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Friday, March 31, 2017

World premiere by Aynsley Vandenbroucke comes to Abrons

Aynsley Vandenbroucke
in her solo, And
Above: Banging on a pan.
Below: Making like Spalding Gray.
(photos: Ian Douglas)


There's no end to And.

Well, it does end--in the literal sense--because, of course, the audience is allowed to get up and go home. But, really, it could have picked up from there and rolled on. And I'm not sure I would have had a problem just sitting there, in Abrons Arts Center, watching and listening to Aynsley Vandenbroucke mostly talking about her life and doing other things. Why not? It's an expansive life lived by a woman self-possessed, awake, curious, always ready to tilt into next. We tilt with her.

And is autobiography bridging disciplines--visual, verbal, sonic, kinetic ones. And a bibliography; Vandenbroucke's program notes include a long list of her recent and influential reading. (Spending an hour with a smart cookie who wears her smartness with accessible humanity and ease ain't half-bad.) And's maker and mover regards the work as "a series of live, three-dimensional essays." Sometimes she tucks the many pieces of her story and her preoccupations inside an inventory of statistical details, at once containing and revealing, safeguarding and sharing intimate, emotional truths. ("Number of times I questioned my relationship to the world around me: Countless.") As she recites this litany, her voice--quiet at first, increasingly warm and supple and musical--she takes her quirky statistics to a level of monastic chant.

There is the dancemaker and the academic, both driven by questions and uncertainty. ("Number of times an older choreographer told me I'd stop asking questions as I got older: 1.") There is a marriage and an entrepreneurial partnership, both adventurous, both now ended. Backstory: With her ex-- photographer Mathew Poikok--Vandenbroucke had created and directed Mt. Tremper Arts in the Catskills. Purchasing property at Mt. Tremper also figures in a monologue by the late Spalding Gray, and she shares this video with us, repeatedly interrupting her own entertaining narrative with Gray's, one of a number of ways she toys with notions of structure and constraint. Both artists are dressed in countrified plaid shirts. One frets about gypsy moths; the other worries the details of hosting an arts center, like placing mints on artists' bed pillows.

And there's single life in one's late 30s, hook-ups in the digital age. There is Vandenbroucke dancing on video, a white woman nearly dissolving in the liquid fire of house music, her hair flying, arms flinging, face a blur though her shimmying body remains a distinct, black-clad, vertical column inside this ecstacy. She and the music belong to each other--though, ultimately, she belongs to herself.

Often single words, or single quotes, briefly flash on the theater's walls. We do or do not take them in. We do or do not notice or focus on them. We might grab one and swallow it whole because it means something to us. In that way, Vandenbroucke gets us dancing for her in a space we have made inside our own minds.

At one moment, Vandenbroucke entirely removes herself from the picture, sitting out on a nearby staircase as we gaze at the visuals playing out before us. At another time, she relocates herself and the locus of focus to a space in audience territory. In both incidents, you immediately feel the difference, which speaks to the confident, convincing presence she has established as And's performer.

*Live and video materials created and performed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke
*Lighting and overall production design by Nelson Downend
*Sound and video design by Max Bernstein

And runs through Sunday, April 2 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Wednesday, March 29, 2017

It's time to E-Moves again at Harlem Stage

Kyle Marshall
(photo: David Gonsier)


Spring's here and, with it, a fresh new season of E-Moves at Harlem Stage, featuring commissioned works by "emerging, evolving and established" choreographers of color, as writes E-Moves series curator Charmaine Warren.

Running from Fridays and Saturdays only, March 31 to April 8, the programming spans a range of interests--iconoclastic approaches to ballet to an innovative blend of Indian and contemporary dance. Choreographers include Francesca Harper ((y)ourstory : Chapter one, a work in progress), Parijat Desai (JustLikeThat), Kyle Marshall (Colored) and Leyland Simmons (Traffic).

E-Moves 18 also promises nightly “Pop-Up” performances by renowned artists such as tap dancer Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards and dancers from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company.

