Sridevi Kapoor, 54

Sridevi Kapoor, Bollywood’s First Female Superstar, Dies at 54
by Maggie Astor and Christina Caron, The New York Times, February 25, 2018

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Peggy Cooper Cafritz, 70

Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Patron of Black Artists, Dies at 70
by Penelope Green, The New York Times, February 23, 2018

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Idrissa Ouedraogo, 64

Idrissa Ouedraogo, Lauded African Filmmaker, Dies at 64
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, February 23, 2018

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Tatyana Tenenbaum's "Untitled Work for Voice"

Cast of Tatyana Tenenbaum's
Untitled Work for Voice
(photo: Liz Charky)

Choreographer/composer Tatyana Tenenbaum
performs in her work.
(photo: Simon Courchel)

I'm fairly sure I saw Shirley Temple's ghost at St. Mark's Church last night. Long, diaphanous curtains descended from the sanctuary's balcony and draped along the side risers. The faint, spectral image of Hollywood's tapdancing white child star shimmered over the sheer fabric and against the wall near the entrance. At least, I think it was Shirley, her spirit briefly hovering--a blessing? a warning?--before Tatyana Tenenbaum premiered a new, hour-long ensemble piece, Untitled Work for Voice, for Danspace Project.

As the title indicates, the work involves not only movement but vocalization and, indeed, blends the two so much that it becomes clear that, for Tenenbaum, one's entire body, not just one's vocal chords, speaks and sings. I've read an interview where she talks about having lived from the neck up, a way of being she connects to her Jewish heritage (self-described, in her program notes, as white and assimilated). Untitled Work for Voice might offer a series of fitful attempts to break through, not by circumventing her situation but by mining it for any tool that might serve her purpose.

We sometimes hear a single word pronounced as if by dissection: courage rendered as kohr-raj-geh. We watch dancers dryly launch jazz dance (sort of) movement phrases and halt them before the payoff. There are moments of call-and-response that seem, at once, meaninglessly secular; because we are trained to expect beauty and sacredness in this format, we hear sacred beauty. Three of the dancers carry out and rattle thunder sheets--a theatrical device to simulate an awesome force of nature in a place where it is not.

An auburn-haired apparition in a white gown dotted with green pompoms softly mewls and sings and turns and twists in the air. Who or what is she?

Sentences might fragment, or start and get rethought and reset: "We had a fight...no, it wasn't a fight. We had an argument." Each element seems like a desperate grasp or stab at something. And dancers confidently intone made-up lyrics to Glenn Miller's, "A String of Pearls," a World War II swing hit best known as an instrumental. The actual lyrics--I Googled this morning to check--are something else again.

Untitled Work for Voice--perhaps "untitled" because how to settle on something that might keep shifting?--did not seem to be building towards anywhere or anything. But--to my surprise and, admittedly, my relief-- it really did with a swirling, gradually expansive solo for dancing, singing Jules Skloot.

Breakthrough.

Created and performed by Marisa Clementi, Pareena Lim, Emily Moore, Skloot and Tenenbaum
Costume design: Claire Fleury
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann

Untitled Work for Voice continues tonight and Saturday with performances at 8pm. There is no late seating. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Bebe Miller Company and Susan Rethorst make room for process

Gabrielle Revlock and Gregory Holt
in Susan Rethorst's Stealing from Myself
(photo: Robert Altman)

Go here now.

It's "The Making Room," the cleverly-named online home (in development) dedicated to a meeting of the minds between dancemakers Bebe Miller and Susan Rethorst in embodied conversation about creative process "from start to premiere." This week, these two also share evenings at New York Live Arts where, if lucky enough to snare a ticket, you can sit among downtown's savviest artists and watch stellar performers of contemporary dance charge and activate space.

The Making Room is a much longer evening than one might expect at NYLA or most downtown spaces. Rethorst's duet, Stealing from Myself, runs 35 minutes, and Miller's ensemble, In a Rhythm, clocks in at 70. Between them: a 15-minute intermission. So: a commitment. Sort of like your trip to see Ailey, including Revelations...and maybe including revelations. Somehow, though, it never feels excessively long.

