Danspace Project presents Reggie Wilson's Platform 2018

Left to right: Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez,
Angie Pittman and Edisa Weeks--artists who participated in
The Dossier Charrette in Reggie Wilson's platform at Danspace Project.
(Photo courtesy of Danspace Project)

Reggie Wilson’s Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018 at Danspace Project) is laden. It is complex. It is stuffed with history and geography and architecture and cultures and ancestral energies and choreography and ideas and imagery and walking around neighborhoods and...stuff. As Black as one of my Bajan family’s festivities--the full range of meat and fowl, desserts and drinks, music and dancing and that one eccentric cousin holding court, as always.

How to take it in? How to make sense? How to interact and respond? Choose to sit on the outskirts and gaze from a critical distance? Or follow your curiosity, your empathy, your bravery, throwing yourself into the deep? Sink or swim, baby!

Maybe it’s wiser to break off a piece, here or there, to work with or be worked over by. You’ll have so many from which to choose.

During part of last Saturday’s Bell & Water: a symposium--for which I performed a brief spiritual ceremony to open the afternoon--Wilson and his Danspace Project associates offered a guide to “How to Navigate the Platforms.” This concluding panel presented an overview of Executive Director/Chief Curator Judy Hussie-Taylor’s groundbreaking curatorial initiative and a rundown of what to expect from Wilson’s current platform programming and its engaging catalogue. What it did not do--what perhaps could never be done--is extend a comforting, reassuring hand to anyone who might need to have things defined and neatly arranged for quick, easy consumption.

I’m thinking, this morning, about Wilson’s post-show conversations with his artists and how, each evening, he insists on passing around the dossier commissioned from historian Prithi Kanakamedala to inform and possibly inspire the platform’s artists and how that document--which I have never held in my own hands--somehow always fails to make it all the way from one end of the audience to the other. I don’t know why Wilson insists in having people try to hand it around in the allotted time. Maybe to demonstrate that it--written down and lasting, central and centering--really exists? That there is an intellectual blueprint, if you want to call it that? Is that really necessary? To glance at a page or two for a few moments--though, clearly, people have been taking longer--before passing it to the guy to your right?

I’ll take the radical view that Wilson--who has said, any number of times, that he’s resistant to the way our Westernized worship of the written word demotes other ways of knowing and communicating--might relax a little and consider stepping back from this practice as well as from the practice of post-show discussions entirely.

Stop right there. Don’t be horrified. And make no mistake: I love Wilson and am a huge fan of his from way back. This is not a criticism. But after seeing each of a couple of the performance events in this platform, I would have been immensely grateful for complete silence--and even private time for recovery--so strong was the impact. I also sensed some hesitation and reticence in some of the artists as they attempted to answer questions and in most of the audience folks as they were asked for questions. Maybe everyone needed time for more than a few breaths to re-group, re-ground and let the energies and ideas inside the works settle in. Settle in and continue the work that the best of dance can do.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe post-show talks are totally cool. But these seem forced. I don’t want to hear about and be directed by...so much...not just yet. But, you’ll say, you’re the woman who says she sat down and read the catalogue from cover to cover. Yes, in my own time, and in my own space, in privacy, so I could concentrate and take in and sift stuff. And the catalogue is a verbal as well as visual collage--mirroring what’s best about the platform format--and I could have read and gazed upon those pages in any order I desired. This time, I just chose to be all compulsively Virgo about it.

Go see the performances. There’s electricity and surprise and vivid performance--thinking now of dancemaker/performers like Jonathan Gonzalez, Angie Pittman, Ni’Ja Whitson and Same as Sister/Briana Brown-Tipley and Hilary Brown--and a real feeling of works with open, organic life which will continue to bring out new things to share and ponder. Works not only glancing at once at history and into the future but gazing from the vantage points of multiple temporal, cultural and personal dimensions. Just find a portal that looks interesting and jump right in.

For full information on Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance, click here.

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

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It's complicated: Cynthia Oliver celebrates Black masculinity

At left, Duane Cyrus with Jonathan Gonzalez
in Cynthia Oliver's Virago-Man Dem
(photo: Chris Cameron)

The Latin prefix “vir” means “man”; the suffix “-ago” indicates female. Thus, the term “virago” has, since ancient times, suggested that elusive flicker between genders we know so well and deny so violently. 

