From a whisper to a shriek: Diamanda Galás's "Schrei 27"

from Schrei 27--
a film by Diamanda Galás and Davide Pepe

What has kept Diamanda Galás's metal-shredder voice going, decade after decade, while gentler singers' pipes rust over? It must be more than "drinking plenty of water," the discipline she cites in a 2017 interview. Should we revive that old legend--a secret deal with the devil? Tartini. Paganini. Robert Johnson. Diamanda Galás?

Schrei 27 (2011)--her installation in collaboration with video artist Davide Pepe--can't quite make up for the total shock-and-awe of Galás performing live right in front of you. And yet, the film--screened for the first time in the US at Performance Space New York--delivers its own body blow.

The work originated, in 1994, as a commission for radio. Then Galás transformed it into a live performance--Schrei X, 1996--set in darkness at Performance Space 122 (now Performance Space New York). So, this week's screenings were a kind of coming home, part of the newly-reopened institution's season of remembrance of the avant-garde artistic history of the East Village.

For Pepe's half-hour film, viewers entered a theater lit only by its movie screen, picked their way to seats and then took a steep descent into the hell of a mysterious medical institution. A prisoner, arrested for treason, suffers torture suggested indirectly in stark, surrealist detail--an eye is a mouth; a mouth, an eye; x-ray flashes reveal the bones of restrained hands and wrists; teeth loom like a row of tombstones in moonlight. And the sounds...those caustic, scorching sounds....

Galás's painted and drawn imagery, Pepe's photography, and the precision sound work by Blaise Dupuy and Dave Hunt create a flickering nightmare intent on seizing and scrambling the brainwaves of witnesses as we try to watch and fail to watch by squinting, looking aside, shielding our eyes. What, I wonder, do they hope to make us confess?

For information on upcoming performances and exhibitions at Performance Space New York, click here.

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Anita Shreve, 71

Anita Shreve, Best-Selling Novelist, Dies at 71
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, March 30, 2018

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Making space sing: Anna Sperber at The Chocolate Factory

Anna Sperber in Wealth From The Salt Seas
(photo: Brian Rogers)

The costumes for Anna Sperber's Wealth From The Salt Seas--a duet with vocalist/musician Gelsey Bell--display at least two variations on a theme of chocolate brown. (Sperber's pants, hard to make out in the lighting, might be of a hue between dull dark brown and charcoal.)  More than a possible sly reference to the work's venue, The Chocolate Factory Theater, the color has immediate effect--low-key and calming, earthy without being overly sensuous or overbearing, not stark like black. This, as it turns out, is a deep-brown dance.

It's appropriate for the choreographer who might easily go unnoticed when making her quiet, unremarkable first entrance with dark-brown hair pulled back from a scrubbed, serene face. She's just suddenly there, settled in place for a moment.

Sperber eventually drifts from one corner to another, positioning herself at one or another end of a row of viewers, slowly tracing hands over her face and neck and around her waist and hips. Her awareness is internal; you can feel that as easily as you feel the weight and slight friction of hands on skin and fabric.

Sperber's enigmatic, repetitive actions bring attention to the margins of the space and gather stillness and silence there like a gift. You might notice the difference this makes and think: Have I ever looked at performance space--or a performance--in quite this way?

Bell's entrance introduces sound--a voice that momentarily heightens in volume and shrillness. The sound score for the hour-long dance is produced by recorded and live voicings; the impact of feet on the floor; the strange effect of crouching and howling into the corner between two walls; the haunting bells played by the women as they bend their faces to them; and the reverberation of metallic sheets rattled and filling the air between Sperber and Bell as if, like whales, they signaled each other across an expanse of sea.

