Colleen Thomas: Woman power is persistent and global

Dance artist Colleen Thomas.
(photo: Lovin Ostenrik)

Joanna Leśnierowska (below) in light and desire
(photo: Miguel Anaya)

This year marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (August 18, 1920), which granted women citizens the right to vote. light and desire--a new, full-evening dance ensemble by Colleen Thomas and her multi-national team of collaborators--comes at a time when lack of respect for women’s political leadership is again a matter of concern and struggle. The piece will have its world premiere at New York Live Arts, March 25-28 (7:30pm), during Women’s History Month.

Colleen Thomas (US), director, performer

Ermira Goro (Albania/Greece), performer

Joanna Leśnierowska (Poland), performer

Ildikó Tóth (Hungary/Germany), performer

Rosalynde Le Blanc (US), performer

Carla Forte (Venezuela), film director, performer

Alexey Taran DP for film

Stacey-Jo Marine, lighting design

Rebecca Makus, mask design

Robert Boston, musician/composer featuring Jo Morris, voice

For further information and tickets, click here.
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Yesterday morning, I met with Thomas at Gibney to learn more about light and desire. Read on for what she had to say about the concept and making of this timely piece on women's resistance and radical expression.

Some performers in light and desire,
by Colleen Thomas and her international collaborators,
premiering at New York Live Arts, March 25-28
(photo: Nadia Halim)

In 2016, I think I was very privileged--and unaware of my privilege--as an American. With the [presidential] election, I just couldn’t believe the misogyny. I sort of woke up to the misogyny that had always been in my world. Maybe I felt I wasn’t good enough, things weren’t happening for me, wouldn’t go my way or just would feel wrong. I’m not good enough, smart enough. It was all on me.

Seeing the way that people looked at the candidates in 2016, how people talked about Hillary Clinton’s personality, which had nothing to do with what her experience was.... Meanwhile, there’s this other person whose personality isn’t great either! But, no, people are talking about her. Even my women friends--smart and artistic, some of the most intelligent, aware people--said things like “I just don’t like her. I don’t know why.” There were other people, family members in other parts of the country, who said things like, “She’s a criminal.” 

I work in academia, I work in this world, and I collaborate with a man in a lot of my work. I just started to question: What is this bias and hatred?

Because of the election, I started talking to people, to women about it. We couldn’t stop talking about it. It was like Voldemort had arrived! None of us had slept. We were in shock. Thank God for New York and our community. But I started talking to people around the globe, people I had worked and toured with for many years. Most of them had worked with us here.

That’s where I woke up to my privilege: Oh, I think it’s so horrible here in America, but they’ve lived through having to move out of their own country to somewhere else where they felt they could have a life. They had personal stories about growing up in a new country. It was really interesting to work with and very cathartic in a way.

All of these women are just extraordinary people. I wanted to work with them because of their dancing and because of who they are, but they are all older now--we’re all older now!--they’re “successful,” whatever that means. We’ve got these jobs, we’re creating art, we’re chairs of departments, we’re successful women. And it’s just interesting to me because I’m not sure we feel that success.

How we feel our power was really interesting to me, how we moved through obstacles. I was interested in telling some personal stories about these women, hopefully something that other people also experience. It went from a political, angry place to “How do we heal? How do we move through? How do we get to this place where we can feel our power, go into our communities and support that?" At the beginning, I was focused on all the negatives: There’s no hope. There’s never going to be a woman president. It’s so deep. And [reflecting on the current presidential candidacy of Elizabeth Warren], we are physically exhausted. I am at the place now where I can’t even read the news.

The stories are an important part of the work. I always work with people’s personal history. That’s what’s real for me rather than having them do something that’s in my mind. Collaboration is so interesting.

There are five other women besides myself, and one--Carla Forte--is Venezuelan-born, a dancer and a documentary and feature filmmaker. She lives in Miami now, but I met her in Venezuela fifteen years ago, and we worked together, toured in different places together. I think she has lived in Miami--where I’m from--ten years now.

When Venezuela just sort of got crazy, she and her husband came here to America. I started off asking each artist how they moved through hard times, passed through their obstacles, and she started talking about being seen a certain way as a Venezuelan in America and even how her mother or their culture expected certain things.

I have a teenage daughter who’s going through a major transition. My husband said this one day--because he’s a man!--”I was a boy, and I went through puberty, and I could just do whatever I wanted.” And he was watching his daughter be seen a different way for that moment of transition where, all of a sudden, other people are seeing you differently, you’re seeing yourself differently, and there’s some kind of freedom that’s lost through how other people look at her. So he just had this epiphany. Really? (laughing hard) Now? At this age, you’re just realizing it now?

