SPAC's "Mugen Noh Othello" at Japan Society in sold-out run

Japan Society, celebrating its 110th anniversary,
and The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival
present Satoshi Miyagi's Mugen Noh Othello.
(photo: Takuma Uchida)

Front left, Micari (Desdemona)
Front right, Maki Honda (Pilgrim from Venice)
with chanters (l-r): Kotoko Kiuchi, Yoneji Ouchi, Asuka Fuse,
Kazunori Abe, Fuyuko Moriyama and Haruyo Suzuki
(photo: Richard Termine)

Mugen Noh Othello

North American premiere

presented by Japan Society (NOH-NOW SERIES, PART IV)

part of The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival

Satoshi Miyagi and his acclaimed Shizuoka Performing Arts Center center and elevate the role of Shakespeare's Desdemona in Othello in Mugen Noh Othello. Seen through the tradition of mugen noh theater, the warrior Othello's wife and victim becomes the potentially disruptive shade trapped between life and definitive death until she can work through her story in front of the living. This crucial process for moving on and finding ultimate rest is, in a real sense, a form of theater as ritual to release her soul. Unlike most otherworldly beings in mugen noh, though, Miyagi's Desdemona is a more humble than formidable figure, appealing to the audience's sympathy.

As the tragic ghost, Micari, silkily, eerily skims the stage on feet we never see, voluminous robes concealing what surely must be casters bearing a body that admits no articulation, drawn forward as if by magnetic force. In her thin, delicate crown, she's a doll, the very model of perfection, but our final sight of her--oh, that parting gesture!--might reveal how much her devastating fate will always define her.

The full-bodied percussive music has power. As kneeling members of the superb chorus, arranged at stage left, chant the story, you will have to scan and stare hard at each mouth to determine the source of each utterance. Supertitles provide English translations, but I bet you'll find it tough to tear your eyes from the stately beauty on stage.

Script: Sukehiro Hirakawa
Original music: Hiroko Tanakawa (arranged by the actors)
Costume design: Kayo Takahashi
Lighting design: Koji Osako

Remaining shows of Mugen No Othello (tonight and Sunday) are sold out. Wait list lineup starts one hour prior to curtain. For information, click here.

Japan Society
333 East 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Performance Space New York opens with Heather Kravas

New logo
for the rebooted, rebranded PS 122

The new lobby for Performance Space New York (renovated Second Coming of historic PS 122) might be the East Side equivalent of the entranceway to The Kitchen. There's almost identical warmth and appeal--which is to say, absolutely none. At least, the lobby at Chelsea's New York Live Arts often offers something creative to gaze at and the chance to take a load off while you wait.

On opening night for PSNY's COIL Festival--on now through February 4--I could not wait to get out of that lobby and up to the 4th-floor studio for the New York premiere of visions of beauty by Heather Kravas. Now that space has possibilities--generously broad with an impressively high ceiling and row of tall windows. It will be interesting to see how a variety of artists re-imagine, re-shape and activate it, just as it will be welcome to have this influential venue back online in my neighborhood.

visions of beauty
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Kravas's vision felt like an apropos place to begin again. Its minimalism and quirky, glacial pacing and moments of matter-of-fact nudity seemed like flashbacks to the sort of thing I remember experiencing here in decades past when it was still cramped-and-funky PS 122. Its quietude, its stillness, seemed intentionally therapeutic. The re-arrangements of wedges of nine dancers in various, alternating, far-flung pockets of space seemed intent on messing with our ability to claim them--the way an audience can "herd" a bunch of performers, as entertainers, in our minds. Instead, they evaded us. They slowed us down and made us wait and gave us an uncompromising atmosphere in which to wait. The last show I'd seen--at The Joyce--did the polar opposite of that, expertly, and it was an ongoing struggle for me to keep my eyes open for Kravas, something else I remember from certain moments and certain artists at the old PS 122.

Though described as "anti-spectacle," the hour does contain one fantastic passage in which dancers create one long, highly-active braid of interlocked bodies along the floor, supporting and shifting under one another. Something oddly meditative and a tad creepy and all the more fascinating for the understated way it brings those qualities together.

visions of beauty was created in collaboration with performers Andrew Champlin, Tarek Halaby, Michael Helland, John Hoobyar, Michael Ingle, Joseph Kipp, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Kayvon Pourazar and Saúl Ulerio.

Original music: Dana Wachs aka Vorhees
Song: Peter Schilling
Piano: Hank Mason
Lighting design: Madeline Best

visions of beauty continues on the following schedule:

Thursday, January 11, 8:30pm
Friday, January 12, 9:30pm
Saturday, January 13, 6:30pm

For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

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

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That upcoming APAP theme is what again?

Have you heard? The theme of the 2018 Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) Conference in New York City (January 12-16) is...

trans.ACT.

Kind of makes your heart beat faster, doesn't it?

But hold on!

Not surprisingly, APAP's call for proposals for trans.ACT. caught the attention of trans dance and performance artist Ashley R.T. Yergens who noticed a curious absence of any mention of trans artists and their work.

Yergens took his questions about all this to Facebook:

The Association of Performing Arts Professionals, formerly known as the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, or more commonly known as APAP is calling for Professional Development Program proposals using the theme "trans.ACT."

They define the theme as the following:

"This year’s theme, trans.ACT, focuses on the transformative power of the arts and the multiple ways - 'trans' meaning across, beyond, and through – in which we 'act' upon our commitment to bring the full meaning, impact and experience of the arts to communities across the country and around the world."

While I understand the etymology of the prefix "trans," I can't help but notice that the theme reads as transact as in transaction. Also, it reads as Trans Act like an act that serves to protect trans people like me. This particular reading of the theme leaves me completely baffled.

There's zero mention of trans people - trans dance and performance artists - like me, which seems like a hugely missed opportunity and evidence of who was in the room to finalize this year's APAP theme for Professional Development Program proposals.

Again, I understand the etymology of the prefix "trans." I'm not here to police language. Words evolve. However, I question and I hold APAP accountable to how they're using the word at this point in the evolution of "trans." The word has finally entered the mainstream to describe people like me who don't identify with their assigned genders at birth. It's a word that empowers me and allows me to find other people who share similar experiences and hardships.

Honestly, this is like APAP naming the theme "Gay.ACT" and defining "gay" simply as happy and distancing the term from its loaded history pertaining to gay people.

