Family life, fantasy life: Tamar Rogoff at La MaMa

Cover of Cherry Ames, Student Nurse (1943),
the first volume in Helen Wells's popular novel series for girls.
(from Collection of the Museum of Health Care)

Core cast members of Grand Rounds, a world premiere by Tamar Rogoff
Center: Cadence Rotarius
At left: Morgan Sullivan, Glen Heroy, Cyndy Gilbertson
At right: Jake Szczypek and Emily Pope
(photo: Asya Danilova)

In the 1950s world of Grand Rounds, a 10-year-old inspired by the adventures of Cherry Ames, nurse and amateur sleuth, turns her perceptive gaze on the rituals of family life. What goes on behind closed doors and on the radio is fodder for her scientific reckonings. Rogoff invites audiences to sit bedsides to share the intimacy that propels her protagonist on a rescue mission of her own. 

-- from publicity for Grand Rounds

Core cast in rehearsal for Grand Rounds
(photo: Asya Danilova)

"They are the greatest cast I've ever worked with," said choreographer/director Tamar Rogoff after her world premiere of Grand Rounds at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre.

Well, they are certainly an interesting cast with individual backgrounds in everything from clowning for the Big Apple Circus to living with Parkinson's Disease. Working with all kinds of folks--even those without training in performance--is nothing new for the adventurous Rogoff. But while the unusual diversity of this cast, as well as their individual skills and all-in commitment, gives the work strength, none of that feels like enough. Even the expansive staging falls short of moving Grand Rounds from a curiosity to a consequential work of art.

Before seeing the show, I checked up on its title:

Medical Definition of grand rounds:  rounds involving the formal presentation by an expert of a clinical issue sometimes in the presence of selected patients (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Grand rounds: A formal meeting at which physicians discuss the clinical case of one or more patients. Grand rounds originated as part of residency training wherein new information was taught and clinical reasoning skills were enhanced. Grand rounds today are an integral component of medical education. They present clinical problems in medicine by focusing on current or interesting cases. They are also sometimes utilized for dissemination of new research information. (MedicineNet)

You could say Rogoff brings her "patients" 'round to us--though, instead of hospital beds, we get a close-up view of beds in a family's home. The beds suggest a modest home and the relationships within.

Rogoff grew up the daughter of a doctor, and her research and work have led her to an understanding of the dual nature of her mission as an artist--transformation and healing. In this new work, she foregrounds a child--a stand-in for herself, one would assume--whose attraction to the Cherry Ames books, popular from the 1940s through the 1960s, leads her to examine family life with the avidity of a smart young sleuth. The happenings here are her "grand rounds," too.

To start, some of the audience members are made to sit on cardboard boxes for sitting shiva in traditional discomfort--clever, that--positioned around the performance space so that we face one of several makeshift beds. The characters--a young girl, her parents, her grandparents--will shift from bed to bed. But, at first, we don't know that. So, as dancers in front of you perform a long series of movements in and around a bed, you might find your interest drifting away to catch what's happening elsewhere, particularly when the noise over there distracts you.

But when I saw Grand Rounds last night, we only learned from Rogoff's Q&A that she had wanted each of us to stay focused on the bed directly in front of us. Since these initial performances rotate among the beds and repeat, she explained, we eventually get to see everything that each character does--the young soldier/brother handily slipping right beneath his bed and repeatedly lifting it like a set of weights, the grandparents coyly approaching each other and dancing to swing music, the parents (superb Emily Pope and Jake Szczypek) in stylized and tense, faintly erotic conflict.

So, are we mourners? Are we doctors on grand rounds? Or are we--each of us--that little blonde girl who shows up everywhere to eye, or maybe imagine, influence, remember--what happens in each instance? The answer could be any or all of these things, but the problem, as I see it, is that it ultimately does not matter. Intimations of mortality--for instance, in the doleful soundscore, in the eventually overused shiva boxes--lead to events too predictable, and to drawn out, to land with emotional force.

