Open Letter from Dance Artist/Educator Dwana A. Smallwood

 

 

Dear Bed Stuy:

The Arts in NYC are dying...

My name is Dwana Adiaha Smallwood. I was a premier dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 1995 - 2007. I’ve been on the cover of Dance Magazine three times. I’ve been featured in Essence Magazine and I have been photographed by Annie Leibowitz for Vogue Magazine.  I was also featured and danced on The Oprah Show.

I took everything I learned over my many years as a professional and created a dance program in South Africa at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. The program was designed for girls who needed validation and opportunities to harness the power within, so they too could exceed the expectations many have of black girls around the world. With dance, I was able to create a sacred space for them; that same space that saved me from the noise of the world to help me reach my goals. 

I yearned to continue that work and to create a space for the community that saved me but almost swallowed me whole.  For Bedford-Stuyvesant (still one of the most underserved communities in Brooklyn),  I wanted so desperately to be the answer to the prayer I often heard: “I wish I had a place to grow and to feel like I can be anything, do anything.” 

So in 2013, I founded and opened the Dwana Smallwood Performing Arts Center in Bed Stuy Brooklyn, a state of the art facility which is a place for artistic exchange that serves to empower and mold elite dancers and artists to develop, grow and compete on the world’s stage. Today I am writing to let you know that due to the COVID - 19 pandemic, in about four months, we will have to shut our doors…. 

I worked hard to create the space politicians said they needed, parents said they wanted, and children said they had to have. I could only imagine how many more of my community members would have had better options had they had a center like mine, to help guide them and keep them safe and provide validation to their lives. It wasn't easy to build. I almost closed before we opened. Each year since, I’ve struggled to keep the doors open and continued to offer opportunities to children and the community to thrive, but COVID-19 has hit us hard like so many other small arts institutions, and what I so dreaded, may actually be a reality. All that I have worked for may not survive. 

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and have lived here my entire life. When I think about my upbringing, I think I had a childhood no different than anyone else in Bed Stuy. I had a single struggling mother mostly -- we were fatherless mostly -- and I was Black always. 

Somehow, through struggle, prayers, tears, hard work, the Creator, and the collective work of the community I was able to live my dream and travel the world. To most elite athletes, we would consider this to be a huge accomplishment; to make it out of millions dancing and training and auditioning to become one of only two elite dancers chosen that year. I was that girl; that black, bald, skinny, struggling girl who had made it past the expectations placed on all little dark-skinned black girls by the world. 

The Dwana Smallwood Performing Arts Center has been closed since March.  Due to NYC’s guidelines, we have not been allowed to open our doors even to rent out space. We will close for good if we don’t raise money NOW. I always wondered how something that means so much to so many and requires so little from each of us, will be allowed to die.

It would be among the greatest failures of our community if we close.

The arts have always been the answer when the healing of a nation is needed.  If and/or when this pandemic is over, the arts will be needed more than ever to replenish, refresh and rejuvenate our communities, our children, and their families.

The intention of this letter is not to ask for money (although that would be helpful and graciously accepted).  I’m asking that you help me to sound the alarm.  I have reached out to media outlets, government officials and others that I had hoped could help and some have, but in the world of fast news cycles, this message has been lost; not just for my organization but for many others like mine.

Please pass this onto ANYONE you know or think can help get this message out to the media (social, news, arts, entertainment...whatever). Any help you can offer will be appreciated.

The collective healing of our nation is going to need the ARTS. Dance is My Oxygen!

 

 
Sincerely,

Dwana A. Smallwood
Dwana Smallwood Performing Arts Center, Inc.
dwanasmallwoodpac.org
(718) 443 - 9800

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Can I get a witness? Viewing mayfield brooks at JACK

Performance artist mayfield brooks
(photo: Amar Puri)

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych)
by mayfield brooks
JACK
January 30-February 1

In the tiny storage room, where the pungent aroma of earth and rose petals prickles your nostrils, I stand in a single line of people skirting the edge of a funereal bier covered in colorful decaying foliage. I see a bare foot sticking out from this cover, even as I hear mayfield brooks' voice on a looping recording (calling for "a witness") and tamp down a feeling of being trapped. I notice a thin, dry stalk, its end lightly poking the sole of brooks' foot, and I wonder if brooks feels it, is irritated by it. I wonder if I shouldn't pluck it away. But I dutifully stand, like everybody else, listening, looking in this solemn enclosure. Finally, I carefully--so as to not startle brooks or draw anyone else's attention--reach for the stalk and pull it off brooks' flesh.

In small groups, the audience will cycle through that opening viewing room then gradually assemble in a larger but still intimate space nicely set up to encourage comfort and seating choice. This feels more like a funeral parlor than a performance space. Merging two of brooks' works, Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) is every bit as much a memorial service, a participatory ritual, a raucous channeling and a party with festive cakes (by Susannah Simpson) as it is a performance.

Attend and you will have ample time to gaze or move around the space and commune with the dead (brooks' and yours). Inspired primarily by the late Black gay activist and Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson, this evening introduces us to brooks' ongoing practice of writing heartfelt letters to this role model and would-be mentor and gently suggests we take up a similar practice with our own ancestors of blood or mind.

Will you also see strong, compelling performance in this space? Oh, yes. brooks' collaborating team--a water bearer, a tea maker, a florist, a guide and various viewing hours caretakers--establishes and eases us into the fluidity of the space, but brooks rules the space and gives a master class in commitment, responsiveness, fervent aliveness.

The evening, nearly two hours of sensory richness, is well worth the sometimes frustrating task of navigating subway travel to, from and around Brooklyn. (As of last night, the "C" in C train stands for "cusswords.") Maybe just give yourself at least 15 minutes more than you think you might need to get there, then don't fret because the opening of the piece is experienced in shifts. Relax with some tea in the lobby.

