The Joyce's American Dance Platform: UBW and DCDC

Chanon Judson of Urban Bush Women
(photo: Gennia Cui)

American Dance Platform: Urban Bush Women and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
January 7 and 12

If it's true what they say about how viewers' mirror neurons respond when audiences look at dancers moving, and you attended The Joyce on Tuesday night for American Dance Platform, your mirror neurons likely got a serious workout. Evidence for that, from me, is how exhausted I felt the next morning as if even every toe nail and eyelash I possess were worked to max from watching Urban Bush Women (UBW) and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC), two troupes of extraordinary physical daring and power. More evidence came from the way the opening night audience responded in the moment. I'm not talking about the expected, and justified, standing Os and rousing cheers; I mean those very Black mmmhmmms, the audible sighs, the cries, the groans and other unrestrained vocalizing that greeted DCDC dancers killing it during Abby Zbikowski's Indestructible (2018) with apparently zero fear of bodily wear-and-tear. If, in a sense, we all danced along with UBW and DCDC as we witnessed them, I await my Bessie nomination.

With the very recent departure of Du'Bois A'Keen, UBW is back to being an all-woman company. My favorite on the evening's bill (to be repeated this coming Sunday) was UBW's Women's Resistance, an excerpt from les écailles de la mémoire (Scales of Memory) with choreographic direction from founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Germaine Acogny with additional choreography from eight former and current UBW members. It takes a village. And, indeed, looks like a village...of disciplined women warriors demonstrating their earth-sprung, spring-loaded battle-readiness within a sonic environment where shredding mechanical rhythms suggest both how formidable these women are and how menacing are the forces they are up against. UBW paired this ensemble with Zollar's 1989 I Don't Know, But I Been Told, If You Keep On Dancin' You Never Grow Old, which now includes segments from visible (2011), made by nora chipaumire and Marguerite Hemmings. And, yes, there is a definite connection and throughline--similar resourcefulness, ingenuity and high skill even in the midst of play that some might unwisely consider trivial.

UBW performers: Courtney J. Cook, Melissa Cobblah Gutierrez (Understudy), Jasmine Hearn, Chanon Judson (Co-Artistic Director), Love Muwwakkil, Samantha Spies (Co-Artistic Director), Elaisa van der Kust, Makaila Ware

Taking on Indestructible, Ohio's venerable DCDC--founded in 1968 by Jeraldyne Blunden and now directed by her daughter, Debbie Blunden-Diggs--was right in tune with the night's audacious mood. The main difference is, with Abby Z high-impact, daredevil choreography, neither you nor the dancers get a chance to chill. So, again, those mirror neurons.... Add occasional blasts from the electronic, industrial hip hop band Death Grips. The evening wrapped up with DCDC's excerpt from Donald Byrd's The Geography of the Cotton Field (2014) which paints, with an elegant hand, a canvas at once sweepingly abstract and epically specific.

DCDC performers: Devin Baker, Qarrianne Blayr (Associate Artistic Director), Breanna Dorsey, Alexandria Flewellen, Michael Green, Steve Lamblin, Robert Pulido, Elizabeth Ramsey, Nile Alicia Ruff, Nabachwa Ssensalo (Actress), Quentin Apollovaughn Sledge, Matthew J. Talley, Countess V. Winfrey

One show remains--this Sunday at 7:30pm--but tickets are sold out.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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La Mama hosts the great Germaine Acogny

Germaine Acogny, "Mother of Contemporary African Dance,"
performs SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
(photo: Thomas Dorn)

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
by Germaine Acogny and Mikäel Serre
FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival
La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre
September 26-28

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING--a US premiere for Crossing The Line Festival by renowned Senegalese/French contemporary dance artist Germaine Acogny and director Mikäel Serre--unfolds as if it were dreamt, a full-sensory haunting both sustained in time and elusively fluid in nature. A rich soundscape makes the viewer feel surrounded, engulfed. Visual design tucks things far out of reach or behind layers of other images, or suddenly zooms them large or slips them back into darkness, seriously messing with rational sense of space.

