Sounding off with Miguel Gutierrez at The Chocolate Factory

Center: Dance artist Miguel Gutierrez
brings his new work,This Bridge Called My Ass,
to The Chocolate Factory Theater
(photo: Paula Lobo)

Miguel Gutierrez
This Bridge Called My Ass
American Realness at The Chocolate Factory Theater
January 9-19

Before the messy mound of fabric scraps, chairs, step stools, electric cords and other discards at center space gets picked through for eccentric props; before festively-colored lights blink on and draw attentions to unexpected places; before dancers, without a shred of self-consciousness. display more and more bare flesh and sexual inclinations, there is sound.

In the beginning of This Bridge Called My Ass, there is the word--or many, really--some written by Miguel Gutierrez. A Spanish call-and-response--all the performers are of Latin American heritage--and a kind of chant that seems derived from an elementary school classroom or a language lesson for the non-Spanish speaker. The pacing and forceful energy of the choral readings of this text sound like a choir filled with conviction. But not a choir without the capacity to be flippant; if you were placed just right, you would have noticed a sly gaze-and-grin passing between Gutierrez and Oakland burlesque dancer Xandra Ibarra.

As things spread out--and lordy, how they do spread out--so does resonant sound of voice, music, props making bizarre impact against the floor and each other. As things spread out, they sometimes come in precarious contact with other things or nearly so. I worried much over the safety of so much unprotected flesh in the presence of hard metal wielded with abandon and also fretted over the safety of a MacBook with a rather large step stool weirdly balanced on the edge of its opened cover. Who takes this kind of risk?

Sprawling over the mess, toying with it, the dancers get tangled apparently without any of the fear I, from the relative safety of my front row seat, was feeling. Nor do they inhibit themselves or others. Soft and hard things are just things. Things are just things, and you might find yourself hallucinating that the inanimate is animate, and very much vice versa. These juxtapositions are truly audacious, monstrous connections. You have to give yourself over to the in-the-moment pointlessness and futility of it all, because the dancers definitely do.

Presented without intermission, the piece is about 90 minutes and feels really endless. Towards the end, though, there's an interesting shift that I resist interpreting. In fact, I resist interpreting anything here. All I will say is that the execution of it has--again, the best words I can find for this show--energy, resonance, to an impressive degree. There's something here that lives beyond the initial mess.

Created by Miguel Gutierrez and performed by Gutierrez with Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, nibia pastrana santiago and Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez

Dramaturg and assistant director: Stephanie Acosta
Lighting design: Tuçe Yasak

This Bridge Called My Ass runs through January 19. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 48th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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"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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"Native American Realness": Address/redress cultural appropriation

Rosy Simas and Christopher K. Morgan
(photos: Tim Rummelhoff and Brianne Bland)

On Saturday, January 7, American Realness 2017 presented a conversation featuring Native American choreographers Rosy Simas (Seneca) and Christopher K. Morgan (Native Hawaiian) with Sara Nash, Program Director, New England Foundation for the Arts at Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room.

The afternoon session was organized by American Realness in response to concerns first raised in mid-December by Simas about the APAP-related festival's planned programming of a solo performance by Latifa Laâbissi, a French national of Moroccan lineage. (See Rosy Simas Reads Laâbissi’s "Self Portrait Camouflage", InfiniteBody, December 13, 2016.)  Sima's complaint and subsequent conversations with American Realness founder, curator and producer Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor led to an apology statement from Pryor, who had programmed the Laâbissi show in collaboration with MoMA PS1 associate curator--now Executive Artistic Director of Performance Space 122--Jenny Schlenka. Although Pryor quickly withdrew his organization's co-sponsorship of the Laâbissi event, MoMA PS1 kept the show on its APAP schedule. In the meantime, Simas and Laâbissi had an extensive conversation about the issue. 

The Native American Realness forum was convened on Saturday:

"to discuss the state of Native American performance work across the US and the epidemic of institutional negligence, insensitivity and attempted erasure of and towards Native American / Indigenous / First Nations’ values, histories and contributions to contemporary artistic practice. This conversation seeks to investigate how our dominant culture’s historical insensitivity aids in forms of cultural appropriation, Redface, and racism in artistic practice, spectatorship and presenting. Does Redface sell? Is curating Native artists seen as risky, unsellable, or uninteresting, or does this speak to institutional and societal ignorance?"

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.--co-founder, with Ricarrdo Valentine, of Brotherhood Dance!--attended this session and contributes a report.

Native American Realness

by guest contributor

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

Native American Realness was nothing short of a resistance that's been happening for over 500 hundred years. Artist Rosy Simas from Minneapolis initially sparked what's part of a larger fire as it relates to indigenous performance, life and well-being. Simas challenged the annual American Realness festival to reexamine why it would present Latifa Laâbissi's Self Portrait Camouflage, a Red Face performance, an appropriation by an artist who may or may not have done the research on indigenous performance.

