The Joyce's American Dance Platform: UBW and DCDC

Chanon Judson of Urban Bush Women
(photo: Gennia Cui)

American Dance Platform: Urban Bush Women and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
January 7 and 12

If it's true what they say about how viewers' mirror neurons respond when audiences look at dancers moving, and you attended The Joyce on Tuesday night for American Dance Platform, your mirror neurons likely got a serious workout. Evidence for that, from me, is how exhausted I felt the next morning as if even every toe nail and eyelash I possess were worked to max from watching Urban Bush Women (UBW) and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC), two troupes of extraordinary physical daring and power. More evidence came from the way the opening night audience responded in the moment. I'm not talking about the expected, and justified, standing Os and rousing cheers; I mean those very Black mmmhmmms, the audible sighs, the cries, the groans and other unrestrained vocalizing that greeted DCDC dancers killing it during Abby Zbikowski's Indestructible (2018) with apparently zero fear of bodily wear-and-tear. If, in a sense, we all danced along with UBW and DCDC as we witnessed them, I await my Bessie nomination.

With the very recent departure of Du'Bois A'Keen, UBW is back to being an all-woman company. My favorite on the evening's bill (to be repeated this coming Sunday) was UBW's Women's Resistance, an excerpt from les écailles de la mémoire (Scales of Memory) with choreographic direction from founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Germaine Acogny with additional choreography from eight former and current UBW members. It takes a village. And, indeed, looks like a village...of disciplined women warriors demonstrating their earth-sprung, spring-loaded battle-readiness within a sonic environment where shredding mechanical rhythms suggest both how formidable these women are and how menacing are the forces they are up against. UBW paired this ensemble with Zollar's 1989 I Don't Know, But I Been Told, If You Keep On Dancin' You Never Grow Old, which now includes segments from visible (2011), made by nora chipaumire and Marguerite Hemmings. And, yes, there is a definite connection and throughline--similar resourcefulness, ingenuity and high skill even in the midst of play that some might unwisely consider trivial.

UBW performers: Courtney J. Cook, Melissa Cobblah Gutierrez (Understudy), Jasmine Hearn, Chanon Judson (Co-Artistic Director), Love Muwwakkil, Samantha Spies (Co-Artistic Director), Elaisa van der Kust, Makaila Ware

Taking on Indestructible, Ohio's venerable DCDC--founded in 1968 by Jeraldyne Blunden and now directed by her daughter, Debbie Blunden-Diggs--was right in tune with the night's audacious mood. The main difference is, with Abby Z high-impact, daredevil choreography, neither you nor the dancers get a chance to chill. So, again, those mirror neurons.... Add occasional blasts from the electronic, industrial hip hop band Death Grips. The evening wrapped up with DCDC's excerpt from Donald Byrd's The Geography of the Cotton Field (2014) which paints, with an elegant hand, a canvas at once sweepingly abstract and epically specific.

DCDC performers: Devin Baker, Qarrianne Blayr (Associate Artistic Director), Breanna Dorsey, Alexandria Flewellen, Michael Green, Steve Lamblin, Robert Pulido, Elizabeth Ramsey, Nile Alicia Ruff, Nabachwa Ssensalo (Actress), Quentin Apollovaughn Sledge, Matthew J. Talley, Countess V. Winfrey

One show remains--this Sunday at 7:30pm--but tickets are sold out.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(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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Uplifting Black choreographers: Gesel Mason

Gesel Mason
(photo: Enoch Chan)

Whoops!

Showing up 45 minutes into a concert because I, somehow, had the wrong curtain time just feels awful. More awful is when it's a historic, keenly-anticipated program like Gesel Mason's No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers.

I missed nearly everything in the first half of the show--works by Bebe Miller, Kyle Abraham and Donald McKayle. <<sound of critic kicking self--hard and repeatedly>> I managed to slip in at a break to catch Rennie Harris's You Are Why! (2014) and watch Mason dance the hell out of it alongside Lisa Engleken and Mahayla Rose. The second half featured works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Bent, 2004), David Roussève (Jumping the Broom, 2005) and a piece by Mason (No Less Black, 2000) with her poetry and MK Abadoo's solo performance. This program has been fifteen years in development and represents both a tribute to a diverse range of Black choreographers and an ongoing gift to dance's future.

Happily, the entire program--a presentation of Gesel Mason Performance Projects, co-presented by 651 ARTS and RestorationART at Brooklyn's Billie Holiday Theatre--will be accessible through the digital archive Mason plans to establish to preserve the legacy of Black artistry in dance. The documentation, just like the concert, will include personable video interviews of the choreographers, revealing the context for understanding how these artists saw and felt about their works when first created and how they view them now.

But try to get to the Billie Holiday tonight-- the show's final evening--for so many, many reasons. Among them is Jumping the Broom with its chilling imagery, prescient warning and the heartbreak of Mason's performance. In the short amount of time he allows himself, Roussève not only conjures vivid scenes in our imagination, he taps our empathy and our sense of foreboding. It is dance as an act of conscience, responsibility and courageous love.