Curious props appear--a long, thick cable that Sperber manipulates; the odd-looking bells cast in blackish metal; a tarp of golden plastic; small, wooden scaffolds at either diagonal end of the space where the women climb and store their equipment. Curious, too, those moments when you swear you just saw one or the other dancer but she's suddenly out of sight, then she reappears as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Wealth From The Salt Seas continues through Saturday, March 31 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Davalois Fearon and the politics of race in dance

Davalois Fearon in Time to Talk
(photo: ANDREW IMAGING)

Sometimes, there's the story you intend to tell, and then there's the unintended story you wind up telling.

Davalois Fearon--a powerful dancer acclaimed for her many years with Stephen Petronio--has struck out on her own. In recent years, she has developed earnest multimedia pieces like Consider Water (2017) and the new Time to Talk, running this week at Mabou Mines. The background of Time to Talk--Fearon's literature cites research in "American history, dance history, racial identity formation and systemic racism"--has yielded a work that slightly gestures at the toxicity of these massive, interlocking entities. It hovers around what it means to train, professionally perform and be seen and critiqued performing dance in a Black body. And we know that's what the Jamaica-born Fearon has done exceptionally well--the irony of the piece being that you readily see she's a woman who excels at whatever she sets her mind to doing. Her supple, sculptural, forceful body is equipped to ace every form of movement--from ballet barre to twerking--even when built-in, exaggerated imperfections show she's unhappy and unfulfilled by the expectations that others put on her.

There's the distraction of her mastery, a mastery undercut by only partially-disguised misery and resentment. I get it. But the main story it's actually telling me--and underscoring any number of times--is the familiar one about how Black people take whatever's available to us and make it shine like the sun. We've been doing that from way back and do it still. And then other people copy what we've done, often profiting from it.

With prompting and accompaniment from her husband, jazz musician Mike McGinnis, Fearon makes various attempts to find the right genre of dance that's "appropriate" for her to do. As an interracial couple, they seem to have mined their own situation and conversations for material. Unfortunately, this creates some imbalance: He's an accomplished artist in his own right but not an actor; his awkwardness, when not working a sax or clarinet, weakens their interactions and gives Time to Talk an amateurish feel. I believe their good intentions, though, and I believe they need still more time to nurture depth, breadth and incisiveness in the work.

Fearon cites her Jamaican upbringing as a shield from racism. She experienced colorism in the Caribbean, for sure, but admits it was only when she entered grad school at a Midwestern university, a few years ago. that she discovered what Blacks face in the US on the regular. Her experiences in Milwaukee shocked her.

Fearon's aims to spark audience dialogue and follows each performance with a talkback with McGinnis and guests. Last evening, she included representatives from the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League. I counted just a few Black people in the room--including myself and Fearon's own understudy. It was disheartening to hear no one actually acknowledge the systemic nature of American racism (not just how people getting to know one another better will cure things). It also made me tired to hear most of the talking--at great length and intensity--issuing from white men.

But, again, the story you didn't intend to tell is sometimes the one that rolls out even so.

Time to Talk continues through Thursday, March 29 with performances at 9pm. For information and tickets, click here. For tickets by phone call 212-352-0255 or 1-866-811-4111.

Mabou Mines Theater
150 1st Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Philip Kerr, 62

Philip Kerr, 62, Author of ‘Gunther’ Crime Novels, Is Dead
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, March 27, 2018

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Delores Taylor, 85

Delores Taylor, 85, Dies; Writer and Star in ‘Billy Jack’ Films
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, March 27, 2018

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Stéphane Audran, 85

Stéphane Audran, Who Starred in ‘Babette’s Feast,’ Dies at 85
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, March 27, 2018

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No one can teach you how to write about dance

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: Axel Jenson)

No One Can Teach You 

How to Write About Dance

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

...at least, not in any conventional way. Because...yawn.

