La Mama hosts the great Germaine Acogny

Germaine Acogny, "Mother of Contemporary African Dance,"
performs SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
(photo: Thomas Dorn)

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
by Germaine Acogny and Mikäel Serre
FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival
La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre
September 26-28

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING--a US premiere for Crossing The Line Festival by renowned Senegalese/French contemporary dance artist Germaine Acogny and director Mikäel Serre--unfolds as if it were dreamt, a full-sensory haunting both sustained in time and elusively fluid in nature. A rich soundscape makes the viewer feel surrounded, engulfed. Visual design tucks things far out of reach or behind layers of other images, or suddenly zooms them large or slips them back into darkness, seriously messing with rational sense of space.

Its fascinating and troubling text, adapted for the stage by Serre, is often spoken in French by Acogny while also running in English as supertitles. If you do not comprehend French, this regularly pulls your gaze up and away from the stately moving sculpture that is Acogny.

You make your choices here; they're difficult, disruptive, regretful and the only ones you're allowed. At almost every turn, she and her creative team suspend us in a phenomena from which we cannot turn away. Even the smell of baby powder and the tickle of tiny, airborne feathers will eventually reach our unguarded selves.

A stage-spanning string curtain serves as a scrim onto which ghostly images may be projected and into which solid objects (and our beloved dancer) can be swallowed out of sight as if dragged below waves.

Like the simple props that will gather dramatic meaning--an open notebook, its white pages reflecting light; a pillow the dancer hugs to her chest, a heavy rock--Acogny contains the brooding power of history, of secrets, a complicated narrative with webs of connection to the Greek Medea and the tragedy of today's refugees seeking safety in Europe.

One surprise discovery, among many, in a diary--the words "Power is passed down from woman to woman." How to access that inheritance? Does it come from things--a set of formidable butcher knives passed along to the wrong person? Or is it knowledge, the force of truth about oneself that can purge the evil wrought by colonialism, patriarchal religion, racism, male supremacy?

Now in her 70s, Acogny--choreographer, performer and educator--has been called "Mother of Contemporary African Dance." Watch as she makes startling use of Johnny Cash's recording of "Hurt" with its evocation of self-inflicted pain and "empire of dirt," and you will grasp why this artist can claim worldwide reverence. Do not miss her historic performance at La MaMa.

Concept and direction: Mikäel Serre
Choreography: Germaine Acogny
Set design: Maciej Fiszer
Costumes: Johanna Diakhate-Rittmeyer
Music: Fabrice Bouillon "LaForest"
Video: Sebastien Dupouey
Lighting design: Sebastien Michaud

Talkback moderation: Okwui Okpokwasili
Translation: Courtney Geraghty

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING runs through tomorrow evening at La MaMa with performance at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For information on other events in Crossing The Line, an annual presentation of French Institute Alliance Française, click here.

La Mama (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan

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

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Look around us: 600 Highwaymen presents "Manmade Earth"

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

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

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

-- Performers of Manmade Earth 

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

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

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

Some of the questions:

"Do you think I look smart?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performers:

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

Original music and sound design: Michael Costagliola

Production design: Eric Southern and Deb O

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

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

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

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"What Remains": Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls collaborate

from What Remains,
a new work by Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls,
premiered this week at Danspace Project
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

“One thing about being black in America—you have to curtail your movements, to live in such a way that what the white gaze projects upon blackness will not end your life,” says Rankine to The New York Times. “So you’re always thinking, can I walk at night?…Can I have my cell phone out? If it glitters, will someone think it’s a gun? At what point can I just be?”

Adds Rawls, “One never just happens to be black, even in the most abstract dance…Whiteness in our society — and this is something Claudia talks about, too — is the space that produces the conditions and terms against which all other lives are measured and enabled or disabled. Dance doesn’t escape those power dynamics.”

-- Danspace Project publicity for What Remains

At what point can I just be?

A few years ago, I read poet Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and felt immediate, grateful identification in her detailing of both the overt and the deceptively subtle aggressions Black people endure, every day, in our society. Racism--within white, patriarchal supremacy--is the American condition, something that does not go away because a Black president gets elected. In fact, as we certainly recognize now, such an unexpected shock to the system only wakes and further enrages the persistent many-headed Hydra.

Upon hearing that Rankine, as writer, would team up with dance artist Will Rawls, I knew, at once, that we should not expect anything as straightforward as Citizen. Rawls--winner of the 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer--comes from that sector of dance that embraces the oblique, the abstract, the elusive, that leaves pin pricks and cracks and often big gaping holes in the fabric of a work for the light--and, ultimately, the viewer's mind--to get in.

