Urban Bush Women to preview "Hair and Other Stories" at Baruch

Urban Bush Women
previews Hair and Other Stories next month
at Baruch Performing Arts Center.
(photo: Jennifer Lester)

Baruch Performing Arts Center, in partnership with the CUNY Dance Initiative, welcomes choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and her renowned Urban Bush Women troupe on March 31 for a preview of Hair and Other Stories. Developed with director Raelle Myrick Hodges, writer Keisha Zollar and the company, this multidisciplinary, evening-length work deals with issues of race, gender identity and economic inequality in the lives of African-American women. Hair and Other Stories will have its world premiere in April at the Virginia Arts Festival.

The Baruch PAC performance--open to the public with free admission for Baruch students--will be followed by a discussion with the artists.

Urban Bush Women

Hair and Other Stories (preview)

Baruch Performing Arts Center at Baruch College

March 31 at 7:30pm

For information and tickets, call 646-312-5073 or click here.

Baruch Performing Arts Center

55 Lexington Avenue (enter 25th Street between 3rd and Lexington Avenues), Manhattan

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Gillen's Vim Vigor presents "FUTURE PERFECT" at Baruch

Jason Cianciulli and Emma Whiteley
of Vim Vigor Dance Company
in FUTURE PERFECT
(photo: David Bazemore)

I'll say this for choreographer Shannon Gillen: She's got wicked imagination. And you might want to think twice about going camping with her. Or taking a swig of whatever she's got in that thermos. I'll say that, too.

Anyway, VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY is running the New York premiere of Gillen's FUTURE PERFECT at Baruch Performing Arts Center. The premise is a wilderness trip that's as wild as they get, where this dance artist plays loose and fast with time, identity, sex, death--everything but taxes. Taxes you can do yourself. Leave the rest to Gillen and her un-matchable performers whose near-acrobatic skills give this roughly hour-long dance drama its wow power.

Hooking up with beer-swilling, shifty-looking strangers under the stars? To be avoided at all costs. But who, actually, are the dangerous ones? Everyone in the show and watching it will be saying the same thing: "Your guess is as good as mine." I only dare tell you that great care has been taken--with the set, the sound and the now normal, now eerie, now garish lighting--to give this landscape just the right combination of realism and pumped-up, laughable artificiality, which is to say, to make it a nightmare waiting to happen.

L-r: Martin Durov, Laja Field, Shannon Gillen,
Emma Whitely, Rebecca Diab and Jason Cianciulli
of VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY
(photo: David Bazemore)

The wonderful cast of Jason Cianciulli, Martin Durov, Laja Field, Emma Whiteley and company apprentice Rebecca Diab could have been recruited from (or might easily be recruited for) one of those online series we all love to binge watch. The only problem I see is the way Gillen's movement--rough handling, tumbling and whirling, with dancers sailing around and over fake boulders and one another--stretches to fill nearly every development in the piece. It's a hoot when you first see it, a holler when you see it again but, after a while, you might have seen it too much, and it veers close to looking like a gimmick.

Best to ignore the press release's claim that the characters "confront their place in the universe," and the piece "wrestles with our desperation for a spiritual sign and asks: What magic is left?" At what point in the making of FUTURE PERFECT were these ideas floated and, I wonder, at what point were they left to float right out to sea? Because I don't know that I see any of that here--or need to.

Concept, Direction, Writing, Set Design: Shannon Gillen

Choreography: Shannon Gillen in collaboration with VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY 

Sound Score: Martin Durov

Lighting Design: Barbara Samuels

Costume Design: Joseph Blaha

FUTURE PERFECT runs Thursdays-Saturdays at 7:30pm through February 11. For tickets and further information, click here.

Baruch Performing Arts Center

55 Lexington Avenue (enter 25th Street between 3rd and Lexington Avenues), Manhattan

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Traveling the many worlds of Sidra Bell Dance New York

Left to right:
Austin Diaz, Rebecca Margolick, Jonathan Campbell and Alexandra Johnson
of Sidra Bell Dance New York in Unidentifiable; Bodies
(photo: David Flores, 2015)

Three questions for...

Sidra Bell, Artistic Director of Sidra Bell Dance New York, presenting a new piece, Unidentifiable; Bodies, for the troupe's fifth season at Baruch Performing Arts Center, June 4-7.

Dance artist Sidra Bell
(photo: David Flores, 2015)

Sidra, what draws you to a particular tone for your movement and the landscape of your work?

In this work I have been attracted to rich and directionally challenging material that asks the dancers to chart and navigate extreme points in their bodies. I wanted to create a body of material that would give the dancers enough freedom to indulge in various worlds and physical identities.  In this rehearsal process I have been very active in facilitating lengthy durational improvisational periods where I take them through multiple realms of experience.  We have worked with images related to human development, universal and architectural systems, relativity, and dynamic energy. My intention is to give the dancers a world of multiplicity that they can create and destroy from performance to performance.

