Okpokwasili and Born's "Adaku's Revolt"

Okwui Okpokwasili
(photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Adaku's Revolt
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
Abrons Arts Center
March 14-24

One young black girl becomes alert to her inner signals, finds the strength to resist expectations, and revolts against efforts to straighten her hair. -- from Abrons Arts Center's website

Out of the blue, a thought visited me over breakfast today:

No, you can't touch my hair. My hair is part of my body. I do not give you permission to touch my body. So, why do you think you can touch my hair?

I'd swear I don't know where that came from, but I do know it's something I should have said, years ago, to one man--the husband of a fellow dance critic--whose white hand shot out and touched my woolly head. Happened so fast, I didn't have time to cringe, flinch or launch a preemptive strike, which I now so wish I had done.

And I also know Okwui Okpokwasili (with director/designer Peter Born) must have triggered something with a new ensemble work, Adaku's Revolt, just opened at Abrons Arts Center. It's not about white people touching Black people's hair, the site of both painful and glorious historical experience and culture. But it is about how white aesthetics touch Black people's hair...and bodies...and values...and lives.

Dear Okwui, as you must imagine, I know all about the perils of getting the "kitchen" straightened with a hot comb. I think you must have reached out and touched a nerve.

Urban Bush Women's dancers are also looking at the Black hair thing this season with Hair & Other Stories. But Okpokwasili's concept and Born's visual design appear to have the potential to help Adaku's Revolt work down into the subconscious in a way that UBW's far more direct piece--with audience participation that keeps our conscious minds centered and on high alert--might not.

Above: Dancer AJ Wilmore as Adaku
Below: Wilmore with Okwui Okpokwasili
(photos: Ian Douglas)

The audience is directed to its place on the stage of Abrons's theater through a back channel and instructed to take seats lining three sides of the performance space. As we enter and get settled, the scene has already been set, a compelling visual atmosphere already built. Before a white screen, four dancers lie on the floor with torsos stiffly arched and heads thrown back. Above them, a large windsock of pearly-white gossamer continuously flows out from a big fan, its hypnotizing, watery fabric reaching for another dancer, our Adaku (AJ Wilmore), who writhes, wriggles, tilts, chops and revs up as she sits in a chair. A dense assemblage of what appear to be ordinary desk lamps lights the area.

Within Born's vision, Okpokwasili's placement and movement of individual and group bodies take the shape of dreams with nonlinear but soul-tugging storytelling. White fabric engulfing and molding itself across faces. Bodies emerging from beneath pulsating fabric. Hips and feet twisting, pelvises rocking and left hands raised high in the air over a captivating--and destabilizing--polyrhythm of music and women's voice-overs and live singing.

I tried to jot down something Wilmore said before her turbulent yet mutually-supportive duet with Okpokwasili, and I think I got it right:

I'm going to open all the doors in my head.

Doors opening bring music and voices--both louder, brighter, undeniable--and the birth-like reclamation of bodies. I think the piece, just under an hour, seemed longer. For me, its conclusion fell short of grace or definitude. But something about it all clearly reminded me to revolt.

******

Choreographed and created in collaboration with Peter Born and performers Khadidiatou Bangoura, Peter Born, Audrey Hailes, Breyanna Maples and AJ Wilmore

Adaku's Revolt runs through March 24 with performances at various times. For information and tickets, click here.

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


******

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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Lime Rickey International presents "Future Faith" at Abrons

Lime Rickey International (aka Leyya Mona Tawil)
(photo: Vesa Loikas Photography)

Future Faith
Lime Rickey International
Abrons Arts Center
March 7-9

"Lime Rickey International is the superconsciousness of Leyya Mona Tawil, an artist working with dance, sound and performance practices. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Lime Rickey International emerged as a container for the world of lost homelands. The works of Lime reference Tawil’s training in Arabic dabke as well as decades of work in the realm of contemporary dance, improvisation and experimental performance." -- from publicity for Future Faith 

*****

Syrian-Palestinian-American transdisciplinary artist Leyya Mona Tawil first appears to us drenched in red light, hunched in a corner just to the side of the Underground Theater's staircase. We're finding our seats, and she's taking a private moment, crouched on the floor with the front of her body turned towards a wall. The audience seating has been shifted around from its usual orientation to now afford a view of the theater's door and staircase and part of the balcony. The theater space is not big but, gazing across at Tawil, an onlooker might feel, at once, both distant and invasive.

The deep red serves as the performer's shield, though; at the start, we can't detect, for instance, the glossy electric-blue/green cyan of her wig or shiny chartreuse of her costume. Later, these items become shields, too, for the human beneath.

There's a persistent drone that--even more than the visual elements--serves notice that we've stepped into altered, potentially hazardous space. Although it comes from equipment near Tawil, it might just as easily stream from her pores. Just who and what are we looking at, anyway, and what is about to happen?

*****

"The choreographers that I know and respect who are pushing dance forward right now are trying to create a model of relationships - not just between dancer and dancer, but dancer and audience, and also dancer and society, and stage and society. So what we're doing onstage is actually a suggestion for how we can treat one another in the world. Contemporary dance is a suggestion about how we wish the world would be. It is less about art reflecting society and more about art going through the wall and creating something more. This is a search for future forms." -- "Leyya Tawil in Conversation with Linda Weintraub" (Critical Correspondence, 2014)

*****

The visual and sonic mood eventually lifts, and we see Tawil more clearly despite the fake hair flopping over her skin. Dancing, she looks robust in her futuristic, kind of goofy costume, a strapping woman freely inventing and reinventing herself and not hesitating to assert herself in space. Her angular moves sprawl every which way, gesticulate as if she were a stick figure engaged in full-body sign language. She flaps and stomps, and I'm reminded that dabke--the name of an exuberant Arabic dance tradition she cites as an influence in her work--literally means the dance of stomping.

