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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Chicago's Deeply Rooted brings "INDUMBA" to BAM Fisher

Dominique Atwood and Joshua L. Ishmon
of Chicago's Deeply Rooted Dance Theater in INDUMBA,
a work by South African choreographer Fana Tshabalala
(photo: Ken Carl)

How fortunate to be introduced to South African dancemaker Fana Tshabalala through his mighty ensemble piece, INDUMBA ("healing hut"), a 2017 work performed for the first time in New York by Kevin Iega Jeff's Deeply Rooted Dance Theater. The Chicago-based troupe completes its too-short run of this stunning piece this afternoon at BAM Fisher.

The hut in question here--evoking sites of African traditional cleansing and healing--takes shape through a semicircle of stools for dancers on the perimeter of a misty space illuminated by hazy shafts of light. Constructed of beautiful, golden wood, the stools are spare and look less than sturdy. Inside that simple boundary, dancers rise to propel themselves through angular, anguished gyrations and convulsions. These obsessive movements suggest horrors born of social conflict. At the same time, they suggest a ritual of pressure to rid body, mind and soul of these lingering toxicities.

Nicholas Aphane's driving music reaches inside any helpless viewer, evoking the violent, relentless churning of massive machinery. We first hear a vague, intermittent hum like a muted signal or something powering up. We don't anticipate its coming textures and caustic power. External, inhumane forces that have become internalized must, like demons, be exorcised. The "hut" itself--heartless but purposeful--nearly pulverizes damaged beings to render them safer for themselves and for their community.

Some of the drama involves two men--are they antagonists? brothers? actually one person wracked by warring forces within himself?--who clutch, grapple, twist and coil around each other as if they were made of the same skin. One shoves away and isolates himself only to later find himself in the other's grip once again. Likewise, a suffering woman turns from her brutal attacker only to find her "savior" treating her with equal brutality.

Tshabalala's research into the experiences of war-scarred Mozambique, as well as his observations of how apartheid's legacy impacts today's South Africa, informed the creation of Indumba. The work resonates for us, as well, in an America newly haunted by its nightmarish past and roiled by present-day hatreds and violence. If Inbumba is a dance, as described in DRDT's program, offering hope of "resilience and reconciliation," there's clearly nothing easy along that path. And its final image suggests not so much the soothing of terrible pain as its honest, open-throated expression.

Performed by Dominique Atwood, Pierre Clark, Shanna Cruzat, Joshua L. Ishmon, Rebekah Kuczma, Marlayna Locklear, William Robertson and Anthony Williams

Costumes: Alex Gordon
Lighting design: Sarah Lackner

INDUMBA concludes with a 3pm performance today with a post-show discussion moderated by Baraka Sele. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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It's complicated: Cynthia Oliver celebrates Black masculinity

At left, Duane Cyrus with Jonathan Gonzalez
in Cynthia Oliver's Virago-Man Dem
(photo: Chris Cameron)

The Latin prefix “vir” means “man”; the suffix “-ago” indicates female. Thus, the term “virago” has, since ancient times, suggested that elusive flicker between genders we know so well and deny so violently. 

--from promotional text for Cynthia Oliver's Virago-Man Dem

Dance artist Cynthia Oliver centers the human body in her adroit Virago-Man Dem, just opened at BAM's Next Wave Festival. In fact, the four bodies centered here--Duane Cyrus, Jonathan Gonzalez, Ni’Ja Whitson and Niall Noel Jones--comprise one of the most cunning, most satisfying performance ensembles on hand this season. But Virago-Man Dem also boasts visual and sonic design of strong-enough confidence to support its movement without distracting or detracting from it. Particularly impressive is the work of Black Kirby (Afro-speculative comics artists John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) with projections and animations by John Boesche and lighting designer Amanda K. Ringger's rich imagination of place, time and mood. With costume designer Susan Becker and composer Jason Finkelman in the mix, Oliver directs a dream team of adepts at BAM Fisher.