So, the piece has become about this idea of transitions, what happens in those moments in between change--slowing down those moments to see what those shifts are. We started with the idea of slowing down the film Carla created for the piece. When things are very, very slow, you can’t tell very clearly what’s happening. Singing can look like a scream...or a laugh. You’re not really sure. That became really interesting to me, the transitions in all forms--women getting older, women moving through hard times, transitions of getting to power, transitions of giving up. Do you give up and move out of your country because it’s so bad there?

Carla talked about her mother wanting her to be a kind of woman like Miss Venezuela--beautiful with the makeup--and she wasn’t. She talked about people in Miami calling her whore because she’s Spanish-speaking. And I talked to people like Ildikó Tóth who lives in Germany, and she said she never felt objectified or anything like that. She said, “I just always dressed like a boy.” Ermira Goro, she lives in Greece now, and she danced with us as well and was here for many years, and then she went on to DV8 [Physical Theatre, a London-based troupe]. She talked about when she moved from Albania to Greece and living with a friend, not having her family there. Everybody seemed to have stories that pertained to their moms and, because I was interested in my daughter’s changes, there's a little flicker of mom stuff in there.

Joanna Leśnierowska is not primarily a dancer; she’s a curator, dramaturg and designer, born in Poland, running a festival. Doing body research with her was really interesting. She’s just so real. She connects to what the truth of the movement is right away, even though she questions, “I’m not a dancer. Should I be doing this?”

I was getting so inspired by my students at Barnard [College] and by [climate change activist] Greta Thunberg, by all these young people who are active out there trying to make change, and they’re like “You guys fucked it up, and we need to do something.” There’s a lot of work I watch my students do that I’m sort of amazed. The idea of having a chorus in the piece, bringing these [local community] people in, was a representation of the inspiration and hope they bring to what’s happening now. 

At first, I wanted a lot of women to take the stage and just stand there, make the audience feel uncomfortable. I was so angry! But then I started workshopping with them. I hope that when I get to do this piece in other places, I will get to workshop with women in these communities. The workshop--working with them through improvisation and talking about their own experiences--it was different because they are a lot younger [than the main cast]. There’s power afforded to us because we have some experience, and we feel strength from the places that we’ve moved through. But the hope that I feel is in working with these young people, talking with them about when they’ve felt erased or objectified or passed over and how they got up and kept going.

These are all my alums of different ages. I have such a personal connection to everybody in this cast. We rehearsed the other day, and I cried after they ran this one section. I realized I know their stories, you know?

The mood I feel, through them, is support--for me, for this piece--and comraderie, community, kind of like the Buddhist sangha. I feel the strength through them. They’re not giving up. They are in a place where they believe they can make change and, just like the masks they wear in the piece, the grotesque becomes beautiful. All of these dancers are able to be vulnerable, which is not always pretty. They have nothing to prove.

That’s the other thing. Maybe that comes with being over 50: I’m done trying to be something. We’re all trying to share this experience with the audience. It gets ugly and uncomfortable, but then, somehow, we work through it--I hope! (laughing hard)

-- Colleen Thomas

See light and desire at New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan (map/directions). For further information and tickets, click here.

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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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Tracks get fresher: bold new moves at New York Live Arts

FRESH TRACKS artists, left to right:
Anh Vo, Annie Heath, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd,
Kayla Hamilton and Stuart B Meyers

FRESH TRACKS: Anh Vo, Annie Heath, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Kayla Hamilton, Stuart B Meyers
New York Live Arts
December 13-14

I came away from last night's edition of FRESH TRACKS--New York Live Arts' showcase for rising choreographers--eager to see each of the five pieces separately, with ample contemplative, processing time and space around each. But, of course, an omnibus program like this--squeezing in five 15-minute works, diverse in maker and nature--does not allow for that. You might take a restroom break during intermission and look around at other audience members on the line, each of them exclaiming variations on "Whew!" Other than that, you better keep pace. Simply put, this particular FRESH TRACKS lineup can be overwhelming--in a good way. Presentations by Anh Vo, Annie Heath, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Kayla Hamilton and Stuart B Meyers made me hopeful for the future of dance in New York City, exemplifying the bold, urgent spirit of the art today.

Kayla Hamilton, first up, is an artist you should already know. But if you don't, take this opportunity. Nearly Sighted/unearthing the dark, created with a community of makers, sasses back at the male gaze, the terrified Karens of this world and anyone who might want to voice unsolicited opinions about a fat Black woman's body. With its quirky lighting cues and accessibility accommodations--including a riveting ASL interpreter/dancer, Brandon Kazen-Maddox--it also messes with the usual centering of non-disabled viewers and points of view.  I love it to pieces.