But consider some tips:

• Fall in love. With dance. With writing. No one can tell you how to do this. It either happens, or it doesn’t.
• Care about others--people beyond yourself, people beyond your immediate circle, people (for now) beyond dance. Want the best for them. Want to share what has worked for you. What has meaning for you.
• In your writing, share your process. Your engagement, curiosity, questions, excitement, discoveries.
• Leave theoryspeak to the academics, please. Write for the rest of us.
• Figure out how best to communicate. What might readers want and need to hear about? What might they already know? 
• Witness dance with your own body. Pay close attention. What are you feeling?
• Admit to yourself (and, possibly, your readers) when you feel disconnected from a performance. There’s important information in that experience. Figuring out what’s going on--with you, with the dance--will help you find a useful way to write about it.
• You might benefit from avoiding people who immediately level judgment. After a performance, give yourself privacy and time to process your own experiences.
• Follow your impulse. Let something irresistible pull you into the writing and keep you there. Learn to sense when there is more in the works, and learn to recognize an internal signal that tells you a piece is finished.
• Don’t compare yourself to other writers. Grow a self, if you have to, and invest in it. Spend major time on this.
• You are not a blank slate. Being open to an experience is more important than so-called “objectivity.” You are most confident in your openness when you are confident in who you are. Bring your true, full self to your encounter with dance, and be honest about that as you write about it. Use that.
• Don’t try to write like your friends or anyone. But do examine how they do what they do. What tools and strategies work for the writer you’re studying? What does not work? Learn from all of this while honoring your own voice, style and inclinations. Take those lessons, and then do things your own way.
• Learn to be your own best editor. Learn to relish the task of self-editing, the opportunity to sharpen your self-expression and tell your story or make your argument in the most engaging, most convincing way.
• Read your writing out loud to yourself (or to a friend or colleague). Your ears will quickly pick up any problems and also identify what you’re doing well.
• Take a keen interest in your world. Dance (and your particular niche in dance) is not the entirety of it.
• Three words: Learn. From. Artists.
• Two words: Respect. Artists.
• One word: Gratitude

©2018, Eva Yaa Asantewaa -- InfiniteBody
https://infinitebody.blogspot.com

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Buell Neidlinger, 82

Buell Neidlinger, Acclaimed Genre-Crossing Bassist, Dies at 82
by Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times, March 25, 2018

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Urban Bush Women's "Hair Parties" at 92Y Harkness

Madame C. J. Walker (1867-1919)
Hair care entrepreneur, philanthropist and activist
America's first woman millionaire

Urban Bush Women's Hair Parties is a boldly hybrid event integrating excerpts of a developing dance (premiere of Hair & Other Stories coming this spring) with a community-sharing workshop in kitchen table-like settings. I'd imagine each "audience"--surely, that's not the right word here--brings a different energy to it and ultimately determines how well it will work.

After all, the folks who participate are what it's about. Through a variety of activities, they're encouraged to remember and tell stories about things they learned, from childhood on, about beauty and grooming and to contemplate how those seminal influences affect their attitudes towards themselves and others today. It's very much about--as one of the dancer/facilitators noted--"practices that allow us to stay inside our greatness" and those that drag us far from it.

Oh, you surely know UBW, the lifework of the great, beloved Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, is a Black troupe, right? But while Hair Parties must be a blast in an all-Black gathering, its meditations on race can be useful for anyone from any culture--as was evident yesterday afternoon at 92Y's Harkness Dance Center where the presenters embraced a multicultural gathering.

Somebody here thinks they came for a show!

We're going on a journey!

A journey it was, indeed--starting with the sight of dancer Samantha Speis arranging, thoughtfully gazing upon and slightly rearranging a collection of hair care products, almost as if they were chess pieces. For me, this brief, subtle moment was amusing, a subtlety anyone caring for Black people's hair in the "natural" way will recognize. We know how much time and money we put into experimenting to get just the right products used in the right combination or sequence for the particular texture and willfulness of our hair. Tell me that's not choreography!