Technical Director/Creative Consultant: Niko Tsocanos

Curated by Stacy Grossfield as part of her IMAGES // LANDSCAPES series and JACK's Reparations365 series.

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) continues with 8pm performances tonight and tomorrow. For information and ticketing, click here.

JACK
18 Putnam Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
C to Clinton-Washington or Shuttle to Franklin Avenue

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Drury and Rankine: award-winning writers challenge whiteness

MaYaa Boteng portrays Keisha,
the pivotal character in Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview
(photo: Julienta Cervantes)

Hosted by Brooklyn's Center for Fiction and presented with Theater Communications Group, playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury and poet Claudia Rankine sat in conversation about Drury's Pulitizer-winning play, Fairview (2018), and Rankine's first published play, The White Card (March 2019). Both stories have scenes centered around a dinner party and deal with race and white surveillance, ultimately training a floodlight on what whiteness is and what it does. The writers discussed Fairview, mostly, including Rankine's experience of seeing Drury's play in the company of a white woman, a close friend and colleague, who (literally) failed to rise to its challenge. So, The White Card, which I have neither seen nor read will remain more of a mystery to me for a bit longer.

Though highly anticipated, the event proved to be frustrating, beginning with its late start (a half-hour) and a curious mismatch of speakers--both thoughtful, distinguished artists--whose personas could not have been more different. Rankine more reserved and watchful, read not from The White Card but from her essay responding to Fairview and contributed careful, finely-wrought, even mournful analysis at select moments. Drury, more accessible and endearing, too often seemed like a nervous student in awe of a visiting star scholar who is, yes, a MacArthur-certified genius. Rakine's 2014 multiple award-winning volume of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, zoomed her into mainstream awareness as a critical witness to everyday racist microaggressions that, along with the fundamental nature and tenacity of white supremacy, make any mention of "post-racial America" an absurd lie. Would that The Center for Fiction could have magically blended these two writers into one fascinating being.

Rankine largely supported Drury in working through the creative process and the varying audience responses to Fairview, a play that first soothes and reassures white audience members with a familiar sit-com scenario and then asks them to participate in gradual, then increasingly unsettling, hard-to-escape exposure of their own white privilege. This conversation gave me a moment to revisit my own reaction to Fairview's final section where the teenager Keisha invites white people to rise from their seats and reassemble on the stage. As a Black woman, I immediately got the system-tilting shift Drury was going for in this theatrical exercise, and I must admit I felt a little smug. No, a lot smug. I also recall that the white people in the SoHo Rep audience I had sat with were all quite cooperative. From Drury's report, it seems that reaction was far from common.

As with reading Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, I'm struck, once again, by a sense of unacknowledged tragedy--what Rankine refers to as the loneliness an oppressed person feels, the sense of having been abandoned by all to injustice. On many levels, for many reasons, so many of us live with unhealed trauma. Gaslighting deepens and worsens the tenacious psychological/emotional effects of injustice. It messes with our overall health as individuals, communities and a society, and we're living in a time when gaslighting is pretty much the National Anthem.

Artists like Drury and Rankine bring heroic witness to this incendiary, potentially transitional time. The rest is up to us--to clean these uncovered wounds and allow them to heal.

Learn about The Center for Fiction and its upcoming events--such as evenings with authors like Edwidge Danticat, Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins--here.

The Center for Fiction
15 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Look around us: 600 Highwaymen presents "Manmade Earth"

Teen performers in Manmade Earth by 600 Highwaymen,
presented by Crossing the Line Festival
at The Invisible Dog Art Center

Manmade Earth
by 600 Highwaymen
Crossing the Line Festival
at The Invisible Dog Art Center

We would like you to think about who is surrounding you. How you feel surrounded by the people around you.

-- Performers of Manmade Earth 

Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone (known, together, as 600 Highwaymen) spent a year building Manmade Earth with eight American teenagers of various cultural backgrounds, including immigrants from Malaysia, Somalia, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The work incorporates movement and text with a modular set design by Eric Southern and Deb O deftly utilized and reconfigured by the performers.

Audience seating is arranged in rows at the sides of a long strip of performance space--like a high-end fashion runway--covered in off-white canvas. Performers, one by one, introduce their participation with a model-like solo turn under the lights, whether in contrasty athletic-wear or a delicate, elegantly-draped hijab. The audience gazes at each young stranger as one and then another proceeds to voice a series of questions to the unseen Other that might be us.

Questions asked without emotional expression, with the matter-of-fact manner that models employ on their walks. When speaking, each one gestures or strikes poses with no motion wasted. The audience looks on, listens, tries to figure them out.

Some of the questions:

"Do you think I look smart?"

"When you look at me, what do you see?"

"What makes you laugh? Do we all laugh at the same things?"

"Does that seem fair? Is being fair important to you?"

"Should I take my shoes off before I come in?"

"Should I eat with a fork or my hands?"

"Do you wish that things were different? Do you want me to change?"

There are some "This is..." statements, too, in a section before these individuals shift gears, folding the canvas into a protective tarp so they can laboriously mix and produce a round slab of cement for which there is no apparent use.

Perhaps it is the quiet ritual of the buckets and water containers and stirring sticks that bears more weight than the actual final product. What seems to come of all this activity--this dedicated teamwork--is an awareness of interdependence. It leads on to the construction and activation of an ingenious environment of corrugated sheets and upturned ladders. There the performers engage in a rapid line game with frequent player eliminations, done in fun while revealing things that cause each of these youngsters to be afraid.

I have no doubt they have all experienced fear, for any number of reasons, but I take note of the focus, poise and precision with which each one of them meets the considerable, if often subtle, demands of Manmade Earth's script and movement.

