The Joyce opens first week of Lucinda Childs repertory

The Lucinda Childs Dance Company’s
Caitlin Scranton, Patrick John O'Neill,
Sharon Milanese and Matt Pardo
in Canto Ostinato
(photo: John Sisley)

Katherine Helen Fisher
in Pastime
(photo: John Sisley)

More than a few times, as I sat watching the Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater last evening, I thought of abstract painter Agnes Martin. Seeing the Martin retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, which continues through January 11, demonstrated what I'd always heard about her painting but could never detect from reproductions in books and magazines. Calling her a minimalist doesn't tell the whole story.

You can read between Martin's meticulous, repetitive lines, read the energy, and there's so much there--a range of feeling, of humanity in its complexity painted in, not everything as perfect as first glance might suggest nor is it meant to be so. If you sincerely ask, the works will often show you where to look and what to listen for.

In the case of Lucinda Childs, the cool, remote severity of her physique and persona and her aesthetic of precise grids, repetitive motion and continuously slipping, interweaving geometric patterns might also have been a distraction, albeit a dazzling one. Her dancing, and her dancers's dancing, were and are like airy, graceful cursive script written across space with the aid of frictionless implements. The company, like a surface glance at Martin's brush strokes, reveals no hint of human individuality. In fact, when music drives the dancing--and Childs favors music that roughly upends or irresistibly and endlessly propels things--it can often suggest we read each member of the corps as sleek, high-grade machinery on the move. But what else is present?

The Joyce Theater season's first week highlights five decades of work from repertory as old as Pastime (1963), a Childs solo from her Judson Church days, and as current as this fall's Into View, premiered at UCLA. The second week's program, which I will see on Tuesday, features Dance (1979), the masterful collaboration of Childs, Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt where LeWitt's film of the original cast in action, jumbo images spanning the stage, plays over and with the current troupe.

The selections for this first week are instructive. One draws an impression of an American with that legendary sense of entitlement to open space; one who knows how to hook audiences with springy, lighter-than-air bodies, feet barely claimed by gravity; one winking at people who share her love for the unadorned inner systems of American ballet and Cunningham and, likely, Astaire; people who respond to the wry, sometimes surreal turns of a brilliant mind. All of this looks as glamorous as all get out (see 1993's Concerto, especially). It can knock you over. And the dancers, an elite corps, are on it.

In Canto Ostinato (2015), narrow, vertical lines of light, sliding across the backdrop at varying speeds, create elusive illusions of each member of the ensemble moving in a spatial groove of his or her own depth. Following those hallucinations, Into View--with its unsettling visual image of a tiny, distant sun surrounded by dusty orange haze--appears dynamic enough to be diverting but not much more, a good-enough Lucinda Childs piece. But here I noticed something happening between dancers that I had not seen before. It was fleeting but clear--eye contact and interaction with an unspoken purpose but a force readable past many rows of watchers. Again, I flashed back to Martin, to the feelings carefully stored within the shielding rigor or deflecting haze of her surfaces. I wondered again at the artist's presence: Who goes there?

Lucinda Childs Dance Company continues at The Joyce through December 11 with the following programs:

Program A: Lucinda Childs: A Portrait (1963-2016), now through December 4. Curtain Chat: Wednesday, November 30

Program B: Dance (1979), December 6-11

For schedule details and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
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Remembering the arts on Giving Tuesday

Photos ©2014-2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Above: Dancing Through the Bronx,
a project of Dancing in the Streets, 2015
Below: Dance artist Nia Love working with students in
the New Directions Choreographic Lab of the
Ailey/Fordham BFA program, 2014

Hey, I know I don't have to tell you it's Giving Tuesday. Your email inbox has got that covered.

We're all getting multiple requests from groups doing good and necessary work in the world. I won't pile on more here.

But, as you sort through these many appeals, I do urge you to consider directing at least some of your support towards the arts. We know we can anticipate further decline in arts funding in the U.S. and the inevitable targeting of artists who challenge complacency and speak truth to power. We need to nurture and back up artists on the front lines.

