Thomas O. Kriegsmann to direct NYLA programming

New York Live Arts Names New Director
by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, November 13, 2014

Jean Davidson: Saving dance in the US

A Chance to Dance in America
by Jean Davidson, The Huffington Post, August 17, 2012

Honest Bill

Finding out quite late in the game about the 2nd Annual DOC NYC film festival, I was only able to get to one screening, but I chose well!
 
A Good Man--directed by Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn is a ravishing and bracing documentary about two years in the making of Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray, the Bill T. Jones masterwork and meditation on the life of Abraham Lincoln, his complexity and his possible significance for American democracy in the current age. As Jones prepares this commissioned piece for premiere at the Ravinia Festival, we're taken behind the scenes. We become privy to his thought processes, his doubts and his often volatile working relationships with dancers and creative collaborators. This is an unflinching, warts-and-all portrait of one of dance's true superstars and geniuses but also an extraordinarily generous portrait of the talented individuals who support his visions, even under heavy fire, and bring them to powerful life.

After watching A Good Man, I tried to figure out why dance isn't the most popular and most rewarded art form in the United States. Okay, maybe it's just me, but who wouldn't want to spend quality time in a theater with these gods and goddesses who are also, as we see all too clearly, real live human beings? That duality--reflected in Jones, as in the Lincoln he was taught to admire--comes across through the sensitive and handsome work of Hercules and Quinn and their Director of Photography, Keith Walker.

A Good Man looks and sounds fantastic on the big screen, but you can catch it on American Masters (PBS) on Friday, November 11 at 9pm ET/PT (check local listings).

DOC NYC runs through next Thursday, November 10, at the IFC Center and New York University, with a fascinating range of programming. Get complete schedule and ticketing information here.

re-Jones/Zane

New York Live Arts has launched its inaugural season with Body Against Body, an exhilarating program of early works by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, performed by Jones's current troupe members and dance celebrity guests such as Janet Eilber, Vicky Shick, Richard Move and Matthew Rushing. I attended last night's opener, the first of two discrete programs that run through September 25.

Reasons to check in with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at this juncture are many. Body Against Body revisits conceptual works--such as Monkey Run Road (1979) and Continuous Replay (1977), with its full-on, un-selfconscious nudity and lightly ritualistic accumulation and repetition--that remain startlingly airy and clear in structure and delightful today. The troupe season's title can imply a cluster of meanings--the sensuality of flesh against flesh, the playfulness of adept physical instruments directed by equally top-level minds, the supple and sturdy support of one partner for the other. All of these meanings and values can be found in the works on display here as throughout the best of the art Jones has made as survivor of his personal and professional relationship with Zane, who passed in 1988.

Jones and Zane did the one-on-one format especially right. So, if you can still manage to grab a ticket, be sure to see Monkey Run Road (with the choreographers' casually elegant, harmonious roles taken by Talli Jackson and Erick Montes) and Valley Cottage: A Study (1980/1981) with a rotating cast of partners. Last night's pair included Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent, Jones/Zane troupe members and "downtown" dance celebrity artists in their own right. Matteson and Nugent will also appear in Program B's Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction).

Perhaps, by breathing new life into these historic duets, Jones intends to work some subliminal mojo on any remaining skeptics as he begins his own grand partnership with the former Dance Theater Workshop, host of the original productions of two of these seminal works. It's good to be reminded of where Jones came from, this searching, breakthrough choreographer who now, with Carla Peterson and the rest of the NYLA team, hopes to break down barriers for other artists. His new season should serve as a blessing on NYLA's ambitious venture.

Company performers: Antonio Brown, Talli Jackson, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, LaMichael Leornard, Jr., I-Lin Liu, Paul Matteson, Erick Montes, Jennifer Nugent and Jenna Riegel. Guest artists vary by performance.

With costumes by Liz Prince and lighting by Robert Wierzel


The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in Body Against Body continues tonight and September 20-24 at 7:30; Sundays September 18 and September 25 at 5pm. Pre-show Talk: September 21 with dance critic Marcia B. Siegel and Bill T. Jones.

Post-Show Talk: September 23 with Bill T. Jones, Carla Peterson, Janet Wong and the dance company

Check the box office for ticket availability: 212-924-0077

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

New York Live Arts announces new season

What in the world is happening here?