Performers:

Nur Aisyah
Nasra Ali
Raiza Almonte
Dimyana Angelo
Amanda Barsi
Augustin Bonane
Jeanvier Nkurunziza
Diaaeddin Zabadini

Original music and sound design: Michael Costagliola

Production design: Eric Southern and Deb O

Manmade Earth continues with performances tonight and Sunday at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here. For more information on FIAF's city-wide Crossing the Line festival--devoted to the creative work of French, Francophone and American artists--click here.

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith Street and Boerum Place), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Forever hunger: Kimberly Bartosik at BAM Fisher

Joanna Kotze in Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you
(photo: Jim Coleman)

Lighting designer Roderick Murray's fluorescent tubes hang from the ceiling inside BAM Fisher's Fishman Space, colder and more severe than stalactites. Two dancers--Christian Allen and Lindsey Jones--step into the bare space of Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you. You can almost hear raptor wings, so forceful is the way they will lunge and beat and spin against the air. Arms lifting and rotated. Heavy breath audible. Heads and chins tilted upward. Torsos arching as they drop to a knee.

Burr Johnson, Dylan Crossman and Joanna Kotze--raptors, too, or perhaps angels, if angels have feet to strike mountainous earth--come in and churn and lash against the empty space as well. Back and forth, they cross it, overlapping in time and close pathways, until their labors clearly take a toll. Watching them, too, provides an initial sensation of exhilaration followed by exertion. When they stop--just stop and stand and shift inside and gasp--you feel the same internal wooziness, everything inside one's own body saying, "Hold up. Can we just settle back into order?"

I hunger for you plays with the risk of release--the kind of dropping of form and letting go that we experience in extremes of sensual and spiritual ecstasy--without guarantee of connection. Or guarantee that connection achieved will stay or will satisfy. A partner backs off or quietly quits the space entirely. The one remaining might freeze in a pose of hopelessness--arms wrenched forward from a torso bent as if in abject submission.

Much of the inspiration for the piece comes from the choreographer's religious upbringing, and it's interesting that she has cast her own child, Dahlia Bartosik-Murray, as a silent witness to some moments of Kotze's dancing as well as, later, a figure of release, coursing around the space like a wild filly.

Choreography: Kimberly Bartosik in collaboration with the dancers
Music: Sivan Jacobovitz, with arrangement by Kimberly Bartosik
Costume design: Harriet Jung
Sound Engineering: James Bigbee Garver
Dramaturgy: Melanie George

I hunger for you continues a sold-out run through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information, click here.

Also, Friday's audience is welcome to an informal post-show discussion, facilitated by Melanie George with Bartosik and company in BAM Fisher's Lower Lobby.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Shamar Wayne Watt and family revisit "Gully spring" at JACK

Shamar Wayne Watt
(photo: Scott Shaw)

This week, Brooklyn's JACK performance space is presenting a new version of Gully spring: Di exhortation, a dance piece by Jamaica-born Shamar Wayne Watt, originally shown on a Gibney program curated by Nora Chipaumire. (See my review of that late 2017 engagement here.) Just short of an hour, the piece centers Afro-Atlantic spirituality as a landscape of resistance to colonial power and the constraints of Eurocentric Christianity. The work embodies and elevates family with the presence of Watt's mother, Valerie Davis, who contributes her choir-singing joy and, now at JACK, brother Lamar Jerome Watt, a Florida-based student athlete and krump dancer.

The center of Gully spring, though, remains the prophet Watt, mounting a platform and revolving and testifying beneath the ongoing baptismal drip of a gallon jug of water suspended above his head. I recall, from Gibney's promotion, that he declared a new religion of his own making, drawn from African-Jamaican traditions and Pentecostal worship as well as the political awareness and urgency of the moment. Is it not fitting and right that he administer his own benediction?

You have one last chance to witness this performance I called "exhortative, magnetic, formidable" this evening at JACK (8pm). For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 ½ Waverly Ave, Brooklyn
C or G train to Clinton-Washington

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Oren Barnoy premieres a new dance trio at JACK

Paul Hamilton in a new work by Oren Barnoy
(photo: Scott Shaw)

You'll find the name of the new trio by choreographer Oren Barnoy if you click on this: (symbol). I'm told there is no official pronunciation, but there might be a rhythm. The glyph resembles something from one of those unauthorized offshoots of Reiki, but the dance itself--which left Paul Hamilton, Candace Tabbs and Molly Lieber dripping and glistening in sweat after its 25 minutes--is more-marathon workout than soothing. The aim is spiritual, though, described as Barnoy's "version of a daily prayer through movement" and a "continuous action...unrelenting ritual...towards transcendence."

Performed in the simple, aluminum-foil surround of Brooklyn's JACK, the piece's exertions bear the same twisty, swirly hieroglyphics of the enigmatic title and its look of a complicated infinity. Dancers, dressed in unremarkable black clothing, come and go, thrusting and retracting with low-dipping torsos and reaching, scooping, swinging, windmilling arms. I imagine some viewers might get into this while others eventually begin to tune it out when it does not appear to be turning into anything. For me, visual drama happened whenever two bodies were at play--at prayer?--in proximity to one another, activating shape and energy in the negative space between. I found my attention snapping to these interactions. On the whole, though, the entire ride can be enjoyable.

(symbol)--part of JACK's Images//Landscapes series, curated by Stacy Grossfield--continues tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn (C or G to Clinton-Washington)

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Join us at BAX's Artist Services Weekend, February 10-11

(Brooklyn Arts Exchange) welcomes you to its annual Artists Services Weekend, Saturday, February 10 and Sunday, February 11. The entire weekend of events is free with reservations made here.

For complete details on the events listed below,  click here.

BAX Artists Services Weekend

Saturday 2/10

2:30

Maria Bauman | AIR Open Studio


2:30 – 4:00

PROCESS AS PRODUCT – hosted by Tanisha Christie: a conversation/presentation looking at work that is explicitly or implicitly "process based" whether that is defined as ritual, practice, or participatory; where the work is shown as generative, "raw,"  "unfinished," improvisational and/or in the moment.