With this piece, Oliver cracks open masculinity as a fixed idea received and upheld by Black men. Inspired by her dancers' experiences as well as her dual sensibilities as a woman of Afro-Caribbean birth living and working in the US, she draws from observation of masculinities, finding material in a deceptively easy stroll down the street, a clever dash on a basketball court, a sinuous sashay along imagined catwalks and more. What makes her resulting dance not merely a patchwork of a bunch of stuff done by three male-identified performers and one gender nonconforming performer is her taste and talent for connective flow and her eye for how being willfully or ecstatically off-center or molten or in-between uncovers the more inside the person. More self, more capacity, more joy, more supple, resilient strength. It's this more that, sadly, often threatens individuals, families, communities, religions and nations. It's this more--isn't it?--that for which we secretly yearn and which artists brilliantly model for us.

It might not necessarily take a woman to watch these things from the outside and bring them to her canvas or stage, but it takes this woman, perhaps, with  apparently endless reserve of movement ideas to bring her concepts alive and keep us interested over 75 minutes. And from the work's beginning (in physical stillness and visual murkiness) through the hoodie-covered dancers' testing of bodies and selves and their growing clarity and enlivening, with Ringger enhancing the dimensions of Oliver's sculpted movement, we're kept on the edge of our seats.

Here's a journey ready to be taken more than once, but consider yourself lucky if you get to see Virago-Man Dem even just one time.

Virago-Man Dem continues tonight through Saturday evening with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Prior to tonight's performance, Cynthia Oliver will offer a free talk, Examining Black Masculinity, at 6pm in Wendy's Subway Reading Room, downstairs at BAM Fisher.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
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What's Next? A solo for the great Germaine Acogny

Germaine Acogny is performing the New York premiere
of a work by Olivier Dubois of Ballet du Nord
at BAM Next Wave.

Sounds of a bassoon undulate like incense in the absolute dark of BAM Fisher's space. We're taking first, tentative steps into the mystery of Le Sacré du Printemps with choreographer Olivier Dubois of Ballet du Nord.

In this imagining of Stravinsky's rite, Mon élue noire (My Black Chosen One): Sacre #2, a 2014 solo for septuagenarian Germaine Acogny, Dubois first makes the audience wait in darkness through long stretches of music. We wait in the cloying aroma of tobacco from, as we later learn, a pipe gripped in the dancer's teeth. Intermittent flashes of light--a thin line vertical line--tease us. The music dials up uncertainty, tension, apprehension.

It's a while before we get a stable-enough look at Acogny and her setting--a platform in a black box that, over the course of the nearly 40-minute dance, confines her, sometimes elevating or partially obscuring her. She wears a black bra and slacks. One's immediate, disturbing thought: Dubois has turned her into a specimen for display.

Her close-shaved head emphasizes formidable features. She stomps the floor like a bull ready for battle. We continue to be stymied and tantalized by fugitive light and the afterimage that it leaves.

Talking to herself, laughing to herself, wrapping her head in black cloth and dragging it off, Acogny is a woman on the verge...of something. A woman to be admired at one moment and feared the next. One passage though, where she mimics the blare and clash of the music in voice and harsh movement, seems a weak offering, merely ordinary after the audacity of the work's initial staging. The regal and storied dancer looks merely petulant.

Were it not for the program's hair-raising quotes from writings by Aimé Césaire--one on the ravages of colonization, the other excoriating anyone who would stand apart, as a spectator, while the world burns--it might be tricky to figure out who Acogny might be, as dreamed up by Dubois, or read her actions said to be "drawn from the depths of her African soul."

In any event, any chance to see the influential Acogny perform here is a worthy occasion. Final performances are tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For more information on the 2017 BAM Next Wave festival, click here.

