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Saturday, January 27, 2018

Where do we fit? 92Y Harkness Dance explores identity

Dancer-choreographer Aimee Rials
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Dance artist Aimee Rials curated Where do we fit? for 92Y Harkness Dance Center's Fridays at Noon, choosing five choreographers to question "identity and sexuality, personhood and power, inclusion and exclusion and the universal desire to belong." With the exception of an ethereal Jasmine Hearn duet from shook-- performed with care by Dominica Greene and Angie Pittman--the hour-long showcase focused on solos danced by their creators. It explored everything from dexterous physicality, quirky and rash in its expression (Chuck Wilt's Cadet) to the mystery and spirituality of gender fluidity (Trebien Pollard's She Gives Birth to Stone). Through a dream-like relationship to costuming, Pamela Pietro worked clear contrasts between a woman's determined self-protection and her vulnerability in everything I thought I Knew but....

Rials's solo--"The Quiet We Keep," a compelling excerpt from Modifi(her)--had dramatic impact, drawn from her experience as an androgynous white lesbian with roots in the rural south. In a post-show Q&A, she noted her caution and self-vigilance on visits home, her need to protect her kin from scrutiny and danger by altering her appearance and behavior. Rials did not discuss the formal qualities of her solo, but I had taken note of intriguing similarities to ritual--the formation and interactions with a circle of empty folding chairs possibly representing absent and recalled family members; tremulous movement that could signal "catching the spirit" or resolutely engaging old pain and trauma. The Quiet We Keep, without being obvious, powerfully evokes place, people and psyche.

Closed. For information on future 92Y Harkness Dance Center Friday at Noon events, click here.

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Friday, January 26, 2018

Lumberyard: Japan's Kei Takei returns with "LIGHT"

Kei Takei solo in LIGHT, Part 8
(photos: Kate Enman)

I remember Japanese choreographer Kei Takei from back in the 1970s when her company made its home in New York, and I used to think of her as "that woman who dances in diapers." Her vision seemed to arise from an earthly environment--she called her troupe Kei Takei's Moving Earth--but also from the humility and scrappiness inspired by watching and feeling and loving the elements of Earth. And, she's no different now at age whatever--which I hear she does not reveal--after many years of being off the New York scene.

Kei Takei's Moving Earth Orient Sphere has opened a season at New York Live Arts, launching this year's Lumberyard in the City Winter Festival. (BTW, while we debate PS 122's re-branding, surely it's time for Lumberyard to retire this festival's clumsy name.)  I was excited to reacquaint myself with Takei's work, which I recalled from the early days of my dance writing career. It felt amazing to revisit her solo from LIGHT, PART 8 (1974) in which this small, scampering character continuously ties fresh white garments to her body, growing into a bulbous, immobile mess that must be carried away by stagehands. The direct, naked lighting on all that white fabric--layered on so thickly--made my eyes sting. Honestly, I don't remember what I made of this absurd, caustic solo back in the day, but last night I wanted to burst out laughing. The opening night audience gazed at it quietly and responded to it, and the ensemble work LIGHT, Part 44 (Bamboo Forest), with reserve and polite applause.

Takei is as funny as a clown...with purpose. Like a clown, she puts her whole body into it. This physical investment you can't help but feel--or, at least, I can't--and that's what made me want to laugh. At the same time, I realize that here she is, an artist of movement, tying herself up and weighing herself down with things she does not need--whether they are material objects or useless ideas or restrictions. Fill in the blank, as I'm sure she'd want us to do. We've all been there. We could be there today, as could our world.


Takei, center, and members of her troupe
in LIGHT, Part 44
(photo: Kate Enman)

LIGHT, Part 44 (Bamboo Forest), a work from 2016 making its US premiere, opened the evening, danced here by Takei and eleven others. About this work, Takei has written:
To me, a bamboo forest is a mystical place. In it something is born, grows, and then vanishes. I am not trying to express anything in particular in "BAMBOO FOREST." It is simply that bamboo, whether it is giant or small, enchants and entices me. I follow it into its world.
And so she does, and so do we, something that we come to understand as the work concludes after a full hour of watching dancers mass, split apart, reorganize themselves into separate organic segments each with its focus, drive and rhythm, turning the single stage space into a tapestry of distinct and changeable dimensions, a living, breathing, regenerating forest. The work--with a minimalist set by Renta Kochi and rich music by Seiichiro Sou--deals with nature's cycles in which we, as mortal beings, partake.

Takei has been bringing to the stage her magnum opus LIGHT--in its numerous autonomous sections, now up to 45--since the late 1960s. She's an impressive elder and shows no sign of any interest, or need, to slow down or break focus.