I do not know what it means when, late in the 45-minute piece, Tawil's sound swerves back into the threat zone, but it's like the room becomes a paper shredder, and I'm thinking that--what does she call it? superconsciousness?--is something formidable with which we should never presume to get too cozy.

Composition/Choreography/Performance: Leyya Mona Tawil
Live Lighting: Emese Csornai
Costume: Scott Tallenger
Set Design:Tim Clifford
Audio Tech: Ian Douglas-Moore

*****

Future Faith concludes with a 7pm performance this evening. For information and tickets, click here.

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

*****

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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prettygirl264264 checks in from Abrons Arts Center

Ashley R.T. Yergens
in character for prettygirl264264
(photo: Fred Attenborough)

What you focus on increases. Or, maybe it's, What you focus on expands. Or what...ever.

That favored quote of New Agey savants came to mind at last evening's world premiere of prettygirl264264, when I gauged the distance--physical and otherwise--between trans performance artist Ashley R.T. Yergens and a flat screen television displaying appearances by singer Cher, the late Sono Bono and their trans son Chaz Bono. My interest in Sonny and Cher had faded out quite early, with their pop star heyday and my youth, and has not made a miraculous recovery in the current age of celebrity tv and Twitter. So, I was content to train nearly undivided attention on the present moment and the live action before us at Abrons Arts Center where the Underground Theater's floor was nearly blanketed by a cheery layer of party balloons. Yes, party balloons for something Yergens billed as his "premature funeral."

The service served an atypical "In Loving Memory Of" funeral card in lieu of a program. The dearly not-quite-yet-departed took a while to appear, the buildup to that appearance including a standout, if painful, performance of "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" by lily bo shapiro, dolled up in gleaming, cherry pink unitard and oversized, rhinestone-encrusted glasses. Yes, a Celine Dion anthem at a premature funeral where evocation of Judy Garland's connection to blackface, Sonny Bono's death by skiing into a tree, and a full-out dance duet routine to La Bouche's "Be My Lover" are not only inevitable but completely appropriate.

Not too long ago, I read a New York Times obituary that told the story of how the late actor James Karen asked his buddies, unbeknownst to one another, to draft his obit long before he actually passed. His wife finally revealed to one friend, George Clooney, that Karen had a habit of doing this so that he'd be around to enjoy what people thought of him. Not a terrible idea. And, in his way, Yergens is doing the same--inviting us in to indulge one trans man's moment of celebration and to contemplate how rare acknowledgement and celebration can be at the end of many trans lives.

If neither the celebs onscreen (one, a "gay icon" who is cisgender and straight; the other, an early, selective and reluctant object of mainstream media spotlight on trans lives) can fairly represent the range of trans experience, neither can Yergens, keenly aware of his white, able-bodied visibility and privilege. prettygirl264264--the title comes from an old AOL handle--speaks from a particular sliver of experience and sensibilities, bringing wry lightheartedness in a time of serious political struggle. And, yes, we need that contribution, too.

Video: Rena Anakwe

Performers: Sydney Boyu, Nico Brown, lily bo shapiro, Mur, Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal, Ashley R.T. Yergens

Lighting: Jennifer Fok

Original Music: Trashed My Living Room and ErasedMur

prettygirl264264 continues tonight and Saturday evening with performances at 7:30pm. 50% of ticket sales benefit trans rights organizations. Although both performances have sold out, Abrons promises to get some walkups in. So try for it! For information, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(Plan your visit.)

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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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"Folk Incest": a new Juliana F. May ensemble at Abrons

Molly Poerstel dancing in Juliana F. May's Folk Incest
(photo: Ian Douglas)

In FOLK INCEST, five women interrogate seemingly unrepresentable subject matters including the Holocaust, sexual trauma, and the fetishization of young girls. As pop cultural references, genres, and bodily traumas compress into each other, the work’s biting humor offers catharsis, simultaneously critiquing and supporting abstraction. (from publicity for Juliana F. May's Folk Incest) 

Disorientation. It starts with being directed into one of the drab rooms at Abrons Arts Center not usually used as a venue for performance.

Once there, the audience for Juliana F. May's new, short ensemble--
Folk Incest--sits in a single row around the perimeter of the room. Last night, May drew a particularly chatty, lively group with a bunch of friends even posing for a cellphone photo before, strangely, everyone suddenly piped down. I looked around to see if there something signaled this quieting. If so, I couldn't detect it. Eventually, the lights lowered.

Then a woman appeared--amazing Molly Poerstel--seated in a chair near one of two doors to the corridor. A gentle light fell upon her, a marking that told us she was not really one of us. Or maybe she was. One of us. Plus.

She held a few sheets of paper. She began to read from them...or try to speak with great, forceful difficulty...and I rapidly became so engrossed in what I heard that I don't even recall if she was really glancing at the paper. Poerstel's monologue turned into a tour de force utilizing dexterous mental and vocal ability, beginning with stammering and sputtering, spinning out into something that...oh, I don't know...maybe an exorcist should be brought in to handle. Secrets blurted, profanities barked, surfaces erupting with the long-buried dead. Searing. Scorching. It felt of the moment.

