no boundaries. Her sense of space, time and even lighting are all equally offbeat, equally heedless. But "consumption, and the active vs. passive infiltration of information into our cells" are things she knows and that I don't see.

The earnest, comprehensive description for EmmaGrace Skove-Epes and Jonathan González's now-titled I'd give you Bodies reads:
Mining collaborative as well as personal movement histories, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes and Jonathan González’s yet-to-be-titled work investigates the disparities and similarities that lie between our bodies culturally, socially, and artistically. Harmony and dissonance continually emerge in their identity markers as a queer identified white woman and a queer identified brown man. While experimenting with the physical aspects of disorientation, duration, momentum, and intimacy, the manifold aspects of their identities, creative visions, and creative histories also become physical realities at play.
None of that conveys the keen, strange theatrical experience of overhearing these dancers apparently colliding and thrashing in the dark over a lengthy period with only a glimmer of their coordinates in space. They conduct an entire relationship in sound--which, oddly enough, sounds sexual--largely hidden from our sight. At one point, one does turn on a flashlight, the beam of which acts more as attractive decor against the dark of the stage than useful illumination of the performers. Eventually, lights reveal them, and the remaining time might show what we could not see and may or may not have misinterpreted--an attachment that looks complex and troublesome. A lot of humanity to look at and process. Skove-Epes and González are skillful, searching artists, and--as I've noticed in González's previous work--they seem intent on subverting how people watch and performers function within theatrical space.

The description for Eli Tamondong's solo (with audience helpers) Feast or Famine, might (just maybe) tell a little too much too soon, but it at least explicitly connects us to living human experience and gets the whole of my attention:
Melding dance and spoken word, Eli Tamondong’s Feast or Famine struggles with American masculinity and love through a queer Filipino boy’s eyes. Tinikling, a traditional Philippine dance, and ballet collide over golf commentary and gay sex, coming-of-age in a world of fetishization and colonized bodies. Entangled by white love, how does this boy find value in all colors?
My wife likes to say that some Hollywood trailers show you everything you need to know about a movie--for better or worse--and, then, why do you have to see it? Nevertheless, this dance's description offers some guidance to the stark, poetic and multi-sensory experience of Tamandong's performance. His visual and sonic approach is bold and unsettling, effective and not to be forgotten.

In Hope So Hard, Georgia Wall and Itamar Segev are, we learn, "topless, wearing only baggy white cotton briefs which resemble diapers or modern day loincloths. They merge and disperse, searching and subverting trying, to burst open lust and prayer. Georgia loves to alter her body. Itamar can make her cry when he sings."

Like the previous artists, Wall and Segev find ways to tear down the fourth wall and mess with lighting, structure and all sense of propriety. I'm just not sure why, and I'm also not sure what's fresh about this particular track.

"Fresh Tracks" concludes tonight with a 7:30pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Friday, February 5, 2016

Welcome to Paradise!

Displaying 3-TaraOCon_JoshuaReaverphotobyDarialSneed.jpg
Scene from The Grand Paradise,
the new production from award-winning Third Rail Projects
(photo: Darial Sneed)
Displaying 10+Elizabeth+Carena.jpg
Elizabeth Carena plays The Siren
in The Grand Paradise.
(photo: Joshua Reaver)

The Grand Paradise--the sexy new confection from Third Rail Projects of Bessie-winning Then She Fell fame--takes place in a cleverly simulated tropical resort. For two hours, "vacationers" get to drift from room to room watching and engaging with a cast of saucy characters in search of the Fountain of Youth.

Immersive physical theater in quirky, lavishly re-designed locations has become TRP's specialty, and the directorial team of Zach Morris, Tom Pearson and Jennine Willett ground it all in dance. Performers clamber all over high and dicey surfaces like mountain goats and handle one another's bodies with gleeful audacity. Dreamy, often ecstatic movement sequences, performed in tight quarters, vie with more intimate, semi-private interludes between resort guests and characters for offering the most delight.

Unlike another critic, I refuse to divulge every last detail of this paradisiacal experience. You should come to The Grand Paradise fairly fresh. A little shyness or bemusement is okay, too. You'll be well taken care of, sweetly so.

Really, it's all for you--the piped-in '70s-style lounge music, the mystery beverages (which can be declined), the self-help advice about setting sail for your "geography of desire." At the core of all the breathless phenomena and bustle is a genuine, and quite gentle, invitation to free your mind--or your ass, as Funkadelic would have it, which will serve up the same result. Whether you find the means of delivery provocative and motivational or hokey depends upon you.

Like Then She Fell (still running), The Grand Paradise might end up running and running and running some more, but the stated end date is March 31. Get all information, schedule and tickets here.

The Grand Paradise
383 Troutman Street (near Jefferson Street station), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Thursday, February 4, 2016

robbinschilds spells "Hex" at Gibney

Hex probes the complexities surrounding authorship, specifically how each collaborator influences the outcome of a day’s work, the building of material, and ultimately the finished composition. By exposing the cooperative agency in the construction of artistic vocabulary, Hex expands the notion of creator.
--from publicity for Hex 
Postmodern choreographers often pose questions or assign themselves challenges that seem mainly addressed to their peers. And just look around at who's sitting in the seats, supporting and grappling with the work--their peers. It's an inside job, a subset of the big, wide world of dance (even just that portion of it fighting for life in New York), a world in which values, philosophies, methods, needs and aspirations are quite diverse.

