BUFU presents "HERE ON OUT" in Bushwick

Curator Ali Rosa-Salas's HERE ON OUT--part of July's BUFU events*--drew an ebullient crowd to Bushwick's Secret Project Robot bar and small performance space. One night only, it was one of those events that compel your presence and, clearly, a lot of dance's smartest and coolest read the memo. The ever-loving MTA did not, however, but that problem was deftly handled, last minute, by pushing the announced start time back a half-hour.

Due to illness, I made an early exit and missed the final performer, Jonathan Gonzalez, but I was there when the little dance party gave way to a solo by FLEXN and FLEXN Evolution star Shelby Shellz Suzie Q Felton--whose uncommonly bendy body surfaces a world of enthralling characters and drama. Felton was followed by a duet by Angie Pittman and Lily Bo Shapiro. Pittman and Shapiro made good use of the dim, crowded room by commandeering space for whatever their willful bodies chose to be, for however they chose to move in ways that question the conventionally functional way we humans are socialized to regard and move our bodies. Pittman maneuvered herself like popping corn. Shapiro sloshed and buried herself in darkness and oozed through the audience. And first both and then Pittman alone repeatedly galloped between two doors accented by powerful sound and a dash of lantern light. Sitting on the floor or on the precious-few benches, we often had to scoot feet and butts out of the way of this toomuchness crashing our shoreline. And it was kind of fun.

As for Gonzalez--always a surprising and striking performer--I hope to catch up with him at The Current Sessions, coming up in mid-August at the wild project. NIC Kay is another must-see artist presenting work in this series. For information on The Current Sessions, click here.

*****

HERE ON OUT has concluded.

*FUBU identifies itself as "a collaborative living archive centered around pan)Black and (pan)Asian cultural and political relationships. We, the founders of this   project, are a collective of queer, femme and non­binary, Black and East­Asian artists and organizer. Our goal is to facilitate a global conversation on the   relationship between Black & Asian diasporas, with an emphasis on building solidarity, de­centering whiteness, and resurfacing our deeply interconnected and complicated histories." FUBU asks, "In times where institutions, programs, and organizations are being de­funded and unsupported by the government, how can we learn to self­generate resources, support one another and help each other thrive?" For information on FUBU's activities, click here.

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the CURRENT SESSIONS: Currently at wild project

Choreographer Fana Fraser presents work this weekend
along with other artists for the CURRENT SESSIONS at wild project.
(photo: Quyn Duong)

Movement Currency will focus on how bodies produce, exchange, and perform within systems of value, drawing on figurative and ethnographic practices to consider the lineage of choreographies which qualify our social identity.

--from promo for the CURRENT SESSIONS's new season Volume VI, Issue II: Movement Currency

With New York's fall dance season looming up ahead--and, believe me, it's looming--we can enjoy a breather for a few more weeks. But if you're still craving dance with some bite to it, Alexis Convento's team, the CURRENT SESSIONS, might have just the thing for you.

Last evening's presentation was organized around the concept of Risk--"from fragility to preservation, harm to survival...risk as a performative dimension which trades personal safety for choreographic opportunity." Tonight's show will tackle Debt, and tomorrow's 3pm matinee and 7pm performances, respectively, spin off from Savings and Credit. Each feature a concise mix of emerging artists guest curated by Ali Rosa-Salas, Justin Cabrillos and Sasha Okshteyn.

Risk--well-paced and clocking in at 45 minutes without break--offered work by dance artists Katrina Reid, Jessica Pretty and Amanda Hunt and filmmaker Ben Hagari. Of these four, all intriguing, I found Pretty and Hagari the most compelling.

Hagari's tour de force, Potter's Will (2015), is a sensuous and yet nightmarish ballet for wet clay, hellish fire glow, a man's clay-smeared body and the madly swirling camera of cinematographer Boaz Freund. Set, quite appropriately, to Ravel's La valse, it draws the viewer ever closer to danger--immolation, extinction and perhaps, at this great cost, unimaginable transformation.

Pretty's solo, the third., images a powerful wanting and not having. The dancer is a Black woman with hands often splayed in front of her gentle face, shielding her squinting eyes from the fierce glare of an imagined light source. She moves and folds and shapes her body like a tangle of brambles in big expenditures of energy and motion. She's a powerful, satisfying dancer--all the more reason that the empty platform stage seems confining, as does that invisible light source. Sudden, insistent bursts of song--Kanye West's "Nobody to Love," with its weird exhortation to just "grab somebody" from the party--both kind of name her situation and fragment it into any number of problematic realities.

