Forever hunger: Kimberly Bartosik at BAM Fisher

Joanna Kotze in Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you
(photo: Jim Coleman)

Lighting designer Roderick Murray's fluorescent tubes hang from the ceiling inside BAM Fisher's Fishman Space, colder and more severe than stalactites. Two dancers--Christian Allen and Lindsey Jones--step into the bare space of Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you. You can almost hear raptor wings, so forceful is the way they will lunge and beat and spin against the air. Arms lifting and rotated. Heavy breath audible. Heads and chins tilted upward. Torsos arching as they drop to a knee.

Burr Johnson, Dylan Crossman and Joanna Kotze--raptors, too, or perhaps angels, if angels have feet to strike mountainous earth--come in and churn and lash against the empty space as well. Back and forth, they cross it, overlapping in time and close pathways, until their labors clearly take a toll. Watching them, too, provides an initial sensation of exhilaration followed by exertion. When they stop--just stop and stand and shift inside and gasp--you feel the same internal wooziness, everything inside one's own body saying, "Hold up. Can we just settle back into order?"

I hunger for you plays with the risk of release--the kind of dropping of form and letting go that we experience in extremes of sensual and spiritual ecstasy--without guarantee of connection. Or guarantee that connection achieved will stay or will satisfy. A partner backs off or quietly quits the space entirely. The one remaining might freeze in a pose of hopelessness--arms wrenched forward from a torso bent as if in abject submission.

Much of the inspiration for the piece comes from the choreographer's religious upbringing, and it's interesting that she has cast her own child, Dahlia Bartosik-Murray, as a silent witness to some moments of Kotze's dancing as well as, later, a figure of release, coursing around the space like a wild filly.

Choreography: Kimberly Bartosik in collaboration with the dancers
Music: Sivan Jacobovitz, with arrangement by Kimberly Bartosik
Costume design: Harriet Jung
Sound Engineering: James Bigbee Garver
Dramaturgy: Melanie George

I hunger for you continues a sold-out run through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information, click here.

Also, Friday's audience is welcome to an informal post-show discussion, facilitated by Melanie George with Bartosik and company in BAM Fisher's Lower Lobby.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(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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My DanceAfrica wish list

Abdel R. Salaam, Artistic Director
of BAM's annual DanceAfrica fest,
presents Remembrance, Reconciliation, Renewal,
honoring the centennial of Nelson Mandela's birth
and the work of "freedom fighters past and present."
The season focuses on South Africa's
traditional and contemporary dance.
Below: Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, founded in 1995,
under the leadership of artistic director Jay Pather
and resident choreographer Simphiwe Magazi

He said it himself. Several times. It's hard to choose.

Why do we have to?

Abdel R. Salaam--Chuck Davis's successor as artistic director of DanceAfrica--went to South Africa and fell in love. He auditioned several dozen dance troupes, knowing he could select only one for his festival. One. At most, two. He watched and watched. And enjoyed. And agonized.

Then he chose one (Durban's Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre). And then he combined a large number of dancers from four different companies into a supergroup, what became Ingoma KwaZulu-Natal Dance Company, made up of performers from:

Champions Dance Crew, which specializes in isipantsula, an energetic street style of movement that first emerged during the apartheid era; Kangaroo, a traditional Zulu ensemble based in Durban; the all-female Tswana Group, trained in Setswana, Pedi, Venda, and Xhosa styles; and Amatsheketshe, another all-female troupe that specializes in the traditional Zulu styles of Ushiyameni, Umkhomaas, and Umzani. -- from DanceAfrica 2018 publicity

And with thoughts of Mandela's birth centennial and mindful of continued struggles both there and here in his own homeland, Salaam began to create a way to introduce a range of South African artistry to his loving and loyal DanceAfrica audience for the 2018 season.

The head swims to think of Salaam's responsibility. And to think the next thought--which is that, since Baba Chuck gave Salaam his wholehearted blessing, telling him to make DanceAfrica his own, it might be time to do exactly that. What's the next level for this annual tradition at BAM--one which, given Brooklyn's struggles around gentrification and cultural displacement--is more significant than ever?

While Salaam is meticulous about thanking DanceAfrica supporters like Bloomberg and ConEd from the stage, I'm going to throw out a challenge to BAM and to funders to help DanceAfrica do more than entertain. It's time to make it an institution that thoroughly illuminates and educates year-round, not just for a single holiday weekend.

DanceAfrica 2018, which continues today and tomorrow, is entertaining and rousing as all get out, designed to be so, with everything from thrilling movement and acrobatics to breathtaking stage design. You can't beat it for that. Salaam inherited a jewel and, wonderfully, brings his own broad interests to it.

I can say that I saw much--and it was quite a range, stylistically, all presented with painstaking skill and openhearted verve--but I can't say much about what it all meant. I can't distinguish between the styles noted in the above description of Ingoma's component groups. I have a woefully imperfect understanding of the theatrical narrative presented in Siwela Sonke's Umsuka (choreographed by Neli Rushualang), despite what's written in the program notes' one-sentence description. And--like Salaam in his way--I want more.