Perhaps this theme wouldn't be so unsettling if it weren't for the fact that dance and live performance lacks history, documentation, and consistent opportunities for dancing and performing bodies of trans experiences. If you want proof of what this field is lacking, then 1) send money to my Venmo account, and I'll do the labor of sharing my research and personal experiences with you or 2) Google.

So, I'm holding APAP accountable to answering the following questions: 

1.) Did you consult any trans people when you selected this theme?

2.) Are there any trans people on your staff or board?

3.) How have you supported trans dance artists and performers in the past? How do you plan on supporting trans dance artists and performers in the future?

4.) While I understand the etymology of "trans," I find it odd that you chose to use a word that is currently used to describe identities that I and so many other people fight for on a daily basis. Why don't you mention trans people in your description? Was any of this discussed when selecting "trans.ACT" as a theme?

I look forward to APAP's thorough responses, and I am eager to see how they will transcend their faux pas with action.

I encourage you to contact APAP as well: https://www.apap365.org/About/Staff

Ashley R.T. Yergens

YERGEN'S QUERY

Yergens also sent the following email to APAP:

Hello,

My name is Ashley R.T. Yergens. I'm a trans dance artist and performer based in Brooklyn, NY.

I was reading your description about this year's PDP theme for proposals.

A few questions come to mind:

1.) Did you consult any trans people when you selected this theme?
2.) Are there any trans people on your staff or board?
3.) How have you supported trans dance artists and performers in the past? How do you plan on supporting trans dance artists and performers in the future?
4.) While I understand the etymology of "trans," I find it odd that you chose to use a word that is currently used to describe identities that I and so many other people fight for on a daily basis. Why don't you mention trans people in your description? Was any of this discussed when selecting "trans.ACT" as a theme?

I look forward to reading your responses and discussing this further.

Best,

Ash

APAP'S REPLY

Minutes later, Yergens received the following reply:

Dear Ash,

Thank you for reaching out with your questions about this year's APAP|NYC conference theme.  Given that we are heading into a holiday weekend, I wanted to be sure to reach out to you.

Our conference committee of artists, agents, presenters and producers spent a considerable amount of time discussing the multiple meanings of "trans" in creating the theme.  We hope to bring together a wide range of professionals, including transgender artists, next January to explore how we can collectively advance the role and value of the performing arts in today’s complicated world.
 
We invite you to submit a conference proposal or otherwise happy to touch base following the upcoming holiday.

Best regards,

Scott

Scott D. Stoner
Vice President, Programs and Resources
Association of Performing Arts Professionals
1211 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
202-331-1890 | APAP365.org

YERGEN'S REPLY

Dear Scott,

Thank you for touching base. I look forward to hearing your responses to my questions, learning more about the considerable time spent discussing the multiple meanings of "trans," how you arrived at the copy on the proposal form, and learning more about how you will include transgender artists at this year's conference.

Best,

Ash

Yes, I think it will be good to hear some direct, meaningful responses to Yergen's reasonable questions, and I welcome him to keep InfiniteBody's readers posted.

*****

Ashley R.T. Yergens is a 2016 boo-koo artist-in-residence at Gibney Dance, and a 2016-17 Fresh Tracks Artist at New York Live Arts. He's a former project coordinator for DanceMotion USA, a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State, produced by BAM. Currently, he works at New York Live Arts as a development associate.

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: "Blind Cinema" by Britt Hatzius

Blind Cinema
(photo: Britt Hatzius)

In 'Blind Cinema' the audience sits blindfolded in a darkened cinema. Behind each row of audience members is a row of children who in hushed voices describe a film only they can see. The children watch the film for the first time, and each performance involves a new group of children all aged between eight and eleven.

--from program notes for Blind Cinema 

I'm not sure why the job had to be done by kids, but Blind Cinema--offered by the film, video, sound and performance artist Britt Hatzius in this year's COIL Festival--is certainly one of the more curious events this APAP season. Presented by PS 122 and SVA Theatre in partnership with East Village Community School (from where the youngsters hail), this forty-minute experience feels like a combination of torture, mind-altering experimentation and goofiness. Years later, you'll be able to say, "I did that," but what exactly "that" was or if it was necessary might remain open to question.

Intentionally or not, my experience of Blind Cinema began in the SVA Theatre's lobby, standing around on line forever waiting to enter the cinema as staff members wordlessly wandered back and forth, possibly counting us. From the noise of people's chattering and the extended wait, energy drained from every fiber of my being. When we were finally admitted to the hall, it was further dispiriting to be forced into the front row abutting the edge of a high platform stage. I don't know about the legroom for the rows behind us but, in the front row, our knees and feet jammed pretty close to that platform. And we had no choice. As we entered, we were ordered to fill the rows all the way across, and I had the great good luck of being one of the first folks in that front row. Add blindfolds to this look and an audio cone that must cover one of your ears, and Blind Cinema is not a good move for anyone with claustrophobia.

The cone helps you hear your assigned movie viewer/whisperer. I hope my fellow audience members found their cones helpful. My ability to hear my young attendant came and went--partly because the child wasn't always very clear-spoken; partly because when you darken a room and cover my eyes, my body gratefully cries sleep time!!! and hijacks the situation. This is actually a healthy thing though inconvenient for this particular sample of performance art.

For me, Blind Cinema was a truly surreal experience, a matter of letting go of understanding WTF was being said; why some people in distant rows, who were not children, were giggling when I could find nothing funny; what was happening on the platform stage where certain noises coming towards us suggested potential danger; and, overall, the ability to stay conscious. I don't think I actually ever fell asleep, but I did go into that liminal "tween" state. When I was most conscious and actually catching words, I was also worrying about how my neck and shoulder were scrunching up as I struggled to maintain connection to the cone. I was, simultaneously, worrying about the narrative I'd lost and getting to a place where I didn't give a damn what I heard or could not hear.

But, okay, maybe Hatzius would find every bit of that well aligned with her purpose as described on PS 122's website:

Through Blind Cinema, Britt Hatzius examines ideas around language and interpretation along with the potential for discrepancies, ruptures and (mis)communication.

Blind Cinema concludes this afternoon with a performance at 5:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: Dana Michel

Dana Michel performs Mercurial George
in this year's American Realness festival.

The Black Canadian dance artist Dana Michel--who made a big splash at home and here in New York in 2014 with her solo Yellow Towel--is back with a new solo, Mercurial George, at Abrons Arts Center for American Realness.

She has described the hour-long piece as an act of “wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig” asking “What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body?” A seeming extension of Yellow Towel, with its genesis in racial stereotypes, Mercurial George implies the release of an authentic identity not imposed by others.

