Singing with spirits

On Saturday, February 22, 2020, I was joined by Okwui Okpokwasili and David Thomson in leading an opening ritual for Danspace Project's platform, Utterances from the Chorus, conceived and curated by Okwui and Judy Hussie-Taylor.

As the audience settled into seats in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery's parish hall, David and Okwui began to hum and vocalize as I read an invitation. It opened with a question derived from Okwui's exploration for the new platform which, regrettably, was interrupted and scrapped as the coronavirus pandemic shut our city down.

Here, I offer a new version of this invitation. As we now struggle with multiple traumas--the pandemic, the economic crisis, the murder of our Black kin--and dedicate our lives to justice, may you find this ritual healing, strengthening and motivating.

I invite you to perform it privately or in groups, as you find it useful.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: D. Feller)

Okwui asked:

What does it mean to weave a collective song?


And so, let us ask:


What does it mean to weave a spirit song on Lenape land? 

What does it mean to sing with the African souls?


What does it mean to be guided?

What does it mean to be activated?


Today, charge this space with the energy of sound.


Seek and find your name inside your cells,

inside your veins,

inside your bones.


Sit or stand with the energy of your name circling inside you until you hear its song.


Bring that energy out into this space on the flow of breath and flow of melody.


What is your name?

Sing your name.

Sing your true name.


Find a melody that transports your name into this space.


Keep singing your name into the space.

You can get loud with it.

You can get soft.


You may pause if you’d like to rest,

and you may resume at any time.


You may raise your votive candle above your head at any time, and that gesture will mean whatever it wants to mean.


You may extend your votive candle in front of you at any time, and that gesture will mean whatever it wants to mean.


Feel and sing or chant the name of ancestors of your family blood or ancestors of your mind.


Find the melodies that transmit their names into this space--loud or soft.


Keep singing their names into this space.

Keep singing their names into this space.

Keep singing their names into this space.


Return at any time to the song of your own name.


Sing. Sing out.

Sing. Sing it out.

Keep singing.

******

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

******

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David Thomson opens world premiere at Performance Space New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above and below: Thomson
(photos: Maria Baranova)

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

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

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

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

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12th Annual Barnard/Columbia Dances at New York Live Arts

No, these Barnard and Columbia dance students do not play. In several performances this weekend at New York Live Arts, they stepped up and nailed four demanding works--Sasha Waltz's Fantasie (2006), staged by Kevin Quinaou, and three world premieres by David Thomson, Joanna Kotze and Jennifer Archibald. And if yesterday's matinee left me absolutely sure I've seen enough of dancers running--Waltz, I'm looking at you in particular, though not exclusively--it also underscored the strengths of the Barnard College dance training. The quicksilver versatility, commitment and stamina of these young performers are impressive. As for the new works, I can say--again, with utmost certainty--that Archibald's Shades ruled the day. Dramatically lit by Tricia Toliver, it's the perfect hip hop video gone live at New York Live Arts, and some movement looks compelling simply because it's danced in unison, spread over and magnified by a mass of fourteen bodies. But the dancers bring everything into lasar-sharp focus. This one's worth a repeat. Presenters, I hope you're reading this! Worth a repeat.

Congratulations to all the dancers, all the choreographers and everyone at Barnard College Department of Dance.

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Dancing the park: Avilés and Thomson get Bronx-specific

photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Roses don't really grow this way, like wildflowers. 

But, if we want, we can place markers for beauty where we envision it or need it to be. 

For Ritual Dance, Arthur Avilés turned the several green stretches of Owen Dolen Park (East Bronx) into sanctified spaces for white-clad celebrants reflecting the late-day sun in their formal handsomeness and pleasure.

Arthur Avilés Typical Theatre performers
approach their ritual site at Owen Dolen Park.
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ritual Dance, featuring thirty dancers, was part of Dancing in the Streets' two-evening site-specific festival Dancing Through the Bronx.

