Can I get a witness? Viewing mayfield brooks at JACK

Performance artist mayfield brooks
(photo: Amar Puri)

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych)
by mayfield brooks
JACK
January 30-February 1

In the tiny storage room, where the pungent aroma of earth and rose petals prickles your nostrils, I stand in a single line of people skirting the edge of a funereal bier covered in colorful decaying foliage. I see a bare foot sticking out from this cover, even as I hear mayfield brooks' voice on a looping recording (calling for "a witness") and tamp down a feeling of being trapped. I notice a thin, dry stalk, its end lightly poking the sole of brooks' foot, and I wonder if brooks feels it, is irritated by it. I wonder if I shouldn't pluck it away. But I dutifully stand, like everybody else, listening, looking in this solemn enclosure. Finally, I carefully--so as to not startle brooks or draw anyone else's attention--reach for the stalk and pull it off brooks' flesh.

In small groups, the audience will cycle through that opening viewing room then gradually assemble in a larger but still intimate space nicely set up to encourage comfort and seating choice. This feels more like a funeral parlor than a performance space. Merging two of brooks' works, Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) is every bit as much a memorial service, a participatory ritual, a raucous channeling and a party with festive cakes (by Susannah Simpson) as it is a performance.

Attend and you will have ample time to gaze or move around the space and commune with the dead (brooks' and yours). Inspired primarily by the late Black gay activist and Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson, this evening introduces us to brooks' ongoing practice of writing heartfelt letters to this role model and would-be mentor and gently suggests we take up a similar practice with our own ancestors of blood or mind.

Will you also see strong, compelling performance in this space? Oh, yes. brooks' collaborating team--a water bearer, a tea maker, a florist, a guide and various viewing hours caretakers--establishes and eases us into the fluidity of the space, but brooks rules the space and gives a master class in commitment, responsiveness, fervent aliveness.

The evening, nearly two hours of sensory richness, is well worth the sometimes frustrating task of navigating subway travel to, from and around Brooklyn. (As of last night, the "C" in C train stands for "cusswords.") Maybe just give yourself at least 15 minutes more than you think you might need to get there, then don't fret because the opening of the piece is experienced in shifts. Relax with some tea in the lobby.

Technical Director/Creative Consultant: Niko Tsocanos

Curated by Stacy Grossfield as part of her IMAGES // LANDSCAPES series and JACK's Reparations365 series.

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) continues with 8pm performances tonight and tomorrow. For information and ticketing, click here.

JACK
18 Putnam Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
C to Clinton-Washington or Shuttle to Franklin Avenue

******

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.

******

Subscribe in a reader

Shamar Wayne Watt and family revisit "Gully spring" at JACK

Shamar Wayne Watt
(photo: Scott Shaw)

This week, Brooklyn's JACK performance space is presenting a new version of Gully spring: Di exhortation, a dance piece by Jamaica-born Shamar Wayne Watt, originally shown on a Gibney program curated by Nora Chipaumire. (See my review of that late 2017 engagement here.) Just short of an hour, the piece centers Afro-Atlantic spirituality as a landscape of resistance to colonial power and the constraints of Eurocentric Christianity. The work embodies and elevates family with the presence of Watt's mother, Valerie Davis, who contributes her choir-singing joy and, now at JACK, brother Lamar Jerome Watt, a Florida-based student athlete and krump dancer.

The center of Gully spring, though, remains the prophet Watt, mounting a platform and revolving and testifying beneath the ongoing baptismal drip of a gallon jug of water suspended above his head. I recall, from Gibney's promotion, that he declared a new religion of his own making, drawn from African-Jamaican traditions and Pentecostal worship as well as the political awareness and urgency of the moment. Is it not fitting and right that he administer his own benediction?

You have one last chance to witness this performance I called "exhortative, magnetic, formidable" this evening at JACK (8pm). For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 ½ Waverly Ave, Brooklyn
C or G train to Clinton-Washington

******

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.