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

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Next on the BAM Next Wave: Faye Driscoll says thanks

Brandon Washington (left) and Alicia Ohs
dance in Faye Driscoll's Thank You For Coming: Play
Below: Sean Donovan
(photos: Maria Baranova)

It's not every day I get a last-minute email that says don't reveal this or that about the show you're about to see and review; we want this to be a surprise. But I got one the afternoon before Faye Driscoll's New York premiere of Thank You for Coming: Play at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space), and I'm completely up for being in on the fun.

No, I wouldn't spoil it. But I'll go Driscoll one better. There's very little I'll reveal about this Next Wave show, short of showing you some photos here that will give you just the slightest hint of the delirious and endearing thrift-shop aesthetics of the thing. Think a bunch of untamed k(ids) with access to costumes like these, uncanny exposure to Kabuki and a passion for storytelling who somehow have sprung from Driscoll's head. Driscoll, herself, is on hand to kind of show us how the springing-from-head thing happens. Dancers Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Paul Singh, Laurel Snyder and Brandon Washington work their butts off while also working their way into our hearts. Dancing, vocalizing and making complete asses of themselves, they are an ensemble to be treasured and long remembered.

Play is the second part of Driscoll's Thank You For Coming trilogy and my first experience of it. I enjoyed watching a structure that made the most of physical space, visual variety, theatrical artifice and excess, and extremes of polarities (even within an individual performer) before tamping down and tapering all of those things like a decorative fan displayed, madly flapped and then finally folded.

Go see it. Driscoll made it with you in mind. And that's all I'm sayin'.

Choreography/text: Driscoll in collaboration with the performers
Sound: Bobby McElver
Musical direction: Bobby McElver and Sean Donovan
Original compositions: Sean Donovan, Bobby McElver and Faye Driscoll
Vocal arrangement: Sean Donovan
Lyrics: Faye Driscoll
Additional lyrics: Sean Donovan

Thank You for Coming: Play runs one hour/15 minutes without intermission and continues through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Kyle Abraham's neighborhood remains in motion

Choreographer Kyle Abraham
dances in Pavement.
(photo: Carrie Schneider)

What does it mean to bring a Black neighborhood into theatrical space? Like the Black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, where dance artist Kyle Abraham grew up, or historically Black sections of Brooklyn where Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion finishes its season at BAM Fisher this evening?

It takes more than lining the space with a chain-linked fence and basketball hoop, evocative though those details certainly are. It takes a sensibility large enough and a skill sharp enough to reflect the complexity of Black life through the power of dance imagery.

What other artists have done so well between the covers of a book or across a movie screen, Abraham strives to do in the hour-long Pavement, first commissioned by Harlem Stage and shown there in the fall of 2012 as the city reeled from Hurricane Sandy. That show went on even as the troupers had to make do without their set, stored away in New Jersey. The fence and hoop (and a projection that features No Loitering signs) appear in the BAM production, establishing, for our benefit, a literal sense of place.

But a neighborhood is more than its coordinates. It lives in its rhythms--its music, its laughter, its glances, its gestures of kinship, its anger and hair-trigger aggression, its desires and its hopes. With his brief, opening solo to gruff blues, Abraham first directs us to look for and read these rhythms in movements that are both hunched and earthy. Nothing's realer than the wide, boisterous roll of his pelvis. But Abraham, as choreographer, can be indirect and elusive, suspending any interpretation-minded viewer in a limbo of ambiguity because there's just so much on his page.

When a white man wraps his arms around a Black man, pulls him to the floor, face down, and gently folds the man's arms behind his back, you read many things at once. The softness of the energy between the men. The unexpected compliance of the brother. The iconic and traumatically internalized image that cannot be severed from too many videos of Black men subdued or slain by cops.

Later in the piece, dancers lower themselves atop one another in the same downward, hands-restrained position--with the same gentleness, willingness, inevitability. You see bodies piling up as Sam Cooke croons a love song--I belong to your heart /You alone can possess me/No one else can caress me /I belong to your heart--and it is simply too much to easily process.

I remember interviewing a wunderkind Abraham in 2008--a year of Hope with a capital H--and asking him some trite question about Obama. Now it is eight years later. How many Black men and women have been incarcerated or murdered by the police since that year of capital H hope? The shades of our dead pass through Pavement and cannot be ignored.

