Deborah Hay's "Ten" draws a crowd at MoMA

Deborah Hay presents a revival of Ten (1968)
at the Museum of Modern Art's Marron Atrium.
(photo: Ralf Hiemisch)

Heading to MoMA for performances of Deborah Hay's 1968 ensemble piece, Ten, today or tomorrow at 2pm? Be sure to set out early. The audience for postmodern dance exists! I found them at the museum's Marron Atrium (exhibiting Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done through February 3) and on four floors of overlooking balconies. In the atrium, they stood several rows deep, cupping the open performance area with stragglers, like me, struggling for viewing space. Associate Curator Thomas Lax kindly secured a folding stool for me and a vantage point on one extreme end, and I was happy as a clam.

Against the far wall, the band Gang Gang Dance--with guitar, percussion, electronic keyboard--started things off precisely at 2 with a cascading, deepening rumble of sounds, a hot, gradually complicating, poly-ethnic mush that would hold steady through most, though not all, of the lengthy performance. A metal pole--perhaps fifteen feet, if dancer Wally Cardona's height is any gauge--rose from the dove-grey floor, and a metal barre, very low to the ground, stretched across the width of the performance space. Black-clad dancers would attach themselves to these items in various ways, as other dancers--inaudible to us over the loud music--would monitor and coach them into just the right positions. The dancers regularly but unpredictably rotated in and out of these supervisory and performing roles.

These dancers--Cardona, Michelle Boulé, Miguel Gutierrez, Miguel Ángel Guzmán, Malcolm Low, Shelley Senter, David Thomson, Adrienne Truscott, Arturo Vidich and Marýa Wethers--well, let me just say these folks are the equivalent of actors you'd pay to hear read the phone book. Given that Hay basically has them doing a string of tasks like draping themselves over the barre as if sunbathing or gracefully embracing the pole or creating a line or stack-up of dancers in similar poses, that phone book thing might not be too far off. It definitely looked more banal when the music dropped out and I could pick up what a patrolling Gutierrez was actually saying to his charges.

But I was enthralled from the first and stayed that way over more than an hour. I can account for this only in that, for several decades now, my mind has been infiltrated by postmodern artists and that I remain a weird child. This is my tribe--or, at least, one of them.

Ten runs through Saturday with performances at 2pm with limited seating. Free with museum admission. For those with sensitive ears, bring earplugs just in case you end up near the speakers. Today's performance will be followed at 3pm with a conversation between Hay and Ana Janevski, MoMA's Curator of Performance and Media. Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done runs through February 3. For information, click here.

Museum of Modern Art
Enter at 18 West 54th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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MOMA to explore work of Judson Dance Theater artists

Peter Moore. Performance view of Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton
in Brown’s Trillium, Concert of Dance #4, January 30, 1963.
© Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Courtesy Paula Cooper, New York

Museum of Modern Art

announces its upcoming exhibition:

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done

September 16, 2018–February 03, 2019

Ana Janevski, Curator

Thomas J. Lax, Associate Curator

with Martha Joseph, Curatorial Assistant,

Department of Media and Performance Art

For a brief period in the early 1960s, a group of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers made use of a local church to present performances that Village Voice critic Jill Johnston declared the most exciting new developments in dance in a generation. Redefining the kinds of movement that could count as dance, the Judson participants—Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, Bill Dixon, Judith Dunn, David Gordon, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Rudy Perez, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, and Elaine Summers, among others—would go on to profoundly shape all fields of art in the second half of the 20th century. Taking its name from the Judson Memorial Church, a socially engaged Protestant congregation in New York’s Greenwich Village, Judson Dance Theater was organized as a series of open workshops from which its participants developed performances. Together, the artists challenged traditional understandings of choreography, expanding dance in ways that reconsidered its place in the world. They employed new compositional methods to strip dance of its theatrical conventions, incorporating “ordinary” movements—gestures typical of the street or home, for example, rather than a stage—into their work, along with games, simple tasks, and social dances to infuse their pieces with a sense of spontaneity.

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done highlights the ongoing significance of the history of Judson Dance Theater, beginning with the workshops and classes led by Anna Halprin, Robert Ellis Dunn, and James Waring and exploring the influence of other figures working downtown such as Simone Forti and Andy Warhol, as well as venues for collective action like Judson Gallery and the Living Theatre. Through live performance and some 300 objects including film, photographic documentation, sculptural objects, scores, music, poetry, architectural drawings, and archival material, the exhibition celebrates the group’s multidisciplinary and collaborative ethos as well as the range of its participants. The Work Is Never Done includes a gallery exhibition, a print publication, and an ambitious performance program in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium.

