Catch this now: A new, slow look at "Trio A"

Video installation of
David Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
at Danspace Project
(photo: Lily Cohen)

No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

--Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto

Okay, no glamour, maybe, but I am completely seduced by the wealth of physical energy and concealed/revealed information streaming through David Michalek's slowed-down video interpretation of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966), here and now at Danspace Project spanning three, large suspended video screens and performed by a succession of 46 soloists. Pat Catterson, a member of Rainer's Raindears troupe, coached performers in the tricky subtleties of Rainer's doing without DOING!  For example, if you reach down as if to pick a bottle from the floor, don't make much of it. It's just a bottle and just a reach. No drama.

David Thomson, one of 46 dancers
performing in Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
(photo: Mark Kornbluth)

Anyone thinking Rainer's so-called pedestrian movement is, in fact, simple or easy will get a big ol' surprise from Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA and might even find a kind of virtuosity in it. (If you caught Michalek's original Slow Dancing, in 2007, at Lincoln Center Plaza, you know he knows from glamorous star power, spectacle...and s-l-o-wwwwnesssss.) But, for goodness sake, was Rainer's Trio A ever anything but engagingly focused, confident, exhilarating in execution? No way will she ever not be my anti-hero hero.

Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA, presented in collaboration with Rainer, continues at Danspace Project tonight and concludes tomorrow evening. Both screenings are available from 6pm to 10pm. Viewers may come and go as they please and can also view Sally Banes' 1978 film of Rainer dancing Trio A.

Admission is free with RSVP recommended. For reservations, visit danspaceproject.org or call (866) 811.4111.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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News from the Bessies for 2017!

Dance artist Lela Aisha Jones is among four nominees
for this year's Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer.
(photo: Alex Shaw)

The NY Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies) organization has announced four nominees for the 2017 Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award:

Lela Aisha Jones
Niall Jones
Will Rawls
Katarzyna Skarpetowska

In addition, Abby Zbikowski will receive the 2017 Juried Bessie Award.

These two awards will be presented on July 12 (6-7pm) at a press conference at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, preceded by a ticketed cocktail party (5-6pm).  The organization will also announce nominees for Outstanding Production, Outstanding Revival, Outstanding Performer, Outstanding Music Composition or Sound Design and Outstanding Visual Design.

Information on the July 12 cocktail party and press conference: click

And hold the date for the 33rd Annual Bessie Awards: Monday, October 9, at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts!

About the Bessies
 The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 33 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize outstanding work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League, as members participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. www.bessies.org

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The Guggenheim's journey into the mystic

Armand Point: The Annunciation or Ancilla Domini (L’Annonciation), 1895
Tempera on panel, 99 x 51 cm
Private collection, courtesy Sotheby’s
Photo: Courtesy Sotheby’s

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

presents

Mystical Symbolism: 
The Salon de la Rose+Croix, 1892–1897

Open now through October 4

Ferdinand Hodler: The Disappointed Souls (Les âmes déçues), 1892
Oil on canvas, 120 x 299 cm
Kuntsmuseum Bern, Staat Bern
Photo: Courtesy Kuntsmuseum Bern, Staat Bern

"The world is too much with us," wrote William Wordsworth, critiquing new realities wrought in Britain's first Industrial Age. Nearly a century later, French Rosicrucian writer Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918) struck a similar note, creating space for artists seeking refuge from a swiftly-changing Europe through the embrace of classical myth, Biblical narratives, nature's elevating beauty and the more ethereal, spiritual climes of imagination. The Guggenheim's new show, Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix, curated by Vivien Greene, samples Symbolist works that appeared in Péladan's annual salon of international works in Paris over its six years, 1892-1897.

Installation view
Photo: David Heald
©Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2017

Greene's installation spaces these works in a way that would encourage the sort of concentration and contemplation Péladan surely intended to inspire. But with its wan religious iconography intertwined with pagan flourishes, inert androgyny and women relegated to either virginal or monstrous roles, most of this visual art will likely merit attention mainly for its historical, influential connections to other artistic mediums of the period. I glanced at and breezed by much of it--the familiar (Khnopff, Delville) and the unexpected, such as Charles Maurin's remarkably political painting, The Dawn of Labor--but did find myself lingering with one pencil-and-chalk work on paper.