(photos: David Flores, 2015)

How do chaos and control play out in your dancemaking? 

We have been working with the idea of internal and external notions of danger in the piece.  I am interested in the tipping point between stasis and rupturing chaos.  The most provocative space in the movement is the quiet before the storm.

This is a dense, complex, demanding and, in many ways, disturbing 90-minute work. Your dancers tackle it all without much let up and relief. What qualities do you look for or work to develop in your dancers?

One of the things I love about this group is that we challenge each other but we are also compassionate. The most important quality I look for in dancers is empathy.  We really listen to each other and ask questions that are important to facilitating the world we are creating on stage. Additionally it is important that we have a durable and sustainable technical foundation that can support performance that asks us to hit physical and emotional extremes.

*****

SIDRA BELL (Artistic Director), is currently a Master Lecturer at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and was an Adjunct Professor at Barnard College in New York City. She will begin an adjunct position at Ball State University in Illinois in 2015.  She has a degree in History from Yale University and an MFA in Choreography from Purchase College Conservatory of Dance. Ms. Bell has won several awards, notably a prestigious 1st Prize for Choreography at the International Solo Tanz Theater Festival in Stuttgart, Germany. Her critically acclaimed work has been seen throughout the United States and in Denmark, France, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey, Germany, China, Canada, Aruba, Korea, Brazil, and Greece. Bell has received many commissions from institutions internationally and created over 100 new works. She had the privilege of being on the international jury for the Stuttgart Solo Tanz Theater Festival in 2014. Bell was commissioned as the choreographer for the feature film “TEST” set in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis in 1985. “TEST” was awarded two grand jury prizes from Outfest and was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. It is nominated for a 2015 Independent Spirit Award. The film has had many screenings at festivals worldwide, notably The Seattle Film Festival, Frameline37 (San Francisco), Outfest (L.A.), Berlinale, and Lincoln Center's NewFest (NYC). It enjoyed an international theatrical run in 2014 and is currently available on Netflix, VoD, and iTunes. She was recently named one of 50 outstanding artists living or working in Westchester County as part of ArtsWestchester’s 50th Anniversary.

*****

See Sidra Bell Dance New York in Unidentifiable; Bodies:

Thursday-Friday, June 4-5 at 8pm
Saturday-Sunday, June 6-7 at 2pm and 8pm.

Tickets are available here or at the door. Box office: 646-312-5073

Baruch Performing Arts Center (Nagelberg Theater)
55 Lexington Avenue (entrance East 25th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues), Manhattan
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Life on the Fringe, still: Q from the BX

Qurrat Ann Kadwani
(bottom photo by Bolti Studios)

"60 minutes..13 characters..1 actress."

That's it. That's how the program notes sum up They Call Me Q!, a monologue about growing up in the Bronx as a child of a family from India, performed by award-winning playwright/actress Qurrat Ann Kadwani. I'd add "an hour well spent with a wicked smart and genuinely funny performer."

Directed by Obaid Kadwani and Claudia Gaspar, the piece manages to charm audiences and critics wherever it goes--from Chicago's Fringe fest to Maui's to Montreal's--and it did well here in New York in the Fringe edition just recently closed. As a result, Kadwani garnered a slot in the FringeNYC Encore series, and you can see her this afternoon at 1pm in the second and final performance of this production.

As a child of an immigrant family (Barbados), I must say Kadwani's anecdotes tickled me, partly because they're truly amusing and wonderfully delivered, but also because, even despite a wide difference in our ages, there may be almost no difference between some of the things her mother told her, what I heard from my folks out in Queens and what my Jewish wife recalls from her family life in the Bronx. This astounded me and reinforced my love of this city as I know it.

See They Call Me Q!, today at 1pm, at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue (entrance on East 25th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenues). For program information and tickets, click here.

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Three dancemakers say, Music is our muse!

Laura Mead and Justin Flores
Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance

Of the three artists contributing work to last evening's opening of Musa! A Dance Festival, Cherylyn Lavagnino did the most to convince me of her passion for music. For both of her works, live musicians perched downstage, so close to their audience--almost in the laps of those of us in the first few rows on one side--that we could catch each one's momentary sideways glance or intake of breath and gathering of energy. The musician's bodies, alive to the wonderful music as they channeled it, formed an integral, conscious part of our experience of each work. How perfect a way to elevate music as the choreographer's Muse, underscoring the entire mission of this series at Baruch Performing Arts Center which runs through June 22.

