Disabled Arts on Camera, Part 1: Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson

Film short Revel in Your Body, directed by Katherine Helen Fisher,
features a duet by disabled artists Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson.
It received its NYC premiere this month at Dance on Camera.

Revel in Your Body

(USA, 2018; 5:18)

directed by Katherine Helen Fisher

Top and bottom, left to right: Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson
Center: Laurel Lawson
(photos: Jared Serfozo)

Here's a taste of the audio description (click) of dance and film artist Katherine Helen Fisher's exhilarating short featuring two dance superstars, Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson of the disabled arts troupe Kinetic Light.

Sheppard and Lawson's collaborative work have always represented, for me, innovation, expansiveness and possibility, powerful expressions of sensuality and joy. In just a little over five minutes, this film captures all of that and in abundance.

The music of composer Missy Mazzoli, deliciously vocalized in the film by Grammy-winning ensemble Roomful of Teeth, welcomes you, the observer, to a percolating and buoyant space. Shimmy Boyle's heady, slow-motion cinematography offers time to appreciate the spatial relationship of body to body, to enjoy the creamy flow of movement of two bodies in wheelchairs. It enters the hidden depths of time and works its way into your system, too.

From Fisher's Director's Statement:

REVEL IN YOUR BODY originated as a creative concept when the dancers shared online a slow-motion iPhone video of them jumping on a trampoline while strapped into their wheelchairs. This was AFTER being told by a well-known editorial photographer that the trampoline frequently used for other dancer photoshoots was off limits to them. This 'no' led these dancers to get their own damn trampoline and find another collaborator… me.

See, it's that #GetOurOwnDamnTrampoline spirit that gets me every single time!

For further information on Revel in Your Body, including future screenings, click here.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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The Bessies: Announcing winners and October's nominees

Celebrating 35 extraordinary years, The New York Dance and Performance Awards (The Bessies) organization held its annual reception and press conference yesterday at Gibney. With community luminaries pressed into Gibney's theater at 280 Broadway, the event was so buoyed with feeling that time-conscious announcers repeatedly (sometimes hilariously) cautioned the assembled to wait for all category nominees to be named before applauding. Still and all, we whooped and hollered for each of our faves, proving that nothing can hold back this dance/performance community!

Plan to be at the legendary award ceremony itself on Monday, October 14 at NYU Skirball Center. In the meantime, here's what you need to know about the announced awards and exciting nominations.

2019 Juried Bessie Award

(Jury: Carlota Santana, Pam Tanowitz and Abby Zbikowski)

Alice Sheppard

for boldly and authentically inventing new movement vocabularies full of supercharged physicality and nuanced detail. Working with gravity, mechanics, human connection, and momentum, she creates work of power and empowerment.

2019 Outstanding Breakout Choreographer Award 

Daina Ashbee

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The 2019 Bessie Awards Nominations

Outstanding Production

600 HIGHWAYMEN
The Fever
Co-presented by La MaMa, The Public Theater, and Onassis USA

Kyle Abraham
The Runaway
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater

Nick Cave
The Let Go
Park Avenue Armory

Nora Chipaumire
#Punk 100% POP* N!GGA
The Kitchen

Merce Cunningham with stager Patricia Lent
Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event
BAM Opera House

Tania El Khoury
As Far As My Fingertips Take Me
Under the Radar/The Public Theater

Juliana F. May
Folk Incest
Abrons Arts Center and American Realness

Alexei Ratmansky
The Seasons 
American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE)
The Art of Luv (Part 6): Awesome Grotto!
Abrons Arts Center

Caleb Teicher
More Forever
Guggenheim Works & Process

Noa Wertheim
One. One & One
Vertigo Dance Company
Baryshnikov Arts Center

Ni'ja Whitson
Oba Qween Baba King Baba
Co-commissioned by Danspace Project and Abrons Arts Center

Outstanding Performer

Xianix Barrera
in Latido by Xianix Barrera
Emerging Choreographers Series at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center