******

Subscribe in a reader

Oren Barnoy premieres a new dance trio at JACK

Paul Hamilton in a new work by Oren Barnoy
(photo: Scott Shaw)

You'll find the name of the new trio by choreographer Oren Barnoy if you click on this: (symbol). I'm told there is no official pronunciation, but there might be a rhythm. The glyph resembles something from one of those unauthorized offshoots of Reiki, but the dance itself--which left Paul Hamilton, Candace Tabbs and Molly Lieber dripping and glistening in sweat after its 25 minutes--is more-marathon workout than soothing. The aim is spiritual, though, described as Barnoy's "version of a daily prayer through movement" and a "continuous action...unrelenting ritual...towards transcendence."

Performed in the simple, aluminum-foil surround of Brooklyn's JACK, the piece's exertions bear the same twisty, swirly hieroglyphics of the enigmatic title and its look of a complicated infinity. Dancers, dressed in unremarkable black clothing, come and go, thrusting and retracting with low-dipping torsos and reaching, scooping, swinging, windmilling arms. I imagine some viewers might get into this while others eventually begin to tune it out when it does not appear to be turning into anything. For me, visual drama happened whenever two bodies were at play--at prayer?--in proximity to one another, activating shape and energy in the negative space between. I found my attention snapping to these interactions. On the whole, though, the entire ride can be enjoyable.

(symbol)--part of JACK's Images//Landscapes series, curated by Stacy Grossfield--continues tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn (C or G to Clinton-Washington)

Subscribe in a reader

Playing games with Karma Mayet at JACK

Karma Mayet
(photo: Karl Ferguson, Jr.)

Multi-talented Karma Mayet--actor, vocalist, composer--is busy crafting something both fun and painful in Race Card at JACK, now through December 16. As the title suggests, this project gets all up into America's favorite non-favorite topic. You might remember Congresswoman Maxine Waters responding to the accusation that she's playing the race card. Words to the effect of "Good, because I've got a whole deck to play!"

Mayet, a Chicago native with roots in Mississippi, has a whole deck, too--literally--with playing cards liberally distributed around the audience seating at JACK. A fan of Bid Whist--her granny is her Bid Whist guru--she has worked out a way for an audience, even card game novices like me, to play a version of the usually intricate, fast-paced game with her as she sits at a little table with a pencil, paper and a phone full of music. The winner of each round triggers her telling of a personal story of racism in a society where macro-aggressions are fundamental and micro-aggressions are thick on the ground.

In between Mayet's true-life stories that both amuse and sting, viewers are shuffled like cards while grooving to what Mayet enjoys calling her "white jams"--the tastiest, most irresistible music made by white appropriators of Black style. ("Twenty years after you create something," she quipped, "they'll get a passable imitation.") Here and there, things might get a bit raggedy--part of the fun, actually. The overall concept rocks. The chance process and continuous audience involvement as co-creators--no two evenings will be alike--are refreshing.

And you've gotta love Mayet. Even rooted in her chair as she tells her stories, she's the Queen of movement and dynamic charm. Go play Bid Whist with her at JACK.

Race Card continues through December 16 with performances at 7:30pm, except where noted:

Saturday, December 2
Sunday, December 3
Friday, December 8
Saturday, December 9
​Sunday, December 10 at 3pm
Thursday, December 14
Friday, December 15
Saturday, December 16

For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

"a fragile son": Matthew Rogers solos at JACK

Dance artist Matthew Rogers
Below: performing a fragile son
(photos: Nika Brunova)

Startlingly clear images from a fragile son--a solo performed by dancer-choreographer Matthew Rogers at JACK--have lasting power. I can attest. I woke up in the middle of the night, and they were right there, in my mind, complete and fresh.

There's something nondescript about Rogers himself. Take the fair, wispy, wayward tresses that, at times, blur his delicate, Southern white guy features. But, lit by Tuce Yasek, he can bring things into focus and bury them deep in the mind even as they retain their enigmatic nature.