Kei Takei's Moving Earth Orient Sphere continues tonight and Saturday night with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets for this and other Lumberyard in the City Winter Festival shows at New York Live Arts through February 10, click here.

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

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COIL: Dean Moss premieres "Petra" at Performance Space New York

Dean Moss fuses a notorious Fassbinder character
with headless, blood-spurting Hindu goddess Chinnamasta
in his new work, Petra, at Performance Space New York.
(photo courtesy of COIL Festival)


APAP might be long gone, but COIL keeps on coiling, offering new chances to take the measure of Performance Space New York, this new--or, I should say, renovated and blandly re-branded--East Village entity. There's not a bit bland, though, about the current PSNY occupant, Dean Moss, and his newest interdisciplinary piece, Petra. Here's this world premiere production has been described:
A masochistic autobiographical meditation on desire, Petra examines race, sex, and power through the lens of service and unrequited love. Directed by Dean Moss, with music performed live by Composer Samita Sinha, and inspired by the Rainer Fassbinder film “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant”, Petra merges the imagined and real lives of its all women immigrant cast, drawing parallels between theirs, his, and the film’s queer, anxiety-laced explorations of ambition, subjection and dispossession. Simultaneously, (taking inspiration from “She whose head is severed” - a Hindu goddess associated with self-sacrifice, spiritual awakening, and the power of the erotic - Moss questions the institutional processes of diversity management, highlighting not only its aspirational goals, but also its self-serving strategies, the implementation of which both support and undermine projects not unlike his own.
I remembered it was mischievous Moss--invited into Parallels, Ishmael Houston-Jones's 2012 Black avant-garde platform for Danspace Project--who raised eyebrows by titling his curated program Black Dance though his selected artists were actually Korean-American, Latinx and white. Petra's adoption and adaptations of characters and visual and narrative elements from Fassbinder's film provide a striking framework for Moss's agenda. Here he battles assumptions and restrictions in arts support and presenting that, as he sees it, can manipulate and hamstring creativity.

Much of Petra contains clues about how Moss feels about his complicated place as a Black artist in a white-dominated downtown performance community where, nevertheless, he has gained recognition and respect. He surrounds his imperious alter-ego, Petra (theater artist Kaneza Schaal), with efficient minions--dancers Mina Nishimura, Sari Nordman and Paz Tanjuaquio. (The women represent different cultural backgrounds: Schaal is of Rwandan ancestry; composer/performer Samita Sinha is Indian; Nishimura, born in Japan; Nordman, in Finland; Tanjuaquio, in the Philippines.) Moss's three "Marlenes"--Nishimura, Nordman and Tanjuaquio--snap to fulfill the stately, glamorous Petra's every barked order. They quietly submit as she towers over them, pulling one after another into a smothering slow dance. The way Schaal clasps and carefully positions that first head (Tanjuaquio's) at her bosom tells us everything we need to know about power imbalance. Sinha, glittering in gold, is Petra's much-desired "Karin," everything an artist’s ego longs for and is often denied. You can't always get what you want.

The numerous Fassbinder parallels can be fascinating, but the work turns far more pointed as it winds down with a solo for Tanjuaquio with Sinha leading three audience members in a vocal chorus. Their text, intoned in unison, rolls out familiar lines of institutional interrogation meant to discern an artist's or cultural project's degree of attention to programming diversity and community engagement. Tanjuaquio's dance--saying nothing particularly translatable to the linear, anxious mind--pushes ever onward. The dancer skims right over the surface of this score just as, I suspect, Moss wants us to know he will always prefer to do.

Concept, Direction, Choreography, Audio/Visual Design: Dean Moss

Performing Collaborators: Mina Nishimura, Sari Nordman, Kaneza Schaal, Samita Sinha and Paz Tanjuaquio

Video Collaborators: Julia Cumming, Cassie Mey, Marya Warshaw and Asher Woodworth

Lighting Design: Zack Tinkelman

Original Music: Samita Sinha

Petra continues with 7:30pm performances tonight through Saturday, January 27. For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets, 4th Floor), Manhattan
(directions)

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MOMA to explore work of Judson Dance Theater artists

Peter Moore. Performance view of Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton
in Brown’s Trillium, Concert of Dance #4, January 30, 1963.
© Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Courtesy Paula Cooper, New York

announces its upcoming exhibition:

September 16, 2018–February 03, 2019

Ana Janevski, Curator
Thomas J. Lax, Associate Curator
with Martha Joseph, Curatorial Assistant,
Department of Media and Performance Art