“Pop Up” artists:

Friday, March 31: Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards: Tap solo created & performed by Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards

Saturday, April 1: Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE: SHE IS HERE (2016), Choreography: Ronald K. Brown, performed by Annique Roberts.

Friday, April 7: Dance Theatre of Harlem: Movement 3, Love from VESSELS (2014), choreographed by Darrell Grand Moultrie, performed by Alison Stroming and Francis Lawrence.

Saturday, April 8: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company: VALLEY COTTAGE (1980/1981 revised in 2011)(excerpt), Choreographers: Bill T. Jones &  Arnie Zane, performed by Antonio Brown and I-Ling Liu.

E-Moves 18 schedule

Friday, March 31, 7:30pm
Saturday, April 1, 7:30pm
Friday, April 7, 7:30pm
Saturday, April 8, 7:30pm

Each program is approximately 90 minutes. For tickets & more information, click here or call (212) 281-9240 ext. 19 or 20.

Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue (at West 135th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)


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Thursday, March 23, 2017

See "Enter the Faun" on WORLD's America ReFramed

"I grew up totally mixed up between art and medicine."
-- choreographer Tamar Rogoff

"To be able to feel the floor with my whole foot is an amazing sensation.
That's so new to me."
--performer Gregg Mozgala

Above and below:
Gregg Mozgala and Tamar Rogoff
appear in the documentary film, Enter the Faun
(photos: Andrew Baker).

Enter the Faun, directed by choreographer Tamar Rogoff and Daisy Wright, will receive its US television premiere next week on America ReFramedWORLD's independent documentary series. The film explores the rigorous and intimate process between Rogoff, an artist deeply engaged with the body's intelligence and diverse neuro-capacities, and Gregg Mozgala, an actor and playwright with cerebral palsy as the collaborators prepared his first foray into dance--her 2009 work, Diagnosis of a Faun. It is a persistent questing beyond fear and panic to a memorably sensuous performance.
Challenging the boundaries of medicine and art, as well as the limitations associated with disability, Tamar and Gregg opened the door to new and endless possibilities. His transformation was so radical that even before Tamar could understand its ramifications, she knew she needed to document it and share it.
Mozgala partners dancer Emily Pope-Blackman.
(photo: Harvey Wang)
Postcard
Photo: Harvey Wang
Drawing: Robert Eggers
Design: Olivia Klaus, Orange Static

Check local listings for the March 28 US premiere screening on WORLD (8pm EST).

Starting Wednesday, March 29, Enter the Faun will be available for free streaming for audiences across the US on WORLD. It is also available for purchase here.

Read about Mozgala's work with Rogoff in "Learning His Body, Learning to Dance" by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, November 24, 2009.

And follow this link to my Dance Magazine review of Tamar Rogoff Performance Projects' 2009 La MaMa premiere of Diagnosis of A Faun. I wrote that Rogoff "shows us people testing and achieving balance through moving away from what’s safely familiar—physically, intellectually, emotionally—into something new."

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Saturday, March 18, 2017

Chuck Berry, 90

Chuck Berry Dies at 90; Helped Define Rock ’n’ Roll
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, March 18, 2017

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Thursday, March 16, 2017

Live Ideas: Trajal Harrell in the house of the spirits

Trajal Harrell performs his solo, The Return of La Argentina.
(photo: Maria Baranova)

In The Return of La Argentina, performer Trajal Harrell--best known for postmodernist vogueing--"walked" Participant, Inc., a Lower East Side gallery stripped of artworks and stuffed with audience members in post-snow drab. The long, white-walled venue had a downbeat, pedestrian air--too few chairs for the crowd, wood floor glistening with tracked-in slush, random doodads tucked around a row of three piano benches clearly reserved for Harrell and his props.

Or perhaps I should say, reserved for the shade Harrell would come to channel--Butoh artist Kazuo Ohno in turn channeling his idol, Antonia ("La Argentina") Mercé, the Argentine, early 20th Century star of Spanish dance. Somewhere in there, also, was Ohno's Butoh co-creator and director, Tatsumi Hijikata, who died of cancer in 1986. It was not only a crowded gallery but a rather crowded seance, too.

