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Saturday, May 28, 2016

Building futures: a fresh DanceAfrica for BAM

Armand Celestin (center)
takes a journey in Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures,
the 2016 season of BAM's DanceAfrica.
(photo: Richard Termine)
The extraordinary Moussa Sonko
of Senegal's Les Ballets de la Renaissance Africaine "WAAtO SiiTA"
(photo: Richard Termine)

The charming Chuck Davis has stepped out of his role as Artistic Director of DanceAfrica--that torch now passed to Forces of Nature's Abdel R. Salaam, a former, and impressive, Davis dancer. But let's just call this change a further expansion of leadership rather than a replacement. DanceAfrica, now celebrating its 39th season at BAM, functions as an engine built to generate leadership in all directions--from its mighty corps of elders to the youthful minds and talents it nourishes, instructs and inspires. It's a village, and that village includes you, too, sitting out in the seats of Gilman Opera House, clapping, cheering or tearing up as you always do.

There was quite a lot of that last evening at the opening of this year's spectacular Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures. There was Baba Chuck and the always nattily-dressed Baba Salaam to greet; generous supporters to thank; nine young Scripps scholarship winners to honor; and one lucky dance artist--DC-native Kwame Opare--to congratulate as first recipient of the new Chuck Davis Emerging Choreographer Fellowship. Opare's award will allow him to continue and deepen his relationship with the National Ballet of Ghana, creating "new work that explores West African dance technique and aesthetics on the contemporary stage."

DanceAfrica welcomed a new Artistic Director this season,
veteran choreographer Abdel R. Salaam.
Much-loved Baba Chuck Davis (below) will stay connected
to DanceAfrica's community as Artistic Director Emeritus.
(photo: Richard Termine)






Under Salaam, DanceAfrica will pursue its own imaginative expansion, newly emphasizing a unity of African tradition and African innovation. The latter is dramatically represented, this season, by Salaam's own work, A Question of Beauty, with its visual grandeur and passion for ousting demons of Black self-hatred, and Marie Agnes GomisWho Are We?, which situates rigorous contemporary movement and traditional Senegalese dance within an imperiled environment. Her handsome, Dakar-based Compagnie Tenane dances that piece amid a gleaming and confining field of one-gallon plastic water bottles. 


Baidy Ba and Marie Agnes Gomis
of Compagnie Tenane in Who Are We?
(photo: Richard Termine)

Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures crackles with fresh energy and--at nearly 2-1/2 hours--benefits from a lightly-applied narrative through line that connects its companies and pieces. Central to this scheme is young Armand Celestin who takes an Alice-like step through an opening in space and time. Celestin's "looking glass" is inspired by Salaam's visits to Gorée Island's Door of No Return, the portal to the ocean that carried so many enslaved Africans west to the Americas. Lagging behind your typical bustling, photo-snapping tourist group, the boy becomes fascinated by this door, passes through and encounters all manner of dancers, musicians and wise elders. In many ways, Celestin stands for all of us in the house: DanceAfrica creates space and opportunities for us to appreciate African concerns--from environmental integrity to personal integrity--and African values.

But messaging isn't all. The stagecraft of Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures--sets, lighting, costuming--has hit an all-time high for sophistication and pleasure. And we thrill to the vibrant performances of Dakar's Les Ballets de la Renaissance Africaine “WATTO SiiTA”--in particular, its leader, choreographer and charismatic chief dancer, Moussa Sonko. I don't know about young Celestin, but--damn--I definitely want to be Sonko when I grow up.

Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures concludes on May 30 with performances today at 2pm and 7:30pm, Sunday at 3pm and Monday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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Monday, May 23, 2016

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Entangled at JACK: "The Geneva Project"

Jennifer Harrison Newman in The Geneva Project
(photos: Barbara Anastaciao)


On any typical evening, the little Clinton Hill performance space JACK makes a tight fit for performers and audience. Visit Jennifer Harrison Newman's The Geneva Project, though, and you'll really find yourself all up in the scenery and some of the performing going on where you'd normally be sitting. But that's okay because you're allowed to step all over Abigail DeVille's very Southern Gothic installation, ducking under hoodoo spirit bottles, picking around wood shavings and dusty, tangled branches, trying to read the writing on discarded sheets of paper and wondering if those suspicious holes in a tattered, trampled American flag were torn by bullets.