Laâbissi was not there to defend her work and dialogue with Simas. Should she have been?

The conversation opened with each person stating their names and if they belonged to any indigenous nation--a traditional way of opening the space and filling it with ourselves and our ancestors. The first questions posed for the room were loaded yet poignant: What is "Red Face" and why is it problematic? Why is it programmed? We further questioned: Why does Red Face programming get funded in the United States while Native American artists do not? Boundaries were set so that Indigenous people in the room would speak first.

It should be noted that not every cultural institution would have the integrity to share their failure so publicly and be willing to host the provocateur and many others who stand in solidarity. And they did this only a month after the controversy arose. Response plus action.

Red Face is a racialized representation of Native American people similar to Black Face in America. Red Face is the impersonation of Native American people by white people of European descent, though not exclusively. People of color can also objectify their own cultures as well as others. Educational structures and cultural production sectors use this and other similar mechanisms to control the image of Native Americans. These efforts continue to write Native Americans out of their own stories, never affording space or access to funding for Native Americans to write their truths.

As the conversation progressed, further challenges emerged around intention and the research process. Who is authentic? For bodies of color, entering European performance spaces is a radical act in and of itself.

Participants questioned how context can be provided for the audience. Should it even be provided? When it comes to esthetics, what is disruptive? If the standard is European esthetics, then we must question who is radical. Someone mentioned a recent performance by Will Rawls that was sourced in Balkan dance traditions. What does "radical" mean for different cultures? In the words of Rosy Simas, "If an artist says it's radical, shouldn't we believe them?" Contextualizing performance is left up to the artist who must negotiate how much they want to let the audience in on their intended communication.

As the ninety-minute conversation ended, everyone realized that this was only a beginning to the work of excavating the dissociative culture we live in and its reluctance to process the trauma suffered by indigenous cultures. How do we heal?

Native American Realness was an opportunity for cultural workers and community members to have open dialogue about the misrepresentation and appropriation of Native culture and performance. This conversation was an example of how cultural production platforms and artists can work together to incite change, offering healing resistance with rigorous dialogue and harmonious creative space.

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Orlando Zane Hunter Jr. is a choreographer and dancer who researches, illustrates and creates from an African-American male perspective. In his work, he tackles issues resulting from a capitalistic imperialist patriarchal white supremacist system. Hunter grew up dancing hip-hop and graduated with a BFA in Dance from University of Minnesota, where he performed works by Donald Byrd, Bill T. Jones, Carl Flink, Louis Falco, Colleen Thomas, Uri Sands, Stephen Petronio and Nora Chipaumire. His solo Mutiny was selected to represent the University of Minnesota at the 2011 ACDFA gala in Madison, Wisconsin. Orlando studied LGBT activism and history in Amsterdam and Berlin. He has performed with Christal Brown/INspirit Dance Company, Contempo Physical Dance, Forces of Nature, Makeda Thomas, Threads Dance Project, TU Dance and Ananya Dance Theater, an all-women’s company where he was the first male member and toured with them to Trinidad & Tobago and Zimbabwe. Hunter is a co-founder of the collective Brother(hood) Dance!

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: Dana Michel

Dana Michel performs Mercurial George
in this year's American Realness festival.

The Black Canadian dance artist Dana Michel--who made a big splash at home and here in New York in 2014 with her solo Yellow Towel--is back with a new solo, Mercurial George, at Abrons Arts Center for American Realness.

She has described the hour-long piece as an act of “wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig” asking “What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body?” A seeming extension of Yellow Towel, with its genesis in racial stereotypes, Mercurial George implies the release of an authentic identity not imposed by others.

This is pertinent for exploration. Identity and marginal otherness--from immigration status to religion to gender--are battlegrounds with renewed real life-or-death stakes in the current moment. And Michel is a curious, fearless explorer, eccentric and mercurial indeed in her body language, fascination with the odd prop oddly used, and tendency to randomly mumble or declaim. She opens dimensions of mind and body that we usually declare unseemly and diseased and seems to say, "Look what else is here."

It's an interesting task and an interesting approach, requiring a performer who can submerge her calm, charming persona and grab hold of a viewer, no matter how resistant, for the space of an hour. Not easy. Go take a look and see what else is there.

Mercurial George
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Here's a mini-interview with Dana Michel

on the occasion of her January 2014 presentation of Yellow Towel

for American Realness.

(And here is my review of that show.)

Mercurial George will be presented again on Monday, January 9 at 4pm and Tuesday, January 10 at 7pm. Run Time: 55 minutes. For information on this and other American Realness events, now through January 12, click here.

