Sidra Bell's worlds of imagination and friction

Sidra Bell who presents two works this week
at New York Live Arts
(photo: David Flores)

I'm on the fence about Sidra Bell's new work F R I C T I O N (prequel)--on the bill now at New York Live Arts along with 2014's garment (Director's Choice) about which I am unreservedly enthusiastic. And so it goes. Like super-clever sci fi writers and filmmakers, Sidra Bell Dance New York creates new worlds, exactingly-designed ones and hellish, to which we are invited. We don't have to go, and maybe we don't always.

F R I C T I O N opens this season's lengthy program--two hours with an intermission. You don't get dancers more weirdly excellent--and let me underscore, here, both *weird* and *excellent*--than Bell's troupe. But I really found it difficult to stay with 56 minutes of them behaving like soulless, mechanistic blips in a manic video game. It was just not for me. That's not to say that the audacity and stylishness of Bell's entire interdisciplinary aesthetic isn't brilliant and impressive and even hypnotically seductive. It is.

But then there's garment (Director's Choice), which has already won praise, and rightly so. This 47-minute work has been promoted as:

a playful, slightly offensive jaunt that attempts to rescue the individual by constructing a world that navigates popular zeitgeists, cultural rituals and social containers. Conceived through materials the work exercises small performance ceremonies and allows the performers to speak and mask through filters to observe identity, appropriation, political incorrectness, subliminal language, transfiguration, nonsense, influence, authorship, and reformation. you’ll be remembered…###

So...okay.

But the team really worked the hell out of this one, in both sight and sound. There's Bell, the auteur who bills herself as "Director," not choreographer. And there's Amith Chandrashaker (Creative Director, Lighting Design, Décor), an adept of space and atmosphere, and costume designer Caitlin Taylor. Costuming, as might be guessed, looms large in Bell's universe but so much more here where it suggests a kind of kinky-glamorous masking of the self; an angry, frustrating search for a less-fraught, more ordinary self; and--with Sebastian Abarbanell's expansive, ritualistic solo--finally a taste of freedom.

Bell's worlds are singular--even when colliding with the worlds of Pina Bausch, fashion and Harlem's ballrooms, as they do here. They fold and contort as much as Abarbanell's uncanny body. They are as ridiculously opulent as an extravagant hotel. It's hard not to cheer Bell on when you see all these things laid out just right and danced to perfection by this crew: Abarbanell, Tushrik Fredericks, Drew Lewis, Misa Kinno Lucyshyn, Madison Wada and Leal Zielińska, her self-described "boutique brand of prolific movement illustrators...."

Sidra Bell Dance New York continues through July 1. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

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

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Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance in repertory season at NYU Tisch

Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance
(photo courtesy of CLD)

Ramona Kelley and Daniel Matei in Summer Evening
(photo: Charles Roussel)

Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance
June 27-28
Jack Crystal Theater
NYU Tisch School of the Arts

The new, two-evening season of Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance presents four works from repertory and live music played on the kora, a stringed instrument from West Africa. That traditional music is lovingly rendered by Kane Mathis, a Brooklyn-based performer and composer who has long studied with master musicians of The Gambia.

When Mathis, a white man, brought out a kora for an interlude in the midst of a program of contemporary ballet, it took me a moment to grasp the meaning of this juxtaposition. Then Matthis began to pluck the strings, with deep concentration and delicate touch and timing. Tinkling sounds brushed past our ears like cool, sweet breezes. Lavagnino included him, clearly, because his dedication to traditions--he also learned the oud from master teachers--parallels her own.

I doubt you'll ever find disruptive, radical experimentation at a Lavagnino show. She's old school with a distinct reverence not only for classical ballet--her works often engage pointe work and fluid lifts,  emphasize well-sculpted, grounded structure and line--but also classic modern dance with its concern for human interest. If you crave dance theater with musicality, romance, universal themes and relateable emotions, you'll be comfortable with Lavagnino.