Warren Craft
in Harlequin and Pantalone by Bill Irwin
Dorrance Dance
New York City Center

Leslie Cuyjet
Sustained Achievement with Jane Comfort, Niall Jones, Juliana F. May, Cynthia Oliver, and Will Rawls

Kirsten Davis
in Oba Qween Baba King Baba by Ni’Ja Whitson
Co-commissioned by Danspace Project and Abrons Arts Center

Gabrielle Hamilton
in Oklahoma! choreographed by John Heginbotham
St. Ann’s Warehouse

Samantha Hines
in Attractor by Dancenorth Australia, Lucy Guerin Inc., Gideon Obarzanek, and Senyawa
The Joyce Theater

Tiler Peck
Sustained Achievement with New York City Ballet

Molly Poerstal
Sustained Achievement with Hilary Clark, David Dorfman, Jeanine Durning, Alex Escalante, Juliana F. May, Susan Rethorst, Roseanne Spradlin, and Larissa Velez-Jackson

Nola Sporn Smith
in metamorphosis by Stacy Grossfield
The Kitchen, Dance and Process

Taylor Stanley
in The Runaway by Kyle Abraham
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater

Shamar Watt
Sustained Achievement in the work of Nora Chipaumire

Takaomi Yoshino (aka Varvara Laptopova)
in ChopEniana by Alexandre Minz
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
The Joyce Theater

Outstanding Revival

Deuce Coupe
By Twyla Tharp
American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House

Hex
By Eleo Pomare, performed by Dyane Harvey
American Dance Guild Performance Festival, Ailey Citigroup Theater

Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done
By Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti
Museum of Modern Art

Outstanding Sound Design/Musical Composition

Joseph Kubera and Adam Tendler for interpretation of music of Julius Eastman, and M. Lamar for original composition inspired by Eastman
for Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part by Kathy Westwater
New York Live Arts

Leyya Mona Tawil
for Future Faith by Lime Rickey International
Abrons Arts Center

Conrad Tao and Caleb Teicher
for More Forever by Caleb Teicher
Guggenheim Works & Process

Outstanding Visual Design

Design Team: Tei Blow, Sean McElroy, Eben Hoffer, and Hyung Seok Jeon for The Art of Luv (Part 6): Awesome Grotto! by Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE). Abrons Arts Center

Design Team: Jeanne Medina and Ni’ja Whitson (Costumes), Gil Sperling, featuring art works by Wangech Mutu and Galvin Jantejes (Video), and Tuçe Yasak (Lighting) for Oba Qween Baba King Baba by Ni’Ja Whitson. Co-commissioned by Danspace Project and Abrons Arts Center

Mirella Weingarten (Set Design) for Xenos by Akram Khan. Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival at Rose Theater

Outstanding Breakout Choreographer

(* indicates award recipient)

Daina Ashbee*
Jonathan González
Stacy Grossfield
Caleb Teicher

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The 2019 Bessie Awards Steering Committee, responsible for setting policy and providing oversight for the Bessie Awards throughout the year, is comprised of Cora Cahan, Beverly D’Anne, Jeanne Linnes, Stanford Makishi, Nicky Paraiso, Carla Peterson, Gus Solomons jr, Paz Tanjuaquio, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Laurie Uprichard, and Martin Wechsler.

The 2018–2019 Bessie Awards Selection Committee: Ronald Alexander, Elise Bernhardt, Charles Vincent Burwell, Diana Byer, Tymberly Canale, Alexis Convento, Parijat Desai, Maura Donohue, Boo Froebel, Angela Fatou Gittens, Diane Grumet, Brinda Guha, Joseph Hall, Mai Lê Hô, Iréne Hultman, Celia Ipiotis, Koosil-ja, Fernando Maneca, Lydia Mokdessi, Harold Norris, Craig Peterson, Doug Post, Rajika Puri, Tiffany Rea-Fisher, Susan Reiter, Walter Rutledge, George Emilio Sanchez, Andrea Snyder, Sally Sommer, Risa Steinberg, Carrie Stern, Catherine Tharin, Tony Waag, and William Whitener.

