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

Forward and backward and forward with John Jasperse

Heather Lang and Stuart Singer
in Remains,
a new work by John Jasperse
(photo: Grant Halverson)

Dance is that art where real bodies, usually in real time, put themselves on view and on the line. But linear time passes, and dance slips away--from place, from sight, from memory. (Well, maybe not completely erased, but memory files can get a bit corrupted.) You want to clamp your arms around something so courageous and so poignant. And, no, you can't.

A new work by John Jasperse for BAM Next Wave pointedly evokes these thoughts and feelings. It is called Remains, both a noun and a verb. That still, prone body we first see lying in the middle of BAM Harvey's stage, cheerfully dressed in glitter? Definitely no longer moving. How strange that the audience--silenced by what appears to be the beginning of the dance--is compelled to gaze at a fallen body while house lights remain up, ushers remain at their stations, and a flurry of latecomers find their seats. And even then. And even then.

Like other folks at last night's premiere, I kept craning my neck to watch the puzzling scene around me. Finally, one usher made a circling gesture in the air, and her fellow workers melted out of sight. If I recall, it still took a while for the lights to dim. And even then. And even then.

Velvety black, like night, surrounded that isolated, illuminated body still at rest on the stage.

The stage reappeared. Throughout the hour, the atmosphere stayed largely serene, sometimes devoid of sound. A minimalist set, parallel lines in the floor pattern, lighting and infusions of music introduced lightly-applied coordinates, giving the dancers a place to be, but most of those coordinates could be altered. Even the board-like panels that hugged the space took on different tones and temperatures of yellow. And the well-crafted dancing, loosely sourced in Jasperse repertory and influences, appeared to channel a flow of imagery from centuries of visual art as well. The game was in allowing that flow--so well conveyed in the dancing--and following it, savoring the things you recognize or think you recognize, then letting them go.

This company--Maggie Cloud, Marc Crousillat, Burr Johnson, Heather Lang, Stuart Singer and Claire Westby-- is a blessing to Jasperse, and the opening night audience responded with loving, palpable warmth, much deserved.

Music: John King
Additional music: Javier Peral and Die Antwoord
Visual design: John Jasperse and Lenore Doxsee
Costume design and construction: Baille Younkman
Lighting design: Lenore Doxsee

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

BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, 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)

How are the mighty fallen: Langella's "King Lear"

Harry Melling, Frank Langella, Steven Pacey
in Chichester Festival Theatre's King Lear
(photo by Richard Termine)

Yes, it's certainly Frank Langella's King Lear, as one would expect it to be and, perhaps, as it should be. But if everything revolves around the grave, magnetic center of Chichester Festival Theatre's production at the intimate BAM Harvey Theater, that doesn't mean that the show's satellites lack their own pull.

First to meet our eyes and impress is a simple but variable set design by Robert Innes Hopkins--variable not only in what can be done to it but also what we can imagine through it. It creates a rugged, rustic, elemental environment, but even the general winter's chill throughout BAM's theater--tip: don't divest yourself of your sweater--feels in character with the chilling events onstage.

Vibrant performances are especially offered by Max Bennett as Edmund, by turns, devious and a hoot ("Gods, stand up for bastards!") and Harry Melling as Fool with sizzling, infinite energy over sustained engagement. Of the three contentious women setting off the tragedy to come, Catherine McCormack, Lear's scheming Goneril, seems most her father's daughter. Regrettably, Isabella Laughland's Cordelia leaves me wondering. Promising flickers of expressiveness play across her facial features from time to time, but the performance lacks stable focus and embodied authority. Whenever she spoke her lines while not facing my direction, the lack of a face to try to figure out only served to further diminish her.

When Langella, 76, made his first royal entrance through a thicket of wooden planks, I watched him as I might watch a dancer. The rewards came quickly. I immediately saw a battered battle ship heading into more fire, too big and unwieldy to turn itself around in time. Ultimately, he will indeed run out of time.

He enters stooped, rigid, harboring rage. His body is one big tangle, but don't dare glance away: He's not dead yet. 

With every encounter and every directive, he uses whatever power is left in his body to dominate. He gets in your face. Further along, he grabs Goneril in a maneuver so swift and decisive, I missed it. He's a raptor diving, striking some hapless creature on the forest floor; those creatures can die from fear alone.

Langella looks ready to pop McCormack's arm right out of its socket as he curses her. ("How sharper than a serpent's tooth...") For good measure, he spits in her palm. Later in the play, he will enact a scene of perverse misogyny, once again, showing that, no matter how decrepit and out of his wits, this king can still depend upon anger to fuel life. Now he can move quite well, thank you. Hate is amazing that way.

