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)

Recommended: Cynthia Hopkins in "A Living Documentary"

Cynthia Hopkins
as her sassiest character in A Living Documentary
(photo by Jeff Sugg)

Whatever enrages, disturbs, and/or frightens me most becomes the subject of my work.

-- Cynthia Hopkins, from her Artist Statement

More intimately enraging, disturbing and frightening than global climate change--a topic Cynthia Hopkins treats in This Clement World--is the abject condition of the serious theater artist attempting to live a healthy life and make meaningful work in New York City. The multiple award-winning Hopkins takes on this issue in her new performance, A Living Documentary, this week at New York Live Arts.

In this quasi-fictional, quasi-autobiographical "documentary," Hopkins transforms herself into a series of comedic characters--veterans of the performing arts scene, for better or for bitter--whose behavior and words maintain a sizzling tension between what's off-putting and what's wise, what's over the top and what's completely down to earth. Their varying points of view on the possibility of a sustainable arts career shape up into a pretty interesting seminar. It's a more bracing kind of career seminar than you might ever imagine attending, with generous helpings of profanity and poignant musical interventions from this irresistible singer/composer.

For her ninety-minute show, Hopkins has adopted the sustainable strategy of simplicity. First, it's a solo. That saves a lot of cash right there. There's recorded music--played on an ancient cassette recorder to boot--and a set and props that look as if they were pulled from her apartment and/or some thrift shop. That's enough when the mission is to call bullshit on the external arts gatekeepers and overseers as well as the internal sabotage agents that conspire to keep artists fearful, passive and broke.

My favorite character, her hilarious motivational speaker-type--rocking rhinestones and a jet black halo of feathers--exhorts us to "act like you're worthy of a prosperous life...act like you're a woman of dignity...even if you're not a woman!" Hopkins knows that while one part of us is smirking, the other part is likely absorbing, that the clown's job has always been to slip around the guards and Make. That. Delivery.

A Living Documentary runs through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

March 6, 6:30pm -- Come Early Conversation: The Truth Behind A Living Documentary. Moderated by Paul Lazar

March 7 -- Stay Late Discussion: No-nonsense - Discussing the Economy of Art-Making. Annie-B Parson in conversation with Cynthia Hopkins

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

Big Dance Theater, as always

The week is finally winding down with some glorious weather. But, hey, I still think you should spend at least some of it in a theater!

If you can manage to get a ticket, do check out Big Dance Theater's Comme Toujours Here I Stand--now at New York Live Arts--a 2009 work sourced in filmmaker Αgחès Varda's Çléο de 5 à 7 (1961). With its cheeky narrative fragmentation and visual splintering, Comme Toujours deals less with how things go in life than how they go in our heads when the world presses forward while we stress out and grasp at anything that could make momentary sense or soothe or distract. BDT founding member Molly Hickok is stellar as the central character who--like Varda's beautiful, vapid Parisian pop star, set adrift by a scary Tarot reading and impending medical test results--becomes a magnetic hub for phenomena that continuously remind us that we're watching a movie, an entertainment, something artificial that we construct and control and invest with a power not necessarily intrinsic to it.

Directed and choreographed by Annie-B Parson, co-directed by Paul Lazar. With Hickok, the cast includes Tymberly Canale, Chris Giarmo, Jeff Larson, Aaron Mattocks, Ryutaro Mishima, Aaron Rosenblum and Kourtney Rutherford.

Now through Saturday at 7:30pm. For more information and ticketing, click here.

And take in a screening of Varda's Çléο de 5 à 7 at NYLA on Saturday, May 19 at 3pm. Details here.

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

Messing around with the French

PLAYING WITH CINEMA
AMERICAN PERFORMERS EXPERIMENT WITH FRENCH FILMS

Saturday, October 22, 6:30 

Miguel Gutierrez
The National Theater of the United States of America
Annie-B Parson
Dan Safer 

Melissa Anderson, host

Co-presented with The Invisible Dog Art Center and Les Subsistances

American artists will use a few minutes of a French movie (Godard, Tati, Demy, Melville) as the basis of their performances, experiencing the tension between images and bodies on stage and questioning the affinities between the imaginative world of movies, and the imagination of a performer. What kind of relationship can a performer have with an image on stage? Moving pictures can have an intense presence and catch the eye, and even compete with the physical presence of the performers. The performers then have to deal with it, either through appropriation or rejection: pictures on stage impose some form of negotiation.

FREE!

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(directions)

theinvisibledog.ny@gmail.com

"I've got a crush on you..."

When I see a great dancer perform, I feel a kinetic response, a physical sympathy--almost as if, as I sit in the audience, I am dancing too. I feel something akin to how people experience movie stars, like their energy field is larger than mine and I am riveted by this performance being. What I value from these performers is not that they can execute the most turns, the highest arabesque or stay in the air the longest, but something else entirely.