I'm intrigued by the half of the stage that often stays empty while dancers bunch in formation in the other half. I'm intrigued by the breadth of Abraham's embrace--Bach to Donny Hathaway--and the compression of contemporary dance, West African dance, ballet and hip hop, dancers confidently switching codes through these distinct states of being. They both acknowledge and defy the limitations of theater space, representing lived experience, culture and intimacy within its make-believe confines. They make a neighborhood.

With performances by Kyle Abraham, Matthew Baker, Vinson Fraley, Jr., Tamisha Guy, Thomas House, Chalvar Monteiro, Jeremy "Jae" Neal and Kevin Ricardo Tate

Pavement concludes this evening with a performance at 7:30pm. For tickets and information, click here.

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

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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
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Jodi Melnick has her Next Wave moment

Jodi Melnick premieres Moment Marigold,
at BAM Next Wave 2014
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Dancers, left to right:
EmmaGrace Skove-Epes, Maggie Thom and Jodi Melnick

Her dancer's resumé includes work with stars of contemporary choreography--Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, John Jasperse, to name a few. She has won two Bessies and launched her own well-regarded dancemaking career. This week, Jodi Melnick made her BAM debut as a choreographer with Moment Marigold, created for BAM's 2014 Next Wave Festival.

Moment Marigold announces itself as a special kind of trio when, after simply walking out into BAM's humble Fishman Space, three women--Melnick with EmmaGrace Skove-Epes and Maggie Thom--variously attach themselves to one another. Hands touch, heads touch. Three graces intertwine in silence, clothing themselves in each other's physicality.

The dance progresses, for slightly less than an hour, as an unspooling of movement that really does look like what Melnick has called it--"a living thing" and "a continuous act of creating."

An early passage in Steven Reker's new composition for this piece reminds me of a journey by train, a regular rhythm of chugging and chiming, marking time spent that can be either tedious or pleasurable. How you hook into Moment Marigold might say something about your own fascination with small discoveries, your patience in observation and your own identification with these three explorers on their journey together. Do you feel their sticky-looking hands and sense your own? Their heavy arms? Their controlled stumbles? Their rubbery capabilities? Their bodies' twisting, rippling impulses opening out into the surrounding air? When Skove-Epes wing-like arms cup a buffer of space around Melnick's arms, can you see and hear what energy is doing in that gap between flesh?

In this context, some marigold moments work well because they are understated. Others, conversely, shout to pointless effect, feel out of place, break the spell by trying too hard. I'm thinking, specifically, of those arms extending out in a circle with splayed, vibrating hands. Melnick brings this out twice, and each time, the impulse looks forced and phony.

Melnick is a delicate bird--one with determination and durability. Skove-Epes and Thom, as powerful and gorgeous as raptors, translate Melnick's fluidity more directly and firmly and provide a necessary grounding force for this dance.

At one point, each of the dancers stride right up to the margin in front of the first row of audience seats on two sides of the space. It's their first acknowledgement--if it is, truly, an acknowledgement--of an outside world and outsiders. They become monumental, properly humbling to gaze upon. One should feel a little awe in the presence of a dancer. If you manage to get a ticket, go early and claim a front-row seat.

Original music and sound: Steven Reker (People Get Ready)
Lighting: Joe Levasseur
Costumes: Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung

Moment Marigold's final performance is tomorrow evening at 7:30pm. Tickets are sold out, but check here for ticket standby information--and good luck!

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

Chris Berry and Maija Garcia's "Legend of Yauna"

Chris Berry,
writer/composer, The Legend of Yauna
(photo by Jamie Soja)

Maija Garcia, 

director/choreographer, The Legend of Yauna 

(photo courtesy of the artist)

The Legend of Yauna, which ran for two nights this weekend at BAM Fisher, is a sprawling work of storytelling through theater, dance, music and visual art. Its collaborators--Grammy-winning world music artist Chris Berry and director/choreographer Maija Garcia, best known for her work with Bill T. Jones's FELA! on Broadway--aim to teach the kind of curiosity and unstoppable courage people need in order to heal their lives and communities. It's a noble mission that I wish I could fully support. Unfortunately, the work is undermined by uneven casting and overall quality as well as issues of cultural appropriation.

