"It's time for courage." Rodabaugh + Orange = DoublePlus

DoublePlus, the smart new artist-curated performance series at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center (280 Broadway), is quickly coming into focus as a space for risk-taking by everyone from maker to presenter to watcher. Without advancing a narrow aesthetic agenda, it is breaking lesser-known artists into potentially wider exposure. More than just a chance for Gina Gibney to host formal performances--still restricted at her original 890 Broadway studios--DoublePlus is shaping up as a contender in the crowded New York dance scene, serving up adventure in a sophisticated container.

Last evening, guest curator Miguel Gutierrez introduced us to the work of Alex Rodabaugh and Rakiya A. Orange.

Alex Rodabaugh with cast of g1br33l
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Alex Rodabaugh channels the archangel Gabriel
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Rakiya A. Orange in her solo, Aziza
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Rodabaugh's ensemble piece, g1br33l, looks like a nightmare that might well start off with spooky space music, cheesy, makeshift costumes, ritual gestures and exhortations to "Breathe and let go" but end in Manson-like bloodshed. Actually, no New Agers are harmed in the making of this movie, but it does veer from Rodabaugh's oft-cited comfort zone into unexpected, suggestive and subversive territory. I think Rodabaugh's channeled alter ego, the archangel Gabriel, might have spent some earthbound time occupying Wall Street as well as a few queer dives. And I found one of his pronouncements intriguing: "We can't change government, but we can change our reaction to government" echoes a familiar spiritual nostrum for all kinds of complicated personal and social ailments. Gabe, as embodied by Rodabaugh, is a modest-looking archangel but with a detectable modern edge, and I think "reaction" might be the word to focus on in that sentence. (Visit Rodabaugh's page here.)

Rakiya A. Orange
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Let me cite the DoublePlus description of Orange's extraordinary solo, Aziza:

...a complicated investigation of self and identity, foregrounded by Stephanie Leigh Batiste’s idea that “The performing black body is material and metaphorical, real and unreal.” Orange’s body becomes a site of infinite feedback, reflecting the gaze of the spectator. She foregrounds her ambiguous status—as a real person, a theatrical representation, and a sociocultural construction—to explore, expose, and explode definitions of blackness.

Orange, when we first see her, dances atop a triangular platform of ludicrous dimensions. It's kind of the size of an American flag folded and handed off to a war widow. But you don't need a lot of space for strip-club moves. Later, she will indeed take the whole of the floor space, and forcefully, but she starts off pinned to this tight spot like the specimen she is for the audience's gaze. And still looks completely in charge. A beautiful woman and dancer, she invites the gaze and is quite good at feeding it while clearly enjoying the rush ride of her powers and savoring music that is nothing short of inviting and wonderful. She's all over a spectrum of being ours and being her own. Her skill, creativity and confidence are clear but complicated by the mundane and exploitative uses to which they are usually put. The world is not necessarily her friend. In silent, strange moments, she might end up upended like a beetle, legs flailing. She seems, at times, to follow ideas and try things out as she dances, raising questions like, Because she smiles, is everything always all right? She seems to be asking questions, too: Is this one thing enough? Is it good enough? How far do I need to go? Can I enjoy this? Can I let you see me enjoying this? Can I let you enjoy this? Who's watching me? Are you WATCHING ME?!!

Orange and Rodabaugh continue tonight through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. Tonight's show will be followed by a Q&A with the curator and 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)

Daria Faïn and Gillian Walsh share a Gibney DoublePlus

Daria Faïn, above and below, in is as if alone
(photos: Alex Escalante)

Gibney Dance Center's DoublePlus performance series, curated by invited dance artists, continues to fascinate. Last evening's show, repeating tonight and through Saturday at 7:30pm, presented the work of Daria Faïn and Bessie-nominee Gillian Walsh, curated by RoseAnne Spradlin.

Walsh, in Hasbro™ Procedures took the measure of the theater's bare space, treating it as the board of a kind of board game involving regular and formally regulated repositioning of game pieces/ dancers, it would seem, in accord with a script consisting of numbers that the dancers softly recite as they execute affectless steps, hops, lunges, shifts of weight and redirections. Notably, Walsh and her three dancers--Maggie Cloud, Mickey Mahar and Nicole Daunic--mostly do not face audience members; they never directly engage them. Nevertheless, some watchers might find themselves swiftly reeled in by this curious play.

Where, for instance, is the number 3? When I gradually became aware of its absence in the litany, I listened hard for it, subsequently hearing it intoned, I believe, only once. I have no idea what relevance that absence and momentary insertion might have, but I note it here to show that there are ways to get caught up in the gentle and esoteric nature of the game. Awareness comes along in unassuming moments like that. I have no idea what other bits and bytes of information my conscious perception might have missed.

