Artists Reach Out: Jasmine Hearn

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Jasmine Hearn

Jasmine Hearn
(photo: Whitney Browne Photography)

Jasmine Hearn is a performer, director, choreographer, organizer, and teaching artist. A native Houstonian, they are a company member with Urban Bush Women and also collaborates with BANDportier, Holly Bass, Vanessa German, Jennifer Nagle Myers, and Alisha B. Wormsley. They have worked and performed with David Dorfman Dance, Alesandra Seutin’s vocabdance, Solange Knowles, Kate Watson-Wallace, STAYCEE PEARL dance project, Marjani Forté-Saunders, will rawls, Tara Aisha Willis, Helen Simoneau Danse, Lovie Olivia, and with Nick Mauss as a part of exhibition, TRANSMISSIONS. Awarded a 2017 “Bessie" Award with Skeleton Architecture, Jasmine has had residencies at the PearlArts Studios, Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Camargo Foundation, and Dance Source Houston. They have shared their work at Danspace Project, La MaMa Theater, New York Live Arts, BAAD!, and the Kelly Strayhorn Theater. They are currently a 2019 Jerome Foundation Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a part of the 2019 MR AIR program.

Jasmine Hearn
(photo: Alisha B. Wormsley)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Yep, I am in the thick of three projects. Before the order to stay at home passed, I was preparing for a string of performances carrying various roles as choreographer, curator, producer, and performer, while also navigating my first year as a company member with Urban Bush Women.

Since most performances have been either canceled or postponed, all the projects I am directing have had a moment to rest since I decided to rest. Currently, I am finding ways for collaborators and me to continue with the intent to focus our creative trajectory towards the detail and depth of our relationship to each other and our creative material. I’m also attempting to mirror how I learned to cook to how I choreograph and direct and teach and learn. My mother comes to mind...her opening the fridge and seeing what we already have.

But it all hasn’t been slow. Long-term collaborators and friends slowdanger and I released our first album, EchoLocation--a collection of live composition recordings from past residencies. Like many others I am talking with, this has been a time to reflect and be with footage, sound bites, text, and memories that were hastily collected and stored.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I grew up craving to be creative in some kind of way—in love with colors, cutting up clothes, dancing alone in a room. Being creative gave me such salve and, over the years, I always returned to art movement song collage color as a way to be in connection with spirit and self. These were moments to express myself without the pressure of making sense.

Dance class was also something I was put into by my mother because I kept falling down the stairs and floating off utterly lost in daydream. I found that dancing with others was hard—judgement, pressure, and doubt sprouted when learning and performing step routines for the Knights and Ladies of St. Peter Claver talent shows, adagios in ballet class, or a part of the group at the club with my sister. It was different than dancing alone in a room or surrendering to color. I kept at it though learning movement, dances, counts, songs, form, choreography, lines, and cultures with encouragement from my mother, my aunties, my village, my teachers, and a voice deep inside saying yes.

And then there is performance—that way of being with a room. I return to memories of me dancing at my mother’s luncheons or at church events--these three minute solos where, all along the aisles, I would just dance in color-themed costumes. Sound played from the boombox. The click of the “play” button. The DIY-edited cassettes tape rolling out the voices of Etta James, Sarah Vaughn, and Carmen McRae. I got to perform what I had been practicing with color and spirit, and now also with witness. The energy exchange here different, intense. Finding pleasure in being seen and pleasure finding me. These moments paired with memories of performing with others who were committed to the counts, songs, form, choreography, lines, and cultures. Us listening. The energy here too different. Charged, powerful.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

I am practicing
what I’ve studied with my teachers
vulnerability
performance
how my body dances and memorizes
how to expand and contract
how to listen on the spectrum
how my voice reflects sound
how to be in connection with myself and others
calling
answering
offering
how to make boundaries
feeling
changing
listening to Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Octavia Butler

while still practicing
cutting up clothes
getting lost in daydream
dancing alone in a room
surrendering to color

It’s easy and difficult most of the time.
I’m envisioning living in a tree. I’m envisioning with Alisha B. Wormsley that there are Black people in the future in the future there are black queer femmes that there are black womyn that there are black genderqueer gender non conforming people in the future in the future there is reproductive justice for all black people especially black women and girls I am dreaming of
pleasure being centered
gut feelings and the Earth listened to
spines moving, all our spines moving
all plastic and styrofoam reused
dancing and singing with you close by
joy
collective mourning

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I have kept returning back to dance, movement, color, fantasy, and sweat because they/it have taught me how to care for myself and be able to communicate with others. Over the years as the rooms, the places, the priorities, the people change, I am asked to change. And I am grateful for each moment that has cast me into discomfort and given me the chance to reconnect with myself—to check in with that deep feeling and see if it’s still saying yes.

