The Joyce's American Dance Platform: UBW and DCDC

Chanon Judson of Urban Bush Women
(photo: Gennia Cui)

American Dance Platform: Urban Bush Women and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
January 7 and 12

If it's true what they say about how viewers' mirror neurons respond when audiences look at dancers moving, and you attended The Joyce on Tuesday night for American Dance Platform, your mirror neurons likely got a serious workout. Evidence for that, from me, is how exhausted I felt the next morning as if even every toe nail and eyelash I possess were worked to max from watching Urban Bush Women (UBW) and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC), two troupes of extraordinary physical daring and power. More evidence came from the way the opening night audience responded in the moment. I'm not talking about the expected, and justified, standing Os and rousing cheers; I mean those very Black mmmhmmms, the audible sighs, the cries, the groans and other unrestrained vocalizing that greeted DCDC dancers killing it during Abby Zbikowski's Indestructible (2018) with apparently zero fear of bodily wear-and-tear. If, in a sense, we all danced along with UBW and DCDC as we witnessed them, I await my Bessie nomination.

With the very recent departure of Du'Bois A'Keen, UBW is back to being an all-woman company. My favorite on the evening's bill (to be repeated this coming Sunday) was UBW's Women's Resistance, an excerpt from les écailles de la mémoire (Scales of Memory) with choreographic direction from founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Germaine Acogny with additional choreography from eight former and current UBW members. It takes a village. And, indeed, looks like a village...of disciplined women warriors demonstrating their earth-sprung, spring-loaded battle-readiness within a sonic environment where shredding mechanical rhythms suggest both how formidable these women are and how menacing are the forces they are up against. UBW paired this ensemble with Zollar's 1989 I Don't Know, But I Been Told, If You Keep On Dancin' You Never Grow Old, which now includes segments from visible (2011), made by nora chipaumire and Marguerite Hemmings. And, yes, there is a definite connection and throughline--similar resourcefulness, ingenuity and high skill even in the midst of play that some might unwisely consider trivial.

UBW performers: Courtney J. Cook, Melissa Cobblah Gutierrez (Understudy), Jasmine Hearn, Chanon Judson (Co-Artistic Director), Love Muwwakkil, Samantha Spies (Co-Artistic Director), Elaisa van der Kust, Makaila Ware

Taking on Indestructible, Ohio's venerable DCDC--founded in 1968 by Jeraldyne Blunden and now directed by her daughter, Debbie Blunden-Diggs--was right in tune with the night's audacious mood. The main difference is, with Abby Z high-impact, daredevil choreography, neither you nor the dancers get a chance to chill. So, again, those mirror neurons.... Add occasional blasts from the electronic, industrial hip hop band Death Grips. The evening wrapped up with DCDC's excerpt from Donald Byrd's The Geography of the Cotton Field (2014) which paints, with an elegant hand, a canvas at once sweepingly abstract and epically specific.

DCDC performers: Devin Baker, Qarrianne Blayr (Associate Artistic Director), Breanna Dorsey, Alexandria Flewellen, Michael Green, Steve Lamblin, Robert Pulido, Elizabeth Ramsey, Nile Alicia Ruff, Nabachwa Ssensalo (Actress), Quentin Apollovaughn Sledge, Matthew J. Talley, Countess V. Winfrey

One show remains--this Sunday at 7:30pm--but tickets are sold out.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(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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Your list of the 2017 Bessie recipients...and thanks!

RECIPIENTS OF 

THE 2017 NY DANCE AND PERFORMANCE (BESSIE) AWARDS

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Artistic Director, Urban Bush Women
(photo: Crush Boone)

A Lifetime Achievement in Dance Bessie Award
was given to Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
last evening at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts,
presented by dancer-choreographer Dianne McIntyre.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN DANCE

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

For forming Urban Bush Women in 1984 and bringing to the stage a complex, bold, and affirming vision of the African Diaspora. For transforming and diversifying the field by developing new ways of training, curating, connecting, and lifting up generations of choreographers of color. For a visionary life both on the stage and in the world.

OUTSTANDING SERVICE TO THE FIELD OF DANCE

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

For her capacity to reflect, contextualize, and discern dance work, providing an urgent and necessary voice for dance artists and their varied practices. For her work as writer, educator, mentor, and activist over many decades in print, radio, and online. For strengthening the city’s arts community as an important witness, an intentional healer, and a mindful presence.

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer Bridgman|Packer Dance for Voyeur at the Sheen Center

For groundbreaking use of video in live performance, creating a space where virtual and actual movement merged. For inhabiting Edward Hopper’s imagery and taking the audience on an inventive journey of private spaces and ever-shifting viewpoints.

