"THEM" returns to its East Village birthplace

Johnnie Mercer Cruise and Hentyle Yapp
dance in THEM at Performance Space New York.
(photo: Rachel Papo)

Michael Watkiss and Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy
(photo: Rachel Papo)

THEM

Conceived, directed, and performed by:

Chris Cochrane (music/sound)
Dennis Cooper (text/spoken word performance)
Ishmael Houston-Jones (movement)

at Performance Space New York (East Village Series)

*****

Tilt in the direction of a memory, starting anywhere. With sound: a deepening drone. With light: splashed across a man's back and legs otherwise engulfed by semidarkness. With bodies: still, lining the margins, covered in shadows.

THEM (made at and for Performance Space 122, premiered in 1986, now revived for Performance Space New York) is a way of remembering the AIDS epidemic and the lives downtown artists led and lost. With Chris Cochrane's electric guitar--caustic shredding, blurting, pounding dissonance. With Dennis Cooper's text--direct and revealing, vulnerable, delivered from off to one side, with isolating distance and longing observation. With dancers, led and gathered by Ishmael Houston-Jones, who toss themselves across the space and at each other with fiery abandon, who occupy the expanse, crafting a world necessary for themselves and their kind. With rites of gesture and behavior. With exploration through touch. With play. With aggression. With a visceral sense of the overpowering, inescapable presence of death...and Death.

The theater at Performance Space New York has just the right degree of plain-and-grim to help this memory work. Houston-Jones's score has been improvised by each of his dancers; the current revival's vigorous cohort includes Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Michael Parmelee, Jeremy Pheiffer, Kensaku Shinohara, Michael Watkiss, and Hentyle Yapp. (Mercer and Yapp are especially headstrong, cogent performers, alone or together.) A spare, functional design--here a simple white mattress; there a menacing plank of wood--makes human movements and energies pop in the space, setting the stage for the emergence of a nightmare buried deep in the work and the blaring sirens (invoking, at once, a speeding ambulance and a city under threat) with which Cochrane drags the work to its end.

THEM continues tonight (7:30pm) and Thursday (7pm) with a post-show talk with Visual AIDS on Thursday. For information and tickets, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue, 4th Floor (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan

Subscribe in a reader

Sharing, surviving: Black men dance at Danspace Project

Damon Green performs at Danspace Project in
Working on Better Versions of Prayers: Volume 1
by Chicago dancemaker J'Sun Howard
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Ricarrdo Valentine, above,
and below with Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.
of Brother(hood) Dance!
in how to survive a plague
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Demonstrations, marches, sit-ins/die-ins/love-ins, rallies, prayer: are there alternatives to these forms of protest that we can employ to generate positive change? 

For his presentation at Danspace Project, Chicago's J'Sun Howard asks this question and offers a possible answer in a trio for Black queer men entitled Working On Better Versions of Prayers: Version 1. Is Howard's result actually a better version of prayer?  Of protest? That's never clear but, choreographically, this dance is easy on the eyes.

Dancers D. Banks, Damon Green and Will Harris mark off an uncluttered space in which, from the start, we can focus on the lyrical fluidity of their movement--a flowing reach and unfurling, a cursive squiggling and twirling and twining that, while accelerating or embracing flourishes of basketball or hip hop or voguing or West African movement, never loses control or its through line. Howard writes with an aesthetically conservative hand. He is a lover of beauty and of the beauty in these dancers, presenting them subtly, sympathetically and with utopian vision--the world he wants to see.

One moment alone appears disruptive--a dancer's brief, frustrated interaction with part of the decor and his partner's intervention. This second dancer's role presents interesting questions: Is he helping his mate? Or is he restraining him? And then, near Howard's conclusion, comes the mystery figure (Green) emerging with face obscured, head enveloped in a leafy bush strung with Christmas lights--a remarkable, if cryptic, image.

In a “reverential gesture to lost ancestral artistic dreams,” Hunter and Valentine seek to venerate the Black African bodies that were exiled from the urgency of care and shunned by their communities and government [during the HIV/AIDS pandemic].

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr and Ricarrdo Valentine--the Black gay couple who are Brother(hood) Dance!--now have built how to survive a plague, a popular feature of Danspace’s Platform 2016: Lost & Found, into a work of enhanced, operatic proportions. Their aesthetics call for so much sensory engagement--and, yes, overload--you might expect the generous sights and sounds to be joined by offerings of food and libations. No such luck. But we did get to sample the aromatherapeutic artistry by Nicole Wilkins. I thought I caught a waft of something minty at one point, and then something else, pleasant enough but unidentifiable.