Directed by Charlotte Brathwaite and presented in association with 651 Arts, the work draws inspiration from Newman's family photographs from Depression-era South Carolina.  She found these photos in the Library of Congress, and their captions identify their subjects as "negro," "mixed race" or "Indian." The title of the work comes from Newman's great-aunt, Geneva Varner Clark.

The Geneva Project is swampy--hazy and dark, airless and disorienting. Haunted, too, with Newman and Justin Hicks emerging out of the depths--or, perhaps, out of the history preserved by those strewn-about pages--like fretful ghosts. Her initial appearance is marginal, partial, fitful--mainly the repeated extension of fistfuls of crumpled paper. When she later moves into the central space, she shows, at first, an interesting combination of flexibility (at her core) and restraint.

Hicks' collaboration--as composer and sound designer as well as performer--contributes to the confining, obsessive, sometimes thunderous atmosphere. At one point, he sings, "I keep going up to that house, 'cause it's not too far up...." and "up" takes on eerie connotations.

But as much as The Geneva Project stirs up a troubled and troubling understory, it leaves so much more to history and to imagination--which is only correct. There's so much more to the American story, and we're scarcely ready for it.

with Paul Leiber (projections), Chris Myers (text) and Tuçe Yasak (lighting)

The Geneva Project concludes tonight with a performance at 8pm. Space is limited, but you can check on ticket availability here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Thursday, May 19, 2016

Beth Gill premieres "Catacomb" at The Chocolate Factory

From Catacomb, a new site-specific work
by Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill
at The Chocolate Factory
(photos: Brian Rogers)


It's not every day that I read all the fine print on a dance show's program, the part where thanks are given to collaborators, friends, presenters, funders. But I had a little time before seeing Beth Gill's new work, Catacomb, at The Chocolate Factory, and my eyes were drawn to that part of the page. Anyone who knows me, knows my intuition rules. So, I read.

I'm beginning this way just to note that I'm in awe of the village it takes to get any dance up and running--from the folks who provide space and time and technical assistance to the folks who fork over the funds. Sometimes--as in Gill's case--it takes more than one New York City borough, just for geographical starters. Each dance, often starting with vague stirrings, undertakes a twisty journey to manifestation. The dance network consists of numerous guiding hands along the way, and it's incredibly moving to think about all of this.

In Catacomb, Gill appears to have been drawn by intuition to sub-regions of the self where sharp reason must yield to things unnamed and dimly understood.
The hour-plus piece, performed by Maggie Cloud, Jennifer Lafferty, Heather Lang, Stuart Singer and Marilyn Maywald Yahel, evokes any journalist's primary questions: Who? What? When? Where? and Why?

We're in the upstairs theater of The Chocolate Factory but--really--where are we? And, maybe from your angle, you won't be able to name the identity or even just the sex of the two bodies, conjoined and at first motionless, pressed against the floor. When these bodies do move--at once sluggishly slithering against each other as they creep along the floor--their interaction appears sexual in nature. If so, it is a very sleepy act of sex organically, unconsciously repeated again and again--the bodies sliding over each other in and out of place--until a certain catalyst draws them out of that pattern. It will be a long, long while before we gaze upon two upright forms and expressionless faces as if glimpsing models of the first human inhabitants on Earth.

Catacomb, described as site-specific, handsomely uses three points of entry into the theater--variously lit by Thomas Dunn to frame dancers for peak drama and strangeness. Dunn's work, along with Gill's interest in glacial pacing and in the marginal placement of one or another dancer--sometimes watching, sometimes ignoring the pair, sometimes stationed against or tucked along a wall--were, for me, the most distinct and fascinating elements of the production.

It is a terrain of risk, which Gill accepts even as she invites company in the risking. I bore that in mind as my mind occasionally wandered or withdrew from Catacomb, which, regrettably, feels longer than it is.  The invitation to take time to look deeply into the fabric of this dance does not come with a guarantee of anything but unfolding territory to explore--an experience, not a conclusion. We enter in media res. We leave, it seems, when Gill is finished with our being there. Its beginning and possible end might not have anything to do with us.