The engrossing solo was originally presented in 2015, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art. Last evening, Harrell performed it for Mx’d Messages, the current Live Ideas Festival, curated by Mx Justin Vivian Bond for New York Live Arts. V, trans-genre artist, designed the 2017 edition of the festival as a presciently timely exploration of "non-binary strategies to approach some of the most vexing and wide-ranging problems our planet is now facing."

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, Mr. Trump,
That wants it down.

What Bond intends to offer with this festival is a free flow of energy and ideas across literal and metaphoric boundaries that no longer do us much good. For Harrell, lately, one such boundary is the veil between worlds. He conceived of The Return of La Argentina as an archiving of Ohno's 1977 solo, Admiring La Argentina. While the audience looked on, he snacked on orange juice, potato chips and, finally, some magical concoction of Greek yogurt and jam to see what would happen next.

Would Ohno make himself present?

He did, Harrell told us later, the proof always being the mistakes that crop up--and a few things did go wrong last night. Which means, in Harrell's way of thinking, things went right.

"If there are mistakes, it means that Kazuo Ohno's spirit is in the room." He tells us this in the middle of performing, and the room suddenly got even more crowded with African, Afro-Atlantic and Native American ancestors who totally get what he's talking about.

Although Harrell takes up this performance hoping to slip behind it, The Return of La Argentina helped me see him better than anything I'd ever watched him do. In the beginning, sensing something about to happen, I turned my head and caught him quietly and shyly entering the space, initially out of view of most of us, barefoot and clutching the ruffled top of a floral Spanish dress against his breast, eventually attempting undulations and haughty attitude, that body otherwise dressed in rumpled black jeans (much like my own) and a blue t-shirt over a long-sleeved black shirt. This guy could not look less like the elegant, charismatic Mercé, and he knows we know it, and that's part of it.

I'm more in touch now with Harrell's transparency. I realize that I've frequently seen him change clothing in front of us, and that that process of costume changing always looks the same--kind of ragged, a little harried, down to earth, another sign of the pedestrian aesthetic of postmodernism, its take on "realness," unified in the Black body of this particular contemporary dance artist. (How "real" is any of this? And why do I always want to use quote marks and assign question marks to things when I'm thinking about and writing about Harrell and the things that interest him?) His straightforward, often unprepared or awkward way with props--like tapping the wrong passcode into a smartphone and having to ask someone for the correct one--is a madness method. Try and fail, and do it right in front of everybody. No cover-up. The body tremors I'd noticed in him years ago and wondered about appear to be constant and, here, add visible texture to the vulnerability of the spooks who pass through The Return of La Argentina.

The performance was followed by a conversation between Harrell, Bond and New York Live Arts director Bill T. Jones. It was useful to hear Harrell articulate his sense of his work here as an act of archiving in which our presence is essential.

"It's a keeper, a space, a record, a context, a conservation," he says. And it's a way of thinking about, overall, my experience of live dance. I am honored to be invited into this house of spirits.

The Return of La Argentina is closed, but Mx’d Messages continues through this Sunday, March 19. Get schedule, venue and ticket information here.

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

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Sunday, March 12, 2017

In memoriam: The tragedy of Fukushima

Eiko Otake introduces her commemorative program,
Remembering Fukushima: Art and Conversations in the Cathedral,
at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine
all photos ©2017, Eva Yaa Asantewaa


During yesterday's anniversary remembrance of Japan's 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster--a deeply moving event organized at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine by artist-in-residence Eiko Otake--Katja Kolcio, choreographer and Wesleyan professor, spoke of the political upheaval wrought in the wake of Ukraine's 1986 crisis at Chernobyl. Photographer William Johnston, Otake's longtime collaborator, noted the growing environmental activism in Japan following the Fukushima crisis. And we were frequently reminded that, just about fifty miles north of here, in Buchanan, New York, the Indian Point nuclear power plant poses a similar threat. A few months ago, state officials announced an agreement that, by 2021, would lead to the complete shutdown of Indian Point--long touted as "Safe. Secure. Vital." and "Right For New York" by its operating Entergy Corporation.