I am given chances to learn how to change—be mercurial listen grow gather share bend stop break open make boundary give move
Easing loneliness when lonely
centering my body when scattered
Reminding my body where i am
Reminding my spirit its connection to source

My current practice supports myself as an individual and as a part of a network group many lineage earth. In company with others, I am a part of cycles of ideas that are timeless and connected. I am reminded where I come from. I am grateful for this.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

My practice does a lot of bending to exist in this world. Sometimes the stretch is nice and other times it hurts. There can be resistance from others and/or myself. I am continuously learning to be in many different kinds of rooms and experiences and climates.

Self care tip

Move my spine move my heart cry eat laugh listen respond hydrate

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

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Imprinting (Dan)space: Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha

Left: Tendayi Kuumba (photo: Angie Vasquez)
Right: Samita Sinha (photo: Aram Jibilian)

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha
Danspace Project
April 25 and April 27, 2019

collective terrain/s is a collective research process into sounding in the body. How does the body open up possibilities for voice and resistance? What resonances in the voice and body exist beyond language?

 --from Danspace Project

As part of an evening organized by collective terrain/s, composer and vocalist Samita Sinha--with numerous collaborating vocalists of cultural diversity--creates a force field of sonic energy to surround an audience informally positioned at the center, not the perimeter, of the performance space. Infinity Folds is vocal music in motion, a lovely, luscious gift that makes you the focus of a meditative sonic bath and massage, your aura tingling. It's marvelously coordinated as the circle of vocalists shape and move breath--moans and drones, trills and low roars--into the outer air, using softly-adjusted bodies as tuning devices. You absorb the circling and circling soundscape that builds, pulses, overlaps, presses towards listeners and then ebbs, flares in spots, sometimes drops away entirely. Set in the sacred and justice-conscious space of St. Mark's Church, this loving ritual feels and sounds so right. You might never want it to end. [Performed by Regina Bain, Rina Espiritu, Fana Fraser, Yingjia Lemon Guo, Chaesong Kim, Risha Lee, Okwui Okpokwasili, lily bo shapiro, Samita Sinha, Sheena Sood and Helen Yung]

Somewhere in the midst of U.F.O.:(Unidentified Fly Objects), made and performed by Tendayi Kuumba in creative collaboration with Greg Purnell, an intermittent projection flashes against an upper corner of the church's wall. It images a patch of cloudy sky lit up by the glow of lightning. Kuumba's formidably quirky self-presentation gives way to something simply majestic, and you realize: this unpredictable, kinda scary woman is lightning. Folding, writhing, recoiling, she lights up the night with pure energy coursing through every stretch of her without impediment. The piece--accompanied by Purnell, seated at a desk, working a soundboard and providing a strong, rumbling ostinato--also features Kuumba's vocals. In body and voice--and soul--she is jazz.

We already whole, she sings. Even through the rain/somehow we always maintain.

We already home.

Purnell sings with her.

Can't break my soul.

Now hear that!

Choreography: Tendayi Kuumba
Creative concepts, lighting, dramaturgy, set design and songwriting/musical composition created with collaborator Greg Purnell

collective terrain/s is organized by Lydia Bell, Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum. To learn more about collective terrain/s's activities and the series' publication--designed by collective please--click here.

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha concludes tomorrow (Saturday) with a performance at 8pm. For the best effects, come a bit early to get a prime seat in the center, though you can also sit along the church's risers. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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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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Where do we fit? 92Y Harkness Dance explores identity

Dancer-choreographer Aimee Rials
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Dance artist Aimee Rials curated Where do we fit? for 92Y Harkness Dance Center's Fridays at Noon, choosing five choreographers to question "identity and sexuality, personhood and power, inclusion and exclusion and the universal desire to belong." With the exception of an ethereal Jasmine Hearn duet from shook-- performed with care by Dominica Greene and Angie Pittman--the hour-long showcase focused on solos danced by their creators. It explored everything from dexterous physicality, quirky and rash in its expression (Chuck Wilt's Cadet) to the mystery and spirituality of gender fluidity (Trebien Pollard's She Gives Birth to Stone). Through a dream-like relationship to costuming, Pamela Pietro worked clear contrasts between a woman's determined self-protection and her vulnerability in everything I thought I Knew but....

