Davalois Fearon and the politics of race in dance

Davalois Fearon in Time to Talk
(photo: ANDREW IMAGING)

Sometimes, there's the story you intend to tell, and then there's the unintended story you wind up telling.

Davalois Fearon--a powerful dancer acclaimed for her many years with Stephen Petronio--has struck out on her own. In recent years, she has developed earnest multimedia pieces like Consider Water (2017) and the new Time to Talk, running this week at Mabou Mines. The background of Time to Talk--Fearon's literature cites research in "American history, dance history, racial identity formation and systemic racism"--has yielded a work that slightly gestures at the toxicity of these massive, interlocking entities. It hovers around what it means to train, professionally perform and be seen and critiqued performing dance in a Black body. And we know that's what the Jamaica-born Fearon has done exceptionally well--the irony of the piece being that you readily see she's a woman who excels at whatever she sets her mind to doing. Her supple, sculptural, forceful body is equipped to ace every form of movement--from ballet barre to twerking--even when built-in, exaggerated imperfections show she's unhappy and unfulfilled by the expectations that others put on her.

There's the distraction of her mastery, a mastery undercut by only partially-disguised misery and resentment. I get it. But the main story it's actually telling me--and underscoring any number of times--is the familiar one about how Black people take whatever's available to us and make it shine like the sun. We've been doing that from way back and do it still. And then other people copy what we've done, often profiting from it.

With prompting and accompaniment from her husband, jazz musician Mike McGinnis, Fearon makes various attempts to find the right genre of dance that's "appropriate" for her to do. As an interracial couple, they seem to have mined their own situation and conversations for material. Unfortunately, this creates some imbalance: He's an accomplished artist in his own right but not an actor; his awkwardness, when not working a sax or clarinet, weakens their interactions and gives Time to Talk an amateurish feel. I believe their good intentions, though, and I believe they need still more time to nurture depth, breadth and incisiveness in the work.

Fearon cites her Jamaican upbringing as a shield from racism. She experienced colorism in the Caribbean, for sure, but admits it was only when she entered grad school at a Midwestern university, a few years ago. that she discovered what Blacks face in the US on the regular. Her experiences in Milwaukee shocked her.

Fearon's aims to spark audience dialogue and follows each performance with a talkback with McGinnis and guests. Last evening, she included representatives from the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League. I counted just a few Black people in the room--including myself and Fearon's own understudy. It was disheartening to hear no one actually acknowledge the systemic nature of American racism (not just how people getting to know one another better will cure things). It also made me tired to hear most of the talking--at great length and intensity--issuing from white men.

But, again, the story you didn't intend to tell is sometimes the one that rolls out even so.

Time to Talk continues through Thursday, March 29 with performances at 9pm. For information and tickets, click here. For tickets by phone call 212-352-0255 or 1-866-811-4111.

Mabou Mines Theater
150 1st Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Black unlimited: André M. Zachery untames space

André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group
dances the world premiere of Untamed Space
this week at Danspace Project.
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Untamed Space--a new work by André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group at Danspace Project--is an epic fantasia envisioning Black creativity and survival on a grand scale. And I mean a really grand, world-regenerating intent the likes of which one might find in a fantasy or sci-fi novel but with everything animated for you outside the confines of your own brain. Zachery is a Black artist with his eye on the past (renegade "maroon" colonies of escaped African slaves), the fraught present, and the future (a new Great Migration with the stars our destination). Abstract and subtly metaphoric, this work is 70 minutes of heady stuff, including Zachery's trippy visual projections, Carol Mullins's fanciful lighting and an electronic stew, by composer/sound artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, evolving in depth and intensity.

Zachery's initial projections--liquified, distorting shapes that appear derived from Haitian veve symbols in eye-popping acid green and turquoise--flow and undulate against a dark screen. The choreographer, in similar fashion, has created a dance style emphasizing organic forms--bendy, furling and unfurling, rolling and cascading, reaching and twining good green things that break through and spring up no matter how much death surrounds them. At one point, too, these beautiful movers--Kentoria Earle, Candace Thompson, Nehemoyia Young and Zachery--reminded me of starfish. I didn't remember at the time, but starfish--or, sea stars, as researchers call them--can grow a new limb if one has been severed or, in rare cases, even regenerate their central disk. Zachery's dancers forever shoot out and deploy limbs and energy from their own "central disks."

Starting with a gradual procession of dancers into the space, the dance accumulates in urgency--first earthbound and propulsive movements, then standing, sometimes interactive behavior, either lyrical or percussive. Vocal passages in the music--such as a warm, muffled remix of Mahalia Jackson "in the upper room...talkin' with my Lord"--seem to herald emergence of desire and new language. As noted by dramaturge Rosamond S. King, Zachery has drawn from his cultural roots in Haiti, the American south and Chicago and a variety of dance styles. Reaching into this rich heritage, he embraces Afrofuturism as a way to understand how Black people have existed, what forces sustain our existence and how it might continue.

At times, Untamed Space and its dancers seem overpowered and diffused by the performance space. A time, its starscape journey yields too much similarity in  movement. Its seventy minutes can seem unnecessarily stretched. Still, Zachery leads us to a final image suggestive of unity and preparedness. The future exists within and among us. It's up to us to bring it to light.

Untamed Space runs through Saturday, September 30, with performances at 8pm with no late seating. Facilitated discussions run each night for a half-hour beginning at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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We're doing it again! Not The Master's Tools at Gibney!

