Must see, last chance: Hadar Ahuvia at 14th Street Y

Above and below,
Mor Mendel (at left) and Hadar Ahuvia
(photos: Jakub Wittchen)

Maybe this has happened to you. You're watching a show and, before long, you're saying to yourself, Damn! Everybody needs to see this! That might occur after the show ends, but when it comes not too far into the hour or so, and that feeling just keeps building and building and building, well....

So, here we have "Everything you have is yours?" It's a fascinating, powerful evening by Hadar Ahuvia and her collaborators and co-performers Mor Mendel and lily bo shapiro, ending its too-short run tonight at 14th Street Y. The question in the title, Ahuvia says, was posed to her by an Israeli security official when she had her passport renewed. In her mind, the question takes a provocative twist.

It inspired Ahuvia to examine her Jewish and Israeli identity in a way particular to her role as a dance artist. She looked at how Israeli settlers of European Ashkenazi heritage (her background) appropriated native North African and Middle Eastern folk dances to solidify their sense of a strong, unified culture in a new homeland, and how, in turn, these numerous "Israeli" dances have been appropriated, watered down and YouTubed by conservative Christian Zionists of the US for their own purposes. If all of that sounds way complicated, didactic, and potentially inflammatory for concert dance, hang on a minute. Ahuvia and her friends do want you to think about all that, but they've got quite a few theatrical tricks to woo you.

The dances--which the three live performers and various on-video instructors demonstrate--have magnetic vivacity and charm. (Some of you, like me, might remember learning a few of these in grade school, back in the day.) But the entire production--created and attended to with meticulous care by Ahuvia's team--appeals not only to the mind but to every sense. Personal histories, cultural history; music; speaking and singing voices; projected photo and video imagery; dance movement, of course; little proffered treats of mint tea and fragrant tangerines; plus the invitation, at the close, to learn some steps and chat with the artists. Everything warmly invites us in--as living bodies-- and helps us stay present with Ahuvia's ideas.

This is a smart, witty, political and ultimately moving work filled with unexpected delights like shapiro's pitch-perfect segment of BBC-style voiceover narration and an alluring passage in which jeans-clad Ahuvia and Mendel overlap an impressionistically-blurred archival film clip of a women's ensemble--begowned, synchronized--performing the same dreamy sequence. The visual design by Gil Sperling (projections) and Kryssy Wright (lighting) obscures, breaks down and transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, arguing for the undeniable power of the body in motion and our human, irresistible pull to celebratory dance that might or might not have originated with our own people.

Sound design: Avi Amon
Dramaturgy: lily bo shapiro
Dramaturgical support: Stacy Grossfield and Rowen Magee

"Everything you have is yours?"--a presentation of LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture--concludes its run with a performance tonight at 8pm followed by a post-show conversation with Franny Silverman of Kolot Chayeinu. For information and tickets, click here.

To read Hadar Ahuvia's guest essay about this work, "The Dances Are For Us" (InfiniteBody, January 10, 2017), click here.

14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Hadar Ahuvia: The Dances Are for Us

Dance artist Hadar Ahuvia (left) with Mor Mendel
(photos, above and below: Cory Antiel)

Guest writer Hadar Ahuvia writes about the inspiration for her new hour-long dance work, Everything you have is yours? 

"This was the question an Israeli security official asked Ahuvia when she went to renew her passport. The question resonated with her as she considers her relationship to her Israeli heritage. Everything you have is yours? explores the construction of Israeli identity through the performance of Israeli folk dance--with attention to gestures appropriated from Palestinian and Arab Jewish traditions. Ahuvia’s investigation also explores the double-appropriation of Israeli dance by American Christian Zionists in their own pursuit of 'authenticity.'”

Hadar Ahuvia
(photo: Corey Antiel)

The Dances Are for Us

by guest writer Hadar Ahuvia

“Everything you have is yours?” he asks. “Kol ma she’yesh lach, hoo shelah?”

