Scotty Moore, 84

Scotty Moore, Hard-Driving Guitarist Who Backed Elvis Presley, Dies at 84
by William Grimes, The New York Times, June 28, 2016

Mack Rice, 82

Mack Rice, Who Wrote ‘Mustang Sally,’ Dies at 82
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, June 28, 2016

Austin Clarke, 81

Austin Clarke, Canadian Author Who Explored Black Experience, Dies at 81
The Associated Press, The New York Times, June 27, 2016

"Her Fishtrap": a reflection from Ni'Ja Whitson

Choreographer Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

In Her Fishtrap, dance artist and guest writer Ni’Ja Whitson reflects on Building a Better Fishtrap, a work presented at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange this month by choreographer Paloma McGregor in collaboration with visual artist Sara Jimenez, installation designer Vassi Spanos and sound designer Everett Saunders.

Photos by Whitney Browne

***

Her Fishtrap

Cold jar swings
from the ceiling.
Coating
its translucence
interior
thick
off white spill.
A residue
memory, and time.

Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

It is another of McGregor’s portals.

Building a Better Fishtrap commands its audience receive and witness with the same stamina the soloist McGregor rigorously expels. The performance takes place between three floors of Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a spatial expanse that mirrors the vast locations of physical, object, and media vocabularies embodied. She is wielder/welder/poet/cyclone/octopus/child/magician/dreamer.

Fishtrap’s audience becomes her ocean-bound garden, being toiled and rooted as the piece unfolds. One of the work’s most striking and successful elements is the manipulation of object and/in space. Among all three floors, her unique world is made by the ways in which the calculated manipulation of objects installed in the performance space are activated. On the first floor, mason jars are rolled and spun, opened and emptied, carried with care and abandoned. McGregor, at one point, makes a clever emptying roll of a jar, releasing a swell of aromatic ground mint, then proceeds to further make her/self a conjurer, shifting the air through the sense of smell. She then wafts the jar to the witnesses, puts mint grounds in hand, over body, head and floor. She cleanses and reopens. The doing in this work is its magic. And McGregor does both the subtle and grand with such intention, the magic hypnotizes.

Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

She breaks
through time. Strung
as a clothesline
the years hang.
With back wing
spread the ocean
sorceress stops
let light wonder over
body.
She sings her birth.
Dances a life
from the deep.

It was born to her.

McGregor is a masterful constructionist; her choreographic structure is tightly considered, thus where she “plays” she, too, devises. Strategically and uniquely working within a grounded knowledge of African diasporic vocabularies (and beyond), Fishtrap makes meaning in the employment of improvisation as a virtuostic practice. And the lines where presumably “set” or improvisationally set material live, exist here as wonderfully blurred. The dance of this performance is as much in the spaces of (brief) stillness as it is in McGregor’s turns, arm curves, undulations, and foot pounds. This is critical to the work; there are no disposable gestures.

Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

Black mama joy

spin her.
Wave skirt and dive
into.
She wet.
We dry. But we all swim.
Black mama child girl
cross a net sea
to the other side.
We wait
at the shore
she our people
bones in the dark.

Paloma McGregor’s Building a Better Fishtrap is an embodied poem and slicing exposition of memory. It, at times lullabies in quiet movement or task, then within an instant destabilizes through near-cinematographic staging and striking movement. Fishtrap gifts what it inquiries: play and recall.

Her Fishtrap
©2016 Ni’Ja Whitson

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Recent obituaries: Cunningham, Herr, Stanley, Worrell, Yesselman

InfiniteBody has been on leave for the past few weeks during which we lost the following great members of the arts community:

Bill Cunningham, 87

Michael Herr, 76

Ralph Stanley, 89

Bernie Worrell, 72

Robert Yesselman

Upcoming US premieres for Carlos Saura's "Argentina"

Fans of Spanish director Carlos Saura's series of flamenco-related films should also enjoy Argentina (2015), a soulful love note to the music and dance of that nation. Shot in Buenos Aires, the sensuous documentary bears family resemblance to Saura's Flamenco Flamenco (2010) in its minimalistic yet dramatic setting, chiarascuro lighting and sunset coloration, intriguingly voyeuristic camera work, close-ups of expressive, lived-in faces and diverse array of excellent performers.

The 85-minute film samples everything from indigenous folk music to extraordinary ballads with an existential or political edge. There are songs about friendship and generosity, songs about the pain we humans cause our earth. "The only thing more important than God," one lyric tells us, "is that no one should spit blood so that another can live better."

The dancing follows a similar mixture--regional social dances, carnival dancing, contemporary choreography. It's all Argentina.

I was moved by so much in this film but especially the photo montage honoring the late, great singer Mercedes Sosa--a progressive artist known as "the voice of the voiceless"--who Saura positions as inspiration to a classroom of youngsters charmingly attentive to her "Todo cambia" ("Everything Changes"). Everything, she tells us, will change--except for the love she holds for her land and its people.

Eighty-five minutes can only give us a taste but, in that short time, Saura does his best to help us understand what Sosa loved with all her heart.

See the trailer here, and the US premiere screenings at New York's Lincoln Plaza Cinema (June 17) and LA's Laemmle Royal (July 1), presented by First Run Features.

