Beth Gill premieres "Catacomb" at The Chocolate Factory

From Catacomb, a new site-specific work
by Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill
at The Chocolate Factory
(photos: Brian Rogers)

It's not every day that I read all the fine print on a dance show's program, the part where thanks are given to collaborators, friends, presenters, funders. But I had a little time before seeing Beth Gill's new work, Catacomb, at The Chocolate Factory, and my eyes were drawn to that part of the page. Anyone who knows me, knows my intuition rules. So, I read.

I'm beginning this way just to note that I'm in awe of the village it takes to get any dance up and running--from the folks who provide space and time and technical assistance to the folks who fork over the funds. Sometimes--as in Gill's case--it takes more than one New York City borough, just for geographical starters. Each dance, often starting with vague stirrings, undertakes a twisty journey to manifestation. The dance network consists of numerous guiding hands along the way, and it's incredibly moving to think about all of this.

In Catacomb, Gill appears to have been drawn by intuition to sub-regions of the self where sharp reason must yield to things unnamed and dimly understood.
The hour-plus piece, performed by Maggie Cloud, Jennifer Lafferty, Heather Lang, Stuart Singer and Marilyn Maywald Yahel, evokes any journalist's primary questions: Who? What? When? Where? and Why?

We're in the upstairs theater of The Chocolate Factory but--really--where are we? And, maybe from your angle, you won't be able to name the identity or even just the sex of the two bodies, conjoined and at first motionless, pressed against the floor. When these bodies do move--at once sluggishly slithering against each other as they creep along the floor--their interaction appears sexual in nature. If so, it is a very sleepy act of sex organically, unconsciously repeated again and again--the bodies sliding over each other in and out of place--until a certain catalyst draws them out of that pattern. It will be a long, long while before we gaze upon two upright forms and expressionless faces as if glimpsing models of the first human inhabitants on Earth.

Catacomb, described as site-specific, handsomely uses three points of entry into the theater--variously lit by Thomas Dunn to frame dancers for peak drama and strangeness. Dunn's work, along with Gill's interest in glacial pacing and in the marginal placement of one or another dancer--sometimes watching, sometimes ignoring the pair, sometimes stationed against or tucked along a wall--were, for me, the most distinct and fascinating elements of the production.

It is a terrain of risk, which Gill accepts even as she invites company in the risking. I bore that in mind as my mind occasionally wandered or withdrew from Catacomb, which, regrettably, feels longer than it is.  The invitation to take time to look deeply into the fabric of this dance does not come with a guarantee of anything but unfolding territory to explore--an experience, not a conclusion. We enter in media res. We leave, it seems, when Gill is finished with our being there. Its beginning and possible end might not have anything to do with us.

With sound by Jon Moniaci and vocals by Rachel Kara Perez and Peter Sciscioli

Catacomb continues through May 28, Wednesdays-Saturdays with performances at 8pm plus an added show at 8pm on Tuesday, May 24. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

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My Eiko journal: Part 3

Eiko's A Body in Places
Saturday, March 5 -- 7-10pm

It was disconcerting to see Eiko with a bandaged sprained arm--the result of a trip and fall at home. But she still danced, still valiantly surveyed, on this Saturday evening in St. Mark's Church along with invited soloists--Michelle Boulé, Beth Gill, Neil Greenberg, Koma Otake, Jimena Paz, Arturo Vidich and Geo Wyeth. Each soloist took a piece of the church--Koma, on the porch in his filmy-thin costume, braving the cold night air; Greenberg commandeering one side of the balcony; Gill inchworming her way all around the sanctuary's carpeted risers--over the course of three hours.

Members of the audience, armed with a site map and schedule, curated their individual experiences. But, clearly, everyone wanted to see everything--or as much of everything as logistics will allow. That meant trying to get over to a tiny space--say, the reportedly-haunted Priest's Room--in time to squeeze yourself in with a dozen other people as Vidich struck and vibrated church bells. His solemn performance, though simple in form, rivaled only Paz's stark, crow-like expressionism for beauty.

Overall, this evening proved to be a fragmentary experience--chaotic, impossible, a nightmare for the claustrophobic but interesting for not only dancer-watching at various angles but watcher-watching. It was funny to run into an old friend who mentioned the same phenomenon--enjoying the unusual vantage points for looking at how people look at the dancing they're looking at.

