What we have in Commons: The Commons Choir at BRIC

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

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

No. Not the subway system.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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Daria Faïn and Gillian Walsh share a Gibney DoublePlus

Daria Faïn, above and below, in is as if alone
(photos: Alex Escalante)

Gibney Dance Center's DoublePlus performance series, curated by invited dance artists, continues to fascinate. Last evening's show, repeating tonight and through Saturday at 7:30pm, presented the work of Daria Faïn and Bessie-nominee Gillian Walsh, curated by RoseAnne Spradlin.

Walsh, in Hasbro™ Procedures took the measure of the theater's bare space, treating it as the board of a kind of board game involving regular and formally regulated repositioning of game pieces/ dancers, it would seem, in accord with a script consisting of numbers that the dancers softly recite as they execute affectless steps, hops, lunges, shifts of weight and redirections. Notably, Walsh and her three dancers--Maggie Cloud, Mickey Mahar and Nicole Daunic--mostly do not face audience members; they never directly engage them. Nevertheless, some watchers might find themselves swiftly reeled in by this curious play.

Where, for instance, is the number 3? When I gradually became aware of its absence in the litany, I listened hard for it, subsequently hearing it intoned, I believe, only once. I have no idea what relevance that absence and momentary insertion might have, but I note it here to show that there are ways to get caught up in the gentle and esoteric nature of the game. Awareness comes along in unassuming moments like that. I have no idea what other bits and bytes of information my conscious perception might have missed.

Scenes from Gillian Walsh's Hasbro™ Procedures (photos: Alex Escalante) 

What a pleasure, what a revelation, to witness Faïn performing solo. The choreographer--who, along with poet-architect Robert Kocik, usually plays with big choruses of moving vocalists/vocalizing movers--here inhabits a roomy space and a dance on her own, and she is beautiful.

The piece, is as if alone, seems like a rite of emergence, starting with husky, dry sounds issuing from Faïn's mouth as she very slowly walks along the dance mirror at one side of the space, solo but doubled in the glass. Dressed in a long, silvery skirt and black halter top, under the cooling gleam of Kryssy Wright's elegant lighting, she looks both severe and glamorous. The feeling is "Take this as seriously as I do." She starts to sound like the north wind--serious, indeed.

She pinches, stretches, coughs and pumps syllables and vowels, enjoys a few variations on the word "wow," her arching, crouching body expressing itself in voice and enigmatic gesture. A more dancey segment finds perhaps her remembering to explore the interior of the theater's space, the middle space. There she shows us the beauty of going off center. Her maturity and her way with timing, with pacing, with shaping, lends itself to grace and power and strangeness. There are spectral visitations from Graham and, I suspect, infusions from the East--Japanese theater, Sufi spinning. And sometimes, a sentence might arise, fully formed, from Kocik's text.

With no room, nothing could have gone wrong for the better.

Like the absence/presence of the number 3 in Walsh's game, these words hook into me and stay.

For more information and tickets for this program and future weeks of DoublePlus shows, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis
Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Freedom to MOVE: Dance and Alexander Technique

Freedom to MOVE: 2013

A conference on Dance and the Alexander Technique

developed by Ann Rodiger

presented by Balance Arts Center

May 17-19

***

Presenters:

Joan Arnold

Tom Baird

Rebecca Brooks

Nada Diachenko

Daria Fain

Emily Faulkner

Eva Karczag

Juliette Mapp

Katherine Mitchell

Rebecca Nettl-Fiol

Cynthia Reynolds

Ann Rodiger

Shelley Senter

Jennifer Sielicki

Erin Thompson

Luc Vanier

Deborah Weitzman

                             

Come join us for the third Freedom to Move Dance and Alexander Technique conference.

We will continue to explore how the Alexander Technique supports and complements dance technique and performance.

Movement freedom, ease, and coordination can be enhanced and taught through concepts and principles of Alexander Technique.  The conference provides experiences and exploration of many ways the Alexander Technique can be applied to dance – from tango to composition to research to performance.

You will also have time to share and exchange ideas as we work together.

