RoseAnne Spradlin marks her Joyce spot with "X"

L-r: Dancers Asli Bulbul, Connor Voss and Kayvon Pourazar
of RoseAnne Spradlin/Performance Projects
(photo: Glen Fogel)

 A quadrille is an 18th century dance performed in a rectangular configuration and viewed from four sides. To kick off its 2016/17 season, The Joyce Theater will be transformed for the NY Quadrille, a sensational two-week engagement created by renowned choreographer Lar Lubovitch and commissioned by The Joyce featuring a specially constructed platform stage designed to create viewing from four sides. Following through with the spirit of “four,” Lubovitch has selected four exciting choreographers—Pam Tanowitz, RoseAnne Spradlin, Tere O’Connor, and Loni Landon to create contemporary dance works on four sides. Each quadrille will be performed on its own program, with each program performed four times over the course of the two weeks. This transformation of The Joyce is sure to challenge audiences to embrace a new concept of the theater’s physical space and to appreciate the artistry of the four choreographers chosen to participate in this exciting event.

 --for promotional material for NY Quadrille

Lar Lubovitch's design and curatorial experiment, NY Quadrille, has landed on The Joyce Theater like an alien mothership scorching circles into a cornfield.

I hear that square performance platform now eating part of the regular stage area and part of the regular audience seating cost the Joyce a lot of coins. My first sight of it--from the vantage point of one of the remaining front-facing seats--made me think I must have overshot the mark and ended up a few avenues away at The Kitchen. Or maybe really overshot and ended up at BAM Fisher. To be honest, this was both exciting and unsettling. And that disturbing ambivalence only intensified when I saw what RoseAnne Spradlin had created for her turn at the quadrille--X, a trio for contemporary dance stars Asli Bulbul, Connor Voss and Kayvon Pourazar, all of whom deserve a hefty pay raise.

Kudos to Lubovitch for giving multiple Bessie-winning Spradlin her Joyce debut. NY Quadrille, on the whole, is an intentional risk. One Times writer, previewing the two-week series, actually called out the Joyce for habitual "staleness," and Lubovitch's initiative certainly throws open a new set of windows. But how will it play with the typical Joyce-goer?

I don't know how Tanowitz fared or how O'Connor and Landon will fare during their runs, but dance press seemed to outnumber civilians at Spradlin's opening night. And, yes, I'm wildly exaggerating, but you get the picture. Someone in the Joyce lobby wondered aloud if City Center's more affordable, aesthetically-accessible Fall for Dance might have drawn the usual Joyce fans uptown.

The evening did not go easy on those who took up the challenge. Spradlin's audience grew quite fidgety--in one man's case, openly surly. Even early on, people started bailing out of the show. And with Joe Levasseur's lights keeping dancers and their gawkers in constant view of one another, those departures were not exactly subtle.

X deserved better, certainly its dancers did, maintaining prodigious concentration and composure even in the face of one man crying out, "Just stop!" But, hey, I'm a downtown girl. I've sat through gnarlier (and less rewarding) stuff. Spradlin is kind of my jam.

Still, even for me, the hour-and-change with X was not without struggle. The audience annoyed me. A lot. I did not want to see or hear them. Glen Fogel's sound work reminded me too often of the less-decorous aspects and processes of life in a body. The repeated and repeated and repeated use of "Love's Theme"--Love Unlimited Orchestra's era-evoking instrumental--got under my skin. The dancers' stately, ritualized tasks of lifting and shifting and rearranging their gymnastic bars--suggesting, by rapid turns of association, heavy gym weights, portable ballet barres, monkey bars and barricades--eventually wore me out, too.