And what of the rest of the staging, a sort-of fantasy placed at a remote distance from all of us and perched high on the theater's usual seating risers, where hospital scenes with cutesy doctors, student nurses and a patient could have been excerpted from a Broadway musical?

Neither here nor there: I had some Cherry Ames books when I was a child. I don't remember a thing about them except having once thought, "Why don't I have Nancy Drew books like everybody else?"  This slight resentment that might or might not have been justified. I have no idea. We can talk, another time, about how my seamstress mother and aunt chose to adorn me relative to what every other girl was wearing at the time.

Grand Rounds continues through May 14, Wednesday to Saturday at 7pm; Sunday at 4pm.  For information and tickets, click here.

La Mama (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)


Subscribe in a reader

Vito Acconci, 77

Vito Acconci, Performance Artist and Uncommon Architect, Dies at 77
by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, April 28, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Martha Lavey, 60

Martha Lavey, a Leading Lady of Chicago Theater, Dies at 60
by William Grimes, The New York Times, April 27, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Jonathan Demme, 73

Oscar-Winning Director Jonathan Demme Dies at 73
by Yohana Desta, Vanity Fair, April 26, 2017

Jonathan Demme, Oscar-Winning Director, Is Dead at 73
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, April 26, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Robert M. Pirsig, 88

Robert M. Pirsig, Author of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,’ Dies at 88
by Paul Vitello, The New York Times, April 24, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Lea Marshall: Who--and what--reinvigorates ballet?

Dance writer and educator Lea Marshall
(photo: courtesy of Lea Marshall)

Guest contributor Lea Marshall responds to New York Times dance writer Roslyn Sulcas's conversation with three contemporary ballet choreographers--Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon (April 20, 2017).

*****

Open Letter to The New York Times

on the Memorable Occasion of 

“A Conversation With Three Choreographers 

Who Are Reinvigorating Ballet.”

by guest contributor Lea Marshall

Monday morning, when I opened my weekly ArtsJournal emailed roundup of dance articles from around the web, I knew better than to click on the title above. I knew better, but I clicked anyway. And then I posted the piece on Facebook with the comment, “Huh. Three white men. Imagine.”

The image alone was enough.  You wouldn’t even have to read the piece to understand whose voices are most valued in ballet today, according to the Times. There they are, all in a row: Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon--three white men.

Under my Facebook post, a friend asked: “Lea, not being into the dance scene like you, and acknowledging the racist and sexist nature of the article, if you had written this article, who would you have included?”

In response, I realized I wanted to dismantle the whole premise of the article and start over. Editors, the problem lies not just with ballet, but with you.

If we’re presented with this question--“Which choreographers have reinvigorated ballet?”--and the answer we come up with is “These three white male choreographers,” we must re-examine the question. What does it mean to “reinvigorate ballet”? Obviously, in this equation it doesn’t mean taking dramatic steps toward diversity, or critically thinking about ballet’s de facto position at the “top” of our white, western, racist, sexist, popular cultural understanding of what dance is. Rather, it appears that in this context to “reinvigorate” means to make dances that seem fresh and appeal to the tired eye of the Eurocentric or Balanchine-worshiping balletomane.

Of course these choreographers make great work. But the context for that work demands examination and discussion. Sulcas actually asks the men why more women don’t hold “major choreographer” status in ballet. For the most part, their answers are laughably inadequate.

So, let’s change the whole question so that the answer includes Dance Theatre of Harlem; includes Misty Copeland, Michaela DePrince, Yuan Yuan Tan; includes American Ballet Theatre's Project Plié’s goal to diversify American ballet companies; includes Ballez (performance, company, class and community, that invites everyone to witness and celebrate the history and performances of lesbian, queer and transgender people). New York Times, you can do so much better.

Throughout the day after the piece appeared, a great flurry arose that focused in large part on the choreographers’ responses to that question about women. But the problem, as I’d hope we all realize, extends far past the privileged men; it’s with the system that privileges them, including the Times.