He opens by first trotting up to a riser opposite the audience and telling us a few things about his family--related to Thomas Jefferson on his granddad's side; the men marked by a rare genetic disorder that thickens their palms and limits their fingers' flexibility. That "son" is part of the title implies we'll likely be dealing with father-son stuff, and "fragile" points to some sort of fault line.

Before the piece began, Rogers personally handed each of his watchers a copy of a missive that begins "Hlelo Dad," nearly every word containing misplaced letters. It's written to a long-absent father, ultimately an act of taking account of, and responsibility for, his own life and happiness.

Some of the indelible imagery involves a thick rope drawn out straight across a diagonal, a rope like an orderly measurement of time, the unfolding of a path. Then rippled, wriggled, lashed, its oscillations invoke a rodeo act, expert and--since we are so close to the performer in this intimate space--a little unsettling at times. Whistling through the air, the rope also calls up images from slavery.

There are also cords, the red of blood and undeniable bloodlines, sometimes stretched between Rogers and an audience member willing to hold an end. Sometimes Rogers wraps himself in the grip of a cord then unwraps his body. It is a slight, wiry body with sufficient knowledge of itself to be deliberate and surprisingly graceful; to tumble hard and flail loosely; to bound up steps as nimbly as "Bojangles" Robinson; to offer itself up as a blank sheet for audience members to mark; to be naked and fragile.

In the genesis of a fragile son, there might have been some work around a literal father, or a lineage of fathers of fathers. But the piece moves in less than literal space and, if you will, can take in the whole idea of place and home, the whole idea of heritage, the whole idea of white patriarchy and masculinity, and what it means to be a body, a mind and a spirit moving in and out of orbit of those ideas.

A few years ago, Rogers uprooted himself from his familial roots in Virginia and his more recent dance roots in New York--dancing in the work of major artists such as Tere O'Connor, Ivy Baldwin and Pavel Zuštiak--and relocated to Slovakia and Germany. Traces of that relocation and possible struggles around it move through a fragile son.

Curated by Stacy Grossfield for her Images//Landscapes series, a fragile son continues through February 12 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Free email subscription

to InfiniteBody

Click here!

We always win: Marguerite Hemmings and friends at JACK

Marguerite Hemmings
(photo: Delwin Kamara)

Look and see. Black women make and hold space within dance for everything to come through.

The latest example of this is To Make Ready Again, an evening of performance and discussion offered by Jamaica-born dance artist Marguerite Hemmings, four dance colleagues, singer/musician Solo Woods and drummer Themba Mkhatshwa. It opened at JACK, the small Brooklyn venue famously decorated with crinkly aluminum foil; its run concludes tonight at 8pm.

Inspired by the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, JACK plans a year-long focus on exploring and expansively defining concepts of reparations in a program entitled Reparations365: From Memory to Movement (February 2017-January 2018). One primary insight already surfaced in community discussions is that monetary value cannot be placed on historic trauma, true justice and healing. It's hard to imagine and calculate in any realistic, satisfying way. Repair and restoration come not from the outside but from within vulnerable yet profoundly resourceful individuals and their communities.

Hemmings's we free multimedia series, of which To Make Ready Again is a part, draws from her knowledge of African diasporan street dance styles, social dancing, hip hop and dancehall, and her work, she says, centers around liberation. In TMRA, she's joined by powerhouse dancers--Courtney J. Cook, Jaimé Dzandu, Katrina Reid and Italy Welton--who whisper and conspire, laugh and vocalize, activating the space in ways both protectively intimate and boldly assertive. A loving circle, a sinuous warrior force, a reservoir of care and uncomplicated joy, they channel and filter even the male vocal energy of hip hop through grounded bodies. Their frequent broad stance roots them into the floor and earth below, freeing up torsos, shoulders and arms for hair-trigger action whenever, wherever necessary. They dance the ancestors through and make their mark on a world they wish to manifest.