Yet these X-cesses read like a poem meant to burrow its way under the viewer's skin. A continuous push-and-pull between what cannot be easily controlled--human bodies in the wild--and the overlaying, controlling law of structure. Shifts and returns, both unexpected and, of course, expected. Voss's supple, sylph-like form rendered strangely weighty and awkward by Pourazar lifting and handling. Pourazar's unexpected reverse of this pattern--all floaty, slidey grace as he slips his body around Voss's with just a lightly-firm pressure from Voss's hand. Metal rods that, straddled first by Bulbul then by the others, combine the utilitarian with the suggestive. Sniper maneuvers mimicked, with dead seriousness, over disco sound: I'm never, ever gonna quit/'Cause quittin' ain't my stick.

Pourazar, Voss and Bulbul don't quit--even when some viewers do--'cause quittin' ain't their stick. With and for Spradlin, they refuse to compromise for our love but work damn hard for our respect.

X continues through October 2. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Agnes Nixon, 93

Agnes Nixon, Who Injected Social Ills Into Soap Operas, Dies at 93
by Robert D. McFadden, The New York Times, September 28, 2016

SERIOUS MOONLIGHT podcast: Sydnie L. Mosley

Sydnie L. Mosley
(photo: Farima Faye/F.F. Visual)

Click here to listen to

Serious Moonlight, Episode 4: 

Sydnie L. Mosley

Subscribe to Serious Moonlight

Sydnie L. Mosley is an artist-activist who is interested in creative work that is both artistically sound and socially aware. Sydnie earned her MFA in Dance with an emphasis on Choreography from the University of Iowa, not long after she received her BA in Dance and Africana Studies from Barnard College at Columbia University. Sydnie’s creative and research interests lie at the intersections of modern dance, movement in the African Diaspora, spirituality, feminism, and literature.​
​​
Her choreographic work with her company SLMDances actively engages audiences, and often reflects the experiences of black peoples and women. Her evening length dances The Window Sex Project and BodyBusiness, their creative processes and performance experiences are a model for dance-activism. ​​​Her dances have been performed extensively throughout New York City and she was listed by TheRoot.com as one of twenty-five “Up and Coming: Young Minority Artists and Entrepreneurs.”​

Sydnie is a recipient of the CUNY Dance Initiative (2016 Artist in Residence), Dancing While Black Artist Fellowship (2015-2016), and The Field Leadership Fund (2015-2017). She produced her most recent evening length work with The Performance Project @ University Settlement (Artist in Residence 2015-2016). She is a 2013 alumna of the Create Change Fellowship with The Laundromat Project, and the Gibney Dance Institute for Community Action Training. In 2011, she became the inaugural Barnard Center for Research on Women Alumnae Fellow.

​A versatile dancer, Sydnie performed most recently with ​INSPIRIT, a dance compan​y, and Brooklyn Ballet. Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times writes of her performance in David Parker’s Nut/Cracked Redux, “I won't soon forget… the woman who stood in the center of a sea of floor-bound bodies, allowing her arms to bloom up and open luxuriously in a gracious, centuries-old convention with radiant pride and pleasure.”​
​
As a dance educator, Sydnie specializes in teaching modern, jazz and West African dance, amongst other styles.  She teaches babies (really!), K-12, undergraduates, non-dancers and professionals alike, with the motto: if you can move, you can dance! She designed and teaches Dance in the City, Barnard College's Pre-College Program in dance.
​
Sydnie’s skills extend beyond the creative. She is an independent scholar who earned honors for her Barnard College senior thesis, “​Dancing Black Christianity: Revealing African American and Ghanaian Cultural Identity through Movement in Christian Worship.” She is a new contributing writer to The Dance Enthusiast and has contributed to Dance Magazine. She is also an advocate for dance currently serving on the Dance/NYC Advisory Board, after a four year tenure on the Dance/NYC Junior Committee which represents the interests of dance professionals in New York City ages 21-30.​​​ She served as Vice Chair 2014-2015.
​
Sydnie currently resides in Harlem, New York City. When she isn’t dancing, she is writing, listening to music, and cooking.

Serious Moonlight--hosted by Eva Yaa Asantewaa and produced with Tei Blow--is a production of Gibney Dance Center's Digital Technology Initiative.

