Janka Nabay, 54

Janka Nabay, 54, Dies; Carried an African Dance Music Worldwide
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, April 3, 2018

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Idrissa Ouedraogo, 64

Idrissa Ouedraogo, Lauded African Filmmaker, Dies at 64
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, February 23, 2018

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Glenn Ligon on The Great Bieri: "A conduit to the ancestors"

These objects change...a subtle reminder that they operate in a different system.
-- Glenn Ligon

The Artist Project: Glenn Ligon on The Great Bieri
from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sierra Leone-born ballerina Michaela DePrince featured in Glamour

Michaela DePrince
(photo: Alique for GLAMOUR)

BALLERINA MICHAELA DEPRINCE 

ON ACHIEVING HER DREAMS

GLAMOUR, August 2015

I Was Orphan Number 27:
Ballerina Michaela DePrince's Inspiring Story

by Erika Hayasaki

Michaela DePrince lost her family as a girl in Sierra Leone during the brutal civil war; now she’s a world-class ballerina, her triumph soon to be a Hollywood movie, Taking Flight. But her biggest goal? To inspire young girls through working with the Girl Scouts and War Child, a group that helps children in conflict zones. DePrince shares her journey in Glamour’s August issue, on national newsstands now and available digitally at glamour.com/app.

The Gathering 2015 meets at Gibney 280

The Gathering, as described by founder Camille A. Brown, is "an open forum for intergenerational black female artists to support one another and to advocate for greater cultural equity and acknowledgement in the contemporary dance world."

Following Winter 2014's successful launch, Brown brought The Gathering back last night in a new format guided by Onye Ozuzu (chair, Dance Department, Columbia College Chicago) at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway.

Camille A. Brown
(photo: Ra-Re Valverde)

Dancer-journalist A Nia Austin-Edwards
tweets The Gathering.
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Left-to right: Choreographers Cynthia Oliver,
Edisa Weeks and Paloma McGregor
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Guests mingle before the evening's exercises begin.
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Facilitator Onye Ozuzu leads participants in improvisatory exercises,
sparked by our questions and stories, keeping bodies in near continual flow.
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The Gathering 2015 was more of a creative game than a discussion of issues, more of an intimate dance of immediacy than a verbal forum. Bodies, questions, tears and testimony filled the theater in shifting, fluid configurations with space for the invisible.

"How are you doing the work?" "What are you excited about?" "How do you know when you're working too hard?" "What is your joy right now?" "Do you ever dance because you hurt?" "I deserve the best. I am the best. I have allies." "Asking for help, connecting with other people, helps you to move from the I to the We."

Participants encircle dance artist Nia Love (seated) and Paloma McGregor.
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Dancemaker Christal Brown (right)
answers a few questions.
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa 

These first steps are power-packed beginnings from which any number of useful new steps may develop for individuals, organizations and potential collaborators within the Black female dance diaspora. Periodic mini-gatherings during the year--to address specific needs, goals and actions--would be a most welcome addition to this inspiring annual event.

Once again, congratulations to Brown, and to all who worked to produce The Gathering 2015.

As Ozuzu would say, "Rest and hold.... Continue."

To connect with The Gathering, please visit this site.

Cynthia Paniagua presents and teaches dances of Afro-Peru

Cynthia Paniagua

Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education announces a free presentation by 2014 Artist-in-Resident Cynthia Paniagua:

AFRO-PERUVIAN DANCE 

WITH CYNTHIA PANIAGUA

CYNTHIA PANIAGUA: DANCING MY ROOTS

Presentation

January 31, 6:30-8 PM

Afro-Peruvian dance workshops

Thursdays, January 16, 23 and 30, 6pm-8pm

Dancing My Roots interweaves contemporary movement and Peruvian traditional dance. Paniagua's choreography explores the heart of her ancestral part and its relationship with present day Latin American cultural realities.

During Paniagua's residency, she will also lead cultural workshops in Peruvian folk dance. To participate or sign up email Aisha Jordan at atajordan@casitamaria.org. Classes are open to all ages and levels, and beginners are welcome.

Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education
928 Simpson Street, the Bronx
(map/directions)

Souleymane Badolo and Cynthia Oliver at New York Live Arts

I've always found that I like the encounter with a new or a developing dance to surprise me. I'm neither a prospective presenter nor a funder nor even a prospective ticket-buyer with an unsparing budget. I don't write for the paper of record. Basically, I can go and have fun at these things. So I don't require having things spelled out to me. All of that can be interesting but confounding, too, when you find yourself searching high and low for the specific things you read about. Which is not to say that what you read about isn't there, somewhere, but that sometimes the advance warning gets in the way of live experience, introducing a sense of passive expectation or distracting anticipation. Maybe not knowing is, in the long run, the better path to knowing.

Cynthia Oliver (left) and Leslie Cuyjet in BOOM! (photo by Ian Douglas)

Souleymane Badolo in Buudou, BADOO, BADOLO (photo by Ian Douglas)

This is by way of saying that I'm not sure that I saw the Boom! duet, a seed work choreographed, written and directed by Cynthia Oliver for herself and Leslie Cuyjet, as advertised: "negotiating and renegotiating the rules of personhood, fate and consequence...." and "simultaneously reveals, resists and submits to the structures and shape of a performance."

The fault might be entirely my own, I will admit. But I will also admit to being captivated from the moment I heard an upstairs door bang and the darkened theater's left aisle fill with the bubbling voices of two women as half-bright blotches (the near-invisible dancers wearing over-sized white shirts) descended through the dark towards New York Live Arts' bare space. Once in place, side by side, the women took up that space--expansive in action, splayed off-kilter, owning the land and air rights and, when grounded, gazing sideways like don't-mess-with lions at rest. Hereafter, Oliver and Cuyjet will be "Tried Patience" and "Unwavering Fortitude."

In motion, their confident gestures and phrases seemed like some kind of Black diasporan Tai Chi--an enigmatic but resonant long form I longed to learn. The genius and appeal of these two dancers grew from their musicality and sure-of-themselves radiance. And the surprise--for anyone who had not seen the previous version of Boom! offered during Danspace Project's great Parallels series--came from the fierce spoken word conclusion of the duet which, I think, intended to uncover who these two entities might be. They might remind each of us, in unique ways, of specific people or types or even groups. Who in your life has the power to raise you up at one moment and strike you down in the next? You should leave Boom! feeling a little shaken, a little stirred, even if you're not immediately sure why.

The English equivalent for the Gurunsi word barack is, roughly, "gratitude." With Barack, dancer-choreographer Souleymane Badolo pays tribute to those who helped him along the path from dance training in his native Burkina Faso to celebrity on the US contemporary dance scene. Edith Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is such a strong, recurring color on the dancemaker's florid palette for this solo--a work that displays external and internal struggle--that we can't help but imagine that that passage has been marked by profound difficulty. Nothing regretted, though, neither the bad nor the good. But perhaps we're not looking at "Solo" (this dancer's nickname) so much as glimpsing an embodiment of African experience, a capacious grail within the capacious memory palace of the human body--in this case, a body with massive, heavy wings that unfurl awkwardly as its feet struggle against slippery or unstable ground. An eagle touched down on a river-washed, floating log. Or on smoldering ash. Badolo is some kind of eagle, though. He keeps a wonderful balance. It's like a game with delicate calibrations of the shift of weight for functional as well as visual effect and an outburst of puckish joy to the music of the Congolese singer-musician Tabu Ley Rochere.

I wish I could attend Badolo's Shared Practice event tomorrow afternoon at New York Live Arts but--in a breathtaking example of synchronicity--I, too, will be sharing and teaching a form of divination at the same time. Mine is called Tarot, but Solo's, from his Gurunsi heritage, is called bagger. This practice divines by interpreting thrown cowrie shells, and Badolo uses it to build the structure of his dances. (To understand this, think Cage/Cunningham/I Ching--but just for a moment.) In his impressive new solo, Buudou, BADOO, BADOLO, he uses the operations of bagger to invoke not just any hazy future but, rather, the powerful through-line connecting him to his male ancestors in the long-ago and to his son in the rich, multidimensional present.