The arts can play a strong, visionary role in the struggle for equity, human rights, justice and care for our endangered environment. Please give to the arts with all of your own imagination and vision for our shared future.

Thank you!

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
InfiniteBody

Fritz Weaver, 90

Fritz Weaver, Tony-Winning Character Actor, Dies at 90
by Robert Berkvist, The New York Times, November 27, 2016

Ron Glass, 71

Ron Glass, Who Played a Dapper Detective on ‘Barney Miller,’ Dies at 71
by Christopher Mele, The New York Times, November 27, 2016

Pauline Oliveros, 84

Pauline Oliveros, musical performer and experimentalist, dies
by Joshua Kosman, SFGate, November 25, 2016

Pauline Oliveros, Composer Who Championed ‘Deep Listening,’ Dies at 84
by Steve Smith, The New York Times, November 27, 2016

Eiko Otake at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Eiko Otake begins her dance in the Choir
at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
(all photos ©2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

In the fall of 2016 and winter of 2017, Eiko is an artist in residence at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Upper Manhattan. She is offering solo performances within the Cathedral, designing a video installation, hosting public conversations, and A Body in Fukushima, a mutable exhibition of dance photographs created in collaboration with historian-photographer William Johnston, is also a part of the larger art exhibition, The Christa Project. Throughout the residency, Eiko will explore the dignity and transcendence inherent in the ordinary and the disregarded.

 --from Eiko & Koma website

Black Friday. I have not spent a penny in stores. Just carfare to travel uptown to watch Eiko Otake at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine where the Japan-born master dancer is in residence through March 11 of next year.

So, how do you find Eiko in that massive space?

Please. Just walk around a few minutes, maybe have a look at William Johnston's portraits of her, and soon, as if from out of nowhere, she will spy you, swoop down and claim you.

When Eiko talks directly to you, she gets right up in your space. You have no time to work out how that happened. You're just swept up in her energy. There's always something somewhere else that she wants to show you, and when she moves off to do so, she's raptor-swift. You just hustle along at her single gesture of command.

She also loves to gather all of her people--friends, students, tourists from Greece and Korea who just happened by--and make a party of strangers. Everyone must first meet everyone else. In this way, Eiko makes the grandeur of the cathedral a little less daunting. She gives permission to everyone to tag along as she drifts here and there--from choir to crossing to congregation seats to art displays to imposing bronze doors--and you get the feeling she might secretly own the joint.

Photos ©2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Not quite, though. Not yet. The handsome cathedral provides a dramatic visual backdrop for this dancer. But I sense these two acclaimed works of art are still getting to know one another.

I have most recently seen Eiko's A Body in Places all over my place--the East Village--in her mesmerizing Spring 2016 platform for Danspace Project. I get and am deeply shaken by what she has done in Fukushima. But I am now trying to get a read on what Eiko's body means in the context of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. So far, I can only make connections between her woman's body and the body of The Christa Project art works displayed throughout this sacred space.

Eiko returns to the cathedral in late January and will continue work through early March, culminating in performances to commemorate the sixth anniversary of Japan's devastating earthquake and tsunami.

Check back here as I have been invited to visit again next year and document what I'm seeing. In the meantime, please enjoy a few more photos from yesterday afternoon.

All photos ©2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

About The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies

During Holy Week of 1984, Edwina Sandys’ Christa was displayed in the Cathedral as part of a small exhibition on the feminine divine. The general reception was positive, but a particularly vocal minority condemned the piece and its placement in a house of worship through ecclesiastical denunciations and a plethora of hate mail that attacked the “blasphemy” of changing the symbol of Christ. These dissenters highlighted how the sculpture’s allegedly sexualized (i.e. female) figure brought attention to Christ’s human body, which was “blasphemous, shocking, and inappropriate.”

Conversations about the politics of identity have changed tremendously since the 1980s. Christa’s essential statement, however, remains vital to our world today: people are hungry to see themselves and each other fully represented in society, especially in its most powerful and iconic institutions. In turn, the Cathedral is thrilled to display Christa once again, alongside works by 21 other contemporary artists, all exploring the language, symbolism, art, and ritual associated with the historic concept of the Christ image and the divine as manifested in every person—across all genders, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and abilities.