I'd like Salaam to have the opportunity and the wherewithal to break DanceAfrica out of its box and build it further. Why, after four decades, is it not yet an institution that can bring companies--from traditional to hip hop and beyond--throughout the year? Why can he not open a permanent DanceAfrica building of studios at the ready to nurture African and African-diasporan dancemakers and new generations of excellent performers? Why can't young Black artists making searching, powerful work here in New York City and the states not have venues to find common ground with colleagues from the continent? Why can we not have year-round DanceAfrica residencies and retreats and networking and commissions and awards?

Why can we not have as many and as much as we want and need? And why, in particular, can't we learn--through adequate opportunities to see and document work--what we most need to know to truly give Africa's artists their due?

I want this. For myself. But also for Salaam and all the artists and audiences DanceAfrica has touched.

Dance Africa continues with 3pm matinees today and tomorrow, Memorial Day. For information on the season and related events and ticketing, click here.

BAM Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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BAM's Joseph V. Melillo to receive a Bessies honor

Joseph V. Melillo
(photo: Jesse Winter)

The NY Dance and Performance Awards (The Bessies) has announced the recipient of the 2018 Bessies Presenter Award for Outstanding Curating--Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer, since 1999, of Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Melillo will receive the award at the Bessies Presenters Gathering on Sunday, January 14 (5-7pm), at La MaMa's Downstairs Theater.

“The Bessie committees wanted to recognize Joe Melillo for his visionary curation for more than three decades,” said Bessies Executive Director Lucy Sexton. “Joe has made sure dance has a place on the stages of BAM—from the grand Howard Gilman Opera House to the adventurous Harvey Theater to the intimate space at the Fisher. He has brought so many international choreographers to New York City and lifted up generations of American dance artists on the world stage. We are thrilled to be honoring him with this award.”

The celebration of Melillo's award is free and open to all in the dance and performance community. Please click here to make your reservation.

La MaMa (Downstairs Theater)
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

ABOUT THE BESSIES PRESENTER AWARD

Established in 2017, the Bessies Presenter Award for Outstanding Curating recognizes a presenter or curator of work performed in the New York City area. It is presented to an individual or curatorial team whose work has had a palpable impact on artists, audiences, or the dance and performance field in general. While the award can recognize sustained achievement in curating or presenting over time, it can equally recognize a particular project, festival, or season that occurred in the past year. Visiting or guest curators, as well as full-time curators and presenters are eligible. The first Presenter Award (in 2017) went to Judy Hussie-Taylor, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Danspace Project. 

ABOUT THE BESSIES

The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 33 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize outstanding work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League, as members participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. The Bessies are produced in partnership with Dance/NYC. For more information about the Bessies, visit www.bessies.org.

Follow the Bessies on Facebook / #theBessies / @bessieawards

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BAM Next Wave presents "Haruki Murakami's Sleep"

from Haruki Murakami's Sleep
(photos: Julia Cervantes)

If you did not sleep for seventeen nights, wouldn't you be terrified? Jiehae Park doesn't look a bit frightened, though, when we first find the actress portraying "Woman," a Japanese housewife and mother, in Haruki Murakami's Sleep, presented by BAM Next Wave.

She's calmly, evenly performing a dry ritual--logical gestures and motions of everyday life in the everyday world, hands purposeful, smooth and deft. Where are the items her hands would actually touch and handle? From our point of entry and view, they are invisible. The box that houses her--taking up not quite all the width of BAM Fisher's Fishman Space--is open to the front and contains only a few, simple, representative things. A chair, a standing lamp. Normal enough. Normal enough...to be suspect.

With the audience fully assembled and houselights lowered, Park begins to address her sleeplessness and its cause. But, under a cool wash of light, her affect hints at fiery excitement. Her face betrays it; her speech races. What might be a source of legitimate concern for any one of us has become, for her, a portal to freedom. She relishes it.

Rachel Dickstein shares directing and choreographic credit with her Brooklyn-based Ripe Time troupe. With a luscious live soundscape by NewBorn Trio and an adaptation by playwright Naomi Iizuka of Murakami's short story, "Sleep," the production draws our eyes and ears into an internal world splintered and continuously shuffled like a deck of cards.

A husband slips into and out of the box--a dentist, nothing more down to earth than that--but he is clearly archetypal "Husband" as he exists inside "Woman's" head. And that head can produce more apparitions through the visual magic wrought by Dickstein's design team and the troupe's physical theater strategies. There are clever projections and material embodiments of "Child," "Shadow," "Anna Karenina"--a character lifted from Woman's daily reading--and other beings and other selves. And a floor board that can detach to become a table. And a table, tilted onto one edge, that still functions as a table you might sit to and gaze across because you see what you choose to believe.

She was not herself.

But no one has to know.

Woman awoke, one day, with one foot still anchored in a dream and chose this situation as a way to survive. An alluring time out of time for Woman becomes one for us as well.

