Seeking a friend for the end of the world: Monstah Black's HOT!

Clockwise from bottom left:
Shiloh Hodges, Monstah Black, Benedict Nguyen,
Alicia Dellimore and Joey Cuellar (center)
(photo: Peter Yesley)

The world is coming to an end!

(No kidding!)

So, what do you do?

Well, if you're Monstah Black, you grab your pals, slap on wigs and stilettos, shake your cocktails and throw a fabulous dance party. Hyperbolic! (the last spectacle)--running Fridays and Saturdays through July 23 for Dixon Place's 25th Anniversary HOT! Festival--takes place by the light of a mushroom cloud and suggests nothing more complicated than what a lot of us have been saying lately in the wake of one bad, unacceptable piece of news after another.

Wherever you go, there you are.

You bring to each crisis precisely who and what you are and do what you were sent to Earth (from, you know, wherever Sun Ra hailed from) to do. So, let's just get the funk on with it!

When we first meet Black and company, they most bring to mind the Wicked Witch of the West--after she's been slain by a flying house, that is. Dressing room chairs and clothing racks have already toppled, pinning them against the floor. Glittery pools of blood-like fabric spread away from their poor heads.

It's August 11, 2033, and only Tucker (Joey Cuellar) appears to have survived the fashion apocalypse, perched on a bed, curly white wig dangling from fingertips. But, like creatures arising from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" ("Midnight hour is close at hand...."), the others soon spring to life, as preoccupied as ever with their usual pursuits.

Johnnie "Cruise" Mercer's character, for instance, can't get enough of his phallic selfie stick. Really, really, really can't get enough. Others obsess over their mirrored reflections, and Black--addressing us from a balcony--frets about how to fit a huge shoe collection into one suitcase.

What's important is important. "I'm going to make sure I look good if the world is coming to an end," one dancer declares. And Black--who designed the amazing costumes--certainly made sure everyone looks smashing, not only in these clubbing outfits but also the show's brisk, cartoonish movement stylings.

A lot of disciplined teamwork went into this production, you can tell, and the creative, performance and production team is sizable and complex--even with multi-talented Black appearing numerous times in the credits. The end result is far more amusement and glamour than you'd expect from catastrophe. But, then again, that's why we have queer artists.

Hyperbolic! (the last spectacle) continues Fridays and Saturdays, July 9, 15, 16, 22 and 23 at 7:30pm.  For information and tickets, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Marga Gomez has a big problem--and shares it in POUND!

Marga Gomez
(photo: Kent Taylor)

Now that Pride weekend is done and gone, and the USA women's soccer team has its way through New York's Canyon of (She)roes, what's left to do, people?

Opening night's standing ovation made the answer clear. The Dixon Place to be is at POUND, a presentation of the 2015 HOT! Festival and the latest one-lesbian show from Marga Gomez, directed by David Schweizer. You'll need some stamina; the monologue feels much longer than its advertised 75-minutes and could use a few scissor snips. But if you find Hollywood movies involving lesbians in any way absurd and surreal--and why wouldn't you?--you'll laugh your head off.

Gomez whip-blends encyclopedic knowledge of movies and culture, rambunctious physicality, and tireless ability to zip from character to character, decade to decade and gentrified coast to gentrified coast without much mussing her lumberjack flannel. If Bound is on your Favorites list, try POUND. If you agree with Gomez that Basic Instinct made America "a little afraid of lesbians," and that's a really good thing, try POUND. If, like Gomez back in the day, you relied upon the National Legion of Decency to actually be your dyke-flick recommender, try POUND.

POUND continues Fridays and Saturdays, July 11, 17, 18, 24 and 25 at 7:30pm. Click here for information and tickets.

Comic monologist Reno
performs free shows at Dixon Place
during the 2015 HOT! Festival.

Another HOT! tip: Also see Ignorance Is No Excuse, Reno, an hour with the matchless comic provocateuse at Dixon Place--free!--Mondays, now through August 3, at 7:30pm. Click here.