With sound by Jon Moniaci and vocals by Rachel Kara Perez and Peter Sciscioli

Catacomb continues through May 28, Wednesdays-Saturdays with performances at 8pm plus an added show at 8pm on Tuesday, May 24. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Friday, May 13, 2016

Spiderwoman: "Material Witness" to violence against women

Gloria Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater
in Material Witness at La MaMa
(photo: courtesy Spiderwoman Theater)

I leave the door open for the spirits to walk about freely.
I welcome all the guardians to our space.
--Gloria Miguel in Material Witness

I never saw Spiderwoman Theater's original Women in Violence--the first production by this legendary Native American troupe, premiered in New York in 1976. But, last night at La MaMa, I got a good look at its rambunctious offspring, Material Witness, a piece designed to reach out to today's young women. It aims to remind them, and all of us, that physical, sexual and emotional abuse has not been eradicated from Native communities and that silence about it remains a deadly force.

Material Witness is directed by Spiderwoman co-founder Muriel Miguel, co-written by its six-woman cast with Miguel, and co-presented with Aanmitaagzi, an indigenous, interdisciplinary troupe from Nipissing First Nation, Ontario.

The 90-minute work bears all the hallmarks of Spiderwoman--communal, community-minded theater, story-based exposition, rollicking physical humor often reminiscent of vaudeville and slapstick comedy, and strong musical drive. The 1976 tune from AC/DC, "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"--its chorus cheekily woven into a narrative about deeds most dirty--meets up with Lady Gaga's "Til It Happens to You." But, of course. And its new generation--the radiantly charming and kickass Cherish Violet Blood, Penny Couchie (choreographer), Donna Couteau, Ange Loft and Tanis Parenteau--share the stage with veteran Spiderwoman Gloria Miguel who serves as witness to their struggles and stories, setting and holding the space for them, collaborating in their honesty and victories. The music is dance-club loud, Soni Moreno's costume and decor colors and combos are eye-popping, and the performers' energy rocks the house.

Let me issue a standard trigger warning:  Some stories related here can be uncomfortable for anyone, especially survivors of violence, to hear. But I must also leave you with this laughter trigger warning: Spiderwoman's commitment to humor as a disinfectant has not and will never quit.

Material Witness continues through May 29 with performances Thursday to Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. Panel discussions are scheduled following certain performances. For information and tickets, click here.

74A East 4th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), Manhattan

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Ni'Ja Whitson: The seed knew itself from the beginning

Dance artist Ni'Ja Whitson in day (photo: Flybird Photography)


This year, Park Slope's BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange), founded by executive director Marya Warshaw, celebrates its 25th anniversary of commitment and service to the arts and social equity. BAX AIR, the multifaceted organization's Artist in Residence program, has earned an international reputation for nurturing emerging artists through provision of practical assistance, supportive community and the time and space to take risks. Alumni of the two-year program include Katy Pyle, luciana achugar, Abigail Browde, Dan Fishback, Young Jean Lee, Faye Driscoll and Dean Moss--some of New York's most distinct, most influential voices in dance, theater and performance.

Dance-choreographer Ni'Ja Whitson joined the 2015-2016 cohort of BAX AIR artists and has been developing, A Meditation on Tongues, a dance adaptation of the 1989 Marlon Riggs film, Tongues Untied. I asked first Warshaw and then Whitson to reflect on the artist's first-year work at BAX.


Whitson in day
(photo: Flybird Photography)

Ni’Ja Whitson applied to be a resident in 2015, already an accomplished artist, performer, choreographer and a powerful practitioner of indigenous African ritual and resistance forms. In both their proposal and subsequent interview, the conversation about their current project, A Meditation on Tongues, weaved through the intersections of gender, sexuality, race and spirit. Our conversation was and continues to be equally about the artistic home BAX could provide and the spiritual alignment necessary for real trust and growth.
Having already witnessed their work as a performer with former AIR Marjani Forte’s Being/Here, I knew and was excited by Ni’Ja’s startling and deeply intelligent presence on stage, and I looked forward to learning about them as a maker.
The 2015/16 cohort included Marissa Perel, Kristine Haruna Lee, Aurin Squire, and Paloma McGregor. With a variety of distinct backgrounds, races, disciplines and goals, Ni’Ja brings themselves and their experiences as a black artist, in queer and trans culture, with their history and with their marvelously inquisitive nature about others work and lives. Whitson has also expanded their teaching practice within the BAX youth education program working with BAX’s talented teenage dance students. Their presence has been greatly and positively felt in all facets of our community.
As a Director and mentor, I have witnessed Ni’Ja counter obstacles, learn new ways of breathing and re-connecting to their work, and along the way I myself have learned they are an even stronger artist than I originally thought.
Their new work, A Meditation on Tongues is a live adaptation of Marlon T. Riggs’ iconic documentary film, Tongues Untied, which found both language and frame through the two Open Studios at BAX and last weekend revealed itself.
The emotional stakes were incredibly high but completely authentic, and emerged from a place of stark honesty. The composition flowed naturally and provocatively, with each new image building upon the previous one.
I am deeply excited that Ni’Ja will return as a second year AIR and look forward to deepening their relationship to, and involvement with BAX, as well as being a part of the full development of the work.
--Marya Warshaw, Founding and Executive Director, BAX 