*****

Read My Eiko journal: 

Part 1
Part 2

*****

Eiko's A Body in Places platform continues at Danspace Project and other venues through March 23. There's so much going on in this platform's programming, that Danspace Project is actually offering consultation with a docent to help you get your bearings. Really. For detailed information, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Movement Research Festival: Gwen Welliver and Abby Zbikowski

Choreographers  Gwen Welliver and Abby Zbikowski shared last evening's program at Danspace Project as part of the 2015 Movement Research Festival (Vanishing Point). The two artists were selected by festival curators Beth Gill and Cori Olinghouse to explore new ways of envisioning abstraction in contemporary dance. If postmodernists stripped "fantasy, metaphor and characters" from dancemaking, would it be possible to reclaim these compelling elements in fresh ways?

Paul Klee's Was für ein Pferd! (What a Horse!), 1929

With What a Horse!--the title alludes to a Paul Klee line drawing--Welliver works on this problem by transferring her own drawing practice to physical bodies on the move. Happily, two of the bodies in question belong to Claire Westby and Stuart Singer, both excellently suited for Welliver's heroic aesthetic here, capable of bold, substantial presence in space, with a launching as noisily assertive as Jake Meginsky's sound score. When Welliver has Westby extend a leg, for instance, it resembles both a puncturing weapon and a decisive act of punctuation. In either case, we quickly get that this is not a figure to tangle with, just as the childlike, spindly lines in the Klee drawing convey the electric dynamism of its horse and rider. Amid the plumped out, sculptural lines of Welliver's abstraction, there is some galloping, cantering, trotting and the introduction of a third figure--dancer Reid Bartelme (sporting a protective vest of what appears to be black leather covering a pale, satiny shirt) who heralds something of smoother, silkier texture in both movement and music.

If, as an abstractionist, Zbikowski takes interest in stripping anything away, it's stripping our sense that the art of dance is about making things look effortless. She foregrounds effort, even discomfort. In her duet, double nickels on a dime, she brings the "outside" influences of punk, hip-hop and martial arts into the formal space of concert dance but not as fetishized artifact but as form, energy and psyche embodied, in a matter-of-factly outrageous way, by wonderful Fiona Lundie and Jennifer Meckley. Like Singer and Westby in What a Horse!, these dancers take the space in great gulps, sneakers making noisy impact, legs striding wide, bodies jutting and wrenching within organized, neat lines of structure. Watch and you feel everything--the concision of the lines, the athletic power, the attitude of being ready for anything. Every now and then, I see a performance that would make an ideal bridge from the often insular world of contemporary dance to the rest of the universe, and this is one.

The 2015 Movement Research Festival concludes tomorrow. For information on remaining events, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Limits of the S K Y: Gill, Anderson, Hay at New York Live Arts

New York Live Arts is what now? Some combination of 92Y and TED Talks? A place, beyond dance, for avant garde marquee names and hip intellectuals to hold forth?

Not that those are necessarily bad things. Let us, indeed, engage with the most stimulating and crucial issues of our day. But the home for a wide range of contemporary dance and performance art--a place I've cherished since the 1970s, where ideas were already quite alive without being forced--seems far from recognizable today.

Again, this is not to suggest that, as a work of intersection, New York Live Arts's annual Live Ideas Festival--launched in 2013 with programs inspired by Oliver Sacks and, last year, James Baldwin--lacks potential meaning and usefulness. By all means, let's intersect. Let's get real intersecty in ways that even the new boss, Bill T. Jones, might not be ready to imagine.

But let's make it work.

This year's Live Ideas Festival, curated by the famously intersecty Laurie Anderson, bears the title, "S K Y - Force and Wisdom in America Today," and New York sophisticates will please themselves to be in one another's presence enjoying contributions from marquee names like Anderson's, Anne Carson, Julian Schnabel, John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros and dance's own Deborah Hay in a slate of 25 events, including performances, screenings, readings and talks.

The desired audience for New York Live Arts will be able to shell out a minimum of $50 to witness a "conversation" between Anderson and Hay, her collaborator on Figure a Sea, a upcoming premiere for Sweden's Cullbert Ballet. And, yes, this less than enlightening encounter followed the premiere of an hour-long dance by Bessie-winner Beth Gill, commissioned for the festival, something that certainly might have run all by itself at New York Live Arts (or even Dance Theater Workshop) but at less than that S K Y-high price point.

From Beth Gill's Portrait Study
at New York Live Arts
(photos: Yi-Chun Wu)

No shame to Gill in describing her presentation, Portrait Study, as a rush job. Gill admits as much. She got Live Arts' invite at the end of January.

January 2015.

So, with her bang-up cast of downtown dance artists, here's how she handled things:

I am building a structural overlay that will both incorporate and highlight the improvised movement of a cast of brilliant dancers. I am using a complex and layered movement score, which will act as both a map and a set of directives for the performers. The show as a whole will be an improvised installation in which the event's timing and structural arrangement is determined by the performers. The movement material for each dancer will be a combination of self-directed individualized choreography and past experiences they have from working within the score during our rehearsals.

