By Association: New performance from Pallavi Sen, Elena Rose Light and Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez

Above: Elena Rose Light (left)
and Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez
(photo: Malcolm-x Betts)

By Association is a platform for artists to collectively experiment with the practice of associative thinking. An artist is invited to be the “instigatory link” in a chain of thought, who then invites another artist whose practice informs and/or challenges their line of inquiry. This artist then invites another artist, and so the pattern continues. For three nights, the chain fuses and breaks in the form of shared evening presentations that put artists in creative discourse with one another across artistic disciplines. -- from publicity for Abrons Arts Center's By Association: Elena Rose Light, Pallavi Sen, Bully Fae Collins

The Underground Theater at Abrons Arts Center bugs me. It is so infernally ugly with its brutal, oppressive design. There isn't anything I like about this space, though I've seen some cool things there. I sometimes think it's designed to eat whatever enters.

And it might have eaten Pallavi Sen's section of last evening's By Association: Elena Rose Light, Pallavi Sen, Bully Fae Collins, except that Sen's multifaceted visual display--a bustling, long/tall thing spanning most of the space while Sen sat all-too-gently reading its text at one side--seemed too monumental to be easily consumed by the theater...or by its audience. I must admit when I wasn't checking out the imagery in front of me, Sen's voice almost lulled me to sleep. I made an effort to shift focus to her, now and again, but I suspect she wanted to stay out of sight, her body folded close to the darkened floor and tucked away with her words (about her South Asian family and about loss) and her little reading light, while her projections unfolded a manifest of what her mind is really like. I can probably call to my own mind what her lost relatives looked like and everything dancing around their cameo portraits but, for the life of me, I will not be able to tell you much of what she told us about them or what Sen looked like last evening.

After a ten-minute break, though, collaborators Elena Rose Light and Mexico-born Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez ate the theater.

Their opening momentarily fooled us into thinking the intermission was just continuing. Lights did not go down. Eventually, at both extreme ends of peripheral vision, I became aware of presences at the tops of the long staircases leading down into the performance space from both sides of the theater. Presences barely visible. Presences beginning to vibrate. Presences that, when finally fully seen, presented as comic. Comic in their ridiculous suits painstakingly constructed of clear, crinkly bubble wrap. Comic in the way they endlessly bounced on their feet and pumped their arms and scampered all around and up and down the theater and its balcony like schoolkids chasing each other at recess.

I know a bit more about Sánchez Narvaez's work and have watched her start other performances with a similar scattered, extroverted approach and gradually unpeel, winding her way down to a deeper, quieter, more sensitive and emotionally brave place. What she and Light accomplish in this demanding, durational piece, as they strip away the plastic, becomes similarly revelatory and wrenching.

You won't catch much of what's said between the two; they have no mics. But you'll catch enough to recognize the triggering of issues of racial and class difference. Sánchez Narvaez first interjects this by calling out Light for having once complained, "I'm paying you more than I'm paying myself." It goes downhill from there with the performers appearing to be athletes in training...or an athlete (Light) with a particularly hardass trainer (Sánchez Narvaez)...or two collaborators who have hit a brick wall that only physical aggression and honesty might begin--only just begin--to demolish.

This is a very hard dance to do...and see...and think about.

The remaining By Association schedule pairs Pallavi Sen's solo with work by Bully Fae Collins (tonight at 7:30pm) and Bully Fae Collins with Elena Rose Light and Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez (tomorrow at 7:30pm). Get information and tickets here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Invoke and provoke: Ben Pryor's new series at Gibney Dance

Jess Pretty in FIVE
at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Invocation Proclamation Manifesto--described by Gibney Dance Center's new programmer, Ben Pryor, as "a three-week micro-festival of short works from choreographers and performance makers wrestling with the urgency of being a body at risk in 45’s America"--launched last night in the notoriously micro-confines of Gibney's Studio A.

First off, aside from Studio A's size and the tiny capacity audience of 30 folks lounging on puffy body pillows, nothing much seemed "micro" here. I wanted to give Diego Montoya (decor designer) and Asami Morita (lighting designer) a standing ovation for the lavish magic they worked with a Mylar fringe curtain, deliciously variable colors of light and a disco ball--a gently dazzling backdrop and atmosphere spanning all three dances. That all seemed hyuggge and bold to me in such an intimate setting, a visual metaphor for the way American artists do a lot with a little. Publicity for the series quoted Justin Vivian Bond's call for Glamour As Resistance!--no argument from me, Mx. Bond--and Montoya and Morita went to work. Jonathan Johnson's pop music tapestry for the final piece, Untitled (Duet in A), and the unidentified, impressive score Jess Pretty used for her solo, FIVE, were also opulent ingredients.

Elena Rose Light in NEUTRALDANCINGBODYMASS
(photo: Scott Shaw)

The choreographers--all of whom performed their works, two solos and a duet--took on the other mission of "casting off, tearing down, and blowing up that which holds us back, denies the truth, and champions regression." So, about that description of these piece as "short works." I didn't time them, but I didn't get the impression of anything micro or mini or short. All three seemed to be big chunks of provocation and not only more than long enough but also capable of continuing to resonate beyond their formal end. Elena Rose Light even concluded her solo, NEUTRALDANCINGBODYMYASS, by having a helper pass out a little white booklet (Tarot inside joke...sorry, I had to drop that for my Tarot peeps) that we could study at our leisure and informing us of the date and location of the next session of her MADATDANCE critical investigation of whiteness in Western body culture and dance training. It's tempting to go.