Dancers invited us to come together around certain agreements on how to work as a community--such as "speaking from the I"--and gave us gestural movements to anchor each agreement, in a fun way, in our bodies. We watched a dance segment depicting a Black woman suffering "hair hell" in an elevator populated first by a group of mocking Black people and then by white people whose very different attention to her hair freaked her out just as much or even more. We learned a tiny bit about the Black hair care entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker (1867-1919), who went from being the child of enslaved parents to being the first American woman to make a million. From table to table, we performed a shared reading of lines from a letter Zollar addressed to this fascinating pioneer. And we moved with the dancers.

The party kicked up memories for many of us. I was stunned when I suddenly recalled the Breck Girl shampoo ads of the 1960s and later bonded with a white woman over these memories. These ubiquitous magazine ads were in my face--all of our faces--at a time when it would have been more useful for me to be learning about Madame Walker. Do you remember them, too?

As I left 92Y, I actually had a pleasant elevator moment when the same woman who remembered those darn Breck girls told me she'd come to the Hair Parties event terribly drained and tired and came away feeling exhilarated. This, I think, is pretty much the hallmark of an Urban Bush Woman event, and I'm glad she got that healing.

Conceived and choreographed by Chanon Judson and Samantha Speis in collaboration with the company--Du'Bois A'Keen, Chanon Judson, Courtney J. Cook, Jaimé Dzandu, Rochelle Jamila, Samantha Speis and Tendayi Kuumba

Music composed by The Illustrious Blacks (Manchildblack and Monstah Black)

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Wilson's Fist & Heel troupe concludes Platform 2018

Choreographer Reggie Wilson
of Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group
(photo: Antoine Tempé)

My old friend Reggie Wilson put a "post-African/Neo-Hoodoo"* curse on me last night at Danspace Project.

Let me explain.

I'd been taking notes during his opening, hour-or-so Powerpoint talk--the initially-rambling preamble to his troupe's performance of …they stood shaking while others began to shout. Friday's talk, amusingly illustrated and delivered, touched on Wilson's perennial sore point--what he perceives as the chasm between the World of the Written Word and the Land of the Body Moving in Space and Time; the way colonized thinking devalues the power of bodies to communicate knowledge to other bodies. Only a man as accomplished and lovable as Wilson could get away with lecturing his audience on how to look at and analyze his (or anybody's) dances right before rolling out his newest one.

There was--for practical reasons as well, I think, symbolic ones--a break between talk and dance. During that brief turnover, I quickly and roughly jammed my notebook and a fairly new ballpoint pen into my crowded shoulderbag and turned to chat with friends and colleagues. When the houselights lowered for the dance, I reached to retrieve notebook and pen only to find the pen entirely dismantling in my hand, one small piece of plastic flying off onto the darkened floor.

I thought of many things at once:

God, I hope nobody's seeing this and laughing at me.

Oh, boy! Reggie and Tere O'Connor (who once admonished critics to stop writing notes and just look) would get a kick out of this!

I can only ever make out 5% of what I wrote in the dark anyway. So, fuck it.

Then, and only then, was I able to let go.

Reggie's curse.

His rich and complex platform--Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance--concludes, this weekend, with the beautiful Fist & Heel Performance Group ranging all over St. Mark's space including, quite vividly, the balcony to which enslaved African people were once relegated. His talk inspired a laser focus on that claiming of space and the variety of ways Wilson takes the measure of it, populates it, creates drama with it, brings warmth to it and affects those of us who watch.

If you get a chance to see …they stood shaking while others began to shout--inspired by rhythmic Black Shaker, Yoruba, Black Baptist and Spiritual Baptist worship traditions and a luscious collage of Black music--I think you will appreciate how all of this craft creates a sturdy container for deep, enormous feeling. (That feeling is the neo-hoodoo secret sauce, quietly simmering away underneath it all, unmistakably permitted and, to me, unmistakably Black.) I think you will find space for emerging feelings of your own, and I would imagine--I would hope--that you would not necessarily need to be Black to find and feel them. Certainly, Wilson's multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational dancers and vocalists--Hadar Ahuvia, Rhetta Aleong, Yeman Brown, Paul Hamilton, Lawrence Harding, Raja Feather Kelly, Clement Mensah, Gabriella Silva, Annie Wang and Michelle Yard--suggest this. Each performer brings palpable individuality--a generously-welcomed selfness--to Wilson's movements, arrangements and scenarios.