Rials's solo--"The Quiet We Keep," a compelling excerpt from Modifi(her)--had dramatic impact, drawn from her experience as an androgynous white lesbian with roots in the rural south. In a post-show Q&A, she noted her caution and self-vigilance on visits home, her need to protect her kin from scrutiny and danger by altering her appearance and behavior. Rials did not discuss the formal qualities of her solo, but I had taken note of intriguing similarities to ritual--the formation and interactions with a circle of empty folding chairs possibly representing absent and recalled family members; tremulous movement that could signal "catching the spirit" or resolutely engaging old pain and trauma. The Quiet We Keep, without being obvious, powerfully evokes place, people and psyche.

Closed. For information on future 92Y Harkness Dance Center Friday at Noon events, click here.

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Shared Evening: Jasmine Hearn and Mariana Valencia

This weekend, Danspace Project presents shared evenings of work
by dance artists Jasmine Hearn (above) and Mariana Valencia (below).
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Maybe this Earth is a bed where each of us rests on the threshold of a dream or all of us can dream collectively. Sitting down to take in this spell by Jasmine Hearn (shook at Danspace Project) means drawing near a fire to hear old, passed-down stories, but the fire is invisible, the stories and songs muffled, the images shadowy, blurry. It might not matter if you can't pick up distinct words, follow sentences; if a song is made up of one word that trails off in the air or is simple sounds intoned in a flutey voice. It calls you to take part in the making.

The costumes are equally indistinct, cobbled together as if by a child who had leafed through pages of history, falling asleep atop them, dreaming and dreaming. The fabric--how unruly, voluminous, billowing, ennobling...or thrown together with function if not sense. The movements--how softly fluid, swirly, simple, repetitive, shifting, un-insistent, graceful, agile (Hearn, Angie Pittman, Dominica Greene...these three and also the traces of all who made this, continue to make this, one spectre floating into the other....) You see what you will see. You dream what you will dream, unfolding a chiffon dream engulfing altar steps like sea foam slipping over a shoreline.

"This is the answer to my 7 year old self who casted spells in her bathtub...spells that dripped honey, affirmation, and the belief that magic lives in the marrow of our bones."

"I am looking to evoke a realm, a place, a time, a memory when/where black women are not doubted." -- Jasmine Hearn

Concept and direction: Jasmine Hearn
Choreography and performance: Maria Bauman, Kayla Farrish, Dominica Greene, Jasmine Hearn, Catherine Kirk and Angie Pittman
Costumes made in collaboration with Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency
Sound: Jasmine Hearn (includes a rework of Sylvan Esso's Die Young)
Video: Alisha B. Wormsley
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Scene from shook
Angie Pittman (at left) and Dominica Greene (center)
with Hearn
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Mariana Valencia performs Yugoslavia
(photo: Ian Douglas)

"What are we if we are together but not related?"

In her solo, Yugoslavia, Mariana Valencia asks this question, specifically referring to her relationship to her Polish stepfather (and, I guess, in a way, her Polish stepfather's relationship to her Guatemalan mom).

One word that recurs in the work is blend. Spoken with Valencia's characteristic clarity and evenness, the word blend has its own physical pose. She hits it, and you watch it...for a few seconds. You might not understand it, but you can see it and recognize it when it comes around again. You learn a piece of movement language by immersive process.

Yugoslavia finds Valencia blending a lengthy monologue into movement in a way that seals any divide between verbal language and dance. That seems to work, although at least one person I spoke with afterwards found the piece to be not very dance-y. To me, it was a poetic marathon, a work of impressive endurance and grace under the pressure to tell a story with a lot of unexpected and seemingly unrelated moving parts and somehow make them hold together. Or not. I think, mostly, not.

At least, not for me. For me, they stayed demarcated, and that seemed okay. Or more than okay. That seemed the right thing.

In Yugoslavia, I intersect the First World, the Second World, the countryside, the imaginary plane and vampires. Factual, humorous, and grave observations depict my herstorical frame,” writes Valencia. With Yugoslavia, “I’m in search of the spiritual, in observation of the physical, and in awe of the artificial.” 

See, those commas and "ands" work well, and the way Valencia speaks shows you one thing after another. And that seems the right thing. More juxtaposition than blend. Blend might be an aspiration. Or not.

Writing about her inspiration for the piece, Valencia says, "visiting the Balkans (Serbia and Macedonia) has awakened my lineage through Slavic languages. I'll be tuning into identities that are landless, homeless, nameless, wandering, and exiled." In other words, not so blended.

Mention of the Balkans also brings me to that word derived from their situation--Balkanization, fragmentation often with tense and hostile juxtaposition of the separate entities. And then there's the discomfort of a young girl, Valencia, trying to sing Leonard Cohen lyrics with her dad without revealing her pleasure in the racy verses. Blending by omission? There's a single painting--just one--by her dad on a tripod in all of St. Mark's roomy space. And something about vampires because, we're told, the word vampire originates in the Serbian language. A lot of thingy things.

I watched Valencia take sheets of raspberry red construction paper and cut them into letters that she then arranged on the floor. I'm not particularly good with cutting paper with any degree of accuracy. But, apparently, she is. She went right to it, and the letters turned out well-shaped. They looked like themselves and like nothing else.

Choreography, script, costume, set and performance: Mariana Valencia
Original score: Mariana Valencia
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann

Shared Evening: Jasmine Hearn & Mariana Valencia continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 8pm. No late seating. 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)

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How to be a BAAD! badass

Above: poet Pamela Sneed
(photo courtesy of the author)
Below: dance artist Jasmine Hearn
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Comedy, dance, poetry, good company and more: BAAD! has it all in the month of March celebrating Women's History Month in full Bronx style.

Comedienne Robbyne Kaamil
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Check out BAAD!ASS Women Festival 2017, running March 9 through April 8 and featuring the creative work and activism of "fierce women and transwomen artists."

For schedule and ticketing details, click here.

BAAD!

The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance

2474 Westchester Avenue (Westchester Square), Bronx

(map/directions)

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Three Open Call dancemakers take wing in the Bronx

This fall, the South Bronx arts organization Pepatián will present evening-length works by three emerging choreographers from its 2016 Open Call residency program in partnership with BAAD!.

All three artists--Fana Fraser, Jasmine Hearn and Alethea Pace--will have received free rehearsal space and mentoring in preparation for this paid performance opportunity. Their Open Call mentors include Aileen Passloff, Dr. Marta Morena Vega, Ni'Ja Whitson and Alicia Diaz.

I asked Fraser, Hearn and Pace to write about where they locate the soul of their creativity, how that's best expressed through dance, what they're currently obsessed with--within or outside of dance--and how they view the value of mentorship to their practice.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

FANA FRASER

Fana Fraser
(photo: Marisol Diaz, 2016)

I often daydream myself into bizarre, delightful and problematic scenarios. As I piece together these fragments, I am finding recurring plots that blend underbelly tempos of the Caribbean--the place where my navel string is buried; assumptions and anxieties surrounding femininity; dying, death, decay; and the nurturing of newness. More and more, I am listening as my body reveals these stories to be from a seemingly endless source of experience. My performance work harnesses dance and theater to create a playground where histories and future tales are rigorously re-imagined compassion, wildness and power. I am conjuring a space for performer and witness to negotiate ways of being.

I am just beginning to unearth my creative process. My dancing body serves a vital role in unraveling the idiosyncrasies of a character or the inner life of an idea. Guided by intuition and sensitivity within tightly constructed frames, my movement research straddles narrative, abstraction, ritual and tradition. It seems that the more specific, intimate and rigorous my work, the more accessible it becomes to a wide cross-section of people. I revel in that connection.

These days I am obsessed with illustration. You can create any universe you want. I’ve been spending hours doodling and drawing odd little characters, imagining them living rich, complex lives in fantastical realities.

Suddenly and more than usual, over the past couple months, I’m craving intimate and even unsettling exchange between myself and performers. I’m remembering how much I love to serve as witness, however glorious or exhausting that might be…and I’m hooked.

