Seven emerging artists make tracks at New York Live Arts

Dance tends to be a highly sensory experience for me, less of a head experience. And it's my senses, my instincts, my gut that I trust first, if not exclusively. If your work comes packaged in words (for funders, for presenters, for press, for your closest colleagues), I might or might not find them useful or, ultimately, reflective of what I've experienced.

So, sometimes I just don't get it. I have to look past what you've written (or has been written about you) to see you. And maybe that means I'm not seeing you the way you want to be seen. But there it is. Think of me as that outsider from another planet who does not share your language now or yet or ever.

Case in point, the language surrounding this season's edition of Fresh Tracks--part of an extensive program for early-career choreographers at New York Live Arts--which will be repeated tonight. Some of the verbiage accompanying works from the current individual artists and duos I get and appreciate. Some of it looks hopelessly opaque to me. I just need to say that straight up.

Melanie Greene’s Performing Okay solos is described as conjuring "a curious contradiction of meaning, quality, and intention as one word sits simultaneously within competing body and language narratives. It sparks questions surrounding repetition, physicality, and language."

The solo is handsomely performed, fascinating, intermittently amusing and emotionally moving, and I suspect that descriptive language around it might speak to Greene's peers (other young choreographers) more than it does to me. What's going on in Performing Okay as I see it? I see a young woman, a Black woman, a young Black woman artist in New York literally struggling with the impulse to tell her truth--which is that she's not always okay--and the ingrained habit of hiding it. That's real and something worth dancing about. Maybe it's not a good idea for an artist to speak too clearly about such things before people have had a chance to sit their butts down in the theater, though. So, I would have been content to be completely surprised by the clear human beauty and meaning in this dance and not be searching for the abstractions dryly listed in its promotional statement.

Sarah Lifson’s i eat pancakes for dinner, we're told "is freedom, free will, and free verse. It concerns itself with consumption, and the active vs. passive infiltration of information into our cells."

In a queer way, I get the freedom part, and I like the implication of movement as free verse. (And pancakes for dinner? Girl, pass me some.) Her performance starts by taking us by surprise--a dash into and out of the space, flailing all the way. Then she leaves us to chuckle at the empty space. Next, a little bomb of music drops--splat!--then abruptly cuts off. When Lifson finally returns to the space, she's all flapping arms and hands; loose, angular body pelting here and there. With one arm rigidly restrained by the other, she zooms forward, aiming to poke a woman in the front row. She observes no boundaries. Her sense of space, time and even lighting are all equally offbeat, equally heedless. But "consumption, and the active vs. passive infiltration of information into our cells" are things she knows and that I don't see.

The earnest, comprehensive description for EmmaGrace Skove-Epes and Jonathan González's now-titled I'd give you Bodies reads:

Mining collaborative as well as personal movement histories, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes and Jonathan González’s yet-to-be-titled work investigates the disparities and similarities that lie between our bodies culturally, socially, and artistically. Harmony and dissonance continually emerge in their identity markers as a queer identified white woman and a queer identified brown man. While experimenting with the physical aspects of disorientation, duration, momentum, and intimacy, the manifold aspects of their identities, creative visions, and creative histories also become physical realities at play.

None of that conveys the keen, strange theatrical experience of overhearing these dancers apparently colliding and thrashing in the dark over a lengthy period with only a glimmer of their coordinates in space. They conduct an entire relationship in sound--which, oddly enough, sounds sexual--largely hidden from our sight. At one point, one does turn on a flashlight, the beam of which acts more as attractive decor against the dark of the stage than useful illumination of the performers. Eventually, lights reveal them, and the remaining time might show what we could not see and may or may not have misinterpreted--an attachment that looks complex and troublesome. A lot of humanity to look at and process. Skove-Epes and González are skillful, searching artists, and--as I've noticed in González's previous work--they seem intent on subverting how people watch and performers function within theatrical space.

The description for Eli Tamondong's solo (with audience helpers) Feast or Famine, might (just maybe) tell a little too much too soon, but it at least explicitly connects us to living human experience and gets the whole of my attention:

Melding dance and spoken word, Eli Tamondong’s Feast or Famine struggles with American masculinity and love through a queer Filipino boy’s eyes. Tinikling, a traditional Philippine dance, and ballet collide over golf commentary and gay sex, coming-of-age in a world of fetishization and colonized bodies. Entangled by white love, how does this boy find value in all colors?

My wife likes to say that some Hollywood trailers show you everything you need to know about a movie--for better or worse--and, then, why do you have to see it? Nevertheless, this dance's description offers some guidance to the stark, poetic and multi-sensory experience of Tamandong's performance. His visual and sonic approach is bold and unsettling, effective and not to be forgotten.

In Hope So Hard, Georgia Wall and Itamar Segev are, we learn, "topless, wearing only baggy white cotton briefs which resemble diapers or modern day loincloths. They merge and disperse, searching and subverting trying, to burst open lust and prayer. Georgia loves to alter her body. Itamar can make her cry when he sings."

Like the previous artists, Wall and Segev find ways to tear down the fourth wall and mess with lighting, structure and all sense of propriety. I'm just not sure why, and I'm also not sure what's fresh about this particular track.

"Fresh Tracks" concludes tonight with a 7:30pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Guest curators offer food for thought at Danspace Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In their skin: BAAD! presents works by men of color

Jonathan González
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Benjamin Lundberg
(photo: Jeca Rodríguez-Colón)

In Our Skin--a one-evening show presented at BAAD! with Pepatián for the 2015 BlakTinX Performance Series--offered a rare and important opportunity. The event focused on works by young male choreographers and performance artists of color--Benjamin Lundberg, Gentry George (who showed several short pieces), Alvaro González Dupuy, Eduardo Fajardo and Jonathan González. The run-on format--two hours with no intermission--should be rethought as it became tedious, poorly serving works presented late in the program. Why not distribute the lineup of artists over at least two evenings of reasonable length--say, no more than 90 minutes--allowing breathing room for both these artists and their audiences?

In a program ranging from Lundberg drawing vials of his own blood to mix with dishwashing liquid as a painting medium (Limpieza de Sangre) to queer chatterbox Fajardo charmingly singing and dancing along to a cumbia hit he later questions for its misogyny (CABARET), George's solos and duets stood out for conventional polish--the look of Ailey crossed with contemporary ballet--and the remarkable facility of their performers. In Our Skin certainly could not be faulted for lack of variety in approach to performance.

Chilean, New York-based Alvaro González Dupuy was, for me, the strongest discovery and pleasure of the evening. In Dame la Mano and i give you my elbow--his duet with equally vivid Emily Smith--stream-of-contact, genial roughhousing and audience involvement yielded unexpected freshness. I would welcome the chance to see more from this mind.

Jonathan González's curious deep divine shows him to be a clean, feline mover with an interest in engaging the possibilities of his environment and messing with the way we understand sound, lighting and the body in theater space. Sorry to say, by this point, the lengthy evening found me feeling captive, low in energy and unprepared to give my best attention. But González--recently seen in Patricia Hoffbauer's Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People at Gibney--has some new projects coming up in 2016. Worth getting on your radar.

Closed. For information on remaining BlakTinX Performance Series programs (closing November 21), click here.

BAAD!
2474 Westchester Avenue, Bronx (map/directions)