RoseAnne Spradlin marks her Joyce spot with "X"

L-r: Dancers Asli Bulbul, Connor Voss and Kayvon Pourazar
of RoseAnne Spradlin/Performance Projects
(photo: Glen Fogel)

 A quadrille is an 18th century dance performed in a rectangular configuration and viewed from four sides. To kick off its 2016/17 season, The Joyce Theater will be transformed for the NY Quadrille, a sensational two-week engagement created by renowned choreographer Lar Lubovitch and commissioned by The Joyce featuring a specially constructed platform stage designed to create viewing from four sides. Following through with the spirit of “four,” Lubovitch has selected four exciting choreographers—Pam Tanowitz, RoseAnne Spradlin, Tere O’Connor, and Loni Landon to create contemporary dance works on four sides. Each quadrille will be performed on its own program, with each program performed four times over the course of the two weeks. This transformation of The Joyce is sure to challenge audiences to embrace a new concept of the theater’s physical space and to appreciate the artistry of the four choreographers chosen to participate in this exciting event.

 --for promotional material for NY Quadrille

Lar Lubovitch's design and curatorial experiment, NY Quadrille, has landed on The Joyce Theater like an alien mothership scorching circles into a cornfield.

I hear that square performance platform now eating part of the regular stage area and part of the regular audience seating cost the Joyce a lot of coins. My first sight of it--from the vantage point of one of the remaining front-facing seats--made me think I must have overshot the mark and ended up a few avenues away at The Kitchen. Or maybe really overshot and ended up at BAM Fisher. To be honest, this was both exciting and unsettling. And that disturbing ambivalence only intensified when I saw what RoseAnne Spradlin had created for her turn at the quadrille--X, a trio for contemporary dance stars Asli Bulbul, Connor Voss and Kayvon Pourazar, all of whom deserve a hefty pay raise.

Kudos to Lubovitch for giving multiple Bessie-winning Spradlin her Joyce debut. NY Quadrille, on the whole, is an intentional risk. One Times writer, previewing the two-week series, actually called out the Joyce for habitual "staleness," and Lubovitch's initiative certainly throws open a new set of windows. But how will it play with the typical Joyce-goer?

I don't know how Tanowitz fared or how O'Connor and Landon will fare during their runs, but dance press seemed to outnumber civilians at Spradlin's opening night. And, yes, I'm wildly exaggerating, but you get the picture. Someone in the Joyce lobby wondered aloud if City Center's more affordable, aesthetically-accessible Fall for Dance might have drawn the usual Joyce fans uptown.

The evening did not go easy on those who took up the challenge. Spradlin's audience grew quite fidgety--in one man's case, openly surly. Even early on, people started bailing out of the show. And with Joe Levasseur's lights keeping dancers and their gawkers in constant view of one another, those departures were not exactly subtle.

X deserved better, certainly its dancers did, maintaining prodigious concentration and composure even in the face of one man crying out, "Just stop!" But, hey, I'm a downtown girl. I've sat through gnarlier (and less rewarding) stuff. Spradlin is kind of my jam.

Still, even for me, the hour-and-change with X was not without struggle. The audience annoyed me. A lot. I did not want to see or hear them. Glen Fogel's sound work reminded me too often of the less-decorous aspects and processes of life in a body. The repeated and repeated and repeated use of "Love's Theme"--Love Unlimited Orchestra's era-evoking instrumental--got under my skin. The dancers' stately, ritualized tasks of lifting and shifting and rearranging their gymnastic bars--suggesting, by rapid turns of association, heavy gym weights, portable ballet barres, monkey bars and barricades--eventually wore me out, too.

Yet these X-cesses read like a poem meant to burrow its way under the viewer's skin. A continuous push-and-pull between what cannot be easily controlled--human bodies in the wild--and the overlaying, controlling law of structure. Shifts and returns, both unexpected and, of course, expected. Voss's supple, sylph-like form rendered strangely weighty and awkward by Pourazar lifting and handling. Pourazar's unexpected reverse of this pattern--all floaty, slidey grace as he slips his body around Voss's with just a lightly-firm pressure from Voss's hand. Metal rods that, straddled first by Bulbul then by the others, combine the utilitarian with the suggestive. Sniper maneuvers mimicked, with dead seriousness, over disco sound: I'm never, ever gonna quit/'Cause quittin' ain't my stick.