Exhibition information

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Trisha Brown: a loving community offers thanks

Leah Morrison

A bouquet of images from

Bird/Woman/Flower/Dare Devil: 

Trisha Brown

A Community Memorial

Saturday, October 28, 2017

at Danspace Project

organized by Iréne Hultman Monti and friends

All photos 

by Ian Douglas

Ralph Lemon (above)
Tere O'Connor (below)

Trisha Brown, Lemon said, was "our feral dancing goddess."
"...shifting from a fireball to a whisper in a second," said O'Connor.

"Be your most gracious self." -- Trisha Brown

Sam Miller

Stacy Spence

Yvonne Rainer

"In rehearsal, you want to be as correct as possible.

In performance, it's a whole other ballgame."

--Trisha Brown

Stephen Petronio

Iréne Hultman

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Gather this Saturday to remember Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown (1936-2017)
(photo: Marc Ginot, courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company)

A Community Memorial

Honoring the Life and Work of Trisha Brown

Saturday, October 28

Noon through 5pm

Danspace Project

Danspace Project and the dance community at large celebrate the legacy of choreographer Trisha Brown (1936-2017), who altered how we perceive, create, and understand dance since forming her company in 1970. Over five hours, Brown’s company alums, colleagues, and admirers will speak, dance, reminisce, and pay tribute to one of our history’s greatest influencers.

This event is free and open to the public and guests may come and go throughout the day. All are welcome to join in paying homage to Brown and her legacy in transforming our worldwide artistic community.

12pm-1pm:

Judy Hussie-Taylor

Iréne Hultman

Wendy Perron

Susan Rosenberg

1pm-2pm:

Denise Luccioni

Laurel Jenkins

Nancy Dalva

Liz Gerring

Stephen Petronio

Val Bourne

2pm-3pm:

Babette Mangolte

Liz Thompson

Sam Miller

Ralph Lemon

Tere O’Connor

3pm-4pm:

Hendel Teicher

Jennifer Tipton

Yvonne Rainer

Jon Kinzel

4pm-5pm:

Philip Bither

Bill T. Jones

Adam Brown

Dancing by Trisha Brown Dance Company Alums:

Kathleen Fisher, Lance Gries, Iréne Hultman, Laurel Jenkins, Eva Karczag, Tara Lorenzen, Mariah Maloney, Leah Morrison, Brandi Norton, Wendy Perron, Jaime Scott, Shelley Senter, Vicky Shick, Keith Thompson, Abby Yaeger

Excerpts of pieces:

Accumulation, Group Primary Accumulation, Glacial Decoy, Opal Loop, Son of Gone Fishing, Set and Reset, Foray Foret, Groove, If You Couldn’t See Me

Screenings of full pieces will be on view in the Parish Hall.

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

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Catch this now: A new, slow look at "Trio A"

Video installation of
David Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
at Danspace Project
(photo: Lily Cohen)

No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

--Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto

Okay, no glamour, maybe, but I am completely seduced by the wealth of physical energy and concealed/revealed information streaming through David Michalek's slowed-down video interpretation of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966), here and now at Danspace Project spanning three, large suspended video screens and performed by a succession of 46 soloists. Pat Catterson, a member of Rainer's Raindears troupe, coached performers in the tricky subtleties of Rainer's doing without DOING!  For example, if you reach down as if to pick a bottle from the floor, don't make much of it. It's just a bottle and just a reach. No drama.

David Thomson, one of 46 dancers
performing in Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
(photo: Mark Kornbluth)

Anyone thinking Rainer's so-called pedestrian movement is, in fact, simple or easy will get a big ol' surprise from Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA and might even find a kind of virtuosity in it. (If you caught Michalek's original Slow Dancing, in 2007, at Lincoln Center Plaza, you know he knows from glamorous star power, spectacle...and s-l-o-wwwwnesssss.) But, for goodness sake, was Rainer's Trio A ever anything but engagingly focused, confident, exhilarating in execution? No way will she ever not be my anti-hero hero.

Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA, presented in collaboration with Rainer, continues at Danspace Project tonight and concludes tomorrow evening. Both screenings are available from 6pm to 10pm. Viewers may come and go as they please and can also view Sally Banes' 1978 film of Rainer dancing Trio A.

Admission is free with RSVP recommended. For reservations, visit danspaceproject.org or call (866) 811.4111.

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

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Trisha Brown, 80

Trisha Brown (1936-2017)

Postmodern dance pioneer Trisha Brown dies at age 80
by Allan Ulrich, SF Gate, March 20, 2017

A Farewell to Trisha Brown
by Wendy Perron, Dance Magazine, March 21, 2017

Remembering Trisha Brown: Ralph Lemon, Vicky Shick, Stacy Spence, Laurie Uprichard, Judy Hussie-Taylor
by Danspace Project, March 21, 2017

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Looking at Lucinda, then and now

Scenes from Dance (2009) by Lucinda Childs
(photos: Sally Cohn)

I regret missing Barnard College Dance Department's recent evening with Lucinda Childs and French filmmaker Patrick Bensard, director of the 2005 documentary, Lucinda Childs. Just short of an hour, the film traces notable influences and milestones in the dance artist's career--her exposure to the aesthetics of Cunningham and Cage, explorations with her fellow Judson iconoclasts such as Yvonne Rainer, magisterial flights through the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson universe.

It is Wilson, interviewed by Bensard, who best sums up the multitude within Childs, the mixed feelings she and her elegant, minimalist aesthetic can stir in a viewer. He describes a being at once soft and severe, hot and cold, and he appears to love her every polarized contradiction. The film includes wonderful excerpts of Childs, Mikhail Baryshnikov and other dancers performing her choreography--skimming the floor and slicing through air like figure skaters, earth and its gravity mere playthings to these mercurial figures.

Worth any price of admission are the brief glimpses of her solo Carnation, made in 1964 when I was 12 and a decade away from starting to write about dance. Maybe only a woman as frosty-looking as Childs could be this wickedly clever, surreal and funny in her ritualistic precision, crowning herself with a flexible strainer basket, carefully stuffing kitchen sponges into her mouth and fanning the stack open like a duck's bill.  How I wish I could see it performed live now.

* * *

See the fall season of The Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater, November 29-December 11. The first week's program includes the New York premiere of a Joyce commission, The Sun Roars Into View (2016), and the second week features Childs's signature work, Dance (1979) with a commissioned score by Philip Glass and the original film decor by Sol LeWitt.

For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Billy Name, 76

Billy Name, Who Glazed Warhol’s Factory in Silver, Dies at 76
by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, July 21, 2016

Sally Gross, 81

Sally Gross, Choreographer of Minimalist Dances, Dies at 81
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, July 24, 2015

Elaine Summers, 89

Elaine Summers, Who Meshed Dance and Film, Dies at 89
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, January 15, 2015

Elaine Summers remembered by Movement Research

from Movement Research

Elaine Summers, 1973
(photo:Philip Hipwell)

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Elaine Summers, an original member of Judson Dance Theater and longtime friend of Movement Research.

For those of you who did not know Elaine personally, here are some bits from her bio, and we hope you will discover her and continue to enjoy her spirit and art in this world.

A memorial is being planned and details will be shared as we have them.

Elaine Summers, MA, Fulbright Fellow, MIT fellow (Center for Advanced Visual Studies) received her BA in Visual Arts in Boston, MA, and came to New York City in 1952 to study dance at Julliard. She worked and lived here ever since and became one of the founders of the by now legendary workshop that would form the Judson Dance Theatre. After her groundbreaking first large-scale intermedia concert "Fantastic Gardens" (1964) she founded the Experimental Intermedia Foundation and continued to produce work both nationally and internationally with her Elaine Summers Dance & Film Co. She received numerous awards and residencies, among others at the University of Iowa. Her work is being studied worldwide and is currently being archived at the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection of Lincoln Center Public Library, with the help of NYU Department of Cinema Studies.

Summers originated the movement approach Kinetic Awareness and has continuously explored and pioneered ways of moving with a healthy body. In 1987 she founded the Kinetic Awareness Center to continue the development and research of the Kinetic Arts & Sciences, as well as train new generations of teachers.

She worked with people as diverse as Trisha Brown, Davidson Gigliotti, Nam June Paik, James Byrne, the Wooster Group, Meredith Monk, Merian Soto, Amy Greenfield, Pauline Oliveros, and many, many others.

Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in Sanarcangelo / Italy, Australia, the UK, and Vienna. Her project, Skytime, was a web-based invitation to all the world to celebrate the sky together in any relatable medium. Its first beginnings can be seen at www.skytime.org.

www.elainesummersdance.com

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)

Happy 70th, Meredith Monk!

I'm wishing a grand, happy birthday to Meredith Monk who got the surprise of a charming little cake last evening at Danspace Project but really gave us all the most beautiful gift.

The special program, Pioneer Days, part of Danspace's PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now programming, included a screening of filmmaker Robert Withers' reconstruction of Monk's breakthrough 16 Millimeter Earrings Judson Memorial Church performance of 1966, filmed excerpts from the transcendent site-specific Songs of Ascension (2008), and reworked selections from pieces from the early '70s, constructing mosaics out of choice, unearthed shards from the past. The early Monk prepared the way for artists who now readily cross boundaries of genre and modalities and for audiences hungry for immersion in total experience and stimulation of all modes of perception.


Her art is more than voice, but even just her voice--or, rather, voices swooping, stretching, ululating, mewing, fluttering in rapid succession--can entice listeners to journey. Monk reminded us that her project is to heal the unnatural rifts between the arts unique to the modern Western approach and to counter our tendency to rely upon secondary experiences through cyberspace. Instead, she would have us engage with the "blood, guts and nerves" of live art where "we're all in the same space at the same time."

"Nothing can substitute for that," says this sage and shaman.

Honoring dance critic Jill Johnston

The New Museum

in conjunction with

Rethinking the Imprint of Judson Dance Theater Fifty Years Later: Movement Research in Residence

presents

“Talking about my generation”: 

Jill Johnston and the Critic as Subject

Critical Correspondence co-editors Aaron Mattocks and Marissa Perel honor the celebrated writer and critic Jill Johnston, whose experimental and personal voice communicated the culture of the interdisciplinary 1960s art scene. In light of Johnston’s innovative contributions to the form, this conversation considers contemporary criticism and the writer as subject. Speakers include David Velasco (critic for Artforum) and Claudia La Rocco (critic for the New York Times). The event culminates as Movement Research artists perform readings of reviews on dance and performance.

Readers:

Thom Donovan
Ariel Goldberg
Cassie Petersen
Christine Shan Shan Hou

Sunday, November 4 (3pm)
Admission: $8 (general public) $6 (museum members)
1/2 gallery admission with same-day event ticket purchase

Information

New Museum
235 Bowery Street, Manhattan
(map/directions/visitors information)

Judson When?: Trajal Harrell at Danspace Project

Yeah, I love Bryan, too.

Yes. 

If I have to come home with an earworm, 

I want it to be this song. 

Every day and all days. 

So, thank you, Trajal Harrell.

So...on to Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now:

Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (M2M)

This mouthful of a title--crafted by dancer-choreographer Trajal Harrell--tells me a few things: Harrell is a man with much on his mind, much of it overlapping, much that does not get thrown away. The Judson Church pioneers are in there, somewhere, and the theater of ancient Greece and the voguing balls and all of the variously-sized (XS, S, M, jr., L, XL) manifestations of his preoccupation with the concept of a collision between queer Harlem and the glory days of downtown postmodern dance. There's also an inclination to play with our heads: I'm going to tell you something or show you something "in all sincerity" and then I'm going to pull it out from under you. You know that thing that just happened? It wasn't what you thought it was. You know that thing I just said? Forget it.

This last trait is slightly annoying but has its place. Harrell seems, simultaneously, to want to seduce and to ward off intimacy. In hallowed St. Mark's Church, which already bears its own extensive arts history, he has overlapped ancient theater, Judson Memorial Church--home of early postmodern dance titans, and the ballrooms of Harlem. With this unlikely theatrical mélange for a moody setting, he performs the (forced) marriage of ironic distancing to emoting, virtuosity, passion and potential catharsis. 

He will just sit there, looking pained, along with dancer Thibault Lac, looking blank, while we simply listen to the entirety--the entirety!--of Adele's "Set Fire to the Rain." When was the last time that happened in a dance show? Audacious spliced with irritating (and I like Adele; I like Harrell, too).