There’s an easy fix for this article, as a start. Change the headline to: “Privileged Positions: Three White Male Choreographers Get Extra Credit in Ballet.”

*****

Lea Marshall is Associate Chair of the Department of Dance and Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as a dance writer, critic and poet. She writes for Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher and Richmond’s Style Weekly.

Subscribe in a reader

Dancer Kayla Hamilton up close at BAAD!

Dance artist Kayla Hamilton
(photos: Travis Magee)

She moves through the world with a chronic illness that has left her with sight in one eye, loss of peripheral vision, double vision, blurred vision, and difficulty seeing in low light.

 --from publicity for Nearly Sighted by Kayla Hamilton

My experience of Nearly Sighted, Kayla Hamilton's solo performance at BAAD!, actually started before I reached the theater. Coming off the #6 train at Zerega Avenue, I ran into a group of people--including some I knew--heading for the show, all in good spirits. We walked together past the churchyard and, once inside BAAD!, were warmly greeted by more people we knew. While we waited for Hamilton to perform, we watched a wonderful video compilation of interviews and studio scenes with the much-loved choreographers, all Black and women, who contributed work to this evening--Francine E. Ott, Nia Love, Christal Brown, Crystal U. Davis and Jaimè Dzandu. Fond co-workers and at least one grateful student of Hamilton spoke up during the post-show discussion. Yes, that kind of evening. More like a family gathering than most anything you'll find at your typical New York dance concert.

Clearly, Nearly Sighted is the place to be. And you're lucky if you can get a ticket. Yes, BAAD! is not the largest venue in town, but even so.

For the suite of dances, which is surprisingly short--maybe 45 minutes at most--Hamilton has woven together material from the choreographers as well as video artists Sammie Amachree and Drake Creative.  Each member of the audience is encouraged to wear an eye patch through most of the performance, giving us a small taste of how Hamilton's vision disability alters her perception of and relationship to her surrounding environment. To work with this, I left my distance glasses off and, given the intimacy of the space, did not need them. I adjusted to the eye patch over time.

If you've ever seen Hamilton dance, you know she brings presence, passion, momentum and juicy fluidity. In her program notes, she calls herself "thick."

"Thick not as in muscular, but thick thick." She adds, "I rarely get to see a thick-bodied disabled person on stage...."

She is a thick spinning top, a thick blossoming flower, a thick burst of fire, a system of thick coursing energy. She is also Black and female all day and embodies Nia Love's words: "It's the way that you stand, the way you sit...the notion that all that you are is all that's right and powerful and good. That's dignity." Her work is a healing gift.

Nearly Sighted was two years in the making. It was fun to talk in our small discussion groups about it and hear Christal Brown tell us none of the choreographers had previous exposure to the finished work. They had no idea how Hamilton would turn their individual material into a this tapestry. The performance, then, was a revelation for everyone.

Nearly Sighted concludes this evening with a performance at 7:30pm. It is sold out, but if you want to try for a last-minute, unclaimed ticket, click here for information.

BAAD!

The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance

2474 Westchester Avenue (Westchester Square), Bronx

(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Cuba Gooding Sr., 72

Cuba Gooding Sr., Soul Singer, Dies at 72
by The Associated Press, The New York Times, April 21, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 86

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sculptor of Brooding Forms, Dies at 86
by William Grimes, The New York Times, April 21, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Shadow dancing: Okwui Okpokwasili at New York Live Arts

Katrina Reid (left) and Okwui Okpokwasili
in Poor People's TV Room
(photo: Paul B. Goode)

Follow me, follow me....

A gentle, haunting refrain concludes Okwui Okpokwasili's Poor People’s TV Room, shown now at New York Live Arts. The sweetness of that final plea cuts to the soul. The artist, with her multitude of tools and methods, draws us closer to a forgotten people and removes some of the false comfort of distance and ignorance.