Participants include: Nina Angela Mercer (playwright/performer), Aisha Bell (multidisciplinary artist and sculptor), NIC Kay (artist), and BJ Evans (Associate Producer, Performing Arts @ BRIC)


3:30 – 4:30

ORIENTATION AND INFORMATION SESSION FOR 2018/19 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE AND SPACE GRANT APPLICATIONS


5:30

Mariana Valencia | AIR Open Studio


6:30

luciana achugar | AIR Open Studio

Sunday 2/11

11:00 - 12:00

ORIENTATION AND INFORMATION SESSION FOR 2018/19 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE AND SPACE GRANT APPLICATIONS


11-12:30

REDEFINING POWER

A workshop created and facilitated by BAX's Youth Education Racial Equity Cohort: Angie Pittman, Donna Costello, Maira Duarte, Billy Schultz, Casey Hayes-Deats and Lucia Scheckner

BAX Youth Education invites you to join us for a conversation about ways in which we can dismantle white supremacist power structures while working with young artists (and beyond) in classrooms and studios.


12:00

Kat Galasso | AIR Open Studio


12:00 – 4:00

OPEN FORUM - Studio C will remain open and available throughout the day. Meet a friend for coffee. Lay down on a mat, or continue a conversation from a previous workshop. Light body work will be available at intervals on a first come, first serve basis.

1:30-3:3O

All Black: A Long Table on Stress and Self-Care

presented by
Dancing While Black and Eva Yaa Asantewaa /EYA Projects

Let's talk about the many sources of stress in the lives of Black and Brown artists. What approaches, resources and tools help us counteract the effects of stress on our physical health, psyches, interpersonal relationships and creativity?

Core participants: Rashida Bumbray, Charmaine Warren, Orlando Hunter and Paloma McGregor

Curated and facilitated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa/EYA Projects

Please note that we are holding this private space for Black and Brown artists and community members. We request that all respect this designation.


2:00

Aya Ogawa | AIR Open Studio


3:45-5:45

Space for Everyone: Different Approaches to Finding the Right Space for Your Project and Your Community.

Join Risa Shoup, ED Space works, Inc. as she explores with and brainstorms about developing your own space and the creating & managing of capital campaigns. What does it mean to advocate against cultural displacement and who are our allies in the business community?

With Stephanie Alvarado and Mara Kravitz from 596 Acres. Jimena Martinez from CUMBE, and Katy Rubin from Theater of the Oppressed NY

6:00

Tanisha Christie | AIR Open Studio


BAX
421 Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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BAM's Joseph V. Melillo to receive a Bessies honor

Joseph V. Melillo
(photo: Jesse Winter)

The NY Dance and Performance Awards (The Bessies) has announced the recipient of the 2018 Bessies Presenter Award for Outstanding Curating--Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer, since 1999, of Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Melillo will receive the award at the Bessies Presenters Gathering on Sunday, January 14 (5-7pm), at La MaMa's Downstairs Theater.

“The Bessie committees wanted to recognize Joe Melillo for his visionary curation for more than three decades,” said Bessies Executive Director Lucy Sexton. “Joe has made sure dance has a place on the stages of BAM—from the grand Howard Gilman Opera House to the adventurous Harvey Theater to the intimate space at the Fisher. He has brought so many international choreographers to New York City and lifted up generations of American dance artists on the world stage. We are thrilled to be honoring him with this award.”

The celebration of Melillo's award is free and open to all in the dance and performance community. Please click here to make your reservation.

La MaMa (Downstairs Theater)
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

ABOUT THE BESSIES PRESENTER AWARD

Established in 2017, the Bessies Presenter Award for Outstanding Curating recognizes a presenter or curator of work performed in the New York City area. It is presented to an individual or curatorial team whose work has had a palpable impact on artists, audiences, or the dance and performance field in general. While the award can recognize sustained achievement in curating or presenting over time, it can equally recognize a particular project, festival, or season that occurred in the past year. Visiting or guest curators, as well as full-time curators and presenters are eligible. The first Presenter Award (in 2017) went to Judy Hussie-Taylor, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Danspace Project. 

ABOUT THE BESSIES

The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 33 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize outstanding work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League, as members participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. The Bessies are produced in partnership with Dance/NYC. For more information about the Bessies, visit www.bessies.org.

Follow the Bessies on Facebook / #theBessies / @bessieawards

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Playing games with Karma Mayet at JACK

Karma Mayet
(photo: Karl Ferguson, Jr.)

Multi-talented Karma Mayet--actor, vocalist, composer--is busy crafting something both fun and painful in Race Card at JACK, now through December 16. As the title suggests, this project gets all up into America's favorite non-favorite topic. You might remember Congresswoman Maxine Waters responding to the accusation that she's playing the race card. Words to the effect of "Good, because I've got a whole deck to play!"

Mayet, a Chicago native with roots in Mississippi, has a whole deck, too--literally--with playing cards liberally distributed around the audience seating at JACK. A fan of Bid Whist--her granny is her Bid Whist guru--she has worked out a way for an audience, even card game novices like me, to play a version of the usually intricate, fast-paced game with her as she sits at a little table with a pencil, paper and a phone full of music. The winner of each round triggers her telling of a personal story of racism in a society where macro-aggressions are fundamental and micro-aggressions are thick on the ground.

In between Mayet's true-life stories that both amuse and sting, viewers are shuffled like cards while grooving to what Mayet enjoys calling her "white jams"--the tastiest, most irresistible music made by white appropriators of Black style. ("Twenty years after you create something," she quipped, "they'll get a passable imitation.") Here and there, things might get a bit raggedy--part of the fun, actually. The overall concept rocks. The chance process and continuous audience involvement as co-creators--no two evenings will be alike--are refreshing.