Informed by German Expressionist film, Stuart B Meyers' KOPFKINO (head cinema) enhances its eerie scenario with dim, blueish lighting that strips its dancers--Meyers and Isabel Umali--of healthy skintones and readable, relatable facial features. Aside from its extraordinary visual aesthetics, the piece gets hair-raising power from a combination of slow, creeping movement and frozen tension in the bodies. A nightmare from the past but made for our nightmarish times.

Anh Vo's BABYLIFT--the title memorializes a tragedy of the Vietnam War, the crash of the first plane to airlift evacuated South Vietnamese orphans--is the boldest of the bold and would reward repeated viewings. The subversive quality of Vo's slithery femme, hypersexualized self-presentation in front of a carefully-arranged votive altar would seem to clash with the projected photo of a Buddhist monk immolating himself as fellow monks look on. When I later had a moment to think it through, I realized these two figures might agree that the body is the fiercest site of resistance.

Annie Heath and Sokunthary Svay--a Khmer refugee and now Bronx-based poet and librettist--often occupy different, primarily diametrically opposed areas of the stage in an excerpt from Heath's This Mother/land Fabric. This keeps you wondering about how they are related, how their thoughts and ways are related, as you gaze from one to the other. Careful, expert gestures of wrapping a sarong contrast with desperate, helpless ones such as lifting a heavy pile of folded clothes, trying to secure this bundle high against the back wall with nothing but one's tired arms. Heath struggles and struggles; Svay's words leave a chill: "my mouth is magically sewn together" and "to find a soft landing spot, leave your skin on the ground" and "let me nurture this brutality."

In his witty abstract ensemble, Neighbors, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd keeps five dancers moving like game pieces continually rearranged in dynamic spacial interrelationship. Coming at the end of a demanding evening, Neighbors both clears the palate and looks like a kind of work easily picked up by major troupe looking for bright new repertory. Which is to say, hooray for Lloyd. Watch this guy. But, really, keep track of everyone here.

FRESH TRACKS: Anh Vo, Annie Heath, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Kayla Hamilton, Stuart B Meyers concludes with tonight's 7:30pm performance. For tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(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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Dormeshia and friends swing out at The Joyce

Dormeshia
(photo: Eduardo Patino)

And Still You Must Swing
by Dormeshia
at The Joyce Theater
December 3-8

No hype. Dormeshia has been crowned Queen of Tap and, while some might find the notion of regal hierarchy in the arts a bit distasteful, there's no denying the evidence of one's eyes and ears. Mastery is mastery. Moreover, the refined ability of this artist to make and switch up minute mental/physical calculations with every passing microsecond qualifies her for superstardom. Go see And Still You Must Swing, one of Aaron Mattocks' great tap presentations at The Joyce this season. All hail the Queen.

Dormeshia's show, which premiered in Summer 2016 at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, teams her with veteran dancers and frequent running buddies, Derick K. Grant and Jason Samuels Smith, of whom we can never ever see enough. The tap firepower is strong with this endearing trio, as we've come to expect. But look who's also in the house: Camille A. Brown, top-notch performer and in-demand choreographer of contemporary and Broadway dance. Her unmatched embodiment of Black culture and legacy adds a distinct, dedicated underpinning of wokeness/awareness to this seamlessly entertaining show.

From left to right:
Derick K. Grant, Dormeshia, Camille A. Brown and Jason Samuels Smith
(photo: Christopher Duggan)

Jason Samuels Smith
(photo: Christopher Duggan)

And Still You Must Swing, a 75-minute suite of dances and musical interludes, has a tight, intermission-less structure with generous fun but no time for fluff. Choreographed and "improvographed" solos, duos, trios and quartets each aim, jump and achieve high spots you think can't possibly be topped, all supported by a vivacious jazz band as sumptuously warm as it is driven--musical director and pianist Carmen Staaf, drummer Winard Harper, bassist Noah Garabedian and percussionist Gabriel Roxbury. And the linkage between the lush, expressive fluidity of swing in dance and swing in music--and the roots of all this in Black experience and sensibility--comes across clearly without being forced. If you can't imagine why a djembe, the iconic West African drum, deserves to get a highlighted moment in the middle of a tap show, no one will get up and tell you. But just wait for Brown's solos; she channels the innovations of enslaved African taking back the power of intense vibration and rhythm, preserving and expressing this freedom through the body. Drums, you see, were forbidden to a stolen people but never truly silenced.

Brown adds outrageous gutsiness and quirk to Dormeshia's lineup. The charming bros--often bookending sleek, slithery Dormeshia--add hoofericious heft while dazzling us with the possibly limitless variety of ways heels, toes and sides of feet can ring changes on the meeting of metal and wood. Legs and feet fly like the digits of a 75 wpm typist.