ABOUT THE BESSIES

The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 35 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize outstanding work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee composed of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League as members and participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. For more information about The Bessies, visit www.bessies.org.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Savion Glover returns to The Joyce!

Tony-winning tap great Savion Glover
has a new show at The Joyce Theater.

LADY 5

@

SAVION GLoVER's

BARoQUE'BLAK

TaP Café

by Savion Glover
at The Joyce Theater
July 2-7, 2019

The letters flip up and down--kind of like hoofers' heels and toes--in the titles tap icon Savion Glover gives things. The off-kilter rhythm of the letters jingles and jangles...and jars. Skim across a program page, and your eyes might get snagged on a particular letter or the oddly-true sound a whimsical word makes inside your head. What, exactly, is Half-Our or I Can Here Myself? Tell me there's no part of you smiling at this thought: "Well, I kinda know what that might mean!"

As noted above, the title of Glover's new ensemble production--running now through Sunday at The Joyce Theater--is rendered in his program notes precisely this way:

LADY 5

@

SAVION GLoVER's

BARoQUE'BLAK

TaP Café

It has been several years since Glover, a popular man at The Joyce, has brought a show there. (The Joyce, by the way, is on a roll with tap--now through early January--with luminaries like Ayodele Casel, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards and Michelle Dorrance waiting in the wings. And a tip of the hat to my dear colleague Aaron Mattocks for that programming.) LADY 5 looks nothing like your conventional tap extravaganza. It's so many things and soooo much. It's an illustrative tribute to a wide range of music genres and artists. It's a way of proving to us that dancers are musicians--and that we see through hearing and hear through seeing, or something like that. And it's a transparently messy, headlong plunge into an artist's overflowing psyche.

I count almost twenty sections in the 90-minute show, including one where a male tap shoe foot puppet (yes, you read that right) chats up a female footless-tight foot puppet (yes...) at a café table, and another binary-boosting segment (What Kind of MaNz) where aggressive male tap dancers seem to be all but literally humping their slithering female jazz dancing partners. I need to scold Glover for engaging superb dancers like Natrea Blake, Samantha Berger, Monique Smith and Megan Gessner (the last introduced by Glover as "our token white person") in cheesy moments like this. A finale set to Stevie Wonder's "Another Star" ends up slaughtering poor Stevie under Glover, Marshall Davis Jr. and Darrell Grand Moultrie's jet-propelled and amplified drilling. Maybe a single dancer--or these three without amplification--would have been kinder to the singer and his gorgeous song.

As noted before, with LADY 5 one must push aside any longing for the conventional. Glover takes you on a journey that, for reasons not exactly or convincingly clear, opens with a display of antique costumes arranged along a metal walkway above a café-like setting. Along the way, you'll see Smith dancing to spoken word (the brilliant Jae Nichelle on recording) about what it's like to live with anxiety; various and sundry face-offs between ballet and tap or ballet and jazz; and surrealistic vignettes with Glover apparently haunted, obsessed and traumatized by a ballerina's disembodied tutu descending from above. A dancer might be doing her thing downstage while a shadowy figure creeps along the high walkway in the background. The Dalai Lama makes an appearance. (Just dropping that here. Don't fret about it.) There was an impressive, spiky contemporary solo (PHuQSPaCE) performed by Gessner to the stylings of Bjork, and there is the lovely warmth of Blake's solo work in Everything Must Change.

So...a lot. And, although I am far from the kind of critic who needs the conventional, I must say I was grateful for a segment with fabulous, straight-up tap dance to Latin jazz that met percussion with percussion, fire with fire, spotlighting virtuosity in a way nothing else in the show really touched.

A show with turbo-charged ambitions and oddities, and not everything works. But, hey...Savion Glover at The Joyce. It took several years for that to happen again.

LADY 5 @ SAVION GLoVER's BARoQUE'BLAK TaP Café continues through this Sunday with matinee and evening performances. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue (between 18th and 19th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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