Audience members could move about and watch from any number of vantage points, all good. With perfect weather and a convivial atmosphere, Ritual Dance drew many curious onlookers from the neighborhood--a dance placed on the green and in the open air, like unexpected blossoms.

Please enjoy these images from Ritual Dance.

photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ni'Ja Whitson
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ni'Ja Whitson
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ni'Ja Whitson
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Arthur Avilés
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Arthur Avilés
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

In contrast to Avilés's playful, purifying light, David Thomson brought intimations of night's veil in his enigmatic short stories, a trio of diffuse but affiliated solos for women dancers--Emmanuélle Phuon, Jodi Bender and Omagbitse Omagbemi. The dancers migrated to various patches of green, carrying the mystery of their identity, intentions and interior engagements.

Emmanuélle Phuon,
above and below, in David Thomson's short stories

photos ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Jodi Bender, this and next two photos
in short stories
©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Omagbitse Omagbemi,
above and below, in short stories
photos ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Acclaimed site-specific choreographer Joanna Haigood, a longtime associate of Dancing in the Streets, served as artistic advisor for Dancing through the Bronx.

The second event in this series will be held tomorrow, Sunday, at 3pm at the Gaudí-inspired Hayden Lord Park. This program includes works by dance artists Marsi Burns, Shizu Homma, Monifa Kincaid and Rebecca Lloyd-Jones.

For directions to Hayden Lord Park, click here.

Dance artist and BAAD! artistic director Arthur Aviles (r)
with his partner and BAAD! executive director Charles Rice-Gonzalez
at 2008 Bessie Awards party at South Street Seaport
(photo ©2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

New York Live Arts presents Buffard's "Baron Samedi"

David Thomson leads the international cast of
Alain Buffard's "choreographed opera," Baron Samedi,
at New York Live Arts, now through Saturday evening
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Danse: a French-American Festival of Performance & Ideas will run through May 18 at fourteen New York City venues (see information here) to examine "the ways in which dance engages with and informs our understanding of the world." The festival got off to a provocative start last night at New York Live Arts with Baron Samedi (2012), the final work of the late multi-genre artist Alain Buffard.

This "choreographed opera" is not easy to embrace. It took me a while before I found my way into it, and its continues to unfold today in my mind--which argues for the gravity and value of Buffard's offering.

Drawing from Haitian voodoo symbolism--in which the corpse-like Baron Samedi rules both healing and death--and the music of Kurt Weill, this work emerges from a very dark morass. At it opens, we are given only a woman's strong, melancholy singing voice and the soft, vulnerable patches of light on her face, something for us to hold onto. An hour later, everything brought to light slowly seeps back into darkness.

When we are first granted full sight of the stage, we see motley figures moving over and away from a clean white platform. Designed by Nadia Lauro, this platform resembles a large, undulating sheet of blank paper. It nearly engulfs the performance space, and it complicates it, creating discrete areas for encounters and interactions or for individual behavior separate from the whole. There's a slippery slide effect, too, that plays a part in the physical theater of the piece.

You will notice that the typical racial balance of "downtown dance" has been upended; most of the performers are Black, born either in African nations or in the US. They include Nadia Beugré (Ivory Coast/France), Dorotheé Munyaneza (Rwanda/France), Hiengiwe Lushaba (South Africa) and venerable New York dance artists Will Rawls and David Thomson. Three others--dancer Olivier Normand and the two musicians, double bass player Sarah Murcia and guitarist Sébastien Martel--are, like Buffard, white and French. This shift in balance, and the pulse and propulsion of the dancers' movement across the sloping white surface, works brilliantly with the platform's undulation, keeping everyone, including observers, in a continuous, unsettling state of flux. Although the villain of the piece--the amoral, lascivious and hideously vain Baron, played by Thomson--is Black, he serves as a lens on the nasty workings of European colonialism. Buffard underscores his preoccupation with this theme by having performers sing Weill's "Pirate Jenny" and "Ballad of the Soldier's Wife."