This is pertinent for exploration. Identity and marginal otherness--from immigration status to religion to gender--are battlegrounds with renewed real life-or-death stakes in the current moment. And Michel is a curious, fearless explorer, eccentric and mercurial indeed in her body language, fascination with the odd prop oddly used, and tendency to randomly mumble or declaim. She opens dimensions of mind and body that we usually declare unseemly and diseased and seems to say, "Look what else is here."

It's an interesting task and an interesting approach, requiring a performer who can submerge her calm, charming persona and grab hold of a viewer, no matter how resistant, for the space of an hour. Not easy. Go take a look and see what else is there.

Mercurial George
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Here's a mini-interview with Dana Michel

on the occasion of her January 2014 presentation of Yellow Towel

for American Realness.

(And here is my review of that show.)

Mercurial George will be presented again on Monday, January 9 at 4pm and Tuesday, January 10 at 7pm. Run Time: 55 minutes. For information on this and other American Realness events, now through January 12, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
(Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo

Members of Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo
perform Custodians of Beauty
(photo: Maria Baranova)

At some point in a dance work by Pavel Zuštiak (Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo), you will find yourself physically, helplessly connected to the surreal, demanding goings-on. In Custodians of Beauty, for instance, you might be chosen to literally occupy the floor for a stretch of time that feels like it's stretching on forever. On another occasion, you might remain in your seat--safe, you'd think, until you notice your ears assaulted by high-pitched sound or your heart racing from the speeding visuals and sonic thunder. Or, in BASTARD / The Painted Bird: Part 1, you might "see" the likes of yourself in a crowd of "just folks" picked up locally by Zuštiak, merged with his professionals and coached into miraculous efficacy as a team. "That's me over there," you think as you feel yourself first saunter then pelt through space, just missing collisions with others in near-chaos, then placidly lowering your body to the floor, again and again and again. The theatrical veil between the worlds, as conceived by Zuštiak, is always gossamer-thin and, ultimately, ripped aside. You have pressed close to some kind of edge and its dangers. You have glimpsed something you cannot name.

This week, La MaMa is reviving Bastard, first seen in the US at this theater in 2010, and PS 122 is presenting Custodians of Beauty at La MaMa as part of its COIL Festival. Both offer concentrated immersion into the world of this bold, Slovak-American dancemaker, a multiple award winner, who gets that theater's power is in the way artists' and audiences' bodies dream together. And if I haven't already sent you running for cover, let me encourage you to step to La MaMa for this opportunity to be moved, to be affected, to be transformed by dance with music by Christian Frederickson and lighting by Joe Levasseur, both master craftsmen in demand and frequent Zuštiak collaborators. Dancer Jaro Viňarský reprises his 2013 Bessie-winning role as the soloist/persecuted outsider in Bastard, inspired by Jerzy Kosiński’s novel, The Painted Bird. In making Bastard, Zuštiak might have been thinking of his own identity as an immigrant to an overwhelming, not always congenial new land and his struggles to make and sustain art. But Bastard returns to us now in a time of heightened social relevance.

Remaining performances of BASTARD / The Painted Bird: Part 1 run tonight at 8pm; Saturday at 2:30pm and Sunday at 6:30pm. Running Time: 75 minutes. For information on this and other La MaMa events, click here.

Remaining performances of Custodians of Beauty run today at 5pm, Saturday at 5:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. Run time: 85 minutes. For information and tickets for this and other COIL Festival events, click here.

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

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Got to be real: "Star Crap Method" at American Realness '16

Star Crap Method is Larissa Velez-Jackson’s compositional methodology that complicates and redefines the skill set of the contemporary dancer and functions as an absurd exposé of the inner workings of the dancer in process. Performers Tyler Ashley, Talya Epstein and Larissa Velez-Jackson collectively compose the entire work in real time, including the sound score of live vocals and digital sound. Bessie-award-winning lighting designer Kathy Kaufmann improvises illumination throughout. The work is founded on Velez-Jackson’s improvisational practice that embraces technical brilliance and failure in equal measure, ushering in a form of interdisciplinary creative limitlessness with opportunities for great humor, and vulnerability.

I wanted to start off with that helpful promotional statement for Star Crap Method because if there's anything I'm sure of, it's that dancemaker Larissa Velez-Jackson is precise as heck about how she wants us to understand the power in any given mess. Sharing space with her and Epstein and Ashley yesterday at Abrons Arts Center was a workout, a vicarious exercise in trust and a parallel to the primordial dance of crap from which stars and planets arose.

Introducing Star Crap Method yesterday, Velez-Jackson called it "the complete encapsulation of my artistic identity" and, even more cheekily, "an emerging artist retrospective." It is definitely all about emerging. And what I take away from several hints sprinkled into live, improvised narration is just how much emerging has to do with breaking down.

Doing the thingness of my body. Thingness. One more time: thingness.

There are many people in me. Sometimes I am surprised who comes out front and who is left behind.

 I disintegrate for you....

I like the way Velez-Jackson encourages--no, requires--audiences to contribute to the crap without her being overbearing about it. She makes it fun. I like the way sincerity dances with satire, both partners quite nimble, ultimately inseparable. I like how the rigorous readiness of each of the three performers--their skills and charisma undeniable--supports and activates the rough materials of chaos. Abrons's space looked like what it is for Velez-Jackson and her collaborators: an ongoing workspace, with all manner of mystery debris--including a fourth person, hooded, masked, possibly sleeping--carelessly thrown against walls and into corners. I like that it's okay for us to see that, to give up any attempt to make things make sense and to give ourselves over to the electric flash of the moment, visual and verbal.

American Realness 2016 ends tomorrow, and you can try to get into the last performance of Star Crap Method tomorrow at 5:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Star Crap Method is presented in association with New York Live Arts.

Abrons Arts Center (Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Triple "Realness" at Abrons: Lamar + Markey + Shelton Mann

As if the expected adventure of American Realness were not enough, I decided to turn it up a notch, at the last minute, by slipping in an extra show between the two I had already scheduled to see yesterday. So, basically, from around 5:30 to 10pm, I lived at Abrons Arts Center, dashing from M. Lamar (Destruction) to Erin Markey (A Ride on the Irish Cream) to Sara Shelton Mann (Sara (the smuggler)) with hurried bathroom breaks in between.

It was a popular evening at Abrons with the last two of these shows sold out, although the festival can always create ways to cram in the desperate. The extra audience seating at Sara (The Smuggler) tested me for claustrophobia, though I made it through just fine.