Both artists, admirably, draw from a seemingly bottomless, self-refreshing well of movement ideas; in the case of Rethorst, that also includes recycled material (hence, the "stealing from myself"). With Rethorst, the fascination is in watching how she deploys the bodies of Gabrielle Revlock and Gregory Holt along with simple props (two wood chairs, two small stacks of books) without being precious about how we usually see things--the bodies being people and the props being inanimate. Everything presented to us has shape and parts that, like 3-D puzzle pieces, can be set in motion, as if by Mickey's magic wand, and placed in proximity to each other in quirky ways, often at high speed. The pace of the pair's opening section makes things especially amusing if not laugh-out-loud funny. Seeing the familiar put to unfamiliar uses begins to make the viewer call everything into question. When something emerges that kinda looks like a ballet run through a Rethorstian blender, you just chuckle to yourself. Well, of course she would.

With Miller, I found myself not paying attention so much to individual movement ideas as to how she surveyed and, with her ensemble, claimed the landscape of the space, even extending it by leaving houselights up at times and addressing us directly to share artists and incidents that influence her making. The dancers are Michelle Boulé, Christal Brown, Sarah Gamblin, Angie Hauser, Bronwen MacArthur, Trebien Pollard and sometimes, and wonderfully, Miller herself. There's that initial, clean, floaty flow; agitation and scattering; sweep around and across the floor; a wash of movement, a splattering, a peeling away, a deft shifting of arrangements; a droopy hanging out together. Here and there, a centerpiece, like Boulé sailing over this song by Donny Hathaway which one YouTube commentor has rightly described as "grown folks music." Boulé gives us full-out grown-folks dancing, as she always does. The juxtaposition of that song--a man giving his all even when he has very little--and her performance is heart-stopping. It might be my imagination, but it sure looked like Boulé made everyone else after her work harder--even Miller.

I also enjoyed noticing individual minds at work--no two alike--and, in particular, watched for Christal Brown's decisions. I assuming they were decisions, not directives, because they looked that way, like they arose from her in the moment, had her signature and were fully hers to make. They made me think back to Miller's citing of Toni Morrison--and the frustrating silliness of an interview Charlie Rose conducted with the valiant Black author (questioning why she always has to write about Black people). In the face of so much failure to "get it," the corrective is just to persist in being Toni Morrison, being Christal Brown, being Michelle Boulé and Bebe Miller. Do what you do and press on.

The Making Room continues nightly through Saturday, February 24 with performances at 7:30pm. After tonight's program, there will be a Stay Late conversation. Saturday, from 2-4PM: Shared Practice. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Jennifer Monson's iLAND premieres "bend the even"

bend the even
danced by Mauriah Kraker (left) and Jennifer Monson
Below: Monson (left) and Kraker
(photos: Ryutaro Ishikane)

This work allows for the possibility that movement disappears and leaves only sensation, an emanation that is experienced through the skin and ears, not so much through the eyes. In bend the even this asks the viewer to release what might be tangible about the experience in preparation for what is newly emerging.
--from publicity for bend the even

Most of New York's dancemakers struggle to secure space to develop their work. But, for Jennifer Monson's latest piece, nature has provided...provided a place for research and exploration...provided motivation, inspiration, even, in its way, partnership.

bend the even--now in its premiere run at The Chocolate Factory Theater--is an experience of an Illinois prairie that we cannot (or maybe can) see. It is darkness and dawn at a beach we cannot (or maybe can) feel beneath our feet. It comes to life in a small loft studio in Long Island City but is intended to take us somewhere to wait for the unexpected and unforeseeable to become apparent to us.

To label it as a dance, and specifically a duet between Monson and Mauriah Kraker, is to lop off two of its essential limbs--the live soundwork of Jeff Kolar (electronics) and Zeena Parkins (acoustic harp); the lightwork of Elliott Jenetopulos, performed in the breath of the moment. (Costumes are by Susan Becker; scenic design by Regina Garcia.) It seems important to this team that their contributions be noted then removed from that hook and released. Something else, we've read, will come to "emanate at the edge of kinesthetic perception."

The research for this project was started in February 2017 with weekly rehearsals at dawn. These rehearsals have generated material connections between light, music, and movement – not as a representation of the liminal states of dawn but as a way of accessing new frameworks for emanating presence and animacy through the three mediums. This work allows for the possibility that movement disappears and leaves only sensation, an emanation that is experienced through the skin and ears, not so much through the eyes. Through the choreographic process, the collaborators will research the physics of sound, light, and movement on multiple scales – both scientific and experiential – drawing on atmospheric science as well as particle physics to inform the dawn practice.

Monson proposes something new, not so much relinquishing the choreographer's role--for the movement in this piece is fascinating and appealing as it is willful and wayward--as redirecting us to an unacknowledged result of choreography, a different purpose for it and for its fusion with other stimulants. I feel that I'm quite stuck on the edge of this desire, instinctually sympathetic with it while what's aimed for remains elusive. As audience members, we're habituated to focus on looking and listening for things and to appreciate (and, yes, interpret and judge) what we see and hear. bend the even intends disruption, or some form of liberation, but I'm caught up in its sensations.