Produced by Berry's Banakuma organization, this work draws from the musician's attraction to an eclectic range of philosophies, symbols and ritual practices, primarily his experience of the ways of the Shona of Zimbabwe. A white American born in California, the musician believes that a vision and subsequent synchronicities led him to discover a profound spiritual connection to the mbira (thumb piano) and drums of southern Africa. Inspired by his exploration, he has devised an intricate metaphysical system related to the four elements of Air, Water, Fire and Earth. (Watch Berry's tutorial on Vimeo. See also World music artist Chris Berry goes digital, Quibian Salazar-Moreno, Boulder Weekly.)

Visualizing Chris Berry's Black Panther Queen (above)
and hero Yauna (below)
(artwork by Leif Wold)

Leif Wold's fantasy-style illustrations of Berry's mythic characters add visual gravitas and charm to Legend's production, but their intricate collaging of symbols from African, Hindu, Northwest indigenous and perhaps other traditions too strongly evokes a New Agey cherry-picking tendency. Everything--from traditional stories to ritual dance styles--gets tossed into Berry and Garcia's post-racial, colorblind blender. The appearance of Zap Mama herself--vocalist Marie Daulne portraying the Black Panther Queen dressed in Catwoman-style getup--is a missed opportunity. Daulne's much-heralded participation is what made me take a chance on Legend, but Daulne appears for one song (with poor sound quality) and a quick dispatch up a flight of stairs past the audience and out of sight.

Legend is a classic Hero's Journey, where the hero's disobedience to his wife ("Don't open the forbidden door!") leads to loss, disorientation, failure, tragedy and...well, you know. At two hours, including an intermission, it could stand judicious trimming, and elements of its staging--especially its frequent use of balcony scenes that are hard to see or properly hear--can be awkward and frustrating. But the live music often has warmth and, among the many cast members, Benjamin Sands (Yauna), Oscar Trujillo (Great White Eagle), Laurie M. Taylor (Sula and Gurthusula) and Naoko Arimura (Sah-i-Sah) bring distinction to their performances.

Tere O'Connor premieres "BLEED" at BAM Next Wave Festival

David Thomson (l) with Ryan Kelly in BLEED
(photo by Ian Douglas)

In the close quarters of BAM Fisher's Fishman Space, audiences enjoy an impressive, affecting view into BLEED--the new piece from Tere O'Connor Dance for BAM's Next Wave Festival. Seating is by general admission. So, if you go tonight for the final performance, arrive early so that you can sit up front and take pleasure in watching some of New York's smartest performers at work. O'Connor's eleven dancing adepts include Tess Dworman, devynn emory, Natalie Green, Michael Ingle, Ryan Kelly, Oisín Monaghan, Cynthia Oliver, Heather Olson, Mary Read, Silas Riener and David Thomson, each of these a veteran of one or another disparate works--Secret Mary, poem and Sister--folded into one another and distilled for the making of this piece. 

While that's the creation story behind BLEED, it does not explain BLEED, nor does BLEED seem to call for explicit analysis. For me, it is an hour of pure experience--awareness of being floated into and through a work of art so that its components, made and performed with exacting craft, suddenly magnify, opening themselves to exploration and marvel and amusement. Ideally, we should always be moved to see art in this way. Ideally--as I have come to anticipate from O'Connor--art should always reward this way of seeing.

James Baker--a Bessie winner and frequent O'Connor collaborator--composed the musical enchantments, performed along with cellist Chris Gross and vocalist Julia Read. Lighting is by Michael O'Connor and costumes by Walter Dundervill.