Markey's on for several more shows in Abrons's Experimental Theater before the end on Sunday, and her personal chemistry with co-star Becca Blackwell (so winning as "Irish Cream," a boat or a horse or...) anchors all the wild, comic tanginess and simmering eroticism. Accompanied by a rock band with music by Markey, Emily Bate and Kenny Mellman, this production is alive, crazed, relentless, voracious and completely irresistible. I'm glad I took a chance and made it in. (Click for scheduling/ticketing info.)

For Lamar's 70-minute solo, Destruction, the audience looks on from within a dimly-lit space (Abrons's Underground Theater) with a ceiling sloping darkly and heavily over a shallow performance area. The gloom and compression suit this project. An operatic lament co-written with Tucker Culbertson, Destruction calls vengeance on white supremacy and racist violence through art director Sabin Michael Calvert's creepy visuals (smoky stone crypt; coffin; handsome Black male corpse; severe subtitles) and the performer's countertenor pyrotechnics and piano work. Think Diamanda Galás but, in Lamar's words, "Negrogothic Devil worshipping free black man in the blues tradition." Lamar's vocals dip into the good well of Black spirituals and uppity-ism and have the tone of dread prophecy, swerving from stone-cold anger to bleak despair and back again. The number 2116 appears in the video projection, perhaps a hint that--despite the grieving singer's consigning everyone to hell--society might actually have something like 100 years to get its damn act together. 100 years--but no more.

Destruction continues tonight at 8:30pm and concludes with a 10pm performance on Saturday. Get more information and your tickets here.

Sara (the smuggler), an hour-long event by dance artist Sara Shelton Mann, is a patchwork infused with emotions, a performed life review, a fast trot from childhood through to the now, spoken in a great, gender-blurring, Lauren Bacall but a tad drier voice. (Her essential nature: "I've always felt kind of half on the planet and half off." Of discovering Contact Improvisation: "I got to touch people, and I didn't have to talk.") Her slipped-through history in dance--starring the likes of Alwin Nikolais, Murray Louis and Remy Charlip--was less of a draw for me than her engagement with energy healing, which parallels mine. In this way, her hour did not disappoint as it folded in a guided meditation for her by Keith Hennessy, some shamanic-looking clearing work she unleashed upon the patient Kayvon Pourazar volunteering from the audience, and a vigorous somatic exercise for anyone who cared to participate.  (Closed)

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Back to APAP: Regina Nejman at Dixon Place

Above, Brazil-born choreographer Regina Nejman
in Beautiful Figure
Below, Ryan Tully at piano and Julie Miller with Nejman
(photos: Julie Lemberger)

This past weekend, felled by the bad cold that's going around town, I missed some APAP-season shows I had long looked forward to seeing. I'm back now, and a full week it will be--culminating on Sunday with The Gathering, Camille A. Brown's annual event for Black women dance artists, scholars, educators and allies!

Last night, I made it to Dixon Place for a showing of Regina Nejman's work in progress, Beautiful Figure. I won't say too much about Beautiful Figure since it is, after all, still "in progress."  But it's worth keeping watch for an official launch. Ambitious in concept and design, though compact in length, this piece fully reflects the painstaking effort already invested in its development.

Nejman tackles the notion of beauty as conceptualized through historical and contemporary Western societies. Late in the piece, she also satirizes today's digital obsessions and hookup culture.

She opens with a duet danced with Julie Miller under dim, sculpting light, both women draped in rippled lengths of slate gray fabric. Ryan Tully, the work's composer, sits at his piano, playing spare, quiet notes that, in time, will build and recede in intensity. The women move through a string of languorous poses--twisted, arched, splayed, crossed--as if at the behest of an invisible painter. Later, each will gather a length of fabric to herself, flip it around with her feet and make a grand whirlpool of energy. The dance takes the women (and their fabric) through various transformations, and even draws Tully into an undertow coursing down centuries to the age of hip hop and sexting.

Cast-wise, Beautiful Figure is a cleverly expandable thing. As noted before, Tully gets swept up into movement and dialogue, an expansion that, amusingly, does not stop with him. Nejman demonstrates her ability to coordinate activity on intimate and large scales and shows a creative range--from exquisite to athletic, from quiet to raucous, from meditative to absurd. There's palpable tension beneath all the beauty on display--always--and an evident desire for freedom. She's convincing in most things, though perhaps not yet convincing in the way she appears to conclude with a note of hope for the arrival of that freedom.

Early on in the piece, before Nejman branched into text and satire, I noticed something interesting about her approach to movement. She made us see her and Miller's bodies as human first and foremost. Not abstractions. Not symbols. Not even tools for a choreographer, trained to deliver the assigned steps and shapes. I was struck by this: Here were women. Dancing. And, yes--despite our imagination of the imaginary "artist" sketching or painting them--these were women's bodies speaking for their lives as bodies. Real ones. And Nejman's insistence on giving us even a small glimpe of the human being within the choreographed body was...well, I can only call it beautiful.

Closed. For further information on Regina Nejman & Company, click here.

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COIL 2016 festival: It's "DISCOTROPIC" down below

Diahann Carroll as the holographic Mermeia
from Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)
(photo from Starwarsholidayspecial.com)

Somewhere, there must be an Official Contemporary Performance Checklist that itemizes terms like "Afrofuturism" and "queer politics" and "the black female body," all of which show up in promotion surrounding niv Acosta's DISCOTROPIC (part of PS 122's COIL festival). I'm always wondering where this spaceship is headed; the answer isn't always clear. But DISCOTROPIC turns out to be a quality ride, bracing and perhaps as illuminating as any potential destination.

Running for ninety minutes, DISCOTROPIC utilizes rough basement space at Westbeth, artist housing in the West Village, including a recessed room, straight and spiral staircases and an ample platform. As architecture, DISCOTROPIC revels in the aesthetics of hide and seek, hear and strain to hear, sincerity and exhibitionism. Instrumental and electronic sound sources are tucked around the space, and bold, color-saturated video abstractions and lighting play a hallucinogenic role. Audience members stand to watch and--carefully, please--step here and there, following the actions of Acosta, Monstah Black, Justin Allen, Ashley Brockington and Dion TygaPaw.

DISCOTROPIC, we've been told, exists "between the pragmatic and the fantastical while exploring the relationship between science fiction, disco, astrophysics and the black American experience." The unseen, but presiding, archetypal figure here is the elegant Diahann Carroll. Specifically, Acosta's literature references Carroll's acting role as a sea creature in a 1978 television movie. Added to the cast after pressure to bring in a Black performer, Carroll portrayed not a flesh-and-blood woman but a sexy sea creature--and a hologram at that. Acosta sees Carroll's role as "an illusion that distills the ways in which the black female body has been consumed in mass media: as alien, bodacious, and marginalized."