And you've gotta love Mayet. Even rooted in her chair as she tells her stories, she's the Queen of movement and dynamic charm. Go play Bid Whist with her at JACK.

Race Card continues through December 16 with performances at 7:30pm, except where noted:

Saturday, December 2
Sunday, December 3
Friday, December 8
Saturday, December 9
​Sunday, December 10 at 3pm
Thursday, December 14
Friday, December 15
Saturday, December 16

For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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BAM Next Wave presents "Haruki Murakami's Sleep"

from Haruki Murakami's Sleep
(photos: Julia Cervantes)

If you did not sleep for seventeen nights, wouldn't you be terrified? Jiehae Park doesn't look a bit frightened, though, when we first find the actress portraying "Woman," a Japanese housewife and mother, in Haruki Murakami's Sleep, presented by BAM Next Wave.

She's calmly, evenly performing a dry ritual--logical gestures and motions of everyday life in the everyday world, hands purposeful, smooth and deft. Where are the items her hands would actually touch and handle? From our point of entry and view, they are invisible. The box that houses her--taking up not quite all the width of BAM Fisher's Fishman Space--is open to the front and contains only a few, simple, representative things. A chair, a standing lamp. Normal enough. Normal enough...to be suspect.

With the audience fully assembled and houselights lowered, Park begins to address her sleeplessness and its cause. But, under a cool wash of light, her affect hints at fiery excitement. Her face betrays it; her speech races. What might be a source of legitimate concern for any one of us has become, for her, a portal to freedom. She relishes it.

Rachel Dickstein shares directing and choreographic credit with her Brooklyn-based Ripe Time troupe. With a luscious live soundscape by NewBorn Trio and an adaptation by playwright Naomi Iizuka of Murakami's short story, "Sleep," the production draws our eyes and ears into an internal world splintered and continuously shuffled like a deck of cards.

A husband slips into and out of the box--a dentist, nothing more down to earth than that--but he is clearly archetypal "Husband" as he exists inside "Woman's" head. And that head can produce more apparitions through the visual magic wrought by Dickstein's design team and the troupe's physical theater strategies. There are clever projections and material embodiments of "Child," "Shadow," "Anna Karenina"--a character lifted from Woman's daily reading--and other beings and other selves. And a floor board that can detach to become a table. And a table, tilted onto one edge, that still functions as a table you might sit to and gaze across because you see what you choose to believe.

She was not herself.

But no one has to know.

Woman awoke, one day, with one foot still anchored in a dream and chose this situation as a way to survive. An alluring time out of time for Woman becomes one for us as well.

Set design: Susan Zeeman Rogers
Projections design: Hannah Wasileski
Lighting design: Jiyoun Chang
Sound design: Matt Stine
Costume design: Ilona Somogyi

Haruki Murakami's Sleep continues tonight through Saturday, December 2 with evening performances at 7:30pm and an additional 2:30 matinee on Saturday. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
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Dance is her oxygen, and Smallwood welcomes your help

Dwana Smallwood Performing Arts Center, opened in 2014 by the former Alvin Ailey star, recently suffered a fire. No one was injured, and the intrepid Smallwood, her instructors and her students have returned to continue their essential work in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy community.

Why are dance, dance education and community important to Brooklyn and, especially, today's Bed-Stuy? Watch the above video, and read the DSPAC statement here.

And if you'd like to help Smallwood achieve her vision of owning rather than renting her space, please consider contributing to the DSPAC Building Fund. Contact DSPAC here to request information on how to donate.

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What we have in Commons: The Commons Choir at BRIC

Daria Faïn
in her mayday heyday parfait at BRIC House
Below: members of The Commons Choir
(photo: Ryan Muir) 

You find yourself surrounded by resonant sneezes, explosive farts, otherwise unidentifiable big or more subtle expulsions of air from a multitude of gesticulating bodies.

No. Not the subway system.

It's the sonic opening of mayday heyday parfait, a new 90-minute work presented by The Commons Choir at BRIC House. This large, multifaceted, multicultural ensemble, co-directed by choreographer Daria Faïn and poet Robert Kocik, represents artists spanning disciplines from dance to poetry to song.

For the first several minutes, the audience stands in the middle of the performance space with performers darting or weaving through them. Every sound has a clear launchpad within a moving body. You watch--and feel--it being produced. To experience this at maximum intensity, keep your eyes on Faïn's clenched movements. But every dancer contributes to a variable soundscape that pulls the standing, slightly shifting audience together into one organism--like a forest with sounds whistling through its canopy and rustling through its understory.

After a time, the watchers can take seats on the space's perimeter, and the story continues with words spoken by a man, a woman and a young girl. In his opening remarks, the man mentions Brooklyn--BRIC's home, of course, and a symbol of historic, if threatened, class and cultural diversity. I forget now what the woman said--and my scrawled notes are of minor help--but the youngster wrapped up by thrice intoning three words, like a mantra and admonition: Change what happens.

Those words combine a sense of inevitability (shit happens and will happen) with a directive: Do your magick. The ensuing performance continues the interdependency of physical movement and vocalization testifying for the body as a site of individuality, intelligence, will, communication and meaningful interaction. The vocalizing is varied. Dancer Saúl Ulerio, for instance, gradually rolls onto his side and front while quietly emitting a kind of musical moan--un-ing. At other moments, strings of words like "uninhabitable worst-case scenario invaluable" float by in an enigmatic stream.

As the movers move, the arrangements look like drifting patchworks of individual bodies doing individual things and putting sound into a site, and that seems okay because no one is impinging on the space of another. I wrote--and think I actually heard someone say--"You can only be who you are." Co-existence and working together do not render us all exactly the same. Cannot. Should not. How could it? Why would it?

