David Thomson opens world premiere at Performance Space New York

Scenes from he his own mythical beast by David Thomson
Above and below: Thomson, at left, with Paul Hamilton
(photos: Maria Baranova)

he his own mythical beast interrogates the complexities of American culture and draws from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, James Baldwin, the confession booth, Claudia Rankine, high school fights, Judith Butler, baptism, Roland Barthes, and Trisha Brown. Venus, a character that flirts with black face, gender ambiguity and sexuality, becomes a guide on this journey. Part beast and part myth, Venus is named after the Hottentot Venus, aka Sarah Baartman – an enslaved black woman who was exhibited as an exotic in the early 19th Century London and Paris. This code-shifting chimaera is Thomson’s response to the post-modern performance aesthetic that historically privileged neutrality as a means of subverting the personal narrative.

--promotional material for he his own mythical beast, a world premiere at Performance Space New York 

At center, Jodi Bender (left) with Katrina Reid
(photo: Maria Baranova)

This week, David Thomson wraps up Performance Space New York' 2018 COIL festival with the world premiere of he his own mythical beast, a work he has developed and shown, in various iterations from Danspace Project to BRIC, since 2012. A quartet with video and projected text installation, it feels like something massive punching its way out of a confining container.

I hated, but also sort-of understood, the space it inhabits--a black coffin of a room with audience rows set up along one long and two short sides, and woe to you if you happened to be positioned on one of those short ends trying to figure out what's going on at a spot that seems many cold miles away, the dancers like austere, awesome planets and moons. From the distancing and darkness rose stark ring lights washing across dark faces and torsoes--Thomson's and Paul Hamilton's dark Black skin. The men turned their limbs into layered sculpture, feverishly churning within a square on the floor, its space and boundaries sealed by tape. Compressed, trained to be small and of controlled beauty, the dynamism, fluidity and complexity of these two men only grew more apparent.

Above and below: Thomson
(photos: Maria Baranova)

The solid core of Thomson's project, with its numerous sources of inspiration and extraordinary creative contributors over the years, is the situation of the Black body--his body and Hamilton's and Reid's, too, though this Black woman's role here seems perhaps deliberately secondary--within aesthetics and systems upheld by white postmodernism. In a straightforward sequence, Bender--the sole white dancer-- gets to humiliate and brutalize Hamilton over and over and over and over again and then some more. The viewer, appalled, might flash back to some of the hallway's projected text--a brief exchange, between two speakers, about slavery reenactments--that runs alongside the loop of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Does it help, here, to remember that the dastardly, Road Runner-chasing Wile E. Coyote always brought about his own undoing? Maybe. I can't help but think that a good part of that punching out I felt from the whole work was about punching the hell out of one's own mindset.

Fierce performances make this work special and memorable, but I also credit the striking visual and lighting concepts realized, respectively, by Peter Born and Roderick Murray.

he his own mythical beast continues with performances tonight and Friday at 7:30pm and Sunday, February 4 at 3pm. These performances include an installation, and you are invited to arrive early to view it. For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets, 4th Floor), Manhattan
(directions)

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COIL: Dean Moss premieres "Petra" at Performance Space New York

Dean Moss fuses a notorious Fassbinder character
with headless, blood-spurting Hindu goddess Chinnamasta
in his new work, Petra, at Performance Space New York.
(photo courtesy of COIL Festival)

APAP might be long gone, but COIL keeps on coiling, offering new chances to take the measure of Performance Space New York, this new--or, I should say, renovated and blandly re-branded--East Village entity. There's not a bit bland, though, about the current PSNY occupant, Dean Moss, and his newest interdisciplinary piece, Petra. Here's this world premiere production has been described:

A masochistic autobiographical meditation on desire, Petra examines race, sex, and power through the lens of service and unrequited love. Directed by Dean Moss, with music performed live by Composer Samita Sinha, and inspired by the Rainer Fassbinder film “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant”, Petra merges the imagined and real lives of its all women immigrant cast, drawing parallels between theirs, his, and the film’s queer, anxiety-laced explorations of ambition, subjection and dispossession. Simultaneously, (taking inspiration from “She whose head is severed” - a Hindu goddess associated with self-sacrifice, spiritual awakening, and the power of the erotic - Moss questions the institutional processes of diversity management, highlighting not only its aspirational goals, but also its self-serving strategies, the implementation of which both support and undermine projects not unlike his own.

I remembered it was mischievous Moss--invited into Parallels, Ishmael Houston-Jones's 2012 Black avant-garde platform for Danspace Project--who raised eyebrows by titling his curated program Black Dance though his selected artists were actually Korean-American, Latinx and white. Petra's adoption and adaptations of characters and visual and narrative elements from Fassbinder's film provide a striking framework for Moss's agenda. Here he battles assumptions and restrictions in arts support and presenting that, as he sees it, can manipulate and hamstring creativity.