That's a familiar concern in contemporary performance, and the bodies in Acosta's work, with booties frequently a'twerking at any and all angles, can be viewed in these ways, both boldly playing to and subverting exploitation.

"I exist for you. As you create me, yes, I control your reaction. I'm getting your message. Are you getting mine?" 

--Ashley Brockington in DISCOTROPIC

But I sensed something deeper going on in DISCOTROPIC that proved unique and exciting. I sensed the engineering of a durable spaceship.

My first inkling came as Monstah Black, back turned towards us, flailed his arms and slipped his sneakered feet over what appeared to be a layer of black sand in a recessed storage room. His "sand dancing," his more distinct stomp-and-drag rhythm, and a minute burst of shimmying had me thinking about vaudevillian dance acts. In a later segment, I watched the dancers form a tight, disciplined squadron in which various dancerly routines emerged, the sort of thing we used to see Black singing groups do to enhance the appeal of their acts. I thought of how some marginalized, underemployed tap dancers survived by teaching dance skills to these emerging pop and R&B artists.

Invoking We Travel the Spaceways, by future-perfect jazz priest Sun Ra, the cast's circling, metronomic, escalating vocal patterns suggest an evolution of something post-human, proto-robotic.  But not post-Black. Black survives in the rocking, the swinging and, eventually, in the excess--Acosta's beaming as joy leaps out of his vocal performance.

There's always something passed along, voice to voice, body to body. Something Black survives any alteration of form and any displacement of form, from Africa to the Americas, from the Americas to worlds beyond. Black always was and always will be.

DISCOTROPIC's remaining performances run today at 3pm and 8pm, and Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Westbeth Artist Community
55 Bethune Street (corner of Washington Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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On the APAP Trail: Jack Ferver

Fred Herko was a dancer, an actor, a choreographer, and he took a bath and got out and danced naked in front of his friend to Mozart, finally dancing out of a window to his death. I am a dancer, an actor, a choreographer, and I love taking baths and I have danced naked though have yet to jeté out a window. I have often talked about suicide with my childhood friend Reid Bartelme. Reid will join me in the work. Reid is a beautiful dancer. Reid will make sure I don’t jump.

– Jack Ferver

I'd say there you have it in a nutshell, except there you don't have it.

Jack Ferver's duet with Reid Bartelme, Night Light Bright Light--an American Realness presentation at Abrons Arts Center--runs faster than you can and will leave you panting. It is death-ridden but keeps its audience chuckling. Chock-full of play and humor, nevertheless it harbors the terrible and the irrevocable. It dwells in absurdity as well as precision, grandiosity as well as sincerity, trauma as well as release. There's so much splicing (convulsions of narrative, of tone) from moment to moment that one can get rather annoyed at Mr. Ferver even while marveling at his adorableness. I'm convinced that, with every performance, Ferver must turn his audience into his collective therapist, and that his actual one is somewhere out there in the night, grappling with confusion and doubt and self-medication.

Ballet, sex, torture, anxiety, singing, laughter, death, Tennesee Williams. These things belong together? Well, of course they do!  But see for yourself as the wondrous Night Light Bright Light repeats tomorrow night at 10pm and Sunday, January 18, 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For details about other American Realness festival events at Abrons Arts Center and beyond, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

On the APAP trail--Tere O'Connor's "Undersweet"

In Undersweet, O’Connor works from the supposition that formalism might result from repressed sexual desire. The work is a choreographic meditation on how this paradox finds expression in dance, or possibly even generates it. -- American Realness

But of course.

And, of course, the Facebook hive mind sort of chimed in today with a listicle of ten reasons that dancers make superior sex partners. It's a good day in America when we wake up to find dancers acknowledged for being good for something.

Anyway, if you think you can cram into the tiny Experimental Theater at Abrons Arts Center--and American Realness fest will make every effort, even illegally from what I observed yesterday, to see that you do--try to see Undersweet. It's a 35-minute duet by Tere O'Connor for Michael Ingle and Silas Riener.

If sexual desire is repressed by formalism, that primal energy is seeping out all over the place in Undersweet, and it is affirmed. How could it not be? Let me repeat: Michael Ingle and Silas Riener. Those two angelically gorgeous men could dance the phone book, and it would be worth all of your time. The courtly framework and flourishes of Undersweet do not so much imprison desire as press grapes for wine.

with lighting by Michael O'Connor and a musical collage by Tere O'Connor from Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys

Undersweet repeats on tonight at 8:30pm and Wednesday, January 14 at 5:30pm. Click here for information and tickets.

For information on other American Realness festival events at Abrons Arts Center and beyond, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

On the APAP trail: Half Straddle and Ballez

Some members of The Ballez
(photo: Hedia Maron)

Now might not be the kindest season to hang around The Kitchen, that drab industrial box for the industry of experiment in far Chelsea. But Tina Satter's Obie-winning Half Straddle has set up shop there for the first time, and the chilly environs actually add a bit of vérité to the proceedings.

In Ancient Lives, which is kind of a movie-as-theater inspired by teen flicks from the 1980s but with a whiff of something decades, centuries and even aeons older, we find ourselves deep in the woods with a mesmerizing teacher, her three charges, a little witch and broadcast media equipment old and new. We know we're in the woods because that downstage chaise lounge, inexplicably covered, encrusted and taped by packing materials, has an owl statue perched atop, and there's an outsized badger (Chris Giarmo) playing Chris Giarmo's music live in the upper left corner of the space. And I swear there's a scent of pine--along with troubling power dynamics--drifting through the night air.

The aura of the artificial as well as the self-consciously awkward tickled me, everybody playacting in a production cobbled together as if by a magpie. My favorite bit--a time-warped set piece around the word "poppet"--shows Satter's players at their sharpest in vocal skills and timing.

Performed by Jess Barbagallo, Eliza Bent, Emily Davis, Julia Sirna-Frest, and Lucy Taylor with choreography by Elizabeth Dement, video by Ilan Bachrach, set by Andreea Mincic and lighting by Zack Tinkelman

Ancient Lives continues Wednesday-Saturday, January 14-17 with performances at 8PM. For information and tickets, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

***

Oh, how I regret that Katy Pyle's Variations on Virtuosity, A Gala Performance with The Stars of The Ballez--presented by American Realness at Abrons Arts Center--will have come and gone after only two shows on a single weekend. Why do the best things in life last so briefly while we must endure the likes of social injustice and bad performance? A better question: How soon can someone bring The Ballez (and sexy) back?