For this complex, 90-minute piece, Okpokwasili drew impetus from the resistance of Nigerian women against British colonialism and, more recently, their organizing for the return of 300 girls kidnapped by the militant group, Boko Haram. Teaming up again with director/visual designer Peter Born, with whom she shares two Bessie Awards, Okpokwasili reshapes not only the stage space at New York Live Arts but the way in which the meaning of a potentially didactic history can be artfully conveyed through an assured blend of movement, text, song and imagery.

Born's set hacks a wedge of space out of the wide NYLA stage and litters it with things the eye works hard to identify or, if identified as they are used, resolve into an overall coherence. His lighting ranges from withholding to assaulting, mostly making us aware that there's so much we will not see, cannot interpret, might never reach. Like Okpokwasili singing "I am the face beneath the sand...," or a figure draped entirely in jet black cloth somehow twinkling from Born's harsh light, the visual space of the work tantalizes us with the possibility and impossibility of discovery. Or the unreliability of discovery.

For my part, I will long carry the image of a woman--Okpokwasili, it turned out--pressed into the far side of a wide stretch of translucent fabric, rising into elusive visibility like ectoplasm. I struggled with the violent mechanical sounds, which viewers readily feel within their own bodies. And I wondered at the tiny skitter steps of elder Thuli Dumakude, South African-born star of music and stage, and the precise, if arcane, gestures performed by the younger Black American artist Katrina Reid. Both bodies, at the epicenter of violent force, confront and defy the oppressive sound. Or so it seemed to me.

Poor People's TV Room is a robust creation transcending category for real and not just in the academic talk we've come to expect. But it's thrilling to know that an artist of the body, a dancer, envisioned and guided this achievement.

Performers:

Thuli Dumakude, Okwui Okpokwasili, Katrina Reid and Nehemoyia Young

Poor People's TV Room continues with performances April 21-22 and April 26-29, all at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Subscribe in a reader

NY premieres by Kathy Westwater at Brooklyn Studios for Dance

Scene from the world premiere of
Kathy Westwater's Anywhere at Temple University
Dancers Alex Romania with Ilona Bito and Hadar Ahuvia
(photo: Bill Hebert)

After seeing Kathy Westwater's New York premieres of Anywhere and Extemporaneousness at Brooklyn Studios for Dance, I went looking for synonyms of the word entropy. I found deterioration, degeneration, crumbling, decline, degradation, decomposition, breaking down, collapse. I know she has made work and performed at Staten Island's former Fresh Kills Landfill--see Chambered, an installation of Anja Hitzenberger's photos from this project, also at BSD through April 30--and, like many of us, surely has societal and planetary fate on her mind. And, just maybe, there's something in there that's about the need to yank a structure from its pedestal and start over.

While there's nothing of this overtly expressed in Extemporaneousness and Anywhere--performed by separate casts that do not overlap--they both inhabit a space where bodies appear to continuously struggle, and lose that struggle, against gravity and time. Their periodic impact on the floor emphasizes weight, consequence and maybe desperation.

In both works, I found the dynamics unchanging--bodies jutting, squiggling, folding, twisting, drooping, buckling, sagging, staggering, slumping, tumbling either alone or in interactions across the wide studio space. I'm thinking it was Wilson Pickett who sang "Put your hand on your hip and let your backbone slip." Westwater is big on letting the backbone slip--literally and over and over--though Soul Man Pickett might take issue with this interpretation.

At the start of Anywhere, the cast labors to unfurl Seung-Jae Lee's gleaming and monumental set. That set is an eyeful--less whimsical in nature than its ingenious structure might first lead you to believe. In its own way, it's beautiful, but it looms with almost hypnotic, magnetizing control over the community of dancers in front of it. It was fascinating to play with the possible intentions here--as with the difference between those cute, high-tech headphones we were all issued and the analog boombox that shows up late in the piece. Unfortunately, I ended up feeling weary from the aesthetic sameness and the unconvincing lengthiness of the piece.