--from Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine website 

The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies will be on view at the cathedral through March 12, 2017. For information, click here.

The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue, at 112th Street (Manhattan)
(directions)

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Florence Henderson, 82

Florence Henderson, Upbeat Mom of ‘The Brady Bunch,’ Dies at 82
by Anita Gates, The New York Times, November 25, 2016

Sutton Foster: fun, laughs, good times...and something more

Broadway's golden girl, Sutton Foster, has become Neil Simon's refugee of the heart, Charity Hope Valentine. And all the reasons some critics felt disappointed with The New Group's approach to Simon's fifty-year-old phenom, Sweet Charity, are reasons I admire it.

Scaled back, toned down and set in 3/4-round, small-theater intimacy that finds jaded dance hall girls and their clientele looming over the first few audience rows, this Sweet Charity feels like a musical for the sobering times we're suddenly living in. You surely expected fun, laughs, good times only to get this bucket of cold water thrown in your face.

I came for the brilliant Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields tunes that, decades ago, took up permanent residence in my brain--"Big Spender," "If My Friends Could See Me Now," "There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This," "Baby, Dream Your Dream" and, especially as later socked home by Streisand, "Where Am I Going?" Even with the poignant re-positioning of one of those songs, they hit the mark again as rendered by Georgia Stitt's all-women, five-member band and director Leigh Silverman's sturdy, versatile, multicultural cast.

I'm a downtown gal, much more accustomed to close-up performance than being set back behind an invisible screen with action unfolding at a far remove. Sitting in the 200-seat arrangement, I liked being able to see what was in these characters' eyes--the dead or dying souls, particularly--and how hard the actors worked for this show. I felt privileged to witness a top-of-her-game performance from Foster--my first time--who owns every single twisty complexity of her character and her show.

Unlike some of her co-workers, Charity maintains moral lines she won't cross. Yet, in her ever-hopeful quest and desperation for love, she's easy pickings for exploitative men. Yet, in the right situation, she can show a crafty, even tough side. Yet, she breaks just like a little girl, shielding that quirky, sparkly grin and lively, hungry, intelligent eyes. And yet. And yet. Foster--in some mind-boggling integration of Carol Burnett and Jane Fonda happening right before our eyes--manages to master every bit of this. I came late to fandom, but I now adore her and would follow her to any stage.

As panicky Oscar, Shuler Hensley is so viscerally good--and adorably hilarious--in the stuck-elevator scene that he began to make me feel claustrophobic. (Okay, maybe the Linney Theatre really is a little small...). I also enjoyed the smooth subtleties in Joel Perez's work as movie star Vittorio Vidal but liked him even more when, as the usually loutish dance hall owner Herman, he suddenly reveals how much he loves to cry at weddings.

Sweet Charity leaves Herman, and the rest of us, with something to cry about all right. It feels unexpected, unimaginable, all wrong and...yeah...familiar.

Sweet Charity's run has been extended through January 8. Get information and tickets here.

The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
at The Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West 42nd Street, Manhattan
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The Fierce Urgency of Now: A Space to Process the Election

The Fierce Urgency of Now: 

A Space to Process the Election

Tuesday, November 29

7pm to 9pm

FREE/OPEN TO ALL

Initiated by Jill Sigman and Co-Facilitated by Marguerite Hemmings, Joshua Hall, Mary Suk, David King, and other artists and thinkers 

Hosted by Gibney Dance

FREE and open to people of all races, ethnicities, ages, and nationalities, artists and non-artists

The Fierce Urgency of Now is a public dialogue event for artists, activists, friends, colleagues, and affiliates. Many of us are still feeling the need for space and community in which to process the election and its ramifications. Artists and activists are simultaneously part of multiple vulnerable populations; now more than ever, we are concerned about racism, sexism, visas and immigration, access to healthcare, rights and safety for queer and trans people, disability access, affordable housing, financial stability, and so much more. This loosely structured public event creates a “temporary commons” in which to think, talk, wonder, question, imagine, and brainstorm. It is conceived as an open dialogue (not a strategy meeting or a place to determine actionable steps, although if those emerge, we’ll welcome them too). One event can’t do everything. The Fierce Urgency of Now is intended to be part of a collective beginning, which hopefully leads to future dialogues, more focused groups, strategy building, task forces, etc.