Of course, I cannot speak of Mason's dancing in all of the program's pieces, but I do know she should rank high on your list of artists who jump into the fire of a work with the nimbleness and rigor to survive its flames. She's all up in the Zollar solo (an edgy, dissonant portrait of the extreme state of mind in addiction) and the Harris trio (with its unrelenting movement multiplicities upon complexities upon multiplicities). It's almost unbelievable that she would--and could--program demanding works like these two on the same bill as the Roussève piece. She says, now, that she will never do this again--herself, personally, though the works could be danced by others--and that much is believable.

But, for now--at least this evening--you've got a chance to see a great one at the height of her powers. Go!

For information and tickets to tonight's show (7pm), click here.

The Billie Holiday Theatre
At Restoration Plaza, 1368 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Urban Bush Women's "Hair Parties" at 92Y Harkness

Madame C. J. Walker (1867-1919)
Hair care entrepreneur, philanthropist and activist
America's first woman millionaire

Urban Bush Women's Hair Parties is a boldly hybrid event integrating excerpts of a developing dance (premiere of Hair & Other Stories coming this spring) with a community-sharing workshop in kitchen table-like settings. I'd imagine each "audience"--surely, that's not the right word here--brings a different energy to it and ultimately determines how well it will work.

After all, the folks who participate are what it's about. Through a variety of activities, they're encouraged to remember and tell stories about things they learned, from childhood on, about beauty and grooming and to contemplate how those seminal influences affect their attitudes towards themselves and others today. It's very much about--as one of the dancer/facilitators noted--"practices that allow us to stay inside our greatness" and those that drag us far from it.

Oh, you surely know UBW, the lifework of the great, beloved Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, is a Black troupe, right? But while Hair Parties must be a blast in an all-Black gathering, its meditations on race can be useful for anyone from any culture--as was evident yesterday afternoon at 92Y's Harkness Dance Center where the presenters embraced a multicultural gathering.

Somebody here thinks they came for a show!

We're going on a journey!

A journey it was, indeed--starting with the sight of dancer Samantha Speis arranging, thoughtfully gazing upon and slightly rearranging a collection of hair care products, almost as if they were chess pieces. For me, this brief, subtle moment was amusing, a subtlety anyone caring for Black people's hair in the "natural" way will recognize. We know how much time and money we put into experimenting to get just the right products used in the right combination or sequence for the particular texture and willfulness of our hair. Tell me that's not choreography!

Dancers invited us to come together around certain agreements on how to work as a community--such as "speaking from the I"--and gave us gestural movements to anchor each agreement, in a fun way, in our bodies. We watched a dance segment depicting a Black woman suffering "hair hell" in an elevator populated first by a group of mocking Black people and then by white people whose very different attention to her hair freaked her out just as much or even more. We learned a tiny bit about the Black hair care entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker (1867-1919), who went from being the child of enslaved parents to being the first American woman to make a million. From table to table, we performed a shared reading of lines from a letter Zollar addressed to this fascinating pioneer. And we moved with the dancers.

The party kicked up memories for many of us. I was stunned when I suddenly recalled the Breck Girl shampoo ads of the 1960s and later bonded with a white woman over these memories. These ubiquitous magazine ads were in my face--all of our faces--at a time when it would have been more useful for me to be learning about Madame Walker. Do you remember them, too?

As I left 92Y, I actually had a pleasant elevator moment when the same woman who remembered those darn Breck girls told me she'd come to the Hair Parties event terribly drained and tired and came away feeling exhilarated. This, I think, is pretty much the hallmark of an Urban Bush Woman event, and I'm glad she got that healing.

Conceived and choreographed by Chanon Judson and Samantha Speis in collaboration with the company--Du'Bois A'Keen, Chanon Judson, Courtney J. Cook, Jaimé Dzandu, Rochelle Jamila, Samantha Speis and Tendayi Kuumba

Music composed by The Illustrious Blacks (Manchildblack and Monstah Black)

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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gives us "Shelter"

Linda Celeste Sims
of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
in Twyla Tharp's The Golden Section
(photo: Paul Kolnik)

All I wanted for Solstice was a trip up to New York City Center for an Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater matinee!

It was great to see Twyla Tharp's The Golden Section on Ailey bodies again and to watch (for my first time) Ailey women embody Shelter, a work Jawole Willa Jo Zollar premiered with her renowned Urban Bush Women.

Tharp's company first launched The Golden Section in 1981 as the exhilarating finale of The Catherine Wheel, her Broadway collaboration with her lover at the time, rock composer David Byrne; later, that segment gained its own spotlight as a standalone work in Tharp repertory. The Ailey troupe got it in 2006. The Zollar piece premiered for UBW in 1988 and for Ailey in 1992. Both works, then, are products of the Reagan years, and both have much to offer us today.