For more HOT! Festival events, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Tyler Ashley premieres "KIDNAP ME" at Dixon Place

Spaciousness and freedom are at the core of dancer Tyler Ashley's artistic and genderqueer quest. His new ensemble work KIDNAP ME cries out for escape from regulation that might come only from being "rescued" in the suggested way. When I looked at this piece, danced last night at Dixon Place's 23rd annual HOT! Festival with extraordinary stamina, I flashed back to medieval diagrams of the cosmos, every single object and being set in its place and its pace within concentric circles in eternal whirl according to the direction of some offstage, unseen force. (In this case, the Great Offstage Director is visible, operating a mic and a Mac, and her name is Gillian Walsh.)

Ashley and his collaborating performers--Aranzazu Araujo, McSherry, Diego Montoya, Shane Shane, Rakia Seaborn and Walsh--could not be more different from one another in appearance. But each occupies a place and fulfills a function within KIDNAP ME's well-regulated system. What unfolds over ninety minutes is repetitive, driven and most frequently circular--sweeping, prancing or backpedaling in front of our eyes in a way that, in the viewer's experience, can go from acceptable to interesting to head-swimming to mind-numbing to skin-crawling.

At times, one or another part of this grand pattern splits off into a central space or its own time frame as if to give us zoomed-in views of particular specimens. In another moment, though, the surge of bodies might bunch up, the stream of movement becoming a little raggedy and collision-prone as the carousel-like music momentarily stammers.

As it proceeds, KIDNAP ME can come off as giddy and a little childish, but it builds. Follow it and, before you know it, you're in the holy, manic presence of the Maid of Orléans (via Julius Eastman's stark, declamatory vocal music) or watching Ashley draw black-marker portraits of his dancers' genitals on plywood boards or having his naked flesh whacked by the boards as, under Walsh's direction, he carefully works his delicate, willowy limbs into various ballet positions. "You can hit him harder," Walsh instructs, and sometimes the dancers do just that.

Influenced not only by Eastman's music but also Bela Tarr's acclaimed film, The Turin Horse, KIDNAP ME is a big, ambitious project in a little frame--and a reminder that most contemporary dance gets short shrift in terms of opportunities to be seen and carefully absorbed. It's good that Dixon Place found a night to include this work in its slate of queer programs, but let's hope Ashley will secure more venues and more time.

For more HOT! Festival shows--now through August 2--click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

"HOT" fun in the summertime

Keeping this short and sweet: Get your butts over to Dixon Place's HOT! Festival tonight for the closeout of The Loudest Show on Earth (10pm). I don't know if any tickets remain--likely not--but you have my permission to mug someone for theirs.

Loud and hilarious, potty-mouthed Lea DeLaria--who now bills herself as "the fisting consultant for Orange is the New Black"--and motor-mouthed Maggie Cassella rarely slacken the pace in this tight, roughly hour-long gallop through the personal and the political. Again, let me keep it simple: What have you and your best friends been talking and thinking about lately? Okay. You'll find all of that right here but wilder and wackier than you could ever have imagined.

But beyond the stand-ups and character sketches, there's also delicious music. So good to hear DeLaria swing and swoop her way through "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" again and to subvert her own presentational subversion with a sweet rendition of "I Enjoy Being A Girl" while looking like the second coming of Fiorello La Guardia. And later Cassella steps up to the challenge of translating DeLaria's fierce scat singing into English--yeah, right--cracking DeLaria up in the process.

Also repeating tonight on the HOT! bill: Sacha Yanow's solo performance, The Prince at 7pm.

Yanow depicts the prince as a prisoner of her own bedroom--"a fantastical palace...deep in the well of loneliness"--charmingly rendered in her own drawings, which create the set and props. Innocence and sophistication, raw vulnerability and the strength of creative imagination interact in this intimate piece about learning to take a chance on the world and yourself. Yanow has a great face for performance: Under a set of over-determined eyebrows--dashes of black face paint--and madly sculpted hair, she can fix us with a gaze of sad, pleading eyes or a flash of delight. She's a good physical comic with attention to detail and timing.

For program and ticket information about these and other HOT! shows, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey), Manhattan
(directions)

Pamela Sneed at Dixon Place's HOT! Festival

Black lesbian poet Pamela Sneed begins her monologue, America Ain't Ready, beneath the projection of a famous photo portrait of Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde. You know the one: Lorde slightly lowering the professorial, thin-rimmed glasses from her eyes, her Black Mona Lisa smile pleasant enough until you realize that she's likely about to say something America Ain't Ready for.