Much of Petra contains clues about how Moss feels about his complicated place as a Black artist in a white-dominated downtown performance community where, nevertheless, he has gained recognition and respect. He surrounds his imperious alter-ego, Petra (theater artist Kaneza Schaal), with efficient minions--dancers Mina Nishimura, Sari Nordman and Paz Tanjuaquio. (The women represent different cultural backgrounds: Schaal is of Rwandan ancestry; composer/performer Samita Sinha is Indian; Nishimura, born in Japan; Nordman, in Finland; Tanjuaquio, in the Philippines.) Moss's three "Marlenes"--Nishimura, Nordman and Tanjuaquio--snap to fulfill the stately, glamorous Petra's every barked order. They quietly submit as she towers over them, pulling one after another into a smothering slow dance. The way Schaal clasps and carefully positions that first head (Tanjuaquio's) at her bosom tells us everything we need to know about power imbalance. Sinha, glittering in gold, is Petra's much-desired "Karin," everything an artist’s ego longs for and is often denied. You can't always get what you want.

The numerous Fassbinder parallels can be fascinating, but the work turns far more pointed as it winds down with a solo for Tanjuaquio with Sinha leading three audience members in a vocal chorus. Their text, intoned in unison, rolls out familiar lines of institutional interrogation meant to discern an artist's or cultural project's degree of attention to programming diversity and community engagement. Tanjuaquio's dance--saying nothing particularly translatable to the linear, anxious mind--pushes ever onward. The dancer skims right over the surface of this score just as, I suspect, Moss wants us to know he will always prefer to do.

Concept, Direction, Choreography, Audio/Visual Design: Dean Moss

Performing Collaborators: Mina Nishimura, Sari Nordman, Kaneza Schaal, Samita Sinha and Paz Tanjuaquio

Video Collaborators: Julia Cumming, Cassie Mey, Marya Warshaw and Asher Woodworth

Lighting Design: Zack Tinkelman

Original Music: Samita Sinha

Petra continues with 7:30pm performances tonight through Saturday, January 27. For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets, 4th Floor), Manhattan
(directions)

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Performance Space New York opens with Heather Kravas

New logo
for the rebooted, rebranded PS 122

The new lobby for Performance Space New York (renovated Second Coming of historic PS 122) might be the East Side equivalent of the entranceway to The Kitchen. There's almost identical warmth and appeal--which is to say, absolutely none. At least, the lobby at Chelsea's New York Live Arts often offers something creative to gaze at and the chance to take a load off while you wait.

On opening night for PSNY's COIL Festival--on now through February 4--I could not wait to get out of that lobby and up to the 4th-floor studio for the New York premiere of visions of beauty by Heather Kravas. Now that space has possibilities--generously broad with an impressively high ceiling and row of tall windows. It will be interesting to see how a variety of artists re-imagine, re-shape and activate it, just as it will be welcome to have this influential venue back online in my neighborhood.

visions of beauty
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Kravas's vision felt like an apropos place to begin again. Its minimalism and quirky, glacial pacing and moments of matter-of-fact nudity seemed like flashbacks to the sort of thing I remember experiencing here in decades past when it was still cramped-and-funky PS 122. Its quietude, its stillness, seemed intentionally therapeutic. The re-arrangements of wedges of nine dancers in various, alternating, far-flung pockets of space seemed intent on messing with our ability to claim them--the way an audience can "herd" a bunch of performers, as entertainers, in our minds. Instead, they evaded us. They slowed us down and made us wait and gave us an uncompromising atmosphere in which to wait. The last show I'd seen--at The Joyce--did the polar opposite of that, expertly, and it was an ongoing struggle for me to keep my eyes open for Kravas, something else I remember from certain moments and certain artists at the old PS 122.

Though described as "anti-spectacle," the hour does contain one fantastic passage in which dancers create one long, highly-active braid of interlocked bodies along the floor, supporting and shifting under one another. Something oddly meditative and a tad creepy and all the more fascinating for the understated way it brings those qualities together.

visions of beauty was created in collaboration with performers Andrew Champlin, Tarek Halaby, Michael Helland, John Hoobyar, Michael Ingle, Joseph Kipp, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Kayvon Pourazar and Saúl Ulerio.

Original music: Dana Wachs aka Vorhees
Song: Peter Schilling
Piano: Hank Mason
Lighting design: Madeline Best

visions of beauty continues on the following schedule:

Thursday, January 11, 8:30pm
Friday, January 12, 9:30pm
Saturday, January 13, 6:30pm

For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(directions)

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: "Blind Cinema" by Britt Hatzius

Blind Cinema
(photo: Britt Hatzius)

In 'Blind Cinema' the audience sits blindfolded in a darkened cinema. Behind each row of audience members is a row of children who in hushed voices describe a film only they can see. The children watch the film for the first time, and each performance involves a new group of children all aged between eight and eleven.

--from program notes for Blind Cinema 

I'm not sure why the job had to be done by kids, but Blind Cinema--offered by the film, video, sound and performance artist Britt Hatzius in this year's COIL Festival--is certainly one of the more curious events this APAP season. Presented by PS 122 and SVA Theatre in partnership with East Village Community School (from where the youngsters hail), this forty-minute experience feels like a combination of torture, mind-altering experimentation and goofiness. Years later, you'll be able to say, "I did that," but what exactly "that" was or if it was necessary might remain open to question.