These dances lit up a program also featuring Robert Battle's The Hunt and Alvin Ailey's cherished signature work, Revelations. (The only revelation here? Clifton Brown's "I Wanna Be Ready." How can he still look as sharp as a jet while exuding so much gravitas?) The exciting Tharp and Zollar pieces--like forest fires that, paradoxically, usher in new life--make it hard to watch dancers not being challenged, shown off but not shown at their most fluent, capable and venturesome.

The Golden Section--which once blasted its way out of The Catherine Wheel's odd tale of nuclear family/nuclear peril--is brassy fanfare with no let up. (We're going boom, boom, boom! That's the way we live!) Dancers scoot, slide, glide, twist, twirl, prance and fly across the stage in continual agitation, working flavors of jazz, flourishes of ballet, and dashes of athletics into Byrne's percussive, polyrhythmic brew. (There's nothing stronger than the feeling you get when your eyes are wide open!) Back door, screen door--all wide open, Byrne sings. Dancers embody physical and mental joy, liberated and defiant back in the day and defiant today, needed again. For them, nothing exists besides this ecstasy. Tharpian fusion, wriggling through a company of mostly Black bodies, looks like movement going right back home to its people. The Ailey dancers claim it and then some.

Unlike The Golden Section, Zollar's Shelter retains its context of peril and specifically calls for responsibility and justice. (Texts by Hattie Gossett, Carl Hancock Rux, Laurie Carlos, Paloma McGregor and Zollar address the carelessness with which we treat our fellow humans and our environment, as if both were disposable.) But the dancing steadily moves through this context and builds its ecstasy, sourced in woman ways and the Black diaspora. Shelter often calls for mass movement--coordinated shifting of weight, direction and energy that feels like collective amplification of Zollar's design. It's not just doing the same thing at the same time in a huddle. It's a feeling shared from woman to woman, and either you have it, as a group, or you don't. They have it, we can all tell. In the performance I saw, Ailey's Ashley Mayeux, Fana Tesfagiorgis, Danica Paulos, Hope Boykin, Bélen Pereyra-Alem and Constance Stamatiou boldly rendered the collective aesthetics and intention of the work. They showed us a powerful community. Credit not only Zollar but also her team of rehearsal assistants--Maria Bauman, Jaimé Dzandu, Marjani Forté, McGregor, Samantha Speis and Bennalldra Williams--for the excellent training of the Ailey dancers in this moving production.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater continues through December 31. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

New York City Center
131 W 55th St (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Your list of the 2017 Bessie recipients...and thanks!

RECIPIENTS OF 

THE 2017 NY DANCE AND PERFORMANCE (BESSIE) AWARDS

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Artistic Director, Urban Bush Women
(photo: Crush Boone)

A Lifetime Achievement in Dance Bessie Award
was given to Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
last evening at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts,
presented by dancer-choreographer Dianne McIntyre.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN DANCE

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

For forming Urban Bush Women in 1984 and bringing to the stage a complex, bold, and affirming vision of the African Diaspora. For transforming and diversifying the field by developing new ways of training, curating, connecting, and lifting up generations of choreographers of color. For a visionary life both on the stage and in the world.

OUTSTANDING SERVICE TO THE FIELD OF DANCE

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

For her capacity to reflect, contextualize, and discern dance work, providing an urgent and necessary voice for dance artists and their varied practices. For her work as writer, educator, mentor, and activist over many decades in print, radio, and online. For strengthening the city’s arts community as an important witness, an intentional healer, and a mindful presence.

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer Bridgman|Packer Dance for Voyeur at the Sheen Center

For groundbreaking use of video in live performance, creating a space where virtual and actual movement merged. For inhabiting Edward Hopper’s imagery and taking the audience on an inventive journey of private spaces and ever-shifting viewpoints.

Antony Hamilton for Meeting at La MaMa with Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

For obsessive, precise choreography that synthesized two men’s movements with a circle of robots’ percussive tapping into a mesmerizing whole. For a work both abstract and profoundly human.

Ligia Lewis for minor matter at American Realness with Lumberyard Contemporary Performing Arts at Abrons Arts Center

For interrogating the social inscriptions on the black body within the frame of the black box. Moving with the logic of interdependence, three dancers push against the theater’s physical space transforming it into a visceral world pulsing with love and rage.

Taylor Mac for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse with Pomegranate Arts

For an epic, tireless, and bold 24-hour performance that generated thought and action through the deep investigation of music's role in our common humanity. A carefully curated concert featuring 246 songs, extravagant visual transformations, and a community-creating ritual of hope.