The loveliest work on hand this season might be RU (2014), which takes inspiration from an autobiographical novel by Canadian writer Kim Thúy, a Vietnamese refugee. It largely skirts specifics to embrace sensuous gesture, partner interaction and atmosphere, though it might be a bit jarring--again, these juxtapositions--to see predominantly white dancers wafting about in áo dài tunics and trousers. But, beyond that, Lavagnino captures the gentleness and flow implied by the work's title ("lullaby" or "stream"). Dancers here are Chad Balen, Jesse Campbell, Dervla Carey-Jones, Justin Faircloth, Gwendolyn Gussman, Corinne Hart, Emma Pajewski, Lila Simmons and Claire Westby. Also, look for Ramona Kelley's snappy performance with Daniel Mantei sweeping her off her feet in Summer Evening (2017), set to the Janis Joplin’s version of "Summertime." Kelley, who has danced with Twyla Tharp and Sidra Bell, has got spunk of the "Mary Richards" variety and delivers energy to the work.

Costume design: Christopher Metzger
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann

Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance concludes tonight with a performance at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Jack Crystal Theater
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
111 Second Avenue, Manhattan

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"THEM" returns to its East Village birthplace

Johnnie Mercer Cruise and Hentyle Yapp
dance in THEM at Performance Space New York.
(photo: Rachel Papo)

Michael Watkiss and Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy
(photo: Rachel Papo)

THEM

Conceived, directed, and performed by:

Chris Cochrane (music/sound)
Dennis Cooper (text/spoken word performance)
Ishmael Houston-Jones (movement)

at Performance Space New York (East Village Series)

*****

Tilt in the direction of a memory, starting anywhere. With sound: a deepening drone. With light: splashed across a man's back and legs otherwise engulfed by semidarkness. With bodies: still, lining the margins, covered in shadows.

THEM (made at and for Performance Space 122, premiered in 1986, now revived for Performance Space New York) is a way of remembering the AIDS epidemic and the lives downtown artists led and lost. With Chris Cochrane's electric guitar--caustic shredding, blurting, pounding dissonance. With Dennis Cooper's text--direct and revealing, vulnerable, delivered from off to one side, with isolating distance and longing observation. With dancers, led and gathered by Ishmael Houston-Jones, who toss themselves across the space and at each other with fiery abandon, who occupy the expanse, crafting a world necessary for themselves and their kind. With rites of gesture and behavior. With exploration through touch. With play. With aggression. With a visceral sense of the overpowering, inescapable presence of death...and Death.

The theater at Performance Space New York has just the right degree of plain-and-grim to help this memory work. Houston-Jones's score has been improvised by each of his dancers; the current revival's vigorous cohort includes Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Michael Parmelee, Jeremy Pheiffer, Kensaku Shinohara, Michael Watkiss, and Hentyle Yapp. (Mercer and Yapp are especially headstrong, cogent performers, alone or together.) A spare, functional design--here a simple white mattress; there a menacing plank of wood--makes human movements and energies pop in the space, setting the stage for the emergence of a nightmare buried deep in the work and the blaring sirens (invoking, at once, a speeding ambulance and a city under threat) with which Cochrane drags the work to its end.

THEM continues tonight (7:30pm) and Thursday (7pm) with a post-show talk with Visual AIDS on Thursday. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Save CHARAS: Time to act, Mayor de Blasio!

Gentrification’s Empty Victory
by Allegra Hobbs, The New York Times, June 1, 2018

The story of Chino and CHARAS; Activist hopeful for old P.S. 64’s return
by Lincoln Anderson, The Villager, April 29, 2018

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One more to see: Rennie Harris gets funky at New Victory

Performers from
Rennie Harris: Funkedified,
a world premiere at New Victory Theater
(photo: Brian Mengini)

Two acclaimed Philadelphia dance crews--Rennie Harris Puremovement and The Hood Lockers--are tearing up the stage at New Victory Theater, now through June 10. If you love popping, locking, breaking and all things street dance, go see Rennie Harris: Funkedified.

