Gibney's DoublePlus: Wesley Chavis and Cori Olinghouse

Wesley Chavis in his solo, Ku In Tuo Muah,
a DoublePlus presentation of Gibney Dance,
curated by Dean Moss
(photos: Scott Shaw)

In Ku In Tuo Muah, soloist Wesley Chavis's "physicalizing [of] his worship"--to use Gibney DoublePlus curator Dean Moss's words--adopts a widespread human practice with ancient origins, still active, for example, in the Black churches of Chavis's own Southern upbringing. Worship of higher, disembodied powers is often a practice of the body, and extreme, transcendent states of mind have always been powerfully accessed through the body, say in ritual dancing or ingestion of sacred hallucinogens. 

Ku In Tuo Muah, like most dance works I get to see, might have many behind-the-scenes influencers and supporters. But the few program credits--for "concept, audio/visual design and, of course, performance--go to Chavis solely, no stated collaborators. For the audience, this solo offers a privileged, if complicated, view of a path engaged upon decidedly alone. It's an internal, private, abstract exploration with challenges only one man can know.

Even the sounds that arise from this exploration are sounds of the breathing and gasping (and maybe unseen crying) of a human body. The emphasis on peeling off and shedding articles of clothing suggests continuous self-transformation and digging down to the person beneath persona beyond the grip and labeling of an outside world.

Stopping to remove his shoes and shirt is the first thing Chavis does as he walks through the door into the theater called Studio H at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. It's like watching a weary man come home.

At first, he does not enter the portion of the space directly in front of the audience seats and will not for a long time. Instead, he occupies that stage-left area near the mirrors. So we must look over, slightly sideways, to watch him. It's a brilliant distancing device. You see me, but you have to work a little for it. I'm still over here in my somewhat private space, and I'm going to make you feel like the voyeurs you are.

So we watch as he proceeds to disturb and distort the functional harmony of his body, and we watch the wrenching and shedding and listen to the ragged gasps. His entrance to the main section of the space, which is covered in shiny, black plastic introduces more sound--the noise of him scrunching that floor covering as he continues to contort and scrunch up his body.

At the end, Chavis simply gathers up his clothing and exits the theater, remaining someone seen with the physical eyes but not really known--an impressive, even beautiful, but remote performer. His dance, his ritual, remained--for me, at least--a journey monitored but not truly shared, and I note that with acceptance and respect.

Cori Olinghouse (above and below)
in GRANDMA
(photos: Scott Shaw)

What Cori Olinghouse calls Clown Therapy draws from The Fool's power to look at things sideways upside down and dismantle the everyday mundane and how we habitually see it. Her GRANDMA--an interdisciplinary piece for herself, Martita Abril and Kate Watson Wallace--is wacky without (for the most part) being funny. It really isn't clowning in the conventional manner. Its pace is most often glacial with stiff, stooped, dazed dancers shambling about a space littered with cheap snack food. Their overpowering, face-obscuring wigs and lipstick pink costumes, the recognizable snack food product placement, though--that's where the funny would normally be situated. The clown proffering little plastic-wrapped cupcakes could not be more pathetic as she apparently cannot bring herself to approach more than two people in the audience, her feet repeatedly colliding with the plastic cups that earlier exploded onto the floor right in front of us.

My sympathetic attention cleaves to one performer momentarily and sadly stuck facing a corner, as if in shame, confusion or both. The old-fashioned tv screen at the center of it all gives back nothing but static. Attempts to mop up the mess--or stuff slices of Wonderbread under one's wig--are futile, half-hearted and soon abandoned. The overall ineptitude and visual disarray speak to a growing upheaval at the core of something, and that must be the therapy Olinghouse chooses to agitate.

Olinghouse's inclusion of two pop hits--George Michael's "Father Figure" and Wham!'s "Everything She Wants"--will launch an army of earworms, I can attest. The songs underscore a displeasure with warped values, excess consumption and the detritus it generates.

Wesley Chavis + Cori Olinghouse concludes tonight with a performance at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Subscribe in a reader

Gibney presents Shamar Wayne Watt and Yinka Esi Graves

Shamar Wayne Watt (photo: Natalie Romero Marx)
Below: Yinka Esi Graves (photo: Camilla Greenwall)

DoublePlus presents three weeks of shared evenings for which established artist-curators each choose a pair of emerging artists and mentor them through the creative, production and audience development processes.

--Gibney Dance 

I am very excited about Yinka Esi Graves, a mature, serious thinker and flamenco artist. Shamar Watt is a strong physical performer with a nascent choreographic practice. These artists are both asking questions about the value of human life through different performance forms. What I care about most is how their aesthetics come through. 
Carrying the history and burden of blackness are relevant topics of discussion. But how do time, space and energy capture these issues? With little to no evolution in contemporary politics and economies of race, the body must become a weaponized agent of aesthetics for the artist. Graves’ and Watt’s performative explorations manifest the body as a site for these urgent concerns.