Abdel Salaam for Healing Sevens with Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theatre, Illstyle & Peace Productions, and Dyane Harvey Salaam at DanceAfrica, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

For the combined efforts of three stellar companies using West African, hip-hop, and modern dance forms to find new ways of storytelling, new ways to deliver healing truths. For exploring how multiple generations of a community can look within to resolve conflict and violence

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL

Ishmael Houston-Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, Nick Hallett, and Jennifer Monson for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes From a Life and Other Works by John Bernd at Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found

For channeling the artistic vision of John Bernd, whose narrative, along with those so many others, was cut short by AIDS. For shepherding a young cast into communion with the spirit of the work. For responding to, reimagining, and restoring a missing chapter of our creative history.

OUTSTANDING PERFORMER

PeiJu Chien-Pott in Martha Graham’s Ekstasis, reimagined by Virginie Mécéne, Martha Graham Dance Company at The Joyce Theater

For bringing to life a lost Martha Graham solo from 1933, masterfully inhabiting the earthy, percussive, and fluid movements of pelvis and torso, and embodying the very essence of Graham’s ecstatic vision.

Anna Schön for Sustained Achievement in the work of Reggie Wilson’s Fist & Heel Performance Group

A bold presence and generous performer who moves with raw emotion and lightning speed while remaining sensitive to and connected with her fellow dancers. A deeply spiritual dancer who brings utter conviction to every performance.

Ensemble of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds: Maria Bauman, Sidra Bell, Davalois Fearon, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Melanie Greene, Kayla Hamilton, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Nia Love, Paloma McGregor, Sydnie L. Mosley, Rakiya Orange, Grace Osborne, Leslie Parker, Angie Pittman, Samantha Speis, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Ni’Ja Whitson, and others*

Curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa for Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found

For a history-in-the-making performance that dismantled improvisational dance norms to create a robust, disruptive, and dynamic world. For a cast of individuals who used a full range of movement styles to take the audience from Dakar to Kingston, the Bronx to Bushwick, in a fluid dance of connection.

*Edisa Weeks and Tara Aisha Willis were also in the cast but are ineligible as they serve on the Bessie Selection Committee.

Daaimah Taalib-Din for Sustained Achievement with Forces of Nature Dance Theatre

A chameleon of dance styles from traditional African to contemporary African Diasporic forms. A dynamic presence in every work in which she dances, moving from highly stylized to smoothly nuanced with impeccable grace and technique.

OUTSTANDING MUSICAL COMPOSITION/SOUND DESIGN

Alisdair Macindoe for Meeting by Antony Hamilton at La MaMa with Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

For creating a complex percussive score using 64 tiny robots armed with tapping pencils. For adding the virtuosic rhythms of two dancers slapping hands and reciting numbers to create a unique soundscape that was both relentless and strangely satisfying.

OUTSTANDING VISUAL DESIGN

Taylor Mac (creator), Niegel Smith (director), Machine Dazzle (costume), Mimi Lien (set), John Torres (lights), Eric Avery (puppetry), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (choreography) for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse with Pomegranate Arts

For a thoroughly considered and painstakingly crafted visual experience revealed over 24-hours and 24-decades of American history. For a complex, complementary, and immersive mix of scenography, costumes, lighting, puppets, and crowd control which transformed a concert into a sublime engagement of all the senses.

Two awards were presented in July at the 2017 Bessie Awards press conference:

The 2017 Emerging Choreographer Award went to Will Rawls for creating astute, genre-eluding work that explores the relationship between movement and language and delves deeply into ideas of transmission, translation, and authorship; and for his multifaceted artistry as choreographer, writer, editor, and curator, expanding the presence of dance and performance.

This year’s Juried Bessie Award went to Abby Zbikowski for her rigorous and utterly unique development of an authentic movement vocabulary, employed in complex and demanding structures to create dances of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger. The 2017 Bessies Jury was comprised of Kyle Abraham, Brenda Bufalino, and Beth Gill.

To view the livestream video, click here.

For more information on the Bessies, click here.

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Congratulations to all the Bessie recipients and nominees. I am grateful for your commitment, your work, all you create and share to build and sustain this field.

My deepest thanks to Lucy Sexton and the Bessies Committee for the profound honor of receiving the 2017 Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. I could not be more moved by this recognition of my work and by the amazing, loving introduction byThomas F. DeFrantz. I suppose I will have to carry y'all a little bit longer, but the work is as joyful as it is necessary.

My deepest respect and love to the members of the new collective, Skeleton Architecture. Congratulations on the award we all knew you were destined to receive. As individual artists, each of you have already given so much to the art of dance. Your exceptional performance together at Danspace Project in 2016 wrote an exciting new chapter in all of these individual stories, now part of Bessies history. As a collective now, you will write your future...and ours. We cannot wait to see what you have to teach us!