The premise of this expert world premiere production is a remembrance of the funk music and dancing of the 1970s--think James Brown and Soul Train--that set Harris on his path to becoming one of the world's best-loved masters of hip-hop artistry. A marvelous five-piece band, led by guitarist Matt Dickey and drummer Doron Lev, brings the funk in a big, joyous way. Several cloth panels, hanging above the band like a quilt, capture projected imagery--some hazy, some abstract, some psychedelic--as well as Bob Steineck's luscious, saturated lighting as we hear Harris's musings on his cultural past. His voice--echoey and phantasmal--seems to emerge from out of a cloud or the depths of a dream--but the ingenious, passionate dancing and music speak for themselves.

The New Vic is a family-oriented theater and, at this Saturday matinee, most folks in the audience were small kids in booster seats sitting quiet and polite throughout the show. I kind of longed for an audience of Black teens who'd know just what to do with what we were seeing and hearing! It took a while for any heads to start bopping to the fantastic music--and they were adult heads. I just hope there were youngsters in the audience checking out, in particular, Puremovement soloist Leigh “Breeze-Lee” Foaad whose fluidity, range and poignancy should prove a powerful inspiration.

Rennie Harris Puremovement: Shafeek Westbrook, Katie Cruz, Joshua Culbreath, Phil Cuttino Jr., Tatiana Desardouin, Leigh “Breeze-Lee” Foaad, Mai Lê Hô-Johnson and Yuko “Uko Snowbunny” Tanaka

The Hood Lockers: Ricky “Glytch” Evans, Joshua “J Peazy” Polk, Andrew “Riot” Ramsey and Marcus “Epic” Tucker

Musicians: Shareef Clayton (trumpet), Matt Dickey (Music Director; guitar), Doron Lev (Music Director; drums), Nicholas Marks (keys), Osei Kweku (bass) and FKAjazz (saxophone)

Sound design/composition/production: Darrin Ross
Visual design: Jorge Cousineau
Lighting design: Bob Steineck

Rennie Harris: Funkedified runs through Sunday, June 10. For information and tickets, click here.

New Victory Theater
209 West 42nd Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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A meditation on Ni'Ja Whitson at La MaMa Moves

Ni'Ja Whitson (above) and Stacey Karen Robinson (below)
perform The Unarrival Experiments #4', described as
"a ritual digging into the 'vaporous body'
via relationships between astronomy, cosmology, time,
Blackness, and premature death." 
(photos: Theo Cote)

Opacity is in the very nature of what award-winning dance artist Ni'Ja Whitson created in The Unarrival Experiments #4, a presentation of La MaMa Moves at The Downstairs.

A ritual to which you have been invited and for which you have not prepared.

A space in which you are kept in the literal (mostly) and metaphoric (almost always) dark and in which you learn, deep into 90-or-so uninterrupted minutes, that it's all about darkness.

A dark in which much happens to which you are not privy, like the engulfing dark of the ocean at night or at its greatest depths. Or the dark of the vastness of space between stars.

With their audience scattered in clusters, Whitson, dressed in white, begins the evening by beating large fronds against one of the theater's risers. The rhythms of these strikes are clear but keep changing so much that you begin to listen for a language-like pattern, a message. Straining for this might be your first mistake. If this effort wears you out a bit, good. Just stop it.

Stacey Karen Robinson is also in the space with her supple, musical voice. She takes Whitson's dense text on a long, long stream of a flight. (Whitson will also perform a few soliloquies.) She molds it like clay. But, like the rhythms Whitson beat out at the start, her words slip right by you as you reach to grasp them.

I tried. In the middle of jotting down a sentence, I'd lose the rest of it. I'd labor over the start, and the remainder would evaporate, and Robinson would be way past floundering me, on to something else and something after that and more after that. And even what I thought I had managed to capture in my darkened-theater scrawl turns out to be no good to me today. A senseless, hopeless tangle. Or gone. Mostly gone.

Not all, though:

It is not every day I die, not every day I find me a new body....

These walking glories, these transmigrators....holding the North in themselves....the only direction was free!

He broke her. He broke her.

It seems like a contest. Who is the more distracting?

Robinson--distracting us from the largely fugitive Whitson in their dim environment or in darkness or scurrying out of audience view, so that when we catch sight of Whitson again, faint white clothing peeking out from a different part of the space, we're momentarily startled? Maybe momentarily reassured?