Intentionally or not, my experience of Blind Cinema began in the SVA Theatre's lobby, standing around on line forever waiting to enter the cinema as staff members wordlessly wandered back and forth, possibly counting us. From the noise of people's chattering and the extended wait, energy drained from every fiber of my being. When we were finally admitted to the hall, it was further dispiriting to be forced into the front row abutting the edge of a high platform stage. I don't know about the legroom for the rows behind us but, in the front row, our knees and feet jammed pretty close to that platform. And we had no choice. As we entered, we were ordered to fill the rows all the way across, and I had the great good luck of being one of the first folks in that front row. Add blindfolds to this look and an audio cone that must cover one of your ears, and Blind Cinema is not a good move for anyone with claustrophobia.

The cone helps you hear your assigned movie viewer/whisperer. I hope my fellow audience members found their cones helpful. My ability to hear my young attendant came and went--partly because the child wasn't always very clear-spoken; partly because when you darken a room and cover my eyes, my body gratefully cries sleep time!!! and hijacks the situation. This is actually a healthy thing though inconvenient for this particular sample of performance art.

For me, Blind Cinema was a truly surreal experience, a matter of letting go of understanding WTF was being said; why some people in distant rows, who were not children, were giggling when I could find nothing funny; what was happening on the platform stage where certain noises coming towards us suggested potential danger; and, overall, the ability to stay conscious. I don't think I actually ever fell asleep, but I did go into that liminal "tween" state. When I was most conscious and actually catching words, I was also worrying about how my neck and shoulder were scrunching up as I struggled to maintain connection to the cone. I was, simultaneously, worrying about the narrative I'd lost and getting to a place where I didn't give a damn what I heard or could not hear.

But, okay, maybe Hatzius would find every bit of that well aligned with her purpose as described on PS 122's website:

Through Blind Cinema, Britt Hatzius examines ideas around language and interpretation along with the potential for discrepancies, ruptures and (mis)communication.

Blind Cinema concludes this afternoon with a performance at 5:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo

Members of Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo
perform Custodians of Beauty
(photo: Maria Baranova)

At some point in a dance work by Pavel Zuštiak (Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo), you will find yourself physically, helplessly connected to the surreal, demanding goings-on. In Custodians of Beauty, for instance, you might be chosen to literally occupy the floor for a stretch of time that feels like it's stretching on forever. On another occasion, you might remain in your seat--safe, you'd think, until you notice your ears assaulted by high-pitched sound or your heart racing from the speeding visuals and sonic thunder. Or, in BASTARD / The Painted Bird: Part 1, you might "see" the likes of yourself in a crowd of "just folks" picked up locally by Zuštiak, merged with his professionals and coached into miraculous efficacy as a team. "That's me over there," you think as you feel yourself first saunter then pelt through space, just missing collisions with others in near-chaos, then placidly lowering your body to the floor, again and again and again. The theatrical veil between the worlds, as conceived by Zuštiak, is always gossamer-thin and, ultimately, ripped aside. You have pressed close to some kind of edge and its dangers. You have glimpsed something you cannot name.

This week, La MaMa is reviving Bastard, first seen in the US at this theater in 2010, and PS 122 is presenting Custodians of Beauty at La MaMa as part of its COIL Festival. Both offer concentrated immersion into the world of this bold, Slovak-American dancemaker, a multiple award winner, who gets that theater's power is in the way artists' and audiences' bodies dream together. And if I haven't already sent you running for cover, let me encourage you to step to La MaMa for this opportunity to be moved, to be affected, to be transformed by dance with music by Christian Frederickson and lighting by Joe Levasseur, both master craftsmen in demand and frequent Zuštiak collaborators. Dancer Jaro Viňarský reprises his 2013 Bessie-winning role as the soloist/persecuted outsider in Bastard, inspired by Jerzy Kosiński’s novel, The Painted Bird. In making Bastard, Zuštiak might have been thinking of his own identity as an immigrant to an overwhelming, not always congenial new land and his struggles to make and sustain art. But Bastard returns to us now in a time of heightened social relevance.

Remaining performances of BASTARD / The Painted Bird: Part 1 run tonight at 8pm; Saturday at 2:30pm and Sunday at 6:30pm. Running Time: 75 minutes. For information on this and other La MaMa events, click here.

Remaining performances of Custodians of Beauty run today at 5pm, Saturday at 5:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. Run time: 85 minutes. For information and tickets for this and other COIL Festival events, click here.

La MaMa
(The Downstairs)
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between Bowery and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

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COIL 2016 festival: It's "DISCOTROPIC" down below

Diahann Carroll as the holographic Mermeia
from Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)
(photo from Starwarsholidayspecial.com)

Somewhere, there must be an Official Contemporary Performance Checklist that itemizes terms like "Afrofuturism" and "queer politics" and "the black female body," all of which show up in promotion surrounding niv Acosta's DISCOTROPIC (part of PS 122's COIL festival). I'm always wondering where this spaceship is headed; the answer isn't always clear. But DISCOTROPIC turns out to be a quality ride, bracing and perhaps as illuminating as any potential destination.

Running for ninety minutes, DISCOTROPIC utilizes rough basement space at Westbeth, artist housing in the West Village, including a recessed room, straight and spiral staircases and an ample platform. As architecture, DISCOTROPIC revels in the aesthetics of hide and seek, hear and strain to hear, sincerity and exhibitionism. Instrumental and electronic sound sources are tucked around the space, and bold, color-saturated video abstractions and lighting play a hallucinogenic role. Audience members stand to watch and--carefully, please--step here and there, following the actions of Acosta, Monstah Black, Justin Allen, Ashley Brockington and Dion TygaPaw.

