Stepping out: Colin Dunne's "Concert" at BAC

Dancer Colin Dunne in his solo, Concert,
given its US premiere this month at Baryshnikov Arts Center
(photo: Whitney Browne)

Concert
by Colin Dunne
Baryshnikov Arts Center
co-presented with Irish Arts Center
November 14-16

Irish step dancing might start with a bit of stomping, a bit of running, as Colin Dunne--best known as an early superstar of the Riverdance phenomenon--informed us in the casual opening of his piece, Concert. But it can claim a more expansive range than we might have ever seen or imagined. Dunne's imagination, however, remains unfettered and restless after exploring contemporary dance for nearly two decades. Furthermore, as presented in Concert, his aesthetic journey is inspired by virtuoso Irish fiddler, Tommy Potts. Potts' spirit guided and presided over this intriguing hour of solo performance.

I should put quote marks around "solo." Dunne, dressed in unglamourous running shoes and black jeans and t-shirt, might have been the only flesh-and-blood performer in BAC's space, but he was far from alone. Potts, dead since 1988, was very much in the house. We heard him speak, watched him play in a projected film and saw his eccentric artistry reflected in the thoughtful whimsy of Dunne's choices.

Like Dunne's costuming, his choice of props and sonic accompaniment tilted towards the humble and the analog, stripping away flash, getting down to the nitty gritty. There's no pretense of perfection (or restraint) in Dunne's physicality. That's the honest body of a man who has lived a while. And for equipment to invoke both history and the spirit realm, he employed a turntable spinning the LP of Potts' The Liffey Banks, his only recording. A couple of unremarkable speakers carried Potts' words. There was an upright piano that probably has seen a few years. And, for god's sake, a cassette player. With all of these, Dunne wove an atmosphere with character and authenticity and--would you believe it?--continuity.

Moveable patches of flooring, rearranged as needed, helped the dancer--sometimes barefoot, sometimes wearing heeled boots--lay down sound, some tentative and soft or bold and complex scrapes and patters with one arm or another un-traditionally free to flap out or lift in a kind of punctuation. It was impossible to be a tap dance fan and not sit there mentally pairing him with tap artists--Black ones in particular--soul to soul.

Direction: Sinéad Rushe

Composing/sound designer: Mel Mercier
Lighting: Colin Grenfell
Film design: Jeffrey Weeter

Concert is closed. For more information on events at Baryshnikov Arts Center, click here. For more information on events at Irish Arts Center, click here.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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What fresh hell? Enda Walsh brings "Arlington" to Brooklyn

The world beyond whatever literal, metaphoric or metaphysical rooms or shelters we construct for ourselves is a precarious place--is it not, now more than ever?--and any time spent hiding from it will be limited. Even your own body, in fact, can be thought of as a room or containing structure--illusory, in its way, and unstable.

In his 2016 play, Arlington, Irish playwright and director Enda Walsh--who collaborated with the dying David Bowie on one of his last works, the musical Lazarus--imagines the loveless, meticulously sterile environment of a waiting room, a transitional space continuously and increasingly imposed upon by a ravaged and ravaging external world. Neither the artificial potted tree (easily toppled) nor the aquarium (where are the fish?) provide reliable signs of life and warmth. And surveillance monitors deny even the solace of privacy as you wait for your number to be called.

Staged in its American premiere at St. Ann's Warehouse and co-presented with the Irish Arts Center as part of IAC's Enda Walsh in New York project, the 90-minute play overlaps its three characters' actions with radio voiceovers and highlights the physical quality of their desperation with Emma Martin's ingenious choreography. Alarming sounds, malfunctioning lights and even a small shower of what looks like blood-red ash intensify the situation for Isla (Charlie Murphy), stuck in a room in a tower, a gawky young man (Hugh O'Connor) tasked with keeping an eye on her from his monitor-cluttered security office and another oddball (Oona Doherty) who, in the midst of it all, bursts onto the scene to unleash an extraordinary dance solo. It is Doherty--in her fiery, doom-eager vigor--who dares to raise the banner for life. Although her appearance certainly kicks this play up several notches, there's continuous interest for fans of dance throughout--in particular, the brilliant angularity of Murphy's embodiment of Isla, easily a Duchamp/Marcel Marceau/Pee Wee Herman collab.

