NEW@Graham: Celebrating a decade of "Lamentation Variations"

Lament not. Janet Eilber plans to keep dreaming up ways to revivify America's longest-running dance troupe, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Graham's famed solo, Lamentations, continues to show the way.

Last evening, the company celebrated the 10th year of Lamentation Variations, its unusual commissioning project launched in 2007 as artistic director Eilber noticed that the season's opening night would fall on the anniversary of 9/11. Since then, Eilber has invited dancemakers, representing a diversity of aesthetic approaches, to respond to or re-imagine the Graham solo. So, Yes to Judson genius Yvonne Rainer rethinking Lamentation or tap genius Michelle Dorrance remixing it!

The commissioned artists pledge fidelity, more or less, to a set of spartan rules limiting length (no longer than Graham's four minutes), rehearsal time (10 hours tops) and sets (absolutely none allowed). Even given these restrictions, each has managed to re-envision the original in signature ways--for instance, turning the spare, tense, wrenching angularity of Graham's grieving into something eerily luxurious for soloist Katherine Crockett (Richard Move, 2007), bringing the entire company onstage (Larry Keigwin, 2007), turning the solo into an interracial male duet (Kyle Abraham, 2015) or teaching Memphis Jookin to a cluster of nine young Grahamites (Lil Buck, 2017).

"The question became 'How to put new choreography on the stage next to Graham classics," said Eilber as she opened the evening in the company's studio at Westbeth, former home of Merce Cunningham's troupe. "Would I get run out of town?" Ultimately, though, she found that introducing new work helped audiences "appreciate Martha Graham more and remember what a radical she was."

A radical, indeed. Throughout these opening remarks, an early 1940s video of Graham dancing Lamentation played behind and loomed over Eilber, proving her correct. Graham worked that solo. Her concept and vision for it, along with her fierce performance, remain unmatched. Last evening's program featured Variations by Abraham, Keigwin, Gwen Welliver (preparing for a 2018 Tallahassee premiere), Bulareyaung Pagarlava as well as Lil Buck's New York premiere. Each offered elements of interest...and yet...and yet...Graham remains queen.

Lamentation Variations concludes this evening with another informal toast and studio showing at 7pm, featuring Variations by Aszure Barton, Doug Varone, Richard Move, Larry Keigwin and Lil Buck. Click here for information and ticketing.

Martha Graham Studio Theater
Westbeth, 55 Bethune Street (11th Floor), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Movement Research Festival: Gwen Welliver and Abby Zbikowski

Choreographers  Gwen Welliver and Abby Zbikowski shared last evening's program at Danspace Project as part of the 2015 Movement Research Festival (Vanishing Point). The two artists were selected by festival curators Beth Gill and Cori Olinghouse to explore new ways of envisioning abstraction in contemporary dance. If postmodernists stripped "fantasy, metaphor and characters" from dancemaking, would it be possible to reclaim these compelling elements in fresh ways?

Paul Klee's Was für ein Pferd! (What a Horse!), 1929

With What a Horse!--the title alludes to a Paul Klee line drawing--Welliver works on this problem by transferring her own drawing practice to physical bodies on the move. Happily, two of the bodies in question belong to Claire Westby and Stuart Singer, both excellently suited for Welliver's heroic aesthetic here, capable of bold, substantial presence in space, with a launching as noisily assertive as Jake Meginsky's sound score. When Welliver has Westby extend a leg, for instance, it resembles both a puncturing weapon and a decisive act of punctuation. In either case, we quickly get that this is not a figure to tangle with, just as the childlike, spindly lines in the Klee drawing convey the electric dynamism of its horse and rider. Amid the plumped out, sculptural lines of Welliver's abstraction, there is some galloping, cantering, trotting and the introduction of a third figure--dancer Reid Bartelme (sporting a protective vest of what appears to be black leather covering a pale, satiny shirt) who heralds something of smoother, silkier texture in both movement and music.

If, as an abstractionist, Zbikowski takes interest in stripping anything away, it's stripping our sense that the art of dance is about making things look effortless. She foregrounds effort, even discomfort. In her duet, double nickels on a dime, she brings the "outside" influences of punk, hip-hop and martial arts into the formal space of concert dance but not as fetishized artifact but as form, energy and psyche embodied, in a matter-of-factly outrageous way, by wonderful Fiona Lundie and Jennifer Meckley. Like Singer and Westby in What a Horse!, these dancers take the space in great gulps, sneakers making noisy impact, legs striding wide, bodies jutting and wrenching within organized, neat lines of structure. Watch and you feel everything--the concision of the lines, the athletic power, the attitude of being ready for anything. Every now and then, I see a performance that would make an ideal bridge from the often insular world of contemporary dance to the rest of the universe, and this is one.

