Next on the BAM Next Wave: Faye Driscoll says thanks

Brandon Washington (left) and Alicia Ohs
dance in Faye Driscoll's Thank You For Coming: Play
Below: Sean Donovan
(photos: Maria Baranova)

It's not every day I get a last-minute email that says don't reveal this or that about the show you're about to see and review; we want this to be a surprise. But I got one the afternoon before Faye Driscoll's New York premiere of Thank You for Coming: Play at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space), and I'm completely up for being in on the fun.

No, I wouldn't spoil it. But I'll go Driscoll one better. There's very little I'll reveal about this Next Wave show, short of showing you some photos here that will give you just the slightest hint of the delirious and endearing thrift-shop aesthetics of the thing. Think a bunch of untamed k(ids) with access to costumes like these, uncanny exposure to Kabuki and a passion for storytelling who somehow have sprung from Driscoll's head. Driscoll, herself, is on hand to kind of show us how the springing-from-head thing happens. Dancers Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Paul Singh, Laurel Snyder and Brandon Washington work their butts off while also working their way into our hearts. Dancing, vocalizing and making complete asses of themselves, they are an ensemble to be treasured and long remembered.

Play is the second part of Driscoll's Thank You For Coming trilogy and my first experience of it. I enjoyed watching a structure that made the most of physical space, visual variety, theatrical artifice and excess, and extremes of polarities (even within an individual performer) before tamping down and tapering all of those things like a decorative fan displayed, madly flapped and then finally folded.

Go see it. Driscoll made it with you in mind. And that's all I'm sayin'.

Choreography/text: Driscoll in collaboration with the performers
Sound: Bobby McElver
Musical direction: Bobby McElver and Sean Donovan
Original compositions: Sean Donovan, Bobby McElver and Faye Driscoll
Vocal arrangement: Sean Donovan
Lyrics: Faye Driscoll
Additional lyrics: Sean Donovan

Thank You for Coming: Play runs one hour/15 minutes without intermission and continues through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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New arts residencies announced by Park Avenue Armory

Park Avenue Armory Names Artists in Residence
by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, April 19, 2013

Young Jean Lee and the naked truth

Untitled Feminist Show--created by award-winning director Young Jean Lee, choreographer Faye Driscoll, associate director Morgan Gould and other collaborators--has earned a place on my mental list of favorite dance events of the very young 2012. I know I'm going to have some explaining to do because--as I see here in Lee's program notes--Lee doesn't consider this work to be a dance piece. "Like the performers themselves," she writes, "the show is meant to resist categorization."

So, what am I talking about?

Well, aside from the fact that I would like to be able to claim every damn good thing in the Universe for dance, I'm beginning to get a sense that calling something "theater" (as she calls her company, after all: Young Jean Lee's Theater Company) is fine and dandy, but calling something "dance" is somehow limiting. 

Hmmm....

Seems it was just yesterday that the idea of calling all sorts of wild and crazy (or mild and boring) things "dance" was bold and liberating.

In any case, Lee's six marvelous stars are performing arts of the body, including dance and some incredibly edgy mime, and they are stark naked throughout the hour. I'm calling this one for dance, and I will not be dissuaded.

I also hear tell--because I've been reading some of her interviews--that she doesn't want Untitled Feminist Show to be considered sexy. Oh, please. Nothing wrong with (or un-feminist about) sexy. Bring sexy back. In fact, this show does so--directly and indirectly.

What couldn't be genuinely sexy about six unselfconsciously nude, female-bodied performers, each with a distinct body type and size, defining themselves across a fluid gender spectrum and expressing, almost entirely in iconic and primal physical movement, how it might feel to be free?

Free is sexy.

They are Becca Blackwell, World Famous *BOB*, Amelia Zirin-Brown (aka Lady Rizo), Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle and Regina Rocke, collectively hailing from cabaret, theater, dance and burlesque with some crossovers, all stripped of theatricalizing makeup, hairstyling and, of course, costumes. They make a fabulous team in this fabulous romp, but Blackwell, Zirin-Brown and especially Clark seem to be having the most high-charged and, yes, liberating fun.