--Annie-B Parson, curator of Dancer Crush (with Carla Peterson)

Oh, right on, sister! And Dancer Crush, a program of short works running now at New York Live Arts and dedicated to exemplars of performance and interpretation, really is "something else entirely." Something wonderful. And glamorous. And essential. And instructive. Leaving the show last night, one friend called the experience inspiring. When I talk about dance with my college students--most of whom expect dance to be entertaining and little more--I remind them that dancers do far more than entertain: They show us how we can live.

I've got a crush on Dancer Crush's curators--Carla Peterson and Annie-Parson whose sensibilities blow me away, whose vision here is not only intelligent and coherent, which would be enough, but electrifying. (Thank you for the joy.)

I've got a crush on Steven Reker who--with his band of dancer/rock musicians, People Get Ready--move, play and sing with ecstatic passion.

I've got a crush on Arturo Vidich, one-man tempest who, under Yvonne Meier's deadpan direction, throws himself into pretty much anything, from flamingo walking to aborted lap dancing. ("No, Arturo," Meier says, speaking into her microphone for emphasis.) He's Theater.

I've got a crush on Ishmael Houston-Jones, playing a game of taking direction from an on-stage quartet of manipulators and dancing the perfect Trickster-Ish combination of grace and gross.

I've got a crush on Jodi Melnick who makes whimsy and high authority virtually indistinguishable.

I've got a crush on Brandi Norton who moves inside the contour of the music.

I've got a crush on Heather Olson and her eccentric virtuosity, Queen of All She Surveys.

I've got a crush on Holley Farmer, elfin and clean and in charge.

I've got a crush on Leah Cox--She of Multiple Intelligences.

I've got a crush of David Neumann--Master of Absurdity.

I've got a crush on Dancer Crush, and I'm not alone. So, if tickets remain, I suggest that you hurry to scoop them up, because word gets around, and you will have lots of competition.

This program continues nightly through Saturday (7:30pm). Click here for more information and ticketing. 

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

Five plan major tribute to Merce

Five Choreographers to Honor Cunningham at River to River Festival

by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, July 1, 2010

Holiday dancing at WFC

arts>World Financial Center dance events for Holiday 2009

New York Theatre Ballet in The Nutcracker
Tuesday, December 1 (12:30pm and 6pm)

Hour-long version. The 6pm show will be preceded by the annual Winter Garden lighting celebration.

ETHEL and Annie-B Parson: Wait for Green
Friday, December 18 (12:30pm and 7pm)

Choreographer/director Parson once again joins forces with postclassical string quartet ETHEL, restaging their 2008 collaboration, Wait for Green.

Ase Dance Theatre Collective
Monday, December 28 (12:30pm)
Dance and song in celebration of Kwanzaa

All events take place in WFC's Winter Garden and are free; no tickets required.

Map and directions

For a complete schedule and information on all Holiday 2009 events in the arts>World Financial Center series, click here.

Baryshnikov-Ringling partners launch arts fest

My wife and I recently took a short trip to Sarasota, Florida, where we lodged in a quiet Lido Key bungalow. We enjoyed mornings walking and birding in Myakka River State Park and on a nature trail near South Lido Beach--where we discovered mangrove trees and a pileated woodpecker. We made a side trip to St. Petersburg's fascinating Salvador Dalí Museum and caught up with a New Yorker friend who'd relocated to Gulfport. But our primary reason for visiting the region was the brand new Ringling International Arts Festival, a joint venture of New York's Baryshnikov Arts Center and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, a Sarasota institution governed, since 2000, by Florida State University.

We sampled a small but impressive selection of the festival's offerings, which ranged from orchestral and chamber music to avant-garde cabaret, from flamenco to contemporary dance and experimental theater. All in all, the five-day fest might not be The Greatest Show on Earth, but if the partners can sustain and build upon this initial level of diversity, accessibility and freshness, John Ringling's town will have another tradition to point to with pride.


Some highlights


The surprise fireworks show at opening night's pre-concert festivities had nothing on conductor Robert Spano's bang and dazzle as he later led the FSU Symphony Orchestra in works by Beethoven and Steve Reich. In the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, the orchestra flowed in joy and intensity; the fragrant music fairly danced under and around the agile, vivacious playing of pianist Pedja Muzijevic. With Baryshnikov looking on from the balcony, the festival got off to a joyous start.

The next afternoon, we attended our first dance show, Compañia María Pagés. Pages possesses a ship's-prow body, a mature sturdiness to match her assertive, lusty self-presentation in Flamenco y Poesía--her suite of dances inspired by works by José Saramago and Federico García Lorca. We have come to expect flamenco, when genuinely rich in duende, to take us on a fiery, often wrenching inner journey of the soul. With Pagés, instead, we stormed the path of womanly righteousness.

"I want to dance the words, only the words," Pagés wrote about this U.S. premiere for the program booklet. But the notes provided no translations, or even identification, of the selected poems. This created the curious effect of keeping us pretty much focused on the diva herself. Yes, her handsome quartet of young male dancers executed Riverdance-style synchronized routines--wicked-sharp ones, if ultimately unaffecting. And, yes, the heartfelt singers Ana Ramón and Ismael de La Rosa and the sublime guitar work of José Carrillo "Fyty" and Isaac Muñoz contributed lavishly to the beauty and "all in" feeling of Pagés's presentation. But the inescapable fact is that María! María!--to echo one of de la Rosa's wild cries--ruled the stage.