--Nora Chipaumire 

Nora Chipaumire--otherwise known as one of the most exhilarating dance performers of our times--writes that she prefers to avoid calling herself a curator. So let's call her, instead, a practiced eye that allows us all to see further and wider. Fulfilling her role as "eye" and one of the mentors for the DoublePlus fall series at Gibney Dance, she has now introduced us to two exciting emerging artists--Yinka Esi Graves and Shamar Wayne Watt. I attended Watt and Graves's final show in the theater at Gibney's Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center.

When the audience first entered, Watt's Gully spring: Di exhortation was already in motion. His gnarly shadow played across a canvas curtain enclosing him like a shower stall. His mother, Valerie Davis, sat nearby, waiting to sing, play her mini-tambourine and read pointed Scripture passages at certain times during the dance.

Jamaica-born Watt draws his aesthetic for Gully spring from a prophetic spirituality that is, indeed, exhortative, magnetic, formidable. He is both high priest of a religion of his own creation--insurgency, liberation--and its exemplary warrior. For most of the lengthy, engrossing performance, the muscular, dreadlocked dancer anchors himself at the center of a broad, low platform, under the periodic drip of a gallon jug of water, and slowly rotates on his axis, gathering tension and power. He speaks, imparting searing visions to us, his captive congregation. When he stamps, it shakes the ground beneath our chairs, and when he tells us to do something--yes, you just looking on as if this is mere spectacle--he means it.

I have watched dance artists address the frightening toxicity of our times with rituals of healing. I have never watched--and felt--anything that could match this hypnotic intensity.

Watt's sermon? Every valley--or gully, if you will--shall be exalted. It is written. It is coming. We make it happen.

An intermission gave Gibney's theater crew time to reset things for Yinka Esi Graves, but maybe also offered time for us to turn to one another, talk a bit, let some of that tension out.

Graves's Twitter bio reads:

In short: born in london, grew up in nicaragua, guadeloupe, london, part educated in french, studied art history, wanted to make films, now flamenco dancer...

Her dancing has been featured in M. Angel Rosales's film, Gurumbé: Canciones de tu Memoria Negra (2016), a documentary tracing the influence of Africans on Spain and flamenco. She is the first Black flamenco artist I have seen and one of the most exciting flamenco dancers in my experience. I am grateful to Chipaumire for opening my eyes to this artist, and I hope she will return to New York so that we can see more.

Her solea--The fine line por Solea--follows a wistful, delicately sensuous prelude by Guillermo Guilén (guitar) and Ismael Fernandez (vocals). Here the dancer's authority and intensity--which, as I see it, connects her to Watt--lies in the depth and exactitude of shape in her movements, right down to the specificity of each finger. She has her own chosen, deployed power. She sweeps us up in the follow-through of impulse through inclination and gesture. And there's nothing wasted. Nothing just for filler or flash. Such intelligence, such beauty I can only call regal and bow before.

This program has concluded. For information and tickets to the DoublePlus series, click here (Week Two) and here (Week Three).

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

Subscribe in a reader

My upcoming Long Tables for Gibney Dance & Abrons Arts Center

I'm so excited to be curating and facilitating two more arts community Long Tables and hope you can join us for either or both of these welcoming, informal conversations for artists of dance, performance or any discipline!

A Long Table conversation--as first conceived by theater artist Lois Weaver--is initiated by an invited core group of participants who "set the table" with food for thought, but it is open, throughout, to other folks, sitting around the perimeter, who can come up and take seats at the table to share their experiences, ideas, questions and insights in a non-hierarchical, non-panel/Q&A setting. They are not so much "audience" as listening and contributing community.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: Deneka Peniston)

CENTER LINE:

MOVING INTO WRITING

WITH EVA YAA ASANTEWAA

Wednesday, November 8

6:30pm to 8:30pm

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter 53A Chambers), Manhattan

(directions)

Moving into Writing considers approaches to the written word as response to, collaboration with, and documentation of dance and performance. What can writers and dancers learn from each other? What role do writers play within local, national and international dance ecosystems? Core participants will include Maura Donohue, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Paloma McGregor, Marissa Perel and Tara Sheena.

Free admission. Everyone is welcome to listen in and/or pull up a chair at our table to share your thoughts and questions.

An RSVP is not required, but it helps us better plan our space. Click here.

Produced by EYA Projects and Gibney Dance

DISCOMFORT: A LONG TABLE

Thursday, November 30

7pm to 9pm

Abrons Arts Center

466 Grand Street, Manhattan

(directions)

DISCOMFORT makes space for dance, performance and other artists to talk about the place of discomfort in our lives, processes, practices and relationships with collaborators, audiences, our society and world. Core participants will include NIC Kay, Dan Fishback , Ash RT Yergen and Joya Powell.

Free admission. Everyone is welcome to listen in and/or pull up a chair at our table to share your thoughts and questions.

Please hold this date. RSVP information to come.