Aileen Passloff and Dr. Marta Moreno Vega are my mentors through Open Call. It is wonderful to have mentors in differing fields. With them I can share ideas, voice my thoughts, and gain valuable feedback and insight. My mentors are an added support system as I find my way through figuring out the work. And hopefully, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship!

PERFORMANCE: NOVEMBER 19

JASMINE HEARN

Jasmine Hearn
(photo: Marisol Diaz, 2016)

The center focus of my creativity is the listening that needs to happen for when I should need to call on it.

My creativity is best expressed through dance because of how involved the body needs to be with the mind and the spirit to be open and prepared for the complicated work at hand.

Outside of dance, I busy myself with nesting, reading and baking granola. With dance, I am currently obsessed with taking my time.

I believe that having a mentor---someone on the outside that you can trust is so important. I am so curious and glad to have Ni'ja Whitson and Aileen Pasloff as mentors and guides during our residency.

To have inter-generational conversations about what is being found and explored through practice and performance is a rare and wonderful opportunity to have especially as young and emerging artist.

PERFORMANCE: December 7

ALETHEA PACE

Alethea Pace
(photo: No Longer Empty, 2015)

Questioning is central to my creative process. Right now, I'm asking questions that relate to identity, how it lives in both our personal and cultural history, how it is experienced through our senses and how it is manifested in our bodies. The answers are less important than the questions, which can be continually refined and can open up more possibilities.

I'm obsessed with my working on my piece! I go to sleep at night thinking about it and wake up in the morning doing the same. My present focus is researching the Rhinelander case of 1925. Alice Jones, a mixed-race woman, crossed the color line when she married Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a white aristocrat from one of New York's wealthiest families. Leonard’s family disapproved and forced him to annul the marriage on the grounds of fraud. Prosecutors claimed that Alice had portrayed herself as a white woman and had duped Leonard into marrying him. Much to the prosecutors surprise, her defense team did not attempt to prove her white ancestry and instead acknowledged her blackness. Alice won her case and, after some appeal, was awarded spousal support until her death in 1989. The case was tabloid fodder in its day because it challenged notions of how race is perceived in a way that still has relevance today.

Alice was voiceless throughout the trial, never taking the stand in her own defense. She was objectified by the court, which argued that her race was a “material fact.” She was even forced to strip down by her own attorney to prove that she was unmistakably of color. Her experience lends itself to a movement exploration that relies heavily on perception through the eyes of others.

I am so thrilled to have two amazing mentors, Alicia Diaz and Aileen Passloff, as part of this process. Embarking on this creative journey, my first time making an evening of work, can feel overwhelming at times. Mentorship provides the guidance and support to help realize my vision. I'm being challenged in the best ways and feel myself growing as an artist and a person.

PERFORMANCE: NOVEMBER 6

*****

ABOUT 
OPEN CALL

Open Call helps stir up the dance and performance scene happening in the Bronx with support for emerging dancers/choreographers of color and/or emerging Bronx-based artists. We are thrilled to house this opportunity in the Bronx and to help keep the Bronx what it already is--an incubator and site for works that challenge, and provoke, and offer audiences places to imagine and consider possibilities in the world.

Pepatián began the project in partnership with BAAD!/Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance n 2014  with funding from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and individual contributors to Pepatián. Open Call is now substantially funded by the Jerome Foundation, and in 2016, received a boost of support from the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. Currently, the project provides artists with over $2500 each, in addition to free rehearsal space, mentors, video/photo documentation, and other support. I'm currently researching and contacting other funders to continue to grow the project (online donations are warmly welcomed! www.pepatian.org)

Artists have been selected for this opportunity by a committee of established artists, managers, curator/producers; among them: Arthur Aviles, Christal Brown, Susana Cook, Caleb Hammons, Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Merian Soto, and Marya Wethers.

Artists alumni include Awilda Rodriguez Lora (2014); Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, Richard Rivera, Milteri Tucker (2015), and mentors have included Susana Cook, Jorge Merced, Charles Rice-Gonzalez and Merian Soto. All the participating artists have additionally benefited from the experienced input of Arthur Aviles.

In 2015 and 2016, artists participated in creative process workshop with Merián Soto.

BronxNet has also been supportive of the project, hosting artist interviews on OPEN with Rhina Valentin and covering performances.

