BODY AND SOUL: george emilio sanchez: Information is medicine

george emilio sanchez (photo: Dave Sanders)

george emilio sanchez, wearing a black winter coat with a wine-purple scarf wrapped and tucked around his neck, stands against a blurred background. With an intent gaze towards the camera, sanchez has salt-and-pepper hair, mustache, and beard.

Still from In the Court of the Conqueror of a home occupying the ancestral lands of Kaskaskia, Tamaroa and Piankishaw Nations among other Mississippian Cultures. Image by Patty Ortiz.

 

The photo shows one side of a long white house surrounded by trees. There's a flagpole bearing the United States flag. At the base of the slide's image, a line of bright red letters spell out NOTYOURLAND.

My guest today, george emilio sanchez, is a passionate and critical voice for our times. A skilled artist and activist, he brings a gift for blending factual historical and cultural knowledge, lived experience, and creative storytelling in solo performances that inform, captivate, and challenge audiences. In this episode of Body and Soul, sanchez discusses a 19th-century Supreme Court ruling that violated indigenous tribal sovereignty; In the Court of the Conqueror, a performance in collaboration with visual artist Patty Ortiz; and The Shed's great exhibition on Brazil's indigenous Yanomami people.

Please forgive the abrupt ending of this episode! Details I edited out--concerning The Yanomami Struggle exhibition at The Shed, a New York City arts space--can be found at https://theshed.org/program/262-the-yanomami-struggle. The exhibition runs through Sunday, April 16, and I do highly recommend it.

To listen to today's podcast with george emilio sanchez, click here!

And scroll down for more information!

Still from In the Court of the Conqueror (photo: Maria Baranova)

Wearing his long white hair loose and a white, long-sleeved cotton shirt, sanchez gazes directly into the camera. He holds his arms and hands outward, left arm crossing in front of his chest, in the middle of a storytelling gesture.

Bio: george emilio sanchez is a writer, performance artist and advocate for indigenous rights and sovereignty.  Currently, he is touring the US with his recent performance collaboration with visual artist, Patty Ortiz, titled In the Court of the Conqueror.  This piece focuses on the 200 year-old history of US Supreme Court rulings that have diminished the Tribal Sovereignty of Native Nations, while also interlacing his individual journey of acknowledging his own indigeneity while being raised in an Ecuadorian immigrant household.  In the Court of the Conqueror premiered at Abrons Arts Center in New York City in March 2022 and has since toured to five states.  george emilio is also the performance director for Emergenyc, a program that experiments with the intersection of arts and activism and is celebrating its 15th year anniversary in 2023.  He was named the inaugural recipient of the Keith Haring Fellow at The MacDowell in 2021. https://www.georgeemiliosanchez.com/

Sanctuary: George Emilio Sanchez and BAX's Marya Warshaw on upholding free speech

First Amendment Sanctuary Spaces is an initiative that aims to create a network of performance and cultural spaces, as well as places of worship, that pledge to uphold the foundational elements of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment at a time when enforcement of these fundamental constitutional guarantees is not assured.

A statement from

George Emilio Sanchez, 

writer, performer, director, educator

and the creator of the First Amendment Sanctuary Spaces project

Almost overnight, we have found ourselves in a threatening time with little light. Almost overnight, ways of life, the questions of citizenry, the avenues by which people identify who they are and where they come from, our racial and gender identities, and the reality of the 1% v. the 99%, have suddenly arisen to become the signifiers for "authentic" Americans.  As a way to move forward, to continue to create, to find ways to connect one story to another, one person to another, to meet indifference, fear, and ignorance at the crossroads, this initiative, First Amendment Sanctuary Spaces, offers one alternative to create a narrative that brings stories, cultures, faiths and people together under the umbrella we call the Constitution.

The First Amendment articulates the foundational elements essential to any free and open society.  The arts and expression, a free and open press, and the exercise of religious beliefs, all are key ingredients of a democratic society.  Each strand of this quilt, the arts, the press and religion, individually and collectively, function to create the practice of freedom.  All are essential to the life and soul of this country.  But they are all in jeopardy under El Trumpo's administration.  We have awoken to a dark time with little light.  But this project aims to be pro-active, to be one step ahead, as we carve a way forward where we can affirm our place in this country.  Frederick Douglass, who has been cited by our president to be doing amazing things, once said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never has and it never will."  Rights, and subsequently our freedom, are not passively given to people.  Laws are meaningless without the passion and fervor to make the word flesh.  The challenges every one of us faces individually, or as members of the myriad communities we find kinship and solace with, stare us in the face today.  But dark times are also the windows of opportunity we can take up to bring us the light we demand.  Through the arts, we can nurture the strength and commitment of affirming who we are in the face of these challenges.  The arts are the human-made gifts that can bring us joy, can throw us to the depths of our fears, and still ignite celebrations and declarations of how the nuances of our commonality present us with years and years of newfound understanding.  The arts are the ultimate form of non-violent resistance that express the eloquence of the human spirit.