What Remains--co-presented by Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française for FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival--would not be Citizen. And I'm going to be danged honest and tell you that part of me rolled my eyes when I thought about that. The other part of me, though, was chill and is now glad all of me got there.

Rawls has a dream team of collaborating performers for this work--Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (also his sound designer and composer), Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty and Tara Aisha Willis. Draped by designer Eleanor O'Connell in funereal black and haunting St. Mark's sanctuary with its stained glass windows also shrouded in black, they have been described as "a resonant, ghostly chorus."

What they most appear to be are embodiments of the undead spirit of resistance. Nimble, resourceful and unruly, they rise from unshapely, ungainly lurching and stumbling and gentle, quiet harmonizing to steadily refine and define themselves, both physically and vocally, over a solid 70 minutes of un-curtailing their movements. There are musical surprises in this séance that delighted the hell out of me and an ingenious synergy of space, darkness and scattered lighting that transforms the church into mutating dreamscape. I won't spoil any of this for anyone lucky enough to get in to see the final show tonight.

Yes, if you were to have a house haunted by not one but a whole batch of brilliant Black artists--pent-up spirits reclaiming their time at the mic or piano bench--I imagine you might have something like Rawls and Rankine's What Remains. Something more tickling than scary...at least to a Black woman like me. I can imagine some people might find all of this deeply frightening.

Creative Consultant: John Lucas
Production design: David Szlasa

What Remains concludes tonight with a show at 8pm, with no late seating. Tickets are sold out, but a wait list starts at the door beginning at 7:15. For information, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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#PUNK it out, Africa! Nora Chipaumire at FIAF

Nora Chipaumire, above,
and below, with Shamar Watt at far right, in #PUNK
(photos by Elena Olivo)

#PUNK is the first part of a triptych titled #PUNK 100% POP*NIGGA, a live performance album that confronts and celebrates three sonic ideologies: punk, pop, and rumba, explored through the radical artists Patti Smith, Grace Jones, and Rit Nzele. -- from program notes for #PUNK

Nora Chipaumire--a Zimbabwe-born dancer with intensity to rival any other performing artist plus, I see, the ability to land herself an interview on CNN--has made her sinewy body more than the instrument of her forthright ideas. It is a force to be reckoned with and, like her incisive mind, a force that will roll up on you the second you merely think about messing with it.

In #PUNK, company nora chipaumire's new piece for Crossing the Line 2017 at French Institute/Alliance Française, she's joined by Shamar Watt, native of Jamaica, who danced in her sensational and controversial trio, portrait of myself as my father, for BAM's Next Wave 2016. His participation in this new work makes it a duet, a fact that does not appear in the press release that I was issued, just as his bio does not appear in the program (although his name, as performer with Chipaumire, does). I don't know what all this means but, just like the unusual set-up of space and audience for the show, the presence of this killer dancer turned out to be an exciting surprise.

So, they're doing punk now...but with an African twist because Black. And because punk energy is pure joy and indomitability, and that's how Chipaumire sees today's Africa and, likely, the world's future.

The space evoked a humid, airless dive with just a few chairs for folks who needed them--regrettably, nobody advised me about this--and, otherwise, just standing room in front of the performers' territory and above it in a low balcony (where I hung out). Notable faces in the crowd signaled this as that show that everyone in contemporary dance knows they've got to be at (if not in Brooklyn at Bausch).

We had to be on our feet, most of us, because Chipaumire and Watt were all about turning this evening into a rave-up with fans clapping and whooping. "Come up! It's a motherfucking party!" cried Chipaumire as some of us took a second too long to step up to the balcony. We then hastened to comply just as we would all go on to comply with everything the two exhorted us to do.

The performance itself amused me for the way it relentlessly lashed together typical moments of lift-off and climax in rock music performance without delivering anything in between. Chipaumire and Watt always seemed to be startin' somethin' and goin' nowhere in particular, but givin' it all they got. Repeatedly calling out New York! Are you ready??? Counting up 1, 2, 3, 4!!! Or Uno, dos, tres, quatro!!! Literally reminding us, now and again, that they're introducing introductions. Declaring "I am a world-class African nigger" (Chipaumire) or goose-stepping (Watt) to rev up (or scandalize) the crowd.

In #PUNK, Chipaumire riffed on Patti Smith's iconic lyric "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" from "Gloria." She changed the "somebody's" to "your," which makes perfect in-you-face political sense in #PUNK's context, and she kept threatening to go back to Africa and telling us what she'd do when she got there.  "Watch me!" she cried, and I kept hearing James Brown's yowl.