Produced by EYA Projects and Abrons Arts Center


And I'm already planning more Long Tables for 2018! I hope you will support these community gatherings with your presence and by helping to spread the word to your network of friends and colleagues. Let's get this out there all around social media!

Thanks!

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

Maria Bauman sweats truths of life, rest, dying, freedom

Cast of Maria Bauman's dying and dying and dying
l-r: Bauman, Audrey Hailes, Valerie Ifill and Courtney Cook
not shown: Alicia Raquel
(photo: Scott Shaw)

At the close of dying and dying and dying--the new work by Maria Bauman (MBDance), just opened at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center--my guest, another Black woman, turned and asked me to verify the words of a particular line of text. Was it, she wanted to know, I have the right to die a natural death? How interesting that she should pick up on that particular line.

A few weeks ago, Bauman's Open Studio preview made me think about the history of Black death in the Americas, so much of it anything but natural. A history of dying dominated by brutal violence or illness due to poverty, due to lack of healthcare access or access to malignant care. A history of final moments that could have been solemn, sacred, even exalted, but where many Black bodies suffered hard deaths, in some cases, experienced profound dishonoring that should be no one's fate. These are endings of lives lived in the zone of an undeclared war.

I also flashed back to the title of Melvin Van Peebles's 1970s musical, Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, and Audre Lorde's line from her poem "Litany for Survival": "So it is better to speak/remembering/We were never meant to survive."

In this context, the assertion, "I have the right to die a natural death," takes on power and poignancy. And the same can be said for Bauman's expressive ensemble piece.  More than a few times, she and Courtney Cook, Valerie Ifill and Audrey Hailes, all circling an assemblage of ancestral memorabilia with warm, graceful, exuberant movement and vocal work, drop to the floor and lie still long enough for us to wonder what just happened. These sudden, decisive breaks in the flow evoke yoga's Savasana pose (corpse pose), a cessation of motion that allows bodymind time to absorb and integrate the energies of its previous actions.

Bauman aims to reorder what we value in life, to give space and time to rest, to surrender, to lying fallow, now and again, like a patch of good, growing earth, as we regenerate energy needed for the future. In her view, key to the purposefulness of that humble rest is the space and time to listen for and take in what our ancestors have to offer us. And that is why this piece--her "performance-ritual" and "earnest offering" with spoken word performances by Alicia Raquel--continually takes its strength from all of those treasured artifacts and photos of departed loved ones in the center of the space.

Try to imagine a viable way to introduce the notion of "death as the opposite of capitalism," a task Bauman sets for herself in dying and dying and dying. Video work and some mechanistic movement and aggression between Bauman and Cook do evoke the capitalism part, showing the women as having fallen prey to toxic, destructive values. But I'm still not completely convinced that death as a metaphor for needed rest will work for many people outside of a yoga class. It's a tricky conceptual leap for most. (When Death turns up in Tarot layouts, readers like me do quite a bit of verbal tap dancing to allay most querents' immediate fear.) But I do think dying and dying and dying succeeds in its accessible humanity and especially when dancers draw in, embody and ferociously release the personalities and energies of those whose bodies are now permanently still, at peace.

Bauman is Gibney Dance’s 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence and has also received Gibney Dance’s Beth Silverman-Yam Social Action Award. Go a little early, and you can enjoy Bauman and Cook's gallery memorial, To Rest, while you wait for the theater to open. The exhibition will be up through September 22.

dying and dying and dying continues tonight and Saturday at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Subscribe in a reader

Gibney's new Center Line season presents Long Table convos

I'm looking forward to a new season in the arts in New York!

Please join me on September 27 and November 8 

for two special Long Table conversations 

at Gibney Dance, 

free and open to all!

******

Center Line Conversation Series

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

Curated and facilitated by dance writer and independent curator Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Center Line is a conversation series highlighting issues concerning the dance community. Center Line conversations will adopt performance artist Lois Weaver’s non-hierarchical Long Table format to encourage “informal conversation on serious topics.”


Casting About: About Casting
Wednesday, September 27 at 6:30pm

Initiated by Yanira Castro, Casting About: About Casting will explore present day dynamics of cast, audience and choreographer. What does a cast represent? How does access to resource affect the composition of a cast, and does this change the relationships between performers, the work and the choreographer? Does the mutability of the contemporary performer challenge or stimulate creativity? Invited participants include Yanira Castro, Aaron Mattocks, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Kyle Bukhari and Leslie Cuyjet.


Moving into Writing
Wednesday November 8 at 6:30pm

Moving into Writing considers approaches to the written word as response to, collaboration with and documentation of dance and performance. What can writers and dancers learn from each other? What role do writers play within local, national and international dance ecosystems? How can dance artists best interact with critics, scholars and creative writers in their field? Participants may bring one sample written about or for dance, to share if time permits (350 words, maximum). Invited participants include Maura Donohue, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Paloma McGregor, Tara Sheena and Marissa Perel.

******

For information on this and all Gibney Dance programming for Fall 2017, visit Gibney Dance Center here.