Pamela Sneed in "America Ain't Ready" (photo by Lisa Guido)

Lorde's revered presence hovers over Sneed throughout this marathon performance, inspiring, instigating, protecting. And Sneed needs that strength right now because, as we learn, she's performing through a world of pain. Not emotional pain--which also could be the case, of course--but physical pain from complex, enormously costly dental problems. She is an artist without health insurance in an America that ain't ready for universal single payer health care any more than it's ready to compensate artists for the intense, dedicated and crucial work that they do.

Sneed begins by reminding us that Lorde insisted that "poetry is not a luxury." It's a necessity. She invites us to imagine a world without all of the arts and artists. Her itemization of our potential losses is staggering. Here, at Dixon Place, through strain and rage, she preaches to the choir, and you want to send her to Capitol Hill to put the fear of God in those supposedly God-fearing Republicans (and some Democrats, too). She's the woman for the job. And, while we're talking job--damn it--if you ever ask Sneed, or any artist, to do a job, be sure to pay her for it. 

America Ain't Ready, adapted from a book-length epic poem, diagnoses perhaps a few too many things that ail this society. However, Sneed's performance, as real as it can get, sears its way into your consciousness. Her aim: To wake up as many people as possible before it is too late to achieve the America in which she still believes. We all have work to do.

Hot! Festival 2011--Dixon Place's 20th Annual NYC Celebration of Queer Culture--continues through August 6 with a mix of "theater, dance, music, burlesques, performance art and homoeroticism for the whole family." Find out more and make ticket reservations here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map and directions)

Women on the move at Dixon Place

It was heartening to see Dixon Place filled to the rafters with audience last night. How amazing to watch as DP--home of "go ahead, show us anything, take a chance, even be a little half-assed"--became the site of some very grown-up performance. And how gratifying to see that work coming from the women dance artists of "Women Moving," part of DP's HOT! Festival.

The evening featured short pieces by

Maria Bauman/MBDance (Women I Know)

Ephrat Asherie ("brothers," a work-in-progress)

Jen Abrams (Any Resemblance, an excerpt from a work-in-progress)

as well as a more extended movement/text solo for the renowned LAVA acrobat-aerialist Diana Y Greiner, created with playwright Lauren M Feldman. I regret that this was a one-night only program, but don't fail to keep an eye out for another chance to see these artists and their work.

Bauman, who has danced for choreographers such as Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Nia Love and Bill T. Jones, is an up-and-coming force of her own. In Women I Know, set to gentle, lyrical guitar played live by Ashley Phillips, Bauman dances a portfolio of studies juxtaposed with a montage of photo portraits by BJ Watkins. Each seeks, clearly, to suggest the essence of their many subjects. As a choreographer Bauman expresses this humanistic insight with the blend of strength, suppleness and flow that her training in capoeira has given her.

The slight, sinewy Asherie (aka Bounce) blew the audience away with her handsomely-arranged and expert breaking, club dancing and vogueing. Simply put, it's great to see a woman completely own the floor: not just be capable of these dance styles but actually nail every challenge of timing, accuracy of detail, flow and theatrical presentation that she has set for herself. This solo might be a work-in-progress, but I think the only work left to be done would be for Asherie to add more because we would probably be content to watch her forever.

Abrams's solo, on the other hand, really does look like an excerpt-in-progress. So far, this meditation on our hyper-cyber age has a couple of interesting points--some intermittently strange gestures and facial movements and an ethereal accompaniment, delicious to the ear and produced in a clever way that I will not reveal here. Abrams leaves us, perhaps, with an unsettled feeling of something, or perhaps, someone deteriorating, dissolving into electronic blips falling through space.

Greiner is like a stage magician skilled at misdirection. Or maybe she's more like a spider--forgive me, Julie Taymor--skilled at snaring audiences in a web made of alarming props, gutsy physicality, a gift for gab and a heart-stopping smile. In either case, unless you know her personal story--which, after a lengthy bit of weaving, she gets to when you least expect it--there's no way to be prepared for the journey of Now/Not Now or Just on the Corner of Walk/Don't Walk. Again, on the chance that you will see this piece, I won't reveal more. At times, this solo feels needlessly overextended. However, it is not only crafted and performed with impressive maturity and style but performed with confidence.