Whitson (rear) with Kirsten Flores-Davis
in When Water Dries the Mouth
(photo: Alex Escalante)


Questions for Ni'Ja Whitson
BAX Artist in Residence, 2015-16


EYA: When you launched your residency at BAX, at what stage were you in your process in developing A Meditation on Tongues?

NW: In 2013, I began a two-year residency with Movement Research in the initial explorations of this work.  I believed then that it would be an evening-length adaptation, however, I had not begun to experiment with the aesthetic possibilities, nor had I yet conducted significant historic, political and cultural research.  When my BAX residency launched in 2015, I had transcribed the film, engaged significant contextual research–including connections with contributors to the Tongues Untied film and Riggs’ estate–along with completed impactful performance experiments and lectures that revealed a lot about what the work was asking to be.

EYA: What questions sparked (and continue to spark) your process with this piece?

NW: I again watched Tongues Untied just a few months after Trayvon Martin was murdered.  I was immediately struck by two things: how the idea of Black love (received, perceived, or expressed) remained revolutionary, albeit contemporaneously absent in social narratives of Blackness; and the fact that there still existed no comparable documentary chronicling the lives of Black Queer women. Was (Black) love only revolutionary if experienced between men?And today, in our social conversations of gender, how does an ungendering or Queer gendering realize the revolutionary possibilities of loving?

I’ve sought to recontextualize the film’s language and representation of Black Gay masculinities, selecting A Meditation to (re)cast across expressions of gender and Blackness to reveal, question, map and challenge expectations and assumptions of identity. At the center of this project is the script, a uniquely constructed collage of poetry and essays by Black Gay and lesbian writers popularized in the 1980s and 1990s (including Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam and Audre Lorde). To further reflect and unpack the dense nature of cinematic layering, I’ve assumed a methodology of “remix making” where the expanded the script enriches and complicates the storytelling of Black masculinity while the live performance echoes layering via the use of synchronicity and interdisciplinary aesthetics.  What results is a deepening in the experiences of Queer. Of  Blackness. Of gender. Of love.

Riggs’ film concludes with the now legendary (and controversial) words: “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act,” a statement which continues to provoke question and wonder for me.  For Black Queer people what does the audacity of love between one another conjure? What does it invite?  What does it, in the night and might of its dreaming make available for those who dare love against the grain?  As a Black Queer gender-fluid person, I wonder where are the bodies that look and love like mine and how might that narrative become find itself as a revolutionary model? I’m asking what an investigation into Black masculinity for gender non-conforming people, women and trans indentified people of color elicits? Can a Black masculinity that isn’t (or is not only) violent and patriarchal be envisioned?  Can that space for vision be created? I look to engage gender and sexuality as a site, an embodied locale where body, Black/Queer Masculinity and their meanings are excavated. I see this work as contributing to an expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement where the Black body has, too, expanded.

I’ve begun to really deepen the ideas of how shape-shifting exists as a physical process to speak to the questions of what exists beyond the body. Where the body out loud, a dancing body out loud, has the unique facility to create and shift space and self.  In A Meditation, I am encouraging a movement through states of being and body.  This is a phenomenal advantage of the liveness of performance: the emotional and physical landscapes have the opportunity to be witnessed, negotiated, transferred, and even rejected by its viewer. But it is an active and real exchange.  I’m questioning the ways in which people of color and Queer folks have created future selves in the present.  Honoring the value of mythological and metaphysical leanings in this investigation of the body and Futurity.