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

Subscribe in a reader

The 2017 Bessie Awards nominations (and two winners)!

With Managing Director Heather Robles (left)
and Executive Director Lucy Sexton (right)
opening a press conference at Gibney Dance Center,
the Bessies organization announced two early winners
and a slate of nominees for the 2017 Bessies Awards
set for October 9 at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.
(photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

2017 Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award:
Will Rawls

"for creating astute, genre-eluding work that explores the relationship between movement and language and delves deeply into ideas of transmission, translation, and authorship; and for his multifaceted artistry as choreographer, writer, editor, and curator, expanding the presence of dance and performance."

2017 Juried Bessie Award:
Abby Zbikowski 

"recognized for her rigorous and utterly unique development of an authentic movement vocabulary, employed in complex and demanding structures to create dances of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger. (2017 Jury: Kyle Abraham, Brenda Bufalino, and Beth Gill)

The 2017 Bessie Awards Nominations

Outstanding Production

Vanessa Anspaugh
The End of Men; An Ode to Ocean
Joyce Unleashed at Abrons Art Center

Kader Attou of CCN de la Rochelle/Cie Accrorap
OPUS 14
Fall for Dance at New York City Center

Bridgman / Packer
Voyeur
Sheen Center

Nora Chipaumire
portrait of myself as my father
BAM Fisher

Antony Hamilton
Meeting
La MaMa and Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

Jessica Lang
Thousand Yard Stare
The Joyce Theater

Ligia Lewis
minor matter
American Realness at Abrons Art Center

Taylor Mac
A 24-Decade History of Popular Music
St. Ann’s Warehouse/Pomegranate Arts

Crystal Pite
The Statement
Performed by Nederlands Dans Theater
New York City Center

Sébastien Ramirez and Honji Wang
Monchichi
BAM Fisher

Abdel Salaam
Healing Sevens
Featuring Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theatre, Ill Style & Peace Productions, and Dyane Harvey Salaam
DanceAfrica at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

Adrienne Truscott
THIS
New York Live Arts

Outstanding Revived Work

Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd
Conceived by Ishmael Houston-Jones. Co-directed by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Miguel Gutierrez. John Bernd's music compositions arranged and re-mixed by Nick Hallett. Consultation by Jennifer Monson.
Danspace Project Platform 2016: Lost and Found

About Kazuo Ohno
By Takao Kawaguchi
Japan Society

Stephen Petronio Company
For Trio A (1966), Chair Pillow (1969), and Diagonal (1963) by Yvonne Rainer; Goldberg  Variations (1986) by Steve Paxton; The Courtesan and the Crone (1999) by Anna Halprin
The Joyce Theater

Outstanding Performer

Yeman Brown
In Citizen by Reggie Wilson
BAM Harvey

PeiJu Chien-Pott
In Virginie Mécène’s reimagining of Martha Graham’s 1933 solo, Ekstasis
The Joyce Theater

Sean Donovan
For his body of work with The Builders Association, Faye Driscoll, Witness Relocation, Jennie MaryTai Liu, and Jane Comfort

Jonathan Gonzalez
In minor matter by Ligia Lewis
American Realness at Abrons Art Center

Julie McMillan
In KO-BU by Benjamin Kimitch
Danspace Project

Cast of Riff this, Riff that
By Ephrat Asherie Dance
River to River Festival, Atrium Plaza

Anna Schön
In Citizen by Reggie Wilson
BAM Harvey

Nicholas Sciscione
In excerpts from Steve Paxton’s Goldberg Variations
Presented by the Stephen Petronio Company
The Joyce Theater

Ensemble of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds: Maria Bauman, Sidra Bell, Davalois Fearon, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Melanie Greene, Kayla Hamilton, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Nia Love, Paloma McGregor, Sydnie L. Mosley, Rakiya Orange, Leslie Parker, Angie Pittman, Samantha Speis, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Ni’Ja Whitson, Grace Osborne and others*
Curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Danspace Project Platform 2016: Lost and Found
*Edisa Weeks and Tara Aisha Willis also appeared in the cast, but are ineligible to vote on or receive awards as current Bessie Awards Committee members.

Daaimah Taalib-Din
In Eclipse: Visions of the Crescent and the Cross by Abdel Salaam
Aaron Davis Hall

Diana Vishneva
For Sustained Achievement with American Ballet Theatre

Cast of we free: DJ BLKWYNTR, Arielle Rosales, and Solo Woods, as well as Courtney Cook, Marguerite Hemmings, Jessica Phoenix and Italy Welton
By Marguerite Hemmings
Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

Outstanding Emerging Choreographer

(* indicates award recipient)

Lela Aisha Jones

Niall Jones

Will Rawls*

Katarzyna Skarpetowska

Outstanding Music Composition/Sound Design

ICTUS ensemble/ROSAS
For Vortex Temporum
By Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker
BAM Next Wave Festival, Howard Gilman Opera House