Ultimately, the sexy and ecstatic ritual of how to survive a plague is, I think, an invitation to take what we need by way of self-care. In that context, what works for one, in one moment, might not work for another, and many things will compete for your attention. You will find exuberant dance (with superb technique, always) overlapped with poetry and humor and glorious singing and visuals and kooky-fun costuming and booming voiceovers and, for a precious few, a chance to get up and shake your body. Trickster Eshu and Mother Kali share and dance this Carnaval, neither exactly shy and retiring types. I thank these deities--and more--for the audacity of Hunter and Valentine and look forward to whatever they bring us next.

Vocals: Starr Busby
Costume design: Shane Ballard
Lighting Design: Carol Mullins

Shared Evening: Brother(hood) Dance! & J'Sun Howard continues tonight and tomorrow at Danspace Project with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

SPECIAL NOTE:

Nicole Wilkins recommends arriving hydrated for the best possible experience [of the aromoatherapy]; water will also be available during the show. If you have any questions or concerns please call the Danspace Project office at (212) 674.8112.

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

Subscribe in a reader

William M. Hoffman, 78

William M. Hoffman, Who Wrote the Pioneering AIDS Play ‘As Is,’ Dies at 78
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, May 2, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Dada Masilo's swans of a feather flock to the Joyce

Songezo Mcilizeli as Prince Siegfried
with Dada Masilo as Odette
(photo: John Hogg)

some Masilo swans swanning about
(photo: John Hogg)

That blaring Tchaikovsky processional set the tone right away. Those barefoot dancers, flouncy and twitching in their gender-nonspecific tutus on The Joyce Theater stage, simulated the flight of a flock of swans while encoding every point along the movement spectrum from ballet to African. But not seamlessly, never the sort of contemporary ballet where every last element is blended out, airbrushed and...Kumbaya! We've got exotic perfection for ya!  Instead, you can see the separate techniques of dancing smacking up against each other, visibly diced, sliced and spliced by the exacting mind and sharp hand of Dada Masilo. Without question, this extraordinary work is Dada Masilo's Swan Lake.

I only became aware of Masilo when she choreographed and performed in William Kentridge's Refuse the Hour at last fall's BAM Next Wave. But, for several years, this talented Black South African woman has been turning heads all over Europe, making works called I Just Want To Be a Princess for One Day and The World My Butt and Other Big Round Things, and training her wry eye on classical icons like Romeo and Juliet and Swan Lake.

Well, why not use the classical ballets she dearly loves to tell contemporary stories of top importance to her?

Her take on Swan Lake puts me in mind of Camille A. Brown. Fans of that American dance artist will find Masilo's narrative work and her own piquant, bravura performance style similar in nature and appeal. In addition, both artists draw from aspects of Black culture and artistry, have well-honed, character-driven comedic skills and an interest in showing the full range of human experience and feeling. They both step up to address challenging issues, mixing entertaining performance with social relevance. For Masilo, the story of Swan Lake sets the stage for a look at the consequences of homophobia and the devastation of losing generations of South Africans to AIDS.

This turbo-charged, enormously charming Swan Lake pairs, against his will, a closeted Prince Siegfried (Songezo Mcilizeli) with Masilo's eager bride-to-be Odette. Siegfried's parents--especially Mom--freak out when they learn that their son is in love with a man named Odile--yes, I know, usually, the sinister doppelganger of the dancer playing Odette--here danced by tall, graceful Thamsanqa Tshabalala, the only cast member rocking pointe shoes, and beautifully, thank you.

The piece--lit with true magic by Suzette le Sueur--flies by in just an hour. In that hour, nearly everything moves at a speedy, insistent pace. Group scenes are tightly-organized delirium, usually some hooplah over the expected nuptials. Which brings me back to the loud, nearly martial selections from Tchaikovsky. With this music, Masilo seems to underscore how the private life, and will, of the individual can get pounded down by the heedless force of society. This comes in sharp contrast to the tranquility of Siegfried's time alone with Odile. Without the crowd mashing him, Siegfried can get to know himself and his desires.

Because humor has such prominence in the dance, its conclusion can seem either jarring or poignant. Masilo lost her aunt to AIDS, and this work was made in memory of her. Performers in long, black skirts dance against a dark, starry backdrop. Some slump to the floor. Eventually, just two remain, each delicately rubbing fingers together as if sprinkling a handful of dirt on the coffins of loved ones until there's no one left to perform this final rite.

Swan Lake continues tonight through Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

Trio of poets to present "The Poetry of Survival" at CUNY

On Wednesday, November 20, poets Antoinette Bennett, Vaseah Dupree and Melinda Goodman will present the first in a series of mixed-media theater programs dedicated to survivors of physical, mental and psychic violence and for those who are close to them or care for them. This event is free (with RSVP) and open to the public.

The Poetry of Survival

November 20 (7pm–9pm)

Segal Theatre

The Graduate Center, CUNY

Depression, anger, shame, and hatred are some of the issues that many survivors have to deal with on a daily basis. It takes hard work not to be consumed with fear, flashbacks, and ingrained patterns of self-destruction. Additionally, some of us struggle with HIV, AIDS, addiction, and other physical and mental illnesses while trying to support ourselves and our dependents on very limited economic resources.