Scenes from Gillian Walsh's Hasbro™ Procedures (photos: Alex Escalante) 

What a pleasure, what a revelation, to witness Faïn performing solo. The choreographer--who, along with poet-architect Robert Kocik, usually plays with big choruses of moving vocalists/vocalizing movers--here inhabits a roomy space and a dance on her own, and she is beautiful.

The piece, is as if alone, seems like a rite of emergence, starting with husky, dry sounds issuing from Faïn's mouth as she very slowly walks along the dance mirror at one side of the space, solo but doubled in the glass. Dressed in a long, silvery skirt and black halter top, under the cooling gleam of Kryssy Wright's elegant lighting, she looks both severe and glamorous. The feeling is "Take this as seriously as I do." She starts to sound like the north wind--serious, indeed.

She pinches, stretches, coughs and pumps syllables and vowels, enjoys a few variations on the word "wow," her arching, crouching body expressing itself in voice and enigmatic gesture. A more dancey segment finds perhaps her remembering to explore the interior of the theater's space, the middle space. There she shows us the beauty of going off center. Her maturity and her way with timing, with pacing, with shaping, lends itself to grace and power and strangeness. There are spectral visitations from Graham and, I suspect, infusions from the East--Japanese theater, Sufi spinning. And sometimes, a sentence might arise, fully formed, from Kocik's text.

With no room, nothing could have gone wrong for the better.

Like the absence/presence of the number 3 in Walsh's game, these words hook into me and stay.

For more information and tickets for this program and future weeks of DoublePlus shows, click here.

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

DoublePlus: impressive launch for new series at Gibney 280

Sean McElroy (left) and Tei Blow
of Royal Osiris Karoake Ensemble
in The Art of Luv (Part 1)
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Time will tell if DoublePlus--presented at Gibney Dance Center's new Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center near City Hall--proves to be more than the sum of its parts. But last night's performance, the first for this new dance series, represented a bold move by programmer Craig Peterson and his first artist-curator, Annie-B Parson.

Not springing from any centralized aesthetic, each segment of the six-week DoublePlus season has been curated by a different dance artist invited by Peterson. In addition to Parson, the curatorial lineup for Fall 2014 includes RoseAnne Spradlin, Miguel Gutierrez, Donna Uchizono, Jon Kinzel and Bebe Miller. Each have invited two emerging or mid-career choreographers to share a four-evening program. Parson's program introduces works by the multidisciplinary Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (the partnership of Tei Blow and Sean McElroy) and dancer-choreographer Audrey Hailes and continues through this Saturday with all shows at 7:30pm.

Blow and McElroy of Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble, working in multimedia performance installation, describe themselves as "a musical priesthood that explores the metaphysics and mythologies of love, desire and courtship at the end of the 20th century." Nice...and bland...but that doesn't quite prepare you for The Art of Luv (Part 1), for being wafted on a nonstop magic carpet ride through a live and video landscape of New Age meditations, channelings, video blogs for makeup and jeans, and hyped-up self-improvement infomercials, all seamlessly connected to one particularly sinister video centerpiece. ROKE's stated aim--take it as sincere or, given the hokey costumes, decor and projections, ironic or possibly both--is to heal the world, particularly where masculine insecurity is concerned. Maybe everything seen and heard here shares a certain underlying pathology. And maybe, through the wizardry of highlighting those toxic interconnections, these dedicated karaoke masters are among the best healers going.

Hailes calling herself "a so-called theatre artist" seems fitting, given my overwhelming sense of her, in Death Made Love to My Feet, as someone often thrown into space and landing at odd angles, weirdly and precariously attached to things like stools or columns or just air, as if these things had just arrested her fall. I also locate her as she appears to locate herself--as an artist amid decades of sticky social and entertainment history. A Black woman in the arts who finds herself walking past or through energy fields that contain things like Ailey's Revelations, and Beyoncé, and Miss Mary Mack-style clapping games (with co-performers Jasmine Coles and Alison Kibbe), and Barbara Walters training her laser eyes on a ravaged Richard Pryor. There are women warriors in there, too. Do I see Hailes because of these layers or despite them? Or both? And it is just wild when the door to the theater's greenroom opens in a burst of light, and we get our first glimpse of Coles and Kibbe--or, really, just parts of them--while Hailes soldiers on right in front of us. Where to look? The light from that room is undeniable--also, the mystery of who the hell these other people are. What the hell are they doing? Confusion ensues. And I kind of loved it all.

For more information and tickets for this program and all upcoming DoublePlus shows, click here.

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