All the conference presenters have had extensive experience both in teaching the Alexander Technique and in dance. The Alexander Technique has greatly influenced their thinking and approach to movement, how they teach, and how they create work. The variety of workshops speaks to the fundamental all-encompassing nature of the Alexander Technique and how the concepts are permeating many corners of the dance world.
Come join us and explore!

Pearl Studios
500 8th Avenue, 12th Floor (between 35th and 36th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Full conference schedule HERE
Register HERE
Registration by May 1st: $225
Registration after May 1st $250
Student rates and Single sessions available

Strolling with Faïn and Kocik and "E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E"

Somehow I never before considered that a preamble could be visualized--embodied, really--as an actual milling about of performers before a show begins. Such is the pre-ambulating perambulation at New York Live Arts this week where, after the historic Hurricane Sandy postponement, Commons Choir/Daria Faïn & Robert Kocik finally got a chance to open E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E.

As the audience enters the theater, the aisles seem clogged with extra bodies just standing there at the entrances to rows of seating. It turns out that they're members of choreographer Faïn and poet/librettist Kocik's Commons Choir hovering over you and casting pleasant gazes at you and one another, maybe going up or down a few steps. A little unnerving, irritating even--although, as time and the piece goes on, this gets more normalized and is nothing compared to their startling reactive outbursts of movement in at least one row that I could see (reserved for a few of these choir members) in the middle of the piece.

E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E spills up from a stage filled with people of notable racial and ethnic diversity into the audience because--as I understand it, and I'm not saying I've got it right--it is meant to grab all of us up in its experiment. It is about us--the human race--and how we got to be as we are, where we might have taken a particular unfortunate turn and how, if we retraced our steps and looked at the origin of language, breaking it down into its component bits and sounds, we might want to start fresh, we might deconstruct and construct new structures, we might do things very differently. Program notes describe this work as "an epic, town hall musical that calls upon a panoply of reparative tones, tunes and intentions to plead the case for a more compassionate economy, proposing, with Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, money as everyone's." A hybrid of continuous movement and vocalization, the ensemble work is, the creators say, performed in the idiom of "Re-English," since English might be "an inherently commercial, mercenary, discursive, duplicitous tongue," one that they have cleverly attempted to "re-tune, detox and de-delude."

I don't pretend to understand the demarcation, differentiation and meaning of the line up of four acts (here identified as "amulets") and their so-called "(intermission)"--which happened exactly when?, since we went straight through the work's too-lengthy-feeling 90+ minutes--or who represented the characters named in the notes--"Uzume," "Souffleur," "Perineum, "Thrasymachus," et al. But Faïn and Kocik's imagination, particularly with words, charms the hell out of me. The work breathes like one organism formed of many individual ones that rise and fall in levels of intensity, organize themselves alone or in the company of others, remain stationary or move, perform clear, if enigmatic, seed sounds and simple gestures, sometimes orchestrated into seamless rhythmic sense and harmony.

Although everyone--and this is a big cast, including Faïn and Kocik--figures into E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E, the work contains singular moments of transcendent boldness. Larissa Velez-Jackson, who incessantly wields then breaks her wooden saber, triggers shrieks of laughter from the crowd, but then you sense that she is skillfully drawing this harsh music out of them like a conductor or, perhaps, a shaman. Levi Gonzalez hangs onto monologues with heroic earnestness while shrinking and scrunching his body in various punishing ways. Faïn goes right up to Peter Jacobs, a self-contained and self-assured Ayn Rand type, with forthright, gentle and, always, precisely applied movement remedies.

A vague memory from the 60's of anti-war poster showing a a rifle-bearing soldier being offered a flower stays with me. There's a whiff of this innocence in E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E, and something of the (for worse or for better) foolhardiness of it. But to watch Faïn with Jacobs, just in those moments, is to let go and fall in love with her entire project.

