A warm(er) New York City welcome for APAP

This year, New York has welcomed the annual APAP (Association of Performing Arts Presenters) conference with the kind of "winter weather" that makes chasing down performances and showings all around town a whole lot easier than anticipated. I like that I can take post-dinner strolls across town to The Joyce for FOCUS DANCE--the series offered by Gotham Arts Exchange and the Joyce and curated, this year, by Jodee Nimerichter (director, American Dance Festival). I'll only get to the first two of FOCUS's four programs, but I'd like to shake the hand of the man or woman who can manage to get to everything invited to or, for that matter, worth seeing during APAP season.

Last night's show at the Joyce featured work by Jodi Melnick and Stephen Petronio. Melnick's Solo, Re(Deluxe), Version (2012), premiered last spring at New York Live Arts and set to the ecstatic, jagged chugging of Steven Reker's rock band, People Get Ready, finally came into focus and took off for me when the choreographer teamed up with another outstanding dancer, Hristoula Harakas. The two women proceeded to slip within and against the space with moves of silk and sophistication, switched on and attuned to one another's force and timing. Everything on that raw stage suddenly warmed up. It looked like love and intuition and mad stellar skill. Also, mad stellar are Gino Grenek and his fellow dancers from Stephen Petronio Company who offered excerpts from three sculpted pieces--Like Lazarus Did (LLD), a work in progress, The Architecture of Loss (2012) and Underland (2011). I'm always drawn to this ensemble's earth-angel quality: You can see how disciplined they are, but they show honor to the body and materiality--and humanity--by playing with gravity, never straining to escape it. Whatever they're dancing, they are sharing this specific time and place with us. Something so arresting and emotionally moving in this for me.

Tonight? Camille A. Brown & Dancers--to see where Brown's going with the provocative Mr. TOL E. RAncE--and Brian Brooks Moving Company (7:30 at The Joyce Theater). For information on the remaining FOCUS DANCE programs through January 13 at the Joyce--including work by Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, Doug Varone and Dancers, Eiko & Koma and John Jasperse--click here and here.

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

Two women. And two women.

I've been reading David Margolick's Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (Yale University, 2011), most likely the saddest true story I have ever held in my hands. I read it fairly quickly, over a few days, since I simply fell into its compelling, engrossing narrative, one that--no surprise, hence no spoiler--does not end well. And yet, while it is a book that I hope many will read, it is one that offers only a sliver of hope, certainly nothing of the feel-good-now, forget-it-all-later moment of absolution and uplift that many white Americans require when it comes to the issue of race relations. Quite the opposite.

If you have never heard of Elizabeth Eckford or Hazel Bryan Massery, follow this link to a 2007 Vanity Fair article by Margolick--"Through A Lens, Darkly." It's Margolick's original account of the story behind the famous 1957 Will Counts photo that shows Eckford, a young Black student, quietly making her way towards Little Rock, Arkansas' Central High School, suffering verbal taunts and threats from white segregationists. Eckford was the most visible and, at that instant, most vulnerable member of the Little Rock Nine, a pioneer and a target, inadequately protected as she sought to enroll in the all-white school. Counts' historic image captures one young white student, Hazel Bryan, mouth agape in a vicious moment that she has lived to regret every day of her life.

I hope you will read, and endure, this book, because it is necessary for more Americans to reflect on the complex and durable trauma that racism can inflict, that--far from being an abstraction or something easily wished away with good intentions or a sense that we are now beyond all that--it is a killer, exacting a severe toll on the human psyche. It imprisons both victim and victimizer, even when, as in the case of these two interesting women, time and maturity bring a desire to attempt to heal wounds and connect as friends.

Margolick, who got to know both women well and care about them, hung in with his project over many years, gaining insight into the tight weave of racism and psyche, the complication of racism with individual personality and individual pain and vulnerability. Eckford and Massery both cooperated with him for the book and approved its final draft--a remarkable testament, considering how revealing and unsparing, if ultimately compassionate, this book is.

Margolick suggests that Elizabeth and Hazel's story, begun on a terrible day in 1957, is not yet over. Time will tell. But one story that persists is the one we live every day in which racism bears consequences for real people in real time. Whether we have even a shred of the courage of these two women, flawed and stubborn though they may be, is the question each one of us needs to address.

***

Two other women are very much making their mark this weekend at The Kitchen--Maria Hassabi and Hristoula Harakas, dancing the world premiere of Hassabi's SHOW, which continues through Saturday evening.