--from promotional text for Cynthia Oliver's Virago-Man Dem

Dance artist Cynthia Oliver centers the human body in her adroit Virago-Man Dem, just opened at BAM's Next Wave Festival. In fact, the four bodies centered here--Duane Cyrus, Jonathan Gonzalez, Ni’Ja Whitson and Niall Noel Jones--comprise one of the most cunning, most satisfying performance ensembles on hand this season. But Virago-Man Dem also boasts visual and sonic design of strong-enough confidence to support its movement without distracting or detracting from it. Particularly impressive is the work of Black Kirby (Afro-speculative comics artists John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) with projections and animations by John Boesche and lighting designer Amanda K. Ringger's rich imagination of place, time and mood. With costume designer Susan Becker and composer Jason Finkelman in the mix, Oliver directs a dream team of adepts at BAM Fisher.

With this piece, Oliver cracks open masculinity as a fixed idea received and upheld by Black men. Inspired by her dancers' experiences as well as her dual sensibilities as a woman of Afro-Caribbean birth living and working in the US, she draws from observation of masculinities, finding material in a deceptively easy stroll down the street, a clever dash on a basketball court, a sinuous sashay along imagined catwalks and more. What makes her resulting dance not merely a patchwork of a bunch of stuff done by three male-identified performers and one gender nonconforming performer is her taste and talent for connective flow and her eye for how being willfully or ecstatically off-center or molten or in-between uncovers the more inside the person. More self, more capacity, more joy, more supple, resilient strength. It's this more that, sadly, often threatens individuals, families, communities, religions and nations. It's this more--isn't it?--that for which we secretly yearn and which artists brilliantly model for us.

It might not necessarily take a woman to watch these things from the outside and bring them to her canvas or stage, but it takes this woman, perhaps, with  apparently endless reserve of movement ideas to bring her concepts alive and keep us interested over 75 minutes. And from the work's beginning (in physical stillness and visual murkiness) through the hoodie-covered dancers' testing of bodies and selves and their growing clarity and enlivening, with Ringger enhancing the dimensions of Oliver's sculpted movement, we're kept on the edge of our seats.

Here's a journey ready to be taken more than once, but consider yourself lucky if you get to see Virago-Man Dem even just one time.

Virago-Man Dem continues tonight through Saturday evening with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Prior to tonight's performance, Cynthia Oliver will offer a free talk, Examining Black Masculinity, at 6pm in Wendy's Subway Reading Room, downstairs at BAM Fisher.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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What's CURRENT: the CURRENT SESSIONS returns to Wild Project

Curated and produced by Alexis Convento, this season's edition of the CURRENT SESSIONS at Wild Project features performers exploring the concept of embodied resistance. I attended last evening's hour-long show, REFUSE, solos by three artists of color--NIC Kay, Samantha CC and Jonathan Gonzalez.

Of these, only Samantha CC kept us staring at the stage and confined to our seats and the building itself the entire time, which seemed appropriate. After all, her gentle, mellifluous singing, in Sanctuary--second work on the bill--invoked the condition of being settled into the physical state, Black and female, sanctuary for an ethereal soul, a home offering stability, place, placement to something that would otherwise easily flap away, a home offering visibility and audibility and, presumably, power. "I know that the body is a temporary home...a temporary home...a temporary home for my soul." Which brings up this thought in me: While you've got it, use it.

From our temporary perches, we watched this quiet exultation issued from a woman who first presented herself panting and costumed in plastic trash bags she clawed and scraped from her limbs to reveal a body stocking, underwear, one breast covered by the doves' feathers. If we passed her outside on an East Village street, she would be the homeless person famous for incoherent mumbles or formidable rants. Here, she is sweet-voiced, lucid, illuminated and illuminating. A New Age medium.

Sanctuary was described as "a multi-media performance speaking to technology's ability to both restrain and liberate." Honestly, I can't say I saw that, but I did see the body's ability to both restrain and liberate--an idea I found more intriguing.

The evening opened with the audience suddenly, inexplicably uprooted from the seats we'd just sunk into. We were directed, instead, to the sidewalk where it took a while to notice an unassuming figure turned from us and leaning with forehead pressed against the building's white-washed brick wall. Standing under the building number, 195, was this dancer in a sleeveless unitard of black with star-like speckles. White strings from several buoyant balloons--translucent milky white save for one Mylar silver pillow balloon--coiled around the dancer's neck. It was NIC Kay beginning Get Well Soon!, a dance that would gradually move them over the sidewalk, out into traffic, across the street to the edges of a dumpster and finally back to the lights of the Wild Project stage.