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

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Rosy Simas reads Laâbissi’s "Self Portrait Camouflage"

Choreographer Rosy Simas
(photo courtesy of the artist)

On Sunday, January 8, MoMA PS1 and the American Realness festival will co-present Self Portrait Camouflage, an hour-long performance by France's Latifa Laâbissi, a dance artist raised in France by Moroccan immigrant parents. Curated by Jenny Schlenzka, the work is described on the festival's website as a use of

"tropes of caricature and the grotesque to conjure the silent aggressions and tensions at the heart of some immigrant experiences. Performing the piece naked, in bright spotlight against a sterile white backdrop, fully exposed to the world, Laâbissi becomes an object to be gazed at, studied, and scientifically dissected—evoking the imperialist custom of exhibiting indigenous people at World’s Fairs. Against the backdrop of recent anti-immigrant populism in the U.S. as well as the rest of the Western world, Laâbissi’s themes of 19th century representational politics and marginalization acquire new relevance."

Minneapolis-based choreographer Rosy Simas, who is Native American (Seneca, Heron Clan) addresses Laâbissi’s performance in the following statement posted last evening on Facebook. I have reached out to Ben Pryor, American Realness director and curator, for his response and will report back to you once I have heard from him.

*****

December 12, 2016

Dear MoMA PS1, American Realness, and Latifa Laâbissi:
I am writing to express my utter disbelief and outrage at the proposed production of Latifa Laâbissi’s Self Portrait Camouflage for the American Realness program. In the eyes of the Native American community, this production is an aggressive act of hate speech, cultural appropriation, and sacrilege.

My name is Rosy Simas. I am Seneca, Heron Clan. I am the fifth great-granddaughter of Cornplanter, the chief who negotiated with George Washington. My whole family line is of negotiators who have worked to create more understanding between our peoples.

I am a Minneapolis-based dance maker, a moving image maker, a performer, teacher, and an activist. I am a nationally known artist who has toured all over the U.S. and Canada. I am a Guggenheim fellow, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation fellow, a First People’s Fund fellow, and a McKnight fellow. My work is currently funded by NEFA National Dance Project and National Performance Network Creation Fund.

So I am speaking to you as an expert in the field of choreography and as a practicing cultural artist.
I want to explain as best I can why the production of Latifa Laâbissi’s Self Portrait Camouflage is traumatizing to Native women, disrespectful to Native peoples, and an act of white supremacy at MoMA PS1 and the American Realness Festival in NYC. 

I am also going to tell you what can be done on the part of the presenters and the artist to apologize for this atrocity and where you can begin to reconcile.

The description of this work says it is highly personal and that the performer is nude throughout the piece.

She is not Native American, yet the only thing she is wearing is something sacred to Native culture, a Native American headdress, the scared symbol of the Sioux Nations (the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples). Obviously the headdress is fake. Laâbissi would not be allowed to own sacred eagle feathers. Any artist of her stature SHOULD have taken the time to research the subject matter. The production has already been touring for some time now; in fact, this is the second presentation in New York City. The artist has had years to learn about Native people and sacred Sioux headdresses.

Second, the work cannot be highly personal when the weight of it is in the images. She wears the headdress through the whole piece. There is nothing highly personal in the appropriation of a sacred object of another people.

This is America. We are the First Americans. We are Native Americans. And there is nothing real in a non-Native choreographer pretending to be Native on stage. So this is not only offensive — but it is about as far from “American realness” as you can get.

Why would MoMA PS1 and American Realness want to add to the systematic genocide and erasure of Native people? Because that is what this production does.

Why doesn’t the artist draw from her own cultural experience if she is making a highly personal work?

European settlers, American culture and Hollywood has historically objectified, sexualized, and exotified Native women for hundreds of years. It is common to see the sexy mostly nude “squaw” sometimes with a headdress at Halloween, in pornography, in advertising and marketing. We have been and are still treated as if we are just a historic people of the past.

One really must be out of touch to not know that thousands of Native women have been missing in Canada and the U.S. The rape and murder of Native women has been devastating to our people over the past few hundred years -- and it continues today.

So when I see these images of Laâbissi, that is what I see. I see a non-Native woman in a fake headdress performing naked. I see a mockery of who Native women are. And I see a stage reserved for whiteness excusing itself from responsibility because it is an international person of color performing this mockery. 

These images are traumatizing to Native people. Imagine what it triggers for Native women who have been raped and the families of those women who have been murdered and/or are still missing?

Images like this remind those women, remind all of us Native Americans, that we don’t matter and we do not even exist in your eyes.

What needs to happen next:

1) A public apology from the presenters and the artist needs to be issued immediately.

2) This performance should not go on as planned. Laâbissi needs to take off the headdress minimally. A cancellation of the production would be better, and in its place, a public forum led by Native artists on our work should be held, in which stereotypes and cultural appropriation can be dismantled.

3) A commitment from MoMA PS1 and American Realness to present and support contemporary Native American artists.