Breathless, you eventually stop thinking How'd they do that? and surrender to your own connection to the music.

Good. They got ya.

Original music: Allison Miller and Dormeshia
Lighting design: Sue Samuels/Divine Rhythm Prod./Event Systems & Design Inc.
Costume design: Javier Pedroza

And Still You Must Swing continues through Sunday, December 8 (Wednesday, 7:30; Thursday and Friday, 8pm; Saturday and Sunday 2pm and 8pm). If any tickets remain--and that's chancy--grab them here. In the event of sold-out shows, there will be a ticket line for hopefuls starting one hour before curtain time.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(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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"THE DAY" arrives

Cellist Maya Beiser with Wendy Whelan
performing The Day
(photos: Hayim Heron, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow)

THE DAY

by Maya Beiser, Lucinda Childs, David Lang and Wendy Whelan

October 22-27

at The Joyce Theater

In all honesty, when I hear that the events of September 11, 2001 inspired a piece of art, I note and then turn away from that detail, hoping for an alternative reason to connect. The excellence of THE DAY's principal collaborators--cellist Maya Beiser, dancer Wendy Whelan, choreographer Lucinda Childs and composer David Lang--drew me to The Joyce this week for this work's New York premiere. (I went, in particular, for Beiser, and please hurry to her site's video page and share my new obsession.) Thinking back now, I find myself drifting between certainty that THE DAY reflects a moment in our history and, at the very same time, wavering certainty about what my eyes and ears testified as I gazed from my seat in the audience. Thus, for me, it might be the perfect evocation of the experience of witnessing 9/11.

Performed without intermission, the interdisciplinary work consists of two parts--The Day and World To Come, named for music previously composed by Lang for Beiser--and contemplates the aftermath of a soul's separation from its body. The width and height of the Joyce stage, backed by Joshua Higgason's video projection, contribute to THE DAY's monumentality and hallucinatory depth of field and dreamy elusiveness.

In the opening part, Beiser and Whelan occupy separate, opposing territories--cellist and cello crowning a translucent incline; white-draped ballerina starting off artfully perched on a stool as if posing for a fashion shoot. Sara Brown's minimalist, abstract set--angled lines suggest subtle demarcation--works in tandem with the strength, and severity, that Childs' ideas bring out in Whelan's deft improvisations which, at times, evoke an iconic rendering of the architectural proportions of the human body. She creates, and exists within, pristine, divine abstractions.

Lang crafted the voiceover text for Part 1, Beiser writes in her program notes, out of numerous statements crowd-sourced from the Internet, each phrase completing his own phrase "I remember the day I...." Each statement is separated from the next by six seconds, giving the text a hypnotic rhythm, like a prayerful litany, and I found it fascinating to find that he had carefully alphabetized the statements.

I stopped speaking. I stumbled. I switched. I talked. I talked to myself sternly.

Each statement, taken out of context, could sound as if it captured a mundane moment in time. But, in fact, Lang intends each to mark a significant turning point in a person's life. Carefully strung on a silver thread of breath, each statement takes its moment to shimmer in light before giving way to the next. So, in a way, each is extraordinary but no one surpasses any other. Each stands in as a symbol of human consciousness, symbol of human experience--and, it is painful to remember, a single loss out of many.

Some of the sonic and visual atmospherics of THE DAY tease the audience while also being unsubtle--a long, muffled, engine-like roar; two white lengths of fabric suspended from the stage's fly space suddenly rippling to the floor; the video speeding bodies into spectral visitations blurred across an interior space; Whelan increasingly wrapped by shroud-like fabric as her body rolls down the incline.

But the music. Beiser's strong, exacting control of her instrument; the energies generated and invoked in her playing. This mastery at the core of THE DAY anchors everything, gives everything else here a reason for being.

Sound design: Dave Cook

Lighting design: Natasha Katz 

Costume design: Karen Young

The Day concludes today with a performance at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(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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Ayodele Casel and Arturo O'Farrill team up at The Joyce

Tap dancer Ayodele Casel
(photo: Michael Higgins)

Ayodele Casel + Arturo O'Farrill
The Joyce Theater
September 24-29

As I take my seat at the Joyce, a couple of audience members to my left peruse their programs, making note of the fact that tap artist Ayodele Casel has cast herself among her ensemble in all nine dances on the bill. It doesn't faze me. I know Casel. That one--given the Yoruba name for "joy has arrived"--has energy to burn.

This season's particular display of joy, though, surely comes from the victory of sharing her prestigious first full-length program at The Joyce with six-time Grammy-winning Afro-Latin jazz musician Arturo O'Farrill. The woman who once created a solo tap show called While I Have the Floor (Spoleto Festival, 2017) took another floor this time to foreground cultural pride (she is Black and Puerto Rican). Both Casel and O'Farrill are in top form here--as introduced by Scalular, the sharp-edged, scintillating world premiere ensemble piece that opens the night. Their respective arts clearly grow from the same seed. The deep, intuitive communication and affection between these master artists could be easily read throughout the theater.