Described as "a loose meditation on the often used wish of recovery"--and what self-care, recovery and wellness mean in the context of the perennial trauma and threat to Black lives--Get Well Soon! played a serious game with the mind. Kay uses limber flow to sprawl around space and a crunchier, jerking motion to re-position limbs and torso, both strategies rigorously controlled by this skilled performer. Their form is profoundly elegant while bold in assertiveness; their body--crouching, lunging, squatting, splaying--embraces gravity while those well-anchored balloons brightly incline heavenward. The body is like, "I'm doing what I'm doing, regardless." The balloons are heedless of this. They are pretty, a little silly in a way but...yeah, pretty, especially in this mellow summer night on an East Village street. You can't take your eyes off any of this. And you can't help some ambiguity about what you're watching. I can't see this Black body with cords wrapping around the neck and extending up into the air and not think about lynching.

Kay is wicked smart, an exacting performer with a divx quality I will dare call classic glamour. Catch them next chance you get.

I also like Jonathan Gonzalez because I never know what to expect from this guy.
This time, for Ikarus, he showed up in blackface, wearing a shiny Mylar-silver jacket and carrying a huge, scarlet Valentine balloon he ultimately draped around an audience member's neck. A lot of bizarre things happened in Ikarus including a chilling version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky"--yippie yi ooh yippie yi yay--and some foolery in which Gonzalez hid out of viewing range and some of us shot out of our seats to try to find him only to be stymied by the theater's lights flipping on and off, and then he returned in a duck mask to dance his ass off and quite well, mind you, having his own divx quality. Can't say what any of this was about but the short version of his description reads "Escape is exactly the distance between a dirt bike and the will to leave." Oh, and something like that happened, too, ending the show with the audience once again up on its feet and gazing from the lobby out onto Third Street.

As always, I have no idea exactly what you'll encounter if you venture over to the CURRENT SESSIONS for the series' last show tonight, since it's a different draw of artists. (The first evening, RESCUE, offered works by Gregory King and Megan Young; Raha Behnam; and Elena Rose Light.) But Alexis Convento has keen eyes and provocative taste. She always takes risks, and it's worth your doing so, too.

The CURRENT SESSIONS: Volume VII: On Resistance concludes this evening with RESTRICT, featuring works by Dalel Bacre, Dorian Nuskind-Oder and Simon Grenier-Poirier, and Tina Wang and Tingying Ma at 8pm. Click here for information and tickets.

Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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BUFU presents "HERE ON OUT" in Bushwick

Curator Ali Rosa-Salas's HERE ON OUT--part of July's BUFU events*--drew an ebullient crowd to Bushwick's Secret Project Robot bar and small performance space. One night only, it was one of those events that compel your presence and, clearly, a lot of dance's smartest and coolest read the memo. The ever-loving MTA did not, however, but that problem was deftly handled, last minute, by pushing the announced start time back a half-hour.

Due to illness, I made an early exit and missed the final performer, Jonathan Gonzalez, but I was there when the little dance party gave way to a solo by FLEXN and FLEXN Evolution star Shelby Shellz Suzie Q Felton--whose uncommonly bendy body surfaces a world of enthralling characters and drama. Felton was followed by a duet by Angie Pittman and Lily Bo Shapiro. Pittman and Shapiro made good use of the dim, crowded room by commandeering space for whatever their willful bodies chose to be, for however they chose to move in ways that question the conventionally functional way we humans are socialized to regard and move our bodies. Pittman maneuvered herself like popping corn. Shapiro sloshed and buried herself in darkness and oozed through the audience. And first both and then Pittman alone repeatedly galloped between two doors accented by powerful sound and a dash of lantern light. Sitting on the floor or on the precious-few benches, we often had to scoot feet and butts out of the way of this toomuchness crashing our shoreline. And it was kind of fun.

As for Gonzalez--always a surprising and striking performer--I hope to catch up with him at The Current Sessions, coming up in mid-August at the wild project. NIC Kay is another must-see artist presenting work in this series. For information on The Current Sessions, click here.

*****

HERE ON OUT has concluded.

*FUBU identifies itself as "a collaborative living archive centered around pan)Black and (pan)Asian cultural and political relationships. We, the founders of this   project, are a collective of queer, femme and non­binary, Black and East­Asian artists and organizer. Our goal is to facilitate a global conversation on the   relationship between Black & Asian diasporas, with an emphasis on building solidarity, de­centering whiteness, and resurfacing our deeply interconnected and complicated histories." FUBU asks, "In times where institutions, programs, and organizations are being de­funded and unsupported by the government, how can we learn to self­generate resources, support one another and help each other thrive?" For information on FUBU's activities, click here.

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