Portion of Hedia Maron's video for Hex
(photo: Scott Shaw)
Anna Azrieli (top) with Eleanor Smith in Hex
(photo: Scott Shaw)

The dancing in Hex--an hour-long video/live work by robbinschilds at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center--strikes me as a prime example of this situation. It's populated by interesting individual movers--Aretha AokiAnna AzrieliBessie McDonough-ThayerEleanor SmithMariana Valencia--overshadowed by premise and staging. Here, robbinschilds directors Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs yield authorship to these dancers as choreographers. The sixth maker--Vanessa Anspaugh--does not perform live in the piece.
We are committed to our cooperative practice as a means of subverting the archetypal 'male' trope of solo-creator. For this reason we see the process of collaboration not merely as a creative strategy, but also a feminist platform from which to cull a stronger collective vision.
--from "A short manifesto on Hex" by robbinschilds
The audience enters Gibney's Studio C to see four projection screens extended around the broad performance area, two of the screens divided to show two different scenes of the choreographers at work on solos that the ensemble will then take up as material to explore. We watch these images for a while, perhaps most naturally drawn in by the crisp intensity in Hedia Maron's closeups of Valencia and Azrieli.

Otherwise, where to look? Without received direction, our eyes flit and roam, scanning the screens, taking in fragments, randomly piecing one bit with another and another. In a real sense, watchers add to the authorship, and I wonder if Robbins and Childs factored us in.

The soundscape (Dana Wachs/Vorhees) often suggests street-side construction. The live performing seems fragmentary and accumulative, too. A single dancer first appears in the space--McDonough-Thayer, if I recall correctly--but we don't see other dancers in waiting, percolating in the open space to the rear of our seating. Something made me turn my head, though, and I noticed them. Over the course of the dance, one or more drifted into view or returned to this dark recess.  And, again, as a watcher (author?), I found I could relate--leaning in or leaning out from time to time.

Hex runs through Saturday, February 6. Performances are at 8pm plus an additional show at 5pm on Saturday. For information and tickets, click here.

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

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Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Bob Elliott, 92

Bob Elliott, of Bob and Ray Comedy Fame, Dies at 92
by Peter Keepnews and Richard Severo, The New York Times, February 3, 2016

Dada Masilo's swans of a feather flock to the Joyce

Songezo Mcilizeli as Prince Siegfried
with Dada Masilo as Odette
(photo: John Hogg)
some Masilo swans swanning about
(photo: John Hogg)

That blaring Tchaikovsky processional set the tone right away. Those barefoot dancers, flouncy and twitching in their gender-nonspecific tutus on The Joyce Theater stage, simulated the flight of a flock of swans while encoding every point along the movement spectrum from ballet to African. But not seamlessly, never the sort of contemporary ballet where every last element is blended out, airbrushed and...Kumbaya! We've got exotic perfection for ya!  Instead, you can see the separate techniques of dancing smacking up against each other, visibly diced, sliced and spliced by the exacting mind and sharp hand of Dada Masilo. Without question, this extraordinary work is Dada Masilo's Swan Lake.

I only became aware of Masilo when she choreographed and performed in William Kentridge's Refuse the Hour at last fall's BAM Next Wave. But, for several years, this talented Black South African woman has been turning heads all over Europe, making works called I Just Want To Be a Princess for One Day and The World My Butt and Other Big Round Things, and training her wry eye on classical icons like Romeo and Juliet and Swan Lake.

Well, why not use the classical ballets she dearly loves to tell contemporary stories of top importance to her?

Her take on Swan Lake puts me in mind of Camille A. Brown. Fans of that American dance artist will find Masilo's narrative work and her own piquant, bravura performance style similar in nature and appeal. In addition, both artists draw from aspects of Black culture and artistry, have well-honed, character-driven comedic skills and an interest in showing the full range of human experience and feeling. They both step up to address challenging issues, mixing entertaining performance with social relevance. For Masilo, the story of Swan Lake sets the stage for a look at the consequences of homophobia and the devastation of losing generations of South Africans to AIDS.

This turbo-charged, enormously charming Swan Lake pairs, against his will, a closeted Prince Siegfried (Songezo Mcilizeli) with Masilo's eager bride-to-be Odette. Siegfried's parents--especially Mom--freak out when they learn that their son is in love with a man named Odile--yes, I know, usually, the sinister doppelganger of the dancer playing Odette--here danced by tall, graceful Thamsanqa Tshabalala, the only cast member rocking pointe shoes, and beautifully, thank you.

The piece--lit with true magic by Suzette le Sueur--flies by in just an hour. In that hour, nearly everything moves at a speedy, insistent pace. Group scenes are tightly-organized delirium, usually some hooplah over the expected nuptials. Which brings me back to the loud, nearly martial selections from Tchaikovsky. With this music, Masilo seems to underscore how the private life, and will, of the individual can get pounded down by the heedless force of society. This comes in sharp contrast to the tranquility of Siegfried's time alone with Odile. Without the crowd mashing him, Siegfried can get to know himself and his desires.

Because humor has such prominence in the dance, its conclusion can seem either jarring or poignant. Masilo lost her aunt to AIDS, and this work was made in memory of her. Performers in long, black skirts dance against a dark, starry backdrop. Some slump to the floor. Eventually, just two remain, each delicately rubbing fingers together as if sprinkling a handful of dirt on the coffins of loved ones until there's no one left to perform this final rite.

Swan Lake continues tonight through Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Tuesday, February 2, 2016