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SERIOUS MOONLIGHT podcast: Jessica Chen

Jessica Chen
(photo: Vanessa Gonzalez-Bunster
http://www.vgbphotography.com/)

Click here to listen to 
Serious Moonlight, Episode 3: Jessica Chen

Subscribe to Serious Moonlight

Jessica Chen, Artistic Director of J CHEN PROJECT, graduated from the University of California in Santa Barbara and continued her dance training in NYC at The Ailey School and Earl Mosley’s Institute of the Arts, where she received a full scholarship.

She has taught master classes at institutions such as Yale University, Boston University, Mt. Holyoke, DeSales University and Orange County School of the Arts, as well as her alma mater.  As a speaker, she presented “If I Can Dance It, Then It’s Possible” at the 2014 TEDx organized by Semester at Sea and was honored as the Keynote for Cornell University’s 2011 Celebration of Asian American Women.   Her choreography has been showcased throughout NYC including NYLA Studio Series, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Ailey Citigroup Theater and she choreographed and directed a Featured Float in the 2015 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Ms. Chen started a Mentorship Program – Summer Intensive for aspiring professional dancers and curates an annual choreographers’ festival at Dixon Place ‘TRANSLATE (voices of dance).’

J CHEN PROJECT is creating an evening length show title “The Shadow and The Like,” based on real-life tragedy, which addresses the psychological struggles behind a glossy Social Media image.  This show will run at Dixon Place from September 29 to October 1, 2016.

http://www.jchenproject.com

Read more at "Unbreakable Spirit: dancer Jessica Chen" 
by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody, September 3, 2103

Serious Moonlight--hosted by Eva Yaa Asantewaa and produced with Tei Blow--is a production of Gibney Dance Center's Digital Technology Initiative.

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SERIOUS MOONLIGHT podcast: Cassie Mey

Cassie Mey

Click here to listen to 

Serious Moonlight, Episode 2: Cassie Mey

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Cassie Mey is the Oral History Coordinator and Audio Archivist for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Formerly, Cassie was NYPL's project Cataloger for the Merce Cunningham Audio Collection and she was the Oral History Archive Assistant from 2009-2015. Additionally, she conducted a focus group on “Documenting the Creative Process” in 2013 for the Dance Heritage Coalition’s Artist-Driven Archives project. Alongside her work in archives, Cassie is a lifelong dancer, having most recently performed in Dean Moss’s multimedia work and 4 year project, johnbrown. Over the past 15 years, she also danced with Molissa Fenley , Jillian Peña , and other choreographers, as well as presented her own dance works and collaborations in NYC. Cassie holds an MSILS degree from Pratt Institute and a BA in Dance from Mills College.

Serious Moonlight--hosted by Eva Yaa Asantewaa and produced with Tei Blow--is a production of Gibney Dance Center's Digital Technology Initiative.

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Serious Moonlight dance podcast launches on iTunes!

I am over the moon about Serious Moonlight, a new dance interview podcast I'm producing with Tei Blow for Gibney Dance Center's Digital Technology Initiative. (Big thanks to you, Tei!) Our first shows are finally up on iTunes. (Subscribe, please!) 

Episode 1 is a recording of my final Not The Master's Tools panel of speakers--Katy Pyle, Nia Love, Benjamin Kimitch and Kazu Kumagai. Episode 2 is a chat with Cassie Mey, archivist for the New York Public Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division. In Episode 3, choreographer Jessica Chen talks about her blooming life and career following a devastating accident. And in Episode 4, dance artist Sydnie L. Mosley of SLMDances discusses her multifaceted work as a performer, dancemaker, scholar, educator, administrator and activist dedicated to social justice.

I hope you'll enjoy Serious Moonlight. Let's dance!

Visit and subscribe to

Serious Moonlight here.