The 2015 Movement Research Festival concludes tomorrow. For information on remaining events, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Where ideas live and move

Dr. Oliver Sacks (left) in conversation with Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, New York Live Arts (photo by Ian Douglas). Jones says of the dance community, "I wish we were more curious in the big discussion."

New York Live Arts is where thinking and movement meet the future. -- Bill T. Jones

For a healthy, viable future for the art of dance in American society, that art must meet its potential public--a public that is increasingly diverse; a public continuously plugged into numerous and growing sources of information and entertainment; a public caught up, ready or not, by issues of climate change, malfunctioning government, ruthless abuse of children and women, the devaluation of labor, the rise and risks of cyber-technology and more real world concerns and disasters.

New York Live Arts' visionary festival--launched this season as Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, in celebration of the 80th birthday of the great neurologist and author--establishes a toehold for this turbulent world-at-large in one of our city's historic, beloved venues for innovative, contemporary dance. I salute this integration of the outside with the inside and, personally, it tickles me to enjoy the possibility of taking in so much of what has always moved my life--from artistic research to scientific inquiry, from informed citizenship to activism--in one convenient location. The mix--which is not strictly new but is newly presented here at the famously former Dance Theater Workshop--excites me and offers hope.

Some of it is just plain fun: Watching a video of NASA astronauts playfully demonstrating how the absence of gravity radically alters execution of everyday movements, while their very funny colleague, Marsha Ivins, shares her own experiences (panel on Disembodiedness: Body Image & Proprioception) or waiting for steam and F-bombs to shoot from artist Miguel Gutierrez while a philosopher torturously labors to define what dance supposedly is and is not (panel on Minding the Dancing Body). Gutierrez  knows that, when it comes to research in consciousness, dance--a mode of perception, as he defines it--has been excelling at this work for a long time now.

Marsha Ivins, retired veteran of five NASA Space Shuttle missions

Imagine spinning and never getting dizzy. 

Or moving a 700lb object with just a touch of your fingers. 

For more fun with zero g, check this out.

Dance artists have information, strategies and even wisdom that the rest of us could benefit from. Jones seems bent on getting this word out to society as well as making some beneficial connections for the dance field. At times, the dialogue seems a little stilted, a little awkward and even prickly, but as long as the various parties are in the same room, talking, who knows what good might come of it?

On the Minding the Dancing Body panel, choreographer RoseAnne Spradlin spoke of making dances as a way to help people see what is usually hard to see, a purpose that Alva Noë and Colin McGinn--the philosophers on hand--readily identified as the goal of their discipline, too. Later that evening, Donna Uchizono's new dance--presented along with her 1999 trio, State of Heads--illustrated this mission.

Donna Uchizono in Out of Frame (photo by Ian Douglas)

Out of Frame, commissioned for the Live Ideas fest, takes as its inspiration the young Dr. Sacks' observations in 1969 of eighty people who survived the 1920s worldwide occurrence of a brain inflammation called encephalitis lethargica. Working from Sacks' accounts of these "recovered" patients in his renowned book, Awakenings, Uchizono distills the characteristic lingering distortions of body, personality and perception of time and space, even persistent immobility, into a solo performed on a tall ladder in the middle of a bare stage. On its own, this staging says so much--the rarity of the condition, the isolation of those who cannot look or function according to the norm, the extremity and precariousness of their situation even under medication, the mystery of a disease whose cause and prospects for resurgence remain unknown.

The solo is strangely beautiful and bizarre and fascinating; one of Uchizono's initial images presents her hand as if it were the clenched bulb of a carnivorous flower or a slowly rippling sea creature. The piece traps memory and heightened sensations within an altered state in which the body might not be perceived as a stable or singular entity...or even one's own. Josh Higgason's video layers an image of the dancer's body onto her flesh, helping us see what it's like to feel that something is very much, well, off.

Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks continues through Sunday evening, April 21. For information on all remaining events--including the encore of Donna Uchizono's dance program on Saturday at 4pm--click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)