EYA: In what specific ways has working at BAX supported the development of A Meditation on Tongues? What did you need at first–and as you went along--and how are those needs being addressed?

NW: Because I walked in with my gumbo ingredients nearly almost all gathered (research, aesthetics, the “artist’s food”) I really just needed a lot of time to experiment and play, to edit, to compose.  I also needed to seriously explore additional funding resources to build out a creative team in support of what I want the work to have: a touring life.  The BAX residency offered a great deal of time and a “hands-off” approach where I felt no judgment or confusion around developing a group piece as a soloist a lot of times in the studio.  I believed that I initially needed to work with a group of about 5-7 people and that I would not be a performer in the work.  I learned after the first 3 months that the piece was actually a duet (or what I have spoken about as a group work for two people) including myself and Kirsten Flores-Davis who has been a part of the project from the beginning.  This was a hugely shifting discovery for the material.  Marya Warshaw was an instrumental sounding board for the many complications that arose conceptually and logistically in dreaming the piece in a new format.

As the residency deepened, I continued to learn that I needed to secure a viable financial life for the piece.  I’ve received support in applying for funding and receiving valuable application reviews that have additionally supported me to revise and deepen the language with which I communicate about the work.

EYA: The Marlon Riggs film, Tongues Untied, which you adapted for your piece, presents a corrective to the oppressive silence around and invisibility of Black queer lives. At one moment in your dance, I suddenly felt a powerful need to hear the sound of Kirsten Flores-Davis’s voice. That happened right before they began a physical struggle to speak what eventually emerged (from both of you) as toxic words. What are your thoughts on how you work with interior and exterior struggle throughout this piece?

NW: (I could spend a long time on this, Eva!!)  The interior landscape and the metaphysical/spiritual intersections in live performance are critical spaces of inquiry for me.  It is all sacred, all serious spirit/warrior/ritual making. One of the ways the film “works” for me is that it is rooted in Riggs’ personal exploration within a critique of race, masculinity and homophobia.  The material, while in places quite beautifully articulated in poetry, was also intimate, powerfully revealing.  The interior landscape for me was found in exploring the subtext, the undercurrent of that beautiful (and in places heartbreaking) poetry.
 
What I found this piece asked was to honor that the way to get at what a moment needs includes abstraction, omission, simultaneity.  The struggle to physicalize an internal or spiritual or cosmic intelligence has been in conjuring live moments that do that thing as opposed to show it.

Kirsten has become magical and masterful at engendering generosity between the internal and external. They entered the work already with those tendencies, and we’ve developed a great deal of trust in the process where we expect this negotiation of each other, along with myself creating tools wherein this is facilitated and held.

EYA: I’m only guessing at how you go about your work, but the result feels organic–like a seed drawing nutrients from its surrounding resources, which seem to be many, and steadily growing into a sturdy plant. In a way, the seed knew itself from the very beginning. Does that make sense?

NW: Yes, yes.  And it is inspiring phraseology!  Yes, I keep saying that sometimes my work with this piece was to get out of its way.  I had ideas about how to approach Riggs’ concepts and strategies of collectivism that really, just did not work.

However, the processes I’ve conducted with different groups has been instrumental to understanding what the piece wants. I mine my collaborators to access and make use of every inch of their ancestral and personal memory.

Memory is a powerful embodied intelligence that gets built upon and further revealed as we open ourselves to it. And because I am concerned with the sacred, I take great care in holding space for what shows up. I recognize in this work that there are many layers of memory in operation: that of the filmmaker and his collaborators’ speaking of their lives, the generation of Black gay men and women who experienced extreme loss during the height of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and who were the first audiences of this film, and additionally, the memory I am introducing, that which the performers and I are creating and carry in our bones.
 
The seed absolutely knew itself.  My work has been deep, deep listening to the material(s), and people in the room, which I learned eventually had to include myself.  And while superbly non-linear, a great amount of the material worked on/through/experimented with in process finds its way in the final composition in some form.  They may be smaller, brush strokes of an exercise, experiment, gestural or fully embodied movement material, but I’ve learned to trust that everything that happens in the process is purposeful and necessary. Even the things that seem to fail.

EYA: How did you arrive at your unusual and challenging ideas for space at BAX and placement of action in this piece?