Well--believe it or not--it's sort of an impromptu plein air press conference convened by the ever-resourceful Bill T. Jones in front of New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workshop, now merged with Jones's dance troupe) but actually in front of an NYFD fire truck.... Wait. Is this getting way too complicated?

Let me start over.

At a morning press conference inside NYLA's Bessie Schönberg Theater, Jones (NYLA Executive Artistic Director) had just been introduced by the organization's CEO Jean Davidson. Jones surprised us by elegantly, delicately dancing and even singing a little as he made his opening remarks. Halfway through, he started to talk about his own troupe's upcoming season but, suddenly, the NYFD ordered everyone to leave the building and assemble across the street!

We had to wait until the fire truck pulled up and the firemen did...something...I have no idea and no one seemed to know what. In the meantime, Jones doffed his shirt, as is his wont, and completed his address to the crowd of press, staff, dance world colleagues and curious passersby. Happily--and to the great relief of Carla Peterson, NYLA Artistic Director, who would have had to shout over street noise--we were soon able to return to the theater.

Truth be told, for the first time, the very idea of New York Live Arts does seem hot enough to warrant the arrival of a truckload of firemen. And it certainly seems dance enough to still the fears of folks who thought that the loss of the name Dance Theater Workshop meant something sinister.

The upcoming season--beginning September 16 with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company--and other NYLA programs rock. I'll drop a handful of names, just for starters: Reggie Wilson, Yvonne Meier, Rachid Ouramdane, John Kelly, Richard Move, Ivy Baldwin, Jodi Melnick, John Jasperse, RoseAnne Spradlin and Big Dance Theater. Over 40 diverse emerging, mid-career and established dance artists will participate in the presenting season or other NYLA programs. NYLA will continue DTW's traditions of commissioning cutting-edge performance, offering audiences opportunities to revisit seminal works and giving artists the chance to develop and show new projects in informal presentations.

The 2011-2013 recipient of a new program--Resident Commissioned Artist--will be Yasuko Yokoshi, the well-regarded, Hiroshima-born choreographer who has worked in New York since 1986. Yokoshi's two-year award includes a salary, health insurance, and support for creation and possible touring of new work. Imagine that! Jones described this as "a new standard for the entire field." Indeed and amen, amen.

"We launched New York Live Arts because we want to instigate change, not react to it," said Jones, later explaining the organization's initiatives as "a leap of faith."

There's much more to learn about New York Live Arts. So, for complete information about the mission, the upcoming season and the spectrum of artist services, click here.

Trust the public

So I'm reading Movement Research Performance Journal on the M15 crosstown to Chelsea. There's an interview with Bill T. Jones about how professional dance absolutely must change to survive. I'm staring down into that strange, typical soup of words, intense energy, blunt provocation and frustrating lack of specificity--and, yes, I do mean typical for both BTJ and MRPJ. But just before the bus pulls into its 18th Street terminus, I get to this passage from Jones:

Are you clear about what you believe and what you make and how you make it? Are you so clear about it that you could actually invite the most stupid person in there and give that person just a little taste of something that's human in what you do and that is not superior. This whiff of arrogance and superiority--believe me honey I have it, big time. And I'm telling you something, I've had to learn, because it sneaks through, that we actually feel, and this is the history of alienation, that somehow we are entitled because we are a privileged and long-suffering elite that is wandering in the wilderness of mediocrity which is the whole world. Now if that doesn't sound like a load of shit, then you tell me. (MRPJ #38, February 2011, p. 5)

I don't care for the descriptive "stupid," but I think I begin to get what he's getting at despite the fragments and tangents.

Jones is impatient for contemporary dance to break out of its cocoon and make both pragmatic and creative connections out there in the hell of other people. That's what he has in mind for New York Live Arts--the new entity formed from the merger of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop--and it begins with the individual artist deciding that he or she respects and can trust the public.

Detail of Sarah Sze's STILL LIFE WITH LANDSCAPE (MODEL FOR A HABITAT), High Line Park (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

A few steps, a few stairs, and I'm surrounded by the gorgeous, lush greenery and wildflowers of High Line Park, walking its new section. I take photos of a mourning dove alight on an elaborate wildlife sanctuary by artist Sarah Sze. The sculpture provides watering holes, seed feeders and places for resting and nesting. "It's like a mansion for birds," one visitor exclaimed. Yes, now even birdies, butterflies and ladybugs can find an upscale perch in Chelsea!