Its fascinating and troubling text, adapted for the stage by Serre, is often spoken in French by Acogny while also running in English as supertitles. If you do not comprehend French, this regularly pulls your gaze up and away from the stately moving sculpture that is Acogny.

You make your choices here; they're difficult, disruptive, regretful and the only ones you're allowed. At almost every turn, she and her creative team suspend us in a phenomena from which we cannot turn away. Even the smell of baby powder and the tickle of tiny, airborne feathers will eventually reach our unguarded selves.

A stage-spanning string curtain serves as a scrim onto which ghostly images may be projected and into which solid objects (and our beloved dancer) can be swallowed out of sight as if dragged below waves.

Like the simple props that will gather dramatic meaning--an open notebook, its white pages reflecting light; a pillow the dancer hugs to her chest, a heavy rock--Acogny contains the brooding power of history, of secrets, a complicated narrative with webs of connection to the Greek Medea and the tragedy of today's refugees seeking safety in Europe.

One surprise discovery, among many, in a diary--the words "Power is passed down from woman to woman." How to access that inheritance? Does it come from things--a set of formidable butcher knives passed along to the wrong person? Or is it knowledge, the force of truth about oneself that can purge the evil wrought by colonialism, patriarchal religion, racism, male supremacy?

Now in her 70s, Acogny--choreographer, performer and educator--has been called "Mother of Contemporary African Dance." Watch as she makes startling use of Johnny Cash's recording of "Hurt" with its evocation of self-inflicted pain and "empire of dirt," and you will grasp why this artist can claim worldwide reverence. Do not miss her historic performance at La MaMa.

Concept and direction: Mikäel Serre
Choreography: Germaine Acogny
Set design: Maciej Fiszer
Costumes: Johanna Diakhate-Rittmeyer
Music: Fabrice Bouillon "LaForest"
Video: Sebastien Dupouey
Lighting design: Sebastien Michaud

Talkback moderation: Okwui Okpokwasili
Translation: Courtney Geraghty

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING runs through tomorrow evening at La MaMa with performance at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For information on other events in Crossing The Line, an annual presentation of French Institute Alliance Française, click here.

La Mama (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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What's Next? A solo for the great Germaine Acogny

Germaine Acogny is performing the New York premiere
of a work by Olivier Dubois of Ballet du Nord
at BAM Next Wave.

Sounds of a bassoon undulate like incense in the absolute dark of BAM Fisher's space. We're taking first, tentative steps into the mystery of Le Sacré du Printemps with choreographer Olivier Dubois of Ballet du Nord.

In this imagining of Stravinsky's rite, Mon élue noire (My Black Chosen One): Sacre #2, a 2014 solo for septuagenarian Germaine Acogny, Dubois first makes the audience wait in darkness through long stretches of music. We wait in the cloying aroma of tobacco from, as we later learn, a pipe gripped in the dancer's teeth. Intermittent flashes of light--a thin line vertical line--tease us. The music dials up uncertainty, tension, apprehension.

It's a while before we get a stable-enough look at Acogny and her setting--a platform in a black box that, over the course of the nearly 40-minute dance, confines her, sometimes elevating or partially obscuring her. She wears a black bra and slacks. One's immediate, disturbing thought: Dubois has turned her into a specimen for display.

Her close-shaved head emphasizes formidable features. She stomps the floor like a bull ready for battle. We continue to be stymied and tantalized by fugitive light and the afterimage that it leaves.

Talking to herself, laughing to herself, wrapping her head in black cloth and dragging it off, Acogny is a woman on the verge...of something. A woman to be admired at one moment and feared the next. One passage though, where she mimics the blare and clash of the music in voice and harsh movement, seems a weak offering, merely ordinary after the audacity of the work's initial staging. The regal and storied dancer looks merely petulant.