DISCOTROPIC, we've been told, exists "between the pragmatic and the fantastical while exploring the relationship between science fiction, disco, astrophysics and the black American experience." The unseen, but presiding, archetypal figure here is the elegant Diahann Carroll. Specifically, Acosta's literature references Carroll's acting role as a sea creature in a 1978 television movie. Added to the cast after pressure to bring in a Black performer, Carroll portrayed not a flesh-and-blood woman but a sexy sea creature--and a hologram at that. Acosta sees Carroll's role as "an illusion that distills the ways in which the black female body has been consumed in mass media: as alien, bodacious, and marginalized."

That's a familiar concern in contemporary performance, and the bodies in Acosta's work, with booties frequently a'twerking at any and all angles, can be viewed in these ways, both boldly playing to and subverting exploitation.

"I exist for you. As you create me, yes, I control your reaction. I'm getting your message. Are you getting mine?" 

--Ashley Brockington in DISCOTROPIC

But I sensed something deeper going on in DISCOTROPIC that proved unique and exciting. I sensed the engineering of a durable spaceship.

My first inkling came as Monstah Black, back turned towards us, flailed his arms and slipped his sneakered feet over what appeared to be a layer of black sand in a recessed storage room. His "sand dancing," his more distinct stomp-and-drag rhythm, and a minute burst of shimmying had me thinking about vaudevillian dance acts. In a later segment, I watched the dancers form a tight, disciplined squadron in which various dancerly routines emerged, the sort of thing we used to see Black singing groups do to enhance the appeal of their acts. I thought of how some marginalized, underemployed tap dancers survived by teaching dance skills to these emerging pop and R&B artists.

Invoking We Travel the Spaceways, by future-perfect jazz priest Sun Ra, the cast's circling, metronomic, escalating vocal patterns suggest an evolution of something post-human, proto-robotic.  But not post-Black. Black survives in the rocking, the swinging and, eventually, in the excess--Acosta's beaming as joy leaps out of his vocal performance.

There's always something passed along, voice to voice, body to body. Something Black survives any alteration of form and any displacement of form, from Africa to the Americas, from the Americas to worlds beyond. Black always was and always will be.

DISCOTROPIC's remaining performances run today at 3pm and 8pm, and Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Westbeth Artist Community
55 Bethune Street (corner of Washington Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Hurray! Okwui Okpokwasili plans her return to Danspace Project!

Okwui Okpokwasili in Bronx Gothic
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Okwui Okpokwasili, who had to curtail her January run of the astonishing Bronx Gothic at Danspace Project due to ill health, will return with the acclaimed solo for a short run, May 8-10.

Read my review of one of her Danspace Project/COIL Festival performances here.

And be sure to watch the Danspace Project site for ticket information. Tickets are sure to go quickly!

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Okwui Okpokwasili's "Bronx Gothic" at Danspace Project

Okwui Okpokwasili in her solo, Bronx Gothic
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Okwui Okpokwasili's Bronx Gothic--an arresting work-in-progress shown during Ishmael Houston-Jones's PLATFORM 2012: Parallels--has now returned to Danspace Project as a complete, evening-length masterpiece. Commissioned by Danspace Project and Performance Space 122, it had its world premiere as part of COIL 2014 and will continue through February 1.

But before you read on about Bronx Gothic, I'd like you to read my post on Dana Michel's Yellow Towel if you have not done so already. You'll find that here. Go and come back. Promise?

You're back? Great. Now I can tell you about Part Two of my evening.

So...I made it through almost all of Michel's show at Abrons then raced out to try to catch a bus uptown. I just missed that particular bus and ended up reaching Danspace Project with maybe two minutes to spare. By the time I made it down from the restroom--no way was I going to sit through 90 minutes more without a pit stop--Okpokwasili had already launched her solo, coursing a continuous orgasmic tremor through her entire body, her liquid muscles, her long, expressive arms. As I slipped into one of the remaining seats, I realized that the dancer's director and designer, Peter Born, had enclosed the space and her entire audience in white curtains similar to the ones Michel had used for her own solo. That was a moment.

For Bronx Gothic, Okpokwasili, raised by her Nigerian immigrant parents in the Bronx, had turned to her youth for inspiration--just like Michel--and mined painful memories of friendship, treachery and despair. Her text--by turns, witty, delicate and lacerating--takes us right back there through the device of a running record of notes surreptitiously passed between an 11-year-old girl and her more worldly school pal. Yes, what kids did before texting.

Sex is the topic of concern and fascination for these two preteens. Their language is frank; the implications of some of the talk--the unstated likelihood that the pal is being abused by her mother's boyfriend--is worrisome. But along with great pain, Okpokwasili finds humor and a certain powerful glamour in female strength, even when it's just fronting, and something literally tidal, earthshaking, in longing and anger.

I had seen Okpokwasili's performance at DP's Parallels and looked forward to Bronx Gothic in finished form. I can report that, since Parallels, this artist has achieved a rare balance between physical and vocal tours de force. These performing modes run parallel throughout the piece, doubling the required prodigious control and stamina. There should be not only a Bessie but Olympic gold for what Okpokwasili has now accomplished. The fact that, in the midst of this great feat of performance, she breaks your heart, absolutely slays you with the poetry of it, makes it all the more remarkable.