Kathy Westwater Dance performers:

Extemporaneousness: Laurel Atwell, Belinda He, Mercedes Searer, EmmaGrace Skove-Eps, Kay Ottinger and Rainey White

Anywhere: Hadar Ahuvia, Ilona Bito, Amanda Hunt, Alex Romania, and Kathy Westwater

Kathy Westwater Dance continues through April 22 with performances at 8pm. On Saturday, April 22, stay for a post-performance talk with Aaron Mattocks. On Saturday, April 29, Westwater will also hold a roundtable discussion--On Monuments & the Monumental, from 2-4:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Brooklyn Studios for Dance
210 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Memories: FAB x MR DANCE BLOCK SALON Spring '17

FAB x Movement Research: DANCE BLOCK SALON

Abrons Arts Center -- March 28, 2017

facilitated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

All photos 

©Deneka Peniston

Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc) paired up Movement Research for their first collaborative Dance Block Salon. The organizations invited artists from their respective communities to show work in an atmosphere of non-judgmental sharing, radical support and community building. 

I was honored and thrilled to be asked to facilitate the evening and guide the feedback sessions.

Artists showing work included Rina Espiritu, Jenny Boissiere & Dancers, Cain Coleman of ColemanCollective and Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson.

Staff, presenting artists and dancers
gather in Abrons's studio G05 before the salon.

Introducing the evening:
Nadia Tykulsker, FABnyc Director of Programs (above)
Lindsey Dietz Marchant, Movement Research Managing Director (below)

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above: Jenny Boissiere talks about her work.
Below: Cain Coleman performs.

Choreographer Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson,
above and below

Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson's troupe performs.

Above: Rina Espiritu listens to audience feedback.
Below: Dance artist Heather Robles hugs Espiritu after feedback session.

Small, intimate feedback groups for each choreographer
encouraged easygoing participation.

Subscribe in a reader

FAB RESPONSE salons offer artists feedback: April 26, May 3

Alice Klugherz showed a solo work-in-progress
at the first FABnyc RESPONSE salon on April 12.
(photo: Deloris Onwuka)

Malcolm Betts presenting at RESPONSE
(photo: Deloris Onwuka)

Malcolm Betts with music/movement collaborator Andy Kobilka
(photo: Deloris Onwuka)

Please join me and FABnyc for our second RESPONSE salon and give your feedback to artists showing informal 10-minute presentations of works in various stages of development. You need not be an artist to attend.

We next get together on Wednesday, April 26 (2-4pm) at Arts on Site, 12 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village near Cooper Union. (Info and registration here)

Our final salon in the series will be held on Wednesday, May 3 (2-4pm) at Arts on Site. (Info and registration here)

Come join our friendly circle! We’re looking forward to seeing you!

*****

Accessibility:

Please note that the Arts on Site studio is up four flights of stairs with elevator access limited to the building's upper-floor residents. I have requested a change in venue if the RESPONSE series continues past the current May 3 end date.

 
Subscribe in a reader

Barkley L. Hendricks, 72

Painter Barkley L. Hendricks Dies at 72
by Jill Steinhauer, Hyperallergic, April 18, 2017

Barkley L. Hendricks, Portraitist of a New Black Pride, Dies at 72
by William Grimes, The New York Times, April 22, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Allan Holdsworth, 70

Allan Holdsworth, Virtuoso Guitarist, Dies at 70
by Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times, April 18, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Sylvia Moy, 78

Sylvia Moy, Songwriter Who Worked With Stevie Wonder, Dies at 78
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, April 18, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Bruce Langhorne, 78

Bruce Langhorne, Guitarist Who Inspired ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ Dies at 78
by Bill Friskics-Warren, The New York Times, April 16, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Dance artists "living otherwise" at Theater for the New City

studies in living otherwise is the gestation of five dance/performance works that move through collective practices of presence, memory, storytelling and abstraction. We ask how can we center the Other and other the center?  We answer by digging underground pathways to alternative ways of (not) being, remembering, un/doing and dancing.