For a brief period in the early 1960s, a group of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers made use of a local church to present performances that Village Voice critic Jill Johnston declared the most exciting new developments in dance in a generation. Redefining the kinds of movement that could count as dance, the Judson participants—Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, Bill Dixon, Judith Dunn, David Gordon, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Rudy Perez, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, and Elaine Summers, among others—would go on to profoundly shape all fields of art in the second half of the 20th century. Taking its name from the Judson Memorial Church, a socially engaged Protestant congregation in New York’s Greenwich Village, Judson Dance Theater was organized as a series of open workshops from which its participants developed performances. Together, the artists challenged traditional understandings of choreography, expanding dance in ways that reconsidered its place in the world. They employed new compositional methods to strip dance of its theatrical conventions, incorporating “ordinary” movements—gestures typical of the street or home, for example, rather than a stage—into their work, along with games, simple tasks, and social dances to infuse their pieces with a sense of spontaneity.

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done highlights the ongoing significance of the history of Judson Dance Theater, beginning with the workshops and classes led by Anna Halprin, Robert Ellis Dunn, and James Waring and exploring the influence of other figures working downtown such as Simone Forti and Andy Warhol, as well as venues for collective action like Judson Gallery and the Living Theatre. Through live performance and some 300 objects including film, photographic documentation, sculptural objects, scores, music, poetry, architectural drawings, and archival material, the exhibition celebrates the group’s multidisciplinary and collaborative ethos as well as the range of its participants. The Work Is Never Done includes a gallery exhibition, a print publication, and an ambitious performance program in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium.

Exhibition information

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Saturday, January 20, 2018

Meet your doom--maybe--with Split Britches at La MaMa

Above: Lois Weaver
Below: Peggy Shaw
Split Britches brings Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)
to La MaMa for its US premiere.
(photo: Matt Delbridge)


Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), a US premiere from famed lesbian theater duo Split Britches (Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw), takes inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's political satire Dr. Strangelove (1964). It works from a similar wackadoodle take on the threat of nuclear disaster within reach of itchy Twitter--I mean, trigger--fingers. A top-flight general (Shaw) is stationed by a desk and computer monitor where he keeps track of time and apparently takes calls from gal pals. Weaver, referred to by Shaw as "Madame Mr. President Sir," initially slumbers at a far curve of circled "Situation Room" tables. They communicate via landline phones, although sometimes the phone rings, it's not Weaver, and Shaw breaks into randy old pop songs.

The situation at La MaMa, then, is less tense than Shaw's tracking of the countdown clock might suggest. Yes, the show itself must finish by the end of sixty minutes, but Billy Ward and the Dominoes's "60 Minute Man" is one of those randy songs, and there seems to be plenty of time for studly Shaw to bop out to that. Yes, something must be done about the impending doom we're trying to track on confusing overhead monitors, but there's lots of time to field a council of elders from among the oldest of us in attendance. And, no, although lined up with other greyheads, I failed to make the cut.

Directed by Weaver and written by the pair with Hannah Maxwell, the show contains clever text aligned like precision-cut puzzle pieces (best delivered by saucy Shaw) and room for whatever unpredictables the elders might bring to the table. (One woman seemed obsessed with the mysterious whereabouts of one Tiffany Ariana Trump, offspring of Marla Maples and POS...oops, I mean, POTUS. Now that I think about it, Tiff does seem to have been out of the public eye for a suspiciously long time...hmmm.)

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) is more chuckle-provoking and captivating than Kubrick--well, of course! it's lesbian!--with the additional benefit of encouraging the audience to determine not only how the play will go but also, you gotta hope, how the rest of our lives will go. Folks came up with some really good stuff!

Part of The Public Theater's now-closed Under the Radar Festival, and originally scheduled to end last weekend, Unexplode Ordnances (UXO) fortunately continues tonight, Saturday, at 8pm and Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa -- Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Friday, January 19, 2018

Kyoung's Pacific Beat presents "PILLOWTALK"

JP Moraga and Basit Shittu,
the stars of Kyoung H. Park's PILLOWTALK
(photo: andytoad)

If PILLOWTALK were a streamable series, I would so binge-watch it. This short two-hander written and directed by Kyoung Park (Kyoung’s Pacific Beat) has that all-essential factor that gets me every time--people I can give a damn about. That would be Buck (JP Moraga), an Asian-American journalist just fired from the job he hates anyway and who avoids telling this news to his super-practical husband Sam (Basit Shittu), a Black man and former competitive swimmer now working for a bunch of Republicans, the only job he says he was able to find. From beginning to end, and even through the inevitable tension and dissension, Moraga and Shittu subtly radiate the genuine, consistent humanity and appeal in their characters. The romance of Buck and Sam, two contemporary Brooklynites, reflects true complexity and sweet affection in equal measures. I believe in them and root for them.