Chris Kuklis and Will Rawls
For The Planet-Eaters: Seconds
By Will Rawls
River to River Festival, National Museum of the American Indian

Ryan MacDonald
For The End of Men, Again
By Vanessa Anspaugh
Danspace Project

Alisdair Macindoe
For Meeting
By Antony Hamilton
La MaMa and Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

Outstanding Visual Design

Nora Chipaumire
For portrait of myself as my father
By Nora Chipaumire
BAM Fisher

Taylor Mac, Niegel Smith, Machine Dazzle, Mimi Lien, John Torres, Eric Avery, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
For A 24-Decade History of Popular Music
By Taylor Mac
St. Ann’s Warehouse/Pomegranate Arts

Paulina Olowska
For Slavic Goddesses–A Wreath of Ceremonies
By Paulina Olowska
The Kitchen

Mark Ryden and Brad Fields
For Whipped Cream
By Alexei Ratmansky
Performed by American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House

*****

Come to the 33rd annual Bessie Awards on Monday, October 9, at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets will go on sale August 1.

For more information, click here.

Follow the Bessies on Facebook / #theBessies / @bessieawards

Subscribe in a reader

Closing tonight: solos for and by Chelsea Bonosky at Gibney

Dance artist Chelsea Bonosky
(photos: Justin Ervin)

Tonight, Chelsea Bonosky wraps up LUNA, her show of dance solos at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. She performs three poetic, sometimes enigmatic works made for her by colleagues Adam Barruch, Pavel Zustiak and Gabrielle Lamb plus one, named LUNA, that she made in collaboration with vocalist Mary Carter.

Barruch (Testimony) brings out something of the Martha Graham in Bonosky. Zustiak, as is his wont, leads her into dark places (Aphar) and throws her way off-kilter and shakes her to her core. In the evening's most visually-satisfying piece (v²=2gh), Lamb deploys Bonosky in a spare but fanciful arrangement of science lab beakers with a suspended globe dripping water--a metaphor for artistic experimentation or, perhaps, something more. Each of the four works engages Bonosky--a fine, disciplined technician and expressive performer--in a process that reaches into and beyond herself, never shrinking from the discordance that she might find on her way to clarity.

LUNA's final performance takes place tonight at 8pm. For information and ticketing, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Got GRIT? What's new and what's reworked at Gibney

Nigel Campbell (left) and Brandon Welch
perform in Joanna Kotze's world premiere, Already Ready.
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Invent, reinvent. Configure, reconfigure.

Since forming her Gibney Dance Company in 1991, Gina Gibney has continually re-imagined who and what it could be--from its demographics to the degree of its performers' engagement with the world outside of studios and theaters. And, this week, comes the second round of another programming structure out of the Gibney organization--GRIT (Gibney Repertory Initiative for Tomorrow) which, in effect, gives her five-member ensemble the challenge of working with choreographers other than herself.

The organization describes the program as follows:

Gibney Dance Company’s GRIT series “makes space for the future of dance” by commissioning new works and reimagining signature works by contemporary dance artists. GRIT posits the possibility that the present generation’s work will be recognized and celebrated in live performance by future audiences.

So, if I got this right, part of the mission of the troupe will be to embody and preserve works by other select dance makers. What GRIT mainly sounds like, though, is a way to expand on what Gibney dancers are exposed to and what they can be prepared to tackle in the future--an interesting development.

The opening last night at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center showed GRIT to be very much a work in progress. You wish well for these dancers but, with the distinct exception of Gibney stalwart and Associate Artistic Director Amy Miller, they have not yet opened into the depth of the work--in the case of Joanna Kotze's new Already Ready, potential depth; in the case of Reggie Wilson’s collaged config. Khoum-baye Heah, near-bottomless depths.

They risk looking far more callow and untried than they actually are. And even a secure veteran like Miller--whose every appearance is a master class in how to think about performance, how to perform and how to see performance--often seems to be just keeping up with the surface, basic requirements of the Wilson work.

Devin Oshiro, Brandon Welch, Amy Miller,
Nigel Campbell and Kasandra Cruz
in Reggie Wilson's config. Khoum-baye Heah

Wilson has made many dances for his exciting Fist and Heel Performance Group largely informed by his research into the arts and spiritual cultures and ritual practices of the broad African diaspora and infused with his wit and contemporary, formal inventiveness. (Long ago, he named this wondrous melange "post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dance.”)  It is to be hoped that Wilson's valuable repertory will indeed be available to future makers, scholars, performers and audiences.

Veteran FHPG dancer Paul Hamilton assisted Wilson in setting a medly of elements of PANG (2000), The DEW WET (1997) and Big Brick – A Man’s Piece (2002) on the Gibney troupe. By Hamilton's account, the experience was a generous one on both sides with the Gibney dancers bringing their strength of community, willing to embrace the Wilson aesthetic's formidable physical demands. Physically, those demands are ones of speed and a furious multiplicity of isolations, directions, levels, uses of weight and deployments of the pelvis. So much going on at once, often at full force. Their bodies hit it, but I don't see the whole of each person living it, being in it. I don't get why they're doing what they're doing.