Antony Hamilton for Meeting at La MaMa with Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

For obsessive, precise choreography that synthesized two men’s movements with a circle of robots’ percussive tapping into a mesmerizing whole. For a work both abstract and profoundly human.

Ligia Lewis for minor matter at American Realness with Lumberyard Contemporary Performing Arts at Abrons Arts Center

For interrogating the social inscriptions on the black body within the frame of the black box. Moving with the logic of interdependence, three dancers push against the theater’s physical space transforming it into a visceral world pulsing with love and rage.

Taylor Mac for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse with Pomegranate Arts

For an epic, tireless, and bold 24-hour performance that generated thought and action through the deep investigation of music's role in our common humanity. A carefully curated concert featuring 246 songs, extravagant visual transformations, and a community-creating ritual of hope.

Abdel Salaam for Healing Sevens with Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theatre, Illstyle & Peace Productions, and Dyane Harvey Salaam at DanceAfrica, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

For the combined efforts of three stellar companies using West African, hip-hop, and modern dance forms to find new ways of storytelling, new ways to deliver healing truths. For exploring how multiple generations of a community can look within to resolve conflict and violence

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL

Ishmael Houston-Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, Nick Hallett, and Jennifer Monson for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes From a Life and Other Works by John Bernd at Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found

For channeling the artistic vision of John Bernd, whose narrative, along with those so many others, was cut short by AIDS. For shepherding a young cast into communion with the spirit of the work. For responding to, reimagining, and restoring a missing chapter of our creative history.

OUTSTANDING PERFORMER

PeiJu Chien-Pott in Martha Graham’s Ekstasis, reimagined by Virginie Mécéne, Martha Graham Dance Company at The Joyce Theater

For bringing to life a lost Martha Graham solo from 1933, masterfully inhabiting the earthy, percussive, and fluid movements of pelvis and torso, and embodying the very essence of Graham’s ecstatic vision.

Anna Schön for Sustained Achievement in the work of Reggie Wilson’s Fist & Heel Performance Group

A bold presence and generous performer who moves with raw emotion and lightning speed while remaining sensitive to and connected with her fellow dancers. A deeply spiritual dancer who brings utter conviction to every performance.

Ensemble of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds: Maria Bauman, Sidra Bell, Davalois Fearon, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Melanie Greene, Kayla Hamilton, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Nia Love, Paloma McGregor, Sydnie L. Mosley, Rakiya Orange, Grace Osborne, Leslie Parker, Angie Pittman, Samantha Speis, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Ni’Ja Whitson, and others*

Curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa for Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found

For a history-in-the-making performance that dismantled improvisational dance norms to create a robust, disruptive, and dynamic world. For a cast of individuals who used a full range of movement styles to take the audience from Dakar to Kingston, the Bronx to Bushwick, in a fluid dance of connection.

*Edisa Weeks and Tara Aisha Willis were also in the cast but are ineligible as they serve on the Bessie Selection Committee.

Daaimah Taalib-Din for Sustained Achievement with Forces of Nature Dance Theatre

A chameleon of dance styles from traditional African to contemporary African Diasporic forms. A dynamic presence in every work in which she dances, moving from highly stylized to smoothly nuanced with impeccable grace and technique.

OUTSTANDING MUSICAL COMPOSITION/SOUND DESIGN

Alisdair Macindoe for Meeting by Antony Hamilton at La MaMa with Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

For creating a complex percussive score using 64 tiny robots armed with tapping pencils. For adding the virtuosic rhythms of two dancers slapping hands and reciting numbers to create a unique soundscape that was both relentless and strangely satisfying.

OUTSTANDING VISUAL DESIGN

Taylor Mac (creator), Niegel Smith (director), Machine Dazzle (costume), Mimi Lien (set), John Torres (lights), Eric Avery (puppetry), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (choreography) for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse with Pomegranate Arts

For a thoroughly considered and painstakingly crafted visual experience revealed over 24-hours and 24-decades of American history. For a complex, complementary, and immersive mix of scenography, costumes, lighting, puppets, and crowd control which transformed a concert into a sublime engagement of all the senses.

Two awards were presented in July at the 2017 Bessie Awards press conference:

The 2017 Emerging Choreographer Award went to Will Rawls for creating astute, genre-eluding work that explores the relationship between movement and language and delves deeply into ideas of transmission, translation, and authorship; and for his multifaceted artistry as choreographer, writer, editor, and curator, expanding the presence of dance and performance.

This year’s Juried Bessie Award went to Abby Zbikowski for her rigorous and utterly unique development of an authentic movement vocabulary, employed in complex and demanding structures to create dances of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger. The 2017 Bessies Jury was comprised of Kyle Abraham, Brenda Bufalino, and Beth Gill.