Detail of Sze sculpture (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above and below: Mourning dove (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above and below: Seen from High Line Park (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

I stroll to 30th Street. Though reluctant to leave the flowers, the butterflies, the breeze, the views across this cityscape, I ride the elevator down to 10th Avenue. I'm off to the Sean Kelly Gallery for Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans: fifty photographs "selected by fifty Americans of diverse occupations, ages, races and backgrounds...one from each state in the Union...invited to select a single artwork from over 2,000 images in Mapplethorpe's collection that resonated with them personally." Portraits, still lifes, a wintry landscape...the range of these selections is broad and lovely.

Right away, I stumble upon, like a secret wink meant just for me, a 1985 portrait of--yes--Bill T. Jones chosen by a 32-year-old woman from Birmingham, Alabama, a children's author and storyteller. Jones jumps straight up, his body breaching the frame, rendered headless, and as my mind helplessly starts to read something into this that the white Alabama native might not have considered, I move along.

A 66-year-old grandmom from Vermont enjoyed working through the photo collection with her granddaughter. She chose Horse #5 (1982) and wrote, "I was drawn to all the images of animals. I love animals. These horses reminded me of my farm....Lots of memories and stories came to life through his work."

Her response is fairly common: Lots of these folks found that they could relate to aspects of Mapplethorpe's diverse imagery on a personal level. They share their experiences here. Reading the plaques that accompany the photos and bear the selectors' words and a thumbnail picture of each, I find my heart going out to many of them.

Prior to getting involved in the gallery's project, most of the participants knew little, if anything, about the photographer and his work. Some knew just enough about Mapplethorpe's reputation for homoerotic imagery to be a little nervous about having to view it. Some clearly avoided the erotica when making their choices from among the collection's variety of subjects. Yet these non-experts crowd-curated a beautiful, instructive show, and their reflections on this work demonstrate remarkable perception and insight as well as appreciation for Mapplethorpe's sensitivity and brilliance.

I was moved by the capacity people have to meet art with open minds when given a chance to really look at it and allow it to draw close to them, to search their lives for common ground. No wonder repressive social orders seek to manipulate or destroy art. I was touched, too, by this gallery's trust of the American public, and that brought me back to Bill T. Jones.

I stopped for dinner on the way home and, once again, took out my now-rumpled copy of MRPJ. This time, I turned to "New York's Alright," an editorial by dance artist Eleanor Hullihan and was amazed to read this passage, including her reference to Mapplethorpe's great soul mate, Patti Smith:

Phyllis Lamhut and Patti Smith are two women I admire who in different ways have encourage people to get out of New York and either make work where they came from or where they can afford to live more easily.  We could benefit from decentralizing dance in the states. We can't keep talking about the rest of the country like it is full of idiots who don't understand us if they don't have the opportunity to see what we do. I recently had one of the most positive audience responses from a show I did with John Jasperse in Helena, Montana. Montana? Hell yes. It was not a dance audience but they came and enjoyed and wanted to talk afterwards. This may be a mission for our generation of makers. It may also be a mission for people younger than ourselves. (MRPJ #38, February 2011, p. 6)

Okay, Universe, I get it. Trust the people. Just get the work out there. Spread it around, that "little taste of something that's human in what you do and that is not superior." Just trust. Good for artists to remember. Good for people who write about art to remember, too.

Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans ends Saturday, June 18.

Sean Kelly Gallery
528 West 29th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan 212-239-1181
(map)

NYLA, for your viewing pleasure

New York Live Arts Community Welcome Session

Filmed February 19th, 2011. Co-Presented by Dance/NYC.

The leadership of New York Live Arts: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop re-imagined, conduct a panel to discuss the decisions and visions behind New York Live Arts. Moderated by Michelle Coffey

Invitation from NY Live Arts, Febuary 19

New York Live Arts Community Welcome Session

Saturday, February 19, 3pm

Dance Theater Workshop

Bessie Schonberg Theater

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

RSVP required: nyla.eventbrite.com

Meet the staff of New York Live Arts and get answers to your questions about the new organization!

You are invited to a Welcome Panel and public discussion addressing the recent merger between Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop to create New York Live Arts.