-- from publicity materials for studies in living otherwise

All expected intersectionality aside, the most Other-y thing about studies in living otherwise--a collaborative dance show presented by Jesse Phillips-Fein and {dance}withoutWalls--is how it makes you feel you have wandered into a "performance" by people still figuring out how to do what they're trying to do. This continues from all the early fumbling with DIY decor through the final performer's interaction with a sometimes hesitant, sometimes eager-to-help audience. But by the time you do get to that final performer--the undaunted Nia Love--you're in the presence of a charismatic mage who can plunge you to the bottom of the sea and yank you right back up, glowing, sanctified, miraculously never suffering the bends. Her gl(host):lostatsea brings to storytelling the bold multiplicity of collage and jazz's trust in the process of freedom.

studies in living otherwise takes you by surprise from the very start. Phillips-Fein's nothing,is,about,nothing appears, almost out of nowhere, with no fanfare whatsoever and proceeds that way. As it goes, many curious things happen without attachment to explanation but with a system of accounting for passage and duration of time.

Last evening, Context and Reconstruction found Alex Pitre encouraging an older Black woman in the audience to relate a personal childhood story by way of answering Pitre's questions, while the white Pitre simply smeared and splashed themselves white. Who made that dance? Though the woman sat at a safe, if short, distance from Pitre, she contributed her memories to the process and therefore shared the space. One might even argue that without her story...what?? What does it mean, though, that this is the second dance I've seen this week requiring a plastic tarp to protect the floor? New trend?

The program also features Veleda Roehl's Sista Wolf and Mother Love: an urban folk tale and in search of mirrors, and catch the light just right by EmmaGrace Skove-Epes, a duet in collaboration with Gyrchel Moore.

studies in living otherwise lets you breathe, rest and wait for things to develop. There isn't even any formal pauses between dances--although there are humble and even sometimes awkward adjustments--and no applause until the very end...when there's every reason for it.

Catch the final performance of studies in living otherwise this afternoon at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Theater for the New City
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

California dreaming: Roya Carreras at the wild project

This weekend, Roya Carreras shows The Big Balloon at the wild project.
(photo: Jason Knade)

Choreographer Roya Carreras welcomes us into dreamy interiorized exteriors and minimized, constrained interiors in her childhood-memory piece The Big Balloon. Curated by Alexis Convento for her performance series, The CURRENT SESSIONS, Carreras multidisciplinary work will have its final show today at the wild project where aspects of it take over even the surface of a floor (film projection) and the surround of the lobby gallery and restrooms (soundscape).

Our complete immersion, executed by Carreras' team, is greatly enhanced by the close quarters of the space, the numbers of enthusiastic first-night fans and, ultimately, the convenience of a bar right there at the box office. Arrive for the roughly half-hour dance installation prelude--performed by the impeccable Fana Fraser--grab a drink, and you feel as if you have wondered into tiny East Village gallery opening.

Fraser's solo--performed just inside the lobby entrance, in the confines of a plywood enclosure filled with wonderfully-fragrant planting soil and decorated with a patch of artificial grass--interested me the most. Her relationship to the rich earth ranged from delicate and meditative to searching to aggressive. A few times, she ventured out onto the sidewalk to pick up a pot of geraniums to replant in the soil, but she herself seemed more the planted than the planter. Carreras' imageful work takes inspiration from her childhood in California where, I would imagine, the Iranian-Hispanic artist must have found solace in her family's garden.

What happens soon after the stroke of the hour, when we've wandered into the theater proper, is another matter--suggestive and fleeting, and I will not say more. Before the lights go down, Carreras allows us a hint in the stage decor that she shows and which, as the dance proceeds and ends, will perhaps become more meaningful to viewers. The dance itself--well performed by Caitlin Taylor, Elise Ritzel, Eloise DeLuca, Gregory Dolbashian and Maleek Washington--disturbed me in the way it depicted relationships between men and women. I found myself quite often checking out. But it's possible that Carreras' intent was to show us exactly what it was that turned me off.