To view the livestream video, click here.

For more information on the Bessies, click here.

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Congratulations to all the Bessie recipients and nominees. I am grateful for your commitment, your work, all you create and share to build and sustain this field.

My deepest thanks to Lucy Sexton and the Bessies Committee for the profound honor of receiving the 2017 Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. I could not be more moved by this recognition of my work and by the amazing, loving introduction byThomas F. DeFrantz. I suppose I will have to carry y'all a little bit longer, but the work is as joyful as it is necessary.

My deepest respect and love to the members of the new collective, Skeleton Architecture. Congratulations on the award we all knew you were destined to receive. As individual artists, each of you have already given so much to the art of dance. Your exceptional performance together at Danspace Project in 2016 wrote an exciting new chapter in all of these individual stories, now part of Bessies history. As a collective now, you will write your future...and ours. We cannot wait to see what you have to teach us!

Much love,Eva

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News from the Bessies for 2017!

Dance artist Lela Aisha Jones is among four nominees
for this year's Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer.
(photo: Alex Shaw)

The NY Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies) organization has announced four nominees for the 2017 Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award:

Lela Aisha Jones
Niall Jones
Will Rawls
Katarzyna Skarpetowska

In addition, Abby Zbikowski will receive the 2017 Juried Bessie Award.

These two awards will be presented on July 12 (6-7pm) at a press conference at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, preceded by a ticketed cocktail party (5-6pm).  The organization will also announce nominees for Outstanding Production, Outstanding Revival, Outstanding Performer, Outstanding Music Composition or Sound Design and Outstanding Visual Design.

Information on the July 12 cocktail party and press conference: click

And hold the date for the 33rd Annual Bessie Awards: Monday, October 9, at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts!

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 33 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 comprised 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 participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. www.bessies.org

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Rough playground: Abby Zbikowski at Abrons Arts

from Abandoned playground,
a new work by Abby Z and the New Utility
(photos: Eric Falck)

For abandoned playground, her world premiere at Abrons Arts Center, choreographer Abby Zbikowski converts the center's formal Playhouse stage into an intimate and drab, utilitarian performance space. No, let me type the word I first thought of: arena. Although that word might give you the false impression of large-scale size with Zbikowski's audience at a safe remove. Well, forget about it. No such size or safety exists.

Instead, abandoned playground is damned dangerous, as is Abby Z and the New Utility, Zbikowski's outrageous troupe--Alexa Bender, Shaela Davis, Justin Faircloth, Ali Herring, Fiona Lundie, Jennifer Meckley, Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez, Carlo Antonio Villanueva and Jessie Young--like STREB's action heroes. Sitting on the Abrons stage in a ring around these dancers, within inches of their propelled limbs, you find yourself flinching and tucking your body out of reach of thrusts and jabs and droplets of sweat and feet slicing too close to your face. The New Utility might have valiantly signed up for an hour of combat duty, but you did not.

Those moments when one or another dancer will step out of the space, fold over gasping for breath and maybe get a sympathetic back rub from a colleague--those are likely real, not just for show. Because what goes on inside, under Jon Harper's darkness-enhancing lighting, is driven and brutal.

Once the dancers are in the space, warming up in their soccer shorts, if you notice a physicality and physical practice similar to that of prize fighters, you're on the right track. Pretty soon, they're whipping up and around, scrunching, pivoting and rebounding as if fighting with something invisible while battling themselves.

They gradually exit and re-enter through a retracted metal gate at the rear of the stage to an explosive soundscape, like a video war game, and to momentarily stronger lighting. Flailing arms seem to jerk two women's bodies backward, like they might pull right out of their sockets. One dancer spins on her knees, and her head twists rapidly as if trying to detach. Another pair creeps together along the floor or scrambles sideways.

Among other dance styles--such as hip hop and Senegalese Germaine Acogny's technique--Zbikowski has tap in her background. For some reason I can't begin to explain, I began to see it in some manically aggressive yet rhythmic moves. By that point, I might have been hallucinating. Anyway, the impression passed quickly.

Another moment found a dancer rising into a neat headstand--a very satisfying look, no?  So virtuosic!--only to slam over onto her back. She got up and stood near me, loudly panting--sounds of breath and impact of bone on floor are big time here--only to bound back into the center for another punishing solo. Sidelined players sometimes shout encouragement to those on the field--You got it! You got it!

For anyone who, like myself, feels dance to the core, with empathy that draws you into the work, this playground offers a hardcore workout unlike any other. Or almost. Again, there's STREB. But what appears to be going on here--which separates this work from anything I've ever seen from STREB--is a comment on our threatening times and a call to toughen up in response. And that means you, audience, too. This is not mere spectacle.