This seems a most significant retention from all of Wilson's many years traveling the African diaspora to witness how Black people evoke and fill ourselves with Spirit: the idea that one might come to that work through the door of one's own struggle and dignity and pleasure, in a way that has one's own signature, and that there is room for you just as you are. The strong traditions--of song, of movement--hold space for us to do what we need to do as we find family.

[*Wilson has long referred to his choreographic aesthetic as "post-African/ Neo-Hood Modern Dance."]

Tonight's 8pm show--already sold out--ends the Wilson platform. A wait list will be taken at the door beginning at 7:15pm. No late seating. For information, click here.

For full information on Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance, 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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Oleg Tabakov, 82

Oleg Tabakov, Revered Russian Actor and Teacher, Is Dead at 82
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, March 23, 2018

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Olly Wilson, 80

Olly Wilson, 80, Dies; Composer Meshed African and Western Music
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, March 23, 2018

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Kinetic Light opens "DESCENT" at New York Live Arts

Scene from Alice Sheppard's DESCENT
Above: Laurel Lawson
Below: Alice Sheppard
(photo: MANCC)

Dancer-choreographer Alice Sheppard of Kinetic Light
(courtesy of the artist)

Months ago, I saw a raw showing of DESCENT, a work being developed by the disabled artist collective Kinetic Light--Alice Sheppard, Laurel Lawson and Michael Maag. Set up in a smallish GIBNEY studio, it lacked Maag's brilliant lighting and video design but was impressive even then--what with two athletically-strong women in wheelchairs tearing up and down a curvaceous ramp like competitive divas and confronting their desire for each other. Influenced by Rodin's sensuous Toilette de Vénus et Androméde and informed by the collective's interest in matters of disability and race, DESCENT's premiere run at New York Live Arts promised to be a must-see.

Rodin's Toilette de Vénus et Androméde (1886)

DESCENT
(photo: Rain Embuscado)

And so it is.

Strikingly beautiful thanks to Maag with his rotation of deep-colored, earthy landscapes and eye-popping starscapes as backdrop; lighting that conjures the play of moonlight and sun; erotic silhouettes; and ghostly, undulating waters skimming up the incline of the ingeniously-designed ramp.

Strikingly hot thanks to choreographer Sheppard and collaborator Lawson (para ice hockey athlete as well as dancer) who take passionate risks in and out of their chairs, on every surface of the ramp's peak, valley and recesses. Even when woozily swirling in their chairs, hurling themselves from one level of the ramp to another, or zooming one body and chair into the other dancer's grasp, these performers appear to be capable of joining impetuous minds. Their duets "sound" like songs to me, harmonies hard won with an outlandishness and tension about them. Will their union hold? Or will it fracture?

Lawson, in particular, made me see wings while gazing at a streamlined wheelchair and recognize a deity as an elemental force whose fire might range from warming to devastating.

DESCENT is sold out! Performances continue at New York Live Arts through tomorrow night--Saturday, 7:30pm. For information on a wait list for tickets, click here or call the box office at 212-924-0077.