Were it not for the program's hair-raising quotes from writings by Aimé Césaire--one on the ravages of colonization, the other excoriating anyone who would stand apart, as a spectator, while the world burns--it might be tricky to figure out who Acogny might be, as dreamed up by Dubois, or read her actions said to be "drawn from the depths of her African soul."

In any event, any chance to see the influential Acogny perform here is a worthy occasion. Final performances are tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For more information on the 2017 BAM Next Wave festival, click here.

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

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Those five fly ladies return

Remember FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance, with solos made and performed by Dianne McIntyre, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Germaine Acogny, Carmen de Lavallade and Bebe Miller?

Well, if you didn't happen to catch these stellar performers last year at LIU's Kumble Theater (where I reviewed the show for Dance Magazine), you have another chance this December at NJPAC's Victoria Theater:

Saturday, December 11, 7:30pm
Sunday, December 12, 3pm

Each dancer appears in a rarely-performed, signature solo work: 
Bebe Miller’s classic Rain, in which the choreographer powerfully portrays “a woman weighted down by a host of cares, yet refusing to be totally crushed by them” (New York Times); Urban Bush Women innovator Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s recent Bring ‘Em Home, which explores the New Orleans tradition of Second Line dancing while commenting on the failed efforts to assist those displaced by Hurricane Katrina; Dianne McIntyre’s If You Don’t Know, set to a piano score composed by Olu Dara, which fuses improvisational movement and jazz to explore a series of African American lives; contemporary African dance master Germaine Acogny’s Untitled, a riveting new solo that incorporates video and original music to imagine an Africa with a powerful female President; and Carmen de Lavallade in a recreation of her role in The Creation, Geoffrey Holder’s classic dance that tells the Biblical story of creation as interpreted in a poem by James Weldon Johnson.

FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance is a project of 651 ARTS.

Information and ticketing

Directions to NJPAC

Eat, dance and be merry!

The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) and the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) invite you to two full days of complimentary dancing, workshops, and cutting-edge cuisine.

Friday, September 11:

10am–12pm: Workshop with French choreographer Pierre Rigal

1–6pm: Dance Class with Odile Duboc, Latifa Laâbissi, Olivier Dubois, and Germaine Acogny (represented by Nora Chipaumire)

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Studio 6A
450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan

Saturday, September 12:

1–6pm: Le Bal NYC

Central Park, East Meadow
Entrance on Fifth Ave and 99th Street, Manhattan

Kindly RSVP by calling 646-731-3206 before Wednesday, September 2.

Program

On Friday, September 11, attend a workshop with world-renowned choreographer Pierre Rigal at Baryshnikov Arts Center, followed by a fun and invigorating class with four of France’s most respected choreographers: Odile Duboc, Latifa Laâbissi, Olivier Dubois, and Germaine Acogny (represented by Nora Chipaumire). Each choreographer will teach brand new dances created especially for Le Bal NYC, the free public dance party/picnic in Central Park that will launch FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival the next day.

Then, on Saturday, September 12 you’ll attend Le Bal NYC and assist the choreographers in teaching the dances you’ve just learned to the crowd in the Park—all while sampling snacks created by some of the hottest chefs in France and NYC!

What is Le Bal NYC?

A fresh new take on some classic French traditions, the “bal populaire” and the “pique-nique” are reinvented as Crossing the Line is launched on the East Meadow in Central Park. French choreographers Odile Duboc, Latifa Laâbissi, Olivier Dubois, and Germaine Acogny have specially created short new dances to be taught section by section to the public. As both audience and performers of the new work, participants get an insider’s look into the mechanics of contemporary choreography as well as the creative imagination of dance personalities. To sate the appetite of all these dancing feet, the Omnivore “brigade” will be creating special Crossing the Line Bento Boxes—a unique vision of the picnic with different elements created by innovative master chefs Inaki Aizpitarte, Alexandre Gauthier, Pascal Barbot, and Michel Bras from France, as well as New York’s David Chang and Wylie Dufresne.