Bronx Gothic continues with 8pm performances through February 1. For complete schedule details and to reserve tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

(directions)

COIL Festival: Mac Wellman's "Muazzez" opens at The Chocolate Factory

Actor Steve Mellor sits at a small table and gazes at the audience with his doughy, oblong face and initially deadpan expression and begins to spill a torrent of words. This verbal current flows fast, faster, fastest without cease--miraculously, without tongue-twisting--and, at times, will rise to a level of dark bitterness. That Mellor--occupying The Chocolate Factory's earthly space as well as imagined interstellar space strewn with asteroids--introduces himself as an "abandoned cigar factory" with "a zygodactyly foot" is only part of the fun of Muazzez, a 45-minute monologue derived from short stories by known word wizard Mac Wellman.

"There's no drift to my thought," Mellor/Wellman tells us. "My thought is a rooted thing." Sure. No drift but definitely a well-greased sci-fi sequence on the move and speeding you along with it, scrambling your brain along with Wellman's mythopoetic play and scramble of words. We're invited to envision the high Eulalians of whom nothing is known except that they "builded" the cigar factories. We learn of the "primal radial symmetry" of "a series of spokes or spokey type spindles radiating from a deep and frosty central secret," which sounds kid of tasty. There are "non-self hedges and the hegemony of the self's perfect picture of the world" and something Wellman calls the "ambulatory frightwig of unappetizing complication," which strikes me as a useful insult to hurl at the next person to cross me. Yeah.

I am completely won over by this "succession a stratigraphic variorum," this "placing of jars and jarring of places" and Mellor's virtuoso performance that charges and populates nearly bare space with the high Eulalian magic(k) of words.

A COIL Festival co-presentation of Performance Space 122 and The Chocolate Factory, Muazzez runs through January 17. For complete schedule and ticketing details, click here.

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

"Tyson vs. Ali" knocks out 2014 COIL opening

Scene from Reid Farrington's Tyson vs. Ali
(photo by John Hurley)

Reid Farrington and his extensive creative and technical team deliver, yes, a decisive knockout punch with the world premiere of Tyson vs. Ali. And since Farrington's COIL Festival run at 3LD Art & Technology Center has been extended to January 26, you'll have more chances to get your ringside seat.

 

Tyson vs. Ali is a PS 122 commission, produced by
3-Legged Dog and co-presented by PS 122 and 3-Legged Dog.

Less a conventional play about two titans of boxing, Tyson vs. Ali deftly squeezes into one hour, through extraordinary live action, video imagery, text and sound, a visceral encounter with The Boxer as looming archetype and intriguingly complex individual.

At the heart of the work's sensory dazzle are four gifted performers--Dennis A. Allen II, Roger Casey, Femi Olagoke, Jonathan Swain--through which the personalities, words, speech patterns, body language and fighting styles of Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali and others endlessly shift. In other words, no one "fighter" portrays and embodies a stable identity, and you are along for the ride.

The surrounding boxing ring (set by Simon Harding, who also created the video) is similarly fluid with continuously projected imagery, some of it massive, close-up and disturbing. It plunges us into history--through clips from famous matches or from television interviews with the champs--and yanks us back into the present as we gaze upon video images of the actor/dancers' beat-up faces, swollen eyes and bloody gashes. (Shenna Vaughn's special effects makeup is frightfully convincing.)

The various "rounds" and transitions offer, for our contemplation, considerations of boxing style and strategy, the genesis of each boxer's attraction to the sport and, the psychology of champions and, of course, issues of power, sexuality and race.

Although I've seen a few televised matches and have the typical American's awareness of boxing and its celebrities, I do not follow the sport. But you need not be a boxing fan to appreciate Tyson vs. Ali. Farrington's team has achieved a coherent and powerful beauty.

With choreography by Laura K. Nicoll, script by Frank Boudreaux, performances by Dennis A. Allen II, Roger Casey, Femi Olagoke, Jonathan Swain and Dave Shelley; sound design by Juan Aboites

Tyson vs. Ali has been extended through January 26. For complete information, including schedule details, click here. To purchase tickets, click here.

3LD Art & Technology Center
80 Greenwich Street (near Rector Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Closing soon: Half Straddle, Jeanine Durning, "Black Latina"

Susie Sokol and Becca Blackwell of Half Straddle

For Seagull (Thinking of you), Tina Satter and her troupe Half Staddle take scissors to Chekov's The Seagull, his letters and other material, stapling slivers of original language to shards of modern speech (in English, Russian and pseudo-Russian). This deconstruction/reconstruction serves up a compact gull in 75 mostly entertaining minutes with electric, charming performances by a small cast--notably Eliza Bent (Masha), Susie Sokol (Arkadina), Emily Davis (Nina) and Jess Barbagallo (Treplov)--as well as the scrupulous arrangement and deployment of sensory delights (Zack Tinkelman's lighting, Enver Chakartash's costumes and Chris Giarmo's sound design and original music). Presented by Performance Space 122's COIL fest at the New Ohio Theatre. Extended to January 26. For complete schedule information and tickets, click here.