"Watch me! I'm in Africa now!" And, yes, she seemed to have flung every cell of her body home in an altered state. You don't want to cross this woman.

Or Watt. Both dancers were in full command of their lunging, twisting bodies and voices despite the extreme demands of the work (particularly on those strained voices) over the hour or so. I could hardly believe that Chipaumire had anything left for the (lengthy) post-performance conversation moderated by choreographer Ralph Lemon and joined by Congolese dancer Faustin Linyekula, who has three premiere works featured in Crossing the Line.

Two choice moments from that conversation:

Chipaumire:

"I'm a particular kind of Black body. I'm an African body. We hold things differently. I'm acting out against everything but more about having love, joy, having the freedom to act out, having the time to act out."

"The joy. People know how to live. They're there [Zimbabwe] partying all night, and there's a lesson in that. Life is short. You could die tomorrow. It should be worth it."

Linyekula:

"Maybe joy is another way of acting out your rage. I'm here to stay. Maybe this body will be crushed, but there will be other bodies."

"[Euro-centered thinkers] will have to wake up and realize that the world has moved on. We are creating our own world on our own terms. Africans are experts in precarity and re-inventing ourselves."

#PUNK has closed. For information on other Crossing the Line events--now through October 15--click here.

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Be the show: Ivana Müller (and you) at New York Live Arts

Croatian-born Ivana Müller,
choreographer, artist and author of texts,
concludes her unique presentation, We Are Still Watching,
at New York Live Arts tomorrow night.

About We Are Still Watching at New York Live Arts (part of FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival 2014)

Made by Ivana Müller in collaboration with Amsterdam-based choreographer Andrea Bozic, Brussels-based artist and theater director David Weber-Krebs and Brussel-bsed dramaturg Jonas Rutgeerts

                                                                                                                                                                                

I was part of the Legendary Reading Group of October 1, 2014.

Sort of. Which means I ended up with all of one line.

Except for the choral part.

Here's what I learned from Ivana Müller's We Are Still Watching.

1. Arranging a small audience along the sides of a square can foster close observation and intimacy among strangers. If you're lucky.
2. Selling tickets to people who come to see a show and end up being the show--they take turns reading your script about a group of people coming to see a show who end up being the show--is kind of cheeky. And kind of cool.
3. Doing this and then later revealing that you "hate participatory theater" is outrageous. Until you explain that the things you hate about audience participation are totally not what your piece is doing.
4. Not knowing who's going to show up and how they'll behave with your guidelines and your script is risky. And thrilling.
5. Every audience is its own show, and every show is different.
6. It works if all sorts of people reading your words have all sorts of accents, some of them a little hard to hear if you're not sitting right next to them. You're an accented foreigner, too. Constantly. Moving yourself and your work from place to place while making a home in two different European cities. And here you are now, showing this piece in New York City. Where every other person, it seems, hails from someplace else.
7. The words are simple. Got to be. But sometimes, a beautiful surprise: Your "Romeo" and your "Juliet" may end up being the same sex. Or not. Maybe simply two people with foreign accents giggling over the words they mispronounce. Musically, impossibly sweet in the middle of all of this.
8. Sometimes your audience/listeners/readers will chuckle through the entire thing. It's good for their bodies.
9. A touch of subversion will flare for mere seconds along with a smidgen of confusion.
10. Some people may try to "act" their lines, and that will sound funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. Because it's beside the point.
11. Your Q&A moderator will script the follow-up Q&A and have it read by people who are neither you nor him. Happily, this cutesiness will not last long.
12. The script is not as important to you as how people appropriate it.
13. This work is "very choreographic." The voice, traveling.
14. Sometimes people who do not know each other go for drinks afterwards.
15. "Clearly marked with what is about to happen," the script "creates a frame in which everyone is exactly the same."
16. This has some source, you suggest, in social change happening in the Netherlands, one of two places you call home.
17. The New York Times will declare it all "disappointingly banal." Because. And of course. And...Next!!!

Be a part of the Legendary Reading Group of October 3, 2014. Tickets for the final evening of We Are Still Watching--this Friday at 8pm--are here.

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

For details on FIAF's 2014 Crossing the Line Festival, which runs through October 20, click here.

Love is crazy...or so says Justin Vivian Bond

CDs by singer/performance artist
Justin Vivian Bond

It's no small matter that two people--myself and an arts presenter I know--exclaimed the same words as we left Justin Vivian Bond's one-night concert, Love is Crazy, at FIAF: "So inspiring!"

