Vicky Shick brings "Another Spell" to Danspace Project

Heather Olson (above)
Below, l-r: Donna Costello, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Lily Gold
and Heather Olson dancing Another Spell at Danspace Project
(photos: Ian Douglas)

New York provides so many ways to spend your precious weekend. But--oh, you lucky ones--you can spend an hour at Danspace Project with Vicky Shick, Jodi Bender, Donna Costello, Lily Gold, Marilyn Maywald-Yahel, Heather Olson and Omagbitse Omagbemi. Shick and all of her collaborators have brought us Another Spell, one of the most beguiling events of the dance season.

Another Spell's modular look, we're told, came together by picking through earlier work for elements of Barbara Kilpatrick's costume and set design. Even the movement bears that popular aesthetic--easygoing, sustainable--plus all the charm of an afternoon of thrift store shopping with a friend blessed with taste and ingenuity.

I imagine Another Spell drawn across white boards and then described--in juicy 3D--by circling hips, flapping thighs and knees, tensile ideas projected into receptive space. The scrapbook tape, filmic splices and stitched seams never show, and Kathy Kaufmann's lighting makes it all look mutable and luxurious.

Glitches prevented the opening night audience from hearing the proper soundscape (performed live by Elise Kermani with additional tracks composed by Todd Lent), but you might get to hear it if you go tonight or tomorrow. I hope you can!

Another Spell runs through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Tere O'Connor Dance at New York Live Arts

Tere O'Connor Dance (photo by Ian Douglas)

Tere O'Connor is showing handsome new works--Secret Mary and poem--at New York Live Arts this week. Of these premieres, presented in 75 minutes without pause, I'm partial to poem, a language spoken in a dreamscape demarcated by light, faintly remembered but still pulsing in one's tissue and blood. Collaborators Michael O'Connor (lighting) and James Baker (crystalline musical soundscape) and, of course, extraordinary dancers--Natalie Green, Heather Olson, Michael Ingle, Oisín Monaghan and Silas Riener--bring a sense of the expansive, complex, alive Outside inside. Formal structure holds energies in place, long enough for us to appreciate their beauty and strangeness. There is much to see, and we can grasp no one thing for very long. In turn, these pieces and a third will be folded into a work to premiere in 2013. And so it goes.

Tere O'Connor Dance in 2 New Works continues at New York Live Arts through December 1 with 7:30pm curtains tonight, Friday and Saturday and an additional 10pm show on Friday. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Heather Olson's "Shy showoff"

I hear that the rest of The Chocolate Factory's run of Heather Olson's Shy showoff is sold out. But you could try calling 212-352-3101 and see if they've started a waiting list.

The choreographer's 45-minute trio, danced with Levi Gonzalez and Erin Gerken, strikes me as the kind of mystery box of quiet surprises that might make for a cozy idyll on a rainy weekend.

There's wit, a relaxed but distinct precision and even a little Chrissie Hynde (always welcome) when you least expect it. This abstract piece works its modest glamor through an airy, luminous clarity of form and performance. Its shy, showoff imagery melts on the tongue the way a dream, no matter how lucid in the moment, melts away into the night. You must attend--in both senses of that word. I hope you get in.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(directions)

O'Connor's "Rammed Earth"

I relished the chance to return to Tere O'Connor's Rammed Earth (2007)--which I'd first experienced at The Chocolate Factory last autumn--with its dozens of chairs that, for the initial section, spread audience members throughout the performance space, each chair facing this way or that, set in its own eccentric inclination. Against the ushers' gentle suggestions, I kept my well-stuffed messenger bag (on my lap, where it would not get in the way of any dancer). And in accord with a (perhaps not so gentle) suggestion that O'Connor once offered dance critics some time ago--a suggestion I clicked with straightaway--I left my notebook and pen stowed deep in the recesses of that bag where they would not get in my way.

I remembered what it felt like to inhabit the same space as Rammed Earth, with its high-pitched, mysterious poetics and its wide-open possibilities of meaning, and these masterful dancers--Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, Matthew Rogers and Christopher Williams--so weirdly good they make my skin crawl. This time, in the Howard Gilman Performance Space at Baryshnikov Arts Center, it felt as if we, the audience, were being buffeted and shaped by those four powerful bodies and intelligences.  Make that five, not four; of course, O'Connor shapes us, too, as architectural elements in his environment and as nervous systems that cannot help but fire up in such a charged setting.  

More than any other, this dance explicitly reminds me that a work of dance seen more than once is never the same, that it alters and is altered by the giver and by the receiver, and that there's always more there than can be grasped on first glance or easily told. I cherish this dance without needing to figure it all out. And even those things I think I do know about it are things that I'm just as happy to silently nod at and leave alone.

See Tere O'Connor Dance in Rammed Earth, now through Sunday, with two shows per evening: 7pm and 9pm; no late seating.

Baryshnikov Arts Center

450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan

Ticketing at Ticket Central or 212-279-4200