Jeanine Durning's inging (2012) occupies a space set up to have the feeling of a college classroom. In fact, as each member of the audience comes in, he or she can take a folding chair and place it anywhere in the room that will afford a decent view of a table serving as Durning's desk. A tall stack of books on this "desk" prop up a small digital point-and-shoot set for videotaping her. We can see the monitor of the recording as she stands behind the desk. Behind her, we see three different pre-recorded videos--side by side by side--that show Durning sitting, talking and gesturing. For 50 minutes, the live-action Durning (her name ends in ing, and she clearly relishes that state of being in continuous process) mainly talks non-stop. And I don't mean taking pauses for hydration (although a bottle of water rests on her desk, and she occasionally handles it) or for sustained breath. Oh, no. None of that. She starts by suddenly slipping behind the desk and just goes for the duration of the time, with all sorts of associations and disassociations, all kinds of vocal blips and repetitions, self-interruptions and self-disruptions pulled into her rapid, auto-replenishing stream of consciousness. "What do you say when there's too much to say?" she asks, at one point. Maybe the answer is that it all just breaks down and breaks out in every possible direction. Yes--if you were wondering--this "choreography of the mind," as she calls it, can be considered dance because her speech has fabulous rhythms and is, in itself, the body working very hard. Ultimately, she can't even maintain her position behind the desk, and her wandering around forces us to twist in our seats to follow. Presented by American Realness at Abrons Arts Center. Final performances today at 4pm and 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

When Black Latina, a 45-minute ensemble piece written by Crystal S. Roman and directed by Veronica Caicedo, started off looking and, especially, sounding like a derivative from the 1970s--think For Colored Girls--my heart sunk a little. Not that I didn't love (and desperately need) Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. But, in 2013, might we be ready for an innovative approach? In Black Latina, we find an ensemble of women of color, symbolically dressed in orange prison garb, sitting or dancing on blocks arranged around the space, each airing her pain and frustrations and observations in pedantic expressions declaimed at high volume--"The media bombards us with ideas of what beauty should be," "You're too closed-minded to comprehend the miracle of being a Black Latina," and so forth. As expected, they aim to speak for the unheard, raise awareness, rally sisters in the audience in pride and solidarity with evocations of family togetherness and the pleasures of traditional food, music and party time. Somewhere along the way, though, I began to see Roman's contribution as indeed something new, supportive and motivating for her community--women of mixed Black and Latina heritage struggling for acknowledgement and respect, not only in dominant white society, but also among Blacks, Latinos and often their own family members who may value light skin over dark. Out of love and urgency, her devoted cast--particularly Judy Torres, Teniece Divya Johnson and Jenelle Simone, whose performance styles are detailed, joyful and commanding--really work it out. I'd love to see Black Latina produced in our city schools. These women won me over, and their audience returned the love. Presented by The Black Latina Movement at Teatro LATEA. Closing tonight. For information and ticketing, click here.

"Ruff": Peggy Shaw rocks Dixon Place

Watching Peggy Shaw perform Ruff--her new one-woman show at Dixon Place for PS 122's COIL festival--offers an intimate, affecting lesson in empathy. A legend in queer, progressive theater, the much-beloved Shaw suffered a stroke in 2011. This hour-long show is her comeback--a marvelous one--and a way of sharing what it feels like to know that some memories and resources that made you what you are are now unretrievable.

What remains, as Shaw performs it, races by in a stream of consciousness and digressions that are Shaw's but quickly become the audience's, too. As if I'd had the stroke, I found myself struggling to retain the memory of specific words--explication, quips, tales, often amusing--while sartorial details and props (one of which, a brown-and-white wingtip men's shoe, I briefly held for Shaw), body language, facial expressions, shadowy video imagery, music and song easily zapped into my brain and hunkered down. In fact, Shirley Ellis's tongue-and-memory-twisting novelty hit from the 1960's, "The Name Game," became last night's earworm, finally dislodging this morning.

Shaw pivots from tender butch to stage-ruling rock star to slightly mystified stroke survivor who needs a trio of monitors to recall her intricate lines. The audience rides these rhythms and moods, grateful that we occasionally get to see those monitors, too--we sometimes need them--and even more grateful that Shaw has let us into her experience of loss.

Here's a 2010 video clip of Shaw talking about women's roles in theater.


One more thing, a special announcement from Dixon Place founder Ellie Covan: Shaw--who won PS 122's 2011 Ethyl Eichelberger Award--can now also boast that DP's theater has been named for her.

Directed by and co-written with Shaw's partner, Lois Weaver, Ruff runs through Saturday evening at Dixon Place. For a schedule of remaining shows and ticketing information, click here.

Dixon Place
161-A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

All that is: Emily Johnson at Baryshnikov Arts Center

See if you can you snare a ticket to tonight's concluding presentation of Niicugni--an interdisciplinary, movement-based work by Minneapolis-based Emily Johnson/Catalyst.

Presented at Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of PS 122's COIL fest, the 70-minute work offers rich storytelling through poetic words, movement, soundscape and scenic design--all reflecting the values inherent to Johnson's Central Alaskan Yup'ik heritage. It demonstrates and encourages empathy with all life--most memorably, those little red foxes imagined by Johnson and Aretha Aoki, on their nimble run through a forest and a batch of just-folks who periodically emerge from the audience to exalt in being part of the fabric of life.