On the subway trip back downtown, we conferred and agreed: It's the kind of performance that makes you want to look for and bring out your own best. I remember watching Ben Kingsley act in Gandhi and quitting a soul-snuffing job the very next day. I'm not yet sure what Bond's example--or any other part of FIAF's Crossing the Line fest--might inspire me to do in coming days, but V, I'm all ears.

Loosely strung around a theme of love, Love is Crazy found Bond (aka V) in warmly relaxed and sincere, if glamorous, form. V opened with the '40s jazz standard "Angel Eyes," the singer allowing this boozy torch song an unadorned reading, quite right, that only faltered in its final moment. Without an ending note to tether it, "Excuse me while I disappear...." really did seem to dissipate into the ether. But inspiration need not require perfection, as V laughingly proved throughout the show.

Over the next 80 or so minutes, Bond pushed on, recovering voice, energy and wild mind. It's not every songwriter/chanteuse--transgender or otherwise--who would think to source Peggy Lee and Aleister Crowley simultaneously. Nor is it every singer who can build from a husky hush to a voice that makes you feel the scalding steam coming off Sinnerman's boiling seas and fear its devil.

Justin Vivian Bond sings a song by being alert and wholy alive within it. That's the teaching.

The set drew from V's Dendrophile (2011) and Silver Wells (2012) recordings, with selections like Mark Eitzel's furious "Patriot Heart" and Bambi Lake's "The Golden Age of Hustlers," fierce and picturesque dramas from the queer red light zone. We were also invited along quiet strolls through Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and The Cure's "Lovesong." In the latter, V's sensitive accompanists--Matt Ray (musical director/piano), guitarist Nathann Carrera and violinist Claudia Chopek--knew when to hold off and when to fill in and support the simple lyrics and wispy melody.

Bond clearly relished v's folkish duet with guest artist Miguel Gutierrez--better known as an award-winning choreographer--and even got a chance to display a few dance licks. The highlight of Gutierrez's segment was his version of "Smalltown Boy," an '80s hit by Bronski Beat; if you saw Marissa Perel's recent work, More Than Just a Piece of Sky, at The Chocolate Factory, you heard Gutierrez's recording of this song. Gutierrez, though no Jimmy Somerville, has a haunting shimmer to his voice and beautiful delivery.

Visit Justin Vivian Bond's site (photo, videos, the works) here.

For news of the Miguel Gutierrez universe, go here.

For details on FIAF's 2014 Crossing the Line Festival, which runs through October 20, click here.

Trajal Harrell: Serving looks at The Kitchen

Dancer Trajal Harrell and his audience,
prepare for Monday night performance at The Kitchen.
(all photos: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Trajal Harrell is, by now, legendary for his "looks"--specifically, the array of interconnected dance projects, created since 2008, that wear the title Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church. In each of these pieces, Harrell plays with the fantasy of crossing two influential performance movements that arose in New York in the 1960s--a neutral minimalism favored by "downtown" dance artists, questioning what dance is, and Harlem's competitive and fabulous ball culture. Harrell's works, like articles of clothing, come in a variety of sizes--(XS), (S), (jr.), and so on, leading up to what he says will be a publication (XL). On Monday night, Harrell performed his solo, (S), at The Kitchen as part of FIAF's 2014 Crossing the Line Festival.

In the stripped-down, democratic Judson aesthetic, external appearance was nothing; in the world of the balls, it was everything, all about displaying the look of something you're not and, in most cases, will never be. That surface look transcends its illusion and elusiveness, cleverly employing yet moving beyond costume and even physicality to something trickier to glimpse, the spirit of the performer. That spirit becomes more clearly visible the longer we watch Harrell perform (S).

For (S), Harrell spends an hour on and around his catwalk, shifting through twenty personae of apparel and movement, starting from "West Coast Preppy School Boy" (in yellow slicker and white flipflops) and nerdy "East Coast Preppy School Boy" (complete with Obama backpack). In a Judsonian touch, the frequent costume changes take place right in front of us at a stand of ordinary folding chairs draped in pants, jackets and other gear, shoes and boots stored beneath. Harrell dons each "look" with zero fuss and with utmost transparency, hurriedly discarding one outfit for the next. Harrell's strides back and forth and around the rim of watchers, though inspired by the atmosphere and dramatics of a high fashion runway, are based in matter-of-fact human walking.