Co-presented by Park's company and The Tank for The Exponential Festival, the show delves into issues of racism--even inside relationships between people of color--as well as economics, gentrification and political strategy. Most notably, Park probes the issue of how the fight for marriage equality might have robbed queer marginality of its unique, revolutionary bite. His tight, energized writing, deftly linking political and personal issues, contains no waste material. It's all hard at work all the time, and keeps both the actors and us viewers on our toes.

Setting up in the smaller of The Tank's two spaces contributes to our sense of the couple's vulnerability. The tiny black box space and its ingenious, minimalist decor (by Marie Yokoyama) suggest the cramped existence of real-life New Yorkers similar to Sam and Buck. When challenges emerge in this marriage, the men retreat to an even narrower slot of territory on opposite sides of the space, or one might flee the space entirely. Their apartment's un-cozy spatial constraints are as real a worry as the external, invading pressures from community and society. But we also feel the spirit of love in the air. And that's underscored by the final sequence, a pas de deux choreographed by Katy Pyle (of Ballez fame).

Moraga, whose character longs for a new career as a ballet dancer, more clearly resembles someone with ballet training (those feet, that line). I don't know about Shittu, and neither man's bio reveals a history with dance. But Pyle's work as the creator of the inclusive, queer-friendly ballez approach to classical dance upends what we expect, re-purposing and opening up all of ballet's strengths, beauty and fun to people of all genders. Her sequence for Sam and Buck strips away all the external and internal static and reveals what matters and what endures at the heart of this relationship.

Live music: Helen Yee
Sound design: Lawrence Schober
Scenic and lighting design: Marie Yokoyama
Costume design: Andrew Jordan
PILLOWTALK’s Long Table Series is curated by Shannon Matesky and Kyoung H. Park and each event will follow 15 minutes after each listed performance date. Last Long Table:
LOVE’S POWER/MICROINVISIBILITY (Thursday, January 25, 8pm) sheds light on the aggressions and invisibility of QPOC love. What are the spiritual and material dimensions of QPOC love? What are our acts of radical love? Facilitated by Stephanie Hsu with Guest Speakers Nic Kay, Kirya Trabor and more to be announced.
PILLOWTALK continues through Saturday, January 27. For information and tickets, click here.

The Tank
312 West 36th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

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Wednesday, January 17, 2018

"THIS" is what again? Adrienne Truscott at American Realness

Adrienne Truscott in THIS
(photo: Paul Goode)

Adrienne Truscott brought her adaptable THIS show to American Realness 2018 at Abrons Arts Center's Playhouse, and I caught that final performance on the night also marking AR's finale. The APAP conference, too, drew to its close Tuesday morning, although there are APAP-targeted festivities (PSNY's COIL shows; Under The Radar's added week for the great Split Britches duo) still going strong this week.

So, what exactly is THIS? And who exactly is Truscott?

The answer to both seems to be: A LOT. Also, probably, IT DEPENDS.

The woman has worked through numerous genres--from dance to writing to circus to cabaret and stand-up comedy--and THIS draws liberally from her history. Which is what makes it such a fun, elusive and magical this.

At Abrons, it started on a raw stage--look at that rough wall, that corrugated gate, the metal ladder in the corner, the stained paint cloth and other unidentifiable stuff littering the floor--with a rambunctious comic who might or might not be Truscott opening for Truscott, who is who we thought we had come to see and believe we're seeing but now might or might not be seeing because she says she's opening for Truscott who has worked really hard on what we're about to see. Anywho....

After issuing a warning about a blackout we're supposed to imagine that doesn't happen when she says it does but then happens when we think it won't, the unidentified opener is dropping sex-related jokes to varying degrees of success. ("Comedy and abortion have something in common.... Timing is everything.") Timing is important, too, to a stage
magician's sleight of hand, which is what THIS turns out to be. Anything can appear and disappear when we least expect it--elements of decor; running narratives that abruptly stop and run away and...wait...run back, then vanish again so you don't know where they were supposed to be taking you; a mechanical bird that flies prettily until...oh, no...it doesn't; and a performer who sometimes hides behind scenery even as she continues to talk to us.

What to make of it? It's such a...such a...thing, this THIS, and the audience I sat among--mainly young, I noticed--loved it hard and answered it with a big roar.

If you did not see this THIS but you happen get another chance to see THIS, I suspect you will see a somewhat different THIS. But, no worries. You will see Truscott--trust--and she is always worth it, no matter who shows up onstage.

Writing and performance: Adrienne Truscott
Direction: Ellie Heyman
Sound/video/set design: Carmine Covelli
Light Design: Mary Ellen Stebbins

Closed. For general information on American Realness 2018, click here.