If you manage to un-guard your heart and pay attention to subtle things--which is what the title, Niicugni, explicitly invites--you will perceive a gracefully-integrated, seductive work of art at the core of which is one rare, exquisite and charming performer, Emily Johnson. Oh, how I long to see more of her work!

Niicugni concludes its run tonight at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

It's alive!!! Radiohole at The Kitchen

I'm so mind-spun by all the APAP-connected presentations and confused by PS 122's peripatetic condition of late, that I ran a small risk of ending up at Baryshnikov Arts Center last night instead of The Kitchen where, for PS 122's COIL festival, the experimental, interdisciplinary theater troupe Radiohole (Erin Douglass, Eric Dyer and Maggie Hoffman) put on their Inflatable Frankenstein show in front of a hip and actually rather cool (not in a good way) audience. I'd had "The Kitchen" in my head, rightly, but had written "Baryshnikov Arts Center" on the dry erase board that helps keep me organized and my wife informed, and it was only until I was preparing to leave for the show that I realized that I'd been glancing at the exactly wrong thing all day, and the mistake just hadn't registered. I go to BAC tonight to see Emily Johnson!

Never having seen the legendary Radiohole--okay, relax: dance shows keep me a little busy--I'm unable to guess how high Inflatable Frankenstein would rank in their repertory, but the audacity of the hour-long show's elaborate design and execution impresses and tickles me. Hey, kids, let's "liberate Frankenstein from the long shadow of Boris Karloff!" Let's blow up Mary Shelley (literally and in more ways than one)! Go!

The troupe has littered Kitchen's performance space with everything from hi-tech whiz-bang to lo-tech aluminum mixing bowls filled with a pinkish substance like a particularly runny Silly Putty. In the recesses behind the central action, there's a whole big jumble of colorless...something (to be revealed later). We gaze on it apprehensively, past the actors and scenery, for nearly the entire time. Characters continuously shift names and identities (who's who? who's where? when's when?). What's the purpose for all of this mess? One of the play's funniest sequences happens right away when the actors discuss how Inflatable Frankenstein came to be and offer surprisingly competing views of what the show is about. Informal discourse quickly degenerates into speakers stepping all over one another's statements and, finally, a rapid plunge into artistic theoritizing so dense and garbled it might as well be baby-talk. Purpose? Purpose lurches this way and that throughout the hour like a big, misshapen creature stitched together and shot through with high voltage.

It's a good time. One can love it to pieces and love individual pieces--the sharp, wacky performances, the clever sound and visual elements, the allusions to James Whale's films--all spliced together with a sense of desperation and aggression, the kind of desperation and aggression that brings forth humor. I can't answer the question, What does it all add up to? Maybe there really can't and shouldn't be an answer--the troupe's notes quote Artaud: "...to be more precise would spoil the poetry of the thing"--but maybe that's why last night's audience, at the end, sounded polite but less than smitten.

See Inflatable Frankenstein at The Kitchen--for sure!--through January 19. For schedule and ticketing details, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Peggy Shaw returns to the stage at COIL

Peggy Shaw

Certain to be a highlight of Performance Space 122's COIL Festival, Ruff marks the return to the stage of the great Peggy Shaw--actor, producer and playwright--since her 2011 stroke.

Co-presented with Dixon Place,

Ruff pays tribute to the host of crooners, lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands and eccentric family members who have kept Shaw company, living inside her, for the past 68 years. Guided by longtime collaborator Lois Weaver, Shaw throws off the stigma of age and embraces the joy—and necessity—of creating new work, post-stroke, aided by new technology and even deeper courage. Shaw is the recipient of the 2011 Ethyl Eichelberger award.

See Peggy Shaw in Ruff, January 10, 16, 18, 19 at 7pm; January 11, 19 at 10pm; January 12 at 6pm; January 15 at 9pm. For more information and ticketing, click here or call 212-811-4111.

Dixon Place
161-A Chrystie Street (between Delancey and Rivington Streets), Manhattan
(directions)

Young Jean Lee and the naked truth

Untitled Feminist Show--created by award-winning director Young Jean Lee, choreographer Faye Driscoll, associate director Morgan Gould and other collaborators--has earned a place on my mental list of favorite dance events of the very young 2012. I know I'm going to have some explaining to do because--as I see here in Lee's program notes--Lee doesn't consider this work to be a dance piece. "Like the performers themselves," she writes, "the show is meant to resist categorization."

So, what am I talking about?

Well, aside from the fact that I would like to be able to claim every damn good thing in the Universe for dance, I'm beginning to get a sense that calling something "theater" (as she calls her company, after all: Young Jean Lee's Theater Company) is fine and dandy, but calling something "dance" is somehow limiting. 

Hmmm....

Seems it was just yesterday that the idea of calling all sorts of wild and crazy (or mild and boring) things "dance" was bold and liberating.

In any case, Lee's six marvelous stars are performing arts of the body, including dance and some incredibly edgy mime, and they are stark naked throughout the hour. I'm calling this one for dance, and I will not be dissuaded.

I also hear tell--because I've been reading some of her interviews--that she doesn't want Untitled Feminist Show to be considered sexy. Oh, please. Nothing wrong with (or un-feminist about) sexy. Bring sexy back. In fact, this show does so--directly and indirectly.

