Live Ideas presents Radouan Mriziga's "~55"

Radouan Mriziga
(photo: Benjamin Boar)

Fascinated by an artisan’s gestures in which movement is organized to serve production, Mriziga uses his body like a tool to play with perspective and audience expectations. What emerges is an ancient symbol bearing new meaning, questioning our fundamental attachment to symbols and their ability to transgress meanings over time. In the artist’s own words: “The starting point of 55 is: how can I be as functional as possible on stage? As a dancer you constantly ask yourself questions: Is it sufficient? Is this what I want to convey? Is this the right form? What exactly am I doing? What am I making? What do I express? I set out in search of functionality and the form functionality may adopt. It is an almost architectural approach. I question myself as a performer and as a creator.”

--from promotion for Radouan Mriziga's ~55 

Someone recently asked me what I look for when I look at a dance. It's an impossible question. Isn't every dance different? And, anyway, I'm not supposed to be looking for anything. I'm supposed to be looking at something. I'm supposed to be present with whatever's there and, with luck, connect and communicate with it in some way. At least, that's the way I see how I'm seeing. Just to be clear, that doesn't mean that I'm always going to connect or, if I do not, no one else can.

Radouan Mriziga's ~55 solo--a US premiere at New York Live Arts--kept hitting me in the intellectual chakra, you know, the one that detects checklist items like counting, repetition, geometrics, workmanlike gesture. Stuff I get. Performing in NYLA's upstairs studio, Mriziga, dressed simply--black jeans, casual black shirt--made his way within a perimeter of onlookers. Hailing from Belgium, born in Morocco, he looked and moved like he would have been right at home at a showcase at Judson Church.

Every now and then, we would hear individual, ragged outbursts of unidentified music that sounded classic (as in really old), each lasting perhaps a few seconds. Everything about the movement construction seemed snapped together, like a Tinker Toy, and everything about this intermittent soundscape seemed rudely snapped apart, shredded, flying past the audience at unpredictable moments. I was more taken by the source--five ancient cassette decks--and the integration of layers of past-ness in this present-day event in a festival devoted to futurity (Live Ideas 2016: MENA/Future – Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region). I was reminded of how, here in the States, we like to bulldoze and obscure the past--whether it be old neighborhoods or old social traumas--as opposed to other places in the world where the past is either rightly treasured or still sadly inescapable.

Anyway, those were my thoughts. And here I was with Mriziga who has his own thoughts and questions and something that, we would learn, building in his head, in the air and, ultimately and most carefully, on the ground. As his moves and gestures became more familiar to me, either I received them better or--and this could be true--he seemed to relax more, enough for me to see and connect with the human artist at work. Maybe, maybe that was because he knew he was closing in on something he felt sure about and we had yet to see.

~55 concludes with a performance tonight at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Talks on "Dreams, Magic and Desire" at The Met

Above: The Silver Tiara
Fernand Khnopff (1911)
The Museum of Modern Art

Below: Self-portrait, Fernand Khnopff (1879)
Willems Collection, Brussels

On Thursday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a talk by Alison Hokanson (Assistant Curator, European Paintings) on Symbolism with a focus on the work of Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff. In discussing the broad and enigmatic Symbolist movement, with its concern with "desire, the unconscious, human mortality, timelessness and the inner self," Hokanson acknowledged that it had long been dismissed by most art scholars as "an artistic dead end, not sufficiently sophisticated or forward-thinking."  Now that assessment is under revision. A prime example of this new consideration: The Met's own recent acquisition of Hortensia, an interior innovative, for its time, in Khnopff's confident experimentation with perspective and foregrounding.

Fernand Khnopff's Hortensia (1884)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hokanson is a clear, illuminating presenter, and if you missed this first talk from her Dreams, Magic and Desire series, I highly recommend catching the second--"The British Invasion"--on Thursday, March 17 (11am-Noon).

Taking as a starting point the Met’s masterpiece The Love Song by Edward Burne-Jones, this talk highlights the appeal that the work of the Pre-Raphaelites in England had for the Symbolist generation in Northern and Central Europe. From Brussels to Munich and Vienna, artists drew on British models to develop modern styles that differed radically from the French trends that dominated the art world. Their work, as one critic put it, “rendered the profundity of life and a melancholy attitude of beauty.”

Click here for ticket information.

The Grace Rainy Rogers Auditorium at
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
82nd Street and Fifth Avenue
(visitor information including map and directions)

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Chantal Akerman, 65

Chantal Akerman, Whose Films Explored Women’s Inner Lives, Dies at 65
by Rachel Donadio and Cara Buckley, The New York Times, October 6, 2015

Lincoln Center Festival presents Rosas revival

Right before the evening's performance of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Rosas Danst Rosas, I find myself seated behind a tall, big-headed man accompanied by his tall, big-headed friend--they tend to go about in pairs--and our section of rows facing the Gerald W. Lynch Theater's stage at a less-than-ideal angle anyway. I have never seen a Rosas dance live--only on video...theirs and Beyoncé's--but I'd hoped to see De Keersmaeker's stage in full. I longed to see De Keersmaeker's stage in full and to track the play of energies between bodies. I'd not expected to have to tilt way over in my chair at times, the way her dancers sometimes tilt in theirs, in order to follow some of the action. The first man's head, as things develop, will be precisely stationed in some crucial gaps between dancers--De Keersmaeker, Tale Dolven, Cynthia Loemij and Sue-Yeon Youn--bifurcating the choreographer's enigmatic arrangements at certain times. In a mood of revenge, I wildly fantasize going all Harlem Church Lady on this Lincoln Center Festival audience, leaving and coming back with a big ol' feathered hat and refusing to remove it. But you can't go out and come back--hat or no hat. De Keersmaeker won't let you.