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Tuesday, January 16, 2018

American Realness: "We Wait In The Darkness" by Rosy Simas

Rosy Simas in her solo We Wait In The Darkness
(photo: Ian Douglas)


Rosy Simas Danse
We Wait In The Darkness (New York premiere)
co-presented by Abrons Arts Center and Gibney Dance for
American Realness 2018 at Abrons Arts Center

Recent scientific study verifies what many Native people have always known, that traumatic events in our ancestors lives are in our bodies, blood and bones. These events leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA. Our grandmother’s tragic childhood can trigger depression or anxiety in us, but we have the ability to heal these DNA encodings and change that trait for future generations.
--Rosy Simas 

For people of the Black African diaspora, too, these words from Minneapolis-based dance artist Rosy Simas (Seneca, Heron Clan) ring true, and I must begin with gratitude to Simas for work that illustrates the body as truth-teller and healer. We, too, are a people nurtured by connection to ancestors with tragic histories in this hemisphere, and many of us express reverence for ancestral heritage through powerful spiritual and artistic practices that are, in their way, forms of anti-colonial resistance and justice-making.

Simas's 50-minute solo, We Wait In The Darkness--with its soundscape by composer François Richomme--uses visual, textual, kinetic and sonic mediums to affirm and reclaim the strength of ancestry and environment. By employing this sensory overlapping and overload, viewers grasp what it must be like to uncover the memories one's body holds--some sweet, some painful, some subtle or slow to emerge, some earthshaking--and to tap its wisdom.

Over one end of the stage hangs Simas's long, white paper model of a DNA strand. Towards the center back a white, puff-sleeved dress with a long, old-fashioned dirndl skirt dangles. Along stage left, Simas has suspended a series of white paper panels textured like fine quilts. Panels also capture film imagery, often hazy, glimmering and ethereal, that allude to place--and sometimes people--without specific identification for the benefit of those outside Seneca culture. This poetically elusive quality renders the work as ritual rather than documentary, gives it a spaciousness rather than containing it as the story of a particular individual--although we do hear a voiceover of actual letters of Simas's grandmother, as read by her mother, and we also hear words in the Seneca language gruffly whispered as Simas dances. So, precious, protected mystery exists but also a certain porosity and generosity to help all of us begin to understand the possibility and path of healing.

Theater of both the vivid and the indistinct, then. As Simas sits with her naked back to the audience--spine and arms deeply flexing, stretching and reaching, snaking and twisting--I recall my first realization, when I practiced energy healing, that the back shares more information, without a person's conscious intervention and manipulation, than the front of the body. Throughout the dance, even when she finally dons that white dress, Simas shows us a body of focused, determined will, sure of itself, sure of its mission, sure of the ultimate fulfillment of that mission. We come to understand the evocative sound and visual imagery--drawn from earth and waterways of Seneca land--as its sacred source. And we also contemplate what it meant, for indigenous people, to be literally torn from that grounding, nourishing source. Her body speaks as it moves, and it is saying: I will this. I call this back. The spirits of the land respond in Richomme's mesmerizing, commanding weave of sound.

Near the end of the piece, projections of schematic diagrams suggest maps with numbered sections, a landscape reduced to arbitrary parts for some entity's benefit. Again, nothing is identified, verbally or visually, yet the implications are clear. An environment we just experienced so powerfully in sight and sound, now lies butchered. Simas brings out a sheet of white paper marked with this diagram, solemnly ripping each section from its matrix and placing each strip in a carefully-chosen position along the edge of the floor. She also rips away more of these sections before descending into the audience and gifting them to several of us.

I received number 12. Although I have no idea what territory--real or metaphoric--that it might represent, I will preserve and treasure it.

Letter reader: Laura Waterman Wittstock (Simas’s mother)
Letters: Clarinda Waterman (Simas’s grandmother)
Lighting design: Karin Olson and Carolyn Wong
Set and film design: Rosy Simas

Closed. American Realness 2018 concludes this evening. For further information, click here.