Dancers of all ages are invited to participate in Le Bal NYC, a unique celebration set to take place in East Meadow, Central Park on Saturday, September 12, 2009.

Le Bal NYC

What is Crossing the Line?

Crossing the Line is FIAF’s annual fall festival, conceived as a platform to present vibrant new works by a diverse range of transdisciplinary artists working in France and New York City. Initiated, conceived, and produced by FIAF (the French Institute Alliance Française) in partnership with leading New York cultural institutions, the third annual edition of this inter-disciplinary contemporary arts festival further develops its focus on artists who are transforming cultural practices on both sides of the Atlantic. Over three intensive weeks this fall—whether by performing shopping, watching sounds, composing films, or reading movements—audiences will join in exploring and tasting a unique collection of outstanding new works and experiences, and discovering new revelations from each of these extraordinary artists.

Crossing the Line

French Institute Alliance Française
22 East 60th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, Manhattan

Movement (R)evolution Africa

A few days ago, I posted my review of Nora--a 2008 documentary about Nora Chipaumire and her life in Zimbabwe by filmmakers Alla Kovgan and David Hinton. At the end, I added a link to information on Movement (R)evolution Africa (a story of an art form in four acts), an earlier documentary directed by Kovgan and Joan Frosch, Nora's producer.

Unfortunately, at the time, I was unable to say anything more about M(R)A, since my computer's media player had balked at reading the DVD. However, since then, my regular DVD player kicked into action, and now I'm thrilled to be able to urge you to add both films to your must-see list.

If anything, M(R)A electrified me even more than Nora--which is really saying something.

M(R)A is an absorbing, kaleidoscopic introduction to contemporary dance as conceived by artists from many of Africa's regions, artists committed to reflecting 21st Century African realities.

Creators and performers familiar to most serious dance fans--such as Chipaumire, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of New York's Urban Bush Women and Germaine Acogny of Senegal's Jant-Bi--flow through. But we're also treated to numerous tastes of unfamiliar cultural aesthetics and troupes, such as exquisite Company Rary from Madagascar. If your notion of dance from Africa extends only to theatricalized versions of traditional tribal dancing from Africa's West, it's time for you to see M(R)A. Among other things, this film certainly makes the point--still a necessary lesson for many Americans--that the continent of Africa is not only abundant in cultures but historically impacted by, and, in turn, strongly influential upon, a world of cultures.

With lush, fast-paced imagery and a range of intimate interview clips, M(R)A celebrates Africa's contemporary artists as searching innovators who clearly have much to teach and share with American artists. One of my favorite segments involves an exploration of the African concept of contact dance. The filmmakers piece together samples of this from many of the companies, and I found the palpable human connectedness, groundedness and inherent drama even in abstract movement deeply affecting.

You will want to own a copy and revisit M(R)A many times to catch new ideas and inspirations and to dream of seeing artists you might not yet have had the opportunity to see in New York or elsewhere.

For further information and to view a clip from M(R)A, click here.

Review of FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance

Review
FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance
Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(Re-posted from DanceMagazine.com)

“FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance” featured short solos performed by daughters of Africa and her diaspora—Bebe Miller, Dianne McIntyre, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Carmen de Lavallade, and Senegal’s Germaine Acogny—taking to the stage long past what mainstream American society considers to be the optimum age for a dancer and, to be frank, the optimum age for any woman. In celebrating its 20th anniversary, 651 ARTS chose to honor the tenacity and continuing achievements of these artists.

They hail from different aesthetic milieus. Miller’s career, for instance, burgeoned amid New York’s “downtown” avant garde, while de Lavallade trained with Lester Horton and has graced Broadway, opera, and film. Yet each has questioned the status quo of her art and her time, forging a legacy of creative engagement to inspire generations to come.