Both the audience and the performers are implicated in the work as they share the changing sequence of what unfolds and is thus shown. It is within the time and space of this particular shared experience--its shifting bodies and facial gestures, its subtle fluxes and halted poses--that a truly plastic theater of contemporary live performance gains its images, fleeing to memory as the doors of the theater close. (from the press release for SHOW)

Opening night proved to be a magnet for the usual "downtown" corps of white arts intelligentsia, a few people of color sprinkled among them. (Shush! Don't talk about how New York's various cultural communities largely keep to themselves and to their specific vision of what dance should be....) In the lobby, we gave up our coats so that we'd be comfortable for the hour in a raw space reduced by half, stripped of its seating (all hidden behind a curtain, as we'd be shown at the end) and partly endowed with hot lights clustered on one side of the floor. Once inside, the audience could sit on the floor or stand and could move around for better viewing positions. A practical strategy, if nothing new.

The large audience formed semicircular rows, growing quiet as lights illuminated us as if we were performers. This went on for what seemed to be a long time. People appeared to grow uncertain and uncomfortable, looking at one another, wondering when the real dancers would appear or if, perhaps, they were sneakily already somewhere in the room. In fact, I found it a treat to glance around, checking out the known and the unknown, what each person was wearing and how he or she carried his or her self. They all looked rather beautiful in Joe Levasseur's light.

Eventually Hassabi and Harakas came through the front doors, dressed in lightweight, light-gray jeans and tops and wearing identical metallic teal-green nail polish on their fingers and toes. Slender in an edgy way, almost the same height, the two women carefully picked their way through the rings of seated watchers and came to a spot they would inhabit for a very long passage. They planted themselves, face to face and close together, each standing with one hip sharply jutted out as their bodies slowly melted towards the floor in a glacial shift.

Harakas faced in my direction. I could see her sensitive, wide-set eyes and dark bangs. Hassabi, her hair swept up in a knot, was turned away from me. I could only sense the force of her gaze on Harakas though watching Harakas' face and the subtle blinks and shifts in her own gaze. They would maintain this locked gaze through much of SHOW, with a few notable variations, alterations, or unlockings. Think of the staring Marina Abramović liberated from her table, free to move in space, and marry that image to the old party game Twister slowed way, way down (see Wikipedia, if the name Twister means nothing to you because who plays this sort of thing anymore?), and you'll get a sense of what went on at The Kitchen last night.

Yes, as in Twister, "players will often be required to put themselves in unlikely or precarious positions," but, in this case, there's a dead serious atmosphere, no elimination of players, and the benefit of the players being the very watchable Harakas and Hassabi with her heavy-lidded eyes and intense, Mediterranean- sculpted facial structure. With tension straining their arms, shoulders, necks and legs, they made incremental changes in level, direction, closeness, and there was endurance, beauty, drama and command in all of this.

Videographers (and, as far as I could tell, just regular folks in the crowd with smartphones) documented the event. Now and then, people on the very edge of the action scattered away as the dancers spilled or sprawled closer to their feet. Audience members also freely moved about. It was all we could do in a space that felt sealed off, airless and increasingly warm. You'd glance up to see one or another audience member had removed one or another item of clothing.

Near the end of the hour, I suddenly lost sight of both Harakas and Hassabi. The crowd, everyone on their feet, had closed around. In short time, the actual end came--an anticlimax in which the pair stood, vaguely, somewhere near the doors, as if they had simply blended in with the standing audience. Someone at the other side of the space drew back the black curtain to reveal the other half of The Kitchen's space with its chairs neatly stacked, and someone started the applause, and we were free to go.

SHOW with sound by Alex Waterman, lighting by Joe Levasseur, set by Hassabi in collaboration with Scott Lyall and dramaturgy by Lyall and Marcos Rosales

Tonight at 8pm and 10pm and tomorrow, Saturday, at 8pm

For further information and ticketing, click here or call 212-255-5793 x 11. 

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Uchizono: longing...and journeying, too

Last fall, The Foundry Theatre troupe took us on what I called a "magical history tour" bus ride around the South Bronx. Today, Dance New Amsterdam is going to get me on a bus to track the compelling Bill Shannon's Traffic. Last night, I boarded one of two gleaming white buses taking Donna Uchizono's audience from the Baryshnikov Arts Center to The Kitchen for Part 2 of her gleaming white premiere, longing two. And I might have heard of yet another show featuring bus transportation.

I'm not sure what to make of all of this...just sayin'.