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Saturday, January 13, 2018

SPAC's "Mugen Noh Othello" at Japan Society in sold-out run

Japan Society, celebrating its 110th anniversary,
and The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival
present Satoshi Miyagi's Mugen Noh Othello.
(photo: Takuma Uchida)
Front left, Micari (Desdemona)
Front right, Maki Honda (Pilgrim from Venice)
with chanters (l-r): Kotoko Kiuchi, Yoneji Ouchi, Asuka Fuse,
Kazunori Abe, Fuyuko Moriyama and Haruyo Suzuki
(photo: Richard Termine)


North American premiere
presented by Japan Society (NOH-NOW SERIES, PART IV)


Satoshi Miyagi and his acclaimed Shizuoka Performing Arts Center center and elevate the role of Shakespeare's Desdemona in Othello in Mugen Noh Othello. Seen through the tradition of mugen noh theater, the warrior Othello's wife and victim becomes the potentially disruptive shade trapped between life and definitive death until she can work through her story in front of the living. This crucial process for moving on and finding ultimate rest is, in a real sense, a form of theater as ritual to release her soul. Unlike most otherworldly beings in mugen noh, though, Miyagi's Desdemona is a more humble than formidable figure, appealing to the audience's sympathy.

As the tragic ghost, Micari, silkily, eerily skims the stage on feet we never see, voluminous robes concealing what surely must be casters bearing a body that admits no articulation, drawn forward as if by magnetic force. In her thin, delicate crown, she's a doll, the very model of perfection, but our final sight of her--oh, that parting gesture!--might reveal how much her devastating fate will always define her.

The full-bodied percussive music has power. As kneeling members of the superb chorus, arranged at stage left, chant the story, you will have to scan and stare hard at each mouth to determine the source of each utterance. Supertitles provide English translations, but I bet you'll find it tough to tear your eyes from the stately beauty on stage.

Script: Sukehiro Hirakawa
Original music: Hiroko Tanakawa (arranged by the actors)
Costume design: Kayo Takahashi
Lighting design: Koji Osako

Remaining shows of Mugen No Othello (tonight and Sunday) are sold out. Wait list lineup starts one hour prior to curtain. For information, click here.

Japan Society
333 East 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Thursday, January 11, 2018

Performance Space New York opens with Heather Kravas

New logo
for the rebooted, rebranded PS 122

The new lobby for Performance Space New York (renovated Second Coming of historic PS 122) might be the East Side equivalent of the entranceway to The Kitchen. There's almost identical warmth and appeal--which is to say, absolutely none. At least, the lobby at Chelsea's New York Live Arts often offers something creative to gaze at and the chance to take a load off while you wait.

On opening night for PSNY's COIL Festival--on now through February 4--I could not wait to get out of that lobby and up to the 4th-floor studio for the New York premiere of visions of beauty by Heather Kravas. Now that space has possibilities--generously broad with an impressively high ceiling and row of tall windows. It will be interesting to see how a variety of artists re-imagine, re-shape and activate it, just as it will be welcome to have this influential venue back online in my neighborhood.




visions of beauty
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Kravas's vision felt like an apropos place to begin again. Its minimalism and quirky, glacial pacing and moments of matter-of-fact nudity seemed like flashbacks to the sort of thing I remember experiencing here in decades past when it was still cramped-and-funky PS 122. Its quietude, its stillness, seemed intentionally therapeutic. The re-arrangements of wedges of nine dancers in various, alternating, far-flung pockets of space seemed intent on messing with our ability to claim them--the way an audience can "herd" a bunch of performers, as entertainers, in our minds. Instead, they evaded us. They slowed us down and made us wait and gave us an uncompromising atmosphere in which to wait. The last show I'd seen--at The Joyce--did the polar opposite of that, expertly, and it was an ongoing struggle for me to keep my eyes open for Kravas, something else I remember from certain moments and certain artists at the old PS 122.

Though described as "anti-spectacle," the hour does contain one fantastic passage in which dancers create one long, highly-active braid of interlocked bodies along the floor, supporting and shifting under one another. Something oddly meditative and a tad creepy and all the more fascinating for the understated way it brings those qualities together.

visions of beauty was created in collaboration with performers Andrew Champlin, Tarek Halaby, Michael Helland, John Hoobyar, Michael Ingle, Joseph Kipp, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Kayvon Pourazar and Saúl Ulerio.

Original music: Dana Wachs aka Vorhees
Song: Peter Schilling
Piano: Hank Mason
Lighting design: Madeline Best

visions of beauty continues on the following schedule:

Thursday, January 11, 8:30pm
Friday, January 12, 9:30pm
Saturday, January 13, 6:30pm

For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(directions)

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Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Hadar Ahuvia: The Dances Are for Us

Dance artist Hadar Ahuvia (left) with Mor Mendel
(photos, above and below: Cory Antiel)


Guest writer Hadar Ahuvia writes about the inspiration for her new hour-long dance work, Everything you have is yours? 
"This was the question an Israeli security official asked Ahuvia when she went to renew her passport. The question resonated with her as she considers her relationship to her Israeli heritage. Everything you have is yours? explores the construction of Israeli identity through the performance of Israeli folk dance--with attention to gestures appropriated from Palestinian and Arab Jewish traditions. Ahuvia’s investigation also explores the double-appropriation of Israeli dance by American Christian Zionists in their own pursuit of 'authenticity.'”

