Andrea Miller's "W H A L E" of a company at the Joyce

Members of Andrea Miller's Gallim Dance Company in W H A L E
Daniel Staaf (lower left), Austin Tyson (middle),
Paul Vickers (lower right)
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

Daniel Staaf, Georgia Usborne, Austin Tyson,
Matthew Perez, Paul Vickers, Gwyneth Mac
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

I'm wondering why contemporary dance is not nearly as popular as science fiction. After all, each time dancers take to a stage or performance space, a new world is created with its own inhabitants, culture(s), rules, language(s), questions and challenges. There really can't be that much of a divide between sci fi nerds and dance nerds, and I know there's some overlap.

Anyway, all that's to say, choreographer Andrea Miller  of Gallim Dance Company creates one helluva world out of her time on the Joyce Theater's stage. She also has a valiant troupe of players--Celine D'hont, Allysen Hooks, Gwyn Mackenzie, Matthew Perez, Daniel Staaf, Austin Tyson, Georgia Usborne and Paul Vickers--who must love her enough to accept the scary assignments she gives them. Seriously, my heart was in my mouth half the time as I watched the wildly impassioned and danger-courting moves in her new evening-length work, W H A L E.

In a program note, Miller revealed the source of the show's title:

Matteo, our 2 year old son, wakes up in the middle of any given night pointing at the darkness, singing the world whale, as if one of these endangered mammals he loves lives in our apartment. W H A L E is dedicated to love in darkness and in light.

Matteo, it seems, also knows about alternate worlds that are also here on earth right now. What a wonderful thing!

(Top to Bottom) Austin Tyson, Daniel Staaf
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

The overall strangeness and emotional impact of W H A L E might benefit from a more condensed structure, eliminating the 20-minute intermission that jettisons viewers out of its world and, temporarily, out of its grip. Hold us in our seats and in that space with the id on the loose in its many manifestations--with all of the vulnerability, the unleashed exuberance, the careless aggression, the awkward, desperate need, the breathing light and breathing dark, the full catastrophe.

With help from Jordan Chiolis's music (performed live) and Nicole Pearce's lighting, waves of psychological weather pass across the stage as they pass through life and relationships. One male dancer's nudity is just one (and the most obvious) example of Miller's refusal to be delicate and of her company's bravery. Gather up your own courage, and go.

W H A L E continues through Sunday, December 6. Click here for your tickets.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Miller and Bell: new work at DTW

Andrea Miller's Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell Dance New York are bringing something that feels like high glamour to Dance Theater Workshop this week. With their juxtaposed world premieres, these two confident artists and their creative teams take dance theater and punch up the theatricality to an aggressive level. 

Miller's half-hour For Glenn Gould--inspired by a kind of before/after consideration of the pianist's two contrasting approaches to Bach's Goldberg Variations--evokes Gould's eccentricity. Metal folding chairs suggest the specially-designed piano chair that Gould insisted on using; stacks of books and other items prop up dancers' prone bodies just as Gould used blocks to raise his piano to an unusual, preferred height. The stage is littered--colorfully, artistically--with found objects, the detritus of internal disorder spilling outward from a brilliant artist to his environment. Safe to say, dances containing metal folding chairs are going to be irritating--sonically and, perhaps, otherwise. On that score, For Glenn Gould does not disappoint. But Gould seems to exist here as a screen upon which to project and pick through issues around irrationality and creativity in a way that proves more sensational than satisfying. The oddball Gould proves to be a very specific and specifically distracting screen. On the other hand, the Gallim ensemble--Caroline Fermin, Troy Ogilvie, Francesca Romo, Dan Walczak, Jonathan Royse Windham and Arika Yamada--drive the choreography and their bodies at a serious pitch that always amazes.

Bell's Pool ups the theatrical ante with disco-like decadence and sensational performance by Jonathan Campbell, Austin Diaz, Alexandra Johnson, Caroline Kirkpatrick, Zach McNally, Maud de la Purification and Kendra Samson. Miller and Bell share the same lighting designer, but, here, Vincent Vigilante has stepped up his own theatrical attack with stark lighting that carves out sharply-delineated zones and ovular pockets of space with radically different temperatures. Oh, baby, you feel the lighting--a truly impressive thing--while you wonder if you shouldn't be feeling the choreography, too, and getting a better grasp on meaning. Pool keeps spooling out more and more wild cleverness, seeming about to end and always finding more play (if not more sense) in that spool--a stretch of 41 minutes that seems to go on forever.

Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell Dance New York continue at Dance Theater Workshop through this Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For more information, click here.

Dance Theater Workshop

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)

Women in charge at The Joyce

Leslie Kraus and Douglas Gillespie

Kate Weare Company in Bright Land (Photo: Christopher Duggan)

Old-time music band The Crooked Jades 

in live performance for Bright Land (Photo: Christopher Duggan)

I can't give you a review. That's promised for Dance Magazine, and I'll certainly let you know when you can find it there. But I do want you to know that four female choreographers have been royally ripping it up in two different, shared programs at The Joyce Theater this week:

Gallim Dance (choreography by Andrea Miller)

Camille A. Brown

Kate Weare Company

Monica Bill Barnes

They've brought some of the most vibrant dancemaking and dancing I've ever  seen at the Joyce, and you really ought to get there if you can get a ticket.

Remaining shows:

Tonight at 7:30, Friday at 8pm: Camille A. Brown and Andrea Miller

Thursday at 8pm; Saturday at 8pm: Kate Weare and Monica Bill Barnes

Family-friendly program on Saturday at 2pm

More information here and tickets at Joyce Charge: 212-242-0800