I empty my pockets—wallet, iphone, change—and pass my bag through the scanner. I say yes.

I was at the Israeli embassy to renew my Israeli passport. I needed it to return to the Holy Land—that sacred and pockmarked land--one my homes.

I would visit family, yes, but also join a delegation of Jews doing solidarity work with Palestinians in the West Bank.

In Hebrew, the irony of the familiar questions hit more forcefully.
Hebrew is my mother tongue, but waning usage does something naive and sometimes fruitful to my comprehension.

I know he’s asking “Did you take something, knowingly or unknowingly that might not be yours?’” I hear: Everything you have, that is for you, is yours?

There is an Israeli kids song:

“My land of Israel is beautiful and blooming.
Who built and planted it? We all did!
So we have a country, and we have a street, we have a song in the land of Israel.”

But grammatically it holds the meaning:

There is for us a country, the street is for us, the land is for us, this song is for us.

I add: the dances are for us.

And I did grow up believing it was for us, for me. The fruits at the market were for me to pick up smell and taste. The security was for me. The roads were for me to travel with my uncle, the archeological park was for us. So the gate and closure hours didn’t matter. The Roman ruins were for us, as we hopped the fence to walk down 2,000- year-old streets with disregard to the Palestinian villages that have survived in this frequently-hostile land for hundreds of years. The Romans are the ones who kicked us out anyway. That my students in the US have little connection to these enslaved and expelled Israelites of 2000 years ago still surprises me. It’s a testament to the diasporic focus of our Jewish pedagogy, and to the resilience of my Zionist upbringing.

I am the granddaughter of Eastern European settlers who founded Kibbutz Beit Hashita, where my parents and siblings grew up, a place we call home. It is also where the Palestinian village of Shatta used to be. We spent holidays on the kibbutz, where pageants of song and dance originating in the 1930s still took shape in the agricultural fields and the dining hall.  When we moved to Florida and then Hawaii, we continued celebrating and gathering with these particular Socialist Zionist symbols and Israeli folk dance choreographies.

Increasingly our home began to mimic the Arab essence that is claimed as fundamentally Israeli. Hummus, tahini, olive oil zaatar, pita, baklava. And beside the Palestinian shepherd salad, the syncopated dabke and Yemenite steps, Turkish and Druz inspired melodies of early Hebrew songs and their synchronous dances. These kept us marinating in a Mediterranean Israeli identity, our distinction from the American Ashkenazi diaspora encroaching on us-- ameripoop-- treacherously symbolized by applesauce on latkes.

We had the political freedom to enter and leave Israel and the US as we liked, though not the economic ability.  And because even this produced a profound longing, I could later easily empathize with the indefinite and ongoing exile of Palestinians.

On Israel’s Independence Day--May 15, 1948--Israeli folk dances seemed to “spontaneously” break out, thanks to the organizing of the Israeli Folk Dance movement and support from pre-state political organizations.  At Biet Hashita, the dancers had to overcome my grandfather’s faction, who refused to celebrate a partitioned Israel, who they thought of as “a stillborn child.”

Today, there are more than 8000 Israeli “folk” dances (most often not called “folk” any longer, but simply Israeli). They have been choreographed and disseminated continuously since the 1930s, mainly in white Jewish spaces. I danced them in Israeli elementary school and with family at far flung “outposts”--the Altamonte Springs JCCs and the Ala Wai Golf Course Center in Honolulu.

