Cheering at The Joyce

What's the deal with that reported Google-sponsored free WiFi in Chelsea? I hoped to post my FOCUS DANCE observations and thoughts to Facebook and Twitter at intermission, but all I could find was a "Joyce Public" connection that hung for hours every time I typed just a few characters. Crazy.

Last night's presentation of Camille A. Brown & Dancers and Brian Brooks Moving Company at the APAP-targeted FOCUS DANCE at The Joyce got the audience cheering so vociferously I began to wonder if I hadn't slipped into a wormhole and ended up at City Center's Fall For Dance festival instead. The cheering sounded a little pre-planned, shall we say?

I will cheer, though--and loudly--for a couple of solos from this program.

Brian Brooks presented I'm Going to Explode, a signature piece from 2007 where the choreographer steps out (and flips out) of his character's mundane, buttoned-down existence and splinters into rapid-fire, thrashing, punishing movement. It's an amazing performance of physical control and endurance, one I never tire of seeing, just as I never tire of its accompanying music--"Losing My Edge" by LCD Soundsystem. (Yeah, I'm losing my edge...The kids are coming up from behind...the kids from France and from London, but I was there...I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band. I told him, "Don't do it that way. You'll never make a dime."...But have you seen my records?...Gil! Scott! Heron!)

Brown's half of the show also featured a distinguished solo--The Real Cool, an excerpt from her ensemble piece, Mr. TOL E. RAncE (2012). The solo works as a standalone item. Like Brooks, Brown has superb control of timing, weight, every last movement in this meditation on Black performing artists and stereotypical representations. A dancer with legendary skill and presence, Brown turns her character into a full-body mask. Its intelligent, fiery and sorrowful human spirit seems to float a few feet back from this animated shell. Eerie.

Other highlights on the bill: Brown's fun and feisty Been There, Done That (2010) duet with lovable Jule D. Lane (a Jacob's Pillow crowd-pleaser that, yes, this talented duo should work the hell out of as long as they can) and Brooks's duet, Fall Falls, some attractive, if inconsequential, slippery-do and swirling around with Wendy Whelan which exploits her malleable qualities without giving her much of a point for being there except to be Wendy Whelan, surely wonderful to indulge in (as dancemaker and as audience) but which, in the end, does not satisfy.

For information on the remaining FOCUS DANCE programs through January 13 at the Joyce--Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, Doug Varone and Dancers, Eiko & Koma and John Jasperse--click here and here.

The Joyce Theater
Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

A warm(er) New York City welcome for APAP

This year, New York has welcomed the annual APAP (Association of Performing Arts Presenters) conference with the kind of "winter weather" that makes chasing down performances and showings all around town a whole lot easier than anticipated. I like that I can take post-dinner strolls across town to The Joyce for FOCUS DANCE--the series offered by Gotham Arts Exchange and the Joyce and curated, this year, by Jodee Nimerichter (director, American Dance Festival). I'll only get to the first two of FOCUS's four programs, but I'd like to shake the hand of the man or woman who can manage to get to everything invited to or, for that matter, worth seeing during APAP season.

Last night's show at the Joyce featured work by Jodi Melnick and Stephen Petronio. Melnick's Solo, Re(Deluxe), Version (2012), premiered last spring at New York Live Arts and set to the ecstatic, jagged chugging of Steven Reker's rock band, People Get Ready, finally came into focus and took off for me when the choreographer teamed up with another outstanding dancer, Hristoula Harakas. The two women proceeded to slip within and against the space with moves of silk and sophistication, switched on and attuned to one another's force and timing. Everything on that raw stage suddenly warmed up. It looked like love and intuition and mad stellar skill. Also, mad stellar are Gino Grenek and his fellow dancers from Stephen Petronio Company who offered excerpts from three sculpted pieces--Like Lazarus Did (LLD), a work in progress, The Architecture of Loss (2012) and Underland (2011). I'm always drawn to this ensemble's earth-angel quality: You can see how disciplined they are, but they show honor to the body and materiality--and humanity--by playing with gravity, never straining to escape it. Whatever they're dancing, they are sharing this specific time and place with us. Something so arresting and emotionally moving in this for me.

Tonight? Camille A. Brown & Dancers--to see where Brown's going with the provocative Mr. TOL E. RAncE--and Brian Brooks Moving Company (7:30 at The Joyce Theater). For information on the remaining FOCUS DANCE programs through January 13 at the Joyce--including work by Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, Doug Varone and Dancers, Eiko & Koma and John Jasperse--click here and here.

The Joyce Theater
Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Brian Brooks’ loco motion

Aaron Walter and Brian Brooks in Motor 
(Photo by Christopher Duggan)

Yes, Brian Brooks Moving Company is a perpetual motion machine, surely evidenced by the miraculous ensemble spectacle Motor (2010) but also the manic Brooks solo I’m Going to Explode (2007) and shiny new model of the moment, Descent.

Yes to spectacle. Yes to the glamour of discipline and endurance. Yes to Motor’s starburst cables radiating from deep back in the Joyce Theater stage and high over the heads of audience below, taut strings you want to reach up and strum. Yes to the light rays traveling those lines and to the slippery fleetness and heroism of bodies--Brooks himself, Hollis Bartlett, Meghan Frederick, Jeff Kent Jacobs, Jo-anne Lee, Danielle McIntosh and Aaron Walter.

Yes to the sexiness of the machine. Yes to the human machine. Yes to the surging flow, the ebb, the undertow. Yes to obsession. Yes to agitation. Yes to stepping out of oneself, cracking the armor, going nuts.

Yes to virtuosity with edge. Yes to splintered visions, to unexpected, serious musicality.

Yes, even, to working images half to death. Yes to chewing gum 'til the flavor fades. Yes...perhaps...to the strangeness of dropping a piece without a fancy send-off. (Wait... Did Descent just end? What? That's it?)

Yes, finally, to sometimes saying no and no and no...if only for a moment.

Gotham Dance Festival presents Brian Brooks Moving Company again on Friday (8pm) and Sunday (7:30pm). Click here for details, and be sure to check out the festival's complete--and interesting--lineup of programming through June 12.

Schedule and ticketing

The Joyce Theater
8th Avenue and 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)