If you need any reason to be convinced that tap belongs in a bond with Afro-Latin jazz, buy a ticket to this show. As offered by O'Farrill and Casel, the combined music endlessly cascades like a crystalline stream over a long stretch of rocks, sparkling, glinting in sunlight. It gives life. Casel, in particular, finds innumerable delicate, exquisite facets to bring forth in sound--nothing expected or stale or slapdash; her discipline is steely--and she's joined by a diverse, talented young ensemble that includes Naomi Funaki, Dre Torres, Luke Hickey and Andre Imanishi. If I wished for anything at all, it might be a second program with juicy challenges for spirited artists like Hickey or Imanishi, in particular. Both look game for anything, grounded in good training and inspiration.

But I do love this program with its easy-going interlude where Casel tells of going from being a Ginger Rogers fan girl to her revelation at Fazil's--legendary, dearly-departed dance studio--when the entry-level tap she'd mastered fell embarrassingly short of the hoofer's mark. And with its feminist shout-out to Girl Power everywhere and, especially, to the once-overlooked women of color in tap's history, like Jeni LeGon. And O'Farrill and Casel's embrace of everything from Bach (Chromatic Fantasy in D Minor) to Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck and Wayne Shorter.

A grand new leap forward in Casel's career, this show is a must-see if you can manage to get a ticket. I suggest you don't delay.

Arturo O'Farrill (pianist/composer)
Keisel Jiménez (percussion)
Zack O'Farrill (drums)
Ivan Renta (saxophone)
Bam Bam Rodriguez (bass)
Kali Rodriguez-Peña (trumpet)

Carolina Gonzalez Mama (vocals)

A Broadway Foundation Leaders-in-Training (2019-2020):

Sasha Arteaga
Samaria Dalling
Karime De La Cruz
Mckayla Faye
Jasmine Mendoza
Vanessa Pavia Fuentes
Amani Varney

Betsy Chester (lighting)
Daniel Erdberg (sound)

Ayodele Casel + Arturo O'Farrill continues through Sunday, September 29 with 8pm performances through Saturday and a 2pm Sunday matinee. For information and (hurry!!) tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 8th Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(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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Savion Glover returns to The Joyce!

Tony-winning tap great Savion Glover
has a new show at The Joyce Theater.

LADY 5

@

SAVION GLoVER's

BARoQUE'BLAK

TaP Café

by Savion Glover
at The Joyce Theater
July 2-7, 2019

The letters flip up and down--kind of like hoofers' heels and toes--in the titles tap icon Savion Glover gives things. The off-kilter rhythm of the letters jingles and jangles...and jars. Skim across a program page, and your eyes might get snagged on a particular letter or the oddly-true sound a whimsical word makes inside your head. What, exactly, is Half-Our or I Can Here Myself? Tell me there's no part of you smiling at this thought: "Well, I kinda know what that might mean!"

As noted above, the title of Glover's new ensemble production--running now through Sunday at The Joyce Theater--is rendered in his program notes precisely this way:

LADY 5

@

SAVION GLoVER's

BARoQUE'BLAK

TaP Café

It has been several years since Glover, a popular man at The Joyce, has brought a show there. (The Joyce, by the way, is on a roll with tap--now through early January--with luminaries like Ayodele Casel, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards and Michelle Dorrance waiting in the wings. And a tip of the hat to my dear colleague Aaron Mattocks for that programming.) LADY 5 looks nothing like your conventional tap extravaganza. It's so many things and soooo much. It's an illustrative tribute to a wide range of music genres and artists. It's a way of proving to us that dancers are musicians--and that we see through hearing and hear through seeing, or something like that. And it's a transparently messy, headlong plunge into an artist's overflowing psyche.

I count almost twenty sections in the 90-minute show, including one where a male tap shoe foot puppet (yes, you read that right) chats up a female footless-tight foot puppet (yes...) at a café table, and another binary-boosting segment (What Kind of MaNz) where aggressive male tap dancers seem to be all but literally humping their slithering female jazz dancing partners. I need to scold Glover for engaging superb dancers like Natrea Blake, Samantha Berger, Monique Smith and Megan Gessner (the last introduced by Glover as "our token white person") in cheesy moments like this. A finale set to Stevie Wonder's "Another Star" ends up slaughtering poor Stevie under Glover, Marshall Davis Jr. and Darrell Grand Moultrie's jet-propelled and amplified drilling. Maybe a single dancer--or these three without amplification--would have been kinder to the singer and his gorgeous song.