 Panel

Jean Davidson, Executive Director, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company 
and New York Live Arts

Andrea Scholler, Executive Director, Dance Theater Workshop

Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, New York Lives Arts

Carla Peterson, Artistic Director, New York Live Arts

Moderator TBA

Followed by open Q & A

Reception to follow in the Dance Theater Workshop Lobby

RSVP required: nyla.eventbrite.com

Carla Peterson of New York Live Arts [audio]

Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Carla Peterson, Artistic Director of New York Live Arts (the new merger of Dance Theater Workshop and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company). 

In our conversation (see audio link below), Peterson addresses some concerns:

• What does this name change--which omits the word "dance"--mean for the New York dance community and audiences?

• What is the place of dance and dance artists in NYLA's broadening mission?

• How does Peterson see her role vis-à-vis Jones, NYLA's Executive Artistic Director?

Here's the mp3 link (21:15).

For further information about New York Live Arts, visit NYLA's Web site, follow @newyorklivearts on Twitter or friend NYLA on Facebook.

Keep up with New York Live Arts

New York's newest mega-arts entity--New York Live Arts--has rolled out a batch of ways for us to keep track of developments:

a Web URL

Facebook page

Twitter

Google Search

Email

* * * * *

New York Times article on merger of Dance Theater Workshop and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

Merger agreement: DTW & BTJ!

Dance Theater and Bill T. Jones Troupe to Merge

by Kate Taylor, The New York Times, December 1, 2010

Theater of War

Set me as a seal upon your heart. For love is strong as death.

(Song of Solomon)

Bill T. Jones's Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray—which has concluded its New York premiere run at Rose Theater for the Lincoln Center Festival—is a work of heartbroken yet tenacious, resilient love.

Given its world premiere at Illinois's Ravinia Festival in 2009--the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth--this 90-minute, multimedia piece takes inspiration from the life and milieu of this American icon. But before leading us to Lincoln, Jones first draws our attention to Shayla-Vie Jenkins, a lovely Black woman dancing on a circular, spotlit extension of the main stage. She flows with delicate elegance through a seamless pattern of movements as a voice-over recording itemizes parts of the human body, from head to toe.

I am a Black woman, too, and as the voice calmly, caressingly listed these parts, my mind quickly flicked to the blood memory of the slave auction block. That thought flickered out just as swiftly, for I sensed that Jones wanted us to hold two other thoughts in reasonable balance. The first, to be sure, is that illusory, ephemeral flow of dance. The second is the sweaty, effortful reality that gives rise to dance, the discrete bodily structures working in concert to make the fantasy possible. With the auction image gone, I found this juxtaposition almost unbearably moving, a tribute not only to dance and dancers but also to the notion of the democratic body politic, forged from so many individual entities, each with distinct identity, history and concerns. Is the American ideal of a strong, united people capable of respect and harmony, a dream as illusory as a body dancing on a stage?

In examining the life of our nation's heroic, martyred president, Jones has said, he grappled with Lincoln's human complexities. This work touches upon some incidents from Lincoln's biography, including his assassination, but it does not engage with that complexity in any way specific to the man himself. Jones seems far more interested in repeatedly pulling back from Lincoln to afford a better view of the restless ghosts from those times that now float through our own. He recognizes something potentially dangerous—and because he's got an artist's courageous heart, potentially redeeming—in the flaring contentiousness of our political life today, when a man of African and European-American heritage now sits at the head of a country that once enslaved African people.

Long stretches of Fondly Do We Hope's ensemble movement, as well as some choreography for individuals, puzzled me. Most notably, Paul Matteson—who often assumes the Lincoln role—seemed, at best, unrelievedly pleasant. Matteson's moves are big and flung; he is hoisted and ported by the ensemble, as if riding atop a throne of marble. But this performer never transcends blandness, even when engaged in heated debate. But if Jones's movement had been more expressive in itself, it's still not clear that Matteson would possess the command to carry it. On the other hand, Asli Bulbul (in and out of her role as Mary Todd Lincoln) and Jennifer Nugent, like Jenkins, make the most of movement pieces that are perfectly cut, polished and displayed. I am tempted to think that Jones's intentions snap into sharper focus when the dancer is female, but Jenkins, Bulbul and especially the always interesting Nugent, really bring oomph to the challenge.