--Artist's Statement 

Portrait Study--accompanied live with Eliot Krimsky and Ryan Seaton's electronic score and a song by Eliot Krimsky/Glass Ghost--presents "short autobiographical solos that collect in the space over the course of the hour." One or another of a total of thirteen dancers emerges or bursts into the space, executes a short or sustained passage of abstract, eccentric improvisation and finally sinks into a dead pose on the floor. The floor, littered with bodies of the fallen--at one point, I thought of Jonestown--becomes a more and more crowded platform for each dancer, each self-portrait drawn.

A one-time-only event, remember. Here, Gill used the ephemeral nature of dance--and of her specific challenge from New York Live Arts--to strip her usually meticulous process of its training wheels. In this, she reminds me of Katie Workum with her Authentic Movement-inspired Black Lakes shown, just last week, at Danspace Project. Like Workum, Gill now entertains a "broad goal of finding less controlled ways of working—while still producing beautiful and meaningful work...without the pressure of becoming bound over time to the product." She asks of each dancer that they find and make the dance largely from their own inner materials.  Since we're talking about recognized adepts such as David Thomson, Neal Beasley, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Stuart Singer, Jodi Melnick and Emily Wexler, there can be interesting moments to take in and appreciate.

And there can be puzzlement.

Again, as with Workum's presentation, each witness will decide whether all these parts--fascinating or not so much--add up to a substantial sum or if they even need to do so. Perhaps, as observers of dance, we're also being trained to take satisfaction where and when we can.

After a 20-minute intermission, the Anderson-Hay "conversation" kicked on with a rocky, baffling start. Collaborators? The two women did not seem to occupy the same psychic space.

If you're wondering why the quote marks: Is it a conversation when, over the course of an hour, one person is doing almost all of the talking, nearly nonstop? After a long time, though, Hay slipped from her folding chair and started moving around it, around the space, to the edge of the audience and back home to her original perch--while Anderson rambled on or played music, some of which was delicious, at her electronic setup.

I don't know if Hay's sojourn was planned, but it was reasonable strategy--meeting verbal torrent with the language of the body in space.

The evening had started at 7:30. Around 9:40, Anderson looked out and acknowledged that the audience might have questions. I took my leave.

For information on other events from Live Ideas 2015: S K Y - Force and Wisdom in America Today, click here.

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

Desert immersion: Beth Gill at New York Live Arts

L-r: Heather Lang, Jennifer Lafferty,
Marilyn Maywald and Christiana Axelsen
in Thomas Dunn's hazy sunlight in
New Work for the Desert
(photo by Cherylynn Tsushima)

In New Work for the Desert, dancemaker Beth Gill and her collaborators--composer Jon Moniaci and lighting and set designer, Thomas Dunn--translate the desert regions of the American Southwest to the spare, artificial confines of New York Live Arts's stage.

(photo by Cherylynn Tsushima)

Live imagery and motion (or lack of same) and sound (or lack of same) and gradiations of light mimic a psychic and somatic experience of being there. Pre-dawn silhouettes. Clean, empty space and time stretching out in austere silence. Sound just below conscious awareness and then arriving in hums, reverberations, chimes. Sun-baked noon. Bodies introducing slender lines, linear shapes, constructing balance, holding stillness, drifting in and out of sight, twisting as if to seek out signals from afar.

Kayvon Pourazar and Christiana Axelsen
(photos by Cherylynn Tsushima)

with dancing by Christiana Axelsen, Jennifer Lafferty, Heather Lang, Marilyn Maywald, Kayvon Pourazar, Stuart Singer

Now through Saturday, each evening at 7:30pm. For ticket information, click here.

Tonight's show will be followed by a conversation, "Under the Influence of Light," with Beth Gill and John Jasperse.

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

Bessie Award nominees, two recipients announced

Lucy Sexton, Director of The Bessies
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

In a press conference at the Gibney Dance Center, the New York Dance and Performance Awards (aka, The Bessies) announced two award recipients for 2013 and the slate of this year's nominees in various categories including outstanding performance, production and visual design. The awards ceremony returns to Harlem's famed Apollo Theater for the third year on Monday, October 7 (8pm).

Darrell Jones, winner
Juried Bessie Award
above and below
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Darrell Jones

Third annual recipient of the Juried Bessie Award, selected by Ishamel Houston-Jones, Eiko Otake and Jason Samuels Smith and presented by NY State DanceForce member Paz Tanjuaquio, Director of Topaz Arts. The award includes residencies and performance opportunities through organizations in the NY State DanceForce network.