Some of them initially enter the space by slowly drifting down the aisles, giving the audience a sense of being represented in the performance space. (They come from us.) We hear their soft and human breathing, which establishes a comforting sense of common humanity. But don't get too comfortable. Although the inhabitants of Lee's feminist utopia sometimes sport frilly pink parasols, they're capable of using these items as weapons, and they'll happily consume their victim. No, you've never seen Marcel Marceau do the kind of mime you'll see in Untitled Feminist Show--at least, not on Ed Sullivan's show.

And check out that acid-trip video projection at the end! Through the Looking Glass, through the black hole you go! What are you going to be when you come out the other side?

With scenic design by David Evans Morris; lighting design by Raquel Davis; sound design by Chris Giarmo and Jamie McElhinney; and projection design by Leah Gelpe.

Untitled Feminist Show is a presentation of Performance Space 122's COIL Festival and runs at the Baryshnikov Arts Center through February 4. For information, schedule and ticketing, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center

Jerome Robbins Theater

450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)

Barnard Dances at Miller

Barnard College Department of Dance, under chair and artistic director Mary Cochran, has commissioned new works by renowned choreographers Kyle Abraham, Faye Driscoll, Jill Johnson and Jon Kinzel for its student performers. 

Barnard Dances at Miller
Friday, April 29, 7pm
Saturday, April 30, 2pm and 7pm

For more information, click here.

Tickets: $20; $12 with Columbia University ID
To purchase, call 212-854-7799

Miller Theater
2960 Broadway (at 116th Street), Manhattan
(map)

Giving themselves away at every moment...

A luminous summer evening. Dancers slip through breezecloudsmusic at the river's edge. I still get a powerful little thrill as I look through my photographs.

We Give Ourselves Away at Every Moment: An EVENT for Merce

July 26, 2010--First anniversary of the death of Merce Cunningham

"...we come together to nod in his direction through the ritual of dance itself."

Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City esplanade

a program of the River to River Festival, co-presented by Arts World Financial Center and the Battery Park City Authority

featuring choreography by Jon Kinzel, Lucinda Childs, Susan Marshall, Faye Driscoll and Bill T. Jones. Live music by David Eggar, Geoff Hersh and Kotchy.

curated and produced by Annie-B Parson and Will Knapp

Five plan major tribute to Merce

Five Choreographers to Honor Cunningham at River to River Festival

by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, July 1, 2010

Rave on, dancers!

Question for choreographer Faye Driscoll:

What on earth did you do to your dancers to get them this way?

Now, hold on: That is not a hostile question.

In fact, I think it's a question a lot of envious choreographers might want to get answered, because Driscoll's effectiveness in her new piece, There is so much mad in me, is almost totally due to the blasted-open vulnerability and bravery of her nine performers.

Let's name them, right off the bat: Lindsay Clark, Lily Gold, Michael Helland, Jenny MaryTai Liu, Tony Orrico, Jacob Slominski, Adaku Utah, Jesse Zaritt and Nikki Zialcita.

These guys are astonishingly good, and each gets pushed forward in ways that bring out his or her breathtaking power.  Each one seems capable of a full course of possibilities--from delicate sparks of thought and expression flickering across their faces to full-tilt rage, and even the rage comes in 47 varieties. Doubt me on that last one, and I'll tell you to just watch one of Slominski's characters brutally intimidate his colleagues--and at least one audience member, too--and see what secrets his subsequent facial and bodily movements reveal not only about his perverse pleasure in instilling fear but also his childish petulance and repressed hysteria.

The work--charging through 75 minutes in which you never relax enough to worry about the time--is a seamless collage of intense scenarios depicting extreme, mind-pounding, mind-blowing experiences. Sounds like fun? Well, don't trust elation; it quickly turns to terror. And nobody does "quickly" like Driscoll and her crew. This rapid slippage and the ambiguity of just about everything you're seeing reach out past that so-called fourth wall and wreak havoc with your own body-mind continuum.

How do you really feel about the disturbing things you're watching? Not the funny moments--of which there are a goodly amount--but the exploitation, the oppression, the violence? You'll be sitting with that. Yes. This is one of those dances that examines you every bit as much as you examine it. I wish it wide presentation throughout America.

There is so much mad in me runs through Saturday evening with 7:30pm shows at Dance Theater Workshop. Last night's show was sold out. Best of luck. Click here for tickets to one of this season's top premieres and performances.