The Israeli folk dance movement was the enterprise of modern dancers, contemporaries of my grandparents, Jewish women of European descent, also known as Ashkenazi, who sought to become “Oriental” and native to their new surroundings. To embody Zionist/Israeli identity in Palestine, they appropriated steps from Arab Palestinians and Druze they observed in the valley where my family settled, and Yemenite Jews at relocation camps to which they were brought. The “new Hebrew dances” they made were used in the socialization of later Jewish migrations--Jews coming primarily from Muslim countries. They are known today as Mizrahim, literally meaning “Easterners,” treated as inferior by the Ashkenazi establishment. Today, the dances are choreographed mostly by Mizrahi men to Mizrahi pop songs--pejoratively called by some “songs of the central bus station.” The Mizrahim have been allowed to ascend within this social sphere, completing the self-orientalizing maneuver of the Israeli physicality. The dances still contain the vestiges of translated steps, steps that don’t just metaphorically mirror the appropriation of land but operate to justify the claim to land, to create and celebrate a national identity rooted in the spaces we depopulated and conquered.

One deadly claim of 18th- and 19th-Century European anti-Semitism was that European Jews had no culture of their own, no connection to land. No blood on soil. No authentic folk. And this soullessness, true of homosexuals and gypsies too, justified their extermination.  The chants at Charlottesville share a lineage with this race theory.

They would concur--nothing you have is yours.

European Zionist internalized these ideas and imagined that the recreation of ancient Israelite polity would solve the conundrum.

But here we are still posing the question--Everything you have is yours?--while grasping for the sense of security, ownership and belonging we coveted, that we obtained, and continue to violently maintain with the choreography of bodies, bombs, and borders.

So yes, this is all mine; it is on my person.

Each time I remake this dance--and I do each time we perform--I understand a little more clearly what our next steps might be. To ask what decolonizing the dances could be not just as a metaphor, but alongside the fight for Mizrahim and Palestinians to have the space for their steps to survive and thrive.

Hadar Ahuvia
(photo courtesy of the artist)

BIO:

Hadar Ahuvia is a performer and choreographer who makes work grounded in physical research and political consciousness. Raised in the US and Israel, she trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been presented at Judson, Dixon Place, CPR, BkSD, Danspace DraftWork, Movement Research Fall Festival, AUNTS, Catch, Roulette, NYLA and Eastport Art Center, and SPACE Gallery, Maine. Ahuvia has worked with Sara Rudner, Jill Sigman, Donna Uchizono, Molly Poerstel, Anna Sperber, Jon Kinzel, Stuart Shugg, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Kathy Westwater. She is currently performing Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group. Ahuvia was 2012 DTW/NYLA Fresh Tracks Artist, a 2015 Movement Research AIR, a LABA Fellow at the 14th St. Y, and a 2016 Grace Paley Organizing Fellow at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and the recipient of 2017-18 CUNY Dance Initiative Residency.

*****

See Everything you have is yours?, presented by LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture at 14th Street Y, Thursday, February 8 through Saturday, February 10, all at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Aharon Appelfeld, 85

Aharon Appelfeld, Israeli Novelist Haunted by the Holocaust, Dies at 85
by Joseph Berger, The New York Times, January 4, 2017

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Batsheva: "Last Work" at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

Above and below:
Batsheva Dance Company
performs Last Work
by Ohad Naharin
(photos: Gadi Dagon)

Last Work, performed in its New York premiere at BAM by Israel's Batsheva Dance Company, runs for about 65 minutes. And so does Rani Lebzelter, placed upstage right, her royal blue gown flowing around her shins for that entire time as she pumps away on an unseen treadmill. Her look at once heedless and heroic, she comes to represent a figure of privilege and athletic glamour. Never once does she break stride or even turn her head to gaze at her fellow performers who, after all, stay hellabusy for that same hour-and-change creating an entire Ohad Naharin fantasy world and all that implies. At one point, a blob of these dancers congeals center stage right, obstructing the audience's view of the Lebzelter's body. You can see only her disembodied head continuously bobbing above them.

She's Naharin's ostinato. A few times, the soundscape fades, allowing the perfect, rhythmic clopping of her shoes to resound. She is ground and context--even visually, the watery blue against the stage's dark surround, a pop of color amid other white and skimpy costumes, dark, monk-like cloaks, grey, accordion-like screens rigidly guarding the wings. Avi Yona Bueno's lighting makes the stage and all its creatures look like pricey abstract art in motion.