Massive visual documentation, provided by Johnson and others, alerts the world to the devastating, enduring consequences of nuclear accidents--whole towns emptied of people, toxic and uninhabitable except by irradiated animals and plant life. Otake's program drew together numerous educators, activists and visual, literary, music and movement artists to illustrate how creative communication can help us begin the process of grasping the massive scale of the tragedy and the details of lives destroyed or upended.

And Otake, the inimitable, danced her latest iteration of A Body in a Cathedral, cloaked this time in black, thrusting through holy space like a crow in flight, in alarm, disorientation, displacement, grief...and warning.


"This is what I do as an artist," said Otake.
"I hang around. Thanks to the Cathedral for allowing me to hang around."

Remembering Fukushima: Art and Conversations in the Cathedral was presented in partnership with Asia Society and Danspace Project.

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Women comics being BAAD!

Javon Egyptt presides over Women Laugh Back,
a comedy night at BAAD!
(photo: Charles Rice-Gonzalez)


You'll rarely find me in a comedy club. It's not that I don't like to laugh. I do. I love, love, love good comedy as well as humorous elements in any of the arts I enjoy. But with everything else I cover as a critic or attend as a fan, comedy clubs are just not something I make time for.

So, I don't have hard evidence on this, but I doubt your usual comedy club features straight, queer and trans women--particularly, women of color--all gracing the same evening. No, for that, you have to hop the #6 up to the Bronx and visit BAAD!



Left to right: Elizabeth "Macha" Marrero, Robbyne Kaamil,
Javon Egyptt, Lisa Harmon and Katrina Goodlett
(photo: Charles Rice-Gonzalez)


It's Women's History Month and, while we all pray Ben Carson has nothing to say about that, BAAD! has launched its annual BAAD!ASS Women Festival. Friday night's stand-up comedy show, Women Laugh Back--MC'ed by the ebullient Javon Egyptt and her many wigs and costumes--showcased the talents of Robbyne KaamilLisa Harmon, Katrina Goodlett and award-winning performance artist and BAAD! favorite, Elizabeth "Macha" Marrero in a brisk-paced if sometimes uneven lineup.

Kaamil, above all others, won me over by the very act of scraping my last good nerve. She opened her set--unexpectedly, inexplicably--by belting and emoting her high-pitched way through "Tomorrow." Yes, that "Tomorrow." The one in which "the sun will come out." And then her irritating persona just took off, never letting us catch her catching a breath while, for instance, she pressed home the shaky argument that Annie was "a little bitch from Bed-Stuy," and check that hair if you have doubts. A curious preoccupation with Black women's first names ended in the bright idea that the National Weather Service should give Black women's names to weather threats. Do that, and you won't have all these fools thinking they'll just stay put and ride out the storm! I had to bow to Kaamil's way of putting herself--and it all--together, coherent and unrelenting. Later, in an aside about our toxic politics, she counseled, "Don't be quiet, because when you're quiet, nobody pays you no fucking mind." Kaamil will never have this problem. And if she ever did, she will never have it again. "If they don't do right, kick them the fuck out."

You GO, Kaamil!

BAAD!ASS Women Festival 2017 runs through April 8 with a variety of programs showcasing the creative work and activism of "fierce women and transwomen artists." For schedule and ticketing details, click here.

The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance
2474 Westchester Avenue (Westchester Square), Bronx

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Sunday, March 5, 2017

This ability: "Our Configurations" at Gibney Dance


Top: Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson of Kinetic Light
(photo: Scott Shaw)
Bottom: Marc Brew of AXIS Dance Company
(photo: Andrea Testoni)

In a dance concert, what would be more surprising ? What Marissa Perel asks her first two able-bodied "consensual submissives" to do in (do not) despair solo while she exercises her agency to speak to her audience? Or how she treats her third submissive?