What did we do with the sudden, absolute stillness that broke out on occasion? Did we check for external or internal vibes, or did we tick the seconds, wondering what we were supposed to be feeling and when the dancers might finally move again? Did that time feel more awkward than destabilizing? What about Jenetopulos's precipitous jolts in the lighting or other changes in sound and the dynamics of motion? Did we just "even" the bends right out and get back to our usual way of taking things in?

All that's to say, I'm not sure the bends in any even did more than point to a barrier we should know about. It did not lower that barrier--at least, not for me, not last evening. But maybe that pointing is, in itself, a useful beginning.

bend the even, running through Saturday with performances at 8pm, is sold out, but there is a waiting list. For information, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

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Tom Rapp, 70

Tom Rapp, the Voice of Pearls Before Swine, Is Dead at 70
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, February 14, 2018

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Jan Maxwell, 61

Jan Maxwell, Celebrated Stage Actress, Is Dead at 61
by Anita Gates, The New York Times, February 12, 2018

Jan Maxwell Was a Star Made for the Stage
by Ben Brantley, The New York Times, February 13, 2018

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Jóhann Jóhannsson, 48

Oscar-Nominated Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson Dies At 48
by Otis Hart, NPR Music, February 10, 2018

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Sonia Gechtoff, 91

Sonia Gechtoff, Acclaimed Abstract Expressionist, Dies at 91
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, February 9, 2018

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Reg E. Cathey, 59

Reg E. Cathey, Actor on ‘House of Cards’ and ‘The Wire,’ Dies at 59
by Matt Stevens, The New York Times, February 9, 2018

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Must see, last chance: Hadar Ahuvia at 14th Street Y

Above and below,
Mor Mendel (at left) and Hadar Ahuvia
(photos: Jakub Wittchen)

Maybe this has happened to you. You're watching a show and, before long, you're saying to yourself, Damn! Everybody needs to see this! That might occur after the show ends, but when it comes not too far into the hour or so, and that feeling just keeps building and building and building, well....

So, here we have "Everything you have is yours?" It's a fascinating, powerful evening by Hadar Ahuvia and her collaborators and co-performers Mor Mendel and lily bo shapiro, ending its too-short run tonight at 14th Street Y. The question in the title, Ahuvia says, was posed to her by an Israeli security official when she had her passport renewed. In her mind, the question takes a provocative twist.

It inspired Ahuvia to examine her Jewish and Israeli identity in a way particular to her role as a dance artist. She looked at how Israeli settlers of European Ashkenazi heritage (her background) appropriated native North African and Middle Eastern folk dances to solidify their sense of a strong, unified culture in a new homeland, and how, in turn, these numerous "Israeli" dances have been appropriated, watered down and YouTubed by conservative Christian Zionists of the US for their own purposes. If all of that sounds way complicated, didactic, and potentially inflammatory for concert dance, hang on a minute. Ahuvia and her friends do want you to think about all that, but they've got quite a few theatrical tricks to woo you.

The dances--which the three live performers and various on-video instructors demonstrate--have magnetic vivacity and charm. (Some of you, like me, might remember learning a few of these in grade school, back in the day.) But the entire production--created and attended to with meticulous care by Ahuvia's team--appeals not only to the mind but to every sense. Personal histories, cultural history; music; speaking and singing voices; projected photo and video imagery; dance movement, of course; little proffered treats of mint tea and fragrant tangerines; plus the invitation, at the close, to learn some steps and chat with the artists. Everything warmly invites us in--as living bodies-- and helps us stay present with Ahuvia's ideas.

This is a smart, witty, political and ultimately moving work filled with unexpected delights like shapiro's pitch-perfect segment of BBC-style voiceover narration and an alluring passage in which jeans-clad Ahuvia and Mendel overlap an impressionistically-blurred archival film clip of a women's ensemble--begowned, synchronized--performing the same dreamy sequence. The visual design by Gil Sperling (projections) and Kryssy Wright (lighting) obscures, breaks down and transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, arguing for the undeniable power of the body in motion and our human, irresistible pull to celebratory dance that might or might not have originated with our own people.

Sound design: Avi Amon
Dramaturgy: lily bo shapiro
Dramaturgical support: Stacy Grossfield and Rowen Magee

"Everything you have is yours?"--a presentation of LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture--concludes its run with a performance tonight at 8pm followed by a post-show conversation with Franny Silverman of Kolot Chayeinu. For information and tickets, click here.

