Love what you love. Have courage.

Choreographer Bill T. Jones shares his reflections on 9/11 and its effects on culture and creativity in this New York Times video interview: Click here.

Choreographer Laura Shapiro observes 9/11

Choreographer Laura Shapiro just sent in this note of invitation:

Dear All,

Dance New Amsterdam is having a Day of Remembrance and Reflection for the dance community on September 11, 2011. DVD of the performance of Clear Skies, Sun Shining, a piece for five dancers that premiered on September 11, 2009, will be screened there.

I am grateful to Uttara Asha Coorlawala, Tatyana Kot-Diaz, Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz, Trayer Run-kowzun and Mari Sakahara, the performers who journeyed with me in the creation of the piece as well as to cellist Madeleine Shapiro (no relation) through whom I found Matthew Burtner's Fragments from Cold (for cello and electronics), a recording of which became the sound score for the piece (with Shapiro on cello); and to NYFA for providing me with a Special Opportunity Grant to support the performance of the piece.

Wishing you a peaceful weekend,
Laura

Dance New Amsterdam
280 Broadway, 2nd Floor (entrance on Chambers Street), Manhattan
212-625-8369 or info@dnadance.org
(map and directions)

Injured Cities, Urban Afterlives: a conference

Injured Cities, Urban Afterlives

Barnard Center for Research on Women presents a conference on the effects of catastrophe on cities, their inhabitants, and the larger world, and how we can address the politics of terror with which states react to their vulnerability.

Friday-Saturday, October 14-15

Miller Theater and Wood Auditorium, Columbia University

This conference, convened ten years after September 11, 2001, aims to explore the effects of catastrophe and to imagine more life-affirming modes of redress and reinvention. In a series of presentations and conversations, an international group of artists, writers, and activists will imagine creative responses to disaster and initiate a new collective memory of the events of September 11.

Speakers include Ariella Azoulay, Nina Bernstein, Hazel Carby, Teddy Cruz, Ann Jones, Dinh Q. Lê, Shirin Neshat, Walid Raad, Saskia Sassen, Karen Till, Clive van den Berg, Eyal Weizman, and narrators from the September 11, 2001 Oral History Project at Columbia. Co-sponsored with the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University.

To register, click here.

Also notable from BCRW this fall...

Five courses on culture and creativity, including:
 
Storytelling Life (Elizabeth Whitney)

Women's Cultures/Women's Lives (Leslie Calman)

Seeking Your Voice: A Poetry Workshop (Patricia Brody & Eva Miodownik Oppenheim)

Multicultural Memoirs: Personal Histories of Family, Politics, and Identity (Lori Rotskoff)

Self/Portraits: Women Artists in Modern America (Lori Rotskoff)

All courses take place in Barnard Center for Research on Women, 101 Barnard Hall. For complete information schedule, fees and registration, call 212-854-2067.

The arts commemorate 9/11

For Artists, Sept. 11 Anniversary Is a Season of Reflection
by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, August 25, 2011

Dancers to commemorate 9/11

The Table of Silence Project
conceived by choreographer Jacqulyn Buglisi and Italian artist Rosella Vasta

The Table of Silence Project represents the common threads of humanity which unite all mankind into a single force with common goals and aspirations, regardless of race, culture or religion. Through this event we wish to achieve the dual purpose of celebrating and honoring peace through listening - a united moment of silence - a call for Peace in our world from NYC's community of artists. -- Jacqulyn Buglisi

Sunday September 11, 8:20 AM, ending at 8:46 AM
Josie Robertson Plaza, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Complete information here

Sarah Skaggs Dance
9/11 Dance -- A Roving Memorial
 
An 11-minute meditative dance for large groups of dancers, performed simultaneously on September 11 from Noon to 3pm at multiple locations:

• Three New York City parks (Union Square, Washington Square and Battery Park)
• Washington, DC in the atrium of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and as part of the Arts on Foot Festival
• Shanksville, PA at Memorial Park

In shaping the work, Skaggs was driven by such questions as: What is the function of dance post-9/11? What is the role of the body in an anxious and fearful climate? And can multiple bodies moving slowly in space create a shift in public consciousness?

The project will be broadcast on YouTube following the events. Visit Sarah Skaggs Dance.

Topiary's "Landscape"

I wasn't sure where the evening was headed when C. Ryder Cooley sat high atop a platform, strumming a ukulele and singing, in a twee folkie's voice, an elegy to the spirit of a slain goat. (The head of a Pyrenean ibex lay under her platform.) And I wasn't totally sure when writer/video artist/performer Samuael Topiary, dressed to suggest the Renaissance Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel, climbed down a ladder situated at the rear of the audience rows and started picking out potential models. Something about that seemed a little ordinary, a little...done. But trust quickly kicked in because, with Topiary, it soon became clear that we were in the hands of a multi-talented artist who knows what she's doing and why she's doing it.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, presented at Abrons Arts Center, is named for the Bruegel painting in which the mythic flyboy's disastrous splashdown is totally marginalized by the luminous environment dwarfing it. A consideration of this famous painting becomes Topiary's starting point for a deep, flowing meditation on the state of an America pitching towards 9/11 and economic turmoil.

In the course of guiding this Big Myth journey, Topiary assumes not only the role of Bruegel but also doomed high-flyers including explorer Henry Hudson, a bull she calls the Wall Street Minotaur, Amelia Earhart, David Rockefeller (who envisioned the World Trade Center) and, of course, Icarus, weaving connections among them that are both informed and intuitive. "It's pretty fucking meaty," as Miguel Gutierrez, Topiary's director, said during the post-performance Q&A, adding, "It's a show where you can really learn something." Indeed, and yet the learning comes through a fair amount of seduction. Most powerful in this regard are Jocelyn Davis's graceful, minimalist costumes, the eerie atmosphere created by Cooley's musicianship and Peter Kerlin's electronic soundscore and the gifted Topiary's vocal talents and physical authority.

Nothing's forced. It's as if Topiary is not only instructing us but excavating our memories and feelings with all the great care of a seasoned archeologist. No sudden moves. No aggressive jabs. Not right away, at least. Just steady work until, finally, something valuable emerges. Okay, now let's calmly, rationally examine it.

It's interesting to hear that she first conceived this work not terribly long after 9/11, when she was still in grad school and bore a skeptical attitude towards the imperial American overreaching that those two rather graceless buildings stood for. In the Breugel painting, she said, disaster is rendered as a fairly tiny detail in a larger context, whereas after 9/11, America had become obsessed with disaster and could not, would not, look at context.

"People got mad at me and thought I was blaming the victims." Not hard to imagine the flak she got. People were scared and pissed and having these human, understandable feelings worked up and manipulated to the max. Some of the "sacredness" associated with the site of the fallen towers--now complicating the building of an Islamic community center two blocks away--is as much about the supposed "sacredness" of the preeminent icon of corporate America as about reverence for a place where thousands of innocent people perished. With those two things--American power and American vulnerability--so firmly interlocked, will we ever be able to see clearly?

It's still not popular to bring this up, although Topiary's beautiful and intelligent Landscape probably reads differently to an audience of "downtown" artists and arts junkies like most of us and will (and should) be received well in its run at Abrons.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now through November 20, Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm 

Information and ticketing

Abrons Arts Center

Henry Street Settlement

466 Grand Street, Manhattan

(directions)

Op-Ed Contributor - After the Storms, an Island of Calm — and Resilience

via nytimes.com

Posted via web from Eva Yaa Asantewaa's posterous