In the early phases at least, he takes on a modest, restrained demeanor that looks like the imaginary Harlemite showing up for postmodern dance class: "I'm here, but I'm not here." But there's way too much drama, way too much Josephine Baker, Graham, Basquiat, Meryl Streep in this guy to be sealed up in pure Judson, and what Harrell allows to shimmer through and seep out of any and all formal containers can be weirdly beautiful.

More "looks" coming up: (M)imosa, tonight at 8pm; (jr) Antigone Jr. and, at 9:30pm (Plus) Antigone Jr. ++ on Wednesday; (L) Antigone Sr. on Friday; and (M2M) Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem on Saturday. Clicking here will get you complete schedule, casting and ticket information.

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

For more information on FIAF's 2014 Crossing the Line Festival, running through October 20, click here.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma crosses the line

Once again, French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) tempts us to cross boundaries of geography, genre and imagination with its eighth edition of Crossing the Line festival (now through October 20). I will share my thoughts on a few CTL events in coming weeks.

Last night, I attended FIAF's New York premiere of The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma is Calling You!, a documentary by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, founders and co-directors of the OBIE Award-winning Nature Theater of Oklahoma. (The name, if you're wondering, derives from Kafka; this New York-based performance troupe is about as Oklahoman as I am.) The reaction I posted on Facebook, earlier today, says it all: "Endearing and alarming: THEATER!"

Running at 127 minutes, the diary-like film traces events before and during a 2013 residency in Berlin, a demanding time for the anxious Copper and for Liska, a charismatic Slovak complete with bald head and natty handlebar mustache. Liska wrestles with urges to be creatively out of control and in charge at all times. The couple's personal relationship and their confidence as artists are taxed by the considerable stress of overwork, tension and insecurity wrought by their project's complexity.

We witness the heady playfulness and the nearly impossible intricacy of NTO's group process, so much hard, ceaseless labor for productions that seem so slippery of form, swimming between the familiar and the unknown, buoyed by droll humor. A visual knockout with unrestrained, cheerful light and color, the film can also plunge its unsuspecting viewers through emotionally cloudy and dark places.

Oddly enough, The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma is Calling You! made me think back to a Hollywood film I'd just caught up with--George Clooney's World War II drama, The Monuments Men, a diverting, if slapdash, throwback. That film stepped all over its opportunity to make, for our blasé nation, a solid and still necessary case that art is worth sacrificing and maybe even dying for. But I thought of that argument as I watched the NTO collaborators labor and Liska struggle to the point of near breakdown. Maybe not so much why this particular strain of hipster art might matter to society at large but why it matters, greatly, to the artist's soul.

For information on Crossing the Line 2014 programs and venues, click here.

A house is not a home: David Levine's "Habit"

"This is so wild--the semiotics of it! Do you even know what semotics means?"

--David Levine, Habit

David Levine's theater/installation piece, Habit--co-presented by the currently nomadic Performance Space 122 and FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival--inhabits several rooms of an unremarkable ranch house. What is remarkable, though, is that this house and all of its dismal furnishings have been painstakingly assembled within the bare, unused confines of the original Essex Street Market near Rivington Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The audience views the action by peering through or parting several diaphanous curtains and gazing in on dusty Halloween decor dispiritedly strewn around and the typical hipster mess of well-worn electronics, cheap living room furniture and empty beer cans. Kudos to scenic designer Marsha Ginsberg for the cheesy, fascinating macro- and micro-details of all of this, right down to the food-stained menu stuck to the refrigerator and the fine layer of undisturbed dust. Achoo!

Sure, pull the curtains aside, if you wish. No one stops you. If you want to reach past the window and slap some sense into one or another of Levine's characters, you're often close enough to do so. Lucky for the actors, I restrained myself, and I trust most other people will, too, though the temptation lingers through the hour-plus of increasing intrigue and tension.

It all starts off banal enough. "Nobody likes Frank Zappa," argues the curiously snide, menacing Doug (well played, in the cast I saw today, by shark-eyed Ben Mehl). "Nobody likes Captain Fucking Beefheart," he harangues his brother and housemate Mitch (Brian Bickerstaff). In return, the rangy, hapless Mitch can only offer a feeble retort, "But The Grateful Dead are okay?"

The (unwanted--by Doug, vaguely-wanted--by Mitch) presence of a blowsy cokehead named Viv (Eliza Baldi) introduces a few more critical areas of hostility between the brothers, which I will not reveal. Not that revealing any of this story would make a difference one way or another. That the plot of this thing is not really the point of this thing will become obvious once you experience it.