Kotze's Already Ready, she tells us, comes out of desire to meet the demands of the current moment for stepping up--as citizens, as activists, as creative people who care. Are we ready? She believes we are, and that fits in with everything I've ever known about what Gina Gibney wants for her dance artists and for dancers in general. So, here, a good match--at least in terms of aspiration.

What I appreciate about Already Ready is that is does, indeed, seem to be about people ready to play. They bring their noisy feet into the space, and they boldly doodle and squiggle themselves all over it as if they were big, fat crayons. Diverse in racial background and motley in costuming, they're just a bunch of folks making their particular marks in time, bringing what they bring. I don't see a whole lot more going on here, but I do see that, if this is Kotze's ultimate point, it got across.

Performers: Nigel Campbell, Kasandra Cruz, Amy Miller, Devin Oshiro, Brandon Welch

GRIT continues through Saturday with performances tonight at 8pm and Saturday at 5pm and 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Drag for a good cause: Homecoming Queens light up Gibney

Homecoming Queens,
a benefit for New York's Harvey Milk High School,
featured drag performers
such as members of Haus of Umpteen Corpses
with Ragamuffin (second from right)
(photo: Eric Berey)

Kalandra Bankhead
(photo: Chris Barley)

Homecoming Queens--a drag showcase presented at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center this past Wednesday--was a first for Gibney and fantastic fun. The brisk-paced program was hosted by Gibney Dance's 2016 boo-koo Artist in Residence, Ashley R.T. Yergens, who knows how to introduce just the right degree of looseness and absurdity. And it was supported by an excellent technical team, directed by Asami Morita, particularly nifty with lighting the intimate studio setting. We could almost imagine we were in a cabaret.

Highlights included Vic Sin, preternaturally limber and definitively regal in beard and mien; Ragamuffin (Jesse Forte White), powerful in energy and gaze, surprising us with Anne Carson's words on tragedy, rage and grief; the ebullient and warped lady bedbug (Kelindah Schuster) and her...er...was that a crocodile puppet?; transmasculine K.James in his perfect, smoking-hot tribute to the late George Michael, and lots of imaginative extra-extra from The Dauphine of Bushwick (Tyler Ashley), The Haus of Umpteen Corpses (Angelica Sundae, MEGABABE and Mini Horrorwitz) and Kalandra Bankhead.

A good time was had by all, and I certainly hope it raised a good amount of cash for its beneficiary, New York's Harvey Milk High School, founded in 1985 and dedicated to respect, safety, nurturance and excellence for all students.

Homecoming Queens is closed. For information on future events at Gibney Dance, click here.


Subscribe in a reader

This ability: "Our Configurations" at Gibney Dance

Top: Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson of Kinetic Light
(photo: Scott Shaw)
Bottom: Marc Brew of AXIS Dance Company
(photo: Andrea Testoni)

In a dance concert, what would be more surprising ? What Marissa Perel asks her first two able-bodied "consensual submissives" to do in (do not) despair solo while she exercises her agency to speak to her audience? Or how she treats her third submissive?

How about this: What's more in your face? The way choreographer Sonya Delwaide moves her two performers, keeping you aware of dancer Julie Crothers (AXIS Dance Company) phocomelia, a genetic disorder affecting one of her arms? Or the fact that the two women, Crothers and Alivia Schaffer, remain finely, intimately attuned to each other at each point of their duet, Dix minutes plus tard (Ten Minutes Later)?

And what of the partnership of Kinetic Light's Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson (to bend a bough and Broken Intent)? Is it more mindblowing to watch these dancers use streamlined wheelchairs as if these objects were STREB action gear? Or is it the way both women switch on their vulnerable flesh, their minds and their passions throughout a demanding encounter, showing us what it means to claim space, to claim life?

Our Configurations, an evening at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, reworked how we think about and look at disability in dance and performance. It raised questions of audience preconceptions--what do we expect and feel entitled to see?--and the privilege of the able-bodied to decide what is or is not noteworthy and virtuosic in performance.

Virtuosity, the product of disciplined labor, is worthy of respect, no one denies. In the post-show Q&A moderated by Hentyle Yapp, Sheppard declared, "Why wouldn't we have virtuosity? We put in the hours like everyone else." (Absolutely noted!) But for Perel, a queer artist living with pain, making art is "an act of resistance against normativity," an upending of expectations. So virtuosity needs to be "a new set of choices" not projected by viewers or critics but conceived by artists themselves. "Crips to the front," Perel declares. "People with disabilities taking up space in dance contexts."

I came away from Our Configuration with my own energies flying. Like AXIS artistic director Marc Brew (of Remember When, his visual and expressive feast in dance and film), I felt eager for this evening to open the way for "more, more, more."

The Winter/Spring 2017 season at Gibney continues with The Bureau of the Future of Choreography's presentation of 1776. Click here for more information.