In time, other women appeared in the space--Leslie Cuyjet, Tess Dworman, Lucy Kaminsky, Rebecca Wender, eventually joined by Poerstel. Their big, ungainly, willful, scattered movements smack away any sense that they will behave, or that we can relax, or that they don't belong there. Vengeful energies Poerstel's monologue unleashed, perhaps. Later, there came a wiping-off of makeup, a baring of breasts, a flurry of words sometimes tripping out too quickly to catch, an incredibly elaborate performance of something folksong-ish that, once again, made a viewer marvel at performers' abilities to memorize and recall.

I take the "folk" aspect of this to allude to commonality, and that is something we are certainly coming to grips with as we deal with #MeToo revelations and other testimonies of trauma. Traumatic experience and its consequences are common, not rare, one-off incidents happening to people we do not know. They happen to people we know. They happen in our families. They happen to us. They happen with such frequency to make us question the environments in which we should seek safety and solace. They are common, shared among us like the air we breathe, toxic and injurious to individuals and, ultimately, to all.

And they are festering under the skin and in the bones of the art we choose to call abstract.

Seating is limited, and remaining shows are sold out. But if there's a waiting list, Folk Incest is worth a try to get in.

Folk Incest continues through this Saturday, October 20, with performances at 7:30pm. For information, click here.

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

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By Association: New performance from Pallavi Sen, Elena Rose Light and Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez

Above: Elena Rose Light (left)
and Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez
(photo: Malcolm-x Betts)

By Association is a platform for artists to collectively experiment with the practice of associative thinking. An artist is invited to be the “instigatory link” in a chain of thought, who then invites another artist whose practice informs and/or challenges their line of inquiry. This artist then invites another artist, and so the pattern continues. For three nights, the chain fuses and breaks in the form of shared evening presentations that put artists in creative discourse with one another across artistic disciplines. -- from publicity for Abrons Arts Center's By Association: Elena Rose Light, Pallavi Sen, Bully Fae Collins

The Underground Theater at Abrons Arts Center bugs me. It is so infernally ugly with its brutal, oppressive design. There isn't anything I like about this space, though I've seen some cool things there. I sometimes think it's designed to eat whatever enters.

And it might have eaten Pallavi Sen's section of last evening's By Association: Elena Rose Light, Pallavi Sen, Bully Fae Collins, except that Sen's multifaceted visual display--a bustling, long/tall thing spanning most of the space while Sen sat all-too-gently reading its text at one side--seemed too monumental to be easily consumed by the theater...or by its audience. I must admit when I wasn't checking out the imagery in front of me, Sen's voice almost lulled me to sleep. I made an effort to shift focus to her, now and again, but I suspect she wanted to stay out of sight, her body folded close to the darkened floor and tucked away with her words (about her South Asian family and about loss) and her little reading light, while her projections unfolded a manifest of what her mind is really like. I can probably call to my own mind what her lost relatives looked like and everything dancing around their cameo portraits but, for the life of me, I will not be able to tell you much of what she told us about them or what Sen looked like last evening.

After a ten-minute break, though, collaborators Elena Rose Light and Mexico-born Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez ate the theater.

Their opening momentarily fooled us into thinking the intermission was just continuing. Lights did not go down. Eventually, at both extreme ends of peripheral vision, I became aware of presences at the tops of the long staircases leading down into the performance space from both sides of the theater. Presences barely visible. Presences beginning to vibrate. Presences that, when finally fully seen, presented as comic. Comic in their ridiculous suits painstakingly constructed of clear, crinkly bubble wrap. Comic in the way they endlessly bounced on their feet and pumped their arms and scampered all around and up and down the theater and its balcony like schoolkids chasing each other at recess.

I know a bit more about Sánchez Narvaez's work and have watched her start other performances with a similar scattered, extroverted approach and gradually unpeel, winding her way down to a deeper, quieter, more sensitive and emotionally brave place. What she and Light accomplish in this demanding, durational piece, as they strip away the plastic, becomes similarly revelatory and wrenching.

You won't catch much of what's said between the two; they have no mics. But you'll catch enough to recognize the triggering of issues of racial and class difference. Sánchez Narvaez first interjects this by calling out Light for having once complained, "I'm paying you more than I'm paying myself." It goes downhill from there with the performers appearing to be athletes in training...or an athlete (Light) with a particularly hardass trainer (Sánchez Narvaez)...or two collaborators who have hit a brick wall that only physical aggression and honesty might begin--only just begin--to demolish.

This is a very hard dance to do...and see...and think about.

The remaining By Association schedule pairs Pallavi Sen's solo with work by Bully Fae Collins (tonight at 7:30pm) and Bully Fae Collins with Elena Rose Light and Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez (tomorrow at 7:30pm). Get information and tickets here.

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

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We all scream for "Screamers."

Molly Lieber in Screamers,

a film by Brian Rogers, screening now at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Brian Rogers)

More squirmer than screamer, Screamers--a feature film written and directed by Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory Theater--situates a vulnerable woman (Molly Lieber) inside a deconsecrated Catholic church that will now be her home in a small town where, we're told, "there's little to see and even less to do." You might as well ignore the dreary man moving into it with her (Andrew Dinwiddie) because this is Lieber's film. She is the dark matter at the center, the magnetic force, and she is magnificent in her role--visually, symbolically, emotionally. Everyone else seems like hallucinatory debris in orbit--from the smirky, smarmy priest (Jay Wegman) who used to celebrate mass there to the annoyingly inaudible handyman (Jon Kinzel) who leaves an oily black smear on Lieber's lips. And what's with the scenes of a hulking Jim Finlay punching out a hooded captive?

I appreciated the framing of Lieber by her haunted visual environment, but the sonic environment most captured my attention and imagination. Aside from Lieber, the stars of this show are the crisp sounds--everything from a creaking stained glass window to couch cushions that complain when compressed and released--amplified to an unnatural degree. Sounds with heft, with personality. It is as if we all had taken drugs, and the noises ordinary things make--usually in the background of awareness--are now sharing stories and opinions.