Much love,Eva

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Urban Bush Women to preview "Hair and Other Stories" at Baruch

Urban Bush Women
previews Hair and Other Stories next month
at Baruch Performing Arts Center.
(photo: Jennifer Lester)

Baruch Performing Arts Center, in partnership with the CUNY Dance Initiative, welcomes choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and her renowned Urban Bush Women troupe on March 31 for a preview of Hair and Other Stories. Developed with director Raelle Myrick Hodges, writer Keisha Zollar and the company, this multidisciplinary, evening-length work deals with issues of race, gender identity and economic inequality in the lives of African-American women. Hair and Other Stories will have its world premiere in April at the Virginia Arts Festival.

The Baruch PAC performance--open to the public with free admission for Baruch students--will be followed by a discussion with the artists.

Urban Bush Women

Hair and Other Stories (preview)

Baruch Performing Arts Center at Baruch College

March 31 at 7:30pm

For information and tickets, call 646-312-5073 or click here.

Baruch Performing Arts Center

55 Lexington Avenue (enter 25th Street between 3rd and Lexington Avenues), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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Dancers are the music: Urban Bush Women at BAM

Members of Urban Bush Women
perform Walking with 'Trane.
(photos: Julieta Cervantes)

In Walking with 'Trane--performed this week at BAM Next Wave by Urban Bush Women and inspired by the genius and spiritual force of John Coltrane--dancers are not simply people dancing to music. Dancers are music, in turbulence and in silence.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Coltrane's masterpiece, A Love Supreme, and the 30th anniversary season of Urban Bush Women, founded by award-winning dancemaker, educator and activist Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. When developing Walking with 'Trane, Zollar and collaborator Samantha Speis conceived the piece as an album of two "sides" divided by an intermission.

Side A--"JUST A CLOSER WALK WITH 'TRANE," with Philip White's electronic score--opens with one supple, wriggling figure suspended in a faint wash of light against darkened space and thrumming sound. Little by little, dancers assemble on the stage, integrated and attuned to one another but each pulsing her or his own instrumental, multidimensional voice. These musical lines are never straight. Flat is not flat; flow, never one way. Destinations only open up more directions of travel.

Looming, dynamic video projections play across a translucent scrim, evoking the smokiness of a music club. Or the keys of a piano. Or a sheet of lines awaiting notes the dancers will live. Or, thrillingly, the sensation of railway tracks receding from a speeding train/'trane transporting everyone--dances and watchers--into new times and places. Speis takes a masterful solo, and Du'Bois A'Keen introduces a flavor of hip hop to his crisp, clear moves, forging an up-to-the-minute connection to Coltrane.

With the side winding down, we hear recorded voices reflecting on Coltrane's music. The final speaker's words set the stage for Side B, "FREED(OM)," a title inspired by the searching, all-embracing nature of Coltrane's spirituality.

He was free. His music was free. 

He was expressing freedom.

Composer-pianist George O. Caldwell's live music for this new section is infused with themes from A Love Supreme and carries the dancers into a space of expansion and transcendence. There's a panoramic photo of the inside of a jam-packed music hall projected against the back of the stage, giving the illusion of the performers dancing their music for this crowd. Indeed, the UBW dancers savor freedom of movement in the open space of the stage, the dancing here feels expansive and celebratory. The quirks and questions of the earlier movement in SIDE A have dispersed which, I must admit, made me value them so much more and miss them.

The dancers of Urban Bush Women are Du'Bois A'Keen, Amanda Castro, Courtney J. Cook, Chanon Judson, Tendayi Kuumba, Stephanie Mas, Love Muwwakkil (understudy) and Samantha Speis.

With dramaturgy by Talvin Wilks, lighting design by Russell Sandifer, costume design by Helen L. Simmons-Collen and video design by Wendall Harrington

Walking with 'Trane continues through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Reasons to be thankful!

I have many things to be thankful for--among them, being so often surrounded by gifted, accomplished artists. This season, I had the great pleasure of moderating BRIC Arts Media's post-show Q&A with choreographer Ronald K. Brown (celebrating his troupes's 30th anniversary) and poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. For Ronald K. Brown/Evidence's season at BRIC, Brown and Boyce-Taylor presented a revival of Water, their 1999 collaboration. 

The Q&A followed the performance on Friday, November 13 as New Yorkers were just hearing and struggling to process the horrific news from Paris. All through our conversation, I felt the unshakable force of Ron and Cheryl's groundedness and focus. I was happy that they both emphasized how important it is for young, innovating artists to value and tap the experience of arts elders as they move forward in a field--and a world--presenting numerous challenges.

Movers and Shakers: Dance Activists in NYC
a panel at Brooklyn Historical Society
(photo: Tyrone Z. McCants)

L to r: Jason Samuels Smith, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, AntBoogie,
Tamia Santana, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Camille A. Brown
(photo: Tyrone Z. McCants)

I also had the honor of being invited, by Meredith Duncan, Programs and Communication Manager of Brooklyn Historical Society, and Tamia Santana, Executive Director of the Brooklyn Dance Festival, to moderate their panel on dance and activism at BHS. The panelists? Knockouts, all: Camille A. Brown, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, AntBoogie and Jason Samuels Smith, distinguished in their respective genres of dance and deeply engaged with community, education and social justice.