Faïn and Kocik's performers demonstrate palpable unity and commitment. In addition to Velez-Jackson, Gonzalez and Jacobs, they are Christina Andrea, Maximilian Balduzzi, CC Chang, Hazuki Homma, Whitney Hunter, Aram Jibilian, Dora Koimtzi, Mina Nishimura, Jaime Ortega, Peter Sciscioli, Kensaku Shinohara, Samita Sinha, Emily Skillings, Ben Spatz, Despina Stamos, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Julie Ulehia, Saúl Ulerio and Katherine A. Young who also composed the instrumental music performed by Jen Baker (trombone) and Sam Sowyrda (percussion). Lighting is by Carrie Wood.

E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E has two remaining performances--tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

There will be a post-performance Stay Late Discussion this evening, moderated by Carla Peterson, Artistic Director of New York Live Arts.

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

Some DNA discoveries

With its choreography series, OB-ject-ob-JECT, Dance New Amsterdam fosters innovative collaboration among women artists working in various disciplines. This season--which ends tomorrow with a 3pm performance--offers a few good reasons to head to DNA now and to keep watch for more notable developments from its current roster of artists.

I'm most intrigued by the Italian, Amsterdam-based choreographer Giulia Mureddu. In Bava (US premiere), Mureddu duets with a squealing, mewling, man-sized puppet with spongey, bulging cloth flesh and hard, glassy eyes that sparkle under the lights. The puppet (designed by collaborator Ulrike Quade) seems to be fused with the dancer's body and with her soul. Her precise, sensitive manipulation of this figure not only creates an poignant, at times frightening illusion that it is alive but also displays alternating facets of a relationship both tender and terribly dark in nature. Bava is a kaleidoscopic, disturbing dream--and a brilliant execution of Mureddu and Quade's concept.

Soloist Marýa Wethers and choreographer Daria Faïn have made good on the promise of a work-in-progress I saw, last December, at 92nd Street Y. TARGET::furnace (phase one) seems to have clarified its purpose as a fantasy of the iconic woman hero/superhero/martial artist--She possessed of indomitable physical and mental acuity. In the opening segment, Wethers--wrapped in an oversized, thick terry cloth robe, with matching bath towels draped over her head, an amazing, sculptural costume--strides round and around with her game face on and her arms and fists raised in the gesture of a prize fighter. In another high-energy passage, Wethers unleashes her superpowers, spinning this way and that as she throws darts at Robert Kocik's wooden "target-objects." At times, TARGET (otherwise oddly titled, but Faïn and poet Kocik are noted for intricate investigation and word play) feels a little loose-thready. But its interesting conclusion hints at breakthrough to a consciousness beyond strength and heroism. Katherine Young's luscious score--performed live by Young (bassoon), Christine Bard (percussion) and Erica Dicker (violin)--contributes a fragrant, haunting sound bouquet.

In Mariangela Lopez's Accidental #5 (world premiere), a lone woman holding a pose I'd readily call "the kneeling Isadora Duncan" eventually gives way to a floor-full of women and men in weird-ass costumes, no two alike, who flail and jerk their bodies long and hard. Suddenly stopping, they pant, looking around in that way that you do when you're standing still and managing to hold yourself up but your brain seems to spinning in its skull. If Accidental #5, as it progresses, comes off looking like amateurish good-time romping--hey, let's all mass together and boogie down and hoot and holler!--I guess we can trace that back this ecstatic opening. There's a hella lotta energy here, which clearly sparked the audience around me last night; rousing hoots greeted the sixteen dancers and Lopez as they lined up for their bows. Hella lotta energy doesn't quite substitute for innovation, but Lopez does introduce a few unexpected ways of addressing space--by tucking a pocket of hot activity in a far corner, partly obscured by the wings or having her sixteen dancers form a many-headed, multi-faceted organism slowly crawling the rear of the space. A marvelous dancer herself, she's got an interesting eye for visual effects and a playful spirit bordering on the rebellious, and I just want her to totally cross that border and go there.

For more information on OB-ject-ob-JECT and ticketing for tonight (8pm) or tomorrow (3pm), click here.