Ultimately, it’s not enough to just "survive" our childhoods. In fact, in order to really survive we need to thrive. Thriving means finding the flame inside ourselves and each other that makes us glad to be alive. The combined story of survival that these poets are bringing to the table is an inspiring celebration of life through written and spoken word in a multi-media theater presentation.

Writer Bios

Antoinette Bennett is a writer, artist, cancer survivor and PWA whose work is informed by the depth of her spiritual foundation. As a survivor of incest and the child pornography industry, Antoinette’s long journey has involved many years of crack addiction during which she lived in the tunnels of New York City and gave birth to eleven children. She has been a featured speaker at numerous conferences throughout the country and she is only three credits short of her MFA from The School of Visual Arts.

Vaseah Dupree is a spoken word artist and creative writer who grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn during the height of the drug wars and the AIDS/HIV epidemic. She is a survivor of Urban America, sexual, physical, verbal and domestic abuse. While struggling to cope with the affects of the environment in which she grew up, Vaseah received her Associates Degree from BMCC and she plans on continuing her education.

Melinda Goodman is a poet, writer, and producer who has taught at Hunter College since 1987. She is a recipient of awards and/or fellowships from the Astraea Foundation, Columbia University, and New York Foundation on the Arts.

For your FREE ticket, please RSVP here.

For information, click here

or on The Poetry of Survival's Facebook event page here.

Segal Theatre

The Graduate Center, CUNY

365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th and 35th Streets), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Dance artist Patrick Corbin: What is success?

LGBT Legacies: Patrick Corbin

Former Joffrey and Paul Taylor dancer Patrick Corbin, artistic director of CorbinDances, recalls how his life and career led him to a realization about what really matters.

Video (9:04)

AIDS activist/archivist James Wentzy to lose his longtime home

Building Blocks: After Chronicling History, SoHo Artist Is Losing a Vantage Point
by David W. Dunlap, The New York Times, May 27, 2013

Celebrating the work of gay Black writers

"in the life" 

a reading of works by gay Black men from the 1980s and '90s

at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Sunday, April 14, 2pm

(doors opening 1:30pm)

For “in the life,” artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz will host readings from the literary work of gay, male, African American poets and writers, who chronicled sexuality, illness, and death during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s. Many of the writers are now dead, and their works have been collected in anthologies, such as "in the life", edited by Joseph Beam. Bordowitz will be joined by a diverse group of readers including former Q/A/M mentor Pamela Sneed, to pay tribute to artists such as Donald Woods, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs and many more.

Free with museum admission

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave (at 75th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Subscribe to the Queer/Art/Film listserv

Amir Dixon's "Friend of Essex" inspired by poet Essex Hemphill

Poet Essex Hemphill Inspires New Documentary
by David Mattar, Lambda Literary, March 15, 2013

Journey into "Blue"

Here's a gorgeous piece of writing on Derek Jarman's film, Blue, that I wanted to share with you. 

Proof of Life
by Matt Connolly, ReverseShot.com, Issue 32

Wojnarowicz's fire in the belly

‘Fire in the Belly,’ on David Wojnarowicz, by Cynthia Carr
by Dwight Garner, The New York Times, July 19, 2012

Filmmaker France tells the history of ACT UP [UPDATE]

How To Survive A Plague
USA 2012; 110 min.
directed by David France
A Sundance Selects release

Peter Staley in action. Photo: William Lucas Walker

That's Peter Staley--former Wall Street bond trader; later, ACT UP's rock-star activist--who not only talked the eloquent talk but walked the kickass walk along with many comrades, putting the media, pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers and politicians on notice that a community terrorized by AIDS was not going to sit quietly, simply hoping for attention and help. It was going to get in people's faces and demand the research and treatments it needed to survive.

David France's exhilarating and moving How to Survive A Plague relates the boisterous history of ACT UP--all the triumphs and missteps--with a personalizing focus on several of its leading activists. These include Staley and Mark Harrington as well as the late Bob Rafsky who died from AIDS complications in 1993. Rafsky will be remembered by most for his confrontation with presidential-hopeful Bill Clinton that led to the famous "I feel your pain" non-answer.

That scene, from a Clinton fundraiser, is highlighted in France's documentary along with many others that retell the progression of HIV/AIDS in New York's gay male community and that community's dramatic, intelligent responses. Although a sprinkling of women and people of color are shown or interviewed, France has concentrated on assembling footage and gathering oral history that reflect ACT UP as an initiative emerging from well-educated gay white men with an inherent sense of empowerment commensurate with their rage and compassion. Along the way, we do get to see and hear from female advocates and activists--media-savvy Ann Northrop, future journalist Garance Franke-Ruta and pharmaceutical chemist Iris Long, PhD, among a few others.