Bill Nunn, 63

Bill Nunn, Who Played Radio Raheem in ‘Do the Right Thing,’ Dies at 63
by Liam Stack, The New York Times, September 24, 2016

Buckwheat Zydeco, 68

Buckwheat Zydeco, bandleader who helped introduce Louisiana zydeco to the world, dies at 68
by Keith Spera, The Acadiana Advocate, September 24, 2016

Stanley Dural Jr., Founder of Buckwheat Zydeco, Dies at 68
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, September 24, 2016

Forward and backward and forward with John Jasperse

Heather Lang and Stuart Singer
in Remains,
a new work by John Jasperse
(photo: Grant Halverson)

Dance is that art where real bodies, usually in real time, put themselves on view and on the line. But linear time passes, and dance slips away--from place, from sight, from memory. (Well, maybe not completely erased, but memory files can get a bit corrupted.) You want to clamp your arms around something so courageous and so poignant. And, no, you can't.

A new work by John Jasperse for BAM Next Wave pointedly evokes these thoughts and feelings. It is called Remains, both a noun and a verb. That still, prone body we first see lying in the middle of BAM Harvey's stage, cheerfully dressed in glitter? Definitely no longer moving. How strange that the audience--silenced by what appears to be the beginning of the dance--is compelled to gaze at a fallen body while house lights remain up, ushers remain at their stations, and a flurry of latecomers find their seats. And even then. And even then.

Like other folks at last night's premiere, I kept craning my neck to watch the puzzling scene around me. Finally, one usher made a circling gesture in the air, and her fellow workers melted out of sight. If I recall, it still took a while for the lights to dim. And even then. And even then.

Velvety black, like night, surrounded that isolated, illuminated body still at rest on the stage.

The stage reappeared. Throughout the hour, the atmosphere stayed largely serene, sometimes devoid of sound. A minimalist set, parallel lines in the floor pattern, lighting and infusions of music introduced lightly-applied coordinates, giving the dancers a place to be, but most of those coordinates could be altered. Even the board-like panels that hugged the space took on different tones and temperatures of yellow. And the well-crafted dancing, loosely sourced in Jasperse repertory and influences, appeared to channel a flow of imagery from centuries of visual art as well. The game was in allowing that flow--so well conveyed in the dancing--and following it, savoring the things you recognize or think you recognize, then letting them go.

This company--Maggie Cloud, Marc Crousillat, Burr Johnson, Heather Lang, Stuart Singer and Claire Westby-- is a blessing to Jasperse, and the opening night audience responded with loving, palpable warmth, much deserved.

Music: John King
Additional music: Javier Peral and Die Antwoord
Visual design: John Jasperse and Lenore Doxsee
Costume design and construction: Baille Younkman
Lighting design: Lenore Doxsee

Remains continues through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Queer NY presents Mamela Nyamza's "HATCHED"

South African dance artist Mamela Nyamza
in her solo, HATCHED, at Abrons Arts Center
 (photos: John Hogg)

Did I hear right?

It took several years of effort for Shay Wafer's 651 Arts--now co-presenting with Queer New York International Arts Festival--to finally bring South African dancer Mamela Nyamza to New York?

And for only one night?

Curated by Marýa Wethers, Nyamza's HATCHED introduced an artist I wish more New Yorkers could have experienced. Attendance was sparse. Every seat in Abrons Arts Center's Playhouse theater should have been claimed.

(photo: John Hogg)

Abrons has smaller, less formal and more flexible spaces well-suited to alternative dance and performance. But Nyamza pointedly mixed the classically formal (tutu, pointe work, port de bras, Saint-Saëns) with the unexpected (blood-red laundry, looking, for all the world, like flayed flesh or butcher cuts, that she hung to dry on a line strung between the wings). She needed honest-to-god proscenium space for the razzle dazzle of her visual imagery and lighting. She created a jarring, split-awareness for audience members first to take their seats before the show began. We listened to The Dying Swan and gazed out on Nyamza's bare back, shaved head, waves of crimson fabric engulfing her white tulle as, beyond the hall's flung-open doors, stragglers continued their loud chatter.