NW: There were two major reasons I can call on in this moment that motivated my space arrangement at BAX.  One: I embrace that my performance work is, in a word, interdisciplinary, but in more words is working between genres, ideas, temporal and actual spaces in ways that are unique and can be challenging. I aim to shift space, time, body in the duration or journey of a work, so that site and self is not always placeable (that’s how we have always survived! Empowered transformation, shape-shifting, knowing and creating our beyond).  In order to do that the room itself had to be both new and raw enough that witnesses could go there.  The proscenium on its own almost never works for me, and this piece required that while we would have no space to hide, that we had space to hold and recreate it.  Additionally, I believe that this requires people to walk into the building and feel and know that the space is something different, thus to disarm the witnesses’ expectations in order to set the rules of the world early on.

Secondly, Riggs’ dense layering techniques as a director has also been very important to my creative considerations, and in alignment with how I have been working in the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic.  I’ve appreciated the challenging task of translating cinematic layering and techniques in the live.  The proposed impossibilities of reimagining film to the performance have been freeing and encouraged me to expand the space (the frame) of the performance site and performing body.  So where, for example, moments were composed around a “zooming in” or “overlapping,” I looked to spatial arrangements that required narrow sightlines for witnesses or included physical obstructions (of objects or people).

EYA: The opening–in a narrow hallway with audience either lined against a wall or pooled in small areas–features a solo dancer, and I saw Christina James perform. Was the movement the same for Jonathan Gonzalez, who performed on the second night, or unique to him?

NW: It was definitely unique to him, and he had much more of a definitive role in the work.  Jonathan was invited to join the piece in the fall of 2015 when I attempted to reconstruct a larger group.  While I was not sure about what it meant for my vision to have a cis-male in the piece, I was very captivated by what he offered the work, his maturity, the ease with which he entered and contributed to the world of my ideas.  I took the performance weekend as an opportunity to reintroduce him in a role that was much clearer and strong, and out of a more traditional ensemble model.  Jonathan has a magnetic relationship to vogue material in his body and we worked on exploring that/him as a Guide/Goddess/Spirit who interjected strategically throughout.  He also sang “Come Out Tonight” live, the second night.

EYA: What have you taken away from the experience of previewing this work for audiences, engaging them in its development?

NW: I’ve learned that the spatial requests, requirements, arrangements are impactful and necessary.  It is a challenge for both the witnesses and Kirsten and I as performers, but this is such an important element in keeping the integrity of what is being communicated and shared.  It has been a long time in this work, and I’m taking away the reassurance that the piece works and is being asked for.

It may sound trite, but I have also taken away a lot of trust in my process, ideas and collaborators.  This was my first opportunity in New York to have complete access to a building and performance space for a repeat evening run and to be gifted people resource with which to realize my vision (which, I must say, is often encompassing).  It is important for an organization or presenter to trust your bigness, and I found with BAX the same kind of trust that my performers and collaborators over the years have generously offered me.

EYA: What do you look forward to as you enter your second and final year as a BAX artist in residence? Do you have specific objectives and goals for this or other work?

NW: My plan for this work in my second year is that A Meditation on Tongues premieres in the spring.  It may be in partnership with another venue.  I also am planning for the work to have a touring performance life, particularly in the cities for which Tongues Untied was significant: San Francisco, Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York.  The summer and fall will be focused on completing the full evening-length form to include remaining material from the film and research.  Since I aspire to take the piece outside of BAX, my second year there will be expanding on a new project to begin this summer/fall via my Process Space Residency at LMCC.

EYA: In your experience, what qualities or factors make BAX different and essential to artists?

NW: The AIR program is intimately and thoughtfully curated by Marya and she considers not only the work that will be shared between artists, but the potential critical and conceptual dialogues that will inform, challenge and inspire the cohort.  This has been very important for me and I believe is an important aspect of an AIR program of this type.

The BAX staff know and support their AIRs (in the work, and in the forward-thinking dreams/plans thereof), making for an engaged agency in the space.  BAX is unique and essential in its investment in the new/non-traditional/genre-bending which often times, and has been in my time there, another investment in the communities where these approaches are (or are understood to be) commonplace: Queer folks, People of Color interrogating important questions of the time–ability, oppression, futurity, radical love.

EYA: Is there anything else that you’d like readers to know?