If this production proceeds as planned and advertised, MoMA PS1 and American Realness can expect a loud, sustained, and highly visible protest. As demonstrated by the Standing Rock Water Protectors in recent months, Native Americans will not quietly tolerate and accept the theft of our territories, the violent rape of our land, the appropriation and profaning of our religious beliefs, and colonization of our bodies.

Please contact me directly so we can begin to correct this injustice and work toward authentic reconciliation.

Nya:weh Sgeno,

Rosy Simas 

Choreographer

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Triple "Realness" at Abrons: Lamar + Markey + Shelton Mann

As if the expected adventure of American Realness were not enough, I decided to turn it up a notch, at the last minute, by slipping in an extra show between the two I had already scheduled to see yesterday. So, basically, from around 5:30 to 10pm, I lived at Abrons Arts Center, dashing from M. Lamar (Destruction) to Erin Markey (A Ride on the Irish Cream) to Sara Shelton Mann (Sara (the smuggler)) with hurried bathroom breaks in between.

It was a popular evening at Abrons with the last two of these shows sold out, although the festival can always create ways to cram in the desperate. The extra audience seating at Sara (The Smuggler) tested me for claustrophobia, though I made it through just fine.

Markey's on for several more shows in Abrons's Experimental Theater before the end on Sunday, and her personal chemistry with co-star Becca Blackwell (so winning as "Irish Cream," a boat or a horse or...) anchors all the wild, comic tanginess and simmering eroticism. Accompanied by a rock band with music by Markey, Emily Bate and Kenny Mellman, this production is alive, crazed, relentless, voracious and completely irresistible. I'm glad I took a chance and made it in. (Click for scheduling/ticketing info.)

For Lamar's 70-minute solo, Destruction, the audience looks on from within a dimly-lit space (Abrons's Underground Theater) with a ceiling sloping darkly and heavily over a shallow performance area. The gloom and compression suit this project. An operatic lament co-written with Tucker Culbertson, Destruction calls vengeance on white supremacy and racist violence through art director Sabin Michael Calvert's creepy visuals (smoky stone crypt; coffin; handsome Black male corpse; severe subtitles) and the performer's countertenor pyrotechnics and piano work. Think Diamanda Galás but, in Lamar's words, "Negrogothic Devil worshipping free black man in the blues tradition." Lamar's vocals dip into the good well of Black spirituals and uppity-ism and have the tone of dread prophecy, swerving from stone-cold anger to bleak despair and back again. The number 2116 appears in the video projection, perhaps a hint that--despite the grieving singer's consigning everyone to hell--society might actually have something like 100 years to get its damn act together. 100 years--but no more.

Destruction continues tonight at 8:30pm and concludes with a 10pm performance on Saturday. Get more information and your tickets here.

Sara (the smuggler), an hour-long event by dance artist Sara Shelton Mann, is a patchwork infused with emotions, a performed life review, a fast trot from childhood through to the now, spoken in a great, gender-blurring, Lauren Bacall but a tad drier voice. (Her essential nature: "I've always felt kind of half on the planet and half off." Of discovering Contact Improvisation: "I got to touch people, and I didn't have to talk.") Her slipped-through history in dance--starring the likes of Alwin Nikolais, Murray Louis and Remy Charlip--was less of a draw for me than her engagement with energy healing, which parallels mine. In this way, her hour did not disappoint as it folded in a guided meditation for her by Keith Hennessy, some shamanic-looking clearing work she unleashed upon the patient Kayvon Pourazar volunteering from the audience, and a vigorous somatic exercise for anyone who cared to participate.  (Closed)

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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The Pen Thief

Well, actually, from all accounts, there are two of them--Trajal Harrell and Eiko Otake.

Both award-winning, internationally-renowned dance artists. Both of Japanese descent--Harrell by way of one distant ancestor. Both of whom have presented work at the Museum of Modern Art where, last night, they met for the first time for Harrell's much-desired "blind date," introduced and ably chaperoned by LMCC prez Sam Miller.

So, about the pens. Harrell admitted that if he's handed a pen to sign papers, he's liable to just tuck that pen away for safekeeping. Otake, quickly raising her pen in the air, confessed to the same larcenous trait. As a huge fountain pen aficionado, I can tell you, I plan to keep both of these people at arm's length. You do not steal pens from me and live to make art another day. Fair warning.

The most exciting thing about the Harrell-Otake conversation, part of American Realness 2015, was the chance to hear Otake speak at length about her relationship to Japan--apparently, a challenging one. In 1972, with her husband, Koma Otake, she left behind Japan's master-disciple system to craft an independent practice. When she returns to her homeland now, she finds herself getting angry.

"Being angry is very important to me," she said. "It pushes me."

Along with that anger comes feelings of grief and remorse. "And I don't want to be released from that," she added.