Rogers spent time alone in artistic residency at puppeteer Dan Hurlin's upstate house, a deconsecrated church, an experience that, he says, worked some strange changes. So Screamers and probably Lieber's character, to a degree I won't speculate about, contains a fair amount of Rogers. But, for me always, any American ghost story raises useful parallels to those ghastly ghosts of American history we try to avoid and which now are popping up all over the place.

Starring: Andrew Dinwiddie, Jim Findlay, Daniel Fish, Vallejo Gantner, Keely Garfield, Jon Kinzel, Quinn Larson, Molly Lieber, Jay Wegman

Writer/Director/Editor: Brian Rogers
Producer: Madeline Best
Director of Photography: Jeff Larson
Production design: Sara C. Walsh
Lighting: Jon Harper
Location Sound: Stephen Bruckert
Dramaturgy and Directorial Consultation: Madeline Best
Music by Brian Roger
Sound Design, Mix and Mastering: Jim Dawson
2nd Unit Director of Photography: Stephen Bruckert
Assistant Production Design: Jessie Bonaventura
Production Assistants: Youree Choi, Ben Demarest, Jonathan Ginter, Kenneth Olguin, Nicole Simonson

Catch the last screening of Screamers tonight at 7pm at The Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center (466 Grand Street, near Pitt Street, Manhattan). Click here for details, ticket information and directions.

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Eliza Bent gets personal on race and cultural appropriation

Eliza Bent
(photo: Knud Adams)

It's far worse than you might think.

No, that's not my review of Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen, the new monologue written and performed by Eliza Bent, now at Abrons Arts Center. But that's what I believe Bent wants viewers to grasp.

The piece jumps off from the playwright's memories of a film on the 19th Century queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch--a school project Bent cooked up at age 13 with a friend and classmate. The young auteur cast her white affluent self as the indigenous queen and now looks back on it--as we get to do; the film is both cringe-worthy and just ridiculously audacious enough to kind of work, ya know?--with no small amount of shame. I can't gauge how completely woke today's Bent is but, as things unfold, you will definitely see she's got her eyes propped open.

She might have forgiven her teenaged self (and begged our forgiveness) for youthful indiscretion. But she does not stop there.

Surrounded, inexplicably but beautifully, by Elizabeth Chabot's rich, thick textile art and a row of fetching portraits--Bent resembles some combination of high-class talk show host and star monologist. Wearing a buttoned-up little black dress with A-line cut, she talks nonstop with well-practiced intensity that pegs her as facile, artificial, privileged, ready for PBS or an NPR podcast.

Frankly, even when self-revealing, she's off-putting. You take note when she utters something amusing. You note that amusement and yet stand clear of enjoying it. You definitely stand away from Bent, and maybe she means you to do so, because her delivery of text is noticeably, oddly driven, airless, leaving no room for her breathing or your own.

At some point, you get used to that. Which might mean an unseen internal change within her or--and this is really what it felt like--something shifting inside you, like when a climber gets more and more acclimated to lower levels of oxygen.

Maybe, though, Bent's the sort best positioned to lead us where we need to go and show us what we need to see--what she's done and what she's witnessed, particularly in the world of media and the arts. (In addition to her stage work, she served, for several years, as a senior editor at American Theatre magazine.) Deep into the play, she circles back to her own relationships and disconnections--refusing to absolve herself for what remains unresolved, tasking herself and the rest of us with acknowledging the pervasive breadth and durability of privilege and the damage wrought. Not a curious fossil from the ancestral past. Not a specimen of a problem that has not a thing on Earth to do with us now.

Direction: Knud Adams
Textile panel art: Elizabeth Chabot
Sound design/original composition: Jerome Ellis
Lighting: Kate McGee
Make up and styling: Naomi Miyoko Raddatz

Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen continues through April 21. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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"THIS" is what again? Adrienne Truscott at American Realness

Adrienne Truscott in THIS
(photo: Paul Goode)

Adrienne Truscott brought her adaptable THIS show to American Realness 2018 at Abrons Arts Center's Playhouse, and I caught that final performance on the night also marking AR's finale. The APAP conference, too, drew to its close Tuesday morning, although there are APAP-targeted festivities (PSNY's COIL shows; Under The Radar's added week for the great Split Britches duo) still going strong this week.

So, what exactly is THIS? And who exactly is Truscott?

The answer to both seems to be: A LOT. Also, probably, IT DEPENDS.

The woman has worked through numerous genres--from dance to writing to circus to cabaret and stand-up comedy--and THIS draws liberally from her history. Which is what makes it such a fun, elusive and magical this.

At Abrons, it started on a raw stage--look at that rough wall, that corrugated gate, the metal ladder in the corner, the stained paint cloth and other unidentifiable stuff littering the floor--with a rambunctious comic who might or might not be Truscott opening for Truscott, who is who we thought we had come to see and believe we're seeing but now might or might not be seeing because she says she's opening for Truscott who has worked really hard on what we're about to see. Anywho....

After issuing a warning about a blackout we're supposed to imagine that doesn't happen when she says it does but then happens when we think it won't, the unidentified opener is dropping sex-related jokes to varying degrees of success. ("Comedy and abortion have something in common.... Timing is everything.") Timing is important, too, to a stage
magician's sleight of hand, which is what THIS turns out to be. Anything can appear and disappear when we least expect it--elements of decor; running narratives that abruptly stop and run away and...wait...run back, then vanish again so you don't know where they were supposed to be taking you; a mechanical bird that flies prettily until...oh, no...it doesn't; and a performer who sometimes hides behind scenery even as she continues to talk to us.