Lavagnino's Compadre duet--set to an Astor Piazzola tango, performed with easygoing charm by JP Jofre on bandoneon and Evelyn Ulex on piano--serves contemporary ballet with nuevo tango flavor and snap. Or, maybe it's the reverse. When Justin Flores takes Ramona Kelley to the air in various lifts and tangles, it's hard to tell where one dance technique ends and the other begins. They are, in a way, made for each other. Watch for Kelley again in Lavagnino's sweeping, Schubert-powered ensemble work Treize en Jeu, where this dancer combines radiant self-possession with irrepressible joy as one of the stylishly strutting ladies who, with minimal but telling gestures, suggest centuries of yore and acknowledge how glamorous they are in our eyes. Do try to attend one of the show with live music performed by Jane Chung (violin), Sara Biber (cello) and Andrea Lam (piano).

Schubert also seems to have Lavagnino, through the capable men of her company, musing on the proper way to get things done. Lifts, catches, turns: If the job in question is complex and even risky, watch those assured hands go to work--firm and accurate. It's an education! The appealing qualities on display in each case, do they necessarily belong to one specified gender or another? Who cares?

Last evening's program also included works by Lavagnino's partners in Musa!--Dušan Týnek and Zvi Gotheiner, performed by each of their enjoyable troupes. These and other pieces will appear, in various configurations, over the course of the festival. See here for complete schedule and programming details. For ticket information, click here.

Baruch Performing Arts Center
Baruch College (CUNY)
55 Lexington Avenue (25th Street entrance), Manhattan
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Javier Dzul's "Forest of Kings"

Javier Dzul's self-presentation could not be more eye-catching. The dancer/aerialist/choreographer and head of Dzul Dance makes striking sculpture of his sinewy flesh with every movement on land or in the air. His every appearance in Forest of Kings--an ensemble work premiered last night at Baruch Performing Arts Center--is a regal, masterful study in how to stare down and command a stage or, really, life itself, by sheer force of personality and will. And it is clear that he has inspired his young dancers--at least, the male ones--to go for the gusto, though nobody grabs that gusto quite like Dzul.

I can't say that Forest of Kings, itself, stands up to its creator's qualities. Sourced in Dzul's Mayan heritage and childhood in the jungles of Southern Mexico, the hour-long production twists balletic, modern and aerial techniques into a vaguely-ritualistic, ethnographic fantasia that would not be out of place as a Las Vegas revue. There certainly is enough Vegas cheese in the costuming, the women's mechanistic contortions, their slithering over the men, their frequently splayed, crotch-presenting legs, and the solo--by a dancer resembling the young Cyndi Lauper--that's nearly a pole dance en l'air.

If Dzul made this piece truly out of love for his culture, it would be wonderful to actually see more of that culture and less of the worst values in American entertainment.

Forest of Kings continues tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For program, schedule and ticketing information, click here or call 646-312-5073.

Baruch Performing Arts Center

25th Street (between 3rd and Lexington Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)

Oy to the world: "Baby Universe"

What if some remnant of human civilization were to survive way, way, way into the future only to face the imminent death of our solar system? That's the premise of theater troupe Wakka Wakka's Baby Universe (A Puppet Odyssey), running now at Baruch Performing Arts Center through January 9.

Not your standard holiday season fare, for sure, and not intended for very young kids. (A program note advises parents refrain from bringing children under 7.) With a tone that varies from sardonic to poignant, from apocalyptic to bittersweet, Baby Universe is the stuff of environmental nightmares. This mythic sci-fi tale is enacted by dozens of puppets (created by Wakka Wakka's Kirjan Waage) ranging from the very tiny to the larger-than-life and very scary.

With the lurching, dying Sun bearing down on its planets, we find Earth gravely ill, her inhabitants sheltering in bunkers, eating one another and mourning the loss of the natural world. Earth is in line to die along with her neighbors who passively resign themselves to their fate, even seem to welcome it. Closest to the Sun, poor Mercury--soon to come out of retrograde, btw, just as a note to you astrology fans--becomes crazed with heat. The Moon's desperate loyalty to the Sun nearly leads to disastrous ends.

Meanwhile, Earth's scientists experiment with developing numerous "baby universes," hoping to create one that will form a new solar system with an Earth-like planet to house Earth's refugees. Raised by spinsters--puppets clad in white habits with halo-like disks on their heads--these babes don't always make it. But one--#7001--ah! That's the one. Bug-eyed, mewling, jet black as deep space and speckled with tiny stars, he's a feisty brat. And a good thing, too. He's got the whole world riding on his shoulders.

Will 7001 make it? Will he survive and expand and create a new home for humankind?

Directed by Kirjan Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock
Written by Waage and Warnock with the Baby Universe Ensemble, which also includes Melissa Creighton, Andrew Manjuck and Peter Russo

Schedule of remaining performances
Ticket information online or 212-352-3101

Baruch Performing Arts Center
Baruch College
55 Lexington Avenue, Manhattan (map/directions)
(Enter on 25th Street, between 3rd and Lexington Avenues)