I'm so excited that Gibney Dance Center will once again host Not The Master's Tools: Dance Artists Create Alternatives on Monday, December 7. Guess who's presenting and chatting with us this time?

André M. Zachery

Raja Feather Kelly

Jen Abrams

Larissa Velez-Jackson

Remember, hold Monday, December 7 (6-8pm).

These conversations are free and open to all.

Your pre-registration [CLICK HERE] will help us plan for the best space, but walk-ins are certainly welcome. Help us spread the word, and bring your friends and colleagues!

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

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

(map/directions)

Hamilton and Zachery at University Settlement's Performance Project

André M. Zachery (left) and LaMont Hamilton
(photo: Layla Zami)

The dance series Five on the Black Hand Side/Dapline! draws its title from the practice of the dap ("dap" meaning "dignity and pride"), a spectrum of elaborate gestural greetings and supportive hugs between Black men. Visual artist/photographer LaMont Hamilton and André M. Zachery of Brooklyn's Renegade Performance Group have curated three programs that can be seen as commentary on, as Hamilton has written about one of the works, "Not 'Black Lives Matter' but blackness as matter moving throughout the space; real and present."

Last evening, the series opened with three works that approached this embodied Black presence in different ways, each with a flavor of dreamlike timelessness.

Oxana Chi
(photo: Layla Zami)

Oxana Chi (Oxana Chi & Ensemble Xinren) comes to us from Germany, a dancer of Nigerian and Eastern European origin. A chart of her dance background would look like a spinning globe--from ballet and Cunningham and jazz to Javanese and Egyptian dance. Her solo Neferet iti, performed to live music by Layla Zami and a recorded score by Gilbert Trefzger and Abdoul Aziz Sinka, dares to draw visual and kinetic elements from different cultures, too, in a quilt-like, multi-textured performance. Her Central American plumed headdress, her yellow-gold harem pants, her hip thrusts and shimmies, her archer's bow draws, Masai jumps, capoeira maneuvers, vogue hands and dervish spins add up to a heady mixture. She believes it all works--you can see that--and makes it work. A somewhat delicate presence, she is, nevertheless, a woman writ large, claiming concert dance space for a diverse and teeming world, blessing that space. I don't claim to understand the two theatrical sneezes--clearly not real afflictions--that punctuated sections of Chi's performance. Perhaps the audience was meant to respond by offering its own blessing.

Hamilton collaborates with sound artist Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste on Evil Nigger (pt 1), a hallucinatory performance in which he sits behind a small table covered in a drop cloth and smears his dark chocolate face and white dress shirt and tie with a succession of gloopy paints--white, red and black. He is flesh-and-blood canvas, wrecking convention, striking out for something unknown in what starts off, it might appear, as a sendup of blackface and veers out of control. Like the droning, distorted music, the streaks and splotches and ungainly blends of stark, gleaming wet color eventually turn him into a still object of art fading from our view as the lighting slowly drains away.

The dap originated in the Vietnam War/Black Power era with Black GIs and spread throughout African American communities as a way for Black men to express cultural identity and support. In Zachery and Hamilton's ensemble piece, Dapline!, six men of color perform a fugue-like imagining of military discipline and, at the same time, reveal a tight community responsive to the pain, frustration and momentary failures of its members. The idea of the dap is addressed both in spirit and, later in the piece, in technical execution. The viewer marvels at the unity and elegance of this corps of men, the clean architecture of their shifting arrangements and movements in space, the softness and tranquility that can emerge when masculinity is unshackled, given more than one narrow definition. We watch some of the daps performed in slow motion, skin sliding over skin, our eyes absorbing the beauty and meaning of these silent interactions. These are duets; one quite fanciful interpretation unfolds like a stretchy, twisting tango. If I could have anything reconsidered about Dapline!, it would be its duration. Portions of it seem unnecessarily repetitious and drawn out. Rounding out the program, it makes for a long evening. But this important work is given magnificent and affecting performances by its dancers--Brian Henry, Andre Cole, Johnnie Mercer, Malcolm McMichael, TJ Jamez and Stephen Galberth.

Five on the Black Hand Side/Dapline! continues this evening with guest artists Candace Thompson/Nehemoyia Young and University Settlement's New Youth Movement Collective (NYMC). On Saturday evening, the series concludes with Laurie M. Taylor/SOULMOVEMENT and Hamilton and Baptiste's Evil Nigger (Part 2). Both programs include performances of Dapline!, not to be missed.

For information and tickets for tonight and tomorrow's performances, both at 8pm, click here.

Speyer Hall
University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Black lives matter: Moving Spirits RESPOND

Moving Spirits to Enlightenment

a dance performance by Moving Spirits, Inc., 

Tamara Williams, choreographer, 

along with Jonathan Lassiter, Sydnie Mosley, André M. Zachery, 

A. Nia Austin-Edwards and other creative artists

Saturday, February 21, 3pm

at Smack Mellon

Moving Spirits to Enlightenment is a dance event event paying homage to Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Ayana Jones, Rumain Brisbon and countless other black lives. Dance solos, quartets and trios will be divided between moments of audience participation and interaction as well as spoken word and poetry. Singing, chanting and additional vocals from the 1960s civil rights movement and the current civil rights movement will accompany the event. Moving Spirits to Enlightenment will also educate through the distribution of cards listing citizens’ rights and statistics about the militarization of police departments to keep the focus on police brutality and the betterment of black lives.

Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth Street (at Washington), Brooklyn
(directions)