I imagine the young actors sharing the stage with this monster--this master--and thinking to themselves, Damn! Pinch me! But I'm thinking the same: I got to see Frank Langella rocking King Lear. I must be dreaming.

King Lear, directed by Angus Jackson, runs through February 9. For schedule details and tickets, click here.

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

Following Moses(es): Reggie Wilson at BAM

This morning, I continue to mull over why I felt, and still feel, somewhat cool towards Moses(es), a new work presented by Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group for Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. I love it in pieces--and those pieces, I love to pieces. But...I still don't know....

Taking its premise from the biblical story of Moses, notions of leadership/followership and worldwide traditions of migration, Moses(es)--the plurality is important to Wilson, not just clever--incorporates building blocks and methods this dancemaker has employed before. Dry wit, personally researched and beloved vocal music of the African diaspora, choreography sourced in and flavored by cultural traditions but smartly abstracted and meticulously arranged in movements clean as a hound's tooth. His collaboration with lighting designer Jonathan Belcher locates his work in a place of theatrical glamour--never more so than in Moses(es)--and delight, as if spinning popular and folkloric culture into fine gold thread and opulent fabric for optimum display.

And there are Wilson's fellow dancers, a few whom have been along for his journey for more than two decades and turn their steadfast strengths to this piece; out of them all, none quite as eye-catching and heart-stopping in this particular work as the compact and scissory-sharp Anna Schön, a petite Orthodox Jew in a company mostly made up of tall Black men of American, Caribbean and African origins. Dressed in Naoko Nagata's red-themed costumes, Wilson's dancers pop from their empty environment on the Harvey Theater stage, creating pockets of movement and vitality. When I think of those pockets of vitality, though, I recall thinking that they looked like isolated lights clicking on in a stretch of darkness.

Watching Moses(es), I'm just realizing now, turned me into a follower, trailing behind, stumbling behind Wilson and the company as they--literally and figuratively--populated various locations onstage, offered and embodied various cultural reference points, moved to and sometimes sang various genres of music (spirituals, klezmer, house, what have you). At times, dancers would park themselves in a corner--lying on the floor or looking into the wings or just standing around--as action would break out in another location. Set against the rawness of the Harvey's stage which, for some reason, felt farther away from me than it usually does, Wilson's abstract choreography made the air seem completely still around not only any moving group but around each individual mover. The stage picture looked static and chilled, particularly any time that regulated or repeated or ritualistic action was involved or the ensemble evenly distributed its members in the manner of the white polka-dots that decorated some costumes.

Singing and chanting--some live, some on recording--and rhythmic clapping and stamping accompany much of the dancing. Some vocals emerge, subtly, from the dancers, or from Wilson and one or another performer almost entirely tucked out of sight in a corner of the space. Our ears are pulled to follow all of that, too.

I'd catch a glimpse of the very end of Wilson's tapping foot, and I'd want to go down there, round any obstruction, to be able to simply watch him. That strong sense of distance and separation and longing--maybe intentional--formed such a large part of my experience of this piece that, at the end, I felt I never got a chance to wrap my arms around it as a whole.

Did I say how it all starts? Wilson, dressed in a white jumpsuit, comes out on stage and just stands gazing out at us for a while longer than seems normal and comfortable. Then suddenly, and dryly, he identifies the troupe: "Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group." Then the other performers come out, one by one, telling us their names, their places of origin and how long they've been with the company, all of which charms the audience no end. Then they retreat to a corner, turning their backs on us and gazing at something we'll never see, as Louis Armstrong swings "Go Down, Moses." Instead, we watch Wilson, in the middle of the stage, working hard to stuff a large piece of red, soft-sided luggage with what looks like half-a-stage's worth of Mylar tinsel. He pushes and prods and pushes and prods the billowing tinsel. Will he eventually get it all in? What do you think? Now that was one sequence I felt my arms wrap around.

I think back on the silver glitter of that mound of tinsel and the nearly unreasonable dazzle of Belcher's lighting throughout, especially in the house music sequence. Impractical and fabulous, all of it, stuffed in a totally mundane piece of luggage, the way fabulosity can inhabit and animate our mundane physical selves. And necessary for all of its fabulous impracticality. It's a must. Wilson has spent most of his life in art--unreasonably impractical, that--and traveling, traveling, traveling to feed that art with all the unreasonably fabulous gifts of the turning world.

Moses(es) continues through Saturday evening with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

WOW! Hey! It's Zimmerman & de Perrot at BAM!