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

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Sammy Williams, 69

Sammy Williams, Tony Winner in ‘A Chorus Line,’ Dies at 69
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, March 22, 2018

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Barbara Wersba, 85

Barbara Wersba, 85, Dies; Wrote Candid Books for Young Adults
by Helen T. Verongos, The New York Times, March 21, 2018

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Wilson Harris, 96

Wilson Harris, Guyanese Writer of Intricate Novels, Dies at 96
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, March 16, 2018

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Kate Wilhelm, 89

Kate Wilhelm, Prolific Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 89
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, March 16, 2018

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Emily Nasrallah, 86

Emily Nasrallah, Lebanese Novelist and Activist, Dies at 86
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, March 16, 2018

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Danspace Project presents Reggie Wilson's Platform 2018

Left to right: Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez,
Angie Pittman and Edisa Weeks--artists who participated in
The Dossier Charrette in Reggie Wilson's platform at Danspace Project.
(Photo courtesy of Danspace Project)

Reggie Wilson’s Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018 at Danspace Project) is laden. It is complex. It is stuffed with history and geography and architecture and cultures and ancestral energies and choreography and ideas and imagery and walking around neighborhoods and...stuff. As Black as one of my Bajan family’s festivities--the full range of meat and fowl, desserts and drinks, music and dancing and that one eccentric cousin holding court, as always.

How to take it in? How to make sense? How to interact and respond? Choose to sit on the outskirts and gaze from a critical distance? Or follow your curiosity, your empathy, your bravery, throwing yourself into the deep? Sink or swim, baby!

Maybe it’s wiser to break off a piece, here or there, to work with or be worked over by. You’ll have so many from which to choose.

During part of last Saturday’s Bell & Water: a symposium--for which I performed a brief spiritual ceremony to open the afternoon--Wilson and his Danspace Project associates offered a guide to “How to Navigate the Platforms.” This concluding panel presented an overview of Executive Director/Chief Curator Judy Hussie-Taylor’s groundbreaking curatorial initiative and a rundown of what to expect from Wilson’s current platform programming and its engaging catalogue. What it did not do--what perhaps could never be done--is extend a comforting, reassuring hand to anyone who might need to have things defined and neatly arranged for quick, easy consumption.

I’m thinking, this morning, about Wilson’s post-show conversations with his artists and how, each evening, he insists on passing around the dossier commissioned from historian Prithi Kanakamedala to inform and possibly inspire the platform’s artists and how that document--which I have never held in my own hands--somehow always fails to make it all the way from one end of the audience to the other. I don’t know why Wilson insists in having people try to hand it around in the allotted time. Maybe to demonstrate that it--written down and lasting, central and centering--really exists? That there is an intellectual blueprint, if you want to call it that? Is that really necessary? To glance at a page or two for a few moments--though, clearly, people have been taking longer--before passing it to the guy to your right?

I’ll take the radical view that Wilson--who has said, any number of times, that he’s resistant to the way our Westernized worship of the written word demotes other ways of knowing and communicating--might relax a little and consider stepping back from this practice as well as from the practice of post-show discussions entirely.

Stop right there. Don’t be horrified. And make no mistake: I love Wilson and am a huge fan of his from way back. This is not a criticism. But after seeing each of a couple of the performance events in this platform, I would have been immensely grateful for complete silence--and even private time for recovery--so strong was the impact. I also sensed some hesitation and reticence in some of the artists as they attempted to answer questions and in most of the audience folks as they were asked for questions. Maybe everyone needed time for more than a few breaths to re-group, re-ground and let the energies and ideas inside the works settle in. Settle in and continue the work that the best of dance can do.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe post-show talks are totally cool. But these seem forced. I don’t want to hear about and be directed by...so much...not just yet. But, you’ll say, you’re the woman who says she sat down and read the catalogue from cover to cover. Yes, in my own time, and in my own space, in privacy, so I could concentrate and take in and sift stuff. And the catalogue is a verbal as well as visual collage--mirroring what’s best about the platform format--and I could have read and gazed upon those pages in any order I desired. This time, I just chose to be all compulsively Virgo about it.

Go see the performances. There’s electricity and surprise and vivid performance--thinking now of dancemaker/performers like Jonathan Gonzalez, Angie Pittman, Ni’Ja Whitson and Same as Sister/Briana Brown-Tipley and Hilary Brown--and a real feeling of works with open, organic life which will continue to bring out new things to share and ponder. Works not only glancing at once at history and into the future but gazing from the vantage points of multiple temporal, cultural and personal dimensions. Just find a portal that looks interesting and jump right in.