BLEED's concludes this evening with a 7:30pm performance. If tickets remain, you can get them here. 

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

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People at BAM Next Wave Festival

A soft, glowing globe--like a goddess breast of white, translucent parachute cloth--looms over cramped performance space carved out by three angled thrusts of audience seating, their front edges cutting right into that surface in BAM Fisher's Fishman Space. Miguel Gutierrez hasn't given himself--or his dancers...or us, for that matter--much room to maneuver. And yet, during its 90 minutes, And lose the name of action aims to channel big, hefty other worlds and states of being and perception.

L-r: Luke George, Miguel Gutierrez, Ishmael Houston-Jones and K.J. Holmes (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Performed by Gutierrez with a stellar cast of collaborators--Michelle Boulé, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Luke George, Hilary Clark and K.J. Holmes--And lose the name of action takes its premise from the choreographer's interest in neuroscience and the senses and, in particular, what he sees as the absence, in any discourse on philosophy and innovations in neuroscience, of any mention of what dancers know about the body. On a deeply personal level, though, it is also influenced by his father's struggles with a neurological disorder.

His program notes for the piece (worth a read, if you get a copy) conclude,

Along the way, I became intrigued with seemingly irrational ideas from the paranormal field, with their focus on insubstantial bodies, and I created a link between this field and my experiences performing and watching dance, which itself constantly disappears and haunts, and the hallucinatory experience of watching my father and family undergo a change I could never have predicted and only barely understand now.

From the outset, even before the performance begins, something is in the air. A heavy, soapy scent, actually. I can't swear this is deliberate--not something an audience member was wearing--but Gutierrez is interested in the senses. And so...maybe. And there's a very low-level sound thing going on, too. Something chiming, some voice or voices barely detectable beneath the audience chatter and the usher's anxious seating instructions.

The piece, itself, goes on to wink and wobble and lurch so much that it sometimes dumps and spills us out of its disoriented/disorienting state as much as it envelopes us. The relatively brief audience participation in a kind of seance presided over by a smarmy Houston-Jones seems especially wink-y--and yet, also, genuinely intense with all the dancers chanting and stiffly splaying their limbs in spirit-infused rapture.

Gutierrez either contains or explodes energy, feeling, thought. Sequences of hand gestures are performed with great calm despite a sense of obsessive and/or sacred ritualization--playing a piano runs into typing runs into chopping runs into declaiming without words and bigger, formal, ritualistic movements in duets or groups. In inexplicable but interesting spotlit-moments, Houston-Jones makes like a ninja sprite and Boulé, like a drunken Isadora. Dancers spill into the space, flowing, flopping, sloshing, stuttering, stumbling, twirling, negotiating near collisions like suddenly agitated molecules. A voice mumbles a musical "Fuck you," so barely discernible that you check, again and again, to be sure that you're really hearing it. There's pregnant talk of "a gesture of bad faith." The space fills with mad Ophelias. A bearded guy (actor Paul Duncan) appears in a video that, depending on your seat, you can see or not see. Deck chairs on the Titanic get rearranged...okay, well, not the Titanic...or maybe...but the very special, restricted white chairs interspersed among the front audience rows and commandeered by dancers play a heavy role in all of this and take a good deal of the brunt.

With a soundscape often lulling us into an altered state (and possibly slumber), And lose the name of action can switch between graceful and graceless, sharply envisioned and disorganized (deliberately or not), ludicrous and alarming. I doubt that it will come to count among my favorite Gutierrez works, but it does remind me of my first--and abiding--impression of his work, that gut feeling that I'm in the middle of an earthquake.

With lighting by Lenore Doxsee, sound design by Neal Medlyn, video and writing by Boru O'Brien O'Connell, costumes by David Tabbert and dramaturgy by Juliana May

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People perform And lose the name of action at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space) through Saturday, December 8 at 7:30pm and December 7 at 10pm.

Seating is limited. Sold out, although people on last night's waiting list were able to get in. So, give it a shot. For information, click here.

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