I just want to offer that this piece couldn’t have been possible without the incredible support of Signifyin’ Works (the estate of Marlon Riggs’) with whom I pursued and secured the rights to excerpt and adapt the film.  As live artists this is not always seen as a necessary or surmountable task, however, I feel a great deal of accountability to the community for whom the film contributed to their coming of age/self and for who in the future this may be possible.  The writers, activists and camera operators of the Tongues Untied film community who shared their time and stories with me charged the work and were absolutely inspirational when I felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of working with such iconic material.

Portrait of Ni'Ja Whitson
from Quasar: Douglas Ewart, Matt Shipp, and Ni'Ja Whitson
(photo: Maurice D. Robertson)

Ni’Ja Whitson is a 2015 Bogliasco Fellow and a recipient of Creative Capital’s inaugural “On Our Radar” awards. Referred to as “majestic” and “powerful” by The New York Times and “multi-talented” by Gibney Dance, their performance and challenging work as an independent artist has received awards and recognitions across disciplines.

Whitson has been a student and practitioner of indigenous African ritual and resistance forms for over ten years, creating work that reflects the sacred in street, conceptual, and indigenous performance.  They engage a nexus of postmodern and African Diasporic performance practices, through the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and spirit.  Working internationally, creative and scholarly works include collaborations and performances for leading artists interdisciplinarily such as Allison Knowles, La Pocha Nostra, April Berry, Darrell Jones, Merián Soto, and Marjani Forté. As a noted innovating practitioner of the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic and accomplished improviser Whitson enjoys ongoing collaboration with award-winning artist Sharon Bridgforth, and currently as a touring company member of Bridgforth’s River See.  Additionally, Whitson is a member of Douglas Ewart’s (AACM) interdisciplinary performance ensembles touring notable venues across the country with leading creative and jazz musicians such as Mankwe Ndosi, Tatsu Aoki, and Joseph Jarmon.  Whitson’s work as an independent choreographer includes working alongside Dianne McIntyre on the 10-year anniversary revival of Crowns, written and directed by Regina Taylor at the Goodman Theatre, as choreographer for Nia Witherspoon’s Messiah Complex and Susan Watson-Turner’s directing of Anon(ymous) both of which received New York audience and ensemble awards. Recent Commissions and residencies include Harlem Stage, Gibney Dance, St. Marks Danspace, Dancing in the Streets, and residencies with the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and Movement Research.

Other recognitions and awards include Time Out New York and Chicago Critic’s Picks, Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Outstanding Ensemble Award, Downtown Urban Theatre Festival Audience Award, Vermont Studio Center Writing Residency, LinkUp Inaugural Artist in Residence, Chicago DanceBridge Residency, John G. Curtis Jr. Prize, Archibald Motley Grant, 3Arts Visual Artist Award Nomination, and a MFA Fellowship Award from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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For more information about BAX, click here.

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Thursday, May 12, 2016

Movement Research presents "Body Disrupt" at Abrons

Mat Fraser as The Beast
(with Jonny Dixon and Jess Mabel Jones)
in the 2014 production of
Beauty and the Beast at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Sheila Burnett)

Below: Julie Atlas Muz as Beauty
(photo: Sin Bozkurt)


Artists with disabilities and artists whose work disrupts normative notions of what constitutes a dancing body will come together in conversation.
 --about Body Disrupt, a Movement Research Studies Project panel

Body Disrupt
--a panel convened and moderated by dance artist Kathy Westwater at Abrons Arts Center for Movement Research--left my head buzzing, not so much with a bunch of questions or final answers but rich points of departure. In that way, I found it satisfying--again, not in the sense of finality or feeling sated but in the sense of deliciousness. Each panelist--Wendy Whelan, Petra Kuppers, Julie Atlas Muz (representing her husband and creative collaborator, Mat Fraser), Marissa Perel, Cathy Weis, and Westwater herself--offered a different history, pathway, insight and flavor. I consider them all guides who lead you to a good place and leave you there with confidence that you're smart enough to push on forward in your own way.

Westwater introduced the event by talking about how her engagement with somatic practices left her at variance with their emphasis on organizing the body. In her dance practice, she said, she was "pursuing a disorganized body, trying to understand what that was."