Get your free email subscription

to InfiniteBody.

Click here!

Doubling up: Leslie Cuyjet and Lela Aisha Jones at Gibney

Patricia Peaches Jones
in Plight Release & the Diasporic Body: Jesus & Egun
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Choreographers create worlds for us to visit--visits sometimes good enough to make us to want to linger. But I don't recall ever wanting to just go live there. I mean permanently. Then came Lela Aisha Jones.

Jones--curated by Cynthia Oliver for a DoublePlus evening at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center--created a world so finely-crafted and nourishing that I could imagine not ever leaving. Really, this dance might be all I need for the rest of my life.

Her trio, Plight Release & the Diasporic Body: Jesus & Egun, takes off from the notion that Jesus, a figure dear to many people of African descent, is also way overworked. There are so many other ancestors and spiritual beings who could and should be asked to shoulder some of that burden. This is a concept Jones attributes to Nzinga Metzger, PhD, a scholar of African diasporic religious traditions.

Wow. Rather than rejecting Jesus as the ironically white icon of European colonizers, Jones both embraces and frees him. She doesn't so much lower him from his pedestal in Black church tradition as place him on a spectrum with others. And with her wonderful dancing mates--Zakiya L. Cornish and Patricia Peaches Jones--she demonstrates that Afro-Atlantic religious traditions, including those under the banner of Christianity, can exist to serve the nature and cultures and healing needs of the people who take part in them.

L-r: Patricia Peaches Jones, Zakiya L. Cornish and Lela Aisha Jones
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Everything in Plight Release is made or selected by Jones and her team with utmost care--set and props (which we encounter and interact with first), lighting and shadows, costuming, music and, finally, dancing of ritualistic rigor and beauty. There's nothing done by rote or imitation. Jones finds her own ways to employ symbols, gestures, dance steps. The effect is to be welcomed into a gracious home and sacred space, treated with respect and, at every moment, feel yourself to be in the presence of someone with clarity about what she's doing and why she's doing it. You simply relax.

So, it's decided. I need to look for more from Lela Aisha Jones | FlyGround, and you need to go see this piece tonight. Last chance!

Also curated by Oliver for this program: Alike, an intriguing duet by Leslie Cuyjet for herself and Darrin Wright. The big draw here is seeing two of New York's "dancers' dancers" explore magical, even mysterious approaches to space and their more obvious differences of gender, race, timing and expression.

Darren Wright and Leslie Cuyjet in Alike
(photo: Scott Shaw)

This DoublePlus program concludes with tonight's performance at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Free email subscription

to InfiniteBody

Click here! 

Works by Dylan Crossman Dans(c)e, Caleb Teicher and Company at Gibney

Last night, at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, curator David Parker introduced his Double Plus evening as "a utopian event" and "not an ordinary combination of artists." Here we have Dylan Crossman (Dylan Crossman Dans(c)e), with his elite Cunningham/post-Cunningham pedigree. And then there's Caleb Teicher (Caleb Teicher and Company), a young Bessie-winning prince of tap collaborating with swing dance champion Nathan Bugh. Combining these disparate sensibilities and styles into one show is far from your everday New York programming. But what makes sense to Parker is that these artists take what we've come to expect from their respective art forms and ask more of them.

But first, Crossman asks something of us. The opening of [Insert Title] makes us crane our necks to see him and three fellow dancers--Sumi Clements, Jason Collins and Sarah Harrmann--lined up off to the far right of Gibney's theater space in light that both catches their flesh and surrounds it in murk. It's a theatrical attention-getter, though beyond that effect, its purpose remains unclear. When the dancers soon swarm into the central space directly in front of us, there's nothing reserved or shadowy about them. Squatting, lunging, cantilevering, they readily take the measure of a space now theirs to inhabit.

I'd been contemplating Lois Weaver's Long Table discussion format and had just watched Antonia's Line, the 1995 Dutch film where scenes of a dinner table teeming with various and sundry characters served as Weaver's inspiration. So I was amused to see a long table set up behind Crossman and his dancers. Dark, plain, bare and sturdy, it seemed to represent home or, at least, a base to touch, slouch upon, back up against, even mount and dance across in the encounters and confrontations that would ensue as a muddy audio recording--a speaking voice run backwards?--rambled on unhelpfully.

Left-right: Sumi Clements, Sarah Harrmann and Jason Collins
in Dylan Crossman's [Insert Title]
(photo: Scott Shaw)

This long table is the one constant in a variation of interpersonal arrangements. Encircling it, dancers move right up into or back away from one another's personal space. They gaze into one another's eyes as we both project what we think is happening and shy away from those projections. In fact, our own back-and-forth can render us watchers transparent to ourselves. We see ourselves seeing something that might or might not be there. And doesn't that feel odd? Shouldn't we mind our business? Well, if we should mind our business, what are we doing at a dance concert watching bodies in motion?