Set design: Susan Zeeman Rogers
Projections design: Hannah Wasileski
Lighting design: Jiyoun Chang
Sound design: Matt Stine
Costume design: Ilona Somogyi

Haruki Murakami's Sleep continues tonight through Saturday, December 2 with evening performances at 7:30pm and an additional 2:30 matinee on Saturday. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Harvey Lichtenstein, 87

Harvey Lichtenstein, Who Led Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rebirth, Dies at 87
by Robert Berkvist, The New York Times, February 11, 2017

Batsheva: "Last Work" at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

Above and below:
Batsheva Dance Company
performs Last Work
by Ohad Naharin
(photos: Gadi Dagon)

Last Work, performed in its New York premiere at BAM by Israel's Batsheva Dance Company, runs for about 65 minutes. And so does Rani Lebzelter, placed upstage right, her royal blue gown flowing around her shins for that entire time as she pumps away on an unseen treadmill. Her look at once heedless and heroic, she comes to represent a figure of privilege and athletic glamour. Never once does she break stride or even turn her head to gaze at her fellow performers who, after all, stay hellabusy for that same hour-and-change creating an entire Ohad Naharin fantasy world and all that implies. At one point, a blob of these dancers congeals center stage right, obstructing the audience's view of the Lebzelter's body. You can see only her disembodied head continuously bobbing above them.

She's Naharin's ostinato. A few times, the soundscape fades, allowing the perfect, rhythmic clopping of her shoes to resound. She is ground and context--even visually, the watery blue against the stage's dark surround, a pop of color amid other white and skimpy costumes, dark, monk-like cloaks, grey, accordion-like screens rigidly guarding the wings. Avi Yona Bueno's lighting makes the stage and all its creatures look like pricey abstract art in motion.

After Naharin first introduces this vision of Nakamura, another dancer advances from center stage left, hunched over and pedaling across on bent knees. To be sure, nothing as silly as a simple walk will ever do. This is the famous Gaga. More and more dancers accumulate, all with untamed bodies that have long figured out how to do things their own way. The contortion and force of it will often look uncomfortable, reckless, much less than human. But it will also mesmerize. That first man, for instance, takes his sweet time demonstrating a deep, repetitive undulation that flows from one raised knee all the way through the shoulder on that side of his body, sometimes slow, sometimes speedy. It's a sensuous yet deceptive seduction into a world where you will probably find yourself alarmed and repelled.

 A scene from Last Work
(photo: Gadi Dagon)

As it develops, Last Work comes across the most as a dire warning--and, hence, political and timely. (Naharin has openly criticized policies of the Israeli government and, I'd bet, would not look kindly on our own mess in Washington.) The community he builds and reveals in this dance is less unruly than you might first think, more likely to mold itself into tight, locked groups, engage in reassuring rituals or--and this is where the women dancers' bodies carry the heaviest symbolic burden--throw itself wide open for the taking.

It's all heading towards dubious celebration. An orgasmic barrage of rifle shots. A burst of metallic confetti. The rippling satin of a huge, white flag of.... Of what? Of national purity? Or is it, ultimately, a flag of surrender?

Affixed to their spots and firmly connected to one another by packing tape, the once hyperactive dancers come to a standstill. Not our runner, though. She wears the tape and now grasps that gleaming flag in one hand but, somehow still unaware of what has happened, keeps running in place.

Batsheva Dance Company

William Barry

Yael Ben Ezer

Matan Cohen

Omri Drumlevich

Bret Easterling

Hsin-Yi Hsiang

Rani Lebzelter

Eri Nakamura

Ori Moshe Ofri

Rachael Osborne

Nitzan Ressler

Ian Robinson

Kyle Scheurich

Or Meir Schraiber

Maayan Sheinfeld

Yoni Simon

Bobbi Jene Smith

Zina (Natalya) Zinchenko

Lighting design: Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi)
Soundtrack design and edit: Maxim Warratt
Original music: Grischa Lichtenberger
Stage design: Zohar Shoef
Costume design: Eri Nakamura

Last Work continues nightly through Saturday, February 4 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
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BAM Next Wave: Reggie Wilson's NY premiere of "CITIZEN"

Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group
performs Wilson's CITIZEN at BAM Harvey Theater.
(photo: Sally Cohn)

Early on in CITIZEN--new to New York from Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group for BAM Next Wave at BAM Harvey--a striking French Romantic portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley momentarily appears on the backdrop behind one of Wilson's dancers. Belley, born in Senegal, was a slave, a rebel in Haiti's revolution and, during the French Revolution, was elected to the National Convention. If you knew none of those facts, you'd surely guess at the import of a Black man, in 18th Century dress, meriting such painstaking and forceful portraiture.

Belley's image remains visible for only a short time, long enough to impress but not long enough to get you thinking too much about his history. Wilson--ever the researcher and voyager--has taken care of all of that, including making the trip to Versailles to see the actual painting. He has also thought about race and what it means to find oneself in a society not perceived to be home. ("What does it mean to belong, and to not want to belong?") But he sets the viewer free to be with the work without necessarily having to puzzle out any of that.

While we cannot un-see Belley, and he might continue to haunt some of us, everything else we do see appears to atomize Wilson's research and musings. They spread out and form a texturous fabric of clear, repeated gestures and movement patterns sometimes assigned to specific performers and ultimately, beautifully, taken up by all. The work runs just a bit over an hour and, in that time, we're immersed in and transfixed by this living texture that signals individual portraiture without ever delivering big, obvious narrative details about characters, even in Altor Mendilibar's poetic cinematography. I got caught up in Anna Schön's sinuosity and toughness and wondered how Wilson picked that particular combination of traits to highlight in one body, but I would never expect to pinpoint their exact source or his reason.

It's as if Wilson beckons us close to a painting to look at the minute brush strokes and maybe even the chemical and molecular makeup of the paint because, after all, that's how the artist delivered the goods, how the artist told the story. That's how Wilson tells his story.

Along for Wilson's latest postmodern journey into the African diaspora are some adroit and interesting performers in addition to Schön--Yeman Brown, Raja Feather Kelly, Clement Mensah and Annie Wang.

Lighting: Christopher Kuhl
Costumes: Enver Chakartash

CITIZEN runs through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Jonah Bokaer's big wave hits Next Wave

Scenes from Rules of the Game
(photo: Sharen Bradford)

What eye-popping, impulsive joy Jonah Bokaer brings to a stage--every inch, edge and corner of it. He's got a fantastic crew of dancers who, if they haven't exactly absorbed his exalted degree of exquisiteness as a performer, more than make up for it in agility, stamina and adventurousness. He has, in longtime collaborating scenographer Daniel Arsham, a fellow artist with a keen sense of that dream-like place where bold, luscious imagery overlaps with anxiety and menace. In a new ensemble work, Rules of the Game, he's joined by Grammy-winning hit-maker Pharrell Williams (original score) and arranger/co-composer David Campbell for rousing, viscerally affecting sound that straddles and destroys borders between pop and symphonic, cinema-like orchestration. Nino Rota might have dug it.

The season, part of BAM's Next Wave Festival also includes a couple of notable head trips from repertory. There's RECESS (2010), the signature solo in which Bokaer's body, clad in jet black, disturbs, romps with and brazenly "writes" its way across a massive unrolling sheet of white paper. In Why Patterns (2011), Bokaer's dancers share a marked-off square of space with thousands of hyperactive ping-pong balls. The program--one hour and 45 minutes with intermission--might be the most visually clever, stimulating event I've seen this season.

Rules of the Game fields eight players in dusty-pink hoodies with Spalding basketballs in a game that, over time, gets less abstractly playful--less civilized--and more personal in its tension and viciousness. It's backed by a video showing the rise, fall and frequent slow-motion shattering of oversized plaster casts of basketballs and statue heads. The effects behind the stage, as on it, can be startling, often unnerving, but unfortunately repeat themselves beyond reason. No sooner does a possible ending of the piece subside than new action starts up on the stage with a new round of rising, falling, shattering behind it.

Visionary Bokaer and his team make impressive, appealing theater magic. They truly rock. But there comes a point, in each work, where you question why the excess needs further elaboration and where all of this is meant to take us.

Performances by Wendell Gray II, Laura Gutierrez, James Koroni, Callie Lyons, James McGinn, Szabo Pataki, Sara Procopio and Betti Rollo

Rules of the Game concludes tonight with a performance at 7:30pm. The program runs 1h 45 min with intermission. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Verdensteatret's latest show leaves question marks

Verdensteatret's Bridge Over Mud
(photo courtesy of Verdensteatret)

Having seen Verdensteatret's wondrous audiovisual fantasia, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing (Dance Theater Workshop, 2011, review posted here), I looked forward to Bridge Over Mud, the Norwegian art collective's US premiere at BAM Next Wave. First shown in 2014 in Oslo, this award-winning production has some of the enchantments of Question Mark. It boldly engulfs and transforms its space, filling it with a combination of cleverly re-purposed objects, looming video imagery and otherworldly sounds, some played or vocalized live. Viewers may feel as if they have pulled chairs up to the edge of a dream an intelligent, sleeping machine might be having as its brain processes the multitude of physical things and environments--humans, not so much--that it has dealt with throughout its day and down through time.

The hour seems long. Bridge Over Mud strikes me as far murkier and less inviting than Question Mark, if no less strange. The looming, advancing shadows, the massive sculpted sliding panels, the mysterious imagery in the background are items that we in the audience regard and check off from an emotionally-glazed distance. I did initially enjoy the model train engines snaking along 195 feet of track throughout the space but got distracted recalling that I never had model trains as a child. But, at least, that memory formed a momentary bridge to what I was seeing. Dangling from flies to floor, giant strands of Polynesian leis--apparently made of tiles simulating puka shells--seemed at variance with the overall funereal atmosphere. But then, this is the machine's dream, and maybe only the machine can sort it all out.

Presented here in association with Wayne Ashley's provocative FuturePerfect Productions, Verdensteatret is Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Piotr Pajchel, Eirik Blekesaune, Ali Djabbary, Martin Taxt, Espen Sommer Eide, Torgrim Torve, Elisabeth Gmeiner, Niklas Adam, Kristine Sandøy, Thorolf Thuestad, Janne Kruse, Laurent Ravot and Benjamin Nelson.

Bridge Over Mud concludes tonight but is sold out. For information and standby ticket details, click here.

BAM Fishman Space

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
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Joya Powell, Donald McKayle win early Bessies; nominations announced

Oh, how I deeply regret missing the Bessies press conference last evening, but I am up very early this morning to catch a train out of town for a few days.

Here's all the exciting news you need to know, and my hearty congratulations to the winners and the nominees.