After Naharin first introduces this vision of Nakamura, another dancer advances from center stage left, hunched over and pedaling across on bent knees. To be sure, nothing as silly as a simple walk will ever do. This is the famous Gaga. More and more dancers accumulate, all with untamed bodies that have long figured out how to do things their own way. The contortion and force of it will often look uncomfortable, reckless, much less than human. But it will also mesmerize. That first man, for instance, takes his sweet time demonstrating a deep, repetitive undulation that flows from one raised knee all the way through the shoulder on that side of his body, sometimes slow, sometimes speedy. It's a sensuous yet deceptive seduction into a world where you will probably find yourself alarmed and repelled.

 A scene from Last Work
(photo: Gadi Dagon)

As it develops, Last Work comes across the most as a dire warning--and, hence, political and timely. (Naharin has openly criticized policies of the Israeli government and, I'd bet, would not look kindly on our own mess in Washington.) The community he builds and reveals in this dance is less unruly than you might first think, more likely to mold itself into tight, locked groups, engage in reassuring rituals or--and this is where the women dancers' bodies carry the heaviest symbolic burden--throw itself wide open for the taking.

It's all heading towards dubious celebration. An orgasmic barrage of rifle shots. A burst of metallic confetti. The rippling satin of a huge, white flag of.... Of what? Of national purity? Or is it, ultimately, a flag of surrender?

Affixed to their spots and firmly connected to one another by packing tape, the once hyperactive dancers come to a standstill. Not our runner, though. She wears the tape and now grasps that gleaming flag in one hand but, somehow still unaware of what has happened, keeps running in place.

Batsheva Dance Company

William Barry

Yael Ben Ezer

Matan Cohen

Omri Drumlevich

Bret Easterling

Hsin-Yi Hsiang

Rani Lebzelter

Eri Nakamura

Ori Moshe Ofri

Rachael Osborne

Nitzan Ressler

Ian Robinson

Kyle Scheurich

Or Meir Schraiber

Maayan Sheinfeld

Yoni Simon

Bobbi Jene Smith

Zina (Natalya) Zinchenko

Lighting design: Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi)
Soundtrack design and edit: Maxim Warratt
Original music: Grischa Lichtenberger
Stage design: Zohar Shoef
Costume design: Eri Nakamura

Last Work continues nightly through Saturday, February 4 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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February US opening for film on Gaga's Naharin

Choreographer Ohad Naharin
(photo: Gadi Dagon)

Mr. Gaga, Tomer Heymann's 2015 documentary film, delves into the life and maverick work of Ohad Naharin, artistic director of Tel Aviv's Batsheva Dance Company. It will open in US theaters in February of next year.

Clips from an early film of young Naharin flipping and tumbling in the grass around his childhood home suggest the roots of his genius creation, Gaga dance. Son of a dancer, the youngster took obvious pleasure in physicality without fear or rules. The mature artist would come to offer students and dancers a pathway to the freedom he had always sought.

We see the contemporary Naharin in the studio urging dancers to "find a way to let go...just let it happen. The more you let go everywhere in your body at once, the softness of your flesh will protect you." Later, Heymann introduces archival footage of a callow-looking Naharin, serving in an army entertainment unit during the Yom Kippur War. We consider how being surrounded by danger and death might have influenced the intense, liberating aesthetic of Naharin's future work.

He began dance training late, at 22, he tells us as we glimpse clips of a sturdy young guy with confident presence and a sense of what was right or, more to the point, not right for him. Martha Graham was not. Maurice Béjart decidedly was not. At Juilliard, he got by, smartly imitating the technique he observed in ballet class. You clearly see his efforts did not go deep.