For more information, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

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

(map/directions)

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William Trevor, 88

William Trevor, Writer Who Evoked the Struggles of Ordinary Life, Is Dead at 88
by William Grimes, The New York Times, November 21, 2016

Houston Conwill, 69

Houston Conwill, Whose Sculptures Celebrated Black Culture, Dies at 69
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, November 20, 2016

Sharon Jones, 60

Sharon Jones, Powerful Voice of Soul With the Dap-Kings, Dies at 60
by Steve Kenny and Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times, November 18, 2016

Next on the BAM Next Wave: Faye Driscoll says thanks

Brandon Washington (left) and Alicia Ohs
dance in Faye Driscoll's Thank You For Coming: Play
Below: Sean Donovan
(photos: Maria Baranova)

It's not every day I get a last-minute email that says don't reveal this or that about the show you're about to see and review; we want this to be a surprise. But I got one the afternoon before Faye Driscoll's New York premiere of Thank You for Coming: Play at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space), and I'm completely up for being in on the fun.

No, I wouldn't spoil it. But I'll go Driscoll one better. There's very little I'll reveal about this Next Wave show, short of showing you some photos here that will give you just the slightest hint of the delirious and endearing thrift-shop aesthetics of the thing. Think a bunch of untamed k(ids) with access to costumes like these, uncanny exposure to Kabuki and a passion for storytelling who somehow have sprung from Driscoll's head. Driscoll, herself, is on hand to kind of show us how the springing-from-head thing happens. Dancers Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Paul Singh, Laurel Snyder and Brandon Washington work their butts off while also working their way into our hearts. Dancing, vocalizing and making complete asses of themselves, they are an ensemble to be treasured and long remembered.

Play is the second part of Driscoll's Thank You For Coming trilogy and my first experience of it. I enjoyed watching a structure that made the most of physical space, visual variety, theatrical artifice and excess, and extremes of polarities (even within an individual performer) before tamping down and tapering all of those things like a decorative fan displayed, madly flapped and then finally folded.

Go see it. Driscoll made it with you in mind. And that's all I'm sayin'.

Choreography/text: Driscoll in collaboration with the performers
Sound: Bobby McElver
Musical direction: Bobby McElver and Sean Donovan
Original compositions: Sean Donovan, Bobby McElver and Faye Driscoll
Vocal arrangement: Sean Donovan
Lyrics: Faye Driscoll
Additional lyrics: Sean Donovan

Thank You for Coming: Play runs one hour/15 minutes without intermission and continues through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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New World Disorder: Nothing Normal Here

Why the Art World Must Not Normalize Donald Trump’s Presidency

Since the election, many people have called for a return to business as usual and pledged their support for the president-elect, but these attitudes are dangerous for artists, arts workers, and many, many others. (click to read)

by Noah Fischer, Hyperallergic, November 15, 2016

Mose Allison, 89

Mose Allison, a Fount of Jazz and Blues, Dies at 89
by Nate Chinen, The New York Times, November 15, 2016

Leon Russell, 74

Leon Russell, Hit Maker and Musicians’ Musician, Dies at 74
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, November 13, 2016

Four minutes are plenty: NDT at The Met Breuer

Chuck Jones and Parveneh Scharafali
of Nederlands Dans Theater in Shutters Shut
(photo:  © Joris-Jan Bos Photography)

My crazy dance-going life includes things like spending time and subway fare to run up to The Met Breuer on a Saturday afternoon to catch a dance performance lasting all of four minutes.

And then, on the way out, looking longingly from the elevator's open door at the Kerry James Marshall show, powerfully drawn to revisit it but knowing I had to hustle back downtown for a DraftWork showing at Danspace Project.

And then, with less time to spare than I'd hoped, having to abandon my already rerouted downtown bus when it finally could not make it past an anti-Trump demonstration streaming down Fifth Avenue. That's okay. Walking's good for me, and walking's good for our nation. Win/win.