The Ballez, we're told,

celebrates the virtuosity of complexly gendered people by choosing the grandiose container of ballet for its presentation. The company celebrates a lineage of dykes and post-modern performance by telling queer/dyke histories inside the framework of classical ballet narratives.

The 45-minute program, beautifully lit by designer Carrie Wood, sampled the Ballez repertoire, including a suite from The Firebird, A Ballez; the Dying Swan excerpt from Sleeping Beauty & the Beast; and the smoking 1993 Club Suite from that last piece. With the exception of the striking Dying Swan solo--attributed to Pyle and dancer Michael Helland after the Fokine choreography for Pavlova--the other works are the handiwork of Pyle and Jules Skloot in collaboration with their ensemble.

Contemporary ballet, by and large, makes my eyes glaze over. I just can't get into it much or much of it. But this isn't contemporary ballet. With the exception of the Club Suite duets, it's classical ballet for contemporary people living in a real world, and it has got my full attention. The Ballez doesn't satirize ballet; it rewrites the rules of who can dance and how they must present themselves. It appropriates technique, stories and characters for all the right reasons. It makes us look closely, in the interactions between and among dancers, to witness utmost care and delicacy of touch as well as power in the fluidity of physical and emotional roles. Dance lives here and will never flame out.

This troupe could sell out--I'm not talking about seats--and part of me would be very happy for Pyle and her collaborators. They have developed a thrilling sophistication in their teamwork and bring something a wider American audience needs to see.

Last chance: Tonight at 9pm. Click here to see if tickets remain available.

For information on other American Realness festival events at Abrons Arts Center and beyond, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Other Forces presents WaxFactory's "#aspellforfainting"

Gillian Chadsey
in WaxFactory's #aspellforfainting

The always-dizzying APAP season continues, including one of the lesser-publicized festivals devoted to independent theater, Incubator Arts Project's Other Forces 2014. Last night, I caught WaxFactory performer Gillian Chadsey, sound artist Ivan Talijancic and video artist Shige Moriya in their collaborative piece, #aspellforfainting, at the Robert Moss Theater, a small performance space off Astor Place.

#aspellforfainting, a 40-minute improvisation, locates its soloist within cinematic sound from Moriya's electronic setup and within imagined, uncharted territory littered with wacky props--sky-high black high heels, a wiggly, musical robot poodle, the requisite fluorescent-pink fright wig--Talijancic delivering each item throughout the piece according to his fancy. Each time Talijancic, slim and mysterious in his shiny, silver hoodie, drops off another prop, Chadsey gives it a split-second, distracted glance and seems to be thinking, "Um, what do you want me to do with that?" But then she carries on. Because she must. Because that's what artists do.

And how she carries on. By now, readers of InfiniteBody might come to think that every APAP-season show is an intense, outlandish solo having something to do with a woman slipping right off the murky edge. Or that I've deliberately chosen to see the ones that do. Maybe I have.

Using Charcot’s Tuesday night lectures at the Salpêtrière and his instigation of hysterical performance as a leaping-off point, WaxFactory traces the lines of fainting, hallucination, delusion, and love letters that run through the source material.

If you go, you won't see exactly what I saw, of course, but you will experience some jumble of words and behaviors constructed from bits of culture, high and low, from A Street Car Named Desire to YouTube. And you will always have the work's north star, Chadsey, with her strength, versatile skill and magnetism. At a bite-size 40 minutes, what can you lose?

#aspellforfainting runs through January 19. For schedule and ticketing information, click here.

You'll be invited to use your mobile devices to to take photos (without flash) or video during the performance and tweet to #aspellforfainting--hence, the quirky title.

Robert Moss Theater

440 Lafayette Street (south of Astor Place), 3rd Floor, Manhattan

(map/directions)

Okwui Okpokwasili's "Bronx Gothic" at Danspace Project

Okwui Okpokwasili in her solo, Bronx Gothic
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Okwui Okpokwasili's Bronx Gothic--an arresting work-in-progress shown during Ishmael Houston-Jones's PLATFORM 2012: Parallels--has now returned to Danspace Project as a complete, evening-length masterpiece. Commissioned by Danspace Project and Performance Space 122, it had its world premiere as part of COIL 2014 and will continue through February 1.

But before you read on about Bronx Gothic, I'd like you to read my post on Dana Michel's Yellow Towel if you have not done so already. You'll find that here. Go and come back. Promise?

You're back? Great. Now I can tell you about Part Two of my evening.

So...I made it through almost all of Michel's show at Abrons then raced out to try to catch a bus uptown. I just missed that particular bus and ended up reaching Danspace Project with maybe two minutes to spare. By the time I made it down from the restroom--no way was I going to sit through 90 minutes more without a pit stop--Okpokwasili had already launched her solo, coursing a continuous orgasmic tremor through her entire body, her liquid muscles, her long, expressive arms. As I slipped into one of the remaining seats, I realized that the dancer's director and designer, Peter Born, had enclosed the space and her entire audience in white curtains similar to the ones Michel had used for her own solo. That was a moment.

For Bronx Gothic, Okpokwasili, raised by her Nigerian immigrant parents in the Bronx, had turned to her youth for inspiration--just like Michel--and mined painful memories of friendship, treachery and despair. Her text--by turns, witty, delicate and lacerating--takes us right back there through the device of a running record of notes surreptitiously passed between an 11-year-old girl and her more worldly school pal. Yes, what kids did before texting.

Sex is the topic of concern and fascination for these two preteens. Their language is frank; the implications of some of the talk--the unstated likelihood that the pal is being abused by her mother's boyfriend--is worrisome. But along with great pain, Okpokwasili finds humor and a certain powerful glamour in female strength, even when it's just fronting, and something literally tidal, earthshaking, in longing and anger.

I had seen Okpokwasili's performance at DP's Parallels and looked forward to Bronx Gothic in finished form. I can report that, since Parallels, this artist has achieved a rare balance between physical and vocal tours de force. These performing modes run parallel throughout the piece, doubling the required prodigious control and stamina. There should be not only a Bessie but Olympic gold for what Okpokwasili has now accomplished. The fact that, in the midst of this great feat of performance, she breaks your heart, absolutely slays you with the poetry of it, makes it all the more remarkable.