In Rain (1989), a modest rectangle of lawn grass becomes Miller’s set and silent partner. Dressed in red velvet, the dancer stretches her arms out wide, as if enjoying their reach. Backpedaling towards this plot of land, she contemplates it, tenderly runs her hand over it, sprawls before it in a tomboyish way, and dances an enigmatic pattern that nevertheless seems to radiate the pride of new ownership. Her solo made me think of wildly overlapping ideas such as the cultural and historical relationship of African and African American people to land; the relationship of dancers to space; and the manicured, altered nature of being roughly cut from one’s native context and planted in an unfamiliar place.

Acogny’s untitled work-in-progress, choreographed with Pierre Doussaint, appears to meditate on journeying. It opens with promise: a declaration that “We need women presidents de la Republique in Africa!” But Acogny’s meanderings are upstaged by Fred Koenig’s surreal and lovely video, and the piece will benefit from compression and focus.

McIyntre (premiering If You Don’t Know Me) and de Lavallade (in Geoffrey Holder’s The Creation from 1972) both served up lessons in elegant, authoritative comportment and command of space, all with minimal fuss. The McIntyre piece is an homage to artists she respects and wishes we knew better. De Lavallade’s storytelling in words and motions offers a saucy illustration of the Biblical take on how our world came to be and could make a believer out of Darwin.

By comparison, Zollar’s Bring ‘Em Home, inspired by the displaced citizens of New Orleans, felt humble. Zollar, lying on the floor, seems able to do little more than wave the white handkerchief clutched in her fingertips. It evokes, at first, surrender, then memories of people signaling for help from the roofs of their flooded homes. But the piece moves towards exuberant celebration and, returning for her bow, Zollar gave us a firm assignment: Go online, sign the petition, bring New Orleans’s diaspora home.

FLY: FIve First Ladies of Dance

Here's my recent Dance Magazine review of "FLY: FIve First Ladies of Dance," which featured Bebe Miller, Germaine Acogny, Dianne McIntyre, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Carmen de Lavallade, presented by 651 Arts at Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts.

Scaling "The scales of memory"

In Les écailles de la mémoire--a profound and fresh collaboration between Brooklyn's Urban Bush Women and Senegal's Compagnie Jant-Bi--the collision of genders and cultures with common roots creates an explosion of sparks. UBW's chameleon-like dancers and the dynamic all-male corps deployed by Germaine Acogny are, simply, made for each other.

Both troupes have claimed the stage as their throne and dance as their gilded frame. When such commanding, magisterial performers as these can also make room for cartoonish physical humor and forthright sexiness--claiming those things, too, as their province--what can a humble audience member do but accept the role, the gift, of watching them?

Fabrice Bouillon-LaForest's forceful and enveloping score and J. Russell Sandifer's moody, sculptural lighting provide a powerful sense of space and place. Mind the fact that the human body is 70% water; the conjoined forces of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's dancers and Acogny's troupe, costumed by Naoko Nagata, seem to be rolling the waves of the fearsome and often tragic Atlantic through spines and limbs and across the darkened floor of the stage. It is the mighty Atlantic that divides them and unites them, the trickster Atlantic that holds the deep impression of their history and opens the way to their future.

Try for a ticket for tomorrow night or Saturday, both at 7:30. Also, on Friday, November 21, at 6pm, choreographer Reggie Wilson will hold an artist talk with Germaine Acogny and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar in the Hillman Attic Studio at BAM ($8).

2008 Next Wave Festival
Brooklyn Academy of Music Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue
718-636-4100

Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography

Check out these brief video visits with dance artists--such as Miguel Gutierrez and Yanira Castro--who have participated in the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography fellowships and international exchange residency programs at Florida State University.

MANCC also has a couple of podcast interviews, downloadable through iTunes: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women, interviewed by UBW dancer and recent Bessie Award winner Nora Chipaumire, and Germaine Acogny, Artistic Director of JANT-BI, interviewed by UBW dancer Catherine Denecy on their companies' collaborative work, Scales of Memory, which will receive its premiere in 2008.

Dancer-choreographer/video artist Dean Moss will be the first artist to receive commissioning and presentational support in MANCC's new partnership initiative with Dance Theater Workshop. Read the full announcement here.