From the outset, HATCHED announces itself as both forbidding and irresistible--and sacred--very much in its own space, which we must focus to approach.

And it was no surprise when, during the post-show Q&A with Wethers, Nyamza revealed that, in performance, she goes into her "zone," communing with her deceased mother and other ancestors, and that she aims to welcome us into the work while maintaining an unbreachable distance.

Dramatically reflecting the tension between Nyamza's ballet training--with which she maintains a complicated relationship--and her Xhosa heritage and artistry, the solo suggests a search for her true self beyond all external structures, expectations, appearances. Her work is sourced in her life. Married and a mother, Nyamza left her husband for a woman and now exults in her life as an out lesbian. The personal is the political is the poetic.

Let's hope for more chances to see what Nyamza, an artist of arresting skill and a woman of much charm, might have to offer. I hope it will not take long for her to return to New York's venues.

HATCHED is closed, but for other events in the 2016 Queer New York International Arts Festival--running through October 2 at various venues--click here.

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Curtis Hanson, 71

Curtis Hanson, Director of Wicked Noir ‘L.A. Confidential,’ Dies at 71
by Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times, September 21, 2016

Don Buchla, 79

Don Buchla, Electronic Music Maverick, Dies at 79
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, September 17, 2016

William P. Kinsella, 81

William P. Kinsella, Author of ‘Shoeless Joe,’ Dies at 81
by Christopher Mele, The New York Times, September 17, 2016

Take a walk through Colleen Thomas's childhood.

Dance artist Colleen Thomas grew up on Governors Island in the 1970s, long before it became today's popular playground for the creative arts and healthy outdoor fun. Her new interdisciplinary site work, Welcome Home, offers an impressions of an apartment--and life--much like the one she knew. She fills it with generations of relatives, artifacts, visual arts, music and social dancing. It's nostalgia for sure, but nostalgia with a potent kick--that energy provided by the many surprises that Building 10A's rooms hold and the edgy effect of stuffing twenty audience members and a corps of agile, fearlessly turbulent dancers into the same cramped spaces.

For the most part, Welcome Home is an enjoyable forty minutes. But not everything that happens in Building 10A, in the island's quiet Nolan Park area, is upbeat. Thomas evokes the racial divisions of the times, and there's at least one tiny room--darkened, hurried through--that looks like a nightmare in progress. We're hustled away, perhaps for the best.

On Friday, Thomas's dad was on hand in another room, one open to the light of day, to briefly guide us through old family photos.  The father/daughter resemblance is remarkable. Someone asked him how it felt to be back on the island.

"Weird," he said.

Performers: Samantha Allen, Keith Johnson, Saradiane Mosko, Jessica Stroh, Pedro Osorio, Kathy Stephens, Jim Stephens, Colleen Thomas, Darrin Wright, Olivia Young, Dylan Young, Bill Young

Visual Design: Rebecca Makus
Video Installation: Jason Akira Somma
Music: John McGrew
Costume Design: Rachel Jones Bellas
Dramaturgy: Adrian Silver

Welcome Home's remaining shows run today and tomorrow at 3pm, 4pm and 5pm.

(If you go, I strongly recommend that you also take advantage of some of the last chances to see the profoundly moving Michael Richards: Winged  exhibition in The Arts Center in Building 110, right off the Soissons ferry landing. Click here for information and gallery schedule.)

Click here for complete ferry information for Governors Island and here for Welcome Home tickets. Advance purchase is required as each performance accommodates only 20 audience members. You're advised to take a ferry leaving your departure point at least one hour before the start of the show you plan to attend.