I'm also not sure what to make of the fact that Uchizono's piece had me scribbling copious notes throughout--something I rarely do. I can't explain it, and I won't try. But I think, in lieu of a formal review, I'll just go ahead and share my entire one-hour + forty-minute journey with you.

***

When I arrive at BAC's Gilman Space lobby, the publicist, Yuri Kwon, tries to explain where I can locate my reserved seat ("It's the first row...but not...") but gives up. She figures I'll figure it out, and I figure there must be some kind of interesting arrangement beyond the theater doors. Okay. After decades of looking at New York dance, I'm game for pretty much anything.

Once inside, I see an arrangement that's more like an obstacle to viewing than anything else. Two rows of metal folding chairs that stretch the length of the space and face inward towards the theater's shaded windows. Right beyond those rows, with just a little room for walking, there's a nearly four-foot fence made of heavy white paper suspended by wires from the ceiling. It walls off space where, presumably, dancing will happen, since it's followed by another white-paper fence and two more rows of chairs that face it.

I walk along the first set of chairs and never find one with my name on it. I take a quick look at the far set before giving up and taking a seat at the extreme right end of the rows by the door. The space starts to fill up with people who can only see the heads of people facing them. I feel hemmed in and antsy.

I can't make out what's at the very far end of the performance area, but I'll discover, later, that it's a stand of eight fluorescent tubes. There's also a large, round light rising high over that end.

I'm looking at that paper in front of me, and I feel like writing or drawing on it. Really. Where are the crayons? Markers? I do have a few pens, though.

I manage to suppress my Inner Child.

At 7:10 or thereabouts, lights dim and people get quiet. Dancers appear at either end of the space. The A/C goes on. Good.

Four dancers are in pristine white leotards with a ruffling cascade of filmy white fabric draped down the back of one shoulder. Sound of waves, of gulls. Two women--Anna Carapetyan and Savina Theodorou wriggle their bare arms, appearing to float backward from the far end towards my end of the space. Now they disappear, dipping below the paper fence. Reappearing, they're unusually close to us but also truncated, since we can only see their upper bodies, and they look and move like marionettes. Arm and heads move as if suspended and controlled by strings. It's kind of lovely, and I no longer want to mar the purity of their fences.

As this is happening, Uchizono and Hristoula Harakas seem to have remained still on my end of the space but it now seems that they are moving very, very, very slowly leftward, shoulder-to-shoulder, Uchizono facing forward, Harakas backward. As Carapetyan turns, she's close enough to meet my eyes with a tiny, thrilling flicker of connection before flitting away. Uchizono and Harakas continue their leftward drift.

The "dolls"--as I begin to call Carapetyan and Theodorou--are now faintly whisper-singing "When You Dance I Can Really Love". Finally I know where I am: I've fallen into a music box that plays old Neil Young songs. Oh, and now that song--which I really loved, once upon a time--will be crazy-glued to my brain for the rest of the night. Thank you, Donna.

The dolls' skittering, twirling movements--still in character--externalize the rhythm of the barely perceptible song. I imagine Uchizono choreographing to the recording.

The dolls twirl their arms, reach, wave, flap. I look towards the fluorescent lights, anticipating that they'll come on--and they immediately do! Blazing white. The dolls disappear behind the lights. We can hear but not see them. They might have a fairy-like appearance, but they have the footfalls of linebackers. We hear their steps pounding the floor. I think about this a little later, musing that it's an odd touch but, somehow, just not odd enough.

They arrive in front of the lights, which are now doused. Not seeing their lower bodies adds to the sense that they are unworldly beings, but I wonder if a couple of noisy collisions with the paper fence were choreographed to call into question that ethereal nature. No sooner do I wonder that than the dolls, bent backward and back-pedalling again, emit some odd gasps. I'm thinking, "Moving in that position must be hard on their necks," right before Carapetyan holds her neck and says, very quietly, "This is really hard on my throat." Are the dolls becoming more human?

They swirl together, necks and shoulders and arms entangled. They pick up identical off-white ceramic pitchers from somewhere, place them on their heads and slowly sidle from one end of the space to the other. Carapetyan takes the far fence; Theodorou takes my side. As they slip past us, they smile, repeatedly asking no one in particular, "Would you like some water?"

Having finished their waitressing shift, the dolls immediately dip beneath the fence and next materialize as disembodied legs engaged in some poorly-synchronized water ballet. Ah! The lower limbs we had not been able to see! It's disorienting--as if a pool had been turned upside down or we were turned upside down and watching water where air should be. I don't even know how to describe this, really.

Lights out.

We're being advised to use the restrooms before heading outside for the bus ride to The Kitchen. (Clearly, there will be no time for a pit stop when we arrive.) Outside, there's a brief bit of drizzle. As we approach the bus, a woman hands each of us a little paper cup, which people seem to be accepting without comment or question. "For water," she says, when I ask. I refrain from asking, "What water?" I just get on my bus. It's chilly inside, and I just wish we could take off right away. I pull out a big scarf--former Girl Scouts are always prepared--and wrap it around me. Before long, we pull out and head west towards a gleaming, golden sunset. People kick back and chatter, just as if it's a real bus ride to maybe Bear Mountain or somewhere. They don't seem to notice Renee Archibald walking the aisle, fruitlessly checking all the overhead bins then drinking water from a big plastic bottle. She's got one of those paper cups, which she sometimes uses, sometimes does not. From what I can see, she has no intention of offering any of us a drop. My paper cup is down in my bag. My notebook is frequently out on my lap. We drive around Chelsea. A choreographer I met last year suddenly realizes I'm just across the aisle from her. Yes, I have hair now--bushy and grey--and she's never seen that. Yes, it's me.

The Kitchen's doors open to us with the sound of clanging bells that make me think I'm back in Europe. And Carapetyan and Theodorou are already in motion, moving like clanging European church bells. Uchizono sits on the floor, faced towards the back wall, knees up. Harakas stands near the back. A garden of fluorescent lights sprouts in one far corner. A length of crinkled white fabric or paper stretches up from one side of the space to the other, loosely embracing the space.

Static snaps, crackles and pops and some non-specific grinding and whirring fill the space as Harakas diligently works her off-centered balances, leg extensions and articulations of one foot. She's mesmerizing, a virtuoso, Uchizono's secret weapon. Uchizono, resting on the floor, simply watches her, but then I notice Uchizono's knees slowly swaying left and right. Soon her feet rise into the air and legs wriggle like a memory of the upside down pool she created at BAC.

Sounds become grating, tumultuous. I notice movement to one side of me--Theodorou tentatively coming in from the theater's entrance. The voices in James Lo's sound score could be cheering or screaming in fear. It's intriguingly murky. Theodorou disappears. The sounds give me a sense of something happening that should not be--an overturning of the expected natural order. Uchizono's writhing looks non-human, even monstrous. For a long time, she does not show us her face. But when she does, it is by making tiny pivoting moves that bring her around as the murkiness of the sounds recede. We're left with sounds of wind and rain.

Lights dim a bit. Women pedal slowly, softly. I think of islands. Night. Protected coves. The dancers gently sloshing back and forth. Their costumes now remind me of seafoam. A delicious sleepiness creeps over me. I feel cradled and rocked. In one corner, the "dolls" are whisper-singing Neil Young's song again, locked into each other's reality and delicately sidestepping amid the fluorescent sprouts.

The venerable Butoh master Kazuo Ohno died today at 103. I see him clearly as I watch Uchizono's solo. She uses her body like an ancient, gnarled tree branch stirred by wind. In her unadorned face and loosened hair, I'm seeing an unadorned, loose-haired headshot of Ohno that I found earlier in the day. He hovers and haunts.

Later, I'm moved by the way Harakas leans into Uchizono's slumped back, using the strength of one thin arm to hold her up as the clarified sound score reveals the kind of cheering one would hear at a sports event, including one guy's repeated cries of "Run! Run! Run!"

There's more, including a longish passage of stillness and silence. I notice the reprise of certain motifs, but the piece starts loosening its grip until it--and my journey with it--ends around 8:50.

Design team members not previously mentioned:

Costumes: Wendy Winters
Lighting: Joe Levasseur
Set: Ronnie Gensler

longing two continues through this Saturday, June 5, and I strongly recommend that you have your own experience with it.

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street, Manhattan
(travels to The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, via tour bus)
Information and ticketing

Hassabi's collage

When the audience enters Performance Space 122's theater, dancer Maria Hassabi is already in action--well, maybe not in action, since SoloShow is so much about the collaging of a series of static images--"the history of female representation...pulled from art history, pop culture and everyday life." But she's there, amid James Lo's recording of what sounds like a large, bustling audience assembling for a performance.