Pourazar, Voss and Bulbul don't quit--even when some viewers do--'cause quittin' ain't their stick. With and for Spradlin, they refuse to compromise for our love but work damn hard for our respect.

X continues through October 2. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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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)

"First Move," a new work by Ori Flomin at Gibney Dance

Ori Flomin probably could do without showing us the printouts of responses to his survey about dancers' "lives, influences and current work in the dance field." Neatly positioned across the floor during parts of First Move, Flomin's new quartet at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, these sheets of paper do provide stark and startling visual contrast to their surroundings. But when his own dancers read from these pages, the words seem an awkward interruption, superfluous to this abstract, if inspired, work. It might be enough to know, via Flomin's program notes, that forty dance artists--among them, Lance Gries, Miguel Gutierrez, Vicky Shick, Ellis Word and David Thomson--participated in the survey and that First Move attempts "to translate these words back into the moving body."

"How the world falls away the minute I step onstage," begins a poignant poem in the program notes, its lines plucked from survey responses by Jane Gabriels. For starters, Flomin and his fellow dancers--Hannah Button, Isaac Gonyo and Colleen Thomas--occupy separate spaces, mostly in silence. Movement, when it comes, at first looks soft and dreamy. It takes a while for definition to focus and force to gather. They do.

First Move gathers into rock'n'roll-ish insistence with jabs and twists, wind-ups and crunches, unexpected stopping and starting. Pierre de Gaillande and Gary Greenblatt's original score also starts off spare and intermittent, eventually injecting propulsion and occasional and interesting distortions. The lighting (by magical Joe Levasseur) alternates between enhancing theatrical atmosphere and ripping away theatrical pretense.

Flomin, dressed in plaid shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, often looks like a knot struggling to untangling itself. Thomas, Button and especially Gonyo--a gorgeous mover--provide excellent support in the exactitude of their shaping and timing and how they regard one another, near or far. The piece, which exploits the Gibney theater's width to create divergent, sometimes conflicting swarms of activity, feels longer than it needs to be. But, as Flomin intended his survey to do, it beautifully highlights intelligence and sensitivity in dancers.

Ori Flomin's First Move concludes its run tonight with a performance at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The inaugural Making Space spring season continues at Gibney through June 27. Click here for the complete schedule.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis
Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Joe Levasseur: Take a workshop with dance's wizard of lighting

Movement Research presents a workshop with Bessie Award winner Joe Levasseur, lighting designer for dance, at Abrons Arts Center, July 7-11.

Lighting Design for Dance

This classroom and practical workshop will be a technical tutorial and discussion about the process of creating lighting designs for dance. All efforts will be made to demystify lighting in order to promote informative decision making and more easeful discussion in future collaborative processes. This class is designed for anyone interested in dance lighting including dancers, choreographers, and stage technicians. Participants must be present for all workshop dates.

Monday-Wednesday, 6:30-10pm, Thursday-Friday, 5:30-9:30pm
Optional: Tuesday and Wednesday 10am-5pm

Fee: $165

Abrons Art Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Zuštiak's apocalypse now

Dancers of Palissimo in Endangered Pieces
all photos © Jeff Woodward

We seem helplessly drawn to dark visions of apocalypse in our art and even our entertainment--perhaps because, as a species, we've done so much to seed and hasten it. Or perhaps it is because we face down doom not only on a planet-wide scale but in every private life and, potentially, in every personal moment of those lives. In Tarot, the image of the Wheel of Fortune turns without cease, bringing the high and mighty to the depths and raising new victors who, themselves, will be supplanted.

The world premiere of Endangered Pieces, a trio by choreographer Pavel Zuštiak of Palissimo, occasions these thoughts.

As the audience files in, the open, raw mainstage at Abrons Arts Center reveals a naked man (dancer Jaro Viňarský) lying face up and motionless on the floor. Electronic music (by collaborators Christian Frederickson and Bobby McElver) fills the air with a dense, chugging texture. Three tall metal poles with heavy bases have also been toppled. A gate of corrugated metal rises just high enough to show us the shins of a second dancer (Matthew Rogers) and then to allow the choreographer to emerge and pull a lighting cord from its socket.

In this stark, industrial environment, Zuštiak and Rogers go about with expressionless, workman-like calm, standing up the poles and attempting to keep the corpse-like Viňarský on his feet. Each time they raise him and release him, he softly slips to the floor. They flip him vertically, horizontally, sling him over Roger's shoulders, drape him over Zuštiak's thighs like Jesus of the Pietà, only face down, ass outward. In these moments and throughout the hour-long piece, Joe Levasseur's eccentric lighting enhances a dreamlike, even Daliesque feeling, adding at least one or two extra dimensions to the 3D of moving beings that sometimes do not resemble humans like us.

Behind the metal gate, the wall of a recessed area has been covered in short planks of wood snuggly fit together and warmly lit. One or another dancer will sometimes enter this modern cave then slip from view, but its shelter is not long for existence.

Voiceover material instructs us to "imagine the last man" and to question what he does and "Does he even understand what he is doing?" A lot of imagining went into the powerful look and sound and performance of this piece. If it sometimes drags (as during the "let's just experiment with all these planks from the busted-up wall" segment), it also sounds an unavoidable alarm.

See Endangered Pieces at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse. Remaining shows: October 4-5, 10-12, 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center

466 Grand Street (corner of Pitt Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Jennifer Monson premieres "Live Dancing Archive" at The Kitchen

At the outset of Jennifer Monson/iLAND's Live Dancing Archive, the audience sits without benefit of light for a very long time. We hear tiny, ambient sounds of one another breathing, shifting, rustling, settling into an alive, soft darkness. Recalling that Monson recently told me that she had come to think of her audience as the ocean, I'm also remembering a time when I sat and watched the open sea at night, its awesomeness shading into something even more mysterious and compelling than usual and more than a little scary. What's in there? What's down there? 

Jennifer Monson (photo by Valerie Oliveiro)

Live Dancing Archive, presented at The Kitchen, serves as a way for Monson to embody a decade of her history of research and making, her sensitive and searching relationship with ecological systems of environments and communities, and her understanding of herself within all of this as a queer woman, activist and artist. It includes not only her hour-long performance--a collaboration with two brilliant artists, lighting designer Joe Levasseur and composer Jeff Kolar--but also a video installation by Robin Vachal and a digital archive designed by Youngjae Josephine Bae.  Levasseur and Kolar accompany her live for the journey, shaping and toning her austere surroundings: Levasseur striding here and there, adjusting the position and varying intensity of portable lights; Kolar sitting at his table of wonders, manipulating "external weather phenomena, wireless technology systems and human activity" through an array of handmade radio transmitters and receivers. If all of this seems like a pretty packed package, it is indeed, necessarily, packed and yet rendered with elegance.

Having seen a preview of part of the video last year, I limited myself to Monson's live show last evening. Even so, I came away feeling full and privileged to witness the skill and authority of this performance.

Jennifer Monson (photo by Ian Douglas)

In Live Dancing Archive, Monson presents herself as a hybrid creature of fur (fake pelt strapped to her torso, concealing her breasts) and human, womanly flesh (the wide mesh of her translucently pale, footless tights enclosing while revealing the nudity of her lower body). She initiates her dancing by pawing and pushing through the air, unfurling into and swimming into it. She endlessly channels organic forms, many presences coming and going in her movement and aspect. An inner wildness becomes external, and vice versa, all with precise control and calibration of pace, effort and coordination. A brief femme-drag sequence/lipsync to singer Antony's "Bird Gerhl" (with Monson ritually adorned by her costume designer, Susan Becker, in a completely uncharacteristic platinum wig, scarlet lipstick and saffron chiffon sleeves) serves as a solemn moment of vulnerability shortly before we experience, along with her, violent disturbance in the surrounding field of energy and sound.

There's so much more that transpires, in this ferocious, profoundly beautiful presentation, than I can say here. I hope you will jump at your chance to take it all in before Live Dancing Archive ends its run at The Kitchen tomorrow night.

Remaining performances: tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

Vachal's video installation will be on view in the theater today (noon-6pm) and tomorrow (11am-6pm) for free viewing.

Browse, enjoy and subscribe to the Live Dancing Archive site: Click here.

The Kitchen
519 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Tami Stronach premieres "Me and Not Me"

It's possible to find yourself completely lost in a work shaped by Tami Stronach. Lost and wondering if you should have brought along some bright red yarn to unspool as you walked so that, later, you could retrace your steps.

Tami Stonach (l) and Lindsey Dietz Marchant and that crazy little bike in Me and Not Me

A kind of poetic disorientation can work to the choreographer's benefit, but not always. When her drive and facility with movement, her fascination with relationships between dancers, run on long, it looks as if she's a little lost, too. But not in Me and Not Me, that brash duet between the choreographer and Lindsey Dietz Marchant, both articulate, masterful performers. Stronach gave this artful piece its world premiere last night at Dance New Amsterdam, along with a solo from repertory (Mother Tongue, with Dietz Marchant dancing like Isadora-gone-postmodern) and a work in progress (Closer, a more lighthearted quartet toying with DNA's space and our focus of attention). If you enjoy dance that treats human nature in its complexity from the inside out, Stronach's evening at DNA could be a wise choice for your weekend.

The title, Me and Not Me, hints that the two characters might be two sides of the same woman, as easily as they could be a literal Self and Other. It also suggests the rejection of something inside a person that she does not want to see and accept. The piece pits a fairly well-rooted (and ferociously energetic) Stronach against the irrational vision of Dietz-Marchant, a full-grown woman making her wobbly and crash-prone way, 'round and 'round, on a small child's bike, strewing aromatic yellow flowers (that made me sneezy) and, when she is not astride the bike, clinging to, pawing at and struggling with the choreographer. (I made a note: "So, Tami, who was the impossibly difficult person in your life?") The women handle each other with stubbornness, resistance and deep need. Jane Shaw contributes a resonant sound design--a mixtape of gorgeous Czech folk and pop--now, I'll need to seek out more music by Karina Denike--interspersed with the grating, repetitious streaming of anxiety and OCD. Go-to lighting guy Joe Levasseur, once again, works his painterly magic against the women's skin.

Now through Saturday evening, 7:30pm

Information and tickets

Dance New Amsterdam
280 Broadway (entrance on Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Zuštiak's "Strange Cargo"

Sitting in the darkened, looming Synod House--a side building of the world's largest cathedral, St. John the Divine, rarely opened to the public--you're left with the bluish glow from narrow, distant stained-glass windows. The blue emits a vague comfort, but the lead strips crossing, connecting, restraining the blue snatches that meager comfort away. You shrink back, feeling small, a bit threatened. A man creeps across the floor on his knees, passes a table, pivots, hesitates, gingerly touches the heel of one hand to the floor before skittering around. Other people creep in, one by one, building into a quintet of loners who make actions and sounds of motorized, robotic toys or figures from violent video games. Don't look for the remote control; there is none--and no controller--in sight. There is no God. Only the body and the impossibility of two or more bodies occupying the same space at the same time. And, as we will see, the inevitability of trouble.

Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo concludes Zuštiak's Painted Bird Trilogy with Strange Cargo--a interdisciplinary production presented by the currently, and interestingly, nomadic Performance Space 122. (The entire trilogy will play out, in September, at Ohio's Wexner Center for the Arts.) Those who have followed this journey, from La MaMa (Bastard, 2010) to Baryshnikov Arts Center (Amidst, 2011) to this ecclesiastical assembly hall, might agree with me that what unfolds here now bumps the dark intensity up several notches and calls up the most grueling and risk-taking performances from its extraordinary crew. At one point, sweat pours down dancer Jeremy Xido's face, but Zuštiak sweats not only body but mind and soul, too.

Aside from Xido and his quietly-menaced prey Luke Murphy, Strange Cargo boasts astonishing work from Lindsey Dietz-Marchant (the most memorable presence in Amidst), Giulia Carotenuto and Denisa Musilova. The rest of Zuštiak's team of collaborators are also tight, and they once again include Joe Levasseur (innovative lighting techniques) and Christian Frederickson and Ryan Rumery (superb original music, performed live). You must see this one.

Strange Cargo continues at Synod House through May 13: Thursday and Sunday at 8pm, Friday and Saturday at 8pm and 9:30pm. Space is limited, and there will be no late seating. For program and ticket information, click here.

Synod House
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue at West 110th Street, Manhattan
(map and directions)

Zuštiak's "The Painted Bird: Amidst"

Here's the link to my Dance Magazine review of The Painted Bird: Amidst by Pavel Zuštiak+Palissimo Company at Baryshnikov Arts Center.

"THEM" and us

I saw them once. I don’t know when or who they were because they were too far away. -- Dennis Cooper in THEM

PS 122's revival of THEM--a dance/text/music piece created during the early era of AIDS--feels not only fresh but necessary today. With a title that suggests observation and finger-pointing from a distance, this work brings to mind that saying about where your other four fingers are pointing. While its text, quietly recited live by writer Dennis Cooper, reflects memory the way a river's surface plays at capturing the moon, its physical and imaginal energy could not be more in-your-face, more disturbing in real time, in distracted, fearful, denial-bound America.

The hour-long piece premiered at PS 122 in 1986 with a performance team including its primary creators--Cooper, Chris Cochrane (music) and Ishmael Houston-Jones (direction and choreographic score for improvisation). For the reconstructed work, developed in residency at The New Museum, the trio are joined by very talented lighting designer Joe Levasseur and a new team of young dancers--Joey Cannizzaro, Felix Cruz, Niall Noel, Jeremy Pheiffer, Jacob Slominski, Arturo Vidich and Enrico D. Wey. All shoulder great responsibility here with a challenge that demands and takes everything an artist has to give. They give it.

Cruising, anonymous sex, rough sex, gay bashing, anxiety, illness, mortality--the specificity of these things, and of those tumbling, grappling, "tangled guys" invoked by Cooper, are there for anyone to see. The uncommon beauty of THEM is also its terror. Awkward, expansive, often explosive individual and interactive movement throws light onto an aspect of American maleness--whether sourced in biology or in society--that rules. Desire rules: Watch how every aggressive part of a dancer's body gets its way, its voice, humbling the heavy, listless head which merely follows, helplessly and blissfully, in momentum. 

Dramatic lighting carves the various scenarios out of the midnight darkness of a space bound on two sides by packed-solid audience seating. While the hip PS 122 crowd--generally "downtown" artists all--might not be unnerved by most of what occurs in THEM, there are at least two scenes that would fail to rattle only the dead. The first occurs when the tense undercurrent simmering in the air suddenly bursts into violence. The second links back to the work's opening image--Vidich led forward and blindfolded by Houston-Jones--and involves the entanglement, and surely the identification, of the young dancer with the bloody carcass of a goat.

This one scene--not brief enough, I'm sure, for most observers--acts like an implosion, as if everything preceding it has collapsed into horror. Here we have the ancient rite, the casting out or slaughtering of the scapegoat, the one bearing our sins and woes. As long as the goat stays well away (or is dead), we are purified. We can breathe easily, live safely, all troubles gone. We still practice this rite today. We just do it in ways that keep our hands clean and smelling sweet.

THEM concludes tonight with 8pm and 10pm performances. I'd be surprised if tickets were still available, but give it a shot here. It's worth it.

THEM

Performance Space 122

150 First Avenue (at Ninth Street), Manhattan

Paintings by Joe Levasseur

Performance Space 122 invites you to a exhibition of paintings by award-winning lighting designer Joe Levasseur.

Opening: Tuesday, October 12 (7-9pm)
Performance Space 122
Downstairs Theater/Gallery/Lounge
150 First Avenue (enter on East 9th Street), Manhattan

Regular schedule:

Wednesday, October 13 (7-9pm)

Thursday, October 14 (7-11pm)

includes Thursday Night Social for I Am Saying Goodnight

Friday and Saturday, October 15–16 (7-9pm)

Sunday, October 17 (2-6pm)

Thursday, October 21 (7-11pm)

includes Thursday Night Social for Them

Saturday and Sunday October 23- 24 (2-6pm)

Monday, October 25 (7-9pm)

Click here for additional information on Levasseur and his visual art.

Sperber's "Naomi" @Brazil

Naomi is a handsome site-specific work that drills into its site on an almost cellular level. In 2005, choreographer Anna Sperber founded Brazil, the Bushwick studio in which this quintet plays out. Collaborating with lighting mage Joe Lavasseur, she brings out dramatic beauty in this humble loft space.

As the opening night audience squeezed into two tightly-spaced rows of folding chairs along one side of the studio, I suddenly had an unbidden, cheerful thought–that this is a place in which good things happen in this time of so many bad things. Where this thought came from–or why it arrived--I cannot guess. But Naomi is, in any case, a good thing.

Outside the room’s windows, a silken banner rustled in a strong breeze. Streetlights and lights from aircraft and nearby buildings added to an overall sense of embracing brightness and warmth. Sperber used this, opening the work with the studio’s lights out and keeping things that way for a long while, relying upon the external lights to silhouette her dancers--Julie Alexander, Natalie Green, Jennifer Lafferty, Tara Lorenzen and Rebecca Serrell Cyr--as they entered and circumnavigated the studio. Over 40 minutes, they defined a territory, patrolled it, energized it, complicated it, glamorized it, ritualized it, reflected it, haunted it.

Sperber continually brought the outside in–from the gorgeous wet glow of a neighboring building’s facade to the sudden flush of sound from an opened window. She drew our attention beyond the confines of the space, even having dancers gaze outside or extend themselves outside the windows. Add her seredipitous and marvelous collaboration with Bushwick to the credits for Levasseur, Nate Wooley (whose music helped animate Brazil) and FACADE/FASAD (whose costumes, at times, catch the light just so).

Seating is very limited and, according to Sperber's Web site as of this morning, tickets remain only for tonight’s 9:30pm show. Click here now for information and reservations.

Brazil

1182 Flushing Avenue

Bushwick, Brooklyn

Jefferson Street station on the L (complete directions; map)

Hassabi's collage

When the audience enters Performance Space 122's theater, dancer Maria Hassabi is already in action--well, maybe not in action, since SoloShow is so much about the collaging of a series of static images--"the history of female representation...pulled from art history, pop culture and everyday life." But she's there, amid James Lo's recording of what sounds like a large, bustling audience assembling for a performance.

Wearing a cream-colored, sleeveless top and pants clinging to her ballerina-skinny frame, she occupies one corner of a large platform, shifting from pose to pose. We don't often see her expression. When we do, it's like a thunderclap;  she suddenly pivots towards us with that haunted, big-eyed face and legs splayed in tremulous, claw-like rigidity. Soon, though, she tilts her head back so far that her torso appears beheaded.  Although the soundtrack's roar subsides, the severe tension of her pose increases. Joe Levasseur's overhead lighting blasts her, but she appears to take to it, willingly, like a lizard adjusting and drying itself under desert sun.

Sometimes she drapes herself over the platform's edge, neck straining, blood pooling in her face. Often, she will turn her body into brittle sculpture on the featureless, ungiving platform. The work lasts about an hour of clock time--quite a testament to Hassabi's vigor and determination--but you might find yourself completely losing track of time.

I regret missing Hassabi's Solo--conceived as an autonomous half of a diptych and premiered at PS 122 last month as part of FIAF's Crossing the Line festival--and I also haven't seen her SoloShow alternate, Hristoula Harakas.

A joint presentation of Performa 09 and PS 122, SoloShow continues through Sunday: Friday and Saturday, 8pm and 10pm; Sunday, 6pm. Complete information and ticketing here.

Where the heart is

I can only imagine what it must mean for Alex Escalante to present a work like Clandestino in the presence of two families who cherish him--his biological kin and his artistic kin from New York's dance world. The hour-long work--presented through tonight by Danspace Project--is inspired by his parent's Mexican heritage and personal and public policy issues related to the immigration of undocumented workers. That sounds like a lot to swallow, but not to worry: Escalante has blended in just enough personal and political (and aesthetic) elements to encourage us to empathize and to think.

With the help of Joe Levasseur--the lighting phenom who also co-designed Escalante's set--he tranforms the sanctuary of St. Mark's Church into a place of interrogation as well as celebration with high-spirited social dancing amid increasingly provocative interaction with the audience. Escalante cavorts with the rambuntious, sexy team of Reneé Archibald, Pedro Osorio and Sandy Tillet, and I could have watched them dance all night. I also wished for a longer listen to the live music by Los Inmigrantes del Sur--Ausencio Cesario Garcia, Javier Francisco Dorantes Davila and Joel Vasquez Jeronimo.

Clandestino closes tonight. Due to the configuration of the audience, space is very limited, but try to get in. And don't forget to wear your dancing shoes!

Reservations: 212-674-8194
Danspace Project information

And if you missed my Body and Soul interview with Alex, here it is!

Out of Israel

92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival at The Ailey Citigroup Theater. Whew! When I was writing those damned "Footnotes" for The Village Voice, that would have taken up just about all of my word allotment! (Glad that's over!) Here are a few more words to throw into that mix: LeeSaar The Company & Netta Yerushalmy: Out of Israel. One work apiece by young Israeli choreographers of note.

Bilocale--come close please...,Yerushalmy's duet with choreographic collaborator Toni Melaas, benefits from the intimate arrangement of its audience around the edges of the theater's performance space. We feel the energy of the two women as they bound towards us or when one paints the other's back in slashes or dots of scarlet and slams her down onto a sheet of paper--surely an alarming form of printmaking. Over 25 minutes, the movement involves quirky, rubbery effects and various clinches and entanglements, suggesting volatile inner states and external connections. Boundaries will be violated. There will be blood.

For Geisha--presented by writer/actress Lee Sher and dancer-choreographer Saar Harari
--the audience is returned to conventional theater seating. There's no formal intermission between the companies--just a pause while our folding chairs are removed from the performing space. Keeping the audience seated that long doesn't work to the advantage of a piece that might be too long anyway. But Geisha has extraordinarily confident solo turns by Jye-Hwei Lin--topless in jeans and full of vivid, cinematic characters--who also duets with the always provocative and brooding (and identically-attired) Harari. Sher wears a kimono-like robe in her interspersed solos. Resembling a cross between Carrie Fisher and Celine Dion, she lipsyncs a couple of Israeli pop songs, regarding us with oodles of saccharine "sincerity" and strolling past the front row, grabbing our hands. Sher's tackiness stands in contrast to her equally showy yet cool and really out there colleagues. The lighting by Joe Levasseur on bare flesh is--no big surprise--terrific.

Out of Israel runs through Sunday afternoon, March 9. The festival continues through March 16. For a schedule and ticketing information, click here or call 212-415-5552.

Got a C.L.U.E. for you

Like most relatively sane people, I dread crowded subways and cramped airline seats and, for a brief moment last night, I had my attitude on when I was crammed into the middle of a row of tightly-packed seats in Performance Space 122's downtown theater for C.L.U.E. This roughly hour-long work is a new incarnation of a traveling performance and installation piece by robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) and frequent collaborators AJ Blandford (set) and A.L. Steiner (who made the film with the duo). The lighting is by Joe Lavasseur.

The theater brimmed with patrons, and the last person to arrive in my row kept standing up and twisting around to see if the people she expected had finally arrived--they hadn't, and the entrance had already been closed--thus further invading my personal space with her winter coat, her large bag and her warm exhalations. As I waited for the performance to begin, I trained a leery eye on the smallish, identical video projections on two of the walls--a static scene of scruffy, uneven terrain--and on the mound of fake grey boulders wedged into one corner of the space. I didn't notice the lava debris and blond sand on the floor until later, but I did notice that Blandford had placed a representation of the natural world--albeit a tacky, ungainly one--in a theater, a temple of the artificial. The boulders took up much of the performance space and looked ominous and right-up-in-our-faces.

In addition, I had the sneaking suspicion that the score created and performed by Kinski (Chris Martin, Matthew Reid Schwartz, Barrett Wilke and Lucy Atkinson) would mean having to brave an aural onslaught from the left side of the space. (They like that sort of thing at PS 122.) I wasn't wrong about that escalation of hostilities, quite appropriate to the show's escalating exhilaration, but by the end of the evening, the band had made an unlikely new fan. I hadn't realized how enchanting, even sensuous at times, Kinski could be.

And I wasn't quite prepared for what Robbins and Childs had in mind, but their first entrance--and I think it's fair to call it that--warmed me to them and made me chuckle to myself. In the video, a couple of tiny, red-clad figures peeked out from the behind the rocks and sparse foliage and began to pick their way across the terrain, moving in and out of view. Such a small way to make a big entrance and, amid all that stillness, what a big impact that tinyness had! Although they were not physically present in the theater and were remotely situated in the video's environment, they seemed to be with us. And, no, I can't explain it any better than that. Trust me or see for yourself.

Inspired by travels along the backroads of Southern California, C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) introduces us to two wild, mysterious women who, through their movements, live and on video, come to channel the formidably strong and violent forces of the natural (rocks, lake, sea) and artificial (highway) environment around them. Starting off as distant, miniscule figures in a video, who nevertheless seem palpably real, Robbins and Childs become forces of nature who rock the theater--and us--with their raw energy. And I'm upset now to learn that the Times's great art critic Holland Cotter got to call Robbins and Childs Thelma and Louise long before I did.

In the most practical sense, the "color" in "color location ultimate experience" refers to the pair's frequent costume changes--each featuring clothing of a single, deeply-saturated color--which, along with the shock of real sage smoke wafting through the air and the cranked up music put me in mind of the '60s. The piece unfolds before us like a tempting drug and like the effects of one.



See robbinschilds's C.L.U.E. at PS 122 tonight at 8:30pm through Saturday (with additional Friday and Saturday performances at 10:30pm). Click here for information and tickets.

Maria Hassabi's Gloria

Maria Hassabi
P.S. 122 (November 7–10, 2007)
Reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa for DanceMagazine.com (December 2007)

Maria Hassabi and Hristoula Harakas—two of the most exciting contemporary dance artists in New York—exist alone together in Gloria, Hassabi’s latest work. Originally conceived as a trio of solos (with David Adamo), the piece unfolds as two physically separate but temporally overlapping solos in a theater stripped raw. Houselights remain up until the piece’s finale. Both dancers and viewers endure harsh exposure.

Sic transit gloria? Hassabi’s opening section is a long string of limber, absurd, sometimes tawdry poses held for anywhere from eight to sixteen seconds, set against a plain backdrop and performed with the kind of stunned, trauma-victim deadness common to high fashion photos. Her spread-legged sprawls seem less pornographic than forensic. This woman is a mobile crime scene.

The brilliant score—designed by Jody Elf from a real-time recording by Hassabi—is the oppressive roar of highway traffic occasionally haunted by wisps of music. This easily conjures a context: warehouse on the seedy side of town. You can almost smell the pollution.

Hassabi’s solo continues as Harakas quietly slips into the space. In contrast to Hassabi’s pink stirrup tights and undershirt, she’s dressed in peek-a-boo black tights and top. Holding to one side of the space and keeping her back to the audience, Harakas slowly shifts her hips and rolls her shoulders as she approaches a separate backdrop. A long time passes before she idly turns to the audience, unseeing eyes skimming over everyone’s face as she twirls a lock of hair before drifting away. Hassabi now races through her poses while Harakas takes things at a syrupy pace, but both manage to look like big felines in cages. A snippet of someone’s version of Eurythmics’s “Sweet Dreams,” a melancholy swelling of movie music, a cellphone’s ringtone—these sounds hazily float through the score and evaporate like spurts of consciousness, doomed.

Harakas’ performance is particularly stunning. Her face, at rest, evokes a goddess out of classical myth, the kind you don’t mess with. And when, plastered against her distant backdrop, she lets a few facial muscles tug a small, heartless smile into place for no reason at all, it’s devastating.

Lighting designer Joe Levasseur—like Harakas and other members of the creative team, a longtime Hassabi collaborator—has outdone himself. Can you imagine a dance in which both performers suddenly quit the space and, in their unnerving absence, lighting takes center stage, dramatically dimming as the soundscape intensifies? Thus ends Gloria. Sic transit.