Arlington is a disturbing, bracing collage of Walsh's text, Martin's movement, music (Teho Teardo), sound (Helen Atkinson), video (Jack Phelan), scenic design (Jamie Vartan), lighting (Adam Silverman) and the riveting work of its three performers.

Arlington continues through May 28 at St. Ann's Warehouse. For information and tickets, click here.

Rooms--the companion production in the Enda Walsh in New York series--continues through May 28 at Cybert Tire, site of the future home of the Irish Arts Center. For complete information and tickets for Rooms, click here.

St. Ann's Warehouse
45 Water Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Cybert Tire
726 11th Avenue (near 51st Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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"this is an Irish dance": Jean Butler at Danspace Project

Neil Martin and Jean Butler
perform this is an Irish dance at Danspace Project.
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Jean Butler might still be best known for Riverdance--the global Irish dance phenomenon she starred in with Michael Flatley--but she has moved on to a new level of inquiry in contemporary dance. this is an Irish dance, her thoughtful and poetic performance with cellist/composer Neil Martin at Danspace Project, helps us hear music not only in the duet of instrument and movement but also in the sensitive aliveness within silence, stillness and near darkness.

To make this work, the two artists collaborated through simultaneous improvisation. We read the living record of those explorations as they perform or even just regard each other across space, or as Butler quietly holds the cello for Martin as he busies himself with pushing a white cube a short distance. The warmth of his cello's voice contrasts with her sculpted serenity. Its heartful earthiness creates a trusty base for her still-very-Irish lightfootedness.

In an essay for this production, Butler writes of the supremely controlled form of Irish dancing as "a gesture of defiance," meant to elevate the Irish stereotyped by the English as "uncivilized, unruly, and of questionable character." I tried to understand this notion of physical self-restraint as a form of defiance. As a Black woman, I know how, under similar racist conditions, self-restraint can be a strategy for survival, if a self-erasing one. But an act of defiance? Nevertheless, Butler's birdlike physicality does reveal the powerful presence and strength within cool control, a self-awareness and a witty, mercurial facility that could as readily be turned to battle as to fanciful play.

Frank Conway's set further complicates things, evoking the aftermath of some unidentified disaster the two performers have survived. Upon first entering the church sanctuary and seeing his arrangement, I flashed back to the time I passed through my wife's art studio and closed its door behind me just as its ceiling collapsed.

Aside from a narrow, plain white table and a few white cubes, Conway has spilled jagged chunks of white foamcore down two sides of the floor--heavy piles near the altar steps tapering down into lighter remains and finally single pieces close to the audience. Although Butler and Martin rarely interact with this wreckage, it's hard to not be aware of its presence as they interact with each other.

Are we not all living with the wreckage of past injury and, quite likely in these times, foreboding? And do we not all, despite our first misgivings, hope to move beyond these things and find ways to connect and to heal?

this is an Irish dance continues through November 21 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)

LAST CHANCE: Watch out for ponydance!

Ireland's ponydance in action
at Abrons Arts Center
(below: Neil O'Brien lifting Leonie McDonagh)
Photos: Amanda Gentile

If the desperation and mayhem of a typical night out on the Lower East Side doesn't faze you, you should really, really, really like ponydance. And you won't even miss your chance to score a drink. You can get a free one right in the performance space and sip as you watch. What could be more convenient?

The intrepid comedy dance troupe, hailing from Ireland and Northern Ireland, wraps up its run of Anybody Waitin'?  tonight at Abrons Arts Center. With a quirky arrangement of seating, ponydance has made an already small space even moreso by allowing performers a mere melon slice of room to romp in and putting the audience well within reach of kicking feet, hurling bodies and smeary lipstick. That's right, but I'm not going to tell you to sit in the back. What would be the fun of that?

You can't run. You can't hide. But you can tuck your feet in and tilt out of the way.

With a comic and choreographic aesthetic that sweatily embraces dance competitions, music videos, speed dating and pole dancing, Anybody Waitin'?  is certainly not waitin' around for Godot or anybody else. I can scarcely imagine a more proactive bunch of artists or characters, and their approach to audience engagement is more like audience forced marriage. Seriously. Have that drink.

Leonie McDonagh, Paula O'Reilly--Google Images thinks she resembles Paula Deen!--Duane Watters and Neil O'Brien dance their wildly-costumed, skit-like duets and coordinated routines like demons. Tight and with superhuman energy and edge. They are intensely funny.

The show--curated by Laurie Uprichard and co-presented with Irish Arts Center--runs roughly an hour, give or take a few audience-inspired antics I'll leave to your anticipation. Anybody Waitin'? concludes with two performances tonight: 6pm and 9pm. Click here for information and tickets.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

So these four guys get "HYPERACTIVE" at La MaMa.....

John Scott's La MaMa production of HYPERACTIVE,
starring (clockwise from front, left) Stuart Singer, Ryan O'Neill,
Marcus Bellamy and Kevin Coquelard
(photo: Jinyoul Lim)

Give up the struggle.

In the arm wrestling between physical movement and verbal expression, the body wins. See? Even there: It's arm wrestling.

I give in.

As a writer, I will never keep up with what John Scott's dancers do in HYPERACTIVE (2013), a presentation by Irish Modern Dance Theatre, currently at the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. This Irish import, billed as a "human dance installation," takes pretty much everything the bodies of Kevin Coquelard, Ryan O'Neill, Marcus Bellamy and Stuart Singer have to offer. Thank goodness what these men have to offer is a lot. My wife was surprised when I returned home so quickly from Scott's show, which is only fifty-minutes long. I told her, "Had it gone any longer, they would have killed themselves."

You get a sense of HYPERACTIVE, right from the start, as Coquelard, first on the scene, violently scrunches his nose and mouth in ways that will be familiar to anyone suffering New York's spring allergy attacks. Coquelard probably doesn't have a seasonal allergy, but what he has, in HYPERACTIVE, is the essence of something only likely to grow in irrational force.

He's soon joined by Bellamy, whose truncated tale of a dog who likes to chase lizards and another dog with floppy ears quickly gives way to full-bodied howling and floppiness. When the two guys face each other, wind up and wind up and wind up, spin and stumble and wind up some more and guffaw and scamper, it's clear that HYPERACTIVE is going to be a little nuts. And the body will win.

Scott's sense of funny scrambles over any flimsy barrier. What is an "invisible hand dance?" Don't ask. What does an all-male chorus line and a Mack truck have in common? Why does Marcus's "inner geometry" look more like how Jackson Pollock might drip a dance? What might it be like to stop to smell the roses only to have a herd of bison gallop by only inches away? What's the DMZ between exhilarating exuberance and bodily danger? Sit along either of two available sides of the actual dance space, as I did, and you will find out. Or you could sit in La MaMa's regular theater seats and stay all cool and stuff.

HYPERACTIVE wears its own "inner geometry" on the outside. Random steps are often identified by name--as are people, by first names, some of whom I recognized for their connections to Scott and his work. Phrases are vocally counted. Exertion is demonstrated in the booming slap of feet against floor and the rivulets of sweat against skin and soaking clothing. The work embraces transparency and anti-virtuosity in its raucousness, its grin at failure, its refusal to go anywhere near pretty payoff or uplift.

And four butts are worked off, relentlessly, for the entire fifty minutes.

With music by JG Everest and Blackfish; Michael Galasso

Co-presented by the Irish Arts Center, HYPERACTIVE continues at La MaMa tonight at 7:30 and tomorrow at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The First Floor Theatre @ La MaMa
74A East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

February is Black Artstory Month in Brooklyn!

Brooklyn's Hammerstep dance troupe
will perform and offer a lecture-demo
as part of the 3rd Annual Black Artstory Month.

It's time again for Black Artstory Month, presented by Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership and featuring a lineup of free programming!

Here are two of the many events offered now through the end of February:

Hammerstep on Myrtle
presented by Irish Arts Center
Saturday, February 7 (3-5pm)
Ingersoll Community Center, 177 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn

In the late nineteenth century, Fort Greene—home to over half of Brooklyn's African American population— also became widely known as ''Young Dublin'' for the large Irish population that settled on what is now Myrtle Avenue. Black Artstory Month explores the intersecting histories of Irish and African American communities in Fort Greene with an unforgettable performance and lecture demonstration by Hammerstep, a Brooklyn-based contemporary dance company whose cutting-edge choreography melds traditional Irish dance, tap, step and hip hop to address contemporary social and political issues.