Wearing a cream-colored, sleeveless top and pants clinging to her ballerina-skinny frame, she occupies one corner of a large platform, shifting from pose to pose. We don't often see her expression. When we do, it's like a thunderclap;  she suddenly pivots towards us with that haunted, big-eyed face and legs splayed in tremulous, claw-like rigidity. Soon, though, she tilts her head back so far that her torso appears beheaded.  Although the soundtrack's roar subsides, the severe tension of her pose increases. Joe Levasseur's overhead lighting blasts her, but she appears to take to it, willingly, like a lizard adjusting and drying itself under desert sun.

Sometimes she drapes herself over the platform's edge, neck straining, blood pooling in her face. Often, she will turn her body into brittle sculpture on the featureless, ungiving platform. The work lasts about an hour of clock time--quite a testament to Hassabi's vigor and determination--but you might find yourself completely losing track of time.

I regret missing Hassabi's Solo--conceived as an autonomous half of a diptych and premiered at PS 122 last month as part of FIAF's Crossing the Line festival--and I also haven't seen her SoloShow alternate, Hristoula Harakas.

A joint presentation of Performa 09 and PS 122, SoloShow continues through Sunday: Friday and Saturday, 8pm and 10pm; Sunday, 6pm. Complete information and ticketing here.

Maria Hassabi's Gloria

Maria Hassabi
P.S. 122 (November 7–10, 2007)
Reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa for DanceMagazine.com (December 2007)

Maria Hassabi and Hristoula Harakas—two of the most exciting contemporary dance artists in New York—exist alone together in Gloria, Hassabi’s latest work. Originally conceived as a trio of solos (with David Adamo), the piece unfolds as two physically separate but temporally overlapping solos in a theater stripped raw. Houselights remain up until the piece’s finale. Both dancers and viewers endure harsh exposure.

Sic transit gloria? Hassabi’s opening section is a long string of limber, absurd, sometimes tawdry poses held for anywhere from eight to sixteen seconds, set against a plain backdrop and performed with the kind of stunned, trauma-victim deadness common to high fashion photos. Her spread-legged sprawls seem less pornographic than forensic. This woman is a mobile crime scene.

The brilliant score—designed by Jody Elf from a real-time recording by Hassabi—is the oppressive roar of highway traffic occasionally haunted by wisps of music. This easily conjures a context: warehouse on the seedy side of town. You can almost smell the pollution.

Hassabi’s solo continues as Harakas quietly slips into the space. In contrast to Hassabi’s pink stirrup tights and undershirt, she’s dressed in peek-a-boo black tights and top. Holding to one side of the space and keeping her back to the audience, Harakas slowly shifts her hips and rolls her shoulders as she approaches a separate backdrop. A long time passes before she idly turns to the audience, unseeing eyes skimming over everyone’s face as she twirls a lock of hair before drifting away. Hassabi now races through her poses while Harakas takes things at a syrupy pace, but both manage to look like big felines in cages. A snippet of someone’s version of Eurythmics’s “Sweet Dreams,” a melancholy swelling of movie music, a cellphone’s ringtone—these sounds hazily float through the score and evaporate like spurts of consciousness, doomed.

Harakas’ performance is particularly stunning. Her face, at rest, evokes a goddess out of classical myth, the kind you don’t mess with. And when, plastered against her distant backdrop, she lets a few facial muscles tug a small, heartless smile into place for no reason at all, it’s devastating.

Lighting designer Joe Levasseur—like Harakas and other members of the creative team, a longtime Hassabi collaborator—has outdone himself. Can you imagine a dance in which both performers suddenly quit the space and, in their unnerving absence, lighting takes center stage, dramatically dimming as the soundscape intensifies? Thus ends Gloria. Sic transit.

Into "Thin Air"

Donna Uchizono's Thin Air--running at Dance Theater Workshop through Saturday--is only the latest work of a genius, one never content to repeat others' solutions, one who regularly sails out to visit the dragons. For this artist and her collaborating dancers, the body is a minimalist canvas lashed by contradictory lush details--like the arms and supple hands snaking out from dancers serenely and securely perched atop ladders, or the feet dancing out amusingly fast, frenetic patterns as if the dancers were figures in a speeded-up film with a few frames missing here and there.

And these dancers! Julie Alexander! Hristoula Harakas! Antonio Ramos! They are picked out of various pockets of soft darkness and lit like the jewels, the divinities, they are. Credit Jane Shaw for the textured sophistication of this lighting design. Fred Frith (music), Michael Casselli (video) and James Lo and Myles Boisen (sound engineering) complete the collaborative team for one of this young season's most affecting and important achievements.

Tickets will probably be hard to come by. See DTW's site for more details.