Sometime later, Ulerio says something else that sticks with me: "That which I can't know about myself is you."

Writing my notes, I was one of a handful of people who did not opt to reassemble in the middle of the space for the work's resolution and, once again, become bathed in sound. This time, people sat in a large, round bunch like herded cows, and they were ringed by the performers, vocal music rising, falling, burbling, reverberating. At the end, the performers announced their names: Martita Abril, Massimiliano Balduzzi, Ilona Bito, Yoon Sun Choi, Lydia Chrisman, Ichi Go, Alvaro Gonzales Dupuy, Antígona González, Michael Ingle, Aram Jibilian, Anaïs Maviel, Jean Carla Rodea, Saúl Ulerio, Drew Devero, Cecilia Woolfolk and Fay Victor.


Daria Faïn: Co-director and choreographer
Robert Kocik: Co-director and librettist
Darius Jones: Composer
Anaïs Maviel: Composer & Musical Director
Tuce Yasak: Light Designer
AshakaGivens: Costume Design
Eternal Polk: Video Design
Dov Tiefenback: Sound Design
Saúl Ulerio: Assistant choreographer

mayday heyday parfait continues through Sunday, November 12 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BRIC Arts Media
647 Fulton Street (entrance on Rockwell Place), Brooklyn
(directions)

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BUFU presents "HERE ON OUT" in Bushwick

Curator Ali Rosa-Salas's HERE ON OUT--part of July's BUFU events*--drew an ebullient crowd to Bushwick's Secret Project Robot bar and small performance space. One night only, it was one of those events that compel your presence and, clearly, a lot of dance's smartest and coolest read the memo. The ever-loving MTA did not, however, but that problem was deftly handled, last minute, by pushing the announced start time back a half-hour.

Due to illness, I made an early exit and missed the final performer, Jonathan Gonzalez, but I was there when the little dance party gave way to a solo by FLEXN and FLEXN Evolution star Shelby Shellz Suzie Q Felton--whose uncommonly bendy body surfaces a world of enthralling characters and drama. Felton was followed by a duet by Angie Pittman and Lily Bo Shapiro. Pittman and Shapiro made good use of the dim, crowded room by commandeering space for whatever their willful bodies chose to be, for however they chose to move in ways that question the conventionally functional way we humans are socialized to regard and move our bodies. Pittman maneuvered herself like popping corn. Shapiro sloshed and buried herself in darkness and oozed through the audience. And first both and then Pittman alone repeatedly galloped between two doors accented by powerful sound and a dash of lantern light. Sitting on the floor or on the precious-few benches, we often had to scoot feet and butts out of the way of this toomuchness crashing our shoreline. And it was kind of fun.

As for Gonzalez--always a surprising and striking performer--I hope to catch up with him at The Current Sessions, coming up in mid-August at the wild project. NIC Kay is another must-see artist presenting work in this series. For information on The Current Sessions, click here.

*****

HERE ON OUT has concluded.

*FUBU identifies itself as "a collaborative living archive centered around pan)Black and (pan)Asian cultural and political relationships. We, the founders of this   project, are a collective of queer, femme and non­binary, Black and East­Asian artists and organizer. Our goal is to facilitate a global conversation on the   relationship between Black & Asian diasporas, with an emphasis on building solidarity, de­centering whiteness, and resurfacing our deeply interconnected and complicated histories." FUBU asks, "In times where institutions, programs, and organizations are being de­funded and unsupported by the government, how can we learn to self­generate resources, support one another and help each other thrive?" For information on FUBU's activities, click here.

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What fresh hell? Enda Walsh brings "Arlington" to Brooklyn

The world beyond whatever literal, metaphoric or metaphysical rooms or shelters we construct for ourselves is a precarious place--is it not, now more than ever?--and any time spent hiding from it will be limited. Even your own body, in fact, can be thought of as a room or containing structure--illusory, in its way, and unstable.

In his 2016 play, Arlington, Irish playwright and director Enda Walsh--who collaborated with the dying David Bowie on one of his last works, the musical Lazarus--imagines the loveless, meticulously sterile environment of a waiting room, a transitional space continuously and increasingly imposed upon by a ravaged and ravaging external world. Neither the artificial potted tree (easily toppled) nor the aquarium (where are the fish?) provide reliable signs of life and warmth. And surveillance monitors deny even the solace of privacy as you wait for your number to be called.

Staged in its American premiere at St. Ann's Warehouse and co-presented with the Irish Arts Center as part of IAC's Enda Walsh in New York project, the 90-minute play overlaps its three characters' actions with radio voiceovers and highlights the physical quality of their desperation with Emma Martin's ingenious choreography. Alarming sounds, malfunctioning lights and even a small shower of what looks like blood-red ash intensify the situation for Isla (Charlie Murphy), stuck in a room in a tower, a gawky young man (Hugh O'Connor) tasked with keeping an eye on her from his monitor-cluttered security office and another oddball (Oona Doherty) who, in the midst of it all, bursts onto the scene to unleash an extraordinary dance solo. It is Doherty--in her fiery, doom-eager vigor--who dares to raise the banner for life. Although her appearance certainly kicks this play up several notches, there's continuous interest for fans of dance throughout--in particular, the brilliant angularity of Murphy's embodiment of Isla, easily a Duchamp/Marcel Marceau/Pee Wee Herman collab.

Arlington is a disturbing, bracing collage of Walsh's text, Martin's movement, music (Teho Teardo), sound (Helen Atkinson), video (Jack Phelan), scenic design (Jamie Vartan), lighting (Adam Silverman) and the riveting work of its three performers.

Arlington continues through May 28 at St. Ann's Warehouse. For information and tickets, click here.

Rooms--the companion production in the Enda Walsh in New York series--continues through May 28 at Cybert Tire, site of the future home of the Irish Arts Center. For complete information and tickets for Rooms, click here.

