Artists Reach Out: Aszure Barton

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Aszure Barton

Aszure Barton
(photo: Tobin Del Cuore)

Aszure Barton received her formal dance training from Canada’s National Ballet School, where she helped originate the Stephen Godfrey Choreographic Showcase as a student. She has been creating dances for over 25 years and has collaborated with celebrated dance artists and companies including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Teatro alla Scala, English National Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Nederlands Dans Theater, National Ballet of Canada, Martha Graham Dance Company, Bayerisches Staatsballett, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Sydney Dance Company, and Houston Ballet, among many others. She has received accolades and honors including the prestigious Arts & Letters Award. She was the first Martha Duffy resident artist at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and is an official ambassador of contemporary dance in Canada. She founded Aszure Barton & Artists in the early 2000s in order to create an autonomous, collaborative platform for process-centered creation. As an educator, Aszure is regularly invited to collaborate with and give workshops at universities and art institutions around the globe. She is currently an artist in residence faculty member at the University of Southern California.


Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Yes, like so many other artists, I have had projects cancelled. I was currently scheduled to be working with the glorious dancers of Cuba’s Malpaso Dance Company, but unfortunately the project has been cancelled indefinitely. I was also scheduled to work with Houston Ballet last month and had planned to spend the summer creating and touring with my own team (Aszure Barton & Artists) but, again, these events were cancelled.

I am scheduled to work with LA Opera in the fall, though this process and its premier are pending. We shall see what manifests! There are also a couple other stagings pending for the fall and winter season. All this said, I am hopeful that some of these projects, and others, will still happen at some point (in some form) in the future so I’m maximizing this period of time/space to further research and develop the work.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I was born into a dance-loving family. My mother never took lessons herself but she encouraged us; she has always been profoundly moved by dance. My father dances all of the time, not on the stage but from and for his own heart's sake. I am the youngest of three women, and we are all still involved in dance.

I started making dances when I was a child. It was a way of bringing my friends and family together. I saw that it made people feel good, and that brought me joy. Still does.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

During the past couple months, I have discovered my own body again. I hadn’t realized the extent of how disconnected from my physical being I had become. I was a stranger to my own body but, thank goodness, this quiet moment of isolation has presented an opportunity for me to go within and to listen. What I am being taught through obstacle is the importance of community and communication. I have been taking online classes and am wallowing in the generosity and skill of my teachers. It’s really awesome to return to the fundamentals and such a treat to listen and receive direction from others!

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

Practicing movement again has reminded me to show up for myself as well as for others.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

In terms of my daily routine, I carve out very clear windows of time to focus on my physical and choreographic practice. I find that creating a precise timeline for myself allows me to be more present and to have more fun. I have been archiving works from the past and have been researching for projects in the future. I also carve out hours to actively practice “making” (whether that’s on paper or in hand or in the kitchen or garden), or online with a dear friend through Zoom or in person with my generous husband. The other day I was so desperate to practice making movement with a live body in space, that my husband volunteered to be the dancer. He is a nurse, not a dancer, but he did his best. :-)

It’s all a work in progress, and change is a constant.

My self care tip/mantra: Make space for stillness. This is an opportunity for pause and to ask ourselves, “What can we do to make things much better?”

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

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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Works by McGregor, Jones and Barton

AADT in Bill T. Jones's D-Man in the Waters (Part 1).
(photo by Paul Kolnik)

The Dance Enthusiast has just published my review of the Ailey troupe's program of new productions--featuring company premieres of works by Wayne McGregor and Bill T. Jones and a world premiere by Aszure Barton. Read it here!

Dance with Aszure Barton & Artists

The acclaimed Aszure Barton & Artists troupe seeks new dancers:

Dear friends,

We are expanding our dancing family for future projects!

We would love for you to submit the following to auditions@aszurebarton.com
so that we can get to know more about you:

- a brief bio (250 words max)
- photograph (max 2GB, JPG only)
- a video link (1min in length)
- citizenship / working status in the United States

Please submit by July 6th, 2013

For further information on Barton and her company, click here.

On the avenue. Second Avenue...

Second Avenue Dance Company--resident dance troupe of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts--is showing off a whole lotta training and no small measure of pizzazz in several works presented this week in its annual spring season.

Above and below: Second Avenue Dance Company in Aszure Barton's Rookery
(Photos: Tony Dougherty)
 

Two programs interweave work by student dancemakers Matthew Flatley, Mariel Lugosch-Ecker, Allison Schieler and Austin Tyler with world premieres by Sydney Skybetter, Aszure Barton, Seán Curran and Kate Weare. I saw Program A last night.

Barton's got the edge on edge in Rookery, and the NYU students seem to have a handle on her style's striking blend of wired mania and stretchiness and odd locomotion. Skybetter catches them on the other end of things with the clean, cool, continuous reconfigurations of Little Boy. They look great in Mark Koss's costumes and Skybetter's exquisite choreography. Lucky, lucky, lucky students to have such exciting mentors as they set off into the professional sphere.

Above and below: Second Avenue Dance Company in Sydney Skybetter's Little Boy (Photos: Tony Dougherty)

I can't help it: Curran's Oh sleep, why dost thou leave me prompts the answer, "Dude, because you've got all those people dancing around you!" And Weare's Pura Vida makes me long to see Weare's own marvelous dancers get a crack at it.

Performances run through April 2, all at 8pm. For reservations and information, call 212-998-1982 (Monday-Friday, 1-5pm only).

NYU Tisch School of the Arts
111 Second Avenue, 5th Floor
(directions)

A kiss is just a kiss...but this!!!

Happy Valentine's Day!