Her solo invoked, for me, the nightmare of getting stuck in someone's idea of how your body should look and move, and it's coded with dance history and aesthetics that dance artists will recognize. Basically, she shows us the jaw-locked, closed-mouth tension and fakeness of someone directed by authority figures and laboring to fit in and, even if you are not a dancer, you'll get it. We're all under this particular gun, just in different ways. The experience of the Western dancer--in its insularity and insecurity--here stands in for the experience of anyone who just wants to breathe.

Jess Pretty clearly wants out from under, too. A relationship gone bad? A religion of promises that might or might not be kept? I enjoy the way she silkily strides, flows and then swirls and curlicues through the limited space of Studio A in the initial moments of FIVE. She seems to claim the breath and have the self-possession that eluded Light even though one exhortative song--and this could just be my interpretation--appears to signal trouble in the past or even ahead.

She changes up when she coyly hides herself behind the Mylar curtain, advancing sideways across the space in ways we can track only by watching the slow advance of her white sneakers at the base of the curtain. She gradually abandons them. As she emerges, shoeless, one of the things she does next strikes me as particularly vulnerable. Still moving to that shouting gospel voice, she swings her arms around as if jumping rope. In the game but at an eager, younger age.

I know Pretty is thinking beyond this being a subtle character piece, but I actually like its elusiveness and how it offers a personal journey as a metaphor for tackling and surviving and towering over a wider oppression.

Carlo Antonio Villanueva and Miriam Gabriel,
choreographic and performing partners, in Untitled (Duet in A)
(photo: Scott Shaw) 

Time to confess that I have never--no, not ever--watched any televised dance competition shows, but I think Miriam Gabriel and Carlo Antonio Villanueva created my fantasy of one in Untitled (Duet in A). Described as focusing "within and against the hyperstimulation of a volatile pop landscape," it appears to be a long, intricate, meaningless dance routine that the partners dutifully and skillfully perform, side by side, before gradually increasing the groundedness, determination and looseness of their attack. It might not mean anything more to them--or us or, at least, me--at that point, but they have grown more alive and more themselves and more relatable than ever before.

This first week of Pryor's interesting three-week series continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. Space is extremely limited. For information and ticketing for this and upcoming weeks, click here.

Week Two:

Kenya (Robinson), Alexandra Tatarsky

and Eli Tamondong

September 28-30, 8pm

Week Three:

Angie Pittman, Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal

and Ashley R.T. Yergens

October 5-7, 8pm

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

Subscribe in a reader

Working on it: Gibney's Work Up 1.3 presents emerging dancemakers

Elena Rose Light has a background in classical ballet and a feeling for history and intricacy. Alyssa Gersony works in job placement for people with disabilities. Ni’Ja Whitson Adebanjo keeps top of mind the abducted girls of Nigeria, virtually forgotten in the mainstream discourse.

All three choreographers are being showcased this week in Work Up 1.3, the latest edition of Work Up, a new four-week series highlighting emerging dance and performance artists, presented by Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center in the intimate space of Gibney's new Studio C.

On the surface, Light, Gersony and Whitson Adebanjo might seem to have little in common.

English Country Ballz (Sadie Hawkins Remix), Light's duet with Margaret Tudor, dwells on the formal, restrained qualities and courtly framing of the waltz. Yet Light casually slips in time-warpy traces of Patti Page and Frank Sinatra songs or slow-mo twerking and provocative poses.

With part of its soundscape sampled and part eerily created live by electronic looping and layering, Gersony's solo, this place with the pretty-sounding name, recalls the shameful history of Staten Island's Willowbrook State School for children with mental disabilities. Closed since 1987 after decades of investigations into overcrowding, unethical medical experimentation and the physical and sexual abuse of its residents, Willowbrook's "pretty name" became associated with hell on earth. Gersony draws on her agility and strength to portray the living fight within a body in captivity and under siege. At times, that unmistakable life flares, equally disturbing and impressive.

An assured, exuberant physicality in When Water Dries the Mouth obscures its choreographer's stated themes of religion-based repression and violence against women. Or so it would seem. Watching Whitson Adebanjo, Kirsten Flores-Davis and Carissa Chavez-Matsushima made me think of the great spiritual, "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free," but the opposite way around: "I Know How It Feels to Be Free and I'm Going to Show You."  It's as if the performers dance for the vanished girls and young women, dance as who they are or were or could have been or...still are. Dancing their integrity, their resilience, their creativity, their spirit, their desire.

In each work, then, I see dancers responding to the very idea of oppression with resistance shown in sexuality, anger and courage of body and mind.

The final performance of Work Up 1.3 will be tonight at 7:30 pm. Come early for the pre-show talk moderated by Ursula Eagly and to spend some time with Gibney's interesting display of visual presentations created by Work Up choreographers.

Click here for information and tickets for the Work Up series, which concludes next week with presentations by Lauren Ree Slone, Eli Tamondong / Projectile Imagery and Jacob Slominski.

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