What to make of it? It's such a...such a...thing, this THIS, and the audience I sat among--mainly young, I noticed--loved it hard and answered it with a big roar.

If you did not see this THIS but you happen get another chance to see THIS, I suspect you will see a somewhat different THIS. But, no worries. You will see Truscott--trust--and she is always worth it, no matter who shows up onstage.

Writing and performance: Adrienne Truscott
Direction: Ellie Heyman
Sound/video/set design: Carmine Covelli
Light Design: Mary Ellen Stebbins

Closed. For general information on American Realness 2018, click here.

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American Realness: "We Wait In The Darkness" by Rosy Simas

Rosy Simas in her solo We Wait In The Darkness
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Rosy Simas Danse
We Wait In The Darkness (New York premiere)
co-presented by Abrons Arts Center and Gibney Dance for
American Realness 2018 at Abrons Arts Center

Recent scientific study verifies what many Native people have always known, that traumatic events in our ancestors lives are in our bodies, blood and bones. These events leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA. Our grandmother’s tragic childhood can trigger depression or anxiety in us, but we have the ability to heal these DNA encodings and change that trait for future generations.

--Rosy Simas 

For people of the Black African diaspora, too, these words from Minneapolis-based dance artist Rosy Simas (Seneca, Heron Clan) ring true, and I must begin with gratitude to Simas for work that illustrates the body as truth-teller and healer. We, too, are a people nurtured by connection to ancestors with tragic histories in this hemisphere, and many of us express reverence for ancestral heritage through powerful spiritual and artistic practices that are, in their way, forms of anti-colonial resistance and justice-making.

Simas's 50-minute solo, We Wait In The Darkness--with its soundscape by composer François Richomme--uses visual, textual, kinetic and sonic mediums to affirm and reclaim the strength of ancestry and environment. By employing this sensory overlapping and overload, viewers grasp what it must be like to uncover the memories one's body holds--some sweet, some painful, some subtle or slow to emerge, some earthshaking--and to tap its wisdom.

Over one end of the stage hangs Simas's long, white paper model of a DNA strand. Towards the center back a white, puff-sleeved dress with a long, old-fashioned dirndl skirt dangles. Along stage left, Simas has suspended a series of white paper panels textured like fine quilts. Panels also capture film imagery, often hazy, glimmering and ethereal, that allude to place--and sometimes people--without specific identification for the benefit of those outside Seneca culture. This poetically elusive quality renders the work as ritual rather than documentary, gives it a spaciousness rather than containing it as the story of a particular individual--although we do hear a voiceover of actual letters of Simas's grandmother, as read by her mother, and we also hear words in the Seneca language gruffly whispered as Simas dances. So, precious, protected mystery exists but also a certain porosity and generosity to help all of us begin to understand the possibility and path of healing.

Theater of both the vivid and the indistinct, then. As Simas sits with her naked back to the audience--spine and arms deeply flexing, stretching and reaching, snaking and twisting--I recall my first realization, when I practiced energy healing, that the back shares more information, without a person's conscious intervention and manipulation, than the front of the body. Throughout the dance, even when she finally dons that white dress, Simas shows us a body of focused, determined will, sure of itself, sure of its mission, sure of the ultimate fulfillment of that mission. We come to understand the evocative sound and visual imagery--drawn from earth and waterways of Seneca land--as its sacred source. And we also contemplate what it meant, for indigenous people, to be literally torn from that grounding, nourishing source. Her body speaks as it moves, and it is saying: I will this. I call this back. The spirits of the land respond in Richomme's mesmerizing, commanding weave of sound.

Near the end of the piece, projections of schematic diagrams suggest maps with numbered sections, a landscape reduced to arbitrary parts for some entity's benefit. Again, nothing is identified, verbally or visually, yet the implications are clear. An environment we just experienced so powerfully in sight and sound, now lies butchered. Simas brings out a sheet of white paper marked with this diagram, solemnly ripping each section from its matrix and placing each strip in a carefully-chosen position along the edge of the floor. She also rips away more of these sections before descending into the audience and gifting them to several of us.

I received number 12. Although I have no idea what territory--real or metaphoric--that it might represent, I will preserve and treasure it.

Letter reader: Laura Waterman Wittstock (Simas’s mother)
Letters: Clarinda Waterman (Simas’s grandmother)
Lighting design: Karin Olson and Carolyn Wong
Set and film design: Rosy Simas

Closed. American Realness 2018 concludes this evening. For further information, click here.

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Defending the Black dead: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko at Abrons

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko in Séancers,
a world premiere at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Amanda Jensen)

(photo: Erik Carter)

Séancers has landed at Abrons Arts Center like something to gladden the hearts of Sun Ra...and Fela...and Toni Morrison. An audacious, extravagant, overstuffed masquerade enclosing--and sometimes exposing--a gentle, vulnerable core. Jaamil Olawale Kosoko starts off almost backing into the space and backing into performing, gingerly, tentatively talking his way into the thick of things with help, on the night I attended, from a brief exchange with Autumn Knight, another interdisciplinary artist. Each night, Kosoko engages a different companion and wayshower. He calls these helpers Special Guest Séancers.

He appears to meander, physically, verbally, like a warm-up, a figuring out, a taking of temperatures--the room, his own--a way to let his ancestral spirits know he's ready to be inhabited. He fumbles a little, trying to recall exact scripture from bell hooks and James Baldwin; notes that part of his opening represents an homage to Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres; ambushes us with poet Audre Lorde's searing, furious "Power."