ASzURe & Artists

Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive

Recorded at Jacob's Pillow, July 29, 2005

Barton's seekers

For some choreographers, performance space is a laboratory. Or a playpen. Or a classroom. Or a soapbox.

Not so for Canada's Aszure Barton. For her, space is theater. And I mean real, old-school theater. The kind where a performer comes out and practically opens up a vein to reach you. Because that's who he or she is. And where it's okay to lower a disco ball and send flecks of starlight spinning through the darkness of the world.

I first saw Barton's Busk in Sarasota, Florida, where it had its world premiere at the Ringling International Arts Festival (2009). Here's some of what I wrote about it for Dance Magazine:

...costumes merely offer hints of narrative possibilities. Huddling dancers in dark hoodies, in one section, could signal everything from homeless street kids to a death-spooky group of monks, but no matter. We’re not meant to hold onto any identification long enough to pin it down.

Dancers’ bodies move like bold splashes of paint, match the slippery suppleness of clay, shimmer and resonate like stringed instruments, sing in overtones, and emote in a multitude of tongues. Today, many dance artists collaborate widely and consider their productions to be multidisciplinary. Barton—with an assist from her dancers, among the most magnetic and psychologically expressive performers onstage today—delivers the multidisciplinary, and multivalent, body.

A dancer’s long frame undulating, while one hand—adjoined to and splaying out from a hip—wriggles like a sea anemone, is at once human, not quite human, and a collective of humans, or perhaps a collage of human experience. Barton, who famously builds on each of her dancers' individual strengths, also seems quite confident and happy deploying a large group across sizable space. It’s amusing to realize that she can sneakily multiply a group even further by turning each one into many. 

Barton, I now see, can also turn this hour-long, episodic dance into many--revisiting, reworking and recasting it, remolding it to its specific venue and even rethinking its focus. The renewed Busk--running now through Sunday evening at Baryshnikov Arts Center's Jerome Robbins Theater--feels more powerful than the version that intrigued me in Sarasota. Its dancers--some original and some different--are still an astonishingly forceful, magnetic ensemble, agile and hellbent, sly and masterful, as capable of sophisticated musicality and breathtaking beauty as of cartoonish distortion. (I thought, at times, of the mercurial, sublime James Thiérrée, especially when watching Stephan Laks's solo dancing. Eric Beauchesne and Jonathan Emanuell Alsberry are also great standouts in this overall handsome troupe that includes Jenna Fakhoury, Charlaine Katsuyoshi, Andrew Murdock, Emily Oldak, Cynthia Salgado and Evan Teitelbaum.) Barton's vision seems big and bouyant in a way that forces us to ask ourselves, as people, as artists, "Why do you accept limits?"

With a large and grand creative team, most notably including Lev Zhurbin's Ljova + The Kontraband (primary music); Michelle Jank (costumes); Nicole Pearce (lighting); Keith Caggiano (sound design)

See Aszure Barton & Artists in Busk--today at 3pm and 8pm; Sunday at 7pm. For information and ticketing, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center

450 West 37th Street, Manhattan

(between 9th and 10th Avenues; map)

Aszure Barton busking in Sarasota

Hit this link and scroll down the page for my Dance Magazine review of the world premiere of Aszure Barton's Busk.

Dance Magazine reviews: Cardona and more

My Dance Magazine review of Wally Cardona's Really Real at BAM Harvey Theater is now up here.

In coming months, Dance Magazine will feature my print or online reviews of works by the following choreographers:

Aszure Barton (Ringling International Arts Festival, Sarasota, FL)

Deborah Hay and Yvonne Rainer (Baryshnikov Arts Center)

Tamar Rogoff (La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre)

Chunky Move (BAM Gilman Opera House)

Reggie Wilson and Andréya Ouamba (BAM Gilman Opera House)

and, of course, I'll let you known when these are posted or printed. As always, thanks for your interest!

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

Barton quintet does the Duo

From the Good-Things-in-Little-Packages Department:

Aszure Barton's Aszure & Artists company has concluded its three-day run of A Traveling Show on the tiny stage of the Duo Theatre on East 4th Street. Size-wise, this is a small work, as Barton pieces go--involving just five dancers--but its hour is tightly packed with intense movement, intimations of drama, and all the twisted quirks and beautiful flamboyance one has come to expect from this choreographer. It's also a lot of fun, not only for its headlong celebration of entertainment and entertainers but also for the intrigue of its strangeness and the sometimes gnarly interactions it depicts. The performers--Cherice Barton, William Briscoe, James Gregg, Banning Roberts and Ian Robinson--work remarkably hard, and their bright, individual talents are highlighted throughout.

Even nicer than getting this chance to see something fresh from the celebrated A&A was getting the news that Duo Theatre's artistic director, Michelangelo Alasá, intends to follow up with regular dance performances in this space. The East Village is home to significant dance spaces, including La MaMa--Duo's neighbor up the street--P.S. 122 and Danspace Project. Now and again, Duo's other neighbor, WOW Cafe, presents dance work by women choreographers. But dance needs new spaces, and it will be delightful to welcome another series to this neighborhood. Perhaps some of these institutions will collaborate with Alasa. Ideally, besides opportunities for small troupes and new folks, I'd like to see some major companies try out very different, very small things in small, intimate spaces!

For more information on Duo Theatre, part of DMAC--Duo Multicultural Arts Center--click
here, or write to duotheatre@gmail.com.

Dance Magazine update

Dance Magazine's April online issue includes my reviews of Stephen Petronio Company (The Joyce Theater) and Victoria Marks (Danspace Project). Click here for the current reviews. In the print copy of the issue, you'll find my review of Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People (Dance Theater Workshop) as well as my cover story on Aszure Barton.

And check out DM's mini-interviews with ten women choreographers here.