Bronx Gothic continues with 8pm performances through February 1. For complete schedule details and to reserve tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

(directions)

Polendo's Juárez in transition: "Never mention hope. Say 'I'll do it!'"

Theater Mitu's Justin Nestor
in Juárez: A Documentary Mythology
below: Aysan Celik

Bill Clinton got lots of mileage from the name of his Arkansas hometown-- Hope. But the people of Mexico's Ciudad Juárez--infamous for entrenched government corruption and murderous drug cartels--would prefer that their city be known for tough determination rather than anything as passive as hope. That's one message from Juárez: A Documentary Mythology, a play conceived and directed by Theater Mitu's artistic director Rubén Polendo (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater through January 19).

Drawn from numerous interviews--including conversations with folks in El Paso, right across the US border--Juárez might remind many of Anna Deavere Smith's award-winning documentary monologues. But here, the profusion of real-life personalities--factory workers, activists, artists, counselors, journalists, academics and more--are channeled through six white actors, all handsomely expressive in the spoken and sometimes sung material. Unfortunately, an aggressively didactic approach--text and visuals packed with statistics and touching upon complex issues--threatens to unbalance the delicate connection between a New York audience and the Mexicans and Texans whose lives and perspectives we learn about. Still, from the start, Polendo--a son of Juárez who has family there--wins our sympathy for a city he believes can be restored to the safety and beauty remembered from his youth.

Juárez is, the play says, "emblematic of what the rest of the world is going to look like." It is "a laboratory for the future." As Alfredo Corchado's recent article for The Dallas Morning News indicates, recovery will be no simple process. But Juárez: A Documentary Mythology offers one way to remind Americans that all our fates are bound together.

Performances by Denis Butkus, Aysan Celik, Adam Cochran, Ryan Conarro, Michael Littig and Justin Nestor

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Place, Manhattan
(map/directions)

"I didn't mean it when I said...": Houston-Jones and Wexler at Abrons

Ishmael Houston-Jones and Emily Wexler
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Here's what they tell us:

Separated by a generation -- he’s in his 60s she in her 30s, and differing in gender and ethnicity – male, female; black, white, these two innovative dance artists have found common ground in their mutual belief that the pop love song is corrosive. That these songs damage any hope at finding true love with their sickening, cloying, and cheesy lyrics.

Dancers Ishmael Houston-Jones and Emily Wexler have made a collage of songs--from Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" to a pretty British folk ballad by Kate Rusby to the narcotized version of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin" by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. These numbers form an offbeat soundtrack for the dancers' episodic duet, 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot. The often flimsy lyrics--like the inclusion of the artists' demographics in the above promotional statement--seem almost besides the point.

A world premiere at American Realness 2014, 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot runs for one hour during which Houston-Jones and Wexler strip romantic love of its seductive disguises and get down to realness. Manic, desperate, childlike, gritty, aggressive, sticky, comic, addictive, ecstatic, visceral realness. Subjected to harsh light and throwing towering shadow. The animal body speaking in signs and howling its insides out.

In one segment, set to Pascal Rogé's recording of Satie's Gymnopédies, the dancers repeatedly attach to each other then melt, stretch and peel away, clearly remaining connected in a blend of sweat, smell and vibration. In another, Wexler reads from old diary entries about an unrequited crush--I'm guessing these are authentic ones she wrote in high school*--using a megaphone to liberate what was once folded away in privacy. "How pathetic, worthless and small I was," she says at one point. Maybe it's because we've all been there, done that, but the audience giggles at many of her words and even Wexler flashes a radiant grin as she says, "Why the hell are you still alive?"

As I see it here, the body is all. The body undermines and overwhelms words. The body is gutsy, often subversive and self-revealing. Both of these powerful dancers--"he's in his 60s she in her 30s"--give themselves over to everything.

And then they ask audience members to give themselves over, in love and worship, to the everything that is their own bodies. The concluding passage invites a fraction of the audience to come into the performing space to engage in a somatic meditation led by Wexler. Meanwhile, Houston-Jones constructs a shrine off to one side, complete with votive candles and several taped-up photo portraits. He sits in lotus pose before these faces, singing the refrain "You are everything and everything is you...." from The Stylistics hit song. Both approaches--Self vs. Other; be-in-the-present vs. live-in-memories--could be corny but, as finally presented here, don't feel corny; both of these created spaces appear genuine.

As I'm sure you're aware by now, Houston-Jones and Wexler and, by extension, Ben Pryor's American Realness festival, got an exceptionally harsh write-up in The New York Times. Obviously, I disagree with this critique of 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot and its artists as well as Michelle Boulé's WONDER (which I saw and reviewed here last May). I have not seen Adrienne Truscott's performance, but the short-sightedness and petulance of the entire review leads me to believe that I might well have missed something of value.

[*Since I posted this review, Wexler has told me that the diaries date back to 4th through 10th grade.]

For your entertainment, let me direct you to something Houston-Jones wrote and posted on Facebook yesterday morning. You will find it here.

Remaining performances of 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot are tonight at 7pm, Friday, January 17 at 5:30pm and Saturday, January 18 at 2:30pm. For schedule and ticketing information, click here.

For complete information about American Realness 2014 at Abrons Arts Center, click here.

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

COIL Festival: Mac Wellman's "Muazzez" opens at The Chocolate Factory

Actor Steve Mellor sits at a small table and gazes at the audience with his doughy, oblong face and initially deadpan expression and begins to spill a torrent of words. This verbal current flows fast, faster, fastest without cease--miraculously, without tongue-twisting--and, at times, will rise to a level of dark bitterness. That Mellor--occupying The Chocolate Factory's earthly space as well as imagined interstellar space strewn with asteroids--introduces himself as an "abandoned cigar factory" with "a zygodactyly foot" is only part of the fun of Muazzez, a 45-minute monologue derived from short stories by known word wizard Mac Wellman.

"There's no drift to my thought," Mellor/Wellman tells us. "My thought is a rooted thing." Sure. No drift but definitely a well-greased sci-fi sequence on the move and speeding you along with it, scrambling your brain along with Wellman's mythopoetic play and scramble of words. We're invited to envision the high Eulalians of whom nothing is known except that they "builded" the cigar factories. We learn of the "primal radial symmetry" of "a series of spokes or spokey type spindles radiating from a deep and frosty central secret," which sounds kid of tasty. There are "non-self hedges and the hegemony of the self's perfect picture of the world" and something Wellman calls the "ambulatory frightwig of unappetizing complication," which strikes me as a useful insult to hurl at the next person to cross me. Yeah.