Your experience as a watcher is the point. Looking through those windows, figuring out where and how quickly to trot in order to catch the next batch of action, wondering if the "sleeping" Doug--one hand resting in a suspect location under the bedcovers--will start masturbating in front of your very eyes...all of this is the point. Getting to a place where you find yourself also looking hard at your fellow voyeurs as they gaze through windows on the opposite side of the house--that, too, might be the point.

If you lose interest--and you don't opt for reaching in and slapping--you can always keep an eye on the Animal Science show running on the characters' unwatched television. You know: wolves, bears, salmon swimming upstream. Wholesome family fare.

Habit runs through Sunday, September 30, open 1pm-9pm daily, featuring alternating casts. It's free and open to the public. Come and go as you please.

Essex Street Market (not the new one, though)
130 Essex Street (near Rivington Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

The extraordinary Ouramdane

Just posted: my Dance Magazine review of Rachid Ouramdane's Ordinary Witnesses (North American premiere) and World Fair (New York premiere) last week at New York Live Arts. Click here.

Bouchra Ouizguen and "Madame Plaza"

A few thoughts on Madame Plaza (2009), curated by Trajal Harrell for Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2010, certain difficulties, certain joy and co-presented by FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival at Florence Gould Hall:

With her research into the cultural practices of the Aïta women singers and dancers of her native Morocco, dancer-choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen tells us that she intends to break free of conventional perspectives on the female body and its uses in dance. Madame Plaza, however, seems to me to be a sign of the sheer beginning, not the fruit, of experimentation. 

The strongest push of the envelope that this hour-long production offers--at least for an audience that, as usual, is almost completely white--is the sight of four brown-skinned women, three of whom are far heavier than conventional dancers Americans are used to and are, indeed, Aïta performers, moving in spare, often pedestrian gestures and patterns like old-school and, frankly, tedious "downtown" stuff. This made me wonder: If this work did not have the Moroccan context--or the short passages of ecstatic incantation, thrashing and a little bit of gender-bending that directly relate to the world of the Aïta--would we find it interesting, intellectually or sensually compelling enough to justify the time? I paid attention and sought engagement from Madama Plaza's first, langourous, dead-silent moments, when the women sit or recline on oblong cushions, occasionally rearranging themselves. It never sparked my interest.

There was a telling moment, at the conclusion of Harrell's post-show Q&A, when Ouizguen took a final question from the audience about a statement she'd made about breaking away from her training and all that dance was supposed to be. The questioner asked,"What did you think dance was?"  The choreographer thought for a second, then replied that she no longer knew the answer to that question, didn't know what she's originally meant--a quite apt answer from someone apparently still in a liminal state of search. Both ends of the search--past and possible future--seem fuzzy to me, but I'd love to see what she and the Aïta can do when it all comes into focus.

Madame Plaza--with performances by Fatima El Hanna, Naïma Sahmoud, Kabboura Aït Ben Hmad and Bouchra Ouizguen--completes its run tonight at 8pm.

FIAF's Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street (between Park and Madison Avenues), Manhattan

Ticketing

Hoghe: "I invite dancers to my universe."

After a DTW performance of Sans-titre--wrought and performed by Raimund Hoghe (Germany) with Faustin Linyekula (Democratic Republic of Congo)--a respected colleague came up to me and told me that, even allowing for a broad definition, he failed to find much in the way of choreography in the piece. By this, I think he meant a deliberate, effective selection and arranging of movement material with connective tissue, some internal logic, a recognizable through-line. Instead, he found ideas and pieces of things here and there.

This frank assessment sent me into a momentary brain jam. The work had been, for me, intuitively recognizable as a "universe"--as Hoghe might call it--with its own structure and resonance. I had come out of the theater with chills up my back and feeling unable to speak and, what's more, feeling that words were not necessarily the most necessary things I could offer. In the course of seventy minutes, Hoghe and Linyekula had--through stark visual and kinetic elements and a haunting blend of Baroque music and Black spirituals--taken mundane space, marked it off for sacred work and turned it into a place of solemnity and tenderness. I felt no distance between myself, as spectator, and moments of loss, absence, grief or, for that matter, compassion and healing that these two men--different in so many ways--might have experienced in their lives.

The work is entitled "untitled," and it is a work that belongs to, and leaves generous space for, its audience. I cannot say how, but I know that I--as well as others--found ourselves inhabiting those spaces.

At the post-show Q&A--a curious and largely disappointing one, since DTW's Carla Peterson seemed unable to think up a way to engage Linyekula in a conversation dominated by Hoghe--Peterson noted that the audience had remained completely still during the performance. Listening and, now and then, gazing around me, I had noticed that, too. It felt, to me, like an attentiveness that ran unusually deep.