Like Duncan, like Graham, Pagés evokes and invokes the raw, primal elements. They exist in her large, harsh, masculine face with its stark, jutting jaw; in her arms--not muscular but strongly deployed, all angular sculpture framing and whipping about her head and long, thickish but python-like torso; in her powerful winding, churning, twisting and folding upon herself. Large and in charge, she does not so much flirt with her men as rally them to her martial cause. For the most part, she saves her seductive strategies--and she does have these, and in surprising, radiant, killer abundance--for her captive audience.

With supreme confidence, Pagés can also set aside strict flamenco stylings and don a little black dress and a pair of castanets to interject a bit of comedy, challenging two of the men to match her intricate percussive volleys with similar rapping of their walking sticks. This comedic interlude works in no small part because the Queen remains Queen throughout and, by that point, the conquered audience has pledged allegiance.

I'll have a full review of Aszure & Artist's Busk in an upcoming Dance Magazine. For now, I'll simply say that I continue to be charmed by Montreal's Aszure Barton. Busk--which shared a program with Annie-B Parson's The Snow Falls in the Winter, performed by the luminous OtherShore ensemble--just might be Barton's most sophisticated effort yet, a triumph for her terrific dancers and for the festival.

If a polite reception and overheard remarks offer a reliable gauge, Arena--Deganit Shemy's physically-gutsy meditation on toxicity and violence, premiered in April at Dance Theater Workshop--appears to have left Sarasotans a bit confused. Or maybe disturbed and dissociated in a self-protective way. But I hope it kept them thinking about it.

The current version does cry out for serious trimming; repetitiveness can give the impression of choreography going nowhere fast, no matter how striking or how valiantly performed. But the performers--all women and dressed and deployed to suggest athletes in the heat of competition--are, indeed, valiant and gripping. I'm familiar with a few earlier versions of Arena, and yet, as if I were encountering the work for the first time, the Sarasota performance gave me a nightmare. Literally. A very bad one. No lie.

We spent our last festival afternoon at a workshop premiere of Elevator Repair Service's romp through Hemingway--The Sun Also Rises (First Part)-- directed by ERS co-founder John Collins. Great fun. Check it out when it makes its formal premiere in late 2010 at the New York Theater Workshop.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Coming up:

Sideshow: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, a review of visual arts at the Ringling International Arts Festival by artist and psychotherapist Deborah Feller

Annie-B Parson: Body and Soul podcast

Annie-B Parson--co-founder and choreographer of the Bessie Award-winning Big Dance Theater--joins forces with the exciting post-classical string quartet ETHEL and dancer Elizabeth DeMent for a site-specific production in the Winter Garden at World Financial Center. "Wait for Green"--ETHEL's third Winter Solstice concert at WFC--premieres on Friday, December 19, in two free performances--12:30pm and 7pm.
"Wait for Green" has been commissioned by arts>World Financial Center for its 20th Anniversary celebration.

(c)2008,Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File

Program Notes: Upcoming on "Body and Soul"

Annie-B Parson--co-founder and choreographer of the Bessie Award-winning Big Dance Theater--joins forces with the exciting post-classical string quartet ETHEL and dancer Elizabeth DeMent for a site-specific production in the Winter Garden at World Financial Center. Wait for Green--ETHEL's third Winter Solstice concert at WFC--premieres on Friday, December 19, in two free performances, 12:30pm and 7pm. Wait for Green has been commissioned by arts>World Financial Center for its 20th Anniversary celebration. Get further information here.

ETHEL

Big Dance Theater

arts>WorldFinancial Center

Annie-B Parson founded OBIE- and Bessie Award-winning Big Dance Theater in 1991. She has created 14 pieces for the company, touring the work both nationally and internationally to such venues as Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Spoleto Festival USA, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, and American Dance Festival, as well as international festivals and venues in the Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany. She is currently working with David Byrne on his world tour and with the OtherShore dance company as well as preparing a premiere for Lyon with her company. In New York City, her work has been presented at Dance Theater Workshop, City Center, The Kitchen, Classic Stage Company, and the Guggenheim Works & Process Series. She was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and is working on a book about octagenarian, off-the-radar ballet teachers.

ETHEL is comprised of four world-class, Juilliard-trained composer/musicians: Cornelius Dufallo (violin), Ralph Farris (viola), Dorothy Lawson (cello), and Mary Rowell (violin). Described as "the fiercest string quartet this side of hell," and "the most bad-ass quartet around," ETHEL has performed over 300 shows in ten different countries as a favorite at countless festivals and venues around the globe. ETHEL's most recent CD release--Light (Cantaloupe Records)--was #3 on Amazon.com's Best of 2006: Top Classical Editors' Picks. As composers, the members of ETHEL draw on their singular and collective experience with a broad range of genres, styles and influences--from classical to bluegrass, from jazz to rock.