As noted before, with LADY 5 one must push aside any longing for the conventional. Glover takes you on a journey that, for reasons not exactly or convincingly clear, opens with a display of antique costumes arranged along a metal walkway above a café-like setting. Along the way, you'll see Smith dancing to spoken word (the brilliant Jae Nichelle on recording) about what it's like to live with anxiety; various and sundry face-offs between ballet and tap or ballet and jazz; and surrealistic vignettes with Glover apparently haunted, obsessed and traumatized by a ballerina's disembodied tutu descending from above. A dancer might be doing her thing downstage while a shadowy figure creeps along the high walkway in the background. The Dalai Lama makes an appearance. (Just dropping that here. Don't fret about it.) There was an impressive, spiky contemporary solo (PHuQSPaCE) performed by Gessner to the stylings of Bjork, and there is the lovely warmth of Blake's solo work in Everything Must Change.

So...a lot. And, although I am far from the kind of critic who needs the conventional, I must say I was grateful for a segment with fabulous, straight-up tap dance to Latin jazz that met percussion with percussion, fire with fire, spotlighting virtuosity in a way nothing else in the show really touched.

A show with turbo-charged ambitions and oddities, and not everything works. But, hey...Savion Glover at The Joyce. It took several years for that to happen again.

LADY 5 @ SAVION GLoVER's BARoQUE'BLAK TaP Café continues through this Sunday with matinee and evening performances. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue (between 18th and 19th Streets), Manhattan
(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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Ballet Hispánico: all that and a stack of bowlers

From top: Bennyroyce Royon, Edwaard Liang
and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa

Ballet Hispánico
Works by Edwaard Liang, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Bennyroyce Royon
The Joyce Theater
March 26-31

The women of Ballet Hispánico
and their Magritte-inspired bowlers
in a work by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa
(photo: Paula Lobo)

For this Joyce Theater season, Ballet Hispánico bookends a cheeky, all-female performance of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's Magritte-inspired Sombrerísimo--a 2013 work made for men--with world premieres by two Asian-American dancemakers. With El Viaje, Taiwan-born Edwaard Liang has gifted this ensemble with a meditation on immigration and the journey towards love, community and hope. What's the connection to this troupe's Latinx profile? Literally, the historic migration of a Chinese diaspora to the shores of Cuba; yet, beyond that specific backstory, the work--lucid and moving--will prove accessible to anyone with a heart. For music, Liang selected Academy of St. Martin in the Fields's sublime recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis--a performance that has always given me chills. With designers Danielle Truss (costumes) and Joshua Paul Weckesser (lighting), he has turned the Joyce stage into a jewel box displaying every elegantly-sculpted facet of individual movement, partnership and grouping. The dancers are profoundly supple and expressive. One cannot help but get swept up in the energy of Liang's searching and threshing of stage space.

Bennyroyce Royon's gift to Ballet Hispánico draws upon his Filipino heritage and his culture's Spanish/Asian intersection. As in El Viaje, but without the exalted poetics of Liang's dancemaking, Homebound/Alaala, suggests a variety of interpersonal relationships and environments in flux and in possibilities. This robust ensemble will be remembered most for a colorful, cleverly adaptable set design of large boxes developed, in collaboration, by Amanda Gladu and Royon. Continuously rearranged and re-purposed by the dancers, the boxes aid in the telling of stories of leave-taking and travel, of containers holding history and identity, of erecting and dismantling barriers between people.

Ballet Hispánico continues at The Joyce through Sunday, March 31. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

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

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SPECIAL EVENT:

I'm also excited to announce that Eduardo Vilaro (Ballet Hispánico's Artistic Director and CEO) will join choreographer Bennyroyce Royon for a conversation and screening of excerpts from Homebound/Alaala at Gibney on Wednesday, April 17, 6:30-8pm.

This Sorry I Missed Your Show program is free, but seating is limited. So, please RSVP soon. Learn more here.

Gibney
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(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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New York Live Arts presents Westwater's "Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part"

Choreographer Kathy Westwater
opened Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part
last evening at New York Live Arts
in a co-presentation with Lumberyard.

Kathy Westwater
Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part
New York Live Arts
(co-presented with Lumberyard Center for Film and Performing Arts)
February 14-16

It is our universal capacity for pain, and our histories of pain, that offer us hope of ever giving a damn about another being--or even just recognizing the value of doing so. Created by Kathy Westwater and her dancers, Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part, deliberately inflicts nearly unrelenting discomfort and disorder. For the ears, the driven discordance of the late composer Julius Eastman, filled perhaps with the pain of being Black and queer in this society but even more with Black, queer defiance and zest. For the eyes, seven bodies propelled out of everyday, conventional function--how we look, how we walk, when we are doing the things we are asked to do--into states of less rational, conventional control. 