I note--but find myself less interested in--the striking differences between Hoghe and Linyekula. These include realities of race, age, nationality, culture, history and--the ones that usually make the most difference on a dance stage--physical form and ability. Hoghe--exposing his pronounced spinal deformity to our gaze--fits no conventional notion of dancer. (Please note: I wrote conventional.) Linyekula--youthful, slender, sinewy and with the facility of a marionette--is a handsome African Mercury, a dancing god. Their undeniable differences are Hoghe's preoccupation in this work--that and the possibility of human connection across difference.

What interested me more, in a personal way, as a former ritualist in women's spirituality circles, was the two men's creation and holding of ritual space, largely through minimalist iconography--blank sheets of white paper; pale-colored stones smoothed by the pressure of water--that simply takes you there. And as a former ritualist, I recognized, with a catch of my breath, Hoghe's equally deliberate, necessary, erasure of that space near the conclusion of the evening. Ritual space exists in a timeless place--a place out of ordinary human time. It is conjured as a protective enclosure for sacred work, and then it is carefully dispersed before we return to linear time and our day-to-day lives. Hoghe understands this.

Afterwards, in DTW's lobby, I felt I had returned to my life and the world a little too abruptly. Generally speaking, I prefer to incubate my experience with serious art--at least, overnight--before fully assessing it. Moreover, the Q&A felt strange. Had it not been for prompting from a choreographer in the audience, Linyekula--quietly sitting to Peterson's right--would not have been drawn into it at all. Peterson's body language--she was completely turned towards Hoghe for almost all of the time--puzzled me. Was she uncomfortable with the prospect of questioning Linyekula? Both men speak English clearly and both, I would think, could and should speak to the intention of the piece, the creative process and what the work feels like from inside. That Linyekula was left in silence for almost the entire time underscored difference--brought it roaring back into focus--in a way I found disturbing.

And yet this is our world. We leave the theater, leave sacred space, and we are right back in it. If theater, if ritual, has served its purpose, perhaps we will have learned something that we can use in the thick of things.

[Sans-titre, a co-presentation of Dance Theater Workshop and FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival]

Invisible Dog, Off Leash and Reimagined

Invisible Dog, Off Leash and Reimagined
by Melena Ryzik, The New York Times, September 13, 2010

What does "choreography" mean today?

Time to Put Choreography Back on Its Feet

by Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, September 2, 2010

Hassabi's collage

When the audience enters Performance Space 122's theater, dancer Maria Hassabi is already in action--well, maybe not in action, since SoloShow is so much about the collaging of a series of static images--"the history of female representation...pulled from art history, pop culture and everyday life." But she's there, amid James Lo's recording of what sounds like a large, bustling audience assembling for a performance.

Wearing a cream-colored, sleeveless top and pants clinging to her ballerina-skinny frame, she occupies one corner of a large platform, shifting from pose to pose. We don't often see her expression. When we do, it's like a thunderclap;  she suddenly pivots towards us with that haunted, big-eyed face and legs splayed in tremulous, claw-like rigidity. Soon, though, she tilts her head back so far that her torso appears beheaded.  Although the soundtrack's roar subsides, the severe tension of her pose increases. Joe Levasseur's overhead lighting blasts her, but she appears to take to it, willingly, like a lizard adjusting and drying itself under desert sun.

Sometimes she drapes herself over the platform's edge, neck straining, blood pooling in her face. Often, she will turn her body into brittle sculpture on the featureless, ungiving platform. The work lasts about an hour of clock time--quite a testament to Hassabi's vigor and determination--but you might find yourself completely losing track of time.

I regret missing Hassabi's Solo--conceived as an autonomous half of a diptych and premiered at PS 122 last month as part of FIAF's Crossing the Line festival--and I also haven't seen her SoloShow alternate, Hristoula Harakas.

A joint presentation of Performa 09 and PS 122, SoloShow continues through Sunday: Friday and Saturday, 8pm and 10pm; Sunday, 6pm. Complete information and ticketing here.

House of Harrell

How nice to get let into a performance space well before a show begins and be able to enjoy the quietly cheerful presence of its star-to-be as he greets friends. Last night at the New Museum, the stellar soloist in question--Trajal Harrell—started the show by handing out impeccably-printed cards with the lineup of twenty voguing “looks” to be performed over fifty minutes in the museum’s intimate theater space, surrounded on three sides by audience.


The piece is called Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (S)—the S representing “small”; reportedly, there are XS, M, L and XL versions. Besides the museum, Harrell’s savvy co-presenters include Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line festival. You have one more chance to see the exquisitely-performed (S): Go tonight!