Well, Crossman and crew, especially feline Clements, are adroit postmodern movers. They master clean form while suggesting human narrative when bodies are in proximity to other bodies.

Meet Ella, then, makes the perfect follow-up--all about two male bodies in near-constant and joyous proximity, along for the swooping, sliding fun ride of recordings of Ella Fitzgerald singing live. And, yes, as a friend noted, the late great jazz vocalist gets a bio in the program notes. Rightly so. Her agile voice--with all its daredevil technique, its silky warmth and delectable playfulness--is an essential and equal partner here, in high form, as are Teicher and Bugh.

I had only ever seen the mercurial Teicher tap dance, a wonderful thing in itself. I had never seen Bugh; Meet Ella was my introduction to this lighthearted charmer. The two men, wearing regular two-toned oxford shoes, not tap shoes, make nonstop rhythmic "music" throughout their bodies. Swing dance, jitterbug, ballroom, even dashes of Nicholas Brothers virtuosity flow though the duet, powered by standards like "Our Love is Here to Stay," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" and--so lusciously--the Lionel Hampton/Sonny Burke/Johnny Mercer "Midnight Sun."

Was there such a night?

It's still a thrill I don't quite believe;

But after you were gone

There was still some stardust on my sleeve!

Nobody sings it like Ella....

Saucy, sexy Meet Ella leaves us with stardust--a great performance and an instant classic.

Dylan Crossman Dans(c)e and Caleb Teicher and Company continue through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

The Fierce Urgency of Now: A Space to Process the Election

The Fierce Urgency of Now: 

A Space to Process the Election

Tuesday, November 29

7pm to 9pm

FREE/OPEN TO ALL

Initiated by Jill Sigman and Co-Facilitated by Marguerite Hemmings, Joshua Hall, Mary Suk, David King, and other artists and thinkers 

Hosted by Gibney Dance

FREE and open to people of all races, ethnicities, ages, and nationalities, artists and non-artists

The Fierce Urgency of Now is a public dialogue event for artists, activists, friends, colleagues, and affiliates. Many of us are still feeling the need for space and community in which to process the election and its ramifications. Artists and activists are simultaneously part of multiple vulnerable populations; now more than ever, we are concerned about racism, sexism, visas and immigration, access to healthcare, rights and safety for queer and trans people, disability access, affordable housing, financial stability, and so much more. This loosely structured public event creates a “temporary commons” in which to think, talk, wonder, question, imagine, and brainstorm. It is conceived as an open dialogue (not a strategy meeting or a place to determine actionable steps, although if those emerge, we’ll welcome them too). One event can’t do everything. The Fierce Urgency of Now is intended to be part of a collective beginning, which hopefully leads to future dialogues, more focused groups, strategy building, task forces, etc.

For more information, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

Gibney company premieres "Folding In" at home

Scenes from Gina Gibney's Folding In
Above, left to right: Kassandra Cruz, Devin Oshiro and Amy Miller
Below: Nigel Campbell and Kassandra Cruz
(photos: Scott Shaw)

Gina Gibney lists her five dancers--Amy Miller, Brandon Welch, Nigel Campbell, Kassandra Cruz and Devin Oshiro--as collaborators, and dance outsiders might think that role stops when a work's first performance begins. But it continues through the last movement of the work, and Gibney's artistry foregrounds performers in a way calls to mind Yeats musing, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

The Gibney Dance Company celebrates its 25th anniversary this season with the world premiere of Folding In, Gibney's first evening-length piece since opening her organization's second home, Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center.  Set to an atmospheric score by Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, the dance bears the distinct Gibney stamp in its imagistic poetry, picturesque sculpture and sensitive relationships that initiate and flow between and among dancers. This choreographer, I suspect, continuously tinkers and crafts a world she'd like to live in.

She describes the piece as "a meditation on the cycle of extension, resolution, and return" that exposes "the natural state of the body and how it seeks inevitable but unknowable endings." The dancing fills a looming white studio space tinted with lighting designer Asami Morita's muted, shifting chroma. Intriguingly, as the audience seating is arranged, the studio also features a deep area perpendicular to the scene and out of our view--what we can't see, can't know. That recessed area has a definite presence.

What we do see--and quite clearly, as is the Gibney way--might be hard to define. A corps of white-clad dancers spread themselves across the back wall like sticky scraps of paper torn from some once-unified whole--an image reflected in the projection on the wall. They initially use the wall as a medium in which to grow, to explore the strength of their hands and the reach of their limbs, to eventually and crucially render themselves distinct from their beginnings and from one another. Felicity Sargent's interestingly different costumes suggest that they were always meant to strike out in individual ways.

They emerge--agile, spiky Miller, "rubberband man" Welch and all--in a whirlpool of motion generating solitudes and interconnections. The work requires--and receives from its performer--both remarkable plasticity and exactitude. Although the makeup of her company has changed over these many years, Gibney has always had an eye for a dancer's dancer, some of the best collaborators an artist can hope for.

Folding In continues through Wednesday, November 12. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody