Won't stop: Jeanine Durning's new "To Being"

Jeanine Durning, Julian Barnett and Molly Poerstel
(photo: Ian Douglas)

With To Being we are asking: What is at stake? Where is the end? What does it take to stay in action? And how can we give more when we feel that we’ve met our limit? 

-- Jeanine Durning

When you're about to do what Jeanine Durning and her partners do in To Being, it's more than reasonable to ease your way into it. After all, what you plan to do will take force and stamina to a maniacal degree and, in excess of an hour, demand your complete mental and physical will. To Being--which just opened at The Chocolate Factory--requires something of the same from the empathic viewer. In the presence of these dancers, you might flip from feeling startled to feeling tickled to feeling absolutely spent.

Durning calls her process "nonstopping," and she first gave audiences a taste in her solo, inging (2010), where it was largely a phenomenon of the voice or "unscripted nonstop languaging," as she would have it. In the new work, To Being, Durning, Julian Barnett and an impish Molly Poerstel--accompanied by sound designer Tian Rotteveel--bring us nonstopping as disruptive acts of the body.

Audience seating is scarce and widely scattered around the edges of the theater's bright white space. You come in and take any chair. One or more of the performers might drift through, sometimes ambling by to say hello or give a hug to an audience member. And this amiable, apparent nothing-ing goes on for a while until the performers suddenly vacate the space, and one theater light fires up, signaling...what exactly?

In the absence of an immediate something, the audience's coughs and rustling amplify, and that stretches on for another awkward while. Then: a loud bustle from beyond the entrance, from the metal staircase. What?

From the moment the dancers burst through the entrance, they're on, violently, with little transition or drop in energy. If they were sounds--aside from their audible gasps--they would be blaring dissonance. They disturb the atmosphere with their jutting, threshing arms, lashing torsos, jabbing elbows. Being that refuses to stop.

One gets why Durning rejects the word "continuous" as a description of her movement qualities. That word indeed sounds too soft and flow-y. Nonstopping looks--feels, to the empath--like battle, like resistance to the very idea that you cannot do what you will to do.

As Durning wrote in her program notes, "nonstop points to the critical nature of what it takes to keep going in the midst of, and despite, questions, doubts, limitations, and, of course, inevitable failures." She came to this practice after many questions, some of them regarding why she continues to make work and if she should.

Objects in the way--a speaker, a tangle of electric cords, a radiator, a wall--are commandeered and roughly used, often to create flashes of sound. You sometimes worry for a dancer's safety; you always admire the currency of thought and commitment.

With lighting by Joe Levasseur

To Being runs through September 19 with remaining shows this week tonight through Saturday and September 16-19, all at 8pm. Durning will reprise inging Wednesday through Saturday, September 23-26 with 8pm performances. Remember, seating is very limited.

For information on both productions and ticket availability, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Closing soon: Half Straddle, Jeanine Durning, "Black Latina"

Susie Sokol and Becca Blackwell of Half Straddle

For Seagull (Thinking of you), Tina Satter and her troupe Half Staddle take scissors to Chekov's The Seagull, his letters and other material, stapling slivers of original language to shards of modern speech (in English, Russian and pseudo-Russian). This deconstruction/reconstruction serves up a compact gull in 75 mostly entertaining minutes with electric, charming performances by a small cast--notably Eliza Bent (Masha), Susie Sokol (Arkadina), Emily Davis (Nina) and Jess Barbagallo (Treplov)--as well as the scrupulous arrangement and deployment of sensory delights (Zack Tinkelman's lighting, Enver Chakartash's costumes and Chris Giarmo's sound design and original music). Presented by Performance Space 122's COIL fest at the New Ohio Theatre. Extended to January 26. For complete schedule information and tickets, click here.

Jeanine Durning's inging (2012) occupies a space set up to have the feeling of a college classroom. In fact, as each member of the audience comes in, he or she can take a folding chair and place it anywhere in the room that will afford a decent view of a table serving as Durning's desk. A tall stack of books on this "desk" prop up a small digital point-and-shoot set for videotaping her. We can see the monitor of the recording as she stands behind the desk. Behind her, we see three different pre-recorded videos--side by side by side--that show Durning sitting, talking and gesturing. For 50 minutes, the live-action Durning (her name ends in ing, and she clearly relishes that state of being in continuous process) mainly talks non-stop. And I don't mean taking pauses for hydration (although a bottle of water rests on her desk, and she occasionally handles it) or for sustained breath. Oh, no. None of that. She starts by suddenly slipping behind the desk and just goes for the duration of the time, with all sorts of associations and disassociations, all kinds of vocal blips and repetitions, self-interruptions and self-disruptions pulled into her rapid, auto-replenishing stream of consciousness. "What do you say when there's too much to say?" she asks, at one point. Maybe the answer is that it all just breaks down and breaks out in every possible direction. Yes--if you were wondering--this "choreography of the mind," as she calls it, can be considered dance because her speech has fabulous rhythms and is, in itself, the body working very hard. Ultimately, she can't even maintain her position behind the desk, and her wandering around forces us to twist in our seats to follow. Presented by American Realness at Abrons Arts Center. Final performances today at 4pm and 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

When Black Latina, a 45-minute ensemble piece written by Crystal S. Roman and directed by Veronica Caicedo, started off looking and, especially, sounding like a derivative from the 1970s--think For Colored Girls--my heart sunk a little. Not that I didn't love (and desperately need) Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. But, in 2013, might we be ready for an innovative approach? In Black Latina, we find an ensemble of women of color, symbolically dressed in orange prison garb, sitting or dancing on blocks arranged around the space, each airing her pain and frustrations and observations in pedantic expressions declaimed at high volume--"The media bombards us with ideas of what beauty should be," "You're too closed-minded to comprehend the miracle of being a Black Latina," and so forth. As expected, they aim to speak for the unheard, raise awareness, rally sisters in the audience in pride and solidarity with evocations of family togetherness and the pleasures of traditional food, music and party time. Somewhere along the way, though, I began to see Roman's contribution as indeed something new, supportive and motivating for her community--women of mixed Black and Latina heritage struggling for acknowledgement and respect, not only in dominant white society, but also among Blacks, Latinos and often their own family members who may value light skin over dark. Out of love and urgency, her devoted cast--particularly Judy Torres, Teniece Divya Johnson and Jenelle Simone, whose performance styles are detailed, joyful and commanding--really work it out. I'd love to see Black Latina produced in our city schools. These women won me over, and their audience returned the love. Presented by The Black Latina Movement at Teatro LATEA. Closing tonight. For information and ticketing, click here.

Deborah Hay Dance Company at Danspace Project

As Holy Sites Go/duet--presented at the multiply-holy site of Danspace Project--often reminds me of the time I first saw a baby giraffe fold its spindly legs to sit on the ground. Deborah Hay's black-clad dancers--the sturdy-thighed and light-footed Jeanine Durning and severely-neat, delicately-spidery Ros Warby--also reminded me of marionettes without benefit of puppeteers. Maybe they've come alive at midnight and spied each other across the hushed, gaping yet resonant space (and time, yes, when little or nothing occurs) between lines of slender columns. Maybe their handlers have worked them side by side in rehearsals, but only the most basic inclinations remain in their arms and legs to give a ghostly momentum. They move at and close to each other and make tenuous, offbeat connections that look eerie, even creepy, because they don't seem to be based in conscious intent--or, at least, readable intent. They sing sweetly and incomprehensibly and not at all together and yet overlapping. Hay says the dances perform "catastrophic acts of perception," a thought to chew on while you're watching.

Deborah Hay Dance Company continues its run at Danspace Project tonight and Saturday at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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