Daria Faïn's alchemical process

Daria Faïn's will teach six classes in Internal Alchemy as a Motor for Performance, Tuesdays and Thursdays, June 2-18 (10am-Noon).

These six classes will explore the transition between spring and summer involving the correlation between liver and heart and the correspondences with the senses, the emotions and the body systems in sympathy with these two seasons and two organs.

Faïn provides a rigorous practice that opens and strengthens the body/mind symbiosis and leads the student to experience the internal and the external at once. Her movement approach works within the mutual influences between behavior and environment. It is supported by her longtime practice and study of the Chinese 5 Element Theory, the Alexander Technique and architecture. By engaging the core body and its energetic resonances, one can find full embodiment in stillness.

Location: CSV Cultural Center, 107 Suffolk St, 2nd Floor, Manhattan. B,D, F, J, M, V, Z trains

Please arrive before 10am. There is no buzzer. If you are late, call 718 450 1356 to be let in.

Fee: $16/class or series of 4 for $55

You can register online through this link for Paypal. Click on the donate button, and type $65 in the amount box.

Drop-in students are also welcome.

If you are a dance student and have financial difficulties, please contact Daria Faïn to make some arrangements with her: daria@prosodicbody.org.

Possibilities of internship financial plans are available.

Please note that the Tai Chi workshop scheduled for this weekend is cancelled.

Singing the body prosodic

Movement Research presents
Two PROSODIC BODY events

The Prosodic Body - Language as a Somatic Practice

HOW DO WE KNOW WHERE WE ARE AND WHAT TO SAY AND DO BY USING THE SAME BRAIN ALL AT ONCE?

Monday, May 4, 5pm -- Free

Judson Memorial Church Gymnasium
55 Washington Square South, Manhattan

Conceived by and moderated by Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik

As part of the Studies Project Series, choreographer Daria Fain and poet Robert Kocik will engage neuroscientist André A. Fenton in a dialogue about the multiple types of memory and the mental representation of space and experience. In particular, the focus will fall on the brain's polyglotism--the coordination of multiple processes by rapid 'switching' or 'doubling up.' The dialogue will wend its way into a consideration of language. Perhaps some light will be shed on the unanswerable question 'is language acquired or hardwired?' Kocik will trace a broader physiology of language by involving the hypothalamus, glands and organs. Faïn will attempt to extend the findings into movement by experimentally acting out the questions and conundrums surrounding the hippocampus as presented by Fenton.

André A. Fenton is a neuroscientist at SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn. His research focuses on spatial memory and the hippocampus as model structure for understanding all parts of the brain. His SUNY team is responsible for the recent discovery of a very promising 'memory molecule'.

Movement Research at the Judson Church

The Phoneme Choir
by Daria Faïn Robert Kocik
Monday, May 4, 8pm -- Free

Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South, Manhattan

The Phoneme Choir is an orchestrated performance of the forty phonemes that are the English language's most basic structural units. Speech sounds such as vowels and consonants are examples of phonemes. In performance, The Phoneme Choir will bring the subtleties of our language to life through a musical composition of sound, rhythm, unison, and discord. As philosopher Rudolf Steiner wrote, “The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end.” This is the second public presentation of The Phoneme Choir, a work that Faïn and Kocik are developing through the Movement Research Artist In Residence. Faïn and Kocik conducted a series of four workshops leading up to this performance.

Making dance is an inside job

Dollars and Sensibility: "It Topples Fast"
by Daria Faïn, Movement Research Performance Journal, mid-winter to summer, 1996

"The translation of cash in French, is “liquide” or “espece” (liquid or species) It’s liquid. You cannot grasp it."

"For me, money is a form of energy that challenges circulation and dynamic. In our necessities to encounter society, money is an everyday current of exchange. It is good to keep it that way. The use of money may define a way of living."

Dancer Levi Gonzalez suggested a revisiting of this MRPJ essay on money, culture, community and the interior, bony structure of dance by choreographer Daria Faïn. Read more here.