Hot! Festival 2011--Dixon Place's 20th Annual NYC Celebration of Queer Culture--continues through August 6 with a mix of "theater, dance, music, burlesques, performance art and homoeroticism for the whole family." Find out more and make ticket reservations here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map and directions)

Coby Koehl: The songs are all for you

Coby Koehl turned Dixon Place's downstairs theater into an intimate cabaret last evening as the talented neo-soul singer and his accompanists, Ken Kincaid (piano) and Leo Santino (percussion), performed before a handful of merry friends and associates. Maybe the impending holiday weekend kept everyone else away, but everyone else missed a pretty sweet show.

The flute-y, sultry, sometimes edgy Koehl, more than upholds the right of gay white boys to sing like the brothers--I heard elements of Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Luther Vandross and more--and turns Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" several shades sexier.

Boy George regards Koehl as a male Amy Winehouse, and Koehl dares to walk on the Nina Simone side. ("I can't breathe without her. She's everything to me," he says.) I was hoping for "Wild is the Wind" but certainly couldn't turn down "...A Little Sugar in My Bowl." From the Johnny Mercer/Hoagy Carmichael jazz standard "Skylark" to Stephen Trask's "Midnight Radio" from Hedwig and The Angry Inch, Koehl luxuriates in music like a cat rubbing its velvet fur against a velvet pillow.

Here's Koehl--spare and cool, this time, even spiritual--interpreting Yoko Ono's "Death of Samantha," a song from Ono's Approximately Infinite Universe (1972). And because this song is infinitely delicate and heartbreaking, let's hear it again, this time with Ono doing it.

A deft, supple vocalist with a good ear for scene-setting, character and attitude in lyrics, Koehl deserved cleaner sound than the muddy reverberations he got at the start of his show. Happily, that cleared up some as the performance went on. No doubt, he can fill the room next time. He deserves that, too.

So, here's to Patti. And Tina. And Yoko. Aretha. And Nona. And Nico. And...Coby Koehl.

Hot! Festival 2011--Dixon Place's 20th Annual NYC Celebration of Queer Culture--continues through August 6 with a mix of "theater, dance, music, burlesques, performance art and homoeroticism for the whole family." Find out more and make ticket reservations here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map and directions)

Kim Katzberg's "Penetrating the Space"

Under Construction at Dixon Place: Kim Katzberg's "Penetrating the Space"

by Deborah Feller, News and Views, DeborahFeller.com, August 6, 2010

Holly is Hot!

It's so great to be in the presence of Holly Hughes again that the simple awareness that she has stepped into Dixon Place's darkened space gets some wolf whistles going even before we actually see those lemon-yellow, open-toed spike heels she's rocking. When the lights finally go up, there's our free speech hero, our culture warrior, sporting a multi-colored, feathery haircut that only underscores how much of a voluble, little tropical bird she is. A wound-up, high-pitched, smart-as-hell and very funny tropical bird and one who works her butt off over the hour-long course of her demanding monologue, The Dog and Pony Show (Bring Your Own Pony), directed by Dan Hurlin.

My best guess is that, just as last night's Hot! Festival performance took some moments to heat up and make sense, the entire multifaceted monologue took a while in development to shape into some semblance of direction and coherence. I've seen different blurbs forecasting the piece, and none of them exactly square with the others or seem to have much to do with what turned up at Dixon Place. But what turned up--a meditation, by way of barely-controlled chaos, on the close relationship between humans and dogs--is both entertaining and, in the end, touching. Go and see it, even if you're a cat dyke or if you're allergic or irritable or you think you don't give a damn one way or the other.

If you can still get a ticket, visit with Holly tonight, 7:30pm, at Dixon Place.

Hot! Festival at Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
212-219-0736

Hot!ness lost and found

smithsoniansmith.

911? Help! There's a heap of denim clothing--layers and layers of jeans and jackets--standing like a man in the middle of my performance space. I don't know what to do with it. It's not going anywhere. What? No, it doesn't look threatening. Just a little lost and sad.