Essential history can easily be lost. In a climate of right-wing backlash, it can get twisted. New generations of social activists working on marriage equality, transgender rights, immigrant rights and many other progressive issues today need to learn about these shoulders upon which they stand. And we all need a blade of truth to disrupt the nasty fog of culture war that has arisen once again in our country.

[Update: Frank Bruni writes about this documentary in the March 17 New York Times--The Living After the Dying.]

See a screening of How to Survive A Plague at the 2012 New Directors/New Films Festival at the following locations:

Saturday, March 24, 9pm
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Monday, March 26, 6pm
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53r Street (between 5th And 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

How to Survive A Plague Web site

How to Survive A Plague Facebook page

Information on New Directors/New Films

Haring mural restored at LGBT center

A Joyful Mural, Born in a Time of Shame and Fear
by David W. Dunlap, The New York Times, March 6, 2012

Tim Miller censored by Villanova

Villanova Cancels Gay Artist's Workshop
The Huffington Post, February 21, 2012

Ailey goes Gaga!

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's Artistic Director Robert Battle, Associate Artistic Director Masazumy Chaya and Company members. (Photo: Andrew Eccles)

Get ready, New York! Minus 16--a 1999 work recycled from bits of other Gaga-licious dances by Ohad Naharin--is about to get the Ailey treatment, and vice versa.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, under Robert Battle's new leadership, opens its 2011 New York City Center season later this month. Minus 16, arguably the most anticipated company premiere, will find these dancers--noted for majestic technique and entertaining sass--suddenly incorporating things like audience interaction, improvisation, abstract oddities, and a fevered articulation from the inside out that makes their entire bodies bristle with alarming energy.

The piece was taught to the Ailey dancers by Danielle Agami from Naharin's Batsheva Dance Company (Tel Aviv). Its Ailey premiere honors the memory of Mari Kajiwara, Naharin's late wife and an Ailey star for many years.

Yesterday, the company welcomed a select audience for a studio preview of excerpts from Minus 16. While numerous dancers mysteriously huddled in the distance, a soloist treated us to sly, twisty movements that rapidly and endlessly rippled and flicked through his sinewy form from top to bottom, front to back, and side to side. Set to a perky mambo, it was dance as a spreading itch. Gradually, the space accumulated more and more dancers, each rooted in his or her own discrete patch of floor, each obsessed with this movable itch that can never be scratched away.

In another section, a large corps formed a massive semicircle, each dancer set in a wide-legged stance, their movements as propulsive as the recorded Israeli music and vocals. They barked out one of the song's lines each time it came around, and they moved with an unexpected aggression that's going to rock the house. The Ailey crowd will never be the same!

"There's a lot of reaching back and pushing forward," Battle said of his inaugural programming which pays tribute to the Ailey tradition while stretching the performers, young ones and seasoned ones alike, in challenging new directions. Other notable features include the world premiere of Rennie Harris' Home, derived from stories of people living with or affected by HIV, and the company premiere of Paul Taylor's Arden Court.

For information on schedule and ticketing for the upcoming Ailey season (November 30-January 1), click here.

New York City Center
West 55th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, Manhattan
(visitors information, map and directions)

The multitudes that poetry contains

Books interview: Mark Doty
by Alice Gribbin, The New Statesman, November 8, 2011

Short Documentary: Art from Adversity on Vimeo

Short Documentary: Art from Adversity on Vimeo
by Robert Penn

One of the many New York City community organizations that formed in response to the AIDS epidemic is a writers group for Black Gay Men. In honor of James Baldwin's signature work, Another Country, the group selected the name Other Countries. It held its first writers workshop on June 14, 1986. Over the next year, it developed a three pronged program of peer critique, performance and publishing. In its 25 years, Other Countries has published three volumes of work by Black gay men and women. The most recent VOICES RISING came out in January 2007. The workshop continues each 2nd and 4th Saturday at NYC's LGBT Community Center from 6pm to 9pm. Many past and current members have gone on to publish work that "went through" the workshop. Several have developed their craft and have worked in publishing, arts management and television. Though many of its founding members died twenty years ago, their spirit of affinity continues to nurture and foster creativity and appreciation of the life we have, here and now.

Watch this documentary here.

Brantley on "The Normal Heart"

‘The Normal Heart’ on Broadway
by Ben Brantley, The New York Times, April 27, 2011

Hirshorn trustees denounce Smithsonian decision

Hirshorn Trustees Denounce Decision to Pull Video

by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, January 28, 2011

Canadian artist's protest rebuffed by NPG

Canadian Artist Loses Battle With National Portrait Gallery
by Kate Taylor, The New York Times, December 20, 2010