A gallery space on Met Breuer's fifth floor hosted the clever Sol León/Paul Lightfoot duet, Shutters Shut (2003), performed by Chuck Jones and Parvaneh Scharafali of Nederlands Dans Theater. It was repeated three times on the hour, from 1pm to 3pm, before an audience seated on four forward-facing benches and floor cushions. Many people stood to see into the initially roped-off, horizontal and narrow performance area. At a few minutes to the hour, attendants unclasped the front rope, and the dancers backpedaled into their space, Jones followed by Scharafali.

Here's a snippet of the duet, inspired by Gertrude Stein's recitation of "If I Told Him: A Complete Portrait of Picasso" (1923), with its hypnotic, staccato Cubist rhythms so well captured here in physical movement.

NDT's performances of Shutters Shut were presented in conjunction with the exhibition Humor and Fantasy—The Berggruen Paul Klee Collection, on view at The Met Breuer, September 1, 2016–January 2, 2017. For information on the exhibition, click here.

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Jonah Bokaer's big wave hits Next Wave

Scenes from Rules of the Game
(photo: Sharen Bradford)

What eye-popping, impulsive joy Jonah Bokaer brings to a stage--every inch, edge and corner of it. He's got a fantastic crew of dancers who, if they haven't exactly absorbed his exalted degree of exquisiteness as a performer, more than make up for it in agility, stamina and adventurousness. He has, in longtime collaborating scenographer Daniel Arsham, a fellow artist with a keen sense of that dream-like place where bold, luscious imagery overlaps with anxiety and menace. In a new ensemble work, Rules of the Game, he's joined by Grammy-winning hit-maker Pharrell Williams (original score) and arranger/co-composer David Campbell for rousing, viscerally affecting sound that straddles and destroys borders between pop and symphonic, cinema-like orchestration. Nino Rota might have dug it.

The season, part of BAM's Next Wave Festival also includes a couple of notable head trips from repertory. There's RECESS (2010), the signature solo in which Bokaer's body, clad in jet black, disturbs, romps with and brazenly "writes" its way across a massive unrolling sheet of white paper. In Why Patterns (2011), Bokaer's dancers share a marked-off square of space with thousands of hyperactive ping-pong balls. The program--one hour and 45 minutes with intermission--might be the most visually clever, stimulating event I've seen this season.

Rules of the Game fields eight players in dusty-pink hoodies with Spalding basketballs in a game that, over time, gets less abstractly playful--less civilized--and more personal in its tension and viciousness. It's backed by a video showing the rise, fall and frequent slow-motion shattering of oversized plaster casts of basketballs and statue heads. The effects behind the stage, as on it, can be startling, often unnerving, but unfortunately repeat themselves beyond reason. No sooner does a possible ending of the piece subside than new action starts up on the stage with a new round of rising, falling, shattering behind it.

Visionary Bokaer and his team make impressive, appealing theater magic. They truly rock. But there comes a point, in each work, where you question why the excess needs further elaboration and where all of this is meant to take us.

Performances by Wendell Gray II, Laura Gutierrez, James Koroni, Callie Lyons, James McGinn, Szabo Pataki, Sara Procopio and Betti Rollo

Rules of the Game concludes tonight with a performance at 7:30pm. The program runs 1h 45 min with intermission. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
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Robert Vaughn, 83

Robert Vaughn, Who Starred as Napoleon Solo in ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E,’ Dies at 83
by Leslie Kaufman, The New York Times, November 11, 2016

Leonard Cohen, 82

Leonard Cohen, Epic and Enigmatic Songwriter, Is Dead at 82
by Larry Rohter, The New York Times, November 10, 2016

Kate Weare takes aim: New York premiere of "Marksman"

Kate Weare Company in Marksman (photo: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang)

Weare draws inspiration from Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, “The [master] marksman aims at himself….”