I hope to see you on October 18!

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

*****

The 32nd annual Bessie Awards, presented in association with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will take place on Tuesday, October 18 at 7:30pm, at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House.

Three 2016 awards were presented at last evening's press conference at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center:

Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award: Joya Powell

"for her passionate choreographic engagement with issues of justice and race in our communities and our country; for connecting with the audience in ways that make it clear that these concerns belong to all of us—and action is required."

Outstanding Revival: Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder, choreographed by Donald McKayle

"for giving a classic modern dance new and powerful life, transforming the midcentury portrayal of an African American prison chain gang into a searingly resonant cry for our current times, performed with humanity, craft, and beauty by the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, produced by Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance as part of its 2016 season."

Juried Bessie Award: Pam Tanowitz

"for using form and structure as a vehicle for challenging audiences to think, to feel, to experience movement; for pursuing her uniquely poetic and theatrical vision with astounding rigor and focus."

The 2016 Bessie Nominations

Outstanding Production:


luciana achugar

An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center



Souleymane Badolo

Yimbégré: Replanting roots in the name of freedom

BAM Fishman Space



Camille A. Brown

Black Girl: Linguistic Play

The Joyce Theater



Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson

Chambre

The New Museum co-presented by FIAF



Pat Graney

Girl Gods

Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University



Maria Hassabi

PLASTIC

MoMA



Heather Kravas

dead, disappears

American Realness at Abrons Arts Center



Ralph Lemon

Scaffold Room

The Kitchen



Dada Masilo

Swan Lake

The Joyce Theater



Justin Peck

Heatscape

Miami City Ballet

David H. Koch Theater



Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard

For Claude Shannon 

The Kitchen



Safi A. Thomas with H+ | The Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory

Sleeping Beauty

Flamboyán Theater



Outstanding Revival (* indicates award recipient):



get dancing

By Andy de Groat & Catherine Galasso

Danspace Project



Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder  *

Choreographed by Donald McKayle

Performed by Dayton Contemporary Dance Company

Produced by Paul Taylor American Modern Dance

David H. Koch Theater



Outstanding Performer:



Ephrat Asherie

Sustained Achievement with Dorrance Dance, Doug Elkins, Bill Irwin, Gus Solomon jr., Rennie Harris, Cori Olinghouse, and many others



Nicolas Bruder

In Custodians of Beauty by Pavel Zuštiak

New York Live Arts



Omar Edwards

In FLY

New Victory Theater



Paul Hamilton

For his body of work including Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room and the work of Jane Comfort, Keeley Garfield, and others



Parisa Khobdeh

For her body of work with Paul Taylor Dance Company



Kazunori Kumagai

For his body of work including Live at the Blue Note Late Night Groove Series



Jennifer Lafferty

In Catacomb by Beth Gill

The Chocolate Factory



Molly Lieber

For her body of work with several artists including luciana achugar, Maria Hassabi, and Donna Uchizono



Aaron Mattocks

In Big Dance: Short Form by Big Dance Theater

The Kitchen



Gillian Murphy

Sustained Achievement with American Ballet Theatre



Aakash Odedra

In Rising

Skirball Center for the Performing Arts



Jamar Roberts

Sustained Achievement with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

 

Outstanding Emerging Choreographer (* indicates award recipient):



John Heginbotham



Jillian Peña



Joya Powell *



Larissa Velez-Jackson



Outstanding Music Composition/Sound Design:



Admanda Kobilka

For Clap Hands by Jen Rosenblit

Invisible Dog Art Center / New York Live Arts



Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

For #negrophobia by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko | anonymous bodies

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center



Dan Trueman, Sō Percussion, and Mobius Percussion

For There Might Be Others by Rebecca Lazier

New York Live Arts



Ustatshakirt Plus

For Dream'd in a Dream by Seán Curran

BAM Harvey Theater



Outstanding Visual Design:



Holly Batt

For the visual and set design of Girl Gods by Pat Graney

Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University



Design Team: F. Randy deCelle, Ralph Lemon, Roderick Murray, Naoko Nagata, R. Eric Stone, Mike Taylor, and Philip White

For the visual design of Scaffold Room by Ralph Lemon

The Kitchen



DD Dorvillier and Thomas Dunn

For the lighting and visual design of Extra Shapes by DD Dorvillier

The Kitchen



Eamonn Farrell

For the new media scenography of Forgiveness by Emily Berry | B3W Performance Group

BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center

ABOUT THE BESSIES

Produced in partnership with Dance/NYC, the NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 32 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize exceptional work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a 40-member selection committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League, as members participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. www.bessies.org

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Building futures: a fresh DanceAfrica for BAM

Armand Celestin (center)
takes a journey in Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures,
the 2016 season of BAM's DanceAfrica.
(photo: Richard Termine)

The extraordinary Moussa Sonko
of Senegal's Les Ballets de la Renaissance Africaine "WAAtO SiiTA"
(photo: Richard Termine)

The charming Chuck Davis has stepped out of his role as Artistic Director of DanceAfrica--that torch now passed to Forces of Nature's Abdel R. Salaam, a former, and impressive, Davis dancer. But let's just call this change a further expansion of leadership rather than a replacement. DanceAfrica, now celebrating its 39th season at BAM, functions as an engine built to generate leadership in all directions--from its mighty corps of elders to the youthful minds and talents it nourishes, instructs and inspires. It's a village, and that village includes you, too, sitting out in the seats of Gilman Opera House, clapping, cheering or tearing up as you always do.

