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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Zuštiak's apocalypse now

Dancers of Palissimo in Endangered Pieces
all photos © Jeff Woodward

We seem helplessly drawn to dark visions of apocalypse in our art and even our entertainment--perhaps because, as a species, we've done so much to seed and hasten it. Or perhaps it is because we face down doom not only on a planet-wide scale but in every private life and, potentially, in every personal moment of those lives. In Tarot, the image of the Wheel of Fortune turns without cease, bringing the high and mighty to the depths and raising new victors who, themselves, will be supplanted.

The world premiere of Endangered Pieces, a trio by choreographer Pavel Zuštiak of Palissimo, occasions these thoughts.

As the audience files in, the open, raw mainstage at Abrons Arts Center reveals a naked man (dancer Jaro Viňarský) lying face up and motionless on the floor. Electronic music (by collaborators Christian Frederickson and Bobby McElver) fills the air with a dense, chugging texture. Three tall metal poles with heavy bases have also been toppled. A gate of corrugated metal rises just high enough to show us the shins of a second dancer (Matthew Rogers) and then to allow the choreographer to emerge and pull a lighting cord from its socket.

In this stark, industrial environment, Zuštiak and Rogers go about with expressionless, workman-like calm, standing up the poles and attempting to keep the corpse-like Viňarský on his feet. Each time they raise him and release him, he softly slips to the floor. They flip him vertically, horizontally, sling him over Roger's shoulders, drape him over Zuštiak's thighs like Jesus of the Pietà, only face down, ass outward. In these moments and throughout the hour-long piece, Joe Levasseur's eccentric lighting enhances a dreamlike, even Daliesque feeling, adding at least one or two extra dimensions to the 3D of moving beings that sometimes do not resemble humans like us.

Behind the metal gate, the wall of a recessed area has been covered in short planks of wood snuggly fit together and warmly lit. One or another dancer will sometimes enter this modern cave then slip from view, but its shelter is not long for existence.

Voiceover material instructs us to "imagine the last man" and to question what he does and "Does he even understand what he is doing?" A lot of imagining went into the powerful look and sound and performance of this piece. If it sometimes drags (as during the "let's just experiment with all these planks from the busted-up wall" segment), it also sounds an unavoidable alarm.

See Endangered Pieces at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse. Remaining shows: October 4-5, 10-12, 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center

466 Grand Street (corner of Pitt Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Zuštiak's "Strange Cargo"

Sitting in the darkened, looming Synod House--a side building of the world's largest cathedral, St. John the Divine, rarely opened to the public--you're left with the bluish glow from narrow, distant stained-glass windows. The blue emits a vague comfort, but the lead strips crossing, connecting, restraining the blue snatches that meager comfort away. You shrink back, feeling small, a bit threatened. A man creeps across the floor on his knees, passes a table, pivots, hesitates, gingerly touches the heel of one hand to the floor before skittering around. Other people creep in, one by one, building into a quintet of loners who make actions and sounds of motorized, robotic toys or figures from violent video games. Don't look for the remote control; there is none--and no controller--in sight. There is no God. Only the body and the impossibility of two or more bodies occupying the same space at the same time. And, as we will see, the inevitability of trouble.

Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo concludes Zuštiak's Painted Bird Trilogy with Strange Cargo--a interdisciplinary production presented by the currently, and interestingly, nomadic Performance Space 122. (The entire trilogy will play out, in September, at Ohio's Wexner Center for the Arts.) Those who have followed this journey, from La MaMa (Bastard, 2010) to Baryshnikov Arts Center (Amidst, 2011) to this ecclesiastical assembly hall, might agree with me that what unfolds here now bumps the dark intensity up several notches and calls up the most grueling and risk-taking performances from its extraordinary crew. At one point, sweat pours down dancer Jeremy Xido's face, but Zuštiak sweats not only body but mind and soul, too.

Aside from Xido and his quietly-menaced prey Luke Murphy, Strange Cargo boasts astonishing work from Lindsey Dietz-Marchant (the most memorable presence in Amidst), Giulia Carotenuto and Denisa Musilova. The rest of Zuštiak's team of collaborators are also tight, and they once again include Joe Levasseur (innovative lighting techniques) and Christian Frederickson and Ryan Rumery (superb original music, performed live). You must see this one.

Strange Cargo continues at Synod House through May 13: Thursday and Sunday at 8pm, Friday and Saturday at 8pm and 9:30pm. Space is limited, and there will be no late seating. For program and ticket information, click here.

Synod House
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue at West 110th Street, Manhattan
(map and directions)