Abrons's Experimental Theater, from the top audience row (where composer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste generates swoony, enveloping weather) to the far wall of the space, is splashed with all manner of glittery and quaint stuff I can't even begin to inventory--from silver-wrapped Hershey's kisses to rippling, gleaming sheets of golden Mylar and everything in between.

The tiny-fonted program notes include a long, long, long list of members of the creative and production team including a dramaturg, "performance doulas," and the "Special Guest Séancers," a statement about Séancers, a further, and longer, "STATEMENT ABOUT THE WORK" by Kosoko, and a full-paged, three-columned, footnoted, intriguing and quite comprehensive essay about the work by acclaimed dance scholar Brenda Dixon-Gottschild. All of it quite hard to get much into with typical low lighting and the pre-show chatter of people around you. Read it--carefully--at home. It is its own work of art.

This massive documentation--which, frankly, leaves me to think, "What's left to say?"--is likely strategic, a necessary shot across the bow of any presumptuous critic looking to clamp nasty, dirty paws all over an artist's bright new efforts. It says, "I'll document my work myself, thank you very much!" I sympathize--believe me, I do--but I also had to take all of this and lay it to the side.

There is also this, from promotional text for Séancers:

Setting the fugitive experience afforded Black people on fire with majesty, opulence, and agency, Séancers is a nonlinear examination of how the American racialized body uses psychic, spiritual, and theoretical strategies to shapeshift through socio-politically charged fields of loss and oppression.

... collapses lyrical poetry, psychic movement forms and strategies of discursive performance to investigate concepts of loss, resurrection and paranormal activity. Interrogating issues related to American history and coloniality, Séancers journeys into the surreal and fantastical states of the Black imagination to traverse the “fatal” axis of abstraction, illegibility and gender complexity.

So...everything. Everything. Also laid aside...to make room for me to see what I could see.

The work--this apparition, hallucination, ritual container for all of the above--is only 65 minutes. In that time, I saw a man capable of wearing sweetness and bewilderment as easily as he wore jet black fake eyelashes and exquisite costumes sending two inseparable messages--the bold and the delicate. I saw a spirit land as Kosoko's arms and writhing body swished streamers of golden Mylar. I heard him intone the words "get lost" several times like a mantra...or a directive...or, a simple plea. I heard words about trying, about getting tired. I saw the armor of oversized glasses and bespangled bodysuits. And I saw the letting go...of costumes, of coverings. The shedding and sloughing off. The retracing of steps, away from the crossroads, back up the stairway, into piercing light.

Séancers continues through Saturday, December 9 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Upcoming Long Tables: Abrons, Gibney, Dance/NYC

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: Deneka Peniston)

Upcoming Long Tables


A Long Table conversation--as first conceived by theater artist Lois Weaver--is initiated by an invited core group of participants who "set the table" with food for thought, but it is open, throughout, to other folks, sitting around the perimeter, who can come up and take seats at the table to share their experiences, ideas, questions and insights in a non-hierarchical, non-panel/Q&A setting. They are not so much "audience members" as a listening and contributing community.

So, please join us! Listen in and/or pull up a chair at our table to share your thoughts and questions. Admission is free, except where noted.

***

Thursday, November 30 (7-9pm): DISCOMFORT: A Long Table. Presented and hosted by Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, Manhattan. Curated/facilitated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa/EYA Projects. Core participants: Ash RT Yergens, Dan Fishback, Joya Powell, NIC Kay. DISCOMFORT makes space for dance, performance and other artists to talk about the place of discomfort in our lives, processes, practices and relationships with collaborators, audiences, our society and world.

Wednesday, February 7 (6:30-8:30pm): Long Table: Sexual Harassment in the Dance Industry. Presented and hosted by Center Line, Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway (enter 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan. Curated/facilitated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa/EYA Projects. Core participants: Gabri Christa, Katy Pyle, Nicole Wolcott and Siobhan Burke

Sunday, February 25 (time tbd): Decolonizing Dance: A Long Table. Presented and hosted by Dance/NYC Symposium 2018 at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway (enter 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan. Curated/facilitated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa/EYA Projects. Core participants (list in formation): André M. Zachery, Ayodele Casel, J Soto, Layla Zami. Admission with Dance/NYC Symposium 2018 registration. Click here.

Wednesday, April 25 (6:30-8:30pm): Decolonizing Dance: A Long Table. Hosted by Center Line, Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway (enter 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan. Curated/facilitated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa/EYA Projects. Core participants: (list tba)

Community Long Tables are also in the works for BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange) and Dancing While Black in 2018. Keep watch for more information!

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My upcoming Long Tables for Gibney Dance & Abrons Arts Center

I'm so excited to be curating and facilitating two more arts community Long Tables and hope you can join us for either or both of these welcoming, informal conversations for artists of dance, performance or any discipline!

A Long Table conversation--as first conceived by theater artist Lois Weaver--is initiated by an invited core group of participants who "set the table" with food for thought, but it is open, throughout, to other folks, sitting around the perimeter, who can come up and take seats at the table to share their experiences, ideas, questions and insights in a non-hierarchical, non-panel/Q&A setting. They are not so much "audience" as listening and contributing community.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: Deneka Peniston)

CENTER LINE:

MOVING INTO WRITING

WITH EVA YAA ASANTEWAA

Wednesday, November 8

6:30pm to 8:30pm

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter 53A Chambers), Manhattan

(directions)

Moving into Writing considers approaches to the written word as response to, collaboration with, and documentation of dance and performance. What can writers and dancers learn from each other? What role do writers play within local, national and international dance ecosystems? Core participants will include Maura Donohue, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Paloma McGregor, Marissa Perel and Tara Sheena.