          --from publicity for Marksman 


As Kate Weare Company begins Marksman, two dancers stand close to each other on the open Joyce Theater stage. The woman bends away from the man, her supple torso sprung and hanging backward towards the floor. It's an odd shape, billowing yet tense as a bow and the pulled string of a bow. Its design, like all that follow over the coming hour, emphasizes form and heft more than literal meaning. This dancer is the first piece you might pluck from the jumbled pile in a jigsaw puzzle box. She's vividly three-dimensional, though, and abstract. You eye her irregular edge and see how it might belong with that other curious piece over there. And, in fact, from the audience's point of view, the two dancers fit together; one slips in front of the other to create the illusion of a multi-limbed body.

In Kate Weare's statement about the work, citing all she has learned from nature and childbirth, she writes about her sense that "we are always forming while being formed, playing while being played, aiming while being aimed." Nature, in other words, works its powerful will through us despite our belief that we are in control.

In Marksman, Weare makes silky beauty out of a flow of oddities and oddballs, puzzle pieces with shapes that conveniently function well together in every fleeting moment. A sudden, well-placed touch or flick of the hand, one dancer to another, propels a cascade of undulant reactions in the receiver's body. At times, Weare shows us two pairs of dancers, side by side, each pair performing identical luxuriant sequences. Their "marksman" selves must stay alert and attuned because both dancer and environment are always changing.

The troupe--including newcomers Kayla Farrish and Thryn Saxon--performs with lovely skill and cohesion. Watching Marksman, I had a funny thought. When it comes time to nudge your friends past the likes of, say, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater or New York City Ballet, why not gently suggest Kate Weare Company, with its true choreographic rigor and sensuous pleasures, as a good next step?

Kate Weare Company: Julian De Leon, Nicole Diaz, Kayla Farrish, Douglas Gillespie, Thryn Saxon and Ryan Rouland Smith

Curtis Macdonald (original music and sound)
Clifford Ross (set)
Mike Faba (lighting)
Brooke Cohen (costumes)

Marksman continues through Sunday, November 13. Tonight's program will feature a Curtain Chat. For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
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Raoul Coutard, 92

Raoul Coutard, Cinematographer of the French New Wave, Dies at 92
by William Grimes, The New York Times, November 9, 2016

I was interviewed for Movers & Shapers podcast!

Erin Carlisle Norton
Artistic Director of The Moving Architects
and host of Movers & Shapers
(photo courtesy of Erin Carlisle Norton)

The very gracious Erin Carlisle Norton, artistic director of The Moving Architects, interviewed me for her Movers & Shapers dance podcast!

You can find the episode here.

For more Movers & Shapers episodes, click here or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

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Looking at Lucinda, then and now

Scenes from Dance (2009) by Lucinda Childs
(photos: Sally Cohn)

I regret missing Barnard College Dance Department's recent evening with Lucinda Childs and French filmmaker Patrick Bensard, director of the 2005 documentary, Lucinda Childs. Just short of an hour, the film traces notable influences and milestones in the dance artist's career--her exposure to the aesthetics of Cunningham and Cage, explorations with her fellow Judson iconoclasts such as Yvonne Rainer, magisterial flights through the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson universe.

It is Wilson, interviewed by Bensard, who best sums up the multitude within Childs, the mixed feelings she and her elegant, minimalist aesthetic can stir in a viewer. He describes a being at once soft and severe, hot and cold, and he appears to love her every polarized contradiction. The film includes wonderful excerpts of Childs, Mikhail Baryshnikov and other dancers performing her choreography--skimming the floor and slicing through air like figure skaters, earth and its gravity mere playthings to these mercurial figures.

Worth any price of admission are the brief glimpses of her solo Carnation, made in 1964 when I was 12 and a decade away from starting to write about dance. Maybe only a woman as frosty-looking as Childs could be this wickedly clever, surreal and funny in her ritualistic precision, crowning herself with a flexible strainer basket, carefully stuffing kitchen sponges into her mouth and fanning the stack open like a duck's bill.  How I wish I could see it performed live now.

* * *

See the fall season of The Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater, November 29-December 11. The first week's program includes the New York premiere of a Joyce commission, The Sun Roars Into View (2016), and the second week features Childs's signature work, Dance (1979) with a commissioned score by Philip Glass and the original film decor by Sol LeWitt.