Black women like Hemmings--a founding member of the emerging Black women and gender non-conforming collective The Skeleton Architecture--are dancing liberation and reparation. "Bring it down, and spread it all around." And remember, "We always win."

Lighting design: Nikita Maturine
Set design: Zunnania Anderson

To Make Ready Again concludes with a performance this evening at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Free email subscription

to InfiniteBody

Click here!

Afro-Caribbean legacy: Visit "La Sirene" this weekend

The Afro-Cuban Lukumi Arts--founded in 2008 as "an open and growing collective of artists, orisha/palo priests and practitioners, singers, dancers, percussionists, MCs and producers"--presents La Sirene: Rutas de Azucar at Brooklyn's JACK performance space now through tomorrow evening. Dedicated to the Black mermaid water deity who protected Haitian sugarcane workers on their way to Cuba, the 90-minute program is an immersive experience created by a thriving network of multi-talented, accomplished artists dedicated to the continuing relevance of Afro-Atlantic history and spiritual culture especially in our time of renewed resistance to oppression.

For four days, singer/performer Jadele McPherson in collaboration with Director Charlotte Brathwaite, offers a cosmic sonic journey through black liberation figures, conjurers and spiritual leaders from Haiti and Cuba, surrounded by fellow performers Val Jeanty, Maxine Montilus, Yomaira Gonzalez, Caridad Paisan Garbey, Bembesito Akpon, Hansel Vaillant and Daniel Gil. La Sirene: Rutas de Azucar (“The Siren: Routes of Sugar”) probes Cuban revolutionary José Antonio Aponte's libro de pinturas, a book of paintings, of black heroes that served as a catalyst for an attempted rebellion against colonists, leading to the first conspiracy and abolition charge in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Through sound and movement, McPherson maps the connections between West Indian and Haitian migrations to Cuba to harvest sugarcane and repositions the Cuban ingenio (sugar mill) as a birthplace of freedom that extends beyond borders and waters.

Each performance is followed by a special event. Tonight's--on the eve of Santa Barbara/Shango's day--the cast will offer "Afro-Cuban Rumba for the Vispera de Santa Barbara-Chango." Sunday evening will conclude with "Healing Quisqueya and Beyond," a reference to the Taino name for the island including the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This panel features Dr. Nathalie Guillaume, Goussy Célestin, Jose Perez and Osvaldo Lora.

Dr. Nathalie Guillaume is an alumnus of the University of Miami where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry and Foreign Languages. She holds a Master of Science in Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine from the Atlantic Institute of Oriental Medicine, and a Clinical Doctorate in Pain Management & Oncology from Bastyr University. She specializes in lifestyle medicine with an emphasis on nutrition, meditation & Qi Gong, and is dedicated to promoting the benefits of holistic health to the community. She is currently adjunct faculty for the Graduate School of Oriental Medicine at the New York College of Health Professions and practices in New York City where she is the CEO and Medical Director of Healing Happy Hour.

Goussy Célestin currently performs throughout the NYC-Tri state area as a musician and dancer. She is an alum of ASE Dance Theater Collective, a neo-folklore ensemble dedicated to the traditional/contemporary arts of the African Diaspora filtered through Haitian music and dance. She is also a member of ¡Retumba!, an all-female multi-ethnic music-dance ensemble dedicated to the traditions of the Caribbean and Latin-America, in addition to serving as lead vocalist for Charanga Soleil. Ms. Célestin's wide range of interests and versatility, has led her to study classical piano, Jazz and Latin music. While in Cuba, she had the honor of performing with members of the Buena Vista Social Club, as well as performing/mentoring with members of Grupo AfroCuba de Matanzas, Yoruba Andabo and Clave Y Guaguanco. She has performed at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, Del Terzo Studio at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, SOB's, the Knitting Factory, NJPAC, Tilles Center, Newark Symphony Space, Joe's Pub, as well as various jazz clubs in NYC.