Hadar Ahuvia
(photo: Corey Antiel)

The Dances Are for Us

by guest writer Hadar Ahuvia


“Everything you have is yours?” he asks. “Kol ma she’yesh lach, hoo shelah?

I empty my pockets—wallet, iphone, change—and pass my bag through the scanner. I say yes.

I was at the Israeli embassy to renew my Israeli passport. I needed it to return to the Holy Land—that sacred and pockmarked land--one my homes.

I would visit family, yes, but also join a delegation of Jews doing solidarity work with Palestinians in the West Bank.

In Hebrew, the irony of the familiar questions hit more forcefully.
Hebrew is my mother tongue, but waning usage does something naive and sometimes fruitful to my comprehension.

I know he’s asking “Did you take something, knowingly or unknowingly that might not be yours?’” I hear: Everything you have, that is for you, is yours?

There is an Israeli kids song:

My land of Israel is beautiful and blooming.
Who built and planted it? We all did!
So we have a country, and we have a street, we have a song in the land of Israel.

But grammatically it holds the meaning:

There is for us a country, the street is for us, the land is for us, this song is for us.

I add: the dances are for us.

And I did grow up believing it was for us, for me. The fruits at the market were for me to pick up smell and taste. The security was for me. The roads were for me to travel with my uncle, the archeological park was for us. So the gate and closure hours didn’t matter. The Roman ruins were for us, as we hopped the fence to walk down 2,000- year-old streets with disregard to the Palestinian villages that have survived in this frequently-hostile land for hundreds of years. The Romans are the ones who kicked us out anyway. That my students in the US have little connection to these enslaved and expelled Israelites of 2000 years ago still surprises me. It’s a testament to the diasporic focus of our Jewish pedagogy, and to the resilience of my Zionist upbringing.

I am the granddaughter of Eastern European settlers who founded Kibbutz Beit Hashita, where my parents and siblings grew up, a place we call home. It is also where the Palestinian village of Shatta used to be. We spent holidays on the kibbutz, where pageants of song and dance originating in the 1930s still took shape in the agricultural fields and the dining hall.  When we moved to Florida and then Hawaii, we continued celebrating and gathering with these particular Socialist Zionist symbols and Israeli folk dance choreographies.

Increasingly our home began to mimic the Arab essence that is claimed as fundamentally Israeli. Hummus, tahini, olive oil zaatar, pita, baklava. And beside the Palestinian shepherd salad, the syncopated dabke and Yemenite steps, Turkish and Druz inspired melodies of early Hebrew songs and their synchronous dances. These kept us marinating in a Mediterranean Israeli identity, our distinction from the American Ashkenazi diaspora encroaching on us-- ameripoop-- treacherously symbolized by applesauce on latkes.

We had the political freedom to enter and leave Israel and the US as we liked, though not the economic ability.  And because even this produced a profound longing, I could later easily empathize with the indefinite and ongoing exile of Palestinians.

On Israel’s Independence Day--May 15, 1948--Israeli folk dances seemed to “spontaneously” break out, thanks to the organizing of the Israeli Folk Dance movement and support from pre-state political organizations.  At Biet Hashita, the dancers had to overcome my grandfather’s faction, who refused to celebrate a partitioned Israel, who they thought of as “a stillborn child.”

Today, there are more than 8000 Israeli “folk” dances (most often not called “folk” any longer, but simply Israeli). They have been choreographed and disseminated continuously since the 1930s, mainly in white Jewish spaces. I danced them in Israeli elementary school and with family at far flung “outposts”--the Altamonte Springs JCCs and the Ala Wai Golf Course Center in Honolulu.

The Israeli folk dance movement was the enterprise of modern dancers, contemporaries of my grandparents, Jewish women of European descent, also known as Ashkenazi, who sought to become “Oriental” and native to their new surroundings. To embody Zionist/Israeli identity in Palestine, they appropriated steps from Arab Palestinians and Druze they observed in the valley where my family settled, and Yemenite Jews at relocation camps to which they were brought. The “new Hebrew dances” they made were used in the socialization of later Jewish migrations--Jews coming primarily from Muslim countries. They are known today as Mizrahim, literally meaning “Easterners,” treated as inferior by the Ashkenazi establishment. Today, the dances are choreographed mostly by Mizrahi men to Mizrahi pop songs--pejoratively called by some “songs of the central bus station.” The Mizrahim have been allowed to ascend within this social sphere, completing the self-orientalizing maneuver of the Israeli physicality. The dances still contain the vestiges of translated steps, steps that don’t just metaphorically mirror the appropriation of land but operate to justify the claim to land, to create and celebrate a national identity rooted in the spaces we depopulated and conquered.

