robbinschilds spells "Hex" at Gibney

Hex probes the complexities surrounding authorship, specifically how each collaborator influences the outcome of a day’s work, the building of material, and ultimately the finished composition. By exposing the cooperative agency in the construction of artistic vocabulary, Hex expands the notion of creator.

--from publicity for Hex 

Postmodern choreographers often pose questions or assign themselves challenges that seem mainly addressed to their peers. And just look around at who's sitting in the seats, supporting and grappling with the work--their peers. It's an inside job, a subset of the big, wide world of dance (even just that portion of it fighting for life in New York), a world in which values, philosophies, methods, needs and aspirations are quite diverse.

Portion of Hedia Maron's video for Hex
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Anna Azrieli (top) with Eleanor Smith in Hex
(photo: Scott Shaw)

The dancing in Hex--an hour-long video/live work by robbinschilds at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center--strikes me as a prime example of this situation. It's populated by interesting individual movers--Aretha Aoki, Anna Azrieli, Bessie McDonough-Thayer, Eleanor Smith, Mariana Valencia--overshadowed by premise and staging. Here, robbinschilds directors Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs yield authorship to these dancers as choreographers. The sixth maker--Vanessa Anspaugh--does not perform live in the piece.

We are committed to our cooperative practice as a means of subverting the archetypal 'male' trope of solo-creator. For this reason we see the process of collaboration not merely as a creative strategy, but also a feminist platform from which to cull a stronger collective vision.

--from "A short manifesto on Hex" by robbinschilds

The audience enters Gibney's Studio C to see four projection screens extended around the broad performance area, two of the screens divided to show two different scenes of the choreographers at work on solos that the ensemble will then take up as material to explore. We watch these images for a while, perhaps most naturally drawn in by the crisp intensity in Hedia Maron's closeups of Valencia and Azrieli.

Otherwise, where to look? Without received direction, our eyes flit and roam, scanning the screens, taking in fragments, randomly piecing one bit with another and another. In a real sense, watchers add to the authorship, and I wonder if Robbins and Childs factored us in.

The soundscape (Dana Wachs/Vorhees) often suggests street-side construction. The live performing seems fragmentary and accumulative, too. A single dancer first appears in the space--McDonough-Thayer, if I recall correctly--but we don't see other dancers in waiting, percolating in the open space to the rear of our seating. Something made me turn my head, though, and I noticed them. Over the course of the dance, one or more drifted into view or returned to this dark recess.  And, again, as a watcher (author?), I found I could relate--leaning in or leaning out from time to time.

Hex runs through Saturday, February 6. Performances are at 8pm plus an additional show at 5pm on Saturday. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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Katie Workum: "making a living dance" at Danspace Project

Dancers Weena Pauly (l) and Katie Workum
(photo: Ross Karre)

Here's Ross Karre's lovely photo of dancers Weena Pauly and Katie Workum engaged in a contemplative somatic practice called Authentic Movement. This practice forms the basis for Black Lakes, a trio Workum presents this weekend at Danspace Project with collaborators Pauly and Eleanor Smith.

Authentic movement is a profoundly simple form in which a mover moves with eyes closed in the presence of a witness. Rooted in Jungian depth psychology, it is a practice that stands alone with its own integrity.

--Zoë Avstreih, Founder/Director, Center for the Study of Authentic Movement

Each performance of Black Lakes is created by three deeply engaged dancers right before your eyes. Found movement. From the inside. And what I saw last night will not be what you might see tonight or tomorrow.

How does that alter how a concert audience looks at movement and relationships sparked in the moment versus how we look at set choreography? Authentic Movement requires not only a mover but a witness who receives perception of the movement without judgment.

It reduces the typical expectations--what makes sense? what is right? what is perfect? It heightens alertness to everything emerging as well as awareness of the witness's own inner stirrings. The hour-long Black Lakes reminded me of the trusting flight into open air that, for me, is my experience of giving a Tarot reading, a container for the arrival and expression of anything, the next thing and the next after that.

With Black Lakes, Workum, who has been making dance in more traditional ways since 1997, offers us a view into what she has begun exploring with Pauly over the past few years. Her program notes address the reason for this shift and invite the audience to be Witness as understood in Authentic Movement terms.

Black Lakes continues tonight and tomorrow night with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Levi Gonzalez opens "The Craft of The Father" at The Chocolate Factory

Levi Gonzalez and Eleanor Smith in
The Craft of The Father
at The Chocolate Factory
(photo by Brian Rogers)

Levi Gonzalez's The Craft of The Father--his first evening-length dance since 2007's Clusterfuck--plays out before a small audience in a single row of chairs lining one wall at The Chocolate Factory. That familiar performance space will seem smaller and closer than ever when dancing gets going in earnest. Before that, though, it becomes a night-cloaked swamp filled with sounds--minute creaks of metal chairs; a neighbor's breathing; blurts and and moans and shrieks from three dancers tucked away in all-consuming darkness--for what stretches on for an unexpected amount of time. Space seems to stretch on, too, pulling you into a simultaneously close and vast place where the human body speaks its own language, free of rational identification. Ultimately, you don't know who's who or what's what, but you might come to feel that you're an inseparable part of the whole and relax into it.

So, now that you're in, what happens to you?

Mellow light comes, revealing agitated movers. Kayvon Pourazar's hands work so frantically around his jaw and temples that he seems driven to pull his own head off. Gonzalez pants from the exertion of wide-legged twirls. Eleanor Smith, twirling too, adds a rotation of her head, churning being a common thread as well as the sometimes awkward shifting of weight--both of the men have earthy physiques--or suspending weight and stretching movement in time. Incessant, the trio is dizzying to watch, and when these dancers separate across the room's length, you must swing your head to track the imagery and activities of one or another.

But are you truly in or are you out?

A meta moment, in which the trio huddles to discuss the dance and debrief, feels both welcoming and not. You hear their friendly conversation, but they're turned inward towards one another and away from their viewers. But you do hear them, and sometimes that makes you giggle. You feel kind of an insider and kind of not.

It's like that. The dancers entangle themselves in a fleshy ball, slipping around one another quietly, easygoing, then not so easygoing and not so quiet.

Things get a little strange around a Kate Bush song, "This Woman's Work," source of Gonzalez's title. (Please try this gorgeous performance by Maxwell.) I have no idea. Just that, maybe, anything alive--anything given life in this material world, a child, a work of art--has its own logic, illogic, direction, misdirection, welcome and refusal, presence and impermanence.

(photo by Brian Rogers)

With lighting by Natalie Robin and sound collected, assembled and performed by Tatyana Tenenbaum

The Craft of The Father continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)