That's a wild stab. I cannot say for sure. And I ended up not staying for the post-show Q&A. Having gotten tangled in the mob of people getting more drinks and lining up for the restroom, on second thought, I opted to just make my way home.

The Big Balloon concludes this afternoon and evening: lobby installation at 5:30pm, performance at 6pm followed by a wrap party at 7. Proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the National Iranian American Council. For information and tickets, click here.

the wild project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Michael Ballhaus, 81

Michael Ballhaus, an Oscar-Nominated Cinematographer, Dies at 81
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, April 14, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Rough playground: Abby Zbikowski at Abrons Arts

from Abandoned playground,
a new work by Abby Z and the New Utility
(photos: Eric Falck)

For abandoned playground, her world premiere at Abrons Arts Center, choreographer Abby Zbikowski converts the center's formal Playhouse stage into an intimate and drab, utilitarian performance space. No, let me type the word I first thought of: arena. Although that word might give you the false impression of large-scale size with Zbikowski's audience at a safe remove. Well, forget about it. No such size or safety exists.

Instead, abandoned playground is damned dangerous, as is Abby Z and the New Utility, Zbikowski's outrageous troupe--Alexa Bender, Shaela Davis, Justin Faircloth, Ali Herring, Fiona Lundie, Jennifer Meckley, Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez, Carlo Antonio Villanueva and Jessie Young--like STREB's action heroes. Sitting on the Abrons stage in a ring around these dancers, within inches of their propelled limbs, you find yourself flinching and tucking your body out of reach of thrusts and jabs and droplets of sweat and feet slicing too close to your face. The New Utility might have valiantly signed up for an hour of combat duty, but you did not.

Those moments when one or another dancer will step out of the space, fold over gasping for breath and maybe get a sympathetic back rub from a colleague--those are likely real, not just for show. Because what goes on inside, under Jon Harper's darkness-enhancing lighting, is driven and brutal.

Once the dancers are in the space, warming up in their soccer shorts, if you notice a physicality and physical practice similar to that of prize fighters, you're on the right track. Pretty soon, they're whipping up and around, scrunching, pivoting and rebounding as if fighting with something invisible while battling themselves.

They gradually exit and re-enter through a retracted metal gate at the rear of the stage to an explosive soundscape, like a video war game, and to momentarily stronger lighting. Flailing arms seem to jerk two women's bodies backward, like they might pull right out of their sockets. One dancer spins on her knees, and her head twists rapidly as if trying to detach. Another pair creeps together along the floor or scrambles sideways.

Among other dance styles--such as hip hop and Senegalese Germaine Acogny's technique--Zbikowski has tap in her background. For some reason I can't begin to explain, I began to see it in some manically aggressive yet rhythmic moves. By that point, I might have been hallucinating. Anyway, the impression passed quickly.

Another moment found a dancer rising into a neat headstand--a very satisfying look, no?  So virtuosic!--only to slam over onto her back. She got up and stood near me, loudly panting--sounds of breath and impact of bone on floor are big time here--only to bound back into the center for another punishing solo. Sidelined players sometimes shout encouragement to those on the field--You got it! You got it!

For anyone who, like myself, feels dance to the core, with empathy that draws you into the work, this playground offers a hardcore workout unlike any other. Or almost. Again, there's STREB. But what appears to be going on here--which separates this work from anything I've ever seen from STREB--is a comment on our threatening times and a call to toughen up in response. And that means you, audience, too. This is not mere spectacle.

With original music by Raphael Xavier

Abandoned playground runs through Saturday, April 15 with a sold-out run, but for information on possible wait-list tickets, click here.

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

Subscribe in a reader

Charlie Murphy, 57

Charlie Murphy, ‘Chappelle’s Show’ Star and Eddie’s Brother, Dies at 57
by Maya Salam, The New York Times, April 12, 2017

Subscribe in a reader