Or do Whitson's movements, weighty while enigmatic, distract from Robinson's speech?

To which artist do we owe our attention, our witness, our loyalty?

Body? Or Voice?

And what of that moment when a shredding blast--sounding random, meaningless--obscures both artists?

We, audience, may cup the used space--be space-holders in a way--but we appear to matter only in the way cosmic bodies matter to one another. It doesn't feel personal. It feels functional. Even arbitrary.

A strange feeling. One I'm on the fence about. It's a provocative ask of an audience. But I found myself wondering about (and resisting) all the literal and metaphoric darkness. I felt we had been abandoned. Stranded in space.

And something more. At one point, Whitson drew a ball of twine from beneath an audience member's chair. Whitson unraveled it, spider-like, stringing it between the legs of some of our chairs.

I noticed immediately. I was right next to this action and felt the twine as it touched my ankles. I reached down and ran my fingers over it. I noticed where it connected. I wondered what it meant.

When the piece concluded, I happened to remain in my seat for a few moments and watched as two women--hastening to leave, an impulse I must admit I shared but resisted--nearly stumbled because they did not notice (or perhaps remember) the twine at their feet. Oddly, it took a few moments more before a staffer finally warned the audience to be careful of the twine.

Hard to know if this was deliberate--yeah, in a way, I could see that fitting this piece--or an oversight.

What we don't know could fill a multiverse. Whitson's text offered a brief crack of light for me in a few places--the most dramatic being their mention of how infinitesimally huge is the place of black darkness in the cosmos.

How little there is, really, that we can say with certainty we know, define and control.

Sound design and performance: Jeremy Touissant-Baptiste
Lighting design: Tuce Yasak
Lighting and Sound Supervisor: Hao Bai

The Unarrival Experiments #4 concludes tonight with a 7pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa (The Downstairs)
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan

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Johnnie Cruise Mercer presents "process-memoir" at NYU Tisch

Dancer-choreographer Johnnie Cruise Mercer
and his troupe present a "process-memoir"
from their NYU Tisch arts residency,
this week at Tisch's Jack Crystal Theater.
(photo: Marisol Diaz)

Is there a possible way to ascend past what is expected from me, and to return to what I truly know? -- Johnnie Cruise Mercer

This is not really a formal review of the "process-memoir" offered, last evening, by Johnnie Cruise Mercer/TheREDprojectNYC at NYU Tisch School of the Arts's Jack Crystal Theater. I write merely to ask you to consider going tonight for its final showing.

And, yes, I know this has been the season from hell with multiple dance events stacked atop each calendar date like acrobats forming a circus pyramid. But still, go see Mercer's to ascend past numbness and witness birth. You'll have fun, you'll see some amazing performers, and you'll experience surprises I'm not going to reveal. Mercer treats his audience like frogs in that pot of water that starts off nice-and-comfy then gets progressively warmer and warmer.

I had just one problem: this evening--reportedly the third part of a multi-part "process-memoir" moving towards a two-part work...well, maybe you get the picture--feels very long, stuffed with stuff in need of judicious pruning. Excess, though, does seem to be a necessary Mercer ingredient. You'll see what I mean.

Take your buddy who thinks they/she/he can't get into dance or simply get it. Take your mate who only makes time for pop culture. Take your woke co-worker who will surely appreciate how art can simultaneously entertain and question that entertainment. Take anyone capable of having their mind blown.

And then, let's all wait and see what TheREDprojectNYC will make of all of this.

Mercer calls his performers "company partners" and "a community of artistic dare-devils," and so they are: Shanice Mason, Thomas Tyger Moore, Nicholas Rodrigues, Erica Saucedo and collaborating artist Adrianne Ansley.

Visual design/creative consultant: Torian Ugworji

to ascend past numbness and witness birth. concludes this evening with a performance at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, email theredproj.company@gmail.com or click for the Facebook event page.

Jack Crystal Theater
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
5th Floor, 111 2nd Avenue (between 6th and 7th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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