There was quite a lot of that last evening at the opening of this year's spectacular Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures. There was Baba Chuck and the always nattily-dressed Baba Salaam to greet; generous supporters to thank; nine young Scripps scholarship winners to honor; and one lucky dance artist--DC-native Kwame Opare--to congratulate as first recipient of the new Chuck Davis Emerging Choreographer Fellowship. Opare's award will allow him to continue and deepen his relationship with the National Ballet of Ghana, creating "new work that explores West African dance technique and aesthetics on the contemporary stage."

DanceAfrica welcomed a new Artistic Director this season,
veteran choreographer Abdel R. Salaam.
Much-loved Baba Chuck Davis (below) will stay connected
to DanceAfrica's community as Artistic Director Emeritus.
(photo: Richard Termine)

Under Salaam, DanceAfrica will pursue its own imaginative expansion, newly emphasizing a unity of African tradition and African innovation. The latter is dramatically represented, this season, by Salaam's own work, A Question of Beauty, with its visual grandeur and passion for ousting demons of Black self-hatred, and Marie Agnes Gomis' Who Are We?, which situates rigorous contemporary movement and traditional Senegalese dance within an imperiled environment. Her handsome, Dakar-based Compagnie Tenane dances that piece amid a gleaming and confining field of one-gallon plastic water bottles. 

Baidy Ba and Marie Agnes Gomis
of Compagnie Tenane in Who Are We?
(photo: Richard Termine)

Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures crackles with fresh energy and--at nearly 2-1/2 hours--benefits from a lightly-applied narrative through line that connects its companies and pieces. Central to this scheme is young Armand Celestin who takes an Alice-like step through an opening in space and time. Celestin's "looking glass" is inspired by Salaam's visits to Gorée Island's Door of No Return, the portal to the ocean that carried so many enslaved Africans west to the Americas. Lagging behind your typical bustling, photo-snapping tourist group, the boy becomes fascinated by this door, passes through and encounters all manner of dancers, musicians and wise elders. In many ways, Celestin stands for all of us in the house: DanceAfrica creates space and opportunities for us to appreciate African concerns--from environmental integrity to personal integrity--and African values.

But messaging isn't all. The stagecraft of Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures--sets, lighting, costuming--has hit an all-time high for sophistication and pleasure. And we thrill to the vibrant performances of Dakar's Les Ballets de la Renaissance Africaine “WATTO SiiTA”--in particular, its leader, choreographer and charismatic chief dancer, Moussa Sonko. I don't know about young Celestin, but--damn--I definitely want to be Sonko when I grow up.

Senegal: Doors of Ancient Futures concludes on May 30 with performances today at 2pm and 7:30pm, Sunday at 3pm and Monday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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Elemental dancing: Munisteri's new "Antimony (51)"

Katie Weir and other dancers
performing Ben Munisteri's Petrichor (2015)
The company also premieres Antimony (51) on this weekend's program at BAM Fisher.
(photo: William Chafkin)

Antimony sounds as if it could be the opposite of harmony. But while the word--literally meaning "not alone"--does connote the presence of contradiction or paradox, it's also the name of a metalloid element, the 51st element on the Periodic Table. And now it's the newest creation--entitled Antimony (51)--from choreographer Ben Munisteri.

Premiered at BAM Fisher's Fishman Space, the hour-long ensemble work finds its inspiration in the brittle element variously described as "white," "silvery," "silvery-white," "bluish-white" or "lustrous gray." Antimony, Munisteri says, is "unable to exist alone in nature." His dancers exist in an orderly structure and decidedly not alone; in fact, when we first notice them, lined up on the nearly-dark stage, they're holding one another's hands. A brief image, perhaps meant to be received almost subliminally, but it well conveys the spirit of the dance to come.

Munisteri works with only six dancers in this--and only eight in the following piece, Petrichor, last year's premiere--but gives the illusion of far more. It does not take showy, aggressive movement to fill and animate this space--just the opposite. Every turn, dip and extension, every coalescence or separation and regrouping is unforced, performed with modest restraint and within undisturbed tranquility. Partners use the gentlest, most nimble control of each other, by simple touch to, say, a head or a shoulder. This is best shown in the smooth and non-gendered way in which a lift of one can easily transform into a lift of the other. The soft pastels and brights of designer Harry Nadal's flattering unitards contribute to this magic, turning every twirl into a display of quicksilver, fairy-like changeability.

In all things, the dancers model mutual support, and no one gets more spotlight time or higher status than anyone else. Here is Utopia expressed in movement, and I suppose it could not truly be a dance unless "contradiction" and "paradox"--questions, differences contained within the whole--did not empower things to actually move. But what you get out of all of that movement--and out of the clear dedication of these fine dancers to Munisteri's aesthetic--is a remarkable sense of cohesion. You see that also in Petrichor, which offers both a showcase for the dancers' technical rigor with an underlying trace of jazzy impulse and rhythm.