I am completely won over by this "succession a stratigraphic variorum," this "placing of jars and jarring of places" and Mellor's virtuoso performance that charges and populates nearly bare space with the high Eulalian magic(k) of words.

A COIL Festival co-presentation of Performance Space 122 and The Chocolate Factory, Muazzez runs through January 17. For complete schedule and ticketing details, click here.

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

"Tyson vs. Ali" knocks out 2014 COIL opening

Scene from Reid Farrington's Tyson vs. Ali
(photo by John Hurley)

Reid Farrington and his extensive creative and technical team deliver, yes, a decisive knockout punch with the world premiere of Tyson vs. Ali. And since Farrington's COIL Festival run at 3LD Art & Technology Center has been extended to January 26, you'll have more chances to get your ringside seat.

 

Tyson vs. Ali is a PS 122 commission, produced by
3-Legged Dog and co-presented by PS 122 and 3-Legged Dog.

Less a conventional play about two titans of boxing, Tyson vs. Ali deftly squeezes into one hour, through extraordinary live action, video imagery, text and sound, a visceral encounter with The Boxer as looming archetype and intriguingly complex individual.

At the heart of the work's sensory dazzle are four gifted performers--Dennis A. Allen II, Roger Casey, Femi Olagoke, Jonathan Swain--through which the personalities, words, speech patterns, body language and fighting styles of Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali and others endlessly shift. In other words, no one "fighter" portrays and embodies a stable identity, and you are along for the ride.

The surrounding boxing ring (set by Simon Harding, who also created the video) is similarly fluid with continuously projected imagery, some of it massive, close-up and disturbing. It plunges us into history--through clips from famous matches or from television interviews with the champs--and yanks us back into the present as we gaze upon video images of the actor/dancers' beat-up faces, swollen eyes and bloody gashes. (Shenna Vaughn's special effects makeup is frightfully convincing.)

The various "rounds" and transitions offer, for our contemplation, considerations of boxing style and strategy, the genesis of each boxer's attraction to the sport and, the psychology of champions and, of course, issues of power, sexuality and race.

Although I've seen a few televised matches and have the typical American's awareness of boxing and its celebrities, I do not follow the sport. But you need not be a boxing fan to appreciate Tyson vs. Ali. Farrington's team has achieved a coherent and powerful beauty.

With choreography by Laura K. Nicoll, script by Frank Boudreaux, performances by Dennis A. Allen II, Roger Casey, Femi Olagoke, Jonathan Swain and Dave Shelley; sound design by Juan Aboites

Tyson vs. Ali has been extended through January 26. For complete information, including schedule details, click here. To purchase tickets, click here.

3LD Art & Technology Center
80 Greenwich Street (near Rector Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Closing soon: Half Straddle, Jeanine Durning, "Black Latina"

Susie Sokol and Becca Blackwell of Half Straddle

For Seagull (Thinking of you), Tina Satter and her troupe Half Staddle take scissors to Chekov's The Seagull, his letters and other material, stapling slivers of original language to shards of modern speech (in English, Russian and pseudo-Russian). This deconstruction/reconstruction serves up a compact gull in 75 mostly entertaining minutes with electric, charming performances by a small cast--notably Eliza Bent (Masha), Susie Sokol (Arkadina), Emily Davis (Nina) and Jess Barbagallo (Treplov)--as well as the scrupulous arrangement and deployment of sensory delights (Zack Tinkelman's lighting, Enver Chakartash's costumes and Chris Giarmo's sound design and original music). Presented by Performance Space 122's COIL fest at the New Ohio Theatre. Extended to January 26. For complete schedule information and tickets, click here.

Jeanine Durning's inging (2012) occupies a space set up to have the feeling of a college classroom. In fact, as each member of the audience comes in, he or she can take a folding chair and place it anywhere in the room that will afford a decent view of a table serving as Durning's desk. A tall stack of books on this "desk" prop up a small digital point-and-shoot set for videotaping her. We can see the monitor of the recording as she stands behind the desk. Behind her, we see three different pre-recorded videos--side by side by side--that show Durning sitting, talking and gesturing. For 50 minutes, the live-action Durning (her name ends in ing, and she clearly relishes that state of being in continuous process) mainly talks non-stop. And I don't mean taking pauses for hydration (although a bottle of water rests on her desk, and she occasionally handles it) or for sustained breath. Oh, no. None of that. She starts by suddenly slipping behind the desk and just goes for the duration of the time, with all sorts of associations and disassociations, all kinds of vocal blips and repetitions, self-interruptions and self-disruptions pulled into her rapid, auto-replenishing stream of consciousness. "What do you say when there's too much to say?" she asks, at one point. Maybe the answer is that it all just breaks down and breaks out in every possible direction. Yes--if you were wondering--this "choreography of the mind," as she calls it, can be considered dance because her speech has fabulous rhythms and is, in itself, the body working very hard. Ultimately, she can't even maintain her position behind the desk, and her wandering around forces us to twist in our seats to follow. Presented by American Realness at Abrons Arts Center. Final performances today at 4pm and 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

When Black Latina, a 45-minute ensemble piece written by Crystal S. Roman and directed by Veronica Caicedo, started off looking and, especially, sounding like a derivative from the 1970s--think For Colored Girls--my heart sunk a little. Not that I didn't love (and desperately need) Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. But, in 2013, might we be ready for an innovative approach? In Black Latina, we find an ensemble of women of color, symbolically dressed in orange prison garb, sitting or dancing on blocks arranged around the space, each airing her pain and frustrations and observations in pedantic expressions declaimed at high volume--"The media bombards us with ideas of what beauty should be," "You're too closed-minded to comprehend the miracle of being a Black Latina," and so forth. As expected, they aim to speak for the unheard, raise awareness, rally sisters in the audience in pride and solidarity with evocations of family togetherness and the pleasures of traditional food, music and party time. Somewhere along the way, though, I began to see Roman's contribution as indeed something new, supportive and motivating for her community--women of mixed Black and Latina heritage struggling for acknowledgement and respect, not only in dominant white society, but also among Blacks, Latinos and often their own family members who may value light skin over dark. Out of love and urgency, her devoted cast--particularly Judy Torres, Teniece Divya Johnson and Jenelle Simone, whose performance styles are detailed, joyful and commanding--really work it out. I'd love to see Black Latina produced in our city schools. These women won me over, and their audience returned the love. Presented by The Black Latina Movement at Teatro LATEA. Closing tonight. For information and ticketing, click here.