To read Hadar Ahuvia's guest essay about this work, "The Dances Are For Us" (InfiniteBody, January 10, 2017), click here.

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

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Leon (Ndugu) Chancler, 65

Leon (Ndugu) Chancler, Versatile Drummer, Is Dead at 65
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, February 7, 2018

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Joy at The Joyce: Celebrating Cabuag and EVIDENCE

Arcell Cabuag of Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE
(photo: Bill Hebert)

Above: Cabuag (left) with Ronald K. Brown
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)
Below: Brown with Annique Roberts of Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE
(photo: Ayodele Casel)

Two decades ago, a Filipino-American dancer from California joined Brooklyn's Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, going on to become not only one of Brown's most iconic and beloved performers but also a dancemaker, educator, administrator (Associate Artistic Director) and Bessie winner in his own right. Last evening, Brown paid joyful tribute to his colleague, Arcell Cabuag, sharing the stage with him in Den of Dreams during the launch of the troupe's season at The Joyce Theater.

In addition to this new duet, opening night included three selections from Brown's repertory--Come Ye (2002); March, an excerpt from Lessons (1995), part of Carnegie Hall’s The ’60s: The Years that Changed America festival; and Upside Down, an excerpt from Destiny (1998).

The most thrilling moments of all came in the finale of Come Ye, set to Fela Anikulapo Kuti's furious protest song, "Coffin for Head of State." The work's opening passages offer viewers an uncluttered, transparent tutorial on Brown style--a hybrid movement style reflecting the legacy of being and dancing Black across two hemispheres and many cities. But it is, the last section, with Fela's insistent, irresistible Afrobeat, where we can watch the handsomely-trained ensemble take off as never before, at the top of its game.

Brown is less an assured shaper of theatrical landscape than a liberator and enlivener of the dancing body from head to feet. His landscape is there--in the roiling, rippling shoulders, the pitch of the back, the give of the knees, the expansive pumping, slashing arms, the way the body sings the music it hears and tells of the multitudes it contains. In each body, actually--among the many individual bodies on stage--we see a village, many villages, Fela's avenging warrior angels. This finale, a masterpiece, is one of the most beautiful ways to connect with Brown's aesthetic, to connect with his commitment--to connect with dance, period. If I were a professional dancer, I would beg to live inside this work and crave nothing more.

Den of Dreams is a sweet moment of "I'm here to learn from you...I'm here to follow you...and, now, look at us: we are brothers." Sweet, too, to see Brown take the stage again (as he also did as part of the corps in Upside Down, scheduled only for opening night). As choreography, this brief duet might not hold its own, but it clearly speaks of memory, times of testing and response, comradeship and a journey set upon, continued and continuing with respect and affection--feelings the audience and I also share for these two veteran artists.

Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE continues at The Joyce through February 10 with performance tonight at 7:30 and Thursday through Saturday at 8pm with a Saturday family matinee at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Claribel Alegría, 93

Claribel Alegría, 93, Poet for Central America’s Voiceless, Dies
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, February 6, 2018

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John Mahoney, 77

John Mahoney, who played Frasier's Martin Crane, dies aged 77
by Lanre Bakare and agencies, The Guardian, February 6, 2018

John Mahoney, Actor Best Known for ‘Frasier,’ Is Dead at 77
by Anita Gates, The New York Times, February 6, 2018

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Happiness: Kumagai and Watanabe at Asia Society

Left: Kazunori (Kazu) Kumagai
(photo: Maiko Miyagawa)
Right: Kaoru Watanabe
(photo: Yuki Kokubo)

Bessie-winning tap dancer Kazunori Kumagai (2006) is likely better known to my InfiniteBody readership than is composer-musician Kaoru Watanabe, but these two major artists merged forces last night at Asia Society's First Friday, presented with Japan Foundation. Kumagai (aka Kazu) brought two friends he has partnered with in recent years--Sabrina Clery, an engaging, heartful vocalist, and renowned veteran bassist, Alex Blake. Watanabe, percussionist and flutist, was accompanied by colleagues whose work similarly spans cultures and genres--violinist Mazz Swift and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi.