Osvaldo "Bembesito" Lora. Bembesito is one of the most renowned and versatile "akpons" in the U.S. and maybe even internationally speaking. With over 10 years of experience performing religious ceremonies and as an olo Obatala he brings a level of professionalism that is hard to find in most ceremonies. Bembesito's crew does it all, from cajon to guiro to Aña and even the music of the 21 divisions from the Dominican Republic also called los palos. Over all the experience you will receive at a ceremony where Bembesito performs will be clean, authentic, professional and like no other...

Jose Perez is a writer and editor, an investigative reporter, a West Indian Nationalist, and a public school history teacher at North Miami Middle School where over 80% of his students are Haitian.  He infuses social justice into  his underground curriculum, which has led to him to become a leader in professional development trainings to teachers in the Miami-Dade County Public School System, the 4th largest in the United States. Pérez also was a  Research Assistant for Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando during the production of her moving documentary about Haitians in Cuba, Reembarque.  Collaborating with AfroCubaWeb.com and Dr. Andrea Queely of Florida International University, he brought Ms. Rolando to North Miami Middle for her only Florida screening of Reembarque.  Pérez has been recognized by the Haitian American Cultural Society as well as the Mayor and Board of County Commissioners of Miami-Dade County for journalistic coverage of Haitian heritage. Perez's interest in the bridges between Ayiti & Kiba is as deep as the joy found in a plate of homemade legume.

La Sirene: Rutas de Azucar continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 8pm. Seating is limited. For more information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

Entangled at JACK: "The Geneva Project"

Jennifer Harrison Newman in The Geneva Project
(photos: Barbara Anastaciao)

On any typical evening, the little Clinton Hill performance space JACK makes a tight fit for performers and audience. Visit Jennifer Harrison Newman's The Geneva Project, though, and you'll really find yourself all up in the scenery and some of the performing going on where you'd normally be sitting. But that's okay because you're allowed to step all over Abigail DeVille's very Southern Gothic installation, ducking under hoodoo spirit bottles, picking around wood shavings and dusty, tangled branches, trying to read the writing on discarded sheets of paper and wondering if those suspicious holes in a tattered, trampled American flag were torn by bullets.

Directed by Charlotte Brathwaite and presented in association with 651 Arts, the work draws inspiration from Newman's family photographs from Depression-era South Carolina.  She found these photos in the Library of Congress, and their captions identify their subjects as "negro," "mixed race" or "Indian." The title of the work comes from Newman's great-aunt, Geneva Varner Clark.

The Geneva Project is swampy--hazy and dark, airless and disorienting. Haunted, too, with Newman and Justin Hicks emerging out of the depths--or, perhaps, out of the history preserved by those strewn-about pages--like fretful ghosts. Her initial appearance is marginal, partial, fitful--mainly the repeated extension of fistfuls of crumpled paper. When she later moves into the central space, she shows, at first, an interesting combination of flexibility (at her core) and restraint.

Hicks' collaboration--as composer and sound designer as well as performer--contributes to the confining, obsessive, sometimes thunderous atmosphere. At one point, he sings, "I keep going up to that house, 'cause it's not too far up...." and "up" takes on eerie connotations.

But as much as The Geneva Project stirs up a troubled and troubling understory, it leaves so much more to history and to imagination--which is only correct. There's so much more to the American story, and we're scarcely ready for it.

with Paul Leiber (projections), Chris Myers (text) and Tuçe Yasak (lighting)

The Geneva Project concludes tonight with a performance at 8pm. Space is limited, but you can check on ticket availability here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

Brendan Connelly and Scotty Heron at JACK

In Appalachian Spring Break, composer Brendan Connelly and performance artist Scotty Heron collaborate at JACK for an hour of mayhem triggered--let us not say "inspired"--by the collaboration of Martha Graham and Aaron Copland on Graham's Appalachian Spring. Here, with each artist continually invading the other's territory, the worlds of music and dance collide--let us not say "merge" or "overlap"--again and again.