(photo: Tyrone Z. McCants)

(photo: Tyrone Z. McCants)

Despite a late-fall downpour that kept some people home, we had a good gathering and a rich, wide-ranging discussion touching on the power of the arts to shift the way we think and imagine, the fundamental importance of technical discipline, the role of the body in political action, and the perennial challenge posed by mainstream media and conventional tastemakers and gatekeepers. So often, our talk returned to the imperative that progressive artists just go for it, find their own truths, control their own spaces, creating alternatives in an end run around these barriers. I greatly appreciate the example these artists continue to set for us all.

Finally, I want to thank all of you for your nourishing support over the years. InfiniteBody continues to be here for you, and I hope you will continue to enjoy it and send your friends and colleagues my way.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Love,
Eva :-)

Movers and Shakers: Dance Activists in NYC panel, November 19

Please join me and some sensational guests for Movers and Shakers: Dance Activists in NYC at Brooklyn Historic Society -- Thursday, November 19, 6:30pm (FREE!)

New York City has always been a place where artistic expression and activism merge, and the dance world is no exception.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa leads a discussion about artistic expression as activism among pioneering dancers who are leaders in their genre including Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Camille A. Brown, Jason Samuels Smith and AntBoogie.

Doors open at 6pm. Event begins at 6:30pm. Please note that seating is first come, first served.

Click here to RSVP!

Brooklyn Historical Society

128 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn

(map/directions)

We who believe in freedom: UBW invites you

2015 Urban Bush Women

Summer Leadership Institute

We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest: 

Organizing for Racial Equity

July 24 - August 2

New Orleans, LA

Michelle Alexander’s thought-provoking bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is the research touchstone that will inform Urban Bush Women’s 2015 Summer Leadership Institute -- We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest: Organizing for Racial Equity.

Click here for more details.

Click here to apply.

The anatomy of change: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and LIz Lerman at Harlem Stage

Impressions of: Blood, Muscle, Bone: the anatomy of wealth and poverty

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, The Dance Enthusiast, October 14, 2013

"Dance Legacies" on film

from Sand directed by Cari Ann Shim Sham
(USA, 2010; 10 min)

The hour-long Dance Legacies program, a lesser-known gem of this year's Dance on Camera Festival, will present a spectrum of short-film topics--from Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's re-staging of her 1988 work, Shelter, in the wake of New Orleans' Katrina crisis to a look at the vaudeville tradition of sand dancing with father-and-son tappers Darrow Igus and Kenji Igus. The directors of all five films will be on hand to introduce their work.

Dance Legacies screenings are scheduled for January 30 and January 31 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. For more information on this program, click here. To purchase tickets, click your selected date under "Showtimes" (left-hand column).

Dance on Camera is a presentation of Dance Films Association and co-sponsored by The Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Dance on Camera
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street (between Amsterdam and Broadway), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Congratulations to Jawole Willa Jo Zollar!

World-renowned choreographer earns highest honor from FSU colleagues
FSU.com

Chipaumire and Zollar make it "Visible"

Three Visible Dancers: Left to right, Dancers Kota Yamazaki from Japan, Judith Jacobs from Holland and New Yorker Marguerite Hemmings, who also is a choreographer with Harlem Stage’s E-Moves program, make their visible moves. Photo by: Julieta Cervantes


Nora Chipaumire and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar--critically-acclaimed Bessie Award winners and two of the people I most cherish in dance--will present the world premiere of their collaborative project, Visible, at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse on October 12. This ensemble work deals with the struggle of being a foreigner in US society. 

“Visible attempts to reveal the conflicted nature of my experience, the loneliness of the foreigner, the constant push and pull between homeland and new frontier. It explores the idea of community versus the individual,” said the Zimbabwe-born Chipaumire.

Commissioned and nurtured by Harlem Stage, Visible features an international cast and creative team: 

Souleymane Badolo (Burkina Faso), former Urban Bush Women member Ca.Dé (Guadeloupe), Marguerite Hemmings (Jamaica), Judith Jacobs (Holland),  historian John O. Perpener II (Washington, D.C.), Kota Yamazaki (Japan), who also designed the costumes, and percussionists Bashir Shakur and David L. Alston.

Visible runs October 12-15 (7:30pm). For more information and ticketing, click here.

Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue (at 135th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

What a difference...

...a dancer makes.

I'm thinking of Katherine Crockett, that tall drink of water, brightening my evening as she defined the prophetic Chorus in Martha Graham's Cave of the Heart. She works that broad-striped fabric of her costume, unfolds it like a condor's wings and radiantly projects over what seems a vast distance in space and time with dire, desperate gestures that, for all their silence, "sound" to me like trumpets. I saw her, I heard her. There was no one and nothing like her on stage, then or later. Everything else seemed carefully managed and remote--even Bulareyaung Pagarlava's brand-new Chasing, a work that sets out to prove that Graham standard bearers can cut loose and frisk around. (Martha Graham Dance Company at The Rose Theater, now through Sunday. Click here for information and tickets.)