911? Listen, I might be witnessing a crime! There's this woman in this really odd rubber bra. I mean, she’s got these two rubber things sticking out from her breasts. And she's got this guy on a table. And she's strapping and sticking all kinds of strange things on his body. God, is that weird! What? Does he seem to be in distress? I can't really tell.

311? Hey, I came here to see a dance show, and I can't really see it because of all this trash. And there are these homeless people with a shopping cart from the supermarket, and they’re loading up all this trashy stuff on it. A crutch, a traffic cone, a broken umbrella... Can’t the city do anything about all this shit?

But, no, really. smithsoniansmith at Dixon Place? Loved it. You know how they say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure?

The detritus here is thick on the ground, a virtual Smithsonian of found artifacts and theatrical bits that Scott Heron and HIJACK (Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder) resourcefully, if mystifyingly, press into service. From glue-gun constructions and discard-wearables to leather-belt calisthenics, it’s a quick hour-or-so tour of the externalized id of the collectible unconscious. 

It’s also as artificial as the fake, freestanding door-to-nowhere the performers use for swift exits and slamming. It’s gawky and stupid and ham-handed and reckless–in a good way, mind you. But, beneath it all, you detect the controlled, focused understructure of Van Loon’s and Wilder’s performance technique, which is why you won’t be able to take your eyes off these women's faces, their carriage, their gait, even just the way they sit. The slender, playful Heron is another matter–a much-beloved, veteran performer but, for me, a taste yet to be acquired. The transparency of his performing here borders on absence of performing. Costume him and send him out there with props, and he’s clearly as comfy as a child in a treehouse, but he doesn’t fire my imagination. I’ll admit that whenever he appeared with Van Loon and Wilder, I found myself mentally cropping him out of the picture.

smithsoniansmith–a presentation of Dixon Place’s Hot! Festival–runs through August 7 at 7:30pm. For tickets and details on other events in the series, click here.

Hot! sometimes not!

The heat and the Hot! (Festival, that is) continue. But choose wisely.

Exactly two valuable things came out of time spent with Black Took Collective's Live Feed of A Black Unconscious last evening--shelter from a rainstorm and hearing a bit of Nina Simone's Lilac Wine at the tail end of the trio's performance.

Duriel E. Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin and Ronaldo V. Wilson describe themselves as "Black post-theorists who perform and write in hybrid experimental forms, embracing radical poetics and cutting-edge critical theory about race, gender and sexuality." They've taken their work all across the nation. The Dixon Place listing describes Live Feed of A Black Unconscious as "a multi-media performance interrogating the possibility and repercussions of, a black queer unconscious...a radical performance of poetics in order to problematize the claims about being black and queer that many of us hold dear."

All-a-dat translates into a tedious hour of watching the trio working at their Macs, improvising and clumsily tweaking nonsensical blocks of text, vocalizing, and running an aimlessly goofy video. And they're totally lame at jumping Double Dutch, too. This is the queer black unconscious? Fine. Got it. Hit Delete.

Writer-director Jeff McMahon's 74-minute satire Straight Talk (a work-in-regression) opened my very long night with Dixon Place. Its cleverness sometimes frayed my nerves, and it overstayed its welcome. But it shows off McMahon's deft, even daredevil writing and a quicksilver ensemble of actors--Grace Abbot, Salty Brine, Mikeah Earnest Jennings, Alenka Kraigher, Daniel Allen Nelson and Elina Zavala--portraying a shifting assortment of young folks talking about hook-ups they have or might like to have, what they think about themselves and about others. They negotiate McMahon's torrent of words, often at physical and emotional fever pitch, without tripping on their tongues and hurting themselves. There's a certainly huge, huge amount of unconscious here--some of it black, some of it queer, quite a bit of it straight but suspect. A couple of sections--the opener featuring Brine and Kraigher; a later duet for Jennings and Nelson--work brilliantly, and I'd happily revisit them.

See McMahon's Straight Talk (a work-in-regression) tonight at 7:30pm.

Tickets

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
212-219-0736
contact@dixonplace.org

Staying cool at the Hot!