The sonic assault starts right away. From on high, the pair train clarinets down upon the defenseless audience in a shrill and gurgly fanfare. You might notice that handlettered sheets of cardboard subtly bear the word "fanfare," a nod to Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man as well as a sign of the DIY spirit of the production. Music making employs stand-alone instruments (clarinets, kazoos), a snaggle of increasingly snaggled, endangered electronics and the whimsy of amplified stuff simply hitting or being dragged along the floor. Movement involves, among other things, whippet-thin Heron risking life while, strapped into pointe shoes, he laboriously climbs to the top of a stack of tables, or channeling Graham's iconic Lamentation, tense angles stretching the fabric of what a U Michigan arts blogger once called "The Infamous Giant Sock Thing."

No. Not Scotty Heron this time.
The real Martha Graham performs Lamentation.
(photo: Herta Moselsio)

Heron's centerpiece work as Graham is a thing of mystery and scrupulously contained drama, gorgeous in its own way.

Appalachian Spring Break concludes with two performances tonight: 8pm and 10:30 pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

TONY review: afroFUTUREqu##r

Hey, gang! I reviewed the Friday program of afroFUTUREqu##r (curated by Thomas DeFrantz and niv Acosta) at JACK for Time Out New York, and TONY had a delay in posting it. But you can find it now at this link.

Rebecca Serrell Cyr premieres "Assemblage" at JACK

Alex Escalante and Rebecca Serrell Cyr in Assemblage
(photo: Ed Forti Photography)

How much is too much? Who cares!

I'm captivated by the excess in Rebecca Serrell Cyr's Assemblage, her first evening-length work, running now at JACK. I don't need to know why we've each been issued a marginally useless flashlight the size of a quarter and have to hand it back before the show begins--although, as the pre-show lighting is dim, it kind of makes sense for program reading, and the tiny brights look sweet, like something I'd get at the circus and ice shows at Madison Square Garden when I was a kid and every bit as lasting. I don't absolutely need to know why a plywood model house, erected atop a folding tray, gets stripped of its toy inhabitants, disassembled and carted off, floor by floor, before the dance begins--although I might like to know. Then Alex Escalante, embarking in darkness, noisily collapses onto a sheet of Mylar, one of a few stations set up across a floor strewn with apparently random discards. Sure thing.

On the soundtrack, Ravel, master of the out of bounds. Escalante rolling over Cyr's body as fog belches a few times from a sluggish fog machine. Bodies used for resistance and as bracing assistance in half-acrobatic moves. Hurried costume changes. Aretha Aoki emerging from a pile of stuff. The terrain of scrunched up tissue paper, plastic, Mylar, fabric, a fat empty bottle for water. Coffee cups and dervish spins and long skirts that swirl and swordplay with invisible swords and wafting bubbles and pom poms and branches entangled like antlers in a struggle for dominance. The movement lush, the movement heated with the dial forced ever higher in a heck yeah, go-for-it recklessness. And then, the tidying up. Every scrap meticulously cleared away, while we watch, as if what happened never happened but, of course, we watched it happen.

I fell in love with this. And then Cyr hit me with the Bob Ross voiceover and the pliant, heroic dancing of Eleanor Hullihan, a wealth seemingly limitless in its source.

Now, the late Bob Ross is known to me only by reputation--that and a funny Facebook meme about turning mistakes into birds, one of the least offensive Bob Ross memes out there. (The Internet is a cesspool. Avoid it at all cost.) Cyr uses sound--Ross's clear, soothing voice and scratchy brush strokes--from an episode of the PBS instructional series, The Joy of Painting. Which I had never watched. To my regret now. Because.

A few sample quotes from the Ross instructional:

Just this mountain flows right off the knife.