Although the choreography largely disappoints, the score astonishes. Jerome Begin, Christopher Antonio William Lancaster and George Lewis, Jr. contribute a rich blend of Americana in their original compositions and arrangements of traditional music, with delightfully beautiful singing by Clarissa Sinceno and Lewis. I appreciate the reticent simplicity of Bjorn Amelan's set design. The filmy, translucent curtain encircling the main stage reminded me of a screen pulled closed around the bed of a hospitalized patient, perhaps one injured in our Civil War or in Afghanistan. For long stretches, this curtain distanced us from the enclosed dancing ensemble.

Democracy can look like chaos. Is the body politic ill, broken? Is it actually in the frightening throes of a healing crisis? The visitor quietly entering a hospital room, wants to protect, to be gentle with, the patient suffering or recovering within.

Stay me, comfort me. For I am sick of love.

(Song of Solomon)

When Amelan's tender curtain parts, revealing a stand of white columns, it demarcates hallowed space set apart for the exercise of the ancient Greek ideals adopted by the founders of this nation. I wonder if we are still capable of “believing in great men,” as Jones says of himself in the work's text. I wonder, indeed, if believing in some great man out there is exactly what we need to be doing right now, but I trust Jones has entertained that thought, too.

“Lincoln is a story we tell ourselves,” says Jones's narrator, Jamyl Dobson. And just as Americans continue to interrogate and refine this narrative, Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray reportedly has been much reworked since its world premiere last year at Ravinia. Despite visual beauty in design and performance, the work is blunted by choreography dissociated from the work's complex ideas and copious text.

Lincoln Center Festival continues through next Sunday, July 25. For a schedule of the remaining programs and ticketing information, click here.

Fondly do we watch...

See Bill T. Jones on Channel Thirteen tonight at 8pm, discussing his latest evening-length work, Fondly Do We Hope... Fervently Do We Pray, inspired by the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln.

The interview will be repeated this Sunday on SundayArts on Thirteen at noon, on WLIW on Sunday at 3pm and again on WLIW on June 29 at 10:30pm. It will also be available online at WNET Thirteen’s website at this link. 

For more details about the company's July 15-17 performances at Lincoln Center Festival, click here.

Terrance McKnight interviews Bill T. Jones...with music!

In this special two-hour edition of Q2, host Terrance McKnight interviews acclaimed director-choreographer Bill T. Jones and traces his life through music.

The legendary artistic director, choreographer and dancer reminisces about listening to B.B. King back in the days when he and his parents pulled potatoes as migrant workers; discovering Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez at college; sharing Barbra Streisand recordings with his late partner, Arnie Zane, with whom he would later found theBill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in New York; and the music that played as Zane died in his arms.

Let's stay together...

Bill T. Jones and Dance Theater Workshop Explore Merger

by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, April 26, 2010

BTJ+DTW. Who's next?

Bill T. Jones, Dance Theater Workshop to merge

by Miriam Kreinin Souccar, Crains'sNewYorkBusiness.com, April 2, 2010

A sweet Bill T. Jones story...

Sunday Routine - Bill T. Jones - Waking, A Second Time, to Birdsong
by Robin Finn, The New York Times, February 14, 2010

Here's to "scragglier" dance!

Bill T. Jones Salutes His Friend Lincoln
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, September 6, 2009

Chapel/Chapter: Home to Harlem

Chapel/Chapter, a spectacular Bessie Award-winning work by Bill T. Jones, is coming home to Harlem Stage Gatehouse. Created for the Gatehouse and presented in 2006 during the theater's inaugural season, the hour-long piece returns for a brief run, June 11-14.

To follow Friday's performance, Jones has planned a special edition of Harlem Stage's Breaking Ground with Bill T. Jones community dialogue series, featuring Terence Dougherty, General Counsel for the ACLU, and Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University, who will address issues of judgment and redemption reflected in Chapel/Chapter.

Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue (at 135th Street), Manhattan

Thursday through Saturday, 7:30pm
Sunday, 3pm

Click here for further information, directions and ticketing, or call 212-281-9240, ext. 19/20.

Tickets 20% off for Harlem residents and HS members

Family feud in review: Bill T. Jones

A Quarreling Pair by Bill T. Jones, at the Kennedy Center
by Sarah Kaufman, The Washington Post, March 26, 2009