St. Ann's Warehouse
45 Water Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Cybert Tire
726 11th Avenue (near 51st Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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NY premieres by Kathy Westwater at Brooklyn Studios for Dance

Scene from the world premiere of
Kathy Westwater's Anywhere at Temple University
Dancers Alex Romania with Ilona Bito and Hadar Ahuvia
(photo: Bill Hebert)

After seeing Kathy Westwater's New York premieres of Anywhere and Extemporaneousness at Brooklyn Studios for Dance, I went looking for synonyms of the word entropy. I found deterioration, degeneration, crumbling, decline, degradation, decomposition, breaking down, collapse. I know she has made work and performed at Staten Island's former Fresh Kills Landfill--see Chambered, an installation of Anja Hitzenberger's photos from this project, also at BSD through April 30--and, like many of us, surely has societal and planetary fate on her mind. And, just maybe, there's something in there that's about the need to yank a structure from its pedestal and start over.

While there's nothing of this overtly expressed in Extemporaneousness and Anywhere--performed by separate casts that do not overlap--they both inhabit a space where bodies appear to continuously struggle, and lose that struggle, against gravity and time. Their periodic impact on the floor emphasizes weight, consequence and maybe desperation.

In both works, I found the dynamics unchanging--bodies jutting, squiggling, folding, twisting, drooping, buckling, sagging, staggering, slumping, tumbling either alone or in interactions across the wide studio space. I'm thinking it was Wilson Pickett who sang "Put your hand on your hip and let your backbone slip." Westwater is big on letting the backbone slip--literally and over and over--though Soul Man Pickett might take issue with this interpretation.

At the start of Anywhere, the cast labors to unfurl Seung-Jae Lee's gleaming and monumental set. That set is an eyeful--less whimsical in nature than its ingenious structure might first lead you to believe. In its own way, it's beautiful, but it looms with almost hypnotic, magnetizing control over the community of dancers in front of it. It was fascinating to play with the possible intentions here--as with the difference between those cute, high-tech headphones we were all issued and the analog boombox that shows up late in the piece. Unfortunately, I ended up feeling weary from the aesthetic sameness and the unconvincing lengthiness of the piece.

Kathy Westwater Dance performers:

Extemporaneousness: Laurel Atwell, Belinda He, Mercedes Searer, EmmaGrace Skove-Eps, Kay Ottinger and Rainey White

Anywhere: Hadar Ahuvia, Ilona Bito, Amanda Hunt, Alex Romania, and Kathy Westwater

Kathy Westwater Dance continues through April 22 with performances at 8pm. On Saturday, April 22, stay for a post-performance talk with Aaron Mattocks. On Saturday, April 29, Westwater will also hold a roundtable discussion--On Monuments & the Monumental, from 2-4:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Brooklyn Studios for Dance
210 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Brooklyn Dance Festival's Santana: lessons from her journey

Tamia B. Santana (left) with Eva Yaa Asantewaa
at Movers and Shakers: Dance Activists in NYC,
a panel discussion co-sponsored by
Brooklyn Dance Festival and Brooklyn Historical Society,
November 19, 2015
(photo courtesy of Brooklyn Dance Festival)

Guest contributor Tamia B. Santana (Executive Director of the Brooklyn Dance Festival) offers a few life lessons for artists.

*****

Welcome to the leading edge!

by Tamia B. Santana

Artists, welcome! Join us on the leading edge. The arts are here to support you.

Here are a few truths I have discovered on my journey.


1.       Evolution is happening.

I like what I like. Once I am touched by a choreographer or company, like an emperor penguin, I am imprinted and locked on for life.  I support those artists through their entire journey. I may not have loved the last concert they presented, but I will always love their voice and their courage to express themselves.

Savion Glover’s Om at the Joyce was out there. One or two patrons walked out, and it was very a small crowd. I loved it. He was risking it all and revealing who he was in that moment. It taught me about allowing your whole self to be expressed as you continue to evolve.

Like the Universe, we are all evolving. Is he expected to dance Stepz or Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk year after year? It’s not natural.

If we as your fans are stuck in where we were when we discovered you, that is our problem. We all need to accept change, and I love when artists have the courage to remind us of that. So to artists, keep doing you and presenting you. It is liberating us whether or not we acknowledge it to you or to ourselves.

2.       Creation is happening.

As a producer, I wanted to create opportunities for the dance I wanted to see.  It was easy and fun for me, and I had a chance to learn a lot along the way. I now feel grateful to share what I love with as many people as possible.

Please do not wait to see what you love.  Help create a space for it. It can start small but will always have momentum.

I think the oldest profession is performing artist. It cannot be stopped. If we live, we will want to create, and these creations are meant to be seen and connected with each other. The Universe will support you.

3.       Just do it!

When you are on the leading edge, creating new opportunities and experiences that have never been done before, it won’t be perfect.  When artists make “mistakes” on stage or in rehearsal, we as a community are forgiving and exalt those moments as being real and authentic.

I am learning to do the same with producing. With so many working parts, a name may not make it into the program, a music or lighting cue may be missed, a date reversed, and so on. It is all part of the process.

I used to have parents at my dance school who helped me learn that beautiful lesson. They were extremely critical of almost all information and nearly every detail relating to their children. Of course, I drew people around me with that mind set because of my own self critical thinking. They helped me learn that our studio could be locked in a four-wall box, or we could experience something new.

My students now have access to unlimited resources and opportunities in dance in New York. With each new experience, this helped me learn there are new challenges and variables that accompany leading them to the edge.

So, whether it is BAM, Lincoln Center or the local street fair, the point is that we are here. I have learned to take notes, reflect on what can be improved and then let the rest go.