All we want is a nice outside edge. We couldn't really care what's happening on the inside now.

This is your world. let your imagination take you where you want to go.

Just want this mountain to softly, softly disappear...happy little mountains way back in the distance.

It's your projection. You can put it anywhere you want it.

Bend the bristles. Make that brush work for you.

Cyr, lauded for her work as an instrument for other dancemakers, knows she cannot completely discard all that she has absorbed from the outside. Assemblage makes much of accumulation, disguise, dismantling--ah, hah! that model house!--permission, exuberance and mastery. It looks like an artist statement in motion--perpetual motion and perpetual flux. It is rich, deep, thoughtfully accomplished and tickles the hell out of me.

Assemblage continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For all information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Brooklyn's JACK launches Forward Ferguson series

Wildcat! dance collective
(photo: Eleni Zaharopoulos)

Brooklyn performance venue JACK presents Forward Ferguson, a new series "dedicated to furthering the conversation around racial justice in America, featuring dance, music, theater and performance art."

Highlights include a discussion on community-police relationships; work by Social Health Performance Club; the dance collective Wildcat!; a Freedom Songs Festival; readings of Black-authored anti-lynching plays of the early 1900s, performances by our resident youth theater company Truthworker, and a partnership with the activist group Equality for Flatbush.

Events begin January 16 and run through June. For a complete schedule and descriptions, click here.

Three questions for Monstah Black

Monstah Black in the dance film, Cotton
(photo by Charles Meacham)

November 6-9, choreographer, musician and club hero Monstah Black brings to JACK the first installment of his dance film Cotton, featuring original songs and choreography, and filmed over nine months in various locations between New York City and Virginia. The 45-minute presentation features Black performing the soundtrack live (which the artist describes as "a meeting of Erykah Badu and Björk with Prince and Grace Jones, in the living room of Parliament Funkadelic"). In the film, Black employs images from slavery and the plantation as a point of departure, modifying the images into positive iconography meant to inspire, empower and rejuvenate those that have suffered its ugly legacy.

Monstah Black
(photo by Charles Meachem)

Three questions for Monstah Black

EYA: When you think back to your childhood, can you point to any strong influence on the artist you are today?

MB: As a child I was heavily influenced by television, my family and the sounds coming out of the stereo. I grew up surrounded by an eclectic mix of music which included soul, folk, rock, funk, the sounds of Catholic church and Southern Baptist church. The most memorable moments, of course, were people saying "Show us how you do that dance." It began as soon as I could hold my balance on two feet. There is also my mom's sense of style/fashion influence and her love for making clothes. Until 6th grade, she made a lot of what I wore. My dad was also great with his hands, particularly food but also enjoyed building projects. So the two of them are very evident in my work.

Those are the more positive moments. I do believe that being bullied is what turned me into Monstah Black. My desire to flip the negative into something empowering is what lead me to reach deeper in an unapologetic way with my expression in movement, music and style. Recognizing at an early age that words like punk, sissy and faggot could work to my benefit if I thought of them as words of endearment. As I grew older my belief in this grew stronger.

EYA: What challenges you most as an artist? And how do you engage with that challenge?

MB: My biggest challenge as an artist is the budget not matching the elaborate visions I have in my head. I've built a career on shaping my dreams by turning mundane objects into something opposite from what it is "suppose to be" used for and applying it to my project. The joke, back in the day, is that I was able to perform at the drop of a hat, and all I needed was dental floss and safety pins to make an elaborate costume. Every project that I do is a step toward aligning the budget with my dreams rather than the other way around. When that alignment happens? Stay tuned.

EYA: How do ideas arrive for you? And what do you first do with them when they do?

MB: I'm a dreamer. In grade school, it was seen as a downfall, a slow downfall. Parent-Teacher meetings occurred to discuss my daydreaming in class, and I still enjoy a good nap where I can drift off into never never land.

These are the places where my projects are revealed to me. I write them down or I record them. Sometimes they come in the form of a bass line, a melody, a sensation, a quality of movement or a look. Usually the sound and look are put into place first. When those two things inspire me as a whole, I close me eyes to feel how they should move, or I investigate my reflection.

There are also those moments when my movement is out of my control, the alignment of the rhythms, bass lines and melodies are harmoniously working together and film/video saves the day, to help me re-visit that place for stage.

I'm proud of being a daydreamer and I'm also proud of slowing things down, taking my time. I think it keeps you looking and feeling young. Besides, it's not as expensive as Botox or plastic surgery.

Virginia native Reginald Ellis Crump, aka Monstah Black, has been creating and presenting work in New York from since 1999 as a performance artist, dancer, choreographer, musician and composer. Known for his cultural grab-bag approach, he enjoys mixing influences and allusions from many sources and traditions. In choreography, he infuses modern dance with shades of disco and funk and the comic, hyper-performative and sometimes confrontational style of address of burlesque, adding a dash of various martial arts and the expressive slow-motion acrobatics of Japanese Butoh. He has choreographed for nightclubs, art galleries, black box theaters, and warehouses throughout Washington D.C., New York City, and Europe. His work has been seen and heard at The National Theater, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Dixon Place, Movement Research, and many other venues. Monstah is also the front man for his band The Sonic Leroy as well as vocalist for the electro pop duo The Blakz. He performs frequently as a guest vocalist for the electro dance band Girls Like Bass.

See Monstah Black's dance film, Cotton, Thursday-Saturday, November 6-8 at 8pm or Sunday, November 9 at 3pm. Get more information and tickets here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Ave (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Join HANDS UP DON'T SHOOT: a community conversation at JACK

HANDS UP DON'T SHOOT: a community conversation

at JACK

Thursday, August 21, 7pm

JACK, in partnership with The Fire This Time Festival, offers its space for an open conversation about the recent epidemic of violence against unarmed black and brown men. Unmediated. Unmoderated.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

In the "ARENA" with Walter Dundervill

Walter Dundervill (photo by Ian Douglas)

Drop into Walter Dundervill's ARENA, a performance installation at the small arts space JACK tonight, anytime between 6pm and 9pm, and you'll feel close enough to nearly everything to feel the inexorable pull of gravity dragging everyone and everything down. If tonight is anything like the last, and there's no guarantee of that, maybe this showplace of the deep interior will feel a lot like the external world itself, and Dundervill--going about his business of dressing his seven dancer/models in a workmanly manner--will seem like the crafter of that world in his messy workshop full of mylar, aluminum foil, dropcloths, drapery, ribbons, cardboard and plexiglass, piling idea onto idea of costuming and decor details with more industry than clear sense. It might pull at your spirit to watch Omagbitse Omagbemi submit to having Dundervill tie padding to her hips and a length of ribbon around her gray, matted wig and eyes--a tiny flicker of apprehension and reluctance crosses her face each time he approaches--and to watch Rebecca Brooks, with her customary princess-like bearing, peaceably acquiesce to similar treatment. But then it's all going south, all of it, into a mess of forms mashing into one another, Brooks and Omagbemi collapsing into surrounding fabric like half-melted icing; Omagbemi encasing herself in a plastic box listlessly pushed by Brooks; their fellow performers forming a sprawl of bodies along a kind of horizontal, earthbound and joyless maypole. When I left last evening (you can come and go as you please), the intensified and briefly exciting dynamics had started devolving into clutter. Nowhere to go. But, then again, who knows what happened next? Or what will happen tonight?

Installation, costumes and sound by Walter Dundervill

Performed by Dundervill, Omagbemi, Brooks, Benjamin Asriel, Nicole Daunic, Jessie Gold, Jennifer Kjos and Kevin Lovelady

Curated by Stacy Grossfield

ARENA concludes tonight, open to viewing between 6pm and 9pm. Ticketing is by cash at the door. For further information, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)