My seat is way back in the packed theater, and the distance and frequently dimmish lighting (Remon Fromont) make it hard to read facial expressions, the kind that, on video, make a particularly striking segment of Rosas Danst Rosas look like a growing conspiracy among a clique of bored teenagers. Dolven's open, eager presentation and coltish energy carry most clearly, but I often glance at De Keersmaeker, who made this signature piece as an NYU undergrad and performs it now three decades later. I'm excited to see her dance, to see what this piece, born of her body and spirit, can tell me about this woman.

I find a solemn, closed face, what I can see of it, and a dutiful body. It does its work in the ensemble but does not show too much of itself amid the younger women. She tells me nothing. But when De Keersmaeker performs that repeated turning movement that looks like a flamenco dancer whipping a dress front and back, gripping it at her pelvis and tailbone--if you've seen the dance, I think you'll know what I mean--she shows an intensity that underlies everything. Underlies abstraction, repetition, synchronicity, motionlessness. Underlies melting and dissolution. Underlies uncertainty and self-consciousness. A dashing style, a passion and a power that turns the stage and all four physically, mentally vibrant women on it into an engine that, with Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch's aggressive music, opens your head like nobody's business.

Lincoln Center Festival presents Rosas through July 16 with a schedule of performances of Rosas Danst Rosas (1983), Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982), Elena's Aria (1984) and Bartók/Mikrokosmos (1987) as well as several free public events. For further information, click here.

Gerald W. Lynch Theater
John Jay College
524 West 59th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Waiting at BAM: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's "En Atendant"

So, yesterday afternoon, this malcontented woman in the audience--loud enough for people on at least one side of BAM's Gilman Opera House to overhear--leaned over to her date and said, "It doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense." And as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's often unusually silent and exposed En Atendant continued for ninety-plus minutes, the critic-at-large found any number of thoughts to share with us all, culminating with "It's over, I hope!" as gloomy darkness closed in on the final dancer.

Michael Schmid opens a performance of En Atendant

The rest of us, far better behaved, had waited patiently through what seemed to be at least five--possibly as much as ten--minutes of dry, flat sound issuing from Michael Schmid's flute as as he stood alone at the lit edge of an otherwise bare, darkened stage at the opening of En Atendant. The houselights, still up, united audience with one another and with the flutist and--at least for those of us who chose to listen--made us collaborators in the creation of a disquieting place in the mind, a void into which Schmid poured raspy breath, a foreshadow of death.

The bleak, intense 2010 ensemble, En Atendant ("While waiting, I must suffer grievous pain/and languishing live; such is my fate, for I cannot reach the fountain....") is one of two works, premiered at Festival d'Avignon, that the Belgian troupe Rosas has brought to New York for this fall's BAM Next Wave Festival. The other, Cesena (2011), which I will not get a chance to see, represents the flip side--the coming of dawn's light. De Keersmaeker steeped both pieces in the atmosphere of western Europe's 14th century--a time of plague and massacre--while highlighting the exquisite polyphonic music also characteristic of that violent age. The ensemble Cour et Coeur, featuring the sublime vocalist Annelies Van Gramberen, performs live as part of the stage scene.

Above and below: Dancers of Rosas perform En Atendant
at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Gilman Opera House
(photos courtesy of BAM)

In En Atendant, De Keersmaeker resists easy theatricality and obvious narrative while going for the primal essence of drama. You know that when any dancer touches another, a relationship is forged there and registered in your mind, although you might not clearly identify the nature of it. It lives. It resonates. Each of these brilliant dancers transmits a specific and memorable human sense of himself or herself. There is nothing cookie-cutter about these presences--from the severity of Chrysa Parkinson to the frenetic, bull-like thrashings of Boštjan Antončič. De Keersmaeker makes sure of that, just as she makes vivid movement that genuinely breathes like music even when--as in long, long, long stretches of this dance--there's no music to be heard.

Danced by Boštjan Antončič, Carlos Garbin, Cynthia Loemij, Mark Lorimer, Mikael Marklund, Chrysa Parkinson, Sandy Williams and Sue-Yeon Youn

Music performed by Michael Schmid, Bart Coen, Thomas Baeté and Annelies Van Gramberen

En Atendant will be repeated today at 2pm. Cesena will be performed this evening at 7:30pm, concluding Rosas' BAM season. For information on Cesena, click here.

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

Controversy at Royal Ballet of Flanders

A video interview with Kathryn Bennetts, recently forced out of her post as artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders

Visit Save Royal Ballet of Flanders on Facebook

Ballet Leader to Leave Over Flemish Official’s Plan

by Stephanie Goodman, The New York Times, October 28, 2010