When the audience wanders in to take seats, dancers are already in view, attending to one another in preparation for what their bodies will endure (and achieve). I watched this process during a showing of excerpted material Westwater held at Gibney (a showing, as it happens, that in no way prepared me for the ultimate weight of this production). This time, at the New York Live Arts premiere, I did not enter until very shortly before the dance proper began. So I missed almost all of this prelude. But I remembered its importance and kind of felt it in the air as the dancers rose and moved away from view.

With a dimming of the lights, they returned--a few taking seats in easy chairs tucked into downstage corners; the first explorer, Rakia Seaborn, slowly placing one foot, then the other, in front of her as if testing how, and if, her Black body could relate to the white floor gleaming beneath it.

On either side of the space, pianists began to apply intensity, sharp against ear and mind. One by one, or in duos or groupings, dancers began to layer the space with roughly off-centered, loosely flung and floppy movement tumbling in front of a wide backdrop, Roderick Murray's lighting only slightly revealing ashy streaks rising from a dark, murky surface. Like Westwater's enigmatic title, Seung Jae Lee's visual design compels interest but dances forever out of reach. By the end of the hour-plus piece, past a moment of diminished intensity and complexity, we see things more clearly but still do not gain reliable understanding of what we are seeing.

The work of some dancers stood out for me--Alex Romania, vividly bearing down into giving way into seamless motion; Paul Singh letting his backbone slip; Thomas F. DeFrantz eventually slowing the rush of matters to find his hips, find himself, find his life in the midst of chaos. And, although his gift to the work is relatively brief, countertenor M. Lamar introducing an ambiguity that can be both a place of rest and of lush articulation.

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Choreographed by Kathy Westwater in collaboration with
the performers

Directed by Kathy Westwater

Performed by Ilona Bito, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Alex Romania,
Rakia Seaborn, Stacy Lynn Smith, Paul Singh and Kathy Westwater

Music by Julius Eastman, performed by Joseph Kubera and
Adam Tendler, with Patrick Gallagher and others; and
M. Lamar, performed by M. Lamar

Set and Visual Design by Seung Jae Lee

Lighting Design by Roderick Murray

Costumes by fufu

Dramaturgy by Melanie George

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Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part continues through tomorrow with performances at 7:30. For information and tickets, click here.

Visitor Information/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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Together: Nugent and Matteson at New York Live Arts

Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson
in their duet, another piece apart
at New York Live Arts
(photo: Ben McKeown)

I regret that I haven't seen Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson dance together for a long time. I well remember considering them among my favorite downtown performers--profoundly thoughtful, sensitive and moving in their artistry. Last evening, I went to New York Live Arts, excited to get reacquainted with these two Bessie winners and dance heroes of mine. I caught the New York premiere season of their duet another piece apart. Please do yourself a favor and go tonight--your last chance this time--if you can still get a ticket.

Nothing will distract you from these bodies. Now and again, that sort of spareness can be refreshing. Let us focus, for a minute, on the genius of the body.

Their low-lit performance space is completely bare and yet does not seem vast around them. They compel our eyes and subdue that gaping space. Labored breath and occasional, mostly muffled asides to each other provide raw, human sound to a space empty of accompanying music or soundscape. They are not even dressed for admiring gaze; items of dance-wear, stripped down late in the piece, suggest increasing vulnerability, increased transparency to each other.

And we don't even need that visual metaphor, really. From the moment Nugent first backpedals into the space and Matteson soon touches his forehead to hers, these two operate like limbs (and heightened senses) of one body. Locking, arching, twisting in and out and back into connection with one another, they each move with elastic, springy, sticky qualities as if puzzle pieces in 3-D animation. But, if they are pieces of a puzzle, they are polished ones that fit just so, with just the right knowing.

For most of the time, their intimate world is so tenderly quiet that I feared the scratch of my pen on my notebook paper would be heard in every corner of the theater. We are each exposed by their dancing.

This visual poetry of their duet's conclusion.... Well, let me leave it at that.

Lighting design: David Ferri

Another Piece Apart concludes with a 7:30 performance this evening. For tickets, click here.

PARTNERING WORKSHOP: October 13, 2-5pm

A toolbox of methods for partnering exploring negative space, interdependent support, responses to touch, and various ways of harnessing momentum. By a quick bridging of improvisation into set work—followed by imaginative reconstruction steps—we develop dances that embolden personal voice within kinetic collaboration.

For information on Nugent and Matteson's partnering workshop, click here.