This network is committed to upholding the tenets of the first amendment.  We are sanctuaries that will protect and keep safe the freedom of speech, of the press, of the people to peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.  In perpetuity, which colloquially means....to keep on keeping on!

For more information on First Amendment Sanctuary Spaces and to find out how you or your organization can participate, visit the Facebook page here.

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One man's trash...

George Emilio Sanchez performs

Buried Up To My Neck While Thinking Outside The Box

Okay, so why is this guy buried up to his neck in garbage? Find out at Club La MaMa, March 25-27.

Writer/performer George Emilio Sanchez describes Buried Up To My Neck While Thinking Outside the Box as "a motionless monologue inspired a little by Beckett's Happy Days minus the spouse." The piece "spans the scope of fictional memoir to philosophical questions that ponder the meaning of happiness in a democratic society."

Friday and Saturday, 10pm
Sunday 5:30pm

Club La MaMa
47A East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue)
Second Floor
(directions)

Click here for details and ticketing.

Just come get this mess

Can you just clear it up? I need a little more clarity. -- Peter Richards in Para-dice (Stage 1)

When Patricia Hoffbauer auditioned for DTW's Fresh Tracks series, she says, David White argued that her dance was too messy and disorganized. But my guess is that mess is often the point. Because either you're going to have a tidy piece of work or you're going to have a real piece of work (meant in both senses of that term). Hoffbauer sees everything in terms of the mess.

And what she has going on now at Danspace Project--a phenomenon called Para-dice (Stage 1)--is messy to the max on purpose. Sprawling throughout space and time, it doesn't even have a discernible beginning or a definitive end. And oh, that middle!

Add the fact that Para-dice (Stage 1) is messily shoehorned into an evening with another phenomenon called The Adventure (instigator: Trajal Harrell), a nightly sample of choreographic research experiments-in-progress and, on the evening I attended, a thought-provoking party game for audience members followed by an invitation to stick around for wine. What's going on here?

If narrative is power, is there any coincidence whose narratives are visible? -- Patricia Hoffbauer in Para-dice (Stage 1) 

What seems to be going on is a kind of blasting open of assumptions about what it means to make and perform dance, what it means to try to give a lecture on dance and culture (with Hoffbauer and collaborators vividly referencing and mercilessly deconstructing Brazilian history, pop culture and stereotypes), what it means to consume art, what it means to critique it or to willingly live with it and participate in its meaning. It complicates everyone's safe story--and just what does it mean to have a crush on a smooth-singing, smooth-looking samba/funk star who turns out to have been an informer for the dictatorship devastating your country?--and it continuously interrupts "serious" art with entertainment and vice versa. And it does all these things with an almost unimaginable seamlessness and insouciance.

One of my favorite moments happens very early on: There's a smallish film screen set up on one side of the space, and some hazy imagery comes on for just a few seconds before the images inexplicably slide away onto the back wall of St. Mark's Church's sanctuary. Why in hell should the images stay on a little screen when they can more rambunctiously, even sacrilegiously, splash themselves, as in a movie theater, across far more impressive space? This filled me with cheer, and the oncoming dance--riddled with graceful humor among other good and smart and skillful things--kept me alert throughout.

The piece was created in collaboration with its performers--Peggy Gould (so deft and pleasurable to watch in her duet work and other interactions with Hoffbauer), Elisa Osborne, Peter Richards (whose visual contributions include samples from Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha) and George Emilio Sanchez (responsible for much of the text). Costumes are by Liz Prince, lighting by Kathy Kaufmann.

Every performance includes a different work from The Adventure. (Last night, for instance, dancer Anna Whaley "stole" Thibault Lac's solo, 2, Line, Science--simply constructing a sandpainting-like diagram of white powder on the church floor and dustbusting it up again, all to the strains of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine.") So go and see what adventure's in store for you this weekend. 

Patricia Hoffbauer's Para-dice (Stage 1) and The Adventure

continuing tonight through Saturday, 8pm

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church

Second Avenue and Tenth Street, Manhattan

Tickets

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