Anger can be fuel. I was amazed to hear Otake's statement as I shared the same insight, just hours before, with another choreographer. When we shame and seek to scrub ourselves of these troubling energies--which the viewer can readily see in Eiko and Koma's demanding, uncompromising work--what creativity do we end up washing away?

American Realness: Discourse, now through Sunday, January18

On the APAP Trail: Jack Ferver

Fred Herko was a dancer, an actor, a choreographer, and he took a bath and got out and danced naked in front of his friend to Mozart, finally dancing out of a window to his death. I am a dancer, an actor, a choreographer, and I love taking baths and I have danced naked though have yet to jeté out a window. I have often talked about suicide with my childhood friend Reid Bartelme. Reid will join me in the work. Reid is a beautiful dancer. Reid will make sure I don’t jump.

– Jack Ferver

I'd say there you have it in a nutshell, except there you don't have it.

Jack Ferver's duet with Reid Bartelme, Night Light Bright Light--an American Realness presentation at Abrons Arts Center--runs faster than you can and will leave you panting. It is death-ridden but keeps its audience chuckling. Chock-full of play and humor, nevertheless it harbors the terrible and the irrevocable. It dwells in absurdity as well as precision, grandiosity as well as sincerity, trauma as well as release. There's so much splicing (convulsions of narrative, of tone) from moment to moment that one can get rather annoyed at Mr. Ferver even while marveling at his adorableness. I'm convinced that, with every performance, Ferver must turn his audience into his collective therapist, and that his actual one is somewhere out there in the night, grappling with confusion and doubt and self-medication.

Ballet, sex, torture, anxiety, singing, laughter, death, Tennesee Williams. These things belong together? Well, of course they do!  But see for yourself as the wondrous Night Light Bright Light repeats tomorrow night at 10pm and Sunday, January 18, 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For details about other American Realness festival events at Abrons Arts Center and beyond, click here.

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

On the APAP trail--Tere O'Connor's "Undersweet"

In Undersweet, O’Connor works from the supposition that formalism might result from repressed sexual desire. The work is a choreographic meditation on how this paradox finds expression in dance, or possibly even generates it. -- American Realness

But of course.

And, of course, the Facebook hive mind sort of chimed in today with a listicle of ten reasons that dancers make superior sex partners. It's a good day in America when we wake up to find dancers acknowledged for being good for something.

Anyway, if you think you can cram into the tiny Experimental Theater at Abrons Arts Center--and American Realness fest will make every effort, even illegally from what I observed yesterday, to see that you do--try to see Undersweet. It's a 35-minute duet by Tere O'Connor for Michael Ingle and Silas Riener.

If sexual desire is repressed by formalism, that primal energy is seeping out all over the place in Undersweet, and it is affirmed. How could it not be? Let me repeat: Michael Ingle and Silas Riener. Those two angelically gorgeous men could dance the phone book, and it would be worth all of your time. The courtly framework and flourishes of Undersweet do not so much imprison desire as press grapes for wine.

with lighting by Michael O'Connor and a musical collage by Tere O'Connor from Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys

Undersweet repeats on tonight at 8:30pm and Wednesday, January 14 at 5:30pm. Click here for information and tickets.

For information on other American Realness festival events at Abrons Arts Center and beyond, click here.

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

On the APAP trail: Half Straddle and Ballez

Some members of The Ballez
(photo: Hedia Maron)

Now might not be the kindest season to hang around The Kitchen, that drab industrial box for the industry of experiment in far Chelsea. But Tina Satter's Obie-winning Half Straddle has set up shop there for the first time, and the chilly environs actually add a bit of vérité to the proceedings.

In Ancient Lives, which is kind of a movie-as-theater inspired by teen flicks from the 1980s but with a whiff of something decades, centuries and even aeons older, we find ourselves deep in the woods with a mesmerizing teacher, her three charges, a little witch and broadcast media equipment old and new. We know we're in the woods because that downstage chaise lounge, inexplicably covered, encrusted and taped by packing materials, has an owl statue perched atop, and there's an outsized badger (Chris Giarmo) playing Chris Giarmo's music live in the upper left corner of the space. And I swear there's a scent of pine--along with troubling power dynamics--drifting through the night air.

The aura of the artificial as well as the self-consciously awkward tickled me, everybody playacting in a production cobbled together as if by a magpie. My favorite bit--a time-warped set piece around the word "poppet"--shows Satter's players at their sharpest in vocal skills and timing.