For full information on Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance, 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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Charly Wenzel: Seeding a career in American dance

Germany-born dance artist Carly Wenzel 

(photo above by Humberto Carreno;

below: a Wenzel selfie)

Guest contributor Charly Wenzel tells the story of her journey from Munich to her new home--New York City--and from classical ballet to the intimacy and power of immersive theater.

Seeds

by Charly Wenzel

I clearly remember a moment, when I was 11 or 12. I sat in my high school class in Munich, Germany and somehow came across a picture of New York City. Looking at the picture, I was struck by a feeling of homesickness. I distinctly remember that it wasn’t a feeling of curiosity or the hope of  traveling there someday, but I was feeling HOMEsick. How could I be homesick for a place I had never visited? A seed had been planted that would bring me here where I am today.

At age 6, I started taking ballet classes--another, more important, seed. I begged my parents to put me in ballet class for one reason only--all my friends were already enrolled. Experiencing my first years of ballet--and especially performing onstage in our yearly productions--ignited a fire in me that, to this day, still burns strongly. The diary I kept at the time consisted of loose pieces of paper that I didn’t even keep in a particular place, but they all pretty much said, “I can’t wait for my next ballet class!!!”

Right around the same time that I saw that picture of my future home, I transferred to a much more serious and rigorous “ballet school.” The school consisted of a trailer made into a ballet studio, where my dad’s high school teacher colleague--Miss Wood, from England--was allowed to offer ballet classes. There weren’t many students; my class eventually consisted of only myself and one other student. There was no place to hide, and Miss Wood was no joke. Licensed through the Royal Academy of Dance, she prepared us for our RAD exams. Miss Wood taught us hard work and discipline, and there were definitely times when I wanted to give up. Thank God I never did!

Meanwhile my high school put on yearly talent shows where I showed my first choreographies--either solos or duets that I made my poor friend, who had no dance experience or interest, perform with me. I was also enrolled in our theater program, and the rare time my teachers ever heard me speak was when I performed in some of the leading roles of Shakespeare, Ionesco and others. I was extremely shy and introverted, but I became alive onstage, finding freedom in playing a character as well as in expressing myself through movement.

Miss Wood never gave me the impression that I could dance professionally some day, and I knew I wasn’t going to be a ballerina. I didn’t know that there were other forms of dance until I was about 15 years old. I started taking jazz and modern dance at the Iwanson School in my hometown Munich. They offered a three-year professional dance program. So I told my parents that I would become a dancer. A lot of people looked at me like I was crazy but, as far as I was concerned, it was not up for discussion.

While most of my peers enrolled in college programs for jobs in demand at the time, I started my full-time training at the private Iwanson School. Unlike universities in the US, most German universities don’t have dance programs. Getting a college degree in contemporary dance in Germany is pretty much impossible. This made my decision even more incomprehensible to a lot of people. However, dancing every day all day for three years, I was completely in my element. I performed in a duet that I choreographed with a classmate and was awarded a scholarship for a summer at Ballet Academy Stockholm. My teachers wondered why I never performed like that in class. Again, it's the stage where I come alive.

Carly Wenzel
(photo: J. Ryan Roberts)

After finishing the program, one of my classmates and I applied to the Alvin Ailey school to improve our technique. To my surprise, we got accepted; the whirlwind began! The plan was to stay in New York for a year and then return to Germany. Fifteen years later, we’re both still here.

After graduating from Ailey, I worked as a dancer in any imaginable capacity--dancing for a range of contemporary companies; being a show girl in a Russian dinner club; traveling all over the country and abroad as a backup dancer for a Japanese Pop singer; dancing in music videos and dance films; dancing with big puppets in a children’s show, and so forth. Meanwhile, I always worked on my own choreographies and presented my work all over New York City.