Joanna Kotze, winner,
Outstanding Emerging Choreographer
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Joanna Kotze

2013 New York Dance and Performance Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer, presented by Beth Gill, the 2011 winner of this award. Kotze was nominated for her work It Happened It Had Happened It Is Happening It Will Happen (Danspace Project). Other nominees were Justin Peck for Year of the Rabbit (New York City Ballet), Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith for Tulip (Roulette) and Ephrat Asherie for A Single Ride (Dixon Place).

Lane Harwell, member,
Bessies Steering Committee
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Beverly D'Anne, member,
Bessies Steering Committee
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Paz Tanjuaquio, member,
Bessies Nominating Committee
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Fatima Kafele, member,
Bessies Nominating Committee
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Aaron Mattocks, nominee
Outstanding Performer
(c)2013, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The 2013 New York Dance and Performance Award

winners and nominees

Outstanding Performer

Shantala Shivalingappa in Shiva Ganga
Choreographed by Shantala Shivalingappa
Fall for Dance, City Center

Herman Cornejo
American Ballet Theatre
Works by Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp and Alexei Ratmansky
City Center and the Metropolitan Opera House

Aaron Mattocks
Works by David Gordon, Stephen Petronio, Jodi Melnick, Christopher Williams, Faye Driscoll, John Kelly, Dean Moss, Doug Elkins and more

Annique Roberts
Evidence Dance Company
Works by Ronald K. Brown

Charles "Lil Buck" Riley and Ron "Prime Tyme" Myles
Le Poisson Rouge

Kayo Seyama in BELL
Choreographed by Yasuko Yokoshi
New York Live Arts

David Wampach and Tamar Shelef in SACRE
Choreographed by David Wampach
The Invisible Dog Art Center as part of Performance Space 122’s COIL Festival

Jennifer Monson in Live Dancing Archive
Choreographed by Jennifer Monson
The Kitchen

Melissa Toogood in Interface, Choreographed by Rashaun Mitchell at
Baryshnikov Arts Center and The Spectators, Choreographed by Pam Tanowitz
at New York Live Arts

Sebastien Ramirez and Honji Wang in AP15
Choreographed by Sebastien Ramirez and Honji Wang
The Apollo Theater, Breakin’ Convention

Hari Krishnan in The Frog Princess
Choreographed by Hari Krishnan
La MaMa, La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival

Jaro Viňarský in Bastard (The Painted Bird Trilogy Cycle part I)
Choreographed by Pavel Zuštiak
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival

Outstanding Emerging Choreographer

Justin Peck for Year of the Rabbit
New York City Ballet

Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith for Tulip
Roulette

Ephrat Asherie for A Single Ride
Dixon Place

Joanna Kotze for It Happened It Had Happened It Is Happening It Will Happen
Danspace Project

Outstanding Musical Composition/Sound Design

Omar Sosa for Miriam
Choreographed by Nora Chipaumire
BAM’s Fishman Space

Marty Beller for A Single Ride
Choreographed by Ephrat Asherie

Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells for The Quiet Volume
Created by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells
Performance Space 122 and PEN World Voices Festival

Liam O Maonlai for Rian,
Choreographed by Michael Keegan-Dolan of Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre
Lincoln Center, White Light Festival

Outstanding Visual Design

Suzanne Bocanegra, costume design for Ich, Kurbisgeist
by Big Dance Theater at The Chocolate Factory

Pontus Lidberg, set and media design for Within (Labyrinth Within)
by Morphoses at The Joyce

Fleur Elise Noble, visual design with media for Two Dimension Life of Her
by Fleur Elise Noble at Under the Radar Festival, The Public Theater

Akiko Iwasaki, costume design for BELL
by Yasuko Yokoshi at New York Live Arts

Outstanding Revived Work

Dionysus in 69
Rude Mechs from a work by The Performance Group
New York Live Arts

State of Heads
Choreographed by Donna Uchizono
New York Live Arts

Scott, Queen of Marys
Choreographed by Doug Elkins
Baryshnikov Arts Center

D-Man in the Waters
Choreographed by Bill T. Jones
The Joyce

Outstanding Production

(performed in a large capacity venue of more than 400 seats)

Rian, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre
Choreographed by Michael Keegan-Dolan
Lincoln Center, White Light Festival

Shostakovich Trilogy, American Ballet Theatre
Choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky
Metropolitan Opera House

The Legend of Apsara Mera, Royal Ballet of Cambodia
BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House