Baron Samedi, himself, is on hand to stir movement and provoke uncertainty (of one's identity, one's station in life, one's autonomy, one's physical and psychological safety). Thomson, sounding like a bit like the great Geoffrey Holder, reaches his high point in dancing when the Baron is at his lowest. Confronted by his victims, he is revealed to be nothing more than a hollow man, a skeleton tottering on the verge of collapse, a sack of graveyard dust.

Baron Samedi runs through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. You're also invited to come early this evening at 6:30pm for a conversation on Baron Samedi--Symbolism and Practice in Haitian Voodoo moderated by Whitney V. Hunter, PhD Candidate and Director of Whitney Hunter [MEDIUM]. For complete information and tickets, click here.

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

Stella!

I'm telling you now: If you're incapable of being mesmerized by Muna Tseng's Stella, you're dead from the neck up and the neck down. Better see to that little problem.

And if you have not seen Stella, try for tonight's wait list at the door, starting at 7:15pm.

Since Judy Hussie-Taylor took the helm at Danspace Project, glamor, humor, sensuality and ecstasy in "downtown" dance have found a friendly welcome through the creativity of her PLATFORM curators. Tseng's production, though technically not part of the PLATFORM series, feels like an extension of all that and the crown on top and quite shamelessly so. Its art installation and most of its costuming come directly from Tseng's late mother, the Stella in question, an elegant fashion plate in her day.

Entering St. Mark's sanctuary, you might think you took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up at the Met's Costume Institute. Sit down and get comfortable. You're about to have an audience with a woman voted one of Shanghai's Top Ten Beauties.

Four performers--Tseng, David Thomson, Rebecca Warner and Isadora Wolf--embody Stella. Tseng, seated at one side of the space, plays a recording of narration that blends history and personal memory. Thomson, Warner and Wolf play dress-up, their makeup, wigs and cheongsams--curve-hugging, high-necked dresses diagonally zipped up under the arm--invoking the good life recreated in Hong Kong after Stella's folks fled the emergence of Communism in China. (This lifestyle would not remain affluent after the family eventually relocated to Canada, a poignant backdrop to this visual display.) Thomson's lengthy solo segment, opening with a scarily meticulous primer on the right way to set a table and serve guests, is a stunning character study--not to mention that Thomson really has the legs for that little gray dress/jacket ensemble.

The prickly toughie under Stella's polished surface comes through there as well as in a long, amusing parade of Stella-isms projected behind some of the dancing. Go figure a woman who would counsel the use of sunscreen because "you don't want to be an African mask" or who would advise you to "read Emily Bronte not Amy Tan" or slam you with "You make me cough blood." Reading these words takes us further into Tseng's engagement with her complicated inheritance from a mom who internalized values from Western culture and "polite" society. Stella/Stella is, by turns, powerfully seductive and discomfiting.

If Judy Hussie-Taylor and her curators have warmed to the idea of over-the-topness in dance, they probably never envisioned anything as over the top as what Tseng pulls off at Stella's finale--an old-school theatrical Wow! befitting the woman and even out-camping the camp of Thomson and his porcelain soup spoons and high heels. To which I can only say--to Stella and to Tseng--You go, girl!

Stella--final performance tonight at 8pm

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church
Second Avenue and Tenth Street, Manhattan
(directions)

"One-Shot" and infinite possibilities

One-Shot--"a web-based, solo performance relay" curated by Sarah Maxfield and hosted by Gibney Dance Center

Featured performers: Megan Sprenger, David Thomson and Aretha Aoki

Check it out on Vimeo, and join the conversation!