Using a sextet of metal folding chairs—draped in pieces of clothing--as his dressing room, Harrell dons a changing, mix-match array. From Preppy Schoolboy (West and East Coast versions) to Legendary Face and Basquiat Realness, Harrell walks, embodying his long-imagined collision of Judsonian postmodernism (the party of NO!) and the aesthetics of the Harlem ball scene (YES! to glamour, YES! to theatricality, YES! to seduction). In fact, it is a big YES! to the importance of surface impressions and a hearty embrace of making magic (and magick) theatricality in postmodern dance.

For the most part, Harrell avoids the gleaming runway, created by artist Franklin Evans, taped over the theater’s floor. It’s there, but he’s elsewhere, breaking up not only the way we can look at him but the way he looks at everything with a gaze that sometimes draws the watcher in and sometimes evades or wards off the watcher, but is always pulled together and deployed like a serious and irreversible hoodoo spell.

This performance—a pleasure to witness--combines wit, patience, subtlety, awesome fluidity and grace and even some room for amusingly tacky effects (kitchen apron turned superhero’s cape with the help of an electric fan, for instance). The man’s keen taste in music and sure application of it for color and atmosphere are simply delectable. Harrell has always been an interesting thinker and creator. This piece, though, should make him legendary.

Tonight, 7pm, at New Museum, 235 Bowery, at Prince Street between Stanton & Rivington. 212-219-1222. Information also at Danspace Project.

Eat, dance and be merry!

The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) and the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) invite you to two full days of complimentary dancing, workshops, and cutting-edge cuisine.

Friday, September 11:

10am–12pm: Workshop with French choreographer Pierre Rigal

1–6pm: Dance Class with Odile Duboc, Latifa Laâbissi, Olivier Dubois, and Germaine Acogny (represented by Nora Chipaumire)

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Studio 6A
450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan

Saturday, September 12:

1–6pm: Le Bal NYC

Central Park, East Meadow
Entrance on Fifth Ave and 99th Street, Manhattan

Kindly RSVP by calling 646-731-3206 before Wednesday, September 2.

Program

On Friday, September 11, attend a workshop with world-renowned choreographer Pierre Rigal at Baryshnikov Arts Center, followed by a fun and invigorating class with four of France’s most respected choreographers: Odile Duboc, Latifa Laâbissi, Olivier Dubois, and Germaine Acogny (represented by Nora Chipaumire). Each choreographer will teach brand new dances created especially for Le Bal NYC, the free public dance party/picnic in Central Park that will launch FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival the next day.

Then, on Saturday, September 12 you’ll attend Le Bal NYC and assist the choreographers in teaching the dances you’ve just learned to the crowd in the Park—all while sampling snacks created by some of the hottest chefs in France and NYC!

What is Le Bal NYC?

A fresh new take on some classic French traditions, the “bal populaire” and the “pique-nique” are reinvented as Crossing the Line is launched on the East Meadow in Central Park. French choreographers Odile Duboc, Latifa Laâbissi, Olivier Dubois, and Germaine Acogny have specially created short new dances to be taught section by section to the public. As both audience and performers of the new work, participants get an insider’s look into the mechanics of contemporary choreography as well as the creative imagination of dance personalities. To sate the appetite of all these dancing feet, the Omnivore “brigade” will be creating special Crossing the Line Bento Boxes—a unique vision of the picnic with different elements created by innovative master chefs Inaki Aizpitarte, Alexandre Gauthier, Pascal Barbot, and Michel Bras from France, as well as New York’s David Chang and Wylie Dufresne.

Dancers of all ages are invited to participate in Le Bal NYC, a unique celebration set to take place in East Meadow, Central Park on Saturday, September 12, 2009.

Le Bal NYC

What is Crossing the Line?

Crossing the Line is FIAF’s annual fall festival, conceived as a platform to present vibrant new works by a diverse range of transdisciplinary artists working in France and New York City. Initiated, conceived, and produced by FIAF (the French Institute Alliance Française) in partnership with leading New York cultural institutions, the third annual edition of this inter-disciplinary contemporary arts festival further develops its focus on artists who are transforming cultural practices on both sides of the Atlantic. Over three intensive weeks this fall—whether by performing shopping, watching sounds, composing films, or reading movements—audiences will join in exploring and tasting a unique collection of outstanding new works and experiences, and discovering new revelations from each of these extraordinary artists.

Crossing the Line

French Institute Alliance Française
22 East 60th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, Manhattan