Now that I have seen Zimmermann & de Perrot--and, by that, I mean these two Swiss guys, their whole award-winning team and their production of Hans was Heiri at the BAM Harvey Theater--I never want to not see them.

Look at these guys!

Fellow on the right is Dimitri de Perrot, a composer and DJ. From what I could tell, as the opening night audience assembled, he stealth-recorded our discordant chatter, amplified it to a grating roar, sampled it and mixed it with electronic melodies to play as an overture to the evening. He had us from gggggrrrr!!!

Fellow on the left is Martin Zimmermann, the troupe's choreographer. Why I love him is because his performing reminded me of my tuxedo cat (who has been ailing), from his character's sly, wily personality and lithe acrobatics to his black, open-toed footwear with the paw-like white socks showing. I don't know if he intended to look and behave like a tuxedo cat, but he did.

"We call it theater because we haven’t found a better word," the partners write in their wonderful manifesto, "Our Theater."* This phenomenon combines theater, dance, circus and music, blending it all to a rich consistency presented with panache. They came to my attention when I became interested in learning more about contemporary circus--a performance genre that is all about dissolving boundaries between artistic disciplines and blowing minds.

The troupe is so good--particularly in their acrobatic and contortion skills, but also in the freedom with which they establish their individual, endearing characters and present scenarios that make sense in their fantastical senselessness because they have disarmed us.

Scenes from Hans was Heiri
top, left: Tarek Halaby
top, right: Mélissa von Vépy
with Martin Zimmermann
(photos by Mario del Curto/Strates)

In the central showpiece of Hans was Heiri, the cast occupies a quartet of room-like boxes that fit together, open side facing us. This structure frequently tilts and turns at varying speeds, challenging its human cargo. You know how you discover just how much nerve and muscular specificity it takes to merely walk from one side of a room to the other if you slooooooowww down every movement? Imagine the extraordinary fluidity and agility these performers must have, the precise adjustments they must make when they're sloshing around inside this contraption or poetically dangling from it or acting like they're just sitting around at a table as the box bucks upward or moving through doors in the walls as if they're right at home. Throw in a terrifying power yoga class with the cast stuffed into one of the "rooms" by an out-of-control instructor who has worked with Miguel Gutierrez (that would be American ex-pat Tarek Halaby), and you get a sense of why the creative spunk of this troupe is completely irresistible.

With performances by Dimitri de Perrot, Martin Zimmermann, Tarek Halaby, Dimitri Jourde, Gaël Santisteva, Mélissa von Vépy, Methinee Wongtrakoon

Hans was Heiri continues at BAM Harvey Theater through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. Click here for more information and ticketing.

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

******

*OUR THEATER

We build our pieces from little things, everyday things, things that happen when a person feels unobserved—we hunt them out and gather them together. And that’s where we go to discover characters, spaces, sounds—a small gasp, a moment of distractedness, a constriction of the heart.

For our pieces we use everything that comes our way, and let it work its way through the meat grinder.

We call it theater because we haven’t found a better word.

We like distortion, we turn everything upside down.

We seek the possible in the impossible.

We risk and we fail.

We like little things. For us, objects are living beings.

We are little wannabe greats who are suddenly in over our heads.

We fool around at the edge of the abyss.

We laugh our heads off and are deadly serious.

We ride roughshod over physical pain.

We are extremely diligent and quite painstaking.

We let it rip.

Sweat and tears, good luck and bad.

Dimitri de Perrot and Martin Zimmermann 
from program notes for BAM Next Wave Festival production of Hans was Heiri

Jasperse's "Canyon"

Click here to read my Dance Magazine review of John Jasperse's Canyon at BAM's Next Wave Festival, November 16-19.

Shay Wafer to lead 651 Arts

651 ARTS has announced the appointment of Shay Wafer as its new Executive Director. Ms. Wafer will be the fourth woman to lead 651 ARTS, now entering its 23rd year, and succeeds Georgiana Pickett who steps down in mid-August to become Executive Director of the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Here is an excerpt from today's announcement:

Wafer’s appointment comes at a critical time for 651, as the organization is launching a planning and fundraising effort to relocate to a new home outside of the BAM Harvey Theater. While undertaking this next step in the organization’s history, 651 will continue to present live performing arts events born of the African Diaspora in venues in Ft. Greene and Downtown Brooklyn along with conducting education, international exchange and artist development programs focused on artists of African descent.