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Edward Albee, 88

Edward Albee, Playwright of a Desperate Generation, Dies at 88
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, September 16, 2016

nora chipaumire delivers a MAN-ifesto at BAM Next Wave

nora chipaumire

in portrait of myself as my father

below: with Shamar Watt

(photos: Gennadi Novash)

What a scene at BAM Fisher's Fishman Space!  People excitedly grabbing each and every one of the general admission seats. Stragglers desperately searching for places to sit with companions. Harsh lights gleaming from the corners of a boxing ring. The crowd arranged along three sides of the ring and starting to fill the balconies. And as people enter, the evening's star--Zimbabwe-born dance artist nora chipaumire--giving each person gliding past her an appraising once-over, not always silently, although her imperial silence can and will burn anything to a crisp.

I watched chipaumire with amusement and trepidation, the latter brought on not only by the mystery of what might be going on inside her regal head but also by the look of her shoulders braced and armored in football pads, the way she thrust her Black body out beyond the ring's edge and right up into our faces, the amplified animalistic growls arising from some darkened corner of the ring. And, mostly, her restlessness as she examined each unknowing, distracted bypasser, the sense of her engines revving, revving, revving.

Lemme hear you say, Yeah, she says. (Someone bravely answers, Yeah.)

I've been waiting for you.

I'm ready. I'm ready.

Her moves are rhythmic, rolling, spongey, every well-oiled joint sure of itself, tilting forward, ever at the ready.

I been ready. In fact, I was born ready.

Come on,  Brooklyn. Let's do this!

Give me a green light. Now. Now.

The name of her extravagant trio--co-presented by BAM's Next Wave, 651 Arts and Théâtre de la Ville--is portrait of myself as my father. Except that the word "father" is struck out. Here, with thoughts of her father--estranged from his family since she was only five--chipaumire takes on masculinity, specifically Black African masculinity, and sets it down in the boxing ring of imagination and of daily life. Here, no matter what time it is, it is somehow always Round One for the Black man.

nora chipaumire
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

One-part Muhammad Ali rumbling in the jungle. One-part James Brown rumbling at the Apollo. And quite a lot of Black men fighting for their very lives on the daily. This is chipaumire, our chin-thrusting, strutting champion, delivering her MAN-ifesto along with collaborating performers, Shamar Watt and Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye (aka Kaolack).

Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye (Kaolack) with chipaumire
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

But I have not yet mentioned the visual element that, from first to last, most spoke to me--the elastic boxing ring ropes that tether chipaumire and Kaolack's bodies and which occasionally threaten to entangle all three players. You can see them as rough leashes restraining dangerous beasts or puppet strings controlling the range and articulation of their actions. They're worn by the dancers as a matter of course--like no biggie--but why? Like the ring itself, they define how far these characters can go but, within those limits, chipaumire and her mates do their most, infusing the space with energy, with aggression, with sexuality, all the while acknowledging the lingering distortions and damage wrought by colonialism and white dominance.

I think chipaumire hopes we will see those tethers as less restricting than we might first think them to be. She is invested in breaking open the way we see African men and Africa itself. And, in a time when Black male bodies, in popular awareness, are most associated with entertainment, incarceration or genocide, she wants to imagine how Black bodies might matter to Black bodies, how Black bodies might seize their own right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She is seeking the life her father and his generation never had and striving to snap the tethers his generation accepted.

Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye (Kaolack) with umbrella
leads chipaumire and Watt.
(photo: Gennadi Novash)

Ladies and gentlemen, the question is: How do you become a Black man? A Black African man?

You slow down...you slow way down. Like you have the time, like you own time. In fact, you become time.

During the useful post-show Q&A, moderated by Simon Dove, one audience member admiringly referred to the show as "a dangerous work." I agree and admire, too. This production and its three performers are outstanding. Moreover, with this portrait, chipaumire has delivered her clearest and most commanding work to date.