Movement Currency's series resets the lineup for each show, with some repeats. So, your experience may be different but always an opportunity to discover, engage and be challenged.

Volume VI, Issue II: Movement Currency continues through Sunday, August 21. For programming information and ticketing details, click here.

wild project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Hooray! We've got another NTMT panel in the works!

Friends, I have a blessed life. Not a perfect life but blessed. And one of the strongest blessings is being almost constantly surrounded by artists and getting to experience and think about their work. It has been a saving grace in times of personal and societal struggle. I have learned so much from artists, and that is one reason I love the opportunity to invite artists to speak at my Not The Master's Tools panels at Gibney Dance Center so that they can share what they know. Last evening's session, our third, was HIGH ENERGY, and I thank Ali Rosa-Salas, Dan Safer, Maria Bauman and Jack Ferver for their forthright and motivating contributions. Thanks also to Craig Thomas Peterson, Margaret Tudor and Nora Alami at Gibney for their welcome and support.

If you haven't yet attended a NTMT panel, know that we already have another one in the works. You will get a lot from listening to these artists.

Save Tuesday, April 5 (6-8pm)!

All of the artists on my wishlist for this panel have said yes, and I can barely wait to bring them to you. So hold April 5, tell your friends and colleagues and watch for the announcement and RSVP link. Thanks!

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Join us on Wednesday for "Not The Master's Tools Part III"

Ali Rosa-Salas

Jack Ferver

Maria Bauman

Dan Safer

We're all expecting you! So, join us this Wednesday, February 17 (6-8pm) for the third edition of Not The Master's Tools at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center.

I'm excited to be moderating a new panel including:

Maria Bauman

Jack Ferver

Ali Rosa-Salas

and

Dan Safer

sharing their experiences, discoveries, alternative strategies and philosophies as artists, arts advocates and activists in New York.

If you've joined us for previous editions of NTMT at Gibney, you know how full and valuable these discussions have been. Please don't miss your opportunity to meet and learn from our speakers, and bring your own thoughts and questions for our Q&A period.

NTMT is FREE. Please pass this announcement along to your friends and colleagues in dance and performance.

RSVP here!

We look forward to seeing you!

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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Guest curators offer food for thought at Danspace Project

Earlier in the day, I screened a documentary about Yvonne Rainer in which Rainer quipped, "I love existing in front of spectators."  And I had been thinking about the way performance is less a game to be played and won or lost with good or bad reviews than an invitation to someone's world. In the case of the frequent reviewer, that's like frequent flying. I have decades worth of miles and navigation within worlds created by others.

Thinking of it this way removes the pressure to level judgment and opens up some room for...whatever. For Yvonne Rainer's existence, certainly.  For Larissa Velez-Jackson's star crap. For the pleasure curator Ali Rosa-Salas intimated by calling her Food for Thought program "pleasure principles."

Rosa-Salas was the second of three guest curators recruited by Danspace Project for this season's Food for Thought (the series title referring to DP's canned food drive for the food distribution program at St. Mark's; donate a couple, get a ticket discount). Her evening last night brought us performances by serpentwithfeet,  Jasmine Hearn, Dan and Lindsay Reuter, and Jonathan González. These artists had also contributed words to something not labeled an artist statement inviting us to follow our pleasure, our melancholy, our bliss.

serpentwithfeet ("a brooklyn based singer") whose two performances opened and closed the evening--presented the challenge of being completely unfamiliar to me and being about sound instead of dance. I entered his world and bonded with him over the superior metallic gleam of his emerald green nails. I stayed for the way his perfected R&B voice and stylings layered over classical music. His voice had a right (and a rite) to be there, and I took instruction from that. I found myself thinking visually as I listened to him. He wasn't dancing, and there were no projections. Yes, with his piercings, skirt, sneakers, those nails, he was a certified work of art. But something else happened in which I saw what his voice was doing and, sorry, I can't explain it.

I have seen Jasmine Hearn dance, admirably, with Marjani Forté-Saunders (and, I think, Ni'Ja Whitson maybe?). Her solo, cinder, seems like attempts to reach out through voice, through sound, through direct address to a watching, unfortunately passive crowd--"I need an adjective! How are you feeling?" But I found myself looking past all that, almost softly batting it away so that I could concentrate. What shined through was Hearn herself--uncommonly pliable, mercurial, intense, physically invested to the max with zero caution, allowing no daylight between herself and her choreography. She began the work as if carving herself out of darkness and ended it by returning to the dark. In between, she burned and glowed.