Click here for complete information and directions.

Remembering Rodeo Caldonia | Lisa Jones + Alva Rogers in conversation with Greg Tate
Pillow Cafe Lounge, 505 Myrtle Ave, Brooklyn
Friday, February 20 (6-8pm)

Take an insightful look at women artists of the black Brooklyn renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s, as profiled in Brooklyn Boheme, the recent HBO documentary by Nelson George. Writer Lisa Jones and writer/composer/performer Alva Rogers discuss the black women’s Fort Greene arts collective Rodeo Caldonia in a conversation facilitated by cultural critic Greg Tate.

Click here for complete information and directions.

Love brings surprises: "The White Piece" by John Scott Dance at La MaMa

Members of John Scott Dance in The White Piece (Photos by Chris Nash)

top photo: Philip Connaughton and Rebecca Reilly; bottom photo: John Scott and Haile Takabo

Dancer-choreographer John Scott--who has offered dance workshops for Dublin's Centre for Care for Survivors of Torture and also dealt with his performers' knotty, desperate immigration asylum cases--does not make art that speaks directly to the pain he has witnessed and internalized. With a field of trained dancers as well as survivors of injustice whose bodies carry concealed stories, he makes bighearted, absurd rituals of healing. The White Piece--its title referencing the symbolic color of purification, sanctity and, for some cultures, mourning--is one such work. Presented at La MaMa now through March 24, in association with the Irish Arts Center, The White Piece can have a curious effect on audiences, daring to be deceptively uncool in its methods and borderline corny in its optimistic appeal to humanity.

Before the audience can even settle in, Scott subjects everyone to a cacophony of voices as thirteen racially- and culturally-diverse performers mill about and speak, each man or woman on his or her own trajectory or sometimes pairing off to trail and mirror a momentary partner. I would imagine those voices and bodies represent the situation Scott found himself in with so many people--from Eastern Europe, from African nations--and so many troubling histories thrown his way. But pretty soon the mess shifts to a follow-the-leader game of word-and-movement phrases, and the talk is all about love. "Love is a piece of paper written but left unread," one dancer says, tossing a sheet of paper over her shoulder. The others follow suit. "Love is an escape from self," says another, burying his head in the arm of a partner. The rest repeat these words and actions. "Love brings surprises" leads to the initial surprise of one man grabbing a partner by the foot and dragging him halfway around the floor. This love talk goes on for quite a while, through many variations, during which some actual dancey-dance breaks out only to be cheekily undercut by the Broadway razzmatazz its dancers momentarily give it. Scott and company seem to be aware of the inherent disruptive weirdness of mixing privileged dance and theater specialists with folks new to the pleasure and power of movement as a means of artistic expression. They pack the self-consciousness of all of this into the piece, and they don't care if some of the raggedy ends of that hang outside the luggage. It's more fun (and more disruptive) that way.

There's nothing new about "breaking the fourth wall"--and certainly not at La MaMa--but it's cute how John Scott Dance does it in The White Piece where your footwear might get removed to become a flamboyantly admired prop. And not just one time. Then again, if you're fortunate enough to actually be the great Sara Rudner--a Scott colleague--the choreographer might trot over to you and say, "Thank you for coming. I'm giving the rest of this performance for you, and if you need anything, let me know."

But you probably don't have to be Sara Rudner to receive the gift of The White Piece, if willing. After the company's post-show Q&A, guided by La MaMa curator Nicky Paraiso, I left the theater feeling a touch giddy and with a noticeable pep in my step. It's true that, in most times, I am a lighthearted soul and that most dance nourishes me. Even so, this was an unexpected sensation.


The White Piece--performed by Joanna Banks, Ashley Chen, Philip Connaughton, Crinela, James Hosty, Kiribu, Sarah Patience, Florence Welalo Poudima, Rebecca Reilly, John Scott, Daniel Squire, Cheryl Therrien and Mufutau (Junior) Kehinde Yusuf--runs through Sunday, March 24. For schedule and ticket details, click here.

La MaMa (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (2nd Floor), Manhattan
(map/directions)