"Why am I trying to organize my body?" she asked. "I'm an artist. I want to express the body I have." Indeed, she turned to physical "disorganization" as a stimulus for a choreography of exaggerated dis-alignment that, she says, "never stops being interesting to me."

As the panel wrapped up, Westwater revisited this language and reworked it--referencing, instead, "different organizations of bodies."

As a dance writer, I found that revision at once enjoyable and useful. It made me remember a question someone recently posed to me: "What do you look for when you go to see a dance?" My response was perhaps different from what another writer might offer: I go to engage with what's there, whatever it might be, not to look for something predeterminied. In other words, if I expect anything, it's the possibility of something different, and I've signed up for engagement with it. While that's no guarantee that I will get it or like it, it's a protective against simply failing to respect its right to exist.

Westwater and Whelan, it turns out, are old friends from youth. Even so, Whelan's presence on this panel was surprising and proved refreshing. After all, her stellar career, though evolving, has been rooted in classical ballet technique, far from Movement Research's approach to dance. But here's the thing: At age 12, Whelan was diagnosed with scoliosis (curvature and rotation of the spine) and spent months in a chin-to-hip body cast while bravely resuming her rigorous ballet training. Treatment helped, but it did not wipe away her innate sense of difference. At times, the ballerina had to endure fault-finding by members of my profession for the look of her body and her dancing.

Today, Whelan considers her condition a gateway to the truth of herself, beyond picture-perfect ballet conventions, and to the pursuit of more adventurous means of self-expression through the works of contemporary choreographers.

"I strive to be fearless," she says. "I'm never afraid to embarrass myself."

Kuppers--a German-born community performance artist and disability culture activist, now based in Michigan--impressed me with her playful approach to the world as a model of easygoing engagement based in perception and compassion. From Muz--performance and burlesque artist married to an actor with thalidomide-induced Phocomelia--I simply inhaled a renewed affirmation of my femme self and a voracious pleasure in the age-old, radical power of the Outsider. Perel spoke of disabilities and pain hidden from view--"I've been able to look like a dancer"--and, in particular, what dance critics fail to take into account when they encounter her work. A poet, installation artist, choreographer and critic, Perel says she works with forms of art that will give her agency. "I don't really care what they are." Weis, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in decades ago and facing the loss of her marriage, regained her own agency through turning not only to dance but to stained glass and, especially, to video as an extension of herself, made on equipment that she could handle by herself.

Body Disrupt offered notions of disruption that can instigate not only the work of movement artists but also the work those of us who view, process, document and critique their art. These artists encourage each of us to define and relish in our freedom.

*****
Movement Research Studies Project presents a series of artist-instigated panel discussions, roundtables, performances and/or other formats that engage issues of aesthetics, philosophy and social politics relevant to the dance and performance community.

All Studies Project events are free and open to the public.

UPCOMING:

June 7, 6:30pm
Festival Spring 2016 Studies Project
Curated by Aretha Aoki, Elliott Jenetopulos, Eleanor Smith and Tara Aisha Willis

Gibney Dance Choreographic Center
890 Broadway, 5th Floor, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Friday, May 6, 2016

Moving past "the feast" with dance artist Tiffany Mills


Mei Yamanaka and Tiffany Mills
in After the Feast
(photo: Julie Lemberger ©2016)

Kyle Marshall and Emily Pope
in After the Feast
(photo: Julie Lemberger @2016)


Hot on the dazzling tail of Ballez, the Tiffany Mills Company lights up this year's bustling La MaMa Moves festival with another must-see production--the world premiere of After the Feast. Marking Mills's fifteenth anniversary season, the hour-long sextet propels the artist and her fellow dancers through a harsh, ruined environment. The past is shattered. Now survival demands guts, transparency, cooperation and--most of all--the will to keep moving.

Mills is joined by Kyle MarshallJordan MorleyKenneth OlguinEmily Pope and Mei Yamanaka, giving all-in performances, deeply committed to the striking physical volatility and human intimacy of the work. Other collaborators include Jonathan Melville Pratt (music), Dennis O'Leary (visual design), Mary Kokie McNaugher (costumes), Chris Hudacs
 (lighting) and Kay Cummings (dramaturgy).

After the Feast runs Thursday, May 12 through Sunday, May 15. Thursday-Saturday performances are at 7pm with a 4pm performance on Sunday. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa
at Ellen Stewart Theatre and The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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