Performed by Jess Barbagallo, Eliza Bent, Emily Davis, Julia Sirna-Frest, and Lucy Taylor with choreography by Elizabeth Dement, video by Ilan Bachrach, set by Andreea Mincic and lighting by Zack Tinkelman

Ancient Lives continues Wednesday-Saturday, January 14-17 with performances at 8PM. For information and tickets, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

***

Oh, how I regret that Katy Pyle's Variations on Virtuosity, A Gala Performance with The Stars of The Ballez--presented by American Realness at Abrons Arts Center--will have come and gone after only two shows on a single weekend. Why do the best things in life last so briefly while we must endure the likes of social injustice and bad performance? A better question: How soon can someone bring The Ballez (and sexy) back?

The Ballez, we're told,

celebrates the virtuosity of complexly gendered people by choosing the grandiose container of ballet for its presentation. The company celebrates a lineage of dykes and post-modern performance by telling queer/dyke histories inside the framework of classical ballet narratives.

The 45-minute program, beautifully lit by designer Carrie Wood, sampled the Ballez repertoire, including a suite from The Firebird, A Ballez; the Dying Swan excerpt from Sleeping Beauty & the Beast; and the smoking 1993 Club Suite from that last piece. With the exception of the striking Dying Swan solo--attributed to Pyle and dancer Michael Helland after the Fokine choreography for Pavlova--the other works are the handiwork of Pyle and Jules Skloot in collaboration with their ensemble.

Contemporary ballet, by and large, makes my eyes glaze over. I just can't get into it much or much of it. But this isn't contemporary ballet. With the exception of the Club Suite duets, it's classical ballet for contemporary people living in a real world, and it has got my full attention. The Ballez doesn't satirize ballet; it rewrites the rules of who can dance and how they must present themselves. It appropriates technique, stories and characters for all the right reasons. It makes us look closely, in the interactions between and among dancers, to witness utmost care and delicacy of touch as well as power in the fluidity of physical and emotional roles. Dance lives here and will never flame out.

This troupe could sell out--I'm not talking about seats--and part of me would be very happy for Pyle and her collaborators. They have developed a thrilling sophistication in their teamwork and bring something a wider American audience needs to see.

Last chance: Tonight at 9pm. Click here to see if tickets remain available.

For information on other American Realness festival events at Abrons Arts Center and beyond, click here.

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

American Realness matters

My American Realness

by Keith Hennessy, americanrealness.com, January 19, 2014

Dana Michel's "Yellow Towel" at Abrons

Dana Michel
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Dana Michel sidles out from behind a white curtain stretched along one wall. She seems shy, at first, not sure or secure about being seen. She's dressed in a black hoodie that hides her long dreadlocks, and in black slacks and shoes with thick soles. Her tense arms anchor her balled up hands like stumps at waist height. She moves in stiff, tiny jerks and twists of ankles and elbows and does not look at us. What's that box-like object poking out from the back of her hoodie? What are those squawking noises coming from her mouth? What's that white stuff smeared around her mouth?

"Ah...ah...obviously, I am the creator, and this is my house...."

We're at American Realness 2014 in the Experimental Theater at Abrons Arts Center, watching a performance called Yellow Towel, a US premiere of a work by a Canadian dance artist.  But it sure seems like we're trapped in a room with one of those eccentric street people we consider damaged goods and give wide berth. We're trapped for 75 minutes, forced to look at and listen to this person who moves in front of these white curtains like animated Expressionist brushstrokes rendered in thick black paint. She's a living piñata whose garments erupt in showers of Q-tips or rubber bands. When she goes with her impulses, she's all body--spread, contorted, vulgar, messy--and working on her own system, taking her time with everything in an environment that, except for her occasionally lucid mumblings and outbursts, can be dead silent.

That baseline quiet, and that pace in which little happens and what happens makes little sense, controls us. It is her show. A kind of victory in that.

Michel's publicity sources Yellow Towel in her childhood envy of girls with blonde hair and suggests that the solo probes Black stereotypes via her revealing, uncensored alter ego. You have ample time to think about that and what it might mean that her alter ego owns a laptop upon which she drapes a big, curly Afro wig.

I first saw Dana Michel performing a solo--the greater the weight--in the spring of 2007 at PS 122's DANCEOFF! series and noted that the Montreal-based artist was a "killer soloist" with "fiery authority." Seven years later, in Yellow Towel, she is no less than that.

Yellow Towel is now closed. For information about other American Realness 2014 events at Abrons Arts Center (through January 19), click here.

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

"I didn't mean it when I said...": Houston-Jones and Wexler at Abrons

Ishmael Houston-Jones and Emily Wexler
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Here's what they tell us:

Separated by a generation -- he’s in his 60s she in her 30s, and differing in gender and ethnicity – male, female; black, white, these two innovative dance artists have found common ground in their mutual belief that the pop love song is corrosive. That these songs damage any hope at finding true love with their sickening, cloying, and cheesy lyrics.

Dancers Ishmael Houston-Jones and Emily Wexler have made a collage of songs--from Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" to a pretty British folk ballad by Kate Rusby to the narcotized version of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin" by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. These numbers form an offbeat soundtrack for the dancers' episodic duet, 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot. The often flimsy lyrics--like the inclusion of the artists' demographics in the above promotional statement--seem almost besides the point.