While Mayor Bloomberg implements his plans to set up dumpster pools on Park Avenue--yes, really--I'll stay cool in the lavishly air-conditioned Dixon Place performance space, thank you. What's currently hot at DP is the HOT! Festival, celebrating its 19th year and said to be the world's longest-running queer fest. It wraps up in early August. So you have plenty of time to take a little dip in and be a cool New Yorker, too.

In fact--and amazingly--you have time to catch Jibz Cameron (aka Dynasty Handbag) in her one-goofball performance piece, VERTititGO. You have precisely three more times--tonight, next Friday and next Saturday, all at 7:30pm, and I suggest that you attend all three nights so that once your laugh-tortured body recovers from laughing the first time, you can torture it some more and then some more. Also, every time you go, you can look ever more closely at Ms. Handbag with your big magnifying glass and, perhaps, even snap some photos of her--although that might be frowned upon--and try to discover exactly how she does what she does. Climbing in and out of tacky-cute costumes by Hayden Dunham, she is a sly master of narrative, movement, mimicry, faces and voices--although possibly too often like the nails-on-chalkboard thing.

In VERTititGO, a Dixon Place Mondo Cane commission, Cameron/Handbag plays a variety of characters (including the voice-overs) in a cartoonish noir that starts in familiar territory before spinning way out of control. I'll leave you to figure out how this story--opening with a detective meeting a strangely alluring but demanding new client, winding up with the detective meeting a bear in the forest--manages to get from Alpha to Omega.

Tonight and July 23 and 24 at 7:30pm

Tickets

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
212-219-0736
contact@dixonplace.org

Directions

Get HIJACKed

Wildly looking forward to:

Scotty Heron and HIJACK Dance (Kristin VanLoon and Arwen Wilder) in Smithsoniansmith

Dixon Place's HOT! Festival

Thursday-Saturday, July 29, 30, 31, August 5, 6, 7 -- all at 7:30pm

Dixon Place

161A Chrystie Street, Manhattan

Reservations and advance tickets

212-219-0736

Smithsoniansmith is a lovely, lo-fi, sci-fi mess. Dancing sculptors, builders and architects in the midst of a sexy, violent play. Performers courting the radical edge of dance, edge of trash, edge of decency. When everything has fallen apart Smithsoniansmith rises from the dust.

The HOT! and Festive Keckler and Steele

Joseph Keckler and Max Steele

I totally loved this queeralicious HOT! Festival show, presented by Dixon Place offsite at The New Museum for Contemporary Art, regrettably for one night only. Both of these monologuists take audiences to dark, Scorpionic places, although Max Steele's sweet, ditzy, CyberGeneration persona subtly tricks you into thinking that, at worst, you've stumbled into typically dicey fairy tale territory when, in reality, you're in way deeper than that. You have never had a relationship from hell like the one that Steele had with the likes of one "Scott Panther," who sounds like his surname is more than just a little descriptive. Here's a charming Interview magazine video clip of Steele.

Joseph Keckler--a charismatic, astonishingly gifted performer all around--masters a wealth of faces, voices and sounds as he unspools strange/wacky stories or sings his songs, catching you up in silky, sticky webs of wonder and emotion. He commands a versatile vocal range, at times reminding me of Freddie Mercury, or Rufus Wainright, or Antony. As a storyteller, he's an action painter of fallen rainbows and dog-chewed Crayolas. How dangerous a spider is this Keckler? Ask the fan who found an out-of-control wireless mic inadvertently lobbed in her direction. "That's what qualifies this as peformance art," said momentarily unnerved Keckler. "The element of danger!"

Indeed. Oh, brave queer world!

HOT! HOT! HOT!

Quickie notes on more Dixon Place HOT! Festival doings (from last night's show):

Saul Ulerio (Rapt--Extinction of the Self): Described by Ulerio as "an impressionistic exploration of truth, freedom & death," which sounds like something out of teenage poetry and sometimes looks that way, too. However, Ulerio is a disciplined mover and a serious imagist. I trust that his ambition will move him towards increasing clarity of purpose and execution. He's already got the courage.