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Hugh Honour, 88

Hugh Honour, Art Historian and Author, Dies at 88
by William Grimes, The New York Times, June 3, 2016

Dave Swarbrick, 75

Dave Swarbrick, British Folk Fiddler, Dies at 75
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, June 3, 2016

"TROPICO": between what is solid and what is not there

Director-choreographer Raja Feather Kelly performs in TROPICO.
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Above and below: Dancers of The Feath3r Theory
perform TROPICO in the sanctuary of St. Mark's Church.
(photos: Ian Douglas)

I remember some years back, a few people started talking about how we'd simply have to get used to a new reality--that, in order to survive in our brave new world, dance would have to move out of live performance and into cyberspace and new media. That got my back up, and I'm glad to see that live performance in real time and real space seems not only alive but livelier and feistier than ever.

Case in point, a new production from director/choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and his troupe, The Feath3r Theory, running (amok) this week at Danspace Project.

Let's start by invoking its full name. Are you ready? Here we go!

the feath3r theory presents: Andy Warhol's TROPICO or Zeitgeist - the fall of man, the age of desire, Adam and Steve in the Rite of Spring, Lana Del Rey's 'It's Always Everything' staring Allen Ginsberg as William Shakespeare or the greatest story (of survival) ever told.

Now, normally, I'd italicize and boldface that entire name-dropping title (with a hyperlink), but I'm giving it to you the way Kelly gave it to us in order to minimize confusion. You're welcome.

But I understand it's okay, between friends, to refer to Kelly's opus as TROPICO, which also appears to be the name of a nation, or a people, with its own anthem. Although it makes a pretty good name for a queer, campy pop-opera with multiple musical references to everything from a Christmas carol to The Rolling Stones to The Wiz.

I like that Kelly's work not only demands its life but does so while living large. Generally speaking, I can appreciate dance ("multidisciplinary, boundary-breaking dance theatre," as Kelly's promo material would have it) envisioned on the plus size, specifically where it amplifies the creative voices of typically marginalized people. Katy Pyle's Sleeping Beauty & The Beast and Kelly's TROPICO are recent prime examples, both involving prodigious ambition and sprawl.

TROPICO, though, might have Pyle's piece beat for sprawl. (Did I mention it's also a graphic novel? And a downloadable musical collaboration between Kelly and Bryan Strimpel?) I entered TROPICO's befogged atmosphere shortly before 8pm and left it close to 10:30 having spent all that time in an unholy mixture of fascination (genuine) and impatience (equally genuine). Let's deal with that last part first.

Lord, is this piece long! Most maddening are those numerous times when it seems to be building to a possible end only to sprout something new. Honestly, it got to a point where every time an earnest player showed up with mic in hand--to recite, to exhort or to sing a little tune--I wanted to snatch that mic and throw it as far as possible.

For TROPICO, the audience sits on the bare (okay, thinly-carpeted) risers flanking the space. No cushioning, no back support, no intermission. And, as we all know, the humidity inside St. Mark's on a warmish spring or broiling summer evening needs a name as long as this dance's official one. Near-continuous fog-making only contributes to the airlessness.

I'm not whining here, just being real. This is a real experience--and, likely, deliberate. It's legitimate to talk about it.

But, at the same time, let me admit I loved the near-continuous fog-making--if not that humidity. The fog--and the dancing and dramatics within it--took over that familiar space like nothing I've seen before, and I digged that. Tuce Yasak's nimble lighting design played off that fog and the flesh, costumes and neon-colorful wigs of the dancers with maximum witchery, directing our eyes and carving out areas of dramatic interest. Yasak matches Kelly in the painterly ability to take a basic bunch of space and make us feel dimensions and possibilities within it.

Kelly's work proceeds with dream-like pacing, scrambled sequencing, mystifying vagueness and excess. Warhol meets the Symbolists for a drink at the Dada Bar. It's as if a dream has exploded within the sanctuary of St. Mark's Church. Sometimes that ongoing explosion happens in drifting slo-mo; sometimes it bursts out into a crescendo of noise and aggression--dancers gyrating, bouncing, bounding, squatting, strutting, humping the floor or roughhousing for no discernible reason. And sometimes Kelly forces some of us to look at things from weird angles (or through a barrier of tightly-spaced bodies) that makes them fairly impossible to see. Our imaginations take over from our eyes as the initial frustration gives way to wonder--except, of course, in the case of the handful of people who simply got up and walked out.

Kelly has quoted Warhol: “It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.”

I don't know if Warhol had a point, but I think Kelly is fighting back with a barrage of live art that's about not telling you any of these things but maybe pushing you to figure out how to be with it and with yourself inside it.

With performances by Raja Feather Kelly, Shaina Branfman, Amy Gernux, Beth Graczyk, Sara Gurevich, John Gutierrez, Lindsay Head, Rebecca Hite Teicheira, Nik Owens, Rachel Pritzlaff, Collin Ranf and Aaron Moses Robin. Video by Aitor Mendilibar +  Laura Snow. Costumes by Melody Eggen

Andy Warhol's Tropico continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 8pm. Tickets are sold out, but you can join the waiting list at the door at 7:15 each evening. For information, go here.

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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