One deadly claim of 18th- and 19th-Century European anti-Semitism was that European Jews had no culture of their own, no connection to land. No blood on soil. No authentic folk. And this soullessness, true of homosexuals and gypsies too, justified their extermination.  The chants at Charlottesville share a lineage with this race theory.

They would concur--nothing you have is yours.

European Zionist internalized these ideas and imagined that the recreation of ancient Israelite polity would solve the conundrum.

But here we are still posing the question--Everything you have is yours?--while grasping for the sense of security, ownership and belonging we coveted, that we obtained, and continue to violently maintain with the choreography of bodies, bombs, and borders.

So yes, this is all mine; it is on my person.

Each time I remake this dance--and I do each time we perform--I understand a little more clearly what our next steps might be. To ask what decolonizing the dances could be not just as a metaphor, but alongside the fight for Mizrahim and Palestinians to have the space for their steps to survive and thrive.


Hadar Ahuvia
(photo courtesy of the artist)

BIO:
Hadar Ahuvia is a performer and choreographer who makes work grounded in physical research and political consciousness. Raised in the US and Israel, she trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been presented at Judson, Dixon Place, CPR, BkSD, Danspace DraftWork, Movement Research Fall Festival, AUNTS, Catch, Roulette, NYLA and Eastport Art Center, and SPACE Gallery, Maine. Ahuvia has worked with Sara Rudner, Jill Sigman, Donna Uchizono, Molly Poerstel, Anna Sperber, Jon Kinzel, Stuart Shugg, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Kathy Westwater. She is currently performing Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group. Ahuvia was 2012 DTW/NYLA Fresh Tracks Artist, a 2015 Movement Research AIR, a LABA Fellow at the 14th St. Y, and a 2016 Grace Paley Organizing Fellow at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and the recipient of 2017-18 CUNY Dance Initiative Residency.

*****

See Everything you have is yours?, presented by LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture at 14th Street Y, Thursday, February 8 through Saturday, February 10, all at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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The Joyce's American Dance Platform welcomes Caleb Teicher and BODYTRAFFIC

Dancer-choreographer Caleb Teicher
and below with dancer Nathan Bugh
(photos: Scott Shaw)


The powers-that-be are only offering you one more chance to catch New York's fantastic Caleb Teicher & Company along with BODYTRAFFIC, a dance ensemble from Los Angeles, at The Joyce Theater this season during American Dance Platform, curated by Christine Tschida. The entertaining ten-year-old LA troupe focuses on contemporary repertory from a variety of choreographers such as Kyle Abraham, Sidra Bell and Andrea Miller. On the ADP program, the dancers radiated charisma in works by Richard Siegal (The New 45, from 2015) and Matthew Neenan (the previewed A Million Voices) and demonstrated sturdy technique and fierce energy in Hofesh Shechter's dismal Dust (2015). They look thoroughly capable, ready and eager for any challenge a dancemaker might bring.


BODYTRAFFIC in Hofesh Shechter's Dust
(photo courtesy of American Dance Platform)

Nothing, though, charms quite as magically, quite as indelibly as the sight of two men--superb Caleb Teicher and Nathan Bugh--dancing romantic partnership like it has always and everywhere been just another part of life's scenery. And dancing it to the most delicious vocals by Ella Fitzgerald (Meet Ella, 2016), letting the smooth, graceful follow-through and crunchy nuttiness of their movement style ironically and ingeniously intertwine. This generous fantasia, originally shown at Gibney Dance in 2016, sparkles on the Joyce stage where the two bodies manage to write flourished signatures across unbounded space. I often thought of The Nicholas Brothers while watching Teicher, in particular, with his flash and fearlessness, his expansive angularity and impeccable jazz timing and flow. In Bugh, he has an all-in, springy and sassy partner in swing and humor and dance-scatting, both of them working musicality and surprise for all they're worth. Like some of my favorite dance artists, their deep knowledge of the music and their joy make me want to get up and dance, too. Really, what more can one ask?

On the program, too, a trio from Variations (2015), an intricate showpiece set to Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of The Goldberg Variations danced by Teicher, Brittany DeStefano and--watch, especially, for a mindboggling solo by this one--Gabe Winns Ortiz.

Caleb Teicher & Company and BODYTRAFFIC continues with a final performance on Sunday, January 14 at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For schedule information and tickets for other shared programs on the American Dance Platform series, on now through Sunday, January 14, click here.

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

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