I was surprised by how much this cohesion meant to me, how much it worked on me and charmed me. I always love seeing the spark of individuality in individual dancers, and that is so not the look here. And yet. What's in the fabric of this dance, giving it its seamless appearance? Contradiction, paradox, human presence.

Dancers: Eric Sean Fogel, Katie Weir, Shane Rutkowski, Angela Maffia, Shomeiko Ingham, Kenneth Stephen Neil, Andrew Harper and Ricky Wenthen

Lighting: Kathryn Kaufmann

Antimony (51) continues tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, with performances at 7:30. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Dancers are the music: Urban Bush Women at BAM

Members of Urban Bush Women
perform Walking with 'Trane.
(photos: Julieta Cervantes)

In Walking with 'Trane--performed this week at BAM Next Wave by Urban Bush Women and inspired by the genius and spiritual force of John Coltrane--dancers are not simply people dancing to music. Dancers are music, in turbulence and in silence.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Coltrane's masterpiece, A Love Supreme, and the 30th anniversary season of Urban Bush Women, founded by award-winning dancemaker, educator and activist Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. When developing Walking with 'Trane, Zollar and collaborator Samantha Speis conceived the piece as an album of two "sides" divided by an intermission.

Side A--"JUST A CLOSER WALK WITH 'TRANE," with Philip White's electronic score--opens with one supple, wriggling figure suspended in a faint wash of light against darkened space and thrumming sound. Little by little, dancers assemble on the stage, integrated and attuned to one another but each pulsing her or his own instrumental, multidimensional voice. These musical lines are never straight. Flat is not flat; flow, never one way. Destinations only open up more directions of travel.

Looming, dynamic video projections play across a translucent scrim, evoking the smokiness of a music club. Or the keys of a piano. Or a sheet of lines awaiting notes the dancers will live. Or, thrillingly, the sensation of railway tracks receding from a speeding train/'trane transporting everyone--dances and watchers--into new times and places. Speis takes a masterful solo, and Du'Bois A'Keen introduces a flavor of hip hop to his crisp, clear moves, forging an up-to-the-minute connection to Coltrane.

With the side winding down, we hear recorded voices reflecting on Coltrane's music. The final speaker's words set the stage for Side B, "FREED(OM)," a title inspired by the searching, all-embracing nature of Coltrane's spirituality.

He was free. His music was free. 

He was expressing freedom.

Composer-pianist George O. Caldwell's live music for this new section is infused with themes from A Love Supreme and carries the dancers into a space of expansion and transcendence. There's a panoramic photo of the inside of a jam-packed music hall projected against the back of the stage, giving the illusion of the performers dancing their music for this crowd. Indeed, the UBW dancers savor freedom of movement in the open space of the stage, the dancing here feels expansive and celebratory. The quirks and questions of the earlier movement in SIDE A have dispersed which, I must admit, made me value them so much more and miss them.

The dancers of Urban Bush Women are Du'Bois A'Keen, Amanda Castro, Courtney J. Cook, Chanon Judson, Tendayi Kuumba, Stephanie Mas, Love Muwwakkil (understudy) and Samantha Speis.

With dramaturgy by Talvin Wilks, lighting design by Russell Sandifer, costume design by Helen L. Simmons-Collen and video design by Wendall Harrington

Walking with 'Trane continues through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

BAM Next Wave presents NYC premiere of "The Exalted"

Carl Hancock Rux (l) and Theo Beckmann
in costume for The Exalted
(photo: John Labbe)

I might have drawn closer to The Exalted--or, at least, felt a better grasp of its purpose--had writer/teller Carl Hancock Rux delivered his words with a consistent clarity to match their earnestness. I found myself often straining to follow text stuffed with historical and biographical data, distracted from other elements of the collaborative piece--strangely enough, Onome Ekeh's trippy and quite showy video. I started off wishing that Rux could speak without being hemmed in by music but quickly realized that the problem was not the impingement by Theo Bleckmann's sound design but Rux's vocal and narrative cloudiness. Bleckmann's ethereal melodies and supple voice, in fact, handsomely served this multimedia fantasy throughout its hour.

Bleckmann, as performer, contributes an understated elegance, wafting in and out of Rux's awareness like a shade. He portrays the influential German-Jewish art historian and critic Carl Einstein, noted for his scholarship on African sculpture and Cubism, leftist ideology and engagement in the Spanish Civil War. Trapped in Nazi-occupied France in 1940, Einstein committed suicide. Rux's interest in the writer appears to have roots in his own history--an adoptive father who served in World War II, a revelation, through genealogical research, of a link to Germany, and perhaps more.

Under the direction of SITI Company's Anne Bogart, The Exalted gracefully incorporates physical theater--characteristic movement and articulate gestures through which the men initiate a playful understanding of each other. But in a telling scene, Rux stands stock still, mid-space, warily gazing at Bleckmann as he skirts around him, lecturing on how Europeans devalue African art. In this encounter--and, perhaps, in this work--so much remains to be unpacked and examined.