A world premiere at American Realness 2014, 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot runs for one hour during which Houston-Jones and Wexler strip romantic love of its seductive disguises and get down to realness. Manic, desperate, childlike, gritty, aggressive, sticky, comic, addictive, ecstatic, visceral realness. Subjected to harsh light and throwing towering shadow. The animal body speaking in signs and howling its insides out.

In one segment, set to Pascal Rogé's recording of Satie's Gymnopédies, the dancers repeatedly attach to each other then melt, stretch and peel away, clearly remaining connected in a blend of sweat, smell and vibration. In another, Wexler reads from old diary entries about an unrequited crush--I'm guessing these are authentic ones she wrote in high school*--using a megaphone to liberate what was once folded away in privacy. "How pathetic, worthless and small I was," she says at one point. Maybe it's because we've all been there, done that, but the audience giggles at many of her words and even Wexler flashes a radiant grin as she says, "Why the hell are you still alive?"

As I see it here, the body is all. The body undermines and overwhelms words. The body is gutsy, often subversive and self-revealing. Both of these powerful dancers--"he's in his 60s she in her 30s"--give themselves over to everything.

And then they ask audience members to give themselves over, in love and worship, to the everything that is their own bodies. The concluding passage invites a fraction of the audience to come into the performing space to engage in a somatic meditation led by Wexler. Meanwhile, Houston-Jones constructs a shrine off to one side, complete with votive candles and several taped-up photo portraits. He sits in lotus pose before these faces, singing the refrain "You are everything and everything is you...." from The Stylistics hit song. Both approaches--Self vs. Other; be-in-the-present vs. live-in-memories--could be corny but, as finally presented here, don't feel corny; both of these created spaces appear genuine.

As I'm sure you're aware by now, Houston-Jones and Wexler and, by extension, Ben Pryor's American Realness festival, got an exceptionally harsh write-up in The New York Times. Obviously, I disagree with this critique of 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot and its artists as well as Michelle Boulé's WONDER (which I saw and reviewed here last May). I have not seen Adrienne Truscott's performance, but the short-sightedness and petulance of the entire review leads me to believe that I might well have missed something of value.

[*Since I posted this review, Wexler has told me that the diaries date back to 4th through 10th grade.]

For your entertainment, let me direct you to something Houston-Jones wrote and posted on Facebook yesterday morning. You will find it here.

Remaining performances of 13 Love Songs:dot dot dot are tonight at 7pm, Friday, January 17 at 5:30pm and Saturday, January 18 at 2:30pm. For schedule and ticketing information, click here.

For complete information about American Realness 2014 at Abrons Arts Center, click here.

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

Closing soon: Half Straddle, Jeanine Durning, "Black Latina"

Susie Sokol and Becca Blackwell of Half Straddle

For Seagull (Thinking of you), Tina Satter and her troupe Half Staddle take scissors to Chekov's The Seagull, his letters and other material, stapling slivers of original language to shards of modern speech (in English, Russian and pseudo-Russian). This deconstruction/reconstruction serves up a compact gull in 75 mostly entertaining minutes with electric, charming performances by a small cast--notably Eliza Bent (Masha), Susie Sokol (Arkadina), Emily Davis (Nina) and Jess Barbagallo (Treplov)--as well as the scrupulous arrangement and deployment of sensory delights (Zack Tinkelman's lighting, Enver Chakartash's costumes and Chris Giarmo's sound design and original music). Presented by Performance Space 122's COIL fest at the New Ohio Theatre. Extended to January 26. For complete schedule information and tickets, click here.

Jeanine Durning's inging (2012) occupies a space set up to have the feeling of a college classroom. In fact, as each member of the audience comes in, he or she can take a folding chair and place it anywhere in the room that will afford a decent view of a table serving as Durning's desk. A tall stack of books on this "desk" prop up a small digital point-and-shoot set for videotaping her. We can see the monitor of the recording as she stands behind the desk. Behind her, we see three different pre-recorded videos--side by side by side--that show Durning sitting, talking and gesturing. For 50 minutes, the live-action Durning (her name ends in ing, and she clearly relishes that state of being in continuous process) mainly talks non-stop. And I don't mean taking pauses for hydration (although a bottle of water rests on her desk, and she occasionally handles it) or for sustained breath. Oh, no. None of that. She starts by suddenly slipping behind the desk and just goes for the duration of the time, with all sorts of associations and disassociations, all kinds of vocal blips and repetitions, self-interruptions and self-disruptions pulled into her rapid, auto-replenishing stream of consciousness. "What do you say when there's too much to say?" she asks, at one point. Maybe the answer is that it all just breaks down and breaks out in every possible direction. Yes--if you were wondering--this "choreography of the mind," as she calls it, can be considered dance because her speech has fabulous rhythms and is, in itself, the body working very hard. Ultimately, she can't even maintain her position behind the desk, and her wandering around forces us to twist in our seats to follow. Presented by American Realness at Abrons Arts Center. Final performances today at 4pm and 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