How about this: What's more in your face? The way choreographer Sonya Delwaide moves her two performers, keeping you aware of dancer Julie Crothers (AXIS Dance Company) phocomelia, a genetic disorder affecting one of her arms? Or the fact that the two women, Crothers and Alivia Schaffer, remain finely, intimately attuned to each other at each point of their duet, Dix minutes plus tard (Ten Minutes Later)?

And what of the partnership of Kinetic Light's Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson (to bend a bough and Broken Intent)? Is it more mindblowing to watch these dancers use streamlined wheelchairs as if these objects were STREB action gear? Or is it the way both women switch on their vulnerable flesh, their minds and their passions throughout a demanding encounter, showing us what it means to claim space, to claim life?

Our Configurations, an evening at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, reworked how we think about and look at disability in dance and performance. It raised questions of audience preconceptions--what do we expect and feel entitled to see?--and the privilege of the able-bodied to decide what is or is not noteworthy and virtuosic in performance.

Virtuosity, the product of disciplined labor, is worthy of respect, no one denies. In the post-show Q&A moderated by Hentyle Yapp, Sheppard declared, "Why wouldn't we have virtuosity? We put in the hours like everyone else." (Absolutely noted!) But for Perel, a queer artist living with pain, making art is "an act of resistance against normativity," an upending of expectations. So virtuosity needs to be "a new set of choices" not projected by viewers or critics but conceived by artists themselves. "Crips to the front," Perel declares. "People with disabilities taking up space in dance contexts."

I came away from Our Configuration with my own energies flying. Like AXIS artistic director Marc Brew (of Remember When, his visual and expressive feast in dance and film), I felt eager for this evening to open the way for "more, more, more."

The Winter/Spring 2017 season at Gibney continues with The Bureau of the Future of Choreography's presentation of 1776. Click here for more information.

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Saturday, March 4, 2017

Artists come together for global human rights at Dixon Place



This weekend, Dixon Place hosts a new arts festival dedicated to global issues around human rights. The International Human Rights Arts Festival has been launched by DP and producer Tom Block's Institute of Prophetic Activist Art, an educational venture drawing from a spectrum of mystical philosophies, from Martin Buber to Black Elk, for creative engagement with societal concerns. Last evening's opening ceremony was introduced by the venerable television writer, producer and progressive activist Norman Lear. Richard Nixon, he reminded us, derided his groundbreaking All in the Family as a show for and about "queers, fags, homos and hippies."

Well, "queers, fags, homos and hippies," frequently make up the audience at Dixon Place and might well enjoy much that's on tap at the IHRA fest now through Sunday. And there's certainly a lot with 2016 Bessie-winner Joya Powell (Outstanding Emerging Choreographer) showing work today at 1:30 with her troupe, Movement of the People Dance Company, on a bill with Spilling Ink Dance Company, a troupe devoted to the arts of India and the Indian diaspora. Another up-and-coming dancemaker, Jessica Chen has commissioned works for a 10pm show tonight featuring her J CHEN PROJECT troupe, Tom Tsai, Karla Garcia and Heather Robles. Edisa Weeks (Delirious Dances) and Jacqueline Dugal (Dugal Dance Projects) share tomorrow evening's 9pm slot.

And, whew! That's just the dance part!

With performance, film, poetry, theater, music, visual arts, kids activities, discussions, lounge performances and the ever-handy Dixon Place bar, there's truly something for every interest. Get a schedule of events and ticket information (including day passes) here.

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

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Friday, March 3, 2017

How to be a BAAD! badass

Above: poet Pamela Sneed
(photo courtesy of the author)
Below: dance artist Jasmine Hearn
(photo: Scott Shaw)


Comedy, dance, poetry, good company and more: BAAD! has it all in the month of March celebrating Women's History Month in full Bronx style.

Comedienne Robbyne Kaamil
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Check out BAAD!ASS Women Festival 2017, running March 9 through April 8 and featuring the creative work and activism of "fierce women and transwomen artists."

For schedule and ticketing details, click here.

The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance
2474 Westchester Avenue (Westchester Square), Bronx

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to InfiniteBody
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