With lighting by Brian H Scott and scenic and costume design by Maureen Freedman

The Exalted continues its run tonight through October 31 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Rage against the machine: James Thierrée at BAM Next Wave

James Thierrée in Tabac Rouge
(photo: Jack Vartoogian)

James Thierrée with Valérie Doucet
(photo: Jack Vartoogian)

What technical glitch kept a big, well-behaved audience standing for 45 minutes in the lobby of BAM Gilman for last night's performance of Tabac Rouge before ticket-takers finally opened the doors?

Here's my guess: James Thierrée's set. Specifically, the massive, mobile wall--old, discolored mirror panels on one side; dark, formidable lattice of pipes on the other.

This cleverly adaptable sculpture maintains such a crucial, active, nearly living presence throughout the 90-minute piece that you might argue for its status as lead dancer and star. And it has all the makings of a diva that you wouldn't want to cross, with capacity to maim its human co-stars--Thierrée and several members of his Compagnie du Hanneton--in any number of ways as they touch it, move it or scramble over it.

Did its lifting mechanism seize up? Or did it bop someone in the head? Mash a foot? Slice a hand?

Certainly, this structure sets the work's dystopian mood right off. The curtain rises on the wall, pipes-side forward, confronting the audience from the edge of a murky, smoke-filled stage. Viewers barely make out a few dancers crossing the back of the stage or clinging to frameworks that rise or descend. Now and then, a glow will flash from deep within the haze, like distant lightning. Fluorescent bulbs fire, here and there, but you quickly sense that any meaningful illumination (of the literal or metaphoric kind) will be hard-won.

Matina Kokolaki and other cast members in Tabac Rouge
(photo: Jack Vartoogian)

Thierrée, a performer of exquisite physical skill, hails from a storied lineage: child of circus innovators Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thierrée; grandson of Charlie Chaplin; great-grandson of Eugene O’Neill. His previous confections have drawn from the worlds of mime, dance, physical theater and circus, but he considers this steampunk fantasy, Tabac Rouge, to be more in the realm of dance or dance-theater.

Whether bodies are swirling in smooth, circular patterns, hurling themselves with desperate, revolutionary fervor or twisting into showy contortions, the dancey-ness of Tabac Rouge seems pitched to fill space and time and the hunger for entertainment. The second-night audience--perhaps overeager after such a long wait to claim their seats--seemed to crave little things to chuckle at; their choices left me deeply uncertain.

Elements of dance, mime and circus seem stuffed into a container that, in itself, has no clearly thought-out identity. In place of a developed story, there appears to be a situation--Thierrée portraying, maybe, hallucinating, an ash-coated despot whose court includes a military man, a woman who might be a daughter and another who might be a lover, presumably survivors of an unspecified disaster. Things look not only grimy but grim despite dancing and clowning. The balance of power keeps shifting, sort of the way Thierrée's angular balances shift--continually, weirdly, improbably--when he dances.

It's material for a drama--in this rendering, only material. The piece lives, instead, in its central visual element, making Tabac Rouge most convincing and satisfying as art installation. I consider the wall's final, dazzling moments to be my reward for enduring that wait in the lobby.

With performances by Thierrée, Mehdi Baki, Valérie Doucet, Magnus Jakobsson, Namkyung Kim, Matina Kokolaki, Thi Mai Nguyen, Ioulia Plotnikova and Soa Ratsifandrihana

Direction, set design, and choreography: James Thierrée
Costumes: Victoria Thierrée
Sound design: Thomas Delot
Lighting: Bastien Courthieu

Tabac Rouge runs through Sunday, October 4.  For schedule and ticket information, click here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Batsheva BAM opening protested

50 Protest Batsheva Dance Company Opening at BAM
by Mostafa Heddaya, Hyperallergic, November 13, 2014

Abdel R. Salaam to succeed Chuck Davis as head of DanceAfrica

Transition in Leadership for BAM’s DanceAfrica
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, May 16, 2014

An ordinary acrobat's extraordinary tale

I've just finished Duncan Wall's The Ordinary Acrobat (Random House, 2013), which interweaves two engrossing narratives: the often elusive history of circus and this young American's sojourn to France to explore contemporary circus as an increasingly enamored student, scholar and advocate. (Wall currently serves as National Director of Circus Now, the American advocacy organization, and teaches circus history and criticism at the National Circus School of Montreal.) While some of Wall's swings between past and present, personal and historical, might dizzy a few readers, I hung on for the whole vicarious, mental ride, coming away with a thirst for seeing more contemporary/interdisciplinary--and even traditional--circus and turning my skills as an arts writer to this stimulating challenge. If you think you know everything that circus is and can be--Ringling Bros. over here; Cirque du Soleil over there--this book will give you a peek at unexpected possibilities and may inspire you to search out more. Good stories, good ideas, good company.

And on Thursday, October 24 (6pm), meet Duncan Wall at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fisher Hillman Studio for a talk on the rise of contemporary circus and the state of the art today. This event is presented as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival in conjunction with the American premiere of Hans was Heiri by Swiss circus innovators, Zimmerman & de Perrot.

For complete information and tickets for Wall's talk, click here.

BAM Fisher Hillman Studio
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Harvey Lichtenstein, former head of BAM, to receive city award

Former BAM President to Receive Handel Medallion
by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, February 19, 2013