Souleymane Badolo (photo: Julie Lemberger for 92Y)

Speaking of difference, curating is something new and different for the great Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women fame. With her lineup for 92Y, running this weekend, she's offering a chance to watch distinctive performers like Souleymane Badolo, Lacina Coulibaly (his Burkina Faso compatriot), Maria Bauman, Samantha Speis and surprise guest Christal Brown bring ideas and space to gleaming life. The program includes works by Badolo and Bauman and two works inspired by Zollar's "Blind Date" invitation in which she matches pairs of dance artists for a last-minute creative relationship, just hours before the actual performance. If you, as a dance fan, look for the cohesion and depth that long-term creative process allows, this sort of thing is certainly a gamble, but the intelligence and power of these select artists reward Zollar's risk and your time. Having a chance to see a program with so much Badolo and Badolo choreography in it made me notice his uncanny relationship to performance space, the way he habitually dwells in or treads its periphery, rarely occupying its center or sending his dancers there. If memory serves me, I've seen this sort of thing in much of his work. Now I'm eager to find out why. (Jawole Willa Jo Zollar Curates, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, now through Sunday. Click here for information and tickets.)

Those five fly ladies return

Remember FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance, with solos made and performed by Dianne McIntyre, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Germaine Acogny, Carmen de Lavallade and Bebe Miller?

Well, if you didn't happen to catch these stellar performers last year at LIU's Kumble Theater (where I reviewed the show for Dance Magazine), you have another chance this December at NJPAC's Victoria Theater:

Saturday, December 11, 7:30pm
Sunday, December 12, 3pm

Each dancer appears in a rarely-performed, signature solo work: 
Bebe Miller’s classic Rain, in which the choreographer powerfully portrays “a woman weighted down by a host of cares, yet refusing to be totally crushed by them” (New York Times); Urban Bush Women innovator Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s recent Bring ‘Em Home, which explores the New Orleans tradition of Second Line dancing while commenting on the failed efforts to assist those displaced by Hurricane Katrina; Dianne McIntyre’s If You Don’t Know, set to a piano score composed by Olu Dara, which fuses improvisational movement and jazz to explore a series of African American lives; contemporary African dance master Germaine Acogny’s Untitled, a riveting new solo that incorporates video and original music to imagine an Africa with a powerful female President; and Carmen de Lavallade in a recreation of her role in The Creation, Geoffrey Holder’s classic dance that tells the Biblical story of creation as interpreted in a poem by James Weldon Johnson.

FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance is a project of 651 ARTS.

Information and ticketing

Directions to NJPAC

UBW in the (praise) house!

Urban Bush Women's next Being Bushified! evening--tomorrow at 7pm--will feature a screening of Praise House (1991):

Directed by acclaimed director, Julie Dash, this 1991 film is based on Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's dance theater ensemble work, Praise House. It explores the search for liberation and cultural identity within the African Diaspora through the cultural elements of myth, religion and history. 

Being Bushified! is our monthly culture and community series that introduces you to the UBW way and brings you into our community through dance, workshops, conversations and films that show what a great impact dance has on health & wellness, education, communities, individuals and innovation.

Admission: $15 ($5 of every ticket goes to supporting UBW's Juneteenth partnerships.)

Wednesday, September 15, 7pm

Location: 

The Great Room, A.R.T. NY building
138 South Oxford Street, 2nd Floor
(between Hanson Place and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn

Directions: 1 block from C train to Lafayette
2 blocks from G train to Fulton Street
4 blocks from B/D/M/N/Q/R/2/3/4/5 to Atlantic Station
Call 718-398-4537 or click here.

What are you reading this summer? Part 3

Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working It Out by Nadine George-Graves (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010)

Nadine George-Graves's comprehensive study of the art of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Urban Bush Women is the gift of an embodied approach to research. She has examined this acclaimed troupe from every possible angle--including from within, taking company class. She backs up her insights with copious details from many examples of Zollar choreography and the artists' extensive community engagement.

Although informed by scholarly theories and methods of analysis, George-Graves's 206-page volume is written for a broad audience and largely free of academic jargon. This important work will benefit anyone with an interest in contemporary Black choreography, indeed, anyone thinking or writing about dance of any kind. But I want to give a strong recommendation to activists for its documentation of the powerful confluence of art, spirituality, healing, community and social justice. And I especially want to see this book in the hands of Black women—even if they never bother with concert dance—for its example of honesty and its celebration of personal and communal agency which, as the author writes, “promotes a relishing of the [Black female] body, trying to take the body back” from the centuries of myths that have obscured it and fostered its exploitation.