Mathew Heggem (Compelled to Inhale): Oddly enough, this is perhaps the first time I've actually said to myself, "Whoa! This dance is way too big for Dixon Place!" And I don't mean just because a couple of propulsive dancers kept slamming into the clip lights. I mean because deliciously gender-bent testosterone--or something--made everything about the performances seem magnified and propelled. Every time I hear someone talk about Heggem--or I talk about him myself--words like "one to watch" come out. And let's hope he keeps Wendell Cooper in his orbit. Cooper performed the slammin' vogue number that brought the house down. Another "one to keep an eye on."

Victoria Libertore (My Journey of Decay): Since this is My Summer of Dental Work (notice the braces, everyone? :-#), and I'm intent on making braces sexy, I'm totally in step with Libertore. Her work as a performance artist is new to me. She came highly recommended by a dance friend who said, "I don't know if she's doing burlesque in this new piece, but she does really intelligent burlesque." Well, My Journey of Decay is decidely not burlesque--although Libertore does, at one point, face temptation to take it off, take it all off. However, it is a striptease of the soul, revealing things that any woman in this youth-and-looks-and-normalcy-obsessed culture would normally shudder to divulge. Good on her. Performance art as a collage of experience, thoughts and complex feelings with a sense of hardwon knowingness and comfort within one's body and within one's space--that's Libertore's My Journey of Decay. And her slouch-hatted easing into Citizen Cope's "Sideways" --"These feelings won't go away/They've been knockin' me sideways"--knocked me sideways.

In good kilter

I've admired Janessa Clark and Courtney Jo Drasner's vibrant and smart performances with Gina Gibney Dance but had never seen Clark's own choreography prior to last night's presentation by Janessa Clark/KILTERBOX, part of the queer-forward HOT! Festival at Dixon Place.

Clark and Drasner--two stunningly beautiful women--performed part of a 2006 duet called (inner)views I–IV, in which they prowled DP's living room space dressed and preening like go-go girls, wriggling their tongues at us, toying with themselves and each other, and embodying the straight-male fantasy of what it means to be a lesbian. Why, they were close enough for a lap dance and, at one point, Clark bent down and gave one woman in a front seat a lingering smooch.

With bodies espressly for display, the two supercharged Barbie dolls engaged in rapidfire sensual interactions that were the rough equivalent of stuffing your mouth with as much candy as possible and downing it in one gulp. While they were at it, a video showed real-life dykes talking about their real lives. (One of them so real, I know her--an old friend I haven't seen in what must be years.) Their remarks about experiences of coming out or being targeted by homophobes, of self-determined identity and assured self-regard are intimate and reveal humanity and vulnerability. Clark's on to something, I think, since she diverts our attention from the hotties with this video and, often--at least for me--the video won.

Ask yourself: What would you rather watch? Yes, the dancers are hot. (And how often does most contemporary dance let itself get away with that without politely covering up the fact that watching any dancer express him/herself via the body is...um...inherently voyeuristic?) But the women in the video are appealing. They're probably more like yourself, even if you're not female. Maybe even if you're a straight male...an honest one. So that's where your eyes go. Funny, isn't it?

Annie Get Your Bat

Annie Lanzillotto's The Flat Earth: WheredaFFFhuck Did New York Go?--part of Dixon Place's 2008 Hot! Festival--is one woman's backlash against the forces of real estate development that are rendering our city unrecognizable to anyone with more than a minute's worth of memory in their heads.

Lanzillotto packs a lot into this roaring (and roaringly funny) 90-minute extravaganza in a vest-pocket performance space. Her monologue (with a quiet assist from Audrey Kindred and Caitlin Michener, who dance a bit, too) is a thing of wonder--stuffed with color and volume ("I'm not yelling! It's just my accent!"), geological and historical factoids, urban folklore and personal stories of loss and survival, all delivered with a killer combination of Italian-American and butch dyke charm. This is powerful, skillful, poetic performance, born of "the edges of the city where my journeys began" and filled with "buttons and epithets" (a delightful mis-speaking--for "epaulets"--if not deliberate). Lanzillotto will remind you that "neighborhood" means "where the butcher comes to your funeral" and help you get in touch with your Inner Glitter. In her smackdown between Pachelbel and Joan Jett, guess who wins?

Get onboard Annie's houseboat. You've got just two more chances--tonight and tomorrow--and Dixon Place isn't exactly roomy. So, hurry!

Dixon Place
Annie Lanzillotto