Outstanding Production

(performed in a small capacity venue of less than 400 seats)

Then She Fell
Created and choreographed by Third Rail Projects
Kingsland Ward at St. Johns

Everything You See
Choreographed by Vicky Shick
Danspace Project

The Painted Bird Trilogy Cycle
Choreographed by Pavel Zuštiak and Palissimo
La MaMa, La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival

Outstanding Production

(of a work stretching the boundaries of a traditional form)

Paseo
Choreographed by Joanna Haigood
Dancing in the Streets

red, black, & GREEN: a blues
Choreographed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph
BAM’s Fishman Space

Mo(or)town/Redux
Choreographed by Doug Elkins
Baryshnikov Arts Center

Outstanding Production

(of a work at the forefront of contemporary dance 

and performance practices)

Watch It
Choreographed by Liz Santoro
Museum of Arts and Design

The People to Come
Choreographed by Yanira Castro
The Invisible Dog Art Center

Organ Player
Created by Narcissister
Abrons Arts Center

*****

Join the NY Dance and Performance League!

Support The Bessies by becoming a member of the NY Dance and Performance League with benefits:

--Nominate Selection Committee members.

--Receive invitations to discussions of all things Bessies and to the annual press conference

--Buy tickets to the awards show before they go on sale to the public.

Click here for information.

How they carry on: Gill and Lewis

I'm not sure I was glad to walk home last night with old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs stuck on loop in my mind, but the reason was Beth Gill--specifically, a solo performance she gave at Dixon Place in a Brink series program curated by Michael Helland and shared with soloist Isabel Lewis.

In Resurrected Dance Dance III, Gill played the scratchy vinyl on an old turntable set up on a chair, both items silhouetted in front of DP's wall by the solo's initial illumination--a single nightlight. What got me was the way she calmly slowed, grounded and rested herself inside the lilting, tilting, sometimes driving force of voices and guitars; how, when she chose to step, she stepped like a quiet, watchful heron on the hunt. A compelling performer, Gill can pull and hold viewers' focus by drawing us out of the forward strain of ordinary time and into a place deep stillness and concentration. DP is the place for doing a lot (or a meaningful little) with simple, ordinary things, and Gill can be a kitchen magician.

Lewis's Untitled Solo (Sweet Exorcist) contains poetic, powerful imagery and energy. Like Gill's solo, it plays with the effect of light on body and objects and harkens back to the '60s and early '70s in its selection of recordings with songs by The Great Society with Grace Slick, Curtis Mayfield (the source of the "untitle") and the Ethiopian ensemble Alemayheu Eshete/Alem Girma Band.

I've no idea what either artist intended here, but each of their solos conclude in an unsettling way. Gill--who has re-dressed herself in a black hoodie and slacks--replaces the last CSN&Y anthem with a fingernails-on-chalkboard number from Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band. As the Ethiopian tune unfolds, Lewis begins to drape her body in lengths of golden fabric and does not stop until she has wrapped her head and face too and tied the gleaming cloth fast around her neck. Her glamorous, sinuous wriggles do nothing to lessen the chilling effect of this image.

For information on future events at Dixon Place, click here.

New York pride

Yesterday, after dashing from one show (Doug Elkins's Fraulein Maria at Joe's Pub) to another (Danspace Project's Dance CoOp roundup of artists for the APAP crowd), I realized that an unanticipated feeling had blossomed in me--pride. I felt this pride most intensely while I watched Levi Gonzalez dance tribute, a "research project in progress," as he calls it, a lineup of snippets of movement prepared for him by a virtual Murderors' Row of postmodern choreographers. Before each bit, he'd call out the name of its creator: Luciana Achugar, John Jasperse, Miguel Gutierrez, Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi. I can't say why, exactly, but hearing Gonzalez's clear, resonant voice intoning each name sounded like a roll call of heroes. And I suppose it is. Sitting among all of these presenter folks from all over, I had this flash of pride for New York.

Earlier in the afternoon, I'd been swept away by Elkins's Fraulein Maria, his loving, clever dance-up of The Sound of Music--as hilarious as I'd been promised it would be but completely enchanting and soul-touching, too, which was a total surprise. Elkins packs so much rambunctious dance and comedy into an hour and a stage the size of an East Village bathroom, and his performers could not be more delightful. Too many heroic names to call out here--it takes a village to climb this mountain--but some of the most notable are Arthur Aviles, Nicole Wolcott, Jennifer Nugent, David Parker, Archie Burnett, Mark Gindick, Johnnie Moore and Elkins, the man himself. Next chance you get to see it, just go. You will be charmed and moved to your core.