New York Live Arts

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

(map/directions)

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"Y" premiered by RoseAnne Spradlin at New York Live Arts

Y is perhaps a chromosome. Or maybe the fork in a choreographic road, a place of duality and uncertainty. In any case, in all its moody sensuality, Y comes to us this week from award-winning choreographer RoseAnne Spradlin who is the 2017-19 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts.

My initial reading of Annie Heath, Ainesh Madan, Athena Malloy, Claire Westby, Connor Voss, Doug Lecours, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes and Thomas Welsh-Huggins, as they streamed down NYLA's aisles and spread across the stage, was of eight dynamic bodies serving as building blocks piled up and tumbling over one another. Weighted, tilted and propelled, they enlivened the air around them with a wonderful freedom. A few mics, stationed close to the floor, captured the sounds of their footfalls--a sounding that registering presence and marking a place for oneself. I pondered how the distance from viewers or the type of footwear or the cover of music or the nature of technique (as in, say, ballet) usually masks this aspect of the labor, and assertiveness, of dancers.

Dim glow from a row of lights placed low to the floor gave the space an eerie, somewhat illicit atmosphere. A torso and pelvis might suddenly and broadly undulate like a creature giving birth or glide over a partner's supine body. The pale outer costumes dancer Voss designed for his colleagues give only illusory coverage.

Stripping down to undies and near- and full-nudity featured heavily later on in the hour-or-so piece as did images of buttocks openly groped with no shame on the faces staring back at the audience--or, really, any display of feeling--as partners embraced. It's interesting that, when the dance was over and performers appeared for their bow, it seemed only men had had time to slip on a bit of clothing. This might mean nothing to Spradlin. It might be a coincidence. I have no idea. But it is curious.

If we always ask ourselves--and we should--what manner of world have we entered when we enter a dance, this world seems transitional and perhaps reflects something of our own transitional time. It is brazen and discomforting. We can take either road branching away from that Y. Which road will it be? And why?

There is, as yet, no answer to that question.

Production and sound design: Glen Fogel
Lighting design: Roderick Murray
Audio engineer and sound design: Ben Manley
Costume design: Connor Voss
Dramaturgy: Susan Mar Landau

Y continues through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts

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

(map/directions)

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Sidra Bell's worlds of imagination and friction

Sidra Bell who presents two works this week
at New York Live Arts
(photo: David Flores)

I'm on the fence about Sidra Bell's new work F R I C T I O N (prequel)--on the bill now at New York Live Arts along with 2014's garment (Director's Choice) about which I am unreservedly enthusiastic. And so it goes. Like super-clever sci fi writers and filmmakers, Sidra Bell Dance New York creates new worlds, exactingly-designed ones and hellish, to which we are invited. We don't have to go, and maybe we don't always.

F R I C T I O N opens this season's lengthy program--two hours with an intermission. You don't get dancers more weirdly excellent--and let me underscore, here, both *weird* and *excellent*--than Bell's troupe. But I really found it difficult to stay with 56 minutes of them behaving like soulless, mechanistic blips in a manic video game. It was just not for me. That's not to say that the audacity and stylishness of Bell's entire interdisciplinary aesthetic isn't brilliant and impressive and even hypnotically seductive. It is.

But then there's garment (Director's Choice), which has already won praise, and rightly so. This 47-minute work has been promoted as:

a playful, slightly offensive jaunt that attempts to rescue the individual by constructing a world that navigates popular zeitgeists, cultural rituals and social containers. Conceived through materials the work exercises small performance ceremonies and allows the performers to speak and mask through filters to observe identity, appropriation, political incorrectness, subliminal language, transfiguration, nonsense, influence, authorship, and reformation. you’ll be remembered…###

So...okay.

But the team really worked the hell out of this one, in both sight and sound. There's Bell, the auteur who bills herself as "Director," not choreographer. And there's Amith Chandrashaker (Creative Director, Lighting Design, Décor), an adept of space and atmosphere, and costume designer Caitlin Taylor. Costuming, as might be guessed, looms large in Bell's universe but so much more here where it suggests a kind of kinky-glamorous masking of the self; an angry, frustrating search for a less-fraught, more ordinary self; and--with Sebastian Abarbanell's expansive, ritualistic solo--finally a taste of freedom.

Bell's worlds are singular--even when colliding with the worlds of Pina Bausch, fashion and Harlem's ballrooms, as they do here. They fold and contort as much as Abarbanell's uncanny body. They are as ridiculously opulent as an extravagant hotel. It's hard not to cheer Bell on when you see all these things laid out just right and danced to perfection by this crew: Abarbanell, Tushrik Fredericks, Drew Lewis, Misa Kinno Lucyshyn, Madison Wada and Leal Zielińska, her self-described "boutique brand of prolific movement illustrators...."

Sidra Bell Dance New York continues through July 1. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

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

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