For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Kyle Abraham's neighborhood remains in motion

Choreographer Kyle Abraham
dances in Pavement.
(photo: Carrie Schneider)

What does it mean to bring a Black neighborhood into theatrical space? Like the Black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, where dance artist Kyle Abraham grew up, or historically Black sections of Brooklyn where Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion finishes its season at BAM Fisher this evening?

It takes more than lining the space with a chain-linked fence and basketball hoop, evocative though those details certainly are. It takes a sensibility large enough and a skill sharp enough to reflect the complexity of Black life through the power of dance imagery.

What other artists have done so well between the covers of a book or across a movie screen, Abraham strives to do in the hour-long Pavement, first commissioned by Harlem Stage and shown there in the fall of 2012 as the city reeled from Hurricane Sandy. That show went on even as the troupers had to make do without their set, stored away in New Jersey. The fence and hoop (and a projection that features No Loitering signs) appear in the BAM production, establishing, for our benefit, a literal sense of place.

But a neighborhood is more than its coordinates. It lives in its rhythms--its music, its laughter, its glances, its gestures of kinship, its anger and hair-trigger aggression, its desires and its hopes. With his brief, opening solo to gruff blues, Abraham first directs us to look for and read these rhythms in movements that are both hunched and earthy. Nothing's realer than the wide, boisterous roll of his pelvis. But Abraham, as choreographer, can be indirect and elusive, suspending any interpretation-minded viewer in a limbo of ambiguity because there's just so much on his page.

When a white man wraps his arms around a Black man, pulls him to the floor, face down, and gently folds the man's arms behind his back, you read many things at once. The softness of the energy between the men. The unexpected compliance of the brother. The iconic and traumatically internalized image that cannot be severed from too many videos of Black men subdued or slain by cops.

Later in the piece, dancers lower themselves atop one another in the same downward, hands-restrained position--with the same gentleness, willingness, inevitability. You see bodies piling up as Sam Cooke croons a love song--I belong to your heart /You alone can possess me/No one else can caress me /I belong to your heart--and it is simply too much to easily process.

I remember interviewing a wunderkind Abraham in 2008--a year of Hope with a capital H--and asking him some trite question about Obama. Now it is eight years later. How many Black men and women have been incarcerated or murdered by the police since that year of capital H hope? The shades of our dead pass through Pavement and cannot be ignored.

I'm intrigued by the half of the stage that often stays empty while dancers bunch in formation in the other half. I'm intrigued by the breadth of Abraham's embrace--Bach to Donny Hathaway--and the compression of contemporary dance, West African dance, ballet and hip hop, dancers confidently switching codes through these distinct states of being. They both acknowledge and defy the limitations of theater space, representing lived experience, culture and intimacy within its make-believe confines. They make a neighborhood.

With performances by Kyle Abraham, Matthew Baker, Vinson Fraley, Jr., Tamisha Guy, Thomas House, Chalvar Monteiro, Jeremy "Jae" Neal and Kevin Ricardo Tate

Pavement concludes this evening with a performance at 7:30pm. For tickets and information, click here.

BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)
 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
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Gibney company premieres "Folding In" at home

Scenes from Gina Gibney's Folding In
Above, left to right: Kassandra Cruz, Devin Oshiro and Amy Miller
Below: Nigel Campbell and Kassandra Cruz
(photos: Scott Shaw)

Gina Gibney lists her five dancers--Amy Miller, Brandon Welch, Nigel Campbell, Kassandra Cruz and Devin Oshiro--as collaborators, and dance outsiders might think that role stops when a work's first performance begins. But it continues through the last movement of the work, and Gibney's artistry foregrounds performers in a way calls to mind Yeats musing, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

The Gibney Dance Company celebrates its 25th anniversary this season with the world premiere of Folding In, Gibney's first evening-length piece since opening her organization's second home, Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center.  Set to an atmospheric score by Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, the dance bears the distinct Gibney stamp in its imagistic poetry, picturesque sculpture and sensitive relationships that initiate and flow between and among dancers. This choreographer, I suspect, continuously tinkers and crafts a world she'd like to live in.