When Black Latina, a 45-minute ensemble piece written by Crystal S. Roman and directed by Veronica Caicedo, started off looking and, especially, sounding like a derivative from the 1970s--think For Colored Girls--my heart sunk a little. Not that I didn't love (and desperately need) Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. But, in 2013, might we be ready for an innovative approach? In Black Latina, we find an ensemble of women of color, symbolically dressed in orange prison garb, sitting or dancing on blocks arranged around the space, each airing her pain and frustrations and observations in pedantic expressions declaimed at high volume--"The media bombards us with ideas of what beauty should be," "You're too closed-minded to comprehend the miracle of being a Black Latina," and so forth. As expected, they aim to speak for the unheard, raise awareness, rally sisters in the audience in pride and solidarity with evocations of family togetherness and the pleasures of traditional food, music and party time. Somewhere along the way, though, I began to see Roman's contribution as indeed something new, supportive and motivating for her community--women of mixed Black and Latina heritage struggling for acknowledgement and respect, not only in dominant white society, but also among Blacks, Latinos and often their own family members who may value light skin over dark. Out of love and urgency, her devoted cast--particularly Judy Torres, Teniece Divya Johnson and Jenelle Simone, whose performance styles are detailed, joyful and commanding--really work it out. I'd love to see Black Latina produced in our city schools. These women won me over, and their audience returned the love. Presented by The Black Latina Movement at Teatro LATEA. Closing tonight. For information and ticketing, click here.

Dance theater as dark art: "PURO DESEO"

Back in April, my colleague Andy Horwitz (of Culturebot) reviewed luciana achugar’s PURO DESEO when it premiered at The Kitchen and called it “several kinds of awesome.” I usually try my damnedest to avoid that word, but--damn it--Andy got it right. Achugar has delivered a work that should define the experience of awesomeness in dance theater. She and her creative team went on to win a 2010 Bessie for it, much deserved.

Having missed the Kitchen season, I grabbed the chance to catch up with PURO DESEO during Ben Pryor’s innovative American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center.

The first thing that got me was the gutsiness of starting it off in darkness and keeping the audience visually locked down for a very long time, with just achugar’s sing-song voice rising from the far side of the audience, repetitively singing a Spanish lyric, her faint tone slowly intensifying from folksiness to a slightly more strident pitch, and then the sound of something heavy passing me in the aisle, pounding its way towards the stage. Lighting designer Madeline Best is several kinds of gutsy, too. When we’re finally permitted to see, she lights the playhouse’s raw stage to suggest some dank, fire-lit cave of the mind, one you’d do well to avoid.

Thoughout the hour-long piece, achugar and collaborator Michael Mahalchick roam that mysterious, unholy space like ritualists gone quite mad. Awkwardly swathed in heavy black drapery and elbow-length leather gloves, achugar shuffles, shuffles, shuffles, retracing her steps along a proscribed, diagonal path and turning her head to give us an impersonal, unseeing, chilling stare. Best’s lighting later picks out Mahalchick writhing on the floor like a beached walrus. The piece proceeds with solo segments and interactions between these two looming figures in a Gothic atmosphere where desire looks less than pure.

In one lacerating achugar solo, Best brutalizes our eyes (and nerves) by frantically switching light on and off. Eyes simply can’t adjust that rapidly, and it hurts, though achugar, repeatedly slamming herself onto the floor, is surely hurting more.

Another disturbing segment finds achugar flat on her back while Mahalchick, making wizard-like gestures with his arms, works her splayed legs as if by remote control. In another sequence, the two run through a long, striking series of strong, precise gestures of the arms and hands. As the pace of this gesticulation increased, I felt myself slipping into a trance I did not desire and twice had to yank myself back. Powerful stuff.

The sophistication of that ritualistic sequence--both as theater and as, well, a dark art--conflicts with apparently artless elements, such as when achugar, for no discernible purpose, rattles the metal gate at the rear of the stage. That noisemaking doesn’t add much...and yet it works...doesn’t work...works...doesn’t work. Oh, hell, I don’t know. It’s hard to settle one way or the other on this, and yet it seems very achugar, very much about simply throwing something at water to disrupt its surface.

PURO DESEO runs for just one more performance at Abrons--tomorrow, Sunday, at 5:30pm. Hurry for tickets!

Abrons Arts Center
Henry Street Settlemen
466 Grand Street (off Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)

As real as it gets: Ben Pryor

American Realness Takes the Dance World by Storm

by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, January 2, 2011