Meg Stuart lays it out on the table

I hope Meg Stuart and Performa 09 will not mind my quoting a bit of the promotion for Auf den Tisch! (At the Table!) which I attended, last night, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. It's really the best way to get the concept right:

Picture this: you enter a room and can take a seat at an enormous table, with four microphones at the ready, as if in a conference situation. From your chair you can see how the table becomes a platform for action and reflection. Or something of the kind. You see performers sing, play, dance, and talk about performance issues, fragility, and territories. Or not. Meeting and improvising at an oversized table such as this one, it is no wonder that things get out of proportion. “Auf den Tisch!” (At the Table!) is a curatorial improvisation-project by Meg Stuart. Upon her invitation and initiation, a changing cast of performers, thinkers, writers, musicians, actors, and dancers confer about their pressing issues while presenting a performance of negotiations.

If you manage to get a reservation for tonight's final performance (7:30pm), you too can witness--or, as you wish, more directly participate in--this conference of sorts.

The table--a huge, blond wood beauty with a couple of unimaginatively used trap doors--is a total performer magnet. Who wouldn't look at this spacious, brightly lit thing and want to clamber on and act out?  Combining the likes of Stuart, David Thomson, Yvonne Meier, George Emilio Sanchez, Trajal Harrell, Keith Hennessy and others, you certainly have the makings of a major act of acting out. Audience folk sit to table with the performers or occupy a few rows of chairs that ring it. As Stuart settles down in front of her microphone and gazes around the room, there's a sense of something momentous about to happen.

She starts by reading text. It sounds sensitive, fragile and quiet, a kind of table-like base for what will follow, and might represent Stuart's essential nature as the dreamer and generator of the entire project. The performance I saw contained a repeating motif of a heavy body or bodies piling on top of or rolling over a body underneath. Stuart's opening words are followed by other voices around the table that accumulate and spill over one another, swelling, eventually subsiding.

Stuff happens. Lots of it. Anything can happen, since improvisation is in the room. Thomson, dressed in a comic-strip hoodie and jeans, prowled the

space between table and outer chairs. Later, he was the first to bust out dancing, top and center, in loose-limbed, splayed-out movements.

Meier--challenged by Stuart at one point-- retorted, "I'm sorry. I'm not sitting on my mouth." Someone, to clunky effect, alluded to the Fort Hood shooting: "I'm still stuck on the psychiatrist with a machine gun. Was he improvising?"

A parlor game broke out, and the possible fucking of pineapples and righteous politics of pineapples were contemplated. Thomson and Harrell engaged in a cross-table Q&A about forgiveness. A belligerent Janez Jansa somewhat reluctantly performed the history of Richard Schechner's "putting off of clothes." This "getting close to history" made Meier at last "sit on her mouth."

The spectacular "Floral Cat"--the spectacular Hennessy in costume--touched off a segment of leftover Halloween shenanigans. Sanchez--in a kind of Soupy Sales act flipped upside down and turned psychological--encouraged all of us to take a piece of paper money from our own wallets and simply rip it up. Amid more scampering, a few words were carefully added to a flipchart and just left there, meaninglessly, until someone gave the equally meaningless order for the flipchart to be flattened to the floor.

There were dashes of chemistry, untethered patches of the jazz of delicious movement (Thomson, Harrell) and wide-awake humor (Sanchez), and not a little mystification and diminishing returns. The performers seemed unwilling to acknowledge signs that energy and interest had dropped. What I had been told would last "maybe a little over an hour," stretched towards two hours before, having had more than enough, I rose to leave.

You have to know when to push back from the table.

At that point, Stuart, having just asked the audience if it had any questions, was answered by a heavy silence. For an interesting moment, we were left with her standing rather defenselessly before us in all her original sensitivity, fragility and quiet. Okay. Matters could have ended there, and quite reasonably.

But then, Performa founder and director RoseLee Goldberg took the mic and asked something on the order of "Do you think improvisation is still alive?"

I'm not really sure what she was going for with that question but, in light of the overall lack of surprise, challenge or revelation in the performance, I'd rephrase the question, maybe split it into two parts:

"Do you think there's still life in your improvisation?" and "Can improvisation still matter?"

Performa 09 information and resources

Baryshnikov Art Center

450 West 37th Street, Manhattan