An injury led him to explore new strategies to heal his body and allow it more authentic expression. And it was something more, a connection to "feminine forces," as he describes them in the film, "delicacy and aggressiveness at once." Dance teacher Gina Buntz later speaks of Naharin's "Mediterranean spine...very womanly," and Heymann shows the dancer indeed working that glorious spine.

In one teaching moment, Naharin instructs a young man to dance "like you're going to save somebody's life and, if you don't, it's gone." In another scene, we watch a gorgeous, vigorous male duet as Naharin tells us, "Dance is the opposite of macho. Movement, in its purest source, is about gender." Regrettably, we do not hear more about this idea or really learn what makes Gaga work from the inside out. The movement often looks grotesque and mind-blowing. Heymann's sampling of it--lots of it--can make your heart race.

Filmmaker Tomer Heymann
(photo: Mari Laukkanen)

The filmmaker weaves in the story of Naharin's passionate life and partnership with his first wife, Mari Kajiwara, a beloved Alvin Ailey star who quit that company and followed him to Israel. He emphasizes that Kajiwara's grasp of Naharin's often elusive ideas and demanding methods was crucial to their effective transmission to dancers. Sadly, Kajiwara succumbed to cancer in Tel Aviv on Christmas 2001. The choreographer is now remarried and a father.

Celebrated worldwide, Naharin has not escaped controversy in his homeland. Ultra-religious parties took issue with the notion that his dancers, invited to perform in a gala celebration of Israel's 50th anniversary, would tear off their clothes to dance to a Passover Seder song in undershirts and shorts. Under pressure, the choreographer agreed to more modest costuming and then immediately resigned. When his dancers backed him up, refusing to perform at all, Naharin quickly resumed directorship of his company.

In a stunning moment in the film, he chides his nation as "a country infected by racism, hooliganism, widespread ignorance, abuse of power and fanaticism." He continues, "This influences the government we elect. This government has put at risk not only my work, but the actual survival of us all in this country, which I love so much.”

That's tough love, as his dancers would surely recognize it. As Heymann reveals, the choreographer thinks nothing of barking disapproval from the wings--and that's after reportedly sending performers onstage with this tender blessing:

Don't fuck with me. My life depends upon you.

Mr. Gaga (100 min./English/Hebrew) opens in US theaters on February 1, 2017. For further information on international theatrical release and festival screenings, click here.

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Directors protest WJCC firing of Ari Roth

Directors’ Letter Protests Firing of Theater J’s Artistic Director
by Michael Paulson, The New York Times, December 22, 2014

Minds wide shut: WJCC fires theater director Ari Roth [UPDATE]

Ari Roth, Director of Jewish Theater, Is Fired
by Michael Paulson, The New York Times, December 19, 2014

Click for update

Batsheva BAM opening protested

50 Protest Batsheva Dance Company Opening at BAM
by Mostafa Heddaya, Hyperallergic, November 13, 2014

New film traces dance career of Ze'eva Cohen, November 10

Ze'eva Cohen in Anna Sokolow's Rooms (photo: Jack Mitchell)

I think Anna Sokolow saw in me a certain naïveté, a certain rawness. She saw that I could give myself completely to a role and become the role, and she could see that I would go with her all the way.

--Ze'eva Cohen

Award-winning television/video editor Sharon Kaufman makes her directorial debut with the documentary, Ze’eva Cohen: Creating A Life In Dance, to be screened next month at Downtown Community Television Center.

photo: Jack Mitchell

A half-hour portrait of the Yemeni-Israeli modern dancer and educator, the film traces the development of Cohen's distinct sensibility and career with many vintage samples of her lyrical, elemental performances and choreography. A gorgeous dancer with--as dance historian Elizabeth Kendall calls it--a "touch of the raucous," Cohen serves as a model of surviving and thriving as an independent artist.

Free screening: 
November 10, 6:30pm

RSVP: bkwright4@gmail.com

Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV)

87 Lafayette Street, Manhattan

(map/direction)

Israel disputes designation of Arraf film as Palestinian

The Hand That Feeds Bites Back
Israel and Suha Arraf Differ on Nationality of ‘Villa Touma’
by John Anderson, The New York Times, October 16, 2014

Young dancers making noise for Gaza

While everyone else is distracted by Taylor Swift...

