Chicago's Deeply Rooted brings "INDUMBA" to BAM Fisher

Dominique Atwood and Joshua L. Ishmon
of Chicago's Deeply Rooted Dance Theater in INDUMBA,
a work by South African choreographer Fana Tshabalala
(photo: Ken Carl)

How fortunate to be introduced to South African dancemaker Fana Tshabalala through his mighty ensemble piece, INDUMBA ("healing hut"), a 2017 work performed for the first time in New York by Kevin Iega Jeff's Deeply Rooted Dance Theater. The Chicago-based troupe completes its too-short run of this stunning piece this afternoon at BAM Fisher.

The hut in question here--evoking sites of African traditional cleansing and healing--takes shape through a semicircle of stools for dancers on the perimeter of a misty space illuminated by hazy shafts of light. Constructed of beautiful, golden wood, the stools are spare and look less than sturdy. Inside that simple boundary, dancers rise to propel themselves through angular, anguished gyrations and convulsions. These obsessive movements suggest horrors born of social conflict. At the same time, they suggest a ritual of pressure to rid body, mind and soul of these lingering toxicities.

Nicholas Aphane's driving music reaches inside any helpless viewer, evoking the violent, relentless churning of massive machinery. We first hear a vague, intermittent hum like a muted signal or something powering up. We don't anticipate its coming textures and caustic power. External, inhumane forces that have become internalized must, like demons, be exorcised. The "hut" itself--heartless but purposeful--nearly pulverizes damaged beings to render them safer for themselves and for their community.

Some of the drama involves two men--are they antagonists? brothers? actually one person wracked by warring forces within himself?--who clutch, grapple, twist and coil around each other as if they were made of the same skin. One shoves away and isolates himself only to later find himself in the other's grip once again. Likewise, a suffering woman turns from her brutal attacker only to find her "savior" treating her with equal brutality.

Tshabalala's research into the experiences of war-scarred Mozambique, as well as his observations of how apartheid's legacy impacts today's South Africa, informed the creation of Indumba. The work resonates for us, as well, in an America newly haunted by its nightmarish past and roiled by present-day hatreds and violence. If Inbumba is a dance, as described in DRDT's program, offering hope of "resilience and reconciliation," there's clearly nothing easy along that path. And its final image suggests not so much the soothing of terrible pain as its honest, open-throated expression.

Performed by Dominique Atwood, Pierre Clark, Shanna Cruzat, Joshua L. Ishmon, Rebekah Kuczma, Marlayna Locklear, William Robertson and Anthony Williams

Costumes: Alex Gordon
Lighting design: Sarah Lackner

INDUMBA concludes with a 3pm performance today with a post-show discussion moderated by Baraka Sele. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 89

Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 89, Dies; Lifted Brazilian Film
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, April 27, 2018

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Oren Barnoy premieres a new dance trio at JACK

Paul Hamilton in a new work by Oren Barnoy
(photo: Scott Shaw)

You'll find the name of the new trio by choreographer Oren Barnoy if you click on this: (symbol). I'm told there is no official pronunciation, but there might be a rhythm. The glyph resembles something from one of those unauthorized offshoots of Reiki, but the dance itself--which left Paul Hamilton, Candace Tabbs and Molly Lieber dripping and glistening in sweat after its 25 minutes--is more-marathon workout than soothing. The aim is spiritual, though, described as Barnoy's "version of a daily prayer through movement" and a "continuous action...unrelenting ritual...towards transcendence."

Performed in the simple, aluminum-foil surround of Brooklyn's JACK, the piece's exertions bear the same twisty, swirly hieroglyphics of the enigmatic title and its look of a complicated infinity. Dancers, dressed in unremarkable black clothing, come and go, thrusting and retracting with low-dipping torsos and reaching, scooping, swinging, windmilling arms. I imagine some viewers might get into this while others eventually begin to tune it out when it does not appear to be turning into anything. For me, visual drama happened whenever two bodies were at play--at prayer?--in proximity to one another, activating shape and energy in the negative space between. I found my attention snapping to these interactions. On the whole, though, the entire ride can be enjoyable.

(symbol)--part of JACK's Images//Landscapes series, curated by Stacy Grossfield--continues tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn (C or G to Clinton-Washington)

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Sam Hamill, 74

Sam Hamill, Poet, Publisher and War Protester, Dies at 74
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, April 26, 2018

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Gertrude Jeannette, 103

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by Jonathan Wolfe, The New York Times, April 26, 2018

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Charles Neville, 79

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Keith Spera, The New Orleans Advocate, April 26, 2018

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Soon-Tek Oh, 85

Soon-Tek Oh, Actor Who Chafed at Asian Stereotypes, Dies at 85
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, April 25, 2018

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This Black Earth: jumatatu m. poe at GIBNEY

jumatatu m. poe
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Inspired by the hot brown granules in both desert dirt and beach sand, terrestrial is an examination of humans as earth and Black humans as having a long, continuing terrestrial history that far precedes—and will outlive—the past five centuries of white supremacy’s specific oppressions. From beneath packed ground, vocal composition and choreography are unearthed to magnify the epic truthsliesfantasiesmemoriesdreams underneath the hot brown skin tones of the performers.

--from promotion for terrestrial, a work by jumatatu m. poe

Curated by dance artist Marýa Wethers, Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing) continues at the Lab at GIBNEY this week with, terrestrial, a three-hour performance installation by jumatatu m. poe. Between 6pm and 9pm, audience members may come and go throughout the performance, but the door only opens for these transitions at 15-minute intervals. The Lab is also known as Studio A, the lobby-level sliver of space in which GIBNEY has often programmed intimate performances. Capacity is quite limited, and most seating is floorbound around the perimeter with just a few chairs available.

terrestrial's floor is covered in rumpled cloth that can slip under dancers' bare feet--and your feet, too, as you approach or leave your spot; take care. Once, I saw poe deftly catch and right his balance; at another moment, dancer Samantha Speis deliberately played with that slipperiness. This shifting surface is, I think, important to one's experience and understanding. A changing terrain can be treacherous and/or an opportunity to be shaped by one's intelligence and desire.

In any case, the mobile cloth is a marvelous sculptural element in poe's installation. Embedded in it are five round mounds of what appears to be rock salt the light olive-green of peridots, gemstones associated with ancient Egypt, the strength of the Sun and the banishment of toxicity. Interestingly, while I was there at least, none of the dancers' or viewers' movements disturbed these carefully-tended mounds. Even when Speis briefly rested her hands atop one hillock's curve, only a few crystals escaped their circle.

poe, Speis and Brazilian vocalist Rodrigo Jerônimo--who also moves while the other two also often vocalize--perform essentially naked except for scanty, clear plastic wrappings. The wrap around poe's neck rustles as he moves and quickly brings to mind the situation of a creature stuck in a discarded shopping bag.

For the most part, the three did not directly interact--at least, during the time I watched--as they trod and plodded along individual pathways. Their often restrained, internalized, localized movements betrayed a condition of being limited in available space, though occasionally fighting that limitation (Speis's sudden agitation, arms and long dreadlocks flying, for instance). Their eyes looked sightless and strange; red contact lenses?

Their voices expressed bodily experience with gruff, primal directness, but they did not "speak" to or with one another. Land masses unto themselves, then?

In one passage, as performers curled up on the floor, maybe dreaming what would come next, the space erupted in an extended crescendo of Black vocalists--most, perhaps not all, women. The editing here is incredible, as if rapidly switching among a host of radio channels to capture dozens of these voices trilling, soaring, swooping, ululating and keening, each caught at the choice moment. (And, yeah, some of you might play a mental game of "Name That Tune.") There's no specific credit given for this brilliant, spine-tingling collage; I'm assuming that poe created it. Tayarisha Poe is credited with the elusive, splintered video design, and Asami Morita contributed delicate, alluring light effects.

One final note about this GIBNEY presentation:

While poe granted permission for terrestrial to be reviewed, he does not consider it to be a finished piece but, rather, an ongoing process of discovery.

terrestrial continues tonight, starting at 6pm, and will conclude tomorrow, Saturday, also starting at 6pm. Tomorrow's performance will be preceded by a 4:30 talk. For Friday ticket information, click here. Advance tickets for Saturday are sold out; for wait list information, click here.

Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing) concludes with performances by I Moving Lab (Apr 26–28). For information and tickets, click here.

GIBNEY
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
Subways: 4/5/6 to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall; N/R/W to City Hall; 2/3 to Park Place

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Sergio Pitol, 85

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Nathan Davis, 81

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Ronald Dunbar, 78

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Milos Forman, 86

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by Michael Cieply, The New York Times, April 14, 2018

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92Y presents a tribute to Arthur Mitchell

Arthur Mitchell
dancing in George Balanchine's Agon
(photo: Martha Swope)

Arthur Mitchell with Darren Walker: 

A Stellar Life in Dance

presented by

92Y Harkness Dance Center

Fridays@Noon

Arthur Mitchell--who, in 1955, brought Black excellence to Balanchine's New York City Ballet as a principal dancer and, in 1969, founded historic Dance Theatre of Harlem--is, at age 84, a stone-cold hoot. Sure, it took a couple of folks to help the man to his chair at 92Y's Buttenweiser Hall today but, as soon as he took that seat, he took control. Just ripped control right out of the hands of Donna Walker-Kuhne, veteran arts marketer, billed as moderator of his conversation with Ford Foundation president Darren Walker. Make no mistake, Walker-Kuhne can handle herself. But, at least for the moment, there was no handling Mr. Arthur Mitchell.

There was so much he wanted to tell us, you see. And he wasted no opportunity to admonish the young students lining the floor in front of the first row of audience seating at this sold-out event.

"Pull your feet back!" he ordered a few.

"Don't upstage me, dear!" he warned a scurrying Catherine Tharin, Fridays@Noon's curator.

"Darren is one of my role models," he told us. "I need someone to educate me in the business part of dance."

Well, thank goodness there's a reason to keep Darren Walker around!

When Walker-Kuhne finally took the reins, posing a question about diversity in the dance field, Mitchell held to what seems to always be his primary focus--discipline.

"Very few people know what [diversity] means," he said.

To Mitchell, it brings thoughts of the multitude of dance techniques and performance skills today's dancer must possess--everything from ballet and tap to a strong, projecting voice.  Speaking of projection, everyone--from audience members with mumbly questions to the moderator of the concluding panel--got a tongue lashing for not speaking up!

Next up, Darren Walker offered that "diversity is about excellence" and that excellence has the potential to lift everthing from dance troupes to major corporations and foundations like Ford.

"It does not correlate with a loss of quality," he argued. Rectifying the chronic inequality in our society and establishing social justice should be the ultimate goal of philanthropy. However, today's philanthropists, many of them flush with Silicon Valley success, have not yet turned attention to the arts.

"But the arts are what make it possible for us to be empathetic," Walker said. "Without empathy, we won't have justice."

Both men lamented the decline of arts education in our nation's schools, and Walker offered the example of how pressuring New York mayor Bill de Blasio led to his establishment of universal pre-K. Why can't we have a similar push for more arts activities in all our schools?

"You've just implemented the most complicated thing you can do--add on a new population of students," Walker said. "But we lack the political will for an arts policy that puts arts education in every classroom. We have to hold our political leaders accountable to get to that goal."

The program stretched Fridays@Noon's usual ninety minutes to a full two hours. It included an enjoyable slate of performances: Paunika Jones (Mitchell's Balm in Gilead), Rasta Thomas (Flight of the Bumble Bee by Vladamir Angelov after Milton Myers), Jones and Jamal Story (Doina by Royston Maldoom), and Maria Kowroski and Amar Ramasar (the duet from Agon by George Balanchine, made famous by the extraordinary Mitchell and Diana Adams and controversial for that interracial casting). A panel, facilitated by archivist Gillian Lipton, featured remarks by Anna Kisselgoff (former chief dance critic of The New York Times) and remembrances from Lydia Abarca Mitchell (DTH's first prima ballerina), Sheila Rohan (soloist) and Tania León (conductor and composer).

For information on upcoming 92Y Harkness Dance Center and Fridays@Noon events, click here.

92Y
1395 Lexington Avenue (between 91st and 92nd Streets), Manhattan
Subways: #6 to 86th or 96th Streets

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mayfield brooks: improvising while Black at GIBNEY

mayfield brooks
(photo: Amar Puri)

I spent some time this week drifting back into that intriguing realm that Reggie Wilson's Danspace Project platform opened a few weeks ago (Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance). Back with native people of stolen lands and enslaved people of the Middle Passage, back beneath the physical and psychic layers that make up present day Manhattan--this time, though, instigated and guided by mayfield brooks who calls her/their dance practice Improvising While Black.

With the three-part IWB: Dancing in the Hold, brooks opened a new series at GIBNEY called Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing), curated by Marýa Wethers as a place of "intersection among blackness, queerness and indigeneity." This series will continue with performances by jumatatu m. poe (Apr 19–21) and I Moving Lab (Apr 26–28).

The design of brooks's IWB: Dancing in the Hold breaks the framework for presentation. It is not one thing; it is different things. People gather not to just watch people do stuff but possibly do stuff themselves. Anything originally planned for one point in time might easily show up in another. And we all bring ourselves to it because it can't exist without us. In essence, this truly is Black space.

IWB: Dancing in the Hold is a performance in three parts investigating mayfield brooks’ ongoing project, Improvising While Black (IWB), which uses dance improvisation as a tool to create atmospheres of care and inquiry while listening to ancestral whispers of the middle passage.

Part I, P(a)rLAY, is an invitation to Black-identified artists to participate in an improvisational dance workshop and performance exploring IWB’s improvisatory techniques including speaking in tongues, wandering practices, somatic awakenings and partner work.

Part II, Dancing in the Hold, is an evening-length performance exploring underwater textures like shipwrecks and contaminated seaweed while embracing Black queer ancestors, Black rage, brilliance and joy.

Part III, Process(Ion), is a durational performance installation exploring gestures of Black revolt, poetics of oceanic abyss, spontaneous readings of Afropessimist scholarly texts and a procession to the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan.

P(a)rLAY was my second time taking a workshop with brooks--the first, hosted by Movement Research at Abrons Arts Center. Once again, I was amazed by how one gifted teacher's gentle invitations can quickly lead to profound revelations.

brooks has been spending time visiting, contemplating and drawing inspiration from the nearby African Burial Ground memorial. We visited as well, on a windy late afternoon, the twelve of us, and took away impressions for the work we would do together back in the Black Box studio. We also wrote letters to ancestors known and unknown, and learned meaningful things in the writing that perhaps we would never have attained any other way.

I will not be able to attend the durational event, Part III, tomorrow. However, I did return to GIBNEY's Black Box last night for Part II, Dancing in the Hold. I witnessed the entirety of it through a shroud of silver. Because I was a spirit. Because brooks asked nicely. Because two of us from the P(a)rLAY workshop showed up/said yes. So, into the depths where inky dark and screams and whimpers are broken by bioluminescence. Where a switched-on, unrestrained brooks is joined in liberation by South Africa's outstanding Mlondi Zondi.

It's late in the day now, but tickets might remain for tonight's show. Try for them!

For information and tickets for mayfield brooks's events tonight and tomorrow, click here. For information, tickets and series passes for Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing), click here.

GIBNEY
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
Subways: 4/5/6 to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall; N/R/W to City Hall; 2/3 to Park Place

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Eliza Bent gets personal on race and cultural appropriation

Eliza Bent
(photo: Knud Adams)

It's far worse than you might think.

No, that's not my review of Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen, the new monologue written and performed by Eliza Bent, now at Abrons Arts Center. But that's what I believe Bent wants viewers to grasp.

The piece jumps off from the playwright's memories of a film on the 19th Century queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch--a school project Bent cooked up at age 13 with a friend and classmate. The young auteur cast her white affluent self as the indigenous queen and now looks back on it--as we get to do; the film is both cringe-worthy and just ridiculously audacious enough to kind of work, ya know?--with no small amount of shame. I can't gauge how completely woke today's Bent is but, as things unfold, you will definitely see she's got her eyes propped open.

She might have forgiven her teenaged self (and begged our forgiveness) for youthful indiscretion. But she does not stop there.

Surrounded, inexplicably but beautifully, by Elizabeth Chabot's rich, thick textile art and a row of fetching portraits--Bent resembles some combination of high-class talk show host and star monologist. Wearing a buttoned-up little black dress with A-line cut, she talks nonstop with well-practiced intensity that pegs her as facile, artificial, privileged, ready for PBS or an NPR podcast.

Frankly, even when self-revealing, she's off-putting. You take note when she utters something amusing. You note that amusement and yet stand clear of enjoying it. You definitely stand away from Bent, and maybe she means you to do so, because her delivery of text is noticeably, oddly driven, airless, leaving no room for her breathing or your own.

At some point, you get used to that. Which might mean an unseen internal change within her or--and this is really what it felt like--something shifting inside you, like when a climber gets more and more acclimated to lower levels of oxygen.

Maybe, though, Bent's the sort best positioned to lead us where we need to go and show us what we need to see--what she's done and what she's witnessed, particularly in the world of media and the arts. (In addition to her stage work, she served, for several years, as a senior editor at American Theatre magazine.) Deep into the play, she circles back to her own relationships and disconnections--refusing to absolve herself for what remains unresolved, tasking herself and the rest of us with acknowledging the pervasive breadth and durability of privilege and the damage wrought. Not a curious fossil from the ancestral past. Not a specimen of a problem that has not a thing on Earth to do with us now.

Direction: Knud Adams
Textile panel art: Elizabeth Chabot
Sound design/original composition: Jerome Ellis
Lighting: Kate McGee
Make up and styling: Naomi Miyoko Raddatz

Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen continues through April 21. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Lois Wheeler Snow, 97

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by Amy Qin, The New York Times, April 11, 2018

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J.D. McClatchy, 72

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Uplifting Black choreographers: Gesel Mason

Gesel Mason
(photo: Enoch Chan)

Whoops!

Showing up 45 minutes into a concert because I, somehow, had the wrong curtain time just feels awful. More awful is when it's a historic, keenly-anticipated program like Gesel Mason's No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers.

I missed nearly everything in the first half of the show--works by Bebe Miller, Kyle Abraham and Donald McKayle. <<sound of critic kicking self--hard and repeatedly>> I managed to slip in at a break to catch Rennie Harris's You Are Why! (2014) and watch Mason dance the hell out of it alongside Lisa Engleken and Mahayla Rose. The second half featured works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Bent, 2004), David Roussève (Jumping the Broom, 2005) and a piece by Mason (No Less Black, 2000) with her poetry and MK Abadoo's solo performance. This program has been fifteen years in development and represents both a tribute to a diverse range of Black choreographers and an ongoing gift to dance's future.

Happily, the entire program--a presentation of Gesel Mason Performance Projects, co-presented by 651 ARTS and RestorationART at Brooklyn's Billie Holiday Theatre--will be accessible through the digital archive Mason plans to establish to preserve the legacy of Black artistry in dance. The documentation, just like the concert, will include personable video interviews of the choreographers, revealing the context for understanding how these artists saw and felt about their works when first created and how they view them now.

But try to get to the Billie Holiday tonight-- the show's final evening--for so many, many reasons. Among them is Jumping the Broom with its chilling imagery, prescient warning and the heartbreak of Mason's performance. In the short amount of time he allows himself, Roussève not only conjures vivid scenes in our imagination, he taps our empathy and our sense of foreboding. It is dance as an act of conscience, responsibility and courageous love.

Of course, I cannot speak of Mason's dancing in all of the program's pieces, but I do know she should rank high on your list of artists who jump into the fire of a work with the nimbleness and rigor to survive its flames. She's all up in the Zollar solo (an edgy, dissonant portrait of the extreme state of mind in addiction) and the Harris trio (with its unrelenting movement multiplicities upon complexities upon multiplicities). It's almost unbelievable that she would--and could--program demanding works like these two on the same bill as the Roussève piece. She says, now, that she will never do this again--herself, personally, though the works could be danced by others--and that much is believable.

But, for now--at least this evening--you've got a chance to see a great one at the height of her powers. Go!

For information and tickets to tonight's show (7pm), click here.

The Billie Holiday Theatre
At Restoration Plaza, 1368 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Isao Takahata, 82

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La Wilson, 93

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Cecil Taylor, 89

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Susan Anspach, 75

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For Jack Ferver, "Everything Is Imaginable"

Choreographer Jack Ferver
premieres Everthing Is Imaginable
this week at New York Live Arts.

So...where are we?

Sometimes, that's a useful way to begin looking into a dance.

Jeremy Jacob's visual design frames, while never neatly containing, Jack Ferver's Everything Is Possible--a bifurcated evening at New York Live Arts. The first part of the work features an old-timey set, theatrically artificial and cartoonish in its vague pastel flourishes. For the second, Jacob substitutes an unpainted model of the set which Ferver--petite as he is--looms over. The indistinct look of both sets and the Alice in Wonderland-like shift in size open the possibility that we have quit daytime reality and fallen into a queer space where time dissolves, where things and identities overlap, intersperse or become malleable.

The first act features four solos built around the childhood icons of each of their dancers, starting with ballet star James Whiteside's take on the beloved Judy Garland--resplendent in her spangled dress, physically expansive and exuberant just short of flying to pieces. She looks as some of us will remember her on tv in the early '60s. Cole Porter's "I Happen to Like New York," especially Judy's version, strikes just the right clunky note of intensity--sort of "I'm telling you I like it, but I'm gonna break it--and you--before it breaks me." But Whiteside ends up flopped on his back, as will all the dancers to come.

Martha Graham dancer Lloyd Knight--in a shapely standout performance--gives us an exquisite portrait of Graham over the dance rebel's voice--for instance, her thoughts on how "spontaneity" and "simplicity" in dance require years of grueling work, "costing no less than everything." Garen Scribner invokes figure skater Brian Boitano--an Olympics champ from the '80s who came out as gay in 2013. Ferver slows down or fragments or zooms in on details of a skating routine; Scribner's energy reflects the mix of exhilaration and amusement his viewers might feel. And Reid Bartelme, in a bizarre--if still adorable--twist, trots out as the lavishly pink-maned My Little Pony.

The end of intermission brings on apprehension. We've learned that, during an accident in rehearsal, Ferver tore his calf. Now, turned from the audience and towards the model of Jacob's set, he relates that story, painful to hear. It's worse to watch him make his way through revised choreography; though avoiding jumps and other demanding moves, he really dances far more than anyone might have expected and looks grimly determined as he keeps talking. The injury brings up memories of betrayal, trauma and loneliness, transparently shared. His long exposition throws a different light on the earlier solos; it renders damage and lingering vulnerability all too imaginable.

Costumes: Reid and Harriet Design
Lighting: Lauren Libretti

Everything Is Imaginable continues with performances tonight, Friday and Saturday at 8pm; and Friday at 10pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Janka Nabay, 54

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by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, April 3, 2018

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Michael Tree, 84

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