With original music/soundscore by Philip White

portrait of myself as my father continues at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space) tonight and tomorrow with performances at 7:30. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Nora York, 60

Nora York, Singer Who Fused Forms, Dies at 60
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, September 8, 2016

Verdensteatret's latest show leaves question marks

Verdensteatret's Bridge Over Mud
(photo courtesy of Verdensteatret)

Having seen Verdensteatret's wondrous audiovisual fantasia, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing (Dance Theater Workshop, 2011, review posted here), I looked forward to Bridge Over Mud, the Norwegian art collective's US premiere at BAM Next Wave. First shown in 2014 in Oslo, this award-winning production has some of the enchantments of Question Mark. It boldly engulfs and transforms its space, filling it with a combination of cleverly re-purposed objects, looming video imagery and otherworldly sounds, some played or vocalized live. Viewers may feel as if they have pulled chairs up to the edge of a dream an intelligent, sleeping machine might be having as its brain processes the multitude of physical things and environments--humans, not so much--that it has dealt with throughout its day and down through time.

The hour seems long. Bridge Over Mud strikes me as far murkier and less inviting than Question Mark, if no less strange. The looming, advancing shadows, the massive sculpted sliding panels, the mysterious imagery in the background are items that we in the audience regard and check off from an emotionally-glazed distance. I did initially enjoy the model train engines snaking along 195 feet of track throughout the space but got distracted recalling that I never had model trains as a child. But, at least, that memory formed a momentary bridge to what I was seeing. Dangling from flies to floor, giant strands of Polynesian leis--apparently made of tiles simulating puka shells--seemed at variance with the overall funereal atmosphere. But then, this is the machine's dream, and maybe only the machine can sort it all out.

Presented here in association with Wayne Ashley's provocative FuturePerfect Productions, Verdensteatret is Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Piotr Pajchel, Eirik Blekesaune, Ali Djabbary, Martin Taxt, Espen Sommer Eide, Torgrim Torve, Elisabeth Gmeiner, Niklas Adam, Kristine Sandøy, Thorolf Thuestad, Janne Kruse, Laurent Ravot and Benjamin Nelson.

Bridge Over Mud concludes tonight but is sold out. For information and standby ticket details, click here.

BAM Fishman Space

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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jill sigman/thinkdance presents "Weed Heart" at Gibney

Jill Sigman in her performance of Weed Heart
and below with Katrina De Wees
(photos: Scott Shaw)

Unruly.

That word often crops up when we talk about weeds.

And about certain people.

I'll use it here to describe both the artist Jill Sigman (jill sigman/thinkdance) and what she has wrought at Gibney Dance Center: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center as choreographer and as Gibney's first Community Action Artist in Residence.

Her project, Weed Heart, is an unruly yet sociable thing of sculptured plantings, tea servings, soup servings, community conversations, free-ranging ideas, music and movement in intimate space. It willfully sprawls from Gibney's gallery lounge area to its tiny ground-level Studio A and, ultimately, beyond the center's front door.

Weed Heart is both a cozy, rather retro (think: hippie era) installation, a commons where anyone can drop by and hang out (the gallery lounge), and a performance where only a little over thirty onlookers can fit (Studio A). At the evening performance, those thirty or so get soothed by a weedy brew of tea, light and delicious red lentil soup made by Katrina De Wees and luminously textured electronic and vocal energy from composer Kristin Norderval. Seated in a single ring around the space, those thirty or so observe an abstract representation of the path that Sigman took--from earnest seeking and bewilderment to soul-felt awareness--as she sought to learn what common weeds can teach her.

How they communicate with themselves and, potentially, with us. How they survive. How they foster healing. How cultures have regarded and interacted with them over time. How our disdain for weeds parallels our similar ignorance about humans we consider to be unlike ourselves and less worthy.

Working with living creatures whose existence depends upon deep connection below the surface--or, at least, attachment to dug-up portions of earth--she has tapped into sediments of her family legacy and of New York history. Weed Heart is haunted by the displacement of indigenous people, the brutality of slavery, the appropriation of what was once land available for common access.