All artists who applied received specific committee feedback on their proposals. I also forwarded other residency and workshop opportunities. We want to help support artists who sent in their applications to keep growing their work and encourage them to apply to Open Call again next year. I also want to keep growing the community of artists around this residency opportunity--all of the projects' alumni, for example, were invited to attend Soto's creative process workshop as well as the final performances.

Open Call is for artists hungry to create, envision and realize full evening-length works with opportunities to showcase in the "Bronx Artists Now: Showcase & Conversation" APAP event that I've been producing in the Bronx in collaboration with local theaters (BAAD!, Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, Pregones Theater-PRTT) for the past six years.

Open Call supports artists and the community that is inspired by their work and their dedication to creating new work.

Pepatián is a South Bronx-based organization dedicated to creating, producing and supporting contemporary multi-disciplinary art by Latino and Bronx-based artists. www.pepatian.org

The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance creates, produces, presents and supports the development of cutting edge and challenging works in contemporary dance and all creative disciplines which are empowering to women, Latinos and other people of color, and the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) community. www.baadbronx.org

~ Jane Gabriels, Ph.D., and Director, Pepatián

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Guest curators offer food for thought at Danspace Project

Earlier in the day, I screened a documentary about Yvonne Rainer in which Rainer quipped, "I love existing in front of spectators."  And I had been thinking about the way performance is less a game to be played and won or lost with good or bad reviews than an invitation to someone's world. In the case of the frequent reviewer, that's like frequent flying. I have decades worth of miles and navigation within worlds created by others.

Thinking of it this way removes the pressure to level judgment and opens up some room for...whatever. For Yvonne Rainer's existence, certainly.  For Larissa Velez-Jackson's star crap. For the pleasure curator Ali Rosa-Salas intimated by calling her Food for Thought program "pleasure principles."

Rosa-Salas was the second of three guest curators recruited by Danspace Project for this season's Food for Thought (the series title referring to DP's canned food drive for the food distribution program at St. Mark's; donate a couple, get a ticket discount). Her evening last night brought us performances by serpentwithfeet,  Jasmine Hearn, Dan and Lindsay Reuter, and Jonathan González. These artists had also contributed words to something not labeled an artist statement inviting us to follow our pleasure, our melancholy, our bliss.

serpentwithfeet ("a brooklyn based singer") whose two performances opened and closed the evening--presented the challenge of being completely unfamiliar to me and being about sound instead of dance. I entered his world and bonded with him over the superior metallic gleam of his emerald green nails. I stayed for the way his perfected R&B voice and stylings layered over classical music. His voice had a right (and a rite) to be there, and I took instruction from that. I found myself thinking visually as I listened to him. He wasn't dancing, and there were no projections. Yes, with his piercings, skirt, sneakers, those nails, he was a certified work of art. But something else happened in which I saw what his voice was doing and, sorry, I can't explain it.

I have seen Jasmine Hearn dance, admirably, with Marjani Forté-Saunders (and, I think, Ni'Ja Whitson maybe?). Her solo, cinder, seems like attempts to reach out through voice, through sound, through direct address to a watching, unfortunately passive crowd--"I need an adjective! How are you feeling?" But I found myself looking past all that, almost softly batting it away so that I could concentrate. What shined through was Hearn herself--uncommonly pliable, mercurial, intense, physically invested to the max with zero caution, allowing no daylight between herself and her choreography. She began the work as if carving herself out of darkness and ended it by returning to the dark. In between, she burned and glowed.

Dan and Lindsay Reuter's Annie largely evaporated around me. I followed along behind their backs, noting the drab coloration of their costumes, and lost track of them somewhere atop the church's altar steps. For some reason, I never found my way around.

This is the second time I've seen work by Jonathan González; the first time was on a shared program at BAAD! It seems the world he makes is about taking ordinary things--the space, the lighting, his body parts, his voice--and twisting them into unfamiliarity and absurdity. So, if you visit one of his worlds, no matter what you bring in your knapsack, you will never be prepared. Even as the experience winds down, González will find a way to subvert your expectations of an ending. I enjoyed the way he did it this time.

Let's hope that, despite the snowstorm, the third and final evening of Food for Thought will be able to run tonight at 8pm. Curated by Greta Hartenstein, the program will feature work by Ayesha Jordan and André D. Singleton. Check online for details and updates. If it's on, don't forget to bring a couple of cans.

UPDATE: Tonight's program has been cancelled due to weather conditions. Stay safe!

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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