I was inspired to make my first dance film when my singer/composer friend Kristin Hoffmann gave me a piece of music. The story I heard and was inspired to tell required a different medium, especially because of the images that came to mind. I made my first film Global Tides, which won several awards and was accepted by many film festivals. Excited about the endless possibilities for film to bring a vision to life, I later made Licht and most recently Schein.

Schein speaks about how gender-role expectations confront women, how they are supposed to present themselves. Women are much more harshly scrutinized for their appearance than men are. We are expected to underline our so-called femininity. However, the resulting objectification of women makes us vulnerable to discrimination and aggression in male-dominated society.

A couple of years ago, as I reflected on my performance career, knowing that I was far from done, I browsed through audition notices by mostly brand-new companies whose directors were at least ten years younger than me and who couldn’t offer any compensation. I knew If I was going to perform for someone else again, it would have to be someone with more experience than me. It would have to involve a process I could learn from, one that would help me continue to grow as a performer. Thinking back to my acting days, I craved more character- and story-based work. I auditioned for Third Rail Project’s Then She Fell, honestly not knowing what I was auditioning for. A fellow dancer, who was in the TSF cast, had posted “you want this job” on Facebook. I guess I just believed her.

I was asked to read lines in the audition, which came as a complete--but very pleasant--surprise!

I think the universe was looking out for me yet again. I was hired, and the show turned out to be everything that I was looking for and more. I was still in the rehearsal process when I got to see the show for the first time, and I was a sobbing mess at the end.

The show, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, takes place in a mental ward. An audience (fifteen people, maximum) is split into separate groups and led through different rooms in the building. Along the way, they encounter various characters and have many one-on-one interactions with them. It’s a magical, surreal environment in which the audience becomes a part of the story.

To be a part of something so truly special is nothing less than a blessing, and I couldn’t be happier or more thankful. In the last two years with the company, I have been performing six shows a week with a total of around 450 shows. While it is hard work, and I’m definitely feeling my 36-year-old body, it has been an extremely rewarding experience. Seeing the audience transformed and genuinely touched by their experience makes you feel like you are a part of something bigger.

We live in a time when most people spend the majority of their day in front of a computer or smartphone screen and most of our interactions are through social media and e-mail. I truly feel that, as performers, we can provide healing for people through much needed human interactions and an escape from daily worries. Immersive theater allows people to reconnect with their imagination, to fully be in the moment and to have all their senses activated instead of just passively consuming information and entertainment.

I somehow knew this even before my first visit, but New York has become my home and has felt like home from the moment I arrived. And even though I miss my family and friends in Germany, the dance community here has become my family. The support from fellow artists--as well as their enthusiasm to create and collaborate--constantly inspires me.

(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

Charly Wenzel is an award winning choreographer whose work has been presented in her native Germany, as well as at Dixon Place, Judson Church, the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, The Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater, Steps on Broadway, The Secret Theater, Connecticut College and many other venues in and around New York. She worked as the choreographer for several recording artists for their live performances and music videos and she choreographed for a number of dance films.

Charly won several awards for her dance films Global Tides, Licht and Schein, which have been shown at film festivals around the world.

Charly danced at the Bavarian State Opera in Germany and performed with Naganuma Dance, Keila Cordova Dances, Regina Nejman & Company, Earl Mosley/Diversity of Dance, Erick Montes, Bodystories: Teresa Fellion Dance, LolaLola Dance Theater, Eddie Stockton, Morningside Opera, DexDance, Hydroflo Movement Company, Soul Movement and other companies and independent choreographers in and around New York City. She is currently a company member of Third Rail Projects, performing in their Bessie award winning production Then She Fell.

Charly was the Rehearsal Director and Associate Artistic Director of Naganuma Dance and she worked as the Rehearsal Director for Shadow Box Theater.

She is currently the Rehearsal Director of Bodystories: Teresa Fellion Dance.

www.charly-wenzel.com

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