There is also an art in making things happen despite something being uncertain. I saw The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center last season and the Sugar Plum Fairy fell flat on the stage and yet finished beautifully. It was glorious. There was one way to make certain her fall would never happen. She could have never taken the stage. She made the right choice for all of us, and I am better for having seen that performance. I now have the same compassion and reverence for the production.

Just do it!

Tamia B. Santana is the Executive Director of Brooklyn Dance Festival and Jeté Dance Center in Brooklyn, NY. She was born, raised and is currently raising her family in Brooklyn. She is an advocate for the arts. Santana serves on the Board of Directors for One Brooklyn through Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, the co-founder of the "ONE LOVE NY" organization, bringing arts and resources to children in New York's Juvenile Hall. She is a proud member of the Bessie Awards’s Steering Committee and a Resident Director of the Brooklyn Museum's Brooklyn Dance Festival Concert series for Target First Saturday. She has also helped curate and direct dance events at BAM, , Summer Stage, Brooklyn Borough Hall and more.

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Harvey Lichtenstein, 87

Harvey Lichtenstein, Who Led Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rebirth, Dies at 87
by Robert Berkvist, The New York Times, February 11, 2017

"a fragile son": Matthew Rogers solos at JACK

Dance artist Matthew Rogers
Below: performing a fragile son
(photos: Nika Brunova)

Startlingly clear images from a fragile son--a solo performed by dancer-choreographer Matthew Rogers at JACK--have lasting power. I can attest. I woke up in the middle of the night, and they were right there, in my mind, complete and fresh.

There's something nondescript about Rogers himself. Take the fair, wispy, wayward tresses that, at times, blur his delicate, Southern white guy features. But, lit by Tuce Yasek, he can bring things into focus and bury them deep in the mind even as they retain their enigmatic nature.

He opens by first trotting up to a riser opposite the audience and telling us a few things about his family--related to Thomas Jefferson on his granddad's side; the men marked by a rare genetic disorder that thickens their palms and limits their fingers' flexibility. That "son" is part of the title implies we'll likely be dealing with father-son stuff, and "fragile" points to some sort of fault line.

Before the piece began, Rogers personally handed each of his watchers a copy of a missive that begins "Hlelo Dad," nearly every word containing misplaced letters. It's written to a long-absent father, ultimately an act of taking account of, and responsibility for, his own life and happiness.

Some of the indelible imagery involves a thick rope drawn out straight across a diagonal, a rope like an orderly measurement of time, the unfolding of a path. Then rippled, wriggled, lashed, its oscillations invoke a rodeo act, expert and--since we are so close to the performer in this intimate space--a little unsettling at times. Whistling through the air, the rope also calls up images from slavery.

There are also cords, the red of blood and undeniable bloodlines, sometimes stretched between Rogers and an audience member willing to hold an end. Sometimes Rogers wraps himself in the grip of a cord then unwraps his body. It is a slight, wiry body with sufficient knowledge of itself to be deliberate and surprisingly graceful; to tumble hard and flail loosely; to bound up steps as nimbly as "Bojangles" Robinson; to offer itself up as a blank sheet for audience members to mark; to be naked and fragile.

In the genesis of a fragile son, there might have been some work around a literal father, or a lineage of fathers of fathers. But the piece moves in less than literal space and, if you will, can take in the whole idea of place and home, the whole idea of heritage, the whole idea of white patriarchy and masculinity, and what it means to be a body, a mind and a spirit moving in and out of orbit of those ideas.

A few years ago, Rogers uprooted himself from his familial roots in Virginia and his more recent dance roots in New York--dancing in the work of major artists such as Tere O'Connor, Ivy Baldwin and Pavel Zuštiak--and relocated to Slovakia and Germany. Traces of that relocation and possible struggles around it move through a fragile son.

Curated by Stacy Grossfield for her Images//Landscapes series, a fragile son continues through February 12 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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We always win: Marguerite Hemmings and friends at JACK

Marguerite Hemmings
(photo: Delwin Kamara)

Look and see. Black women make and hold space within dance for everything to come through.

The latest example of this is To Make Ready Again, an evening of performance and discussion offered by Jamaica-born dance artist Marguerite Hemmings, four dance colleagues, singer/musician Solo Woods and drummer Themba Mkhatshwa. It opened at JACK, the small Brooklyn venue famously decorated with crinkly aluminum foil; its run concludes tonight at 8pm.

Inspired by the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, JACK plans a year-long focus on exploring and expansively defining concepts of reparations in a program entitled Reparations365: From Memory to Movement (February 2017-January 2018). One primary insight already surfaced in community discussions is that monetary value cannot be placed on historic trauma, true justice and healing. It's hard to imagine and calculate in any realistic, satisfying way. Repair and restoration come not from the outside but from within vulnerable yet profoundly resourceful individuals and their communities.

Hemmings's we free multimedia series, of which To Make Ready Again is a part, draws from her knowledge of African diasporan street dance styles, social dancing, hip hop and dancehall, and her work, she says, centers around liberation. In TMRA, she's joined by powerhouse dancers--Courtney J. Cook, Jaimé Dzandu, Katrina Reid and Italy Welton--who whisper and conspire, laugh and vocalize, activating the space in ways both protectively intimate and boldly assertive. A loving circle, a sinuous warrior force, a reservoir of care and uncomplicated joy, they channel and filter even the male vocal energy of hip hop through grounded bodies. Their frequent broad stance roots them into the floor and earth below, freeing up torsos, shoulders and arms for hair-trigger action whenever, wherever necessary. They dance the ancestors through and make their mark on a world they wish to manifest.

Black women like Hemmings--a founding member of the emerging Black women and gender non-conforming collective The Skeleton Architecture--are dancing liberation and reparation. "Bring it down, and spread it all around." And remember, "We always win."

Lighting design: Nikita Maturine
Set design: Zunnania Anderson

To Make Ready Again concludes with a performance this evening at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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to InfiniteBody

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