Young Palestinian dancers from El-Funoun Dance Troupe فرقة الفنون الشعبية الفلسطينية in Let's Make Noise for Gaza, a film by Nicholas Rowe

John Adams opera stirs concerns, Met cancels simulcast

Met Opera Cancels Simulcast of ‘Klinghoffer’

by Michael Cooper, The New York Times, June 17, 2014

Artists advocate Creative Time boycott

Over 100 Artists and Intellectuals Call for Withdrawal from Creative Time Exhibition
by Mostafa Heddaya, hyperallergic.com, June 10, 2014

A photo archive of the Palestinian experience

Photographs Tell a History of Palestinians Unmoored

by Isabel Kershner, The New York Times, November 28, 2013

Mira Awad's "Arabic Fusion"

A Rainbow of Fragility
Mira Awad at the Metropolitan Room
by Stephen Holden, The New York Times, June 5, 2013

La MaMa to host 2nd Contemporary Israeli Dance Week

From white Wash by Gil C. Harush (photos by Eyal Resh)

La MaMa will host the second Contemporary Israeli Dance Week, curated by Michal Gamily and Hila Gamily-Kaplan. Contemporary Israeli Dance Week features five Israeli-based choreographers and five New York City-based Israeli choreographers and will include performances, master classes, dance video screenings and more at La MaMa and other participating organizations.

Renana Raz (photo by Noam Hamo )

La MaMa information and ticketing

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

This week, journey "Between the Seas"

Between the Seas Festival, produced and directed by Aktina Stathaki, offers New Yorkers a diverse menu of performers and arts disciplines from all around the Mediterranean region. This year--the festival's second--Italy, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey and Albania, among other nations, are represented. It's a smashing idea, even though New York's glut of arts festivals--let alone individual arts and entertainment programs--makes it tough for a relative newcomer to establish a toehold.

Ido Tadmor in the Rachel Erdos solo, And Mr. (Photo by Gadi Dagon)

Tonight, it's worth the trip "between the seas"--or almost to Avenue C--for the chance to watch Ido Tadmor, a magnificent Israeli performer, dance in And Mr. (the choreographer's cut) by the British-born, Tel Aviv-based choreographer Rachel Erdos. Having seen this piece last evening, I'm not convinced that the original solo, And Mr., really needed to be expanded into a duet with Stefan Ferry. Stretching that initial half-hour of oddity into an externalized interaction brings out an unwanted preciousness, and it is simply too long. There seems enough Jekyll-and-Hyde duality and gnarliness within the tousled Tadmor alone as he interprets Erdos' stark, lacerating tangles of movement. It's a brilliant performance and, to my mind, Tadmor should be the end of the matter.

Vanessa Tamburi (Italy) and her FLUSSO Dance Project will open the evening again with Lost Rights, an ensemble piece inspired by the work of the late Italian journalist, Maria G. Cutuli, who was killed in Afghanistan. A well-intentioned piece, it nevertheless displays a disconnect between Tamburi's choreography and her stated theme of African women and children suffering poverty, disease, exploitation and abuse. Although the quartet of performers, who learned the piece in just two weeks, give it their all, the projected text and larger-than-life photo portraits--which carry the only connection to the serious theme--distract the eye and overwhelm the dancing.

Between the Seas Festival continues through Sunday, August 26, at Wild Project. Get complete programming and schedule information here.

Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Naharin's ‘Hora’

Ohad Naharin and Batsheva Come to BAM With ‘Hora’
by Brian Schaefer, The New York Times, March 2 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)

Tony Kushner accepts CUNY honor

Tony Kushner Accepts Honor CUNY Initially Blocked
by The Associate Press, The New York Times, June 3, 2011