As Sigman reminds us, during a video in her performance, when we buy our sports bras next door at Modell's or park our cars in the lot east of Gibney, we do so over the remains of enslaved Africans. Yes, Weed Heart is packed with all of this--and more. Sigman works tend to be threaded with everything and every interconnection engaging her mind--from environmental sustainability to The Movement for Black Lives. It's a fertile mind, and you just plug into something that resonates with you and hang on as best you can.

Weed Heart, the dance and the dancing, seems born of age-old ritual. Here Sigman takes on the trappings of the plant kingdom. She has tied a large, heart-shaped Paulownia leaf around her face (and, much later, reveals its remarkable source). Brighter green leaves--and a little rose-pink rhinestone heart--decorate her dark-blue hoodie. One cannot look at that hoodie, somehow, and not think of Trayvon Martin's and--when her head and face are completely swathed--the Muslim hijab and niqab.

Sigman's movements--often angular, jutting and jarring--have an alien feel, and Norderval's soundscore draws us through metallic or insect-like dimensions that elude easy identification. It's the role of the ritualist, after all, to take us far from Kansas. Sigman does this, yet--with assists from Norderval and De Wees--she shows that "strange new worlds"--removed and hidden and strange and new to us, at least--can be places of graciousness and mercy.

Jill Sigman on Chambers Street
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Weed Heart performances continue through Saturday, September 10 and Wednesday-Saturday, September 14-17, all at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Related event: Weed Heart: People, Plants, and Social Justice panel discussion on Sunday, September 25, 4-5pm. Click here for information.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

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

(map/directions)

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FABnyc launches The Sustainable Artist Toolkit

The Sustainable Artist Toolkit

 (#ArtistToolkit)

Artists, Cultural Workers, Revelers & Explorers of creative expression: DON’T PANIC.

FAB is excited to bring to you The Sustainable Artist Toolkit – a series of workshops led by A. Nia Edwards-Austin, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Kendra Ross, and Sydnie Mosley, for artists, cultural workers, creativity seekers… and everyone in between. Learn to tell your stories, share resources, activate the community, cultivate thoughtful responsiveness — all while working towards a generative and caring ecosystem.

And I'm excited to be part of the team bringing this new initiative to our arts community. You'll hear more about my part of it in coming months but, first up:

Sydnie L. Mosley
(photo: Ferima Faye/F.F. Visual)

BodyBusiness Resource Sharing: getting what you NEED with what you HAVE

led by Sydnie L. Mosley and SLMDances

Wednesday, Sept 21, 7-9pm

Through a series of artist-guided activities, SLMDances will share practices that work towards a cooperative economy based on trust, value transparency and accountability, all while honoring individual voices. In school, in our jobs, in society, we are taught “resources are scarce” — but what if the skills, goods, services, and/or opportunities we already possess becomes the central resource of worth instead of money?

Artists, cultural workers, makers: let’s fully embody a vision of a community that has mastered the art of sharing in order to negotiate obstacles and achieve common goals! In this session, reflect on what you have & what you need, equitably distribute resources, experience how a cooperative economy operates, and together, find ways to shift the culture in our day-to-day.

This model was co-conceived with Our Goods and elevates a vision that values artists’ creative labor and production while decentralizing money as the only source of real worth.

For more #ArtistToolkit programming details and to register for this and other events in the series, click here.

And connect with FABnyc on social media:

Facebook: @FABNYC 
Twitter: @fourthartsblock
Instagram: @fourthartsblock

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The Lady Chablis, 59

The Lady Chablis, Sassy Eccentric in ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,’ Dies at 59
by Niraj Chokshi, The New York Times, September 8, 2016

Jon Polito, 65

Jon Polito, a Favorite in Coen Brothers Films, Dies at 65
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Fred Hellerman, 89

Fred Hellerman, Last of the Weavers Folk Group, Dies at 89
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Nathan Lyons, 86

Nathan Lyons, Influential Photographer and Advocate of the Art, Dies at 86
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