Faïn and Kocik: transformative space

Daria Faïn (choreographer) and Robert Kocik (architect/sculptor/poet) have had the good fortune to visit and soak up the atmosphere of ancient healing sites on the isle of Amorgos in Greece. Their new work, The Extent to Which, evokes the resonant geometry and history of the temples, baths and ampitheaters in which the Greeks cleansed bodymindsoul. As part of The Prosodic Body--Faïn and Kocik's overarching project--The Extent to Which re-links art and health in our modern-day awareness with an aim to create true transformation, not mere spectacle.

As spectacle, though, Extent has its beauties and its intensities, certainly not separate from its purpose. Performed inside and around an open enclosure of plexiglas and wood, with a stream of increasingly primal sounds both remote and startingly near, the hour-long work abstracts the experience of sitting in the ancient structures and witnessing the ritual arts. In one captivating passage, we watch dancers orbit the center of the performance space, and one another in shifting arrangements and pathways, with their arms and hands forming various hieratic gestures and their bare feet making a soft, dry, shuffling sound.

Another segment takes a less soothing approach as dancers pitch painted rocks at the barriers. There's a fascinating theatrical tension between the crash of rocks smacking into plexiglas--not far from audience members looking on from risers on those sides of the space--and the total control of dancers who, though dashing precariously around one another, toss those rocks with the power and disciplined, studied grace of Olympian athletes.

At the end of the performance, I felt more than a little spacey, as if I had been transported to another world.

The Extent to Which, a joint presentation of Danspace Project and CPR--Center for Performance Research, features Faïn's troupe, Human Behavior Explorers: Benjamin Asriel, Charlotte Gibbons, Alexandra Martorell, Valerie Samulski and Peter Sciscioli. Other members of the collaborative team include Rodrick Murray (lighting), Matt Dick (costumes), Michelle Nagai (music), and Kenta Nagai (live sound performer). The show runs through Sunday with two performances tonight, Friday and Saturday (7pm and 9pm) and a 3pm performance on Sunday.

CPR
361 Manhattan Avenue, Williamburg, Brooklyn
Just a short walk from the L train at Graham Avenue

Information and reservations or 718-715-1500

Daria Faïn seeks administrative assistant

Provide administrative oversight and implementation to Daria Faïn and her company in all areas of company activities, including fundraising, grant-writing, marketing, project management and general operations. Writing skills are essential.

Fundraising, Grant Writing: Strategize fund raising in conjunction with Daria and develop grant proposals, budgets and supporting materials. Help plan fund raising events.

Marketing: Help develop and create marketing materials, including programs. Facilitate the duplication of videotapes and press kits.

Project management: Help manage company projects. Research in relation to current or future projects.

General Operations: Check and respond to mail, telephone messages and email.

Part-time position (8-15 hrs per week)
$12 per hour

Job begins as soon as possible.

CONTACT:
d a r i a f a ï n
101 decatur street # 3 -- brooklyn 11216
humanbehaviorexplorers@earthlink.net
7 1 8 4 5 0 1 3 5 6
skype: dariafain

Admin Assistant needed

Daria Faïn of human behavior explorers seeks a new administrative assistant. She writes:

My wonderful assistance Sean Donavan is leaving this position to go on tour and produce is own work and our company is looking for someone to take his place. The position requires administrative oversight and implementation to Daria Fain and her company in all areas of company activities, including fundraising, grant-writing, marketing, project management and general operations.

Fundraising, Grant Writing: Strategize fund raising in conjunction with Daria and develop grant proposals, budgets and supporting materials. Help plan fund raising events.

Marketing: Help develop and create marketing materials, including programs. Facilitate the duplication of videotapes and press kits.

Project management: Help manage company projects. Research in relation to current or future projects.

General Operations: Check and respond to mail, telephone messages and email.

This is a part-time position (12-15 hrs per week) and pay is $12 per hour (negotiable according to experience). Job will begin at the end of May 2008. Commitment through November 2008 minimum.

Contact

d a r i a f a ï n
101 decatur street # 3 -- brooklyn 11216
humanbehaviorexplorers@earthlink.net
718-450-1356
skype: dariafain