She describes the piece as "a meditation on the cycle of extension, resolution, and return" that exposes "the natural state of the body and how it seeks inevitable but unknowable endings." The dancing fills a looming white studio space tinted with lighting designer Asami Morita's muted, shifting chroma. Intriguingly, as the audience seating is arranged, the studio also features a deep area perpendicular to the scene and out of our view--what we can't see, can't know. That recessed area has a definite presence.

What we do see--and quite clearly, as is the Gibney way--might be hard to define. A corps of white-clad dancers spread themselves across the back wall like sticky scraps of paper torn from some once-unified whole--an image reflected in the projection on the wall. They initially use the wall as a medium in which to grow, to explore the strength of their hands and the reach of their limbs, to eventually and crucially render themselves distinct from their beginnings and from one another. Felicity Sargent's interestingly different costumes suggest that they were always meant to strike out in individual ways.

They emerge--agile, spiky Miller, "rubberband man" Welch and all--in a whirlpool of motion generating solitudes and interconnections. The work requires--and receives from its performer--both remarkable plasticity and exactitude. Although the makeup of her company has changed over these many years, Gibney has always had an eye for a dancer's dancer, some of the best collaborators an artist can hope for.

Folding In continues through Wednesday, November 12. 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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In review: "the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds"

Cast of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Read reviews of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, an evening of site-specific improvisation curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, part of Danspace Project's Lost and Found platform at St. Mark's Church, Saturday, October 22, 2016.

Click to read:

Maura Donohue, Culturebot

Alexis Clements, Hyperallergic

Nicole Loeffler-Gladstone, The Dance Enthusiast

Gia Kourlas, The New York Times

For information on remaining Lost and Found events, 

now through November 19, click here.

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Underexposed at Dixon Place...for now

Artists from Dixon Place's Under Exposed program
Above: Breeanah Breeden (left) with Kathleen Kelley
(photo: Andy Ribner)
Below: Sari Nordman
(photo: Shane Solow)

The Dixon Place performance series Under Exposed, curated by Doug Post, offers emerging choreographers opportunities to show work at various stages of development. New York dance watchers might discover one or more up-and-coming artists who should be on our radar. Any such testing-ground programming will be eclectic and likely uneven but not without rewards.

The following artists showed work last evening at Dixon Place:

Kathleen Kelley and Breeanah Breeden

Justin Faircloth and Maddie Schimmel

Liz Charky

Sari Nordman

Ranardo-Domeico Grays

Grays's three excerpts from Roots--performed by members of his VISIONS Contemporary Ballet--is the kind of big-hearted ensemble deployment that would benefit from more space to spread out in and more distance from the audience than Dixon Place can offer. A praise dance steeped in traditional ballet and modern techniques, it finds its life in the elegant technique and conviction of Wesley McIntyre, the one performer who reflects the roaring fire of devotion right down to the cellular level. He is a joy to watch.

I also enjoyed the chance to see a duet by Kelley--my Montclair State University colleague--and Breeden. In Orbicular, the two women--one white, one Black--start out silently, warily eyeing each other as they begin a shifting, growing interaction. Near the end, each dancer takes turns slipping behind the other in a braid of imagery that could mean any number of things. I perceived a newfound bond against external threat, a protective alliance between the two.

Charky is the artist I'll be most excited to track in the future, and you should keep up with her, too. Her funny/scary I'm Afraid of Everyone--a sort of celebrity gossip game played out as interrogation--proved to be the perfect vehicle for four performers capable of droll humor. The two Chris Isaak songs she drops are a big bonus. Dancer Elizabeth Furman's ebbing, flowing, desperately vulnerable solo set against Isaak's "Wicked Game" makes her another distinctive artist to look for again and again.

Under Exposed is closed for the season. For information on this and all Dixon Place programming, click here.

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

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James Galanos, 92

James Galanos, Fashion Designer for the Elite, Dies at 92
by Guy Trebay, The New York Times, October 31, 2016

Tammy Grimes, 82

Tammy Grimes, the Original ‘Unsinkable Molly Brown,’ Dies at 82
by Anita Gates, The New York Times, October 31, 2016