We were treated to an exemplary performance by Kumagai who, over time, demonstrated finer and finer control of his sounds and speed of delivery. Assured technique, yes, but he also learned, from Black funkmeister mentors, to keep heart and soul in place. And sass, too, like those slices of shoe against wood, so like skate blades marking ice. His inward concentration--pitched forward, drilling the floor, eyes on his work--this time reminded me less of Gregory Hines, with whom he has been compared, than Savion Glover. He appears less interested in looking pretty than sounding awesome, getting results, holding his own with rhythmic powerhouses like Blake (in their dynamic Blue Moses duet) and Watanabe (in the stormy and ecstatic Amazing Grace finale, performed with all hands on deck).

This gig with Watanabe marked Kumagai's (and, likely, tap's) Asia Society debut. A huge audience received it all warmly, and I hope that means we can expect future Watanabe/Kumagai collaborations and return visits.

Asia Society's First Friday is celebrated from 6pm to 9pm on the first Friday of the month with free museum admission, exhibition tours, refreshments, late night shopping at AsiaStore and more. The next will be held on March 2. Asia Society also hosts LGBT Connections Night at Leo Bar each night on third Fridays. For more information on all of these events, click here.

Currently on view at Asia Society:

In Focus: An Assembly of Gods

Through March 25, 2018

An in-depth look at a large Chinese pantheon painting

from the early nineteenth century

Masterpieces from the Asia Society Museum Collection

Through March 25, 2018

A selection of the finest artworks

from the renowned Asia Society Museum Collection

For more information, click here.

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Dennis Edwards, 74

Dennis Edwards, Former Temptations Lead Singer, Dies at 74
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, February 2, 2018

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David Thomson opens world premiere at Performance Space New York

Scenes from he his own mythical beast by David Thomson
Above and below: Thomson, at left, with Paul Hamilton
(photos: Maria Baranova)

he his own mythical beast interrogates the complexities of American culture and draws from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, James Baldwin, the confession booth, Claudia Rankine, high school fights, Judith Butler, baptism, Roland Barthes, and Trisha Brown. Venus, a character that flirts with black face, gender ambiguity and sexuality, becomes a guide on this journey. Part beast and part myth, Venus is named after the Hottentot Venus, aka Sarah Baartman – an enslaved black woman who was exhibited as an exotic in the early 19th Century London and Paris. This code-shifting chimaera is Thomson’s response to the post-modern performance aesthetic that historically privileged neutrality as a means of subverting the personal narrative.

--promotional material for he his own mythical beast, a world premiere at Performance Space New York 

At center, Jodi Bender (left) with Katrina Reid
(photo: Maria Baranova)

This week, David Thomson wraps up Performance Space New York' 2018 COIL festival with the world premiere of he his own mythical beast, a work he has developed and shown, in various iterations from Danspace Project to BRIC, since 2012. A quartet with video and projected text installation, it feels like something massive punching its way out of a confining container.

I hated, but also sort-of understood, the space it inhabits--a black coffin of a room with audience rows set up along one long and two short sides, and woe to you if you happened to be positioned on one of those short ends trying to figure out what's going on at a spot that seems many cold miles away, the dancers like austere, awesome planets and moons. From the distancing and darkness rose stark ring lights washing across dark faces and torsoes--Thomson's and Paul Hamilton's dark Black skin. The men turned their limbs into layered sculpture, feverishly churning within a square on the floor, its space and boundaries sealed by tape. Compressed, trained to be small and of controlled beauty, the dynamism, fluidity and complexity of these two men only grew more apparent.

Above and below: Thomson
(photos: Maria Baranova)

The solid core of Thomson's project, with its numerous sources of inspiration and extraordinary creative contributors over the years, is the situation of the Black body--his body and Hamilton's and Reid's, too, though this Black woman's role here seems perhaps deliberately secondary--within aesthetics and systems upheld by white postmodernism. In a straightforward sequence, Bender--the sole white dancer-- gets to humiliate and brutalize Hamilton over and over and over and over again and then some more. The viewer, appalled, might flash back to some of the hallway's projected text--a brief exchange, between two speakers, about slavery reenactments--that runs alongside the loop of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Does it help, here, to remember that the dastardly, Road Runner-chasing Wile E. Coyote always brought about his own undoing? Maybe. I can't help but think that a good part of that punching out I felt from the whole work was about punching the hell out of one's own mindset.

Fierce performances make this work special and memorable, but I also credit the striking visual and lighting concepts realized, respectively, by Peter Born and Roderick Murray.

he his own mythical beast continues with performances tonight and Friday at 7:30pm and Sunday, February 4 at 3pm. These performances include an installation, and you are invited to arrive early to view it. 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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Robert Pincus-Witten, 82

Robert Pincus-Witten, Art Critic and Historian, Is Dead at 82
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, January 31, 2018

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