Dan and Lindsay Reuter's Annie largely evaporated around me. I followed along behind their backs, noting the drab coloration of their costumes, and lost track of them somewhere atop the church's altar steps. For some reason, I never found my way around.

This is the second time I've seen work by Jonathan González; the first time was on a shared program at BAAD! It seems the world he makes is about taking ordinary things--the space, the lighting, his body parts, his voice--and twisting them into unfamiliarity and absurdity. So, if you visit one of his worlds, no matter what you bring in your knapsack, you will never be prepared. Even as the experience winds down, González will find a way to subvert your expectations of an ending. I enjoyed the way he did it this time.

Let's hope that, despite the snowstorm, the third and final evening of Food for Thought will be able to run tonight at 8pm. Curated by Greta Hartenstein, the program will feature work by Ayesha Jordan and André D. Singleton. Check online for details and updates. If it's on, don't forget to bring a couple of cans.

UPDATE: Tonight's program has been cancelled due to weather conditions. Stay safe!

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
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Save the date--February 17--for "Not The Master's Tools"

Ali Rosa-Salas

Jack Ferver

Maria Bauman

Great news!

Join us on Wednesday, February 17 (6-8pm) for the third edition of Not The Master's Tools at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center.

I'm excited to be moderating a new panel including:

Maria Bauman

Jack Ferver

Ali Rosa-Salas

and

Dan Safer

sharing their experiences, discoveries, alternative strategies and philosophies as artists, arts advocates and activists in New York.

Dan Safer

If you've joined us for previous editions of NTMT at Gibney, you know how full and valuable these discussions have been. Please don't miss your opportunity to meet and learn from our speakers, and bring your own thoughts and questions for our Q&A period.

NTMT is FREE. Please pass this announcement along to your friends and colleagues in dance and performance.

RSVP here!

We look forward to seeing you!

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

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Flex and Lite Feet dancers say there's "No Such Thing as Neutral"

BARNARD CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON WOMEN

presents

NO SUCH THING AS NEUTRAL

NYC STREET DANCE SYMPOSIUM

Leaders from the Flex and Lite Feet urban dance
communities gather for a lecture-demonstration and dance battle

Ali Rosa-Salas 
lectures on
No Such Thing as Neutral

Saturday, November 8, 3pm-8pm

Event Oval, The Diana Center
Barnard College

A day-long symposium about two distinctive New York City street dance forms (Lite Feet, founded in Harlem, and Flex, started in Brooklyn) will explore how these urban dance forms—known for improvisation, informal teaching methods, and the central role of marginalized communities of color in their production—are often figured in opposition to more traditional dance forms, but are making significant contributions to the contemporary dance world.

Countless forms of dance created and performed in public spaces are bundled under the umbrella of “vernacular” or “street,” which are recognized for their emphasis on improvisation, informal teaching methods, and the central role
 of communities of color in their production. Yet they are often figured primarily in opposition 
to traditionally valorized forms
 of dance such as ballet and modern dance. With this project, Ali Rosa-Salas highlights the contributions of women who participate in movement-based styles that engage notions of subjectivity and the body in their work while utilizing the technical formalities of abstraction. These New York City-founded dance forms speak directly to the centrality of gender, racial, and community identity in art-making and how such inquiries propel local art forms into international cultural movements.

Symposium schedule:

3pm-5pm: Join pioneers of the Flex and Lite Feet communities for a lecture-demonstration and discussion moderated by Ali Rosa-Salas. Panelists include Chrybaby Cozie, Tatianna "Tati B" Butler, Alora "Gaia" Martinez, Reggie "Regg Roc" Gray, Diedra Braz, Shelby "Shellz" Felton, and Andre "Dre" Redman.

6pm-8pm: Rep Your Style co-founder Melanie Aguirre will host the first-ever all-women Lite Feet and Flex exhibition showcase. Featured dancers include renowned female Flex and Lite Feet dancers Shellz, KitKat, Android, Betty Spaghetti, Lil Spank, Tootie, Cleo, and Gaia.

Information: bcrw.barnard.edu

Event Oval, The Diana Center

Barnard College

3009 Broadway (entrance at 117th Street), Manhattan
(directions)