Ms. Wafer has held senior level positions at a number of non-profit arts organizations with a focus on African-American programming, community engagement and arts education. In 2007 Ms. Wafer became the founding Vice President of Programs for the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, a new multi-disciplinary performing arts center and museum in downtown Pittsburgh. Prior to the August Wilson Center, Wafer served for six years as the managing director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles, California- her hometown. She also served as the Managing Director of the St. Louis Black Repertory Company and was a founding partner of Crossroads Arts Academy and Theatre in L.A. and was a co-founder of Colored Girl Productions. Ms. Wafer has engaged in additional community and volunteer activities throughout her career including serving on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group (TCG). Ms. Wafer is a graduate of Howard University and Yale School of Drama.

It is the mission of 651 ARTS to deepen awareness of and appreciation for contemporary performing arts and culture of the African Diaspora, and to provide professional and creative opportunities for performing artists of African descent.

For more information about 651 Arts and its programs, click here.

A visit with "Raoul"

James Thiérrée performing Raoul 

at the Barbican, London

James Thiérrée's audience at Brooklyn's BAM Harvey Theater gathers before a stage that resembles an old sailing ship run aground, once proud sails collapsed upon themselves. In a sense, this first impression is true. Thiérrée's Raoul--a solo work from the brilliant leader and star of the renowned Compagnie du Hanneton--introduces a man who lives a shipwrecked life, castaway in a world of his own. Over the next 80 minutes, we're drawn into the fortified hut Raoul has built for himself. We become privy to its magic and its vulnerabilities.

Having first witnessed Thiérrée and his troupe in their 2005 BAM debut (Bright Abyss), I count myself among his fervent New York fans. I eagerly anticipated a work promising a focus on Thiérrée. Rest assured, for this year's Next Wave Festival, the man has packed his show with nearly everything he knows how to do. Given his multifaceted authority--as director, actor, dancer, mime, clown, acrobat, trapeze artist, magician and musician--that's quite a lot.

With gentle, stately music, houselights start to dim. A sunset glow drifts behind one "sail" and flows across another. Soon, fabric whips away, revealing a dark, looming structure of metal pipes draped in what could be a giant, dense and very dusty cobweb. A bearded, bedraggled fellow also appears--our Raoul. Or is it?

As Thiérrée storms the structure, crying hoarsely and mounting and dangling from it with his feet treading open air, some of the heavy poles begin to give way, dropping to the ground with a frightening jolt. You cringe and want to say, "James, are you sure?"

Raoul's trouble is that there's at least one other "Raoul" lurking, invading what he once believed to be a well-constructed reality. Thiérrée's skill at misdirecting our attention helps this annoying, not easily contained "double" seem to appear, like a magician's shiny coin, where we least expect him.

The hut, itself, is a kind of Raoul, harboring outdated but dearly loved things such as a gleaming Victrola and scratchy records. The two beings--man and armored home--are closely attuned to each other. They communicate. Now and then, Raoul grumbles something at the hut. When he rattles his shoulders and arms, it responds with a noisy metallic quivering of its own. It can also shift parts of its structure at will. Even the air answers to Raoul's movements with gusts of musical sounds. But the air, too, has a stubborn will, and the loner finds himself batting away these chords as if they were big, invisible flies.

The disheveled, often frenzied Raoul is, without question, a diagnosable refugee from the abyss. We are left to guess the source of his damage and his reason for isolating himself. He attempts to hold himself together as best he can, but his body wages war on itself. Other "Raouls"--not all of them of the human species--continually fire his nerve endings and seep through his pores. For instance, and for no detectable reason, Thiérrée channels a high-spirited horse with such exacting, exhausting and finally convincing physical detail that he thoroughly deserves that feedbag he straps on near the passage's conclusion.

Over time, certain external Others attempt to engage Raoul, and these creatures are absolutely beguiling, thanks to designs and fabrications by Thiérrée's mother and mentor, Victoria Thiérrée. (She is the daughter of Charlie Chaplin, sister of Geraldine Chaplin, and wife of Jean Baptiste Thiérrée with whom she founded traveling New Circus troupes that included their kids, James and Aurélia.) Since I expect you to try to see Raoul, I will not spoil surprises by describing Mme. Thiérrée's handiwork. I will say, however, that her contributions perfectly resonate with the whimsy, beauty and melancholy entwined in her son's artistry.

Raoul's dark underpinning is inextricable from its humor. If you go, you might notice some audience members chuckling at certain things that you do not find funny, and vice versa. Or you might feel sensitive to the grief floating beneath the playful illusions. Thiérrée connects with each of us and reconnects us with something vulnerable within ourselves.

Remaining shows November 9, 10, 12, 13 at 7:30pm and November 14 at 3pm

BAM Next Wave Festival

BAM Harvey Theater

651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn (directions)