Free admission. Everyone is welcome to listen in and/or pull up a chair at our table to share your thoughts and questions.

An RSVP is not required, but it helps us better plan our space. Click here.

Produced by EYA Projects and Gibney Dance

DISCOMFORT: A LONG TABLE

Thursday, November 30

7pm to 9pm

Abrons Arts Center

466 Grand Street, Manhattan

(directions)

DISCOMFORT makes space for dance, performance and other artists to talk about the place of discomfort in our lives, processes, practices and relationships with collaborators, audiences, our society and world. Core participants will include NIC Kay, Dan Fishback , Ash RT Yergen and Joya Powell.

Free admission. Everyone is welcome to listen in and/or pull up a chair at our table to share your thoughts and questions.

Please hold this date. RSVP information to come.

Produced by EYA Projects and Abrons Arts Center


And I'm already planning more Long Tables for 2018! I hope you will support these community gatherings with your presence and by helping to spread the word to your network of friends and colleagues. Let's get this out there all around social media!

Thanks!

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New Yanira Castro trilogy spans three spaces and boroughs

Left to right, Luke Miller, Darrin Wright and Kyle Bukhari,
three dancers among a revolving cast for Yanira Castro's new CAST,
running now at The Chocolate Factory Theater
(photo: Brian Rogers)

This month, choreographer Yanira Castro and her a canary torsi (name anagram) operation are making their mark, simultaneously, on three New York City boroughs--Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Claiming lots of physical and conceptual space and institutional support is, in my eyes, a terrific thing for a woman to do, a woman of color in particular and, even more so, a woman of dance. Go. Get. It.

The three institutions hosting the world premiere of Castro's ambitious trilogy, CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR, are:

• The Invisible Dog Art Center--where, each afternoon, AUTHOR invites visitors, one at a time, to wind their way inside an installation to a little room, remove their shoes, close the door, sit down at a laptop and...that's as far as it makes sense for me to go, because your experience of what Castro has set up and what it means will be unique to you. On view through Sunday, September 17, weekdays and Saturday, 1pm to 7pm; Sunday, 1pm to 5pm. Free admission. For information and directions, click here.
• The Chocolate Factory Theater--home to CAST, now through Saturday, September 23, which I attended last evening and will discuss in a little bit. Information and tickets here.
• Abrons Arts Center--hosting STAGE in the Playhouse, tonight through Saturday, September 23. Information and tickets here.

Now, to my experience of CAST at The Chocolate Factory Theater. From publicity materials about the performance:

CAST brings together a rotating cast of four performers, different each night, who negotiate a new script at each performance in front of a live audience. A computer generates a unique script culling from transcripts of over 100 hours of conversation with CAST’s 15 performers regarding casting, performing and the complexities of representation. It is a concentrated study of what constitutes a cast. 

Last evening's opening night performance set the audience up in a couple of rows of folding chairs on risers arranged in a kind of horseshoe shape around a constricted performance space. The fourth end of the theater was reserved for seating for the evening's quartet of dancers--devynn emory, Luke Miller, Sai Somboon and Darrin Wright, out of an available roster of fifteen performers--and a printer and a table laden with props.

As audience members gradually filled all available seats, Miller sat at another table within the performance area, his hand clasping a stubby pencil poised over a sheet of paper. His steady gaze implied a thinking process and, from time to time, he circled the pencil point just above the paper, all of this provoking a curious frustration in the viewer (well, this viewer).  To the left of him, a laptop screen greeted us with a stark HELLO in white letters and a fast-disappearing list of the evening's performers. The other cast members sat quietly reading scripts with randomly-assigned material they were seeing for the first time. At 7pm on the nose, the noisy audience members suddenly hushed as it became clear that something was starting to happen.

A computer-generated voice identified the script as #67, 404 (I believe, unless it was #67, 040--a number I think I heard later) and proceeded to cyber-stutter its way through the cast's names. It told us the source of the material (conversations at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) and the length of the performance (45 minutes, which would be accurately and usefully announced at its completion).

Wright rose, pulled Miller's table and chair out of the way, re-positioned two speakers and stretched out on the carpeted floor with a microphone. Not quite comfy, though. The script tasked him with a long monologue and the apparent pressure to read it quickly, forcefully and as if, by the time he reached the end of sentences, his throat was squeezed, struggling for the breath to continue. Among other things, allusions to race would surface, float off and disappear in the flood of verbiage and, after a while, a listener (well, this listener) surrendered to the possibility, the likelihood, that none of these words mattered. Whether they do or not, whether dance is about transcending or resisting words, addressing or skating around specific issues and should be or shouldn't be, it was just too much to deal with. The voice was strangulated. The man was gasping to speak and, finally, crumpling the script pages and tossing them aside.

Words on race slipped through later verbal material and complicated activity--the dancers taping paper, cardboard, Mylar and cloth around Miller's head and torso. "this white racist thing gender history seventies noise sorry like Athena body fascist line that identifieds you phallic queer body brain labor...." A misshapen monster, a captive, he struggled to rise and move around the space with all that had been stuck onto him, eventually ripping it off him--an action that looked satisfying to observers (well, this observer). The printer whirred to life and birthed new sheets.

devynn held up the first page, and the others followed suit, posing together and beginning to musically chant a series of scripts for solo or interwoven choral voices ("Ailey, when I was at the Ailey," "I considered Trisha feminine," "When we auditioned, I had really brown eyes" and the rapturous, amusing, repeated intonation of a single seductive name--"Bausch").