What couldn't be genuinely sexy about six unselfconsciously nude, female-bodied performers, each with a distinct body type and size, defining themselves across a fluid gender spectrum and expressing, almost entirely in iconic and primal physical movement, how it might feel to be free?

Free is sexy.

They are Becca Blackwell, World Famous *BOB*, Amelia Zirin-Brown (aka Lady Rizo), Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle and Regina Rocke, collectively hailing from cabaret, theater, dance and burlesque with some crossovers, all stripped of theatricalizing makeup, hairstyling and, of course, costumes. They make a fabulous team in this fabulous romp, but Blackwell, Zirin-Brown and especially Clark seem to be having the most high-charged and, yes, liberating fun.

Some of them initially enter the space by slowly drifting down the aisles, giving the audience a sense of being represented in the performance space. (They come from us.) We hear their soft and human breathing, which establishes a comforting sense of common humanity. But don't get too comfortable. Although the inhabitants of Lee's feminist utopia sometimes sport frilly pink parasols, they're capable of using these items as weapons, and they'll happily consume their victim. No, you've never seen Marcel Marceau do the kind of mime you'll see in Untitled Feminist Show--at least, not on Ed Sullivan's show.

And check out that acid-trip video projection at the end! Through the Looking Glass, through the black hole you go! What are you going to be when you come out the other side?

With scenic design by David Evans Morris; lighting design by Raquel Davis; sound design by Chris Giarmo and Jamie McElhinney; and projection design by Leah Gelpe.

Untitled Feminist Show is a presentation of Performance Space 122's COIL Festival and runs at the Baryshnikov Arts Center through February 4. For information, schedule and ticketing, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center

Jerome Robbins Theater

450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)

APAP Diary: Nails on blackboard

Choreography for Blackboards by Michael Kliën with Steve Valk at The Invisible Dog Art Center, a presentation of PS 122's COIL Festival:

"Choreography is not to constrain movement into a set pattern, it is to provide a cradle for movement to find its own patterns." -- Michael Kliën

In this case, the "cradle" European conceptual choreographer Michael Kliën has set up, with dramaturgical instigation from Steve Valk, resides in a raw and rather chilly arts space--grab some tea while you're there--where the audience can circulate and watch several people vigorously drawing, altering and erasing chalk doodles on standing blackboards in what Kliën calls "a series of precisely rehearsed choreographic instructions and procedures."

Said instructions and procedures were, to my eye, as invisible as the dog who inspired the name of this arts space. But no matter. It was occasionally interesting, even hypnotic, to witness the rise and obliteration of forceful abstractions at the hands of Kliën's dancers--if they are to be called that--who variously hail from the worlds of theater, poetry, physics, academia and Occupy activism. It was like watching Hindu deities--the kind of Hindu deities that might show up in seriously droopy jeans--continuously building and destroying the universe. But with chalk. And bowls of water. And a mop to clean up spills. And arm chairs for when one or another of them might need a break.

This might be a good point, though, to express my general frustration with precious, impenetrable, head-hurting language like: "These [those instructions and procedures] involve developing and exchanging insights and individual expressions in analogue and codified forms, weaving relations into a concentrated collective dance of minds" and "Choreography for Blackboards outlines a vision of dance that not exclusively understands itself as an art form, but as a constituting principle, a technology of the self at the edges of modern consciousness."

Please explain. I do not understand. And I don't think I'm alone.

Choreography for Blackboards continues tonight at 8pm and tomorrow at 6pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

For information on PS 122's COIL Festival performances, which run through January 29 at various locations, click here.

Out and about

All of New York dance is out and about these days and evenings during the APAP (Association of Performing Arts Presenters) annual conference ("Presenting America: New Ground"), running around in a crazy attempt to see as much as possible of the artists who are attempting to be seen as much as possible. I've just started, and I'm already dazed.

Last evening, I caught two hour-long shows in the East Village. The first was a preview of Deganit Shemy & Company's Iodine at P.S. 122's COIL festival, which will premiere at P.S. 122, February 5-10. (Another showing of the work will run on Sunday at 6pm.) This caustic, discordant quintet for women proved Shemy to be a choreographer with a scalding, original theatricality. And her dancers--with their intense, stunned, staring faces and their bodies that move as if made of hard and soft rubber--are fantastic. The Israeli-born Shemy has said that her experience in growing up on a kibbutz served as inspiration for Iodine. The dance stings; it covers a wound but is meant to heal it. If you get a chance, also check out Maria Hassabi's Gloria, a highlight of 2007, returning tonight at 10pm and tomorrow at 3pm as part of COIL.

Since I live between P.S. 122 and Danspace Project--whee!!!--I dropped my Shemy press kit at home and then headed over to St. Mark's Church to see Daniel Léveillé Danse. Now through tomorrow evening, this Montreal troupe is presenting Twilight of the Oceans. Jean Jauvin's delicate, shifting lighting gives the piece an otherworldly quality. In its raw, physical demands and its allusions to and mashups of various body disciplines--martial arts, discus throwing, yoga, ballet pas de deux, swimming--Léveillé's choreography made an interesting accidental companion to the Shemy work. It is intense, every bit as scarily driven, in its own way. It might be working its basic ideas overtime, though. (Once again, I wonder whatever happened to short--and non-repetitious--dances.) A gentle warning: If you have a major issue with nudity in dance, you might want to skip this one.