STREB: how to become an extreme action hero by Elizabeth Streb (The Feminist Press, 2010)

Elizabeth Streb is an artist of turbulence, one who races towards the unknown and danger and potential disaster with scientific curiosity, drawing inspiration, she says, from “slapstick, accidents and labor.” Not content with the standard issue nomenclature of dance, she seeks to forge her own vocabulary of motion based in personal challenge and investigation. Her company holds events--”events of desire and purpose”--not presentations. Her performers engage in PopAction, not dance. They are extreme action specialists, not dancers. And, yes, they are heroic. Heroes don't stop to ask why, she says. They ask how; they take action.

Since evolution has not yet provided a way for humans to fly unassisted, Streb has decided to take the initiative. Appropriately, with this book, Streb gives us a wild ride—part-memoir, part-manifesto, part-Book of Shadows. Just as her method of making motion avoids transitions, her text avoids predictability. At times, following Streb's turns of mind can be as exhilarating--and, frankly, hair-raising--as watching her troupe at work.

Like John Cage—cited as an influence, along with Harry Houdini, Philippe Petit, sound-barrier-breaker Chuck Yeager and Niagara Falls barrel-jumper Margaret E. Wagenfuhrer—Streb is “frightened of the old ideas.” Trained in conventional dance theater forms—from Humphrey-Weidman and Limón technique to classical ballet—she's after experience that eschews decorative artificiality and zooms in on real moves. Real means irreducible; it belongs to itself and stands for nothing else. It belongs to Now. She brings to this quest a working-class daughter's instincts about why concert dance might appeal only to a select, privileged audience—a situation she's committed to busting open in every possible way. See her “new operating system for audience sovereignty” in which you will recognize very little, if anything, of your current experience of going to the theater.

Elsewhere, she writes, “I want the STREB Extreme Action performances to do something to the audience, to cause a physical reaction so strong that they feel that some of the moves have literally happened to them.”

Heaven help us. But not only is she right on about that, she's right on about what forces might be in play when movement, of any kind, works powerfully for the watcher as well as for the doer. In the absence of that visceral, empathic connection, we have distancing and boredom.

I was struck, too, by a passage in which Streb contrasts the way circus space has been purposefully designed for that spectacle's needs with the circumscribed way dance artists traditionally engage space:

“Movement artists...have always settled for already existing places: opera houses, theater stages, or music halls...presentation spaces designed by others, for other disciplines...the majority of the available visual space, the vacant twenty feet above performers' heads is empty, not used, and mostly ignored.” Of the conventional dance studio, she writes, “What could a body do in such a sterile environment? How could you fly there?”

The photos included here provide wonderful documentation of Streb's early performance career as well as offering a taste of the exciting development of her work. My favorite has got to be Tom Caravaglia's photo of the two performers riding the huge wheel from Revolution (2006) which not only shows their strength but captures a sense of their radically-altered orientation in space, their bold claiming of some of that high void above the ground.

Anna Deavere Smith's foreword is, as you might imagine, a joy to read. These two brilliant, unique artists have become fast friends. Unfortunately, there's the puzzling matter of the transcript with which Streb concludes, and potentially undermines, her book—a half-hour, largely inarticulate Q&A session in which the actor-playwright keeps circling around and trying to press Streb to directly address the issue of her fierce attraction to danger. Just remember, Streb's not big on asking—or answering—why.

Apollinaire Scherr to speak on dance criticism

Critic, journalist and blogger Apollinaire Scherr invites you to her keynote address at the Dance Critics Association Conference this Friday, July 16 (9:30am) at NYU Kimmel Center at 60 Washington Square South. Get directions and more nifty details at Scherr's own blog post here.

Scherr's topic?

"How to write criticism that leaves room for dance's future"

She promises answers that are "provisional, hopeful and possibly cause for debate and fuming."

So, if you're up for some fuming, but you're not registered for the DCA conference, Scherr has a deal for you. You can get into the keynote event for a mere $8. But you absolutely must click here to pay in advance, okay?

BTW, if you do go to the DCA conference, you'll find me--your friendly grassroots blogger--on a panel at Dance Theater Workshop with Eiko of Eiko & Koma, writer Valerie Gladstone, presenter Baraka Sele, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Woman, and writer Lori Ortiz (moderator). We're talking Cultural Exchange in 2010. I hope to see you there!

UBW on the go, on the Web

Urban Bush Women has launched its new Web site. Check it out here.

Also, join UBW on July 14 (7pm) for Conversations with Jawole - Working It Out Over 25 Years. Dance Theater Workshop Artistic Director Carla Peterson talks with Jawole and Nadine George-Graves, author of new book about UBW, about UBW's legacy and stories. Signed copies available.

The Great Room
A.R.T. NY building
138 S. Oxford Street, 2nd Floor
(between Hanson Place and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn

Directions: 1 block from C train to Lafayette 4 blocks from B/D/M/N/Q/Q/R/2/3/4/5 to Atlantic Station

Information: Call 718-398-4537 or click here.