Armand Point's April or Saint Cecilia (1896) depicts the martyred patron of musicians strumming her harp before a lush cascade of ivy. Point's chiseled modeling of the bones of Cecilia's articulated hands held my eyes once and again. We are meant to notice those bones. Although willowy and idealized in her femininity, Cecilia is neither flattened nor vague and evanescent, unlike so many of the good girls and femmes mystérieuses rendered in Symbolist allegory. She fully inhabits a defined, structured body. And like legendary Orpheus, a subject popular with the Symbolists, she expresses a transcendent power through music.

Audio introduction to the exhibit and related poetry readings: click

Related programming: click

Visitor information: click

Ticketing: click

Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue (between 88th and 89th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Richard Benson, 73

Richard Benson, Photographer and Printer, Dies at 73
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, June 27, 2017

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Michael Nyqvist, 56

Michael Nyqvist, Swedish Actor Who Played Villain in ‘John Wick,’ Dies at 56
by Matthew Haag, The New York Times, June 27, 2017

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Geri Allen, 60

Geri Allen, Pianist Who Reconciled Jazz’s Far-Flung Styles, Dies at 60
by Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times, June 27, 2017

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Marie Cosindas, 93

Marie Cosindas, Whose Photographs Brought Color to the Fore, Dies at 93
by William Grimes, The New York Times, June 2, 2017

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World premiere: Ivy Baldwin Dance presents "Keen [No. 2]"

Choreographer Ivy Baldwin performs in Keen [No. 2],
a new work for her ensemble, Ivy Baldwin Dance, at Abrons Arts Center.
Set design is by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen.
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Eleanor Smith (left) and Katie Workum
perform a duet in Keen [No. 2].

Below, an ensemble scene
(photos: Maria Baranova)

Grief is a force that seizes the body from within and works its way--by covert pathways and on its own timetable--throughout and through. Although humans have devised various rites for directing and honoring its expression, there's no controlling its urges and its dimensions. As such, grief has much to teach the conscious mind that humbly attends to it.

In Keen [No. 2]--in world premiere at the Abrons Arts Center, co-commissioned with The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Joyce Theater as part of Joyce Unleashed--Ivy Baldwin and her dancers dwell within a space of grief. They boldly ask us to pay attention to so much--in Katie Workum's opening solo, in front of that gorgeous, wow-inducing set by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen, a surprising, sometimes halting, even awkward exploration with no interest in pleasing our eyes; in the ensemble's lengthy passages of repetition, often numbingly even in tone; or the same ensemble indulging itself in excesses of release and of obvious uses of imagery and theatrical space, all of it given unconditional permission.

Among other things, I thought of valkyries and angels in flight. I thought of Isadora Duncan, that passionate force of nature, and her grief at the sudden death of her two young children. And I thought of furious tantrums in response to the unexplained, the unfair, the unbearable. It's significant that the dancing sometimes evokes the animal world in shapes, moves, rhythms, sounds, herd-like and unguarded behaviors. Grief connects us to our bodies in ways that can make us remember our basic animal selves and force us to let go of constructed, functional personas. Who better to demonstrate this for us than a chorus of dancers, artists who study the many intricate, wild truths their bodies hold?

Lawrence P. Cassella--who, in 2015, succumbed to a rare immune system disorder after brief illness--was a member of Ivy Baldwin Dance from 2003 to the end of his life. Keen [No. 2] is dedicated to this beloved member of our dance community and informed by Baldwin's experience of losing and grieving him. I watched it with a flow of questions: Is Workum, the work's initial soloist, testing the remaining abilities of a body she no longer trusts? Or could she be testing the powers of a new "body" beyond physical form--rotating her wrists to see if she can lift a leg, twining her hands to generate a new set of fingers? When dancers duet, their bodies coming into sync, can we know who is lost and who is mourning? Or is that interconnection, that blurring of distinction, that temporary inability to let go, regain and shelter in one's own, separate energy and identity, at the very heart of grief? Might it be, for dancers, even harder than for the rest of us to let the physical bodies of their loved ones and colleagues go?

Like the process of grief itself, Keen [No. 2] makes no appeal to what a viewer might want or accept. It is unreasonable and unruly in nature, but it is true to its own purpose and logic, presented with admirable conviction by Baldwin, Eleanor Smith and Katie Workum with Katie Dean, Dia Dearstyne, Heather Olson, Kay Ottinger, Marýa Wethers (June 1-4), Tara Willis (June 8-11), Tara Sheena and Anna Adams Stark.

Sound design: Justin Jones
Lighting design: Chloe Z. Brown
Costumes: Mindy Nelson

Keen [No. 2] continues through June 11 with performances Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm. For information, click here. For ticketing, click here.

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

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