With original music by Raphael Xavier

Abandoned playground runs through Saturday, April 15 with a sold-out run, but for information on possible wait-list tickets, click here.

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

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Movement Research Festival: Gwen Welliver and Abby Zbikowski

Choreographers  Gwen Welliver and Abby Zbikowski shared last evening's program at Danspace Project as part of the 2015 Movement Research Festival (Vanishing Point). The two artists were selected by festival curators Beth Gill and Cori Olinghouse to explore new ways of envisioning abstraction in contemporary dance. If postmodernists stripped "fantasy, metaphor and characters" from dancemaking, would it be possible to reclaim these compelling elements in fresh ways?

Paul Klee's Was für ein Pferd! (What a Horse!), 1929

With What a Horse!--the title alludes to a Paul Klee line drawing--Welliver works on this problem by transferring her own drawing practice to physical bodies on the move. Happily, two of the bodies in question belong to Claire Westby and Stuart Singer, both excellently suited for Welliver's heroic aesthetic here, capable of bold, substantial presence in space, with a launching as noisily assertive as Jake Meginsky's sound score. When Welliver has Westby extend a leg, for instance, it resembles both a puncturing weapon and a decisive act of punctuation. In either case, we quickly get that this is not a figure to tangle with, just as the childlike, spindly lines in the Klee drawing convey the electric dynamism of its horse and rider. Amid the plumped out, sculptural lines of Welliver's abstraction, there is some galloping, cantering, trotting and the introduction of a third figure--dancer Reid Bartelme (sporting a protective vest of what appears to be black leather covering a pale, satiny shirt) who heralds something of smoother, silkier texture in both movement and music.

If, as an abstractionist, Zbikowski takes interest in stripping anything away, it's stripping our sense that the art of dance is about making things look effortless. She foregrounds effort, even discomfort. In her duet, double nickels on a dime, she brings the "outside" influences of punk, hip-hop and martial arts into the formal space of concert dance but not as fetishized artifact but as form, energy and psyche embodied, in a matter-of-factly outrageous way, by wonderful Fiona Lundie and Jennifer Meckley. Like Singer and Westby in What a Horse!, these dancers take the space in great gulps, sneakers making noisy impact, legs striding wide, bodies jutting and wrenching within organized, neat lines of structure. Watch and you feel everything--the concision of the lines, the athletic power, the attitude of being ready for anything. Every now and then, I see a performance that would make an ideal bridge from the often insular world of contemporary dance to the rest of the universe, and this is one.

The 2015 Movement Research Festival concludes tomorrow. For information on remaining events, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

DoublePlus ends first season: Maree ReMalia and Abby Zbikowski

This week, the DoublePlus series at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center wraps up its first season with works by Maree ReMalia | merrygogo and Abby Zbikowski. The two, both MFA grads from Ohio State University, were curated for DoublePlus by longtime OSU professor and award-winning choreographer Bebe Miller.

Fiona Lundie (left) and Jennifer Meckley
in Abby Zbikowski's destabilizer
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Zbikowski, now teaching at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), is showing her boisterous duet, destabilizer, a solid hunk of choreography. What starts off looking like a predictable gimmick--when Fiona Lundie and Jennifer Meckley show up with rolls of duct tape, you gotta figure where things are headed--turns into an explosive, deliriously creative tour de force. But it doesn't stop there. And it isn't just about two tough cookies, their punk-rock energy and prizefighter reflexes, which is as far as some less-interesting makers would have gotten. The work is surprisingly dance-y, not just athletic, and the excellent Lundie and Meckley are all over that. There's precision, rhythm, spring and sensuality in the bodies and the structure. And also, costume changes! For whatever reason! More Zbikowski, please--and soon.

Anna Thompson
in scenes from now is now by Maree ReMalia
(photos: Alex Escalante)

ReMalia (aka merrygogo), based now in DC, has a background in Gaga, the body-freeing technique created by Ohad Naharin. Her work, now is now, features Pittsburgh-based movement/sound art duo slowdanger (Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson) navigating sonic storms and small, crumpled heaps of plastic rain ponchos. As props and costuming, the ponchos offer nearly endless possibilities for a childlike, cartoonish imagination. But these are two very, very intense children and ones who never allow themselves to stay with any game long enough to get bored. You're advised to follow suit. Dip in where it suits you, pay attention to the now, and keep it moving.

ReMalia and Zbikowski's program continues tonight through Saturday. Performances start at 7:30pm. Friday's show will be followed by a Q&A with Bebe Miller and the choreographers. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis
Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)