So, at this point, I want to stop describing all that went on from there--especially since a lot of it involved rapid, relentless and arbitrary introduction and rearrangement of props, movement and dancers' proximity to a vulnerable audience, a flow of thingy things, none of which we could or would be intended to worry over or hold onto.  Instead, I want to share a thought that popped into my mind as first I gazed at Miller and then at Wright.

Over the years, I'd seen each of these two guys dance in so many works by some of our most accomplished choreographers. Their bodies contain so much and such diverse information, so much imprinting and history, from disparate sources. And--I began to realize--so much wisdom. I began to see these two men as our knights and sages, and I know I don't live in a society that thinks of dancers as sages. But these guys are, and we have a wealth of more like them in our dance community, knights and sages of all genders and gender non-conforming.

I was also aware, towards the end of the 45 minutes, of a feeling of sacredness. I pulled back from this, a little bit, because it began to seem, even to me, a bit hokey. But I really started to think of the space as church. And I am not a church-goer.

Am I going too far with this? I don't know. I don't even know if Castro would care. But when the 45 minutes was dutifully (and cybernetically) announced, it truly felt as if the Mass was ended, and we could go in peace.

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World premiere: Ivy Baldwin Dance presents "Keen [No. 2]"

Choreographer Ivy Baldwin performs in Keen [No. 2],
a new work for her ensemble, Ivy Baldwin Dance, at Abrons Arts Center.
Set design is by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen.
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Eleanor Smith (left) and Katie Workum
perform a duet in Keen [No. 2].

Below, an ensemble scene
(photos: Maria Baranova)

Grief is a force that seizes the body from within and works its way--by covert pathways and on its own timetable--throughout and through. Although humans have devised various rites for directing and honoring its expression, there's no controlling its urges and its dimensions. As such, grief has much to teach the conscious mind that humbly attends to it.

In Keen [No. 2]--in world premiere at the Abrons Arts Center, co-commissioned with The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Joyce Theater as part of Joyce Unleashed--Ivy Baldwin and her dancers dwell within a space of grief. They boldly ask us to pay attention to so much--in Katie Workum's opening solo, in front of that gorgeous, wow-inducing set by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen, a surprising, sometimes halting, even awkward exploration with no interest in pleasing our eyes; in the ensemble's lengthy passages of repetition, often numbingly even in tone; or the same ensemble indulging itself in excesses of release and of obvious uses of imagery and theatrical space, all of it given unconditional permission.

Among other things, I thought of valkyries and angels in flight. I thought of Isadora Duncan, that passionate force of nature, and her grief at the sudden death of her two young children. And I thought of furious tantrums in response to the unexplained, the unfair, the unbearable. It's significant that the dancing sometimes evokes the animal world in shapes, moves, rhythms, sounds, herd-like and unguarded behaviors. Grief connects us to our bodies in ways that can make us remember our basic animal selves and force us to let go of constructed, functional personas. Who better to demonstrate this for us than a chorus of dancers, artists who study the many intricate, wild truths their bodies hold?

Lawrence P. Cassella--who, in 2015, succumbed to a rare immune system disorder after brief illness--was a member of Ivy Baldwin Dance from 2003 to the end of his life. Keen [No. 2] is dedicated to this beloved member of our dance community and informed by Baldwin's experience of losing and grieving him. I watched it with a flow of questions: Is Workum, the work's initial soloist, testing the remaining abilities of a body she no longer trusts? Or could she be testing the powers of a new "body" beyond physical form--rotating her wrists to see if she can lift a leg, twining her hands to generate a new set of fingers? When dancers duet, their bodies coming into sync, can we know who is lost and who is mourning? Or is that interconnection, that blurring of distinction, that temporary inability to let go, regain and shelter in one's own, separate energy and identity, at the very heart of grief? Might it be, for dancers, even harder than for the rest of us to let the physical bodies of their loved ones and colleagues go?

Like the process of grief itself, Keen [No. 2] makes no appeal to what a viewer might want or accept. It is unreasonable and unruly in nature, but it is true to its own purpose and logic, presented with admirable conviction by Baldwin, Eleanor Smith and Katie Workum with Katie Dean, Dia Dearstyne, Heather Olson, Kay Ottinger, Marýa Wethers (June 1-4), Tara Willis (June 8-11), Tara Sheena and Anna Adams Stark.

Sound design: Justin Jones
Lighting design: Chloe Z. Brown
Costumes: Mindy Nelson

Keen [No. 2] continues through June 11 with performances Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm. For information, click here. For ticketing, click here.

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

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Memories: FAB x MR DANCE BLOCK SALON Spring '17

FAB x Movement Research: DANCE BLOCK SALON

Abrons Arts Center -- March 28, 2017

facilitated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

All photos 

©Deneka Peniston

Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc) paired up Movement Research for their first collaborative Dance Block Salon. The organizations invited artists from their respective communities to show work in an atmosphere of non-judgmental sharing, radical support and community building. 

I was honored and thrilled to be asked to facilitate the evening and guide the feedback sessions.

Artists showing work included Rina Espiritu, Jenny Boissiere & Dancers, Cain Coleman of ColemanCollective and Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson.

Staff, presenting artists and dancers
gather in Abrons's studio G05 before the salon.

Introducing the evening:
Nadia Tykulsker, FABnyc Director of Programs (above)
Lindsey Dietz Marchant, Movement Research Managing Director (below)

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above: Jenny Boissiere talks about her work.
Below: Cain Coleman performs.

Choreographer Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson,
above and below

Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson's troupe performs.

Above: Rina Espiritu listens to audience feedback.
Below: Dance artist Heather Robles hugs Espiritu after feedback session.

Small, intimate feedback groups for each choreographer
encouraged easygoing participation.

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