Souleymane Badolo and Cynthia Oliver's shared program continues this evening and tomorrow with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Two great losses for the arts and humanity--Achebe and McKiver

I wanted to acknowledge two great gentlemen who passed while I was away on vacation. Even though late, this blog should not go without mention of their lives and legacy. Here are their New York Times obituaries.

Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan, Dies at 82
by Jonathan Kandell, The New York Times, March 22, 2013

Lawrence McKiver, a Singer in Long Tradition, Dies at 97
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, April 1, 2013

Alf Kumalo, photographer, 82

Alf Kumalo, Whose Photography Indicted Apartheid, Dies at 82
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, November 14, 2012

Skin in the game: Nina, Nora, Miriam

Stir Builds Over Actress to Portray Nina Simone
by Tanzina Vega, The New York Times, September 12, 2012

Should Zoe Saldana play Nina Simone? No. And that's neither a knock on the Dominican-Puerto Rican Saldana for not being African-American nor an assessment of her acting abilities. Simone's dark, dark skin and broad features--clearly not acceptable to Hollywood's image-makers and marketers even today--were essential to her experience in the world as a Black woman and to her politics. Casting a light-skinned actress with conventionally pretty features to portray Nina Simone would be as absurd as trying to turn a gay business associate into a heterosexual lover. Oh, wait....

Dance artist Nora Chipaumire, as I'm sure you've been hearing and reading about everywhere, has had another giant of Black music and activism much on her mind--the late Miriam Makeba. But don't expect Pata Pata, or anything remotely like it, from Miriam, Chipaumire's raw and provocative "solo for two people," set to music composed by Omar Sosa.

Performed at BAM's new 250-seat Fishman Space with Okwui Okpokwasili, this demanding, hour-long ritual digs beneath the surface of Black Woman as Icon (throwing in, less obviously, the Virgin Mary) to the archetypal id of imagination or, perhaps, reality. The intimate performance area remains quite dark almost throughout this experience, greatly magnifying the effect of sound (dripping water; heavy footfalls; a single voice ringing out or a welter of voices overlapping; orgasmic breaths, shrieks and moans) and, whenever it comes, the selective touch of light.

I was stunned to realize that Okpokwasili actually towers over Chipaumire--a majestic performer who looms larger in one's imagination than, perhaps, in reality. By the time Miriam concludes, in a blaze of light, you will have visited the place of the ancestral and archetypical intensities--desire, fear, shame, jealousy, anger. In other words, it is a hair-raising journey through the usually hidden end of the spectrum.

At the end, I stood to leave, struggling to adjust my eyes in a sudden shock of light. Meanwhile, two white women seated to my left immediately took up their pre-show chat precisely where they had left off, as if nothing at all had occurred in the interval. Unbelievable.

Directed by Eric Ting with lighting by Olivier Clausse, scenic design by Olivier Clausse/Hecho Mano, sound by Lucas Indelicato and costumes by Naoko Nagata

Nora Chipaumire's Miriam continues at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space) through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. Tonight's show will be followed by an artist's talk moderated by Simon Dove.

BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(around the corner from BAM's Peter Jay Sharp Building: map/directions)

Dancer Nora Chipaumire: exile and identity

Irene Borger, Director of the Alpert Award in the Arts, has posted a new interview with the brilliant, charismatic Nora Chipaumire, 2012 Alpert winner for Dance.

Taking the measure of "Parallels"

Parallels—a two-month series commissioned by Danspace and curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones—is arguably the most significant event of the current dance season.

To read more of my Dance Magazine review of Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2012: Parallels, click here.

Fists, heels and songs

Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group performed TheRevisitation last week at New York Live Arts. To read my Dance Magazine review, click here.