It makes me think of my own youthful musical obsessions, not too far from this (and some of them I still claim) and how they fired creativity. And then I think I get a little more about Harrell.

It's all a bit much. Interjections of words--impassioned, yet kind of silly. Some dancing--ecstatic, yet trailing into the ordinary. The blues sitting there like the smug papa of all of the other music Harrell has gathered around it. Lengthy, lulling passages of things like Ondrej Vidlar intoning this command--"Don't stop"--stretching those words and playing with the inflection and tone (muttered, gentle, insistent, menacing) while a pained-looking Harrell sits and squirms. Harrell's unexpected, confident singing is too much--luscious and indulgent in equal measure. At times, he reminds me of Antony; at others, a holy-roller getting that (really, really) old-time religion.

I've grooved to Harrell's succulent dancing more in other works than here. In this piece, Thibault Lac, nearly walks off with everything. Though impossibly gawky in appearance, he transforms himself into a voguing superstar with slippery back, crazy legs, arms moving like whips, batons, propellers that blaze into near invisibility. (Don't think! WERK!!! WERK!!! Don't think!) Yes, please. More Lac.

The three men, draped in filmy, flowing black "vestments" (by Complexgeometries) could be ancient ritual celebrants or high-fashion models in little black frocks. These roles crash and clash. I'm waiting for these strutting priests/priestesses to "take us there"--to that place of catharsis--but it's not happening because the models, of course, are making us hold back and just look, sit back and just watch.

Oh...one more great earworm from Judson Church is Ringing. Love it.

Trajal Harrell at Danspace Project tonight and tomorrow, 8pm. Sold out, but there's a wait list. Click here for information.

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

A video glimpse of "Beauty"

dance tech tv's video of excerpts from Deborah Hay's Wednesday evening lecture at Cooper Union

(You'll find my earlier commentary on the lecture at http://infinitebody.blogspot.com/2010/03/deborah-hay-on-beauty.html.)

Watch live streaming video from dancetechtv at livestream.com

Deborah Hay on "Beauty"

Beauty's in the eye of the beholder and, back in 2002, Deborah Hay's eyes beheld beauty in a large doodle that has been given a kind of blueprint status and immortality through the solo dance it has inspired. Last evening, Hay gave a "Lecture on the Performance of Beauty," presented by Danspace Project at the Great Hall of Cooper Union where, we were reminded, Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama once addressed eager listeners.

Hay told us that Beauty, the solo, began life as O Beautiful--a gentle political hint at the song that many people believe should have been our national anthem (instead of the one we have, with its strident war imagery). Hay's outright political overtones swiftly ended right there since, she admitted, she's uncomfortable with the topic, thinking that she's not informed or articulate enough to give adequate voice to her anger. Instead, she's political because she dances.

Dance is my form of political activism. 

It is not what or why I dance. 

It is that I dance.

Hay ran simultaneous videos of two performances of the solo--the left one, which she does not care for, whimsically-costumed and self-conscious; the right one, stark naked, unguarded, meditative and sacred in feeling. As we watched, she continued to talk, now and again alluding to the fundamental question she posed to her body, and drew a more complex version of her progenitor doodle. I'd recently read Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's memoir of her recovery from stroke--My Stroke of Insight--in which she fondly describes her left and right brains as distinctly separate personalities that, once again, work in beautiful, creative collaboration. Seeing the earlier (left) and later (right) version of Hay's Beauty, I felt I was gaining similar insight into radically divergent aspects of this artist.

So, What if...?

What if every cell in my body has the potential 

to perceive beauty and surrender beauty 

simultaneously 

each and every moment?

That was Hay's generative question and one that could underly everything that we do at every moment, could it not?

The question is in the body of the dancer.

You attend to your navigation 

by keeping the question current.

The question is in the body of each one of us. And isn't the question in the body of not only those who dance but those who look at dance? And, in both cases, answers surely come from the body--as Hay has shared with us in her book, My Body, The Buddhist, and reminded a young man who dared to ask her to explain why dance is important:

Everything I have learned about life 

I have learned from my body while dancing.

She rocked that three times and made it one of the most forceful things she said all evening.

And what if? And what if? And what if?

I'm just devoted to noticing.

Again--a thought for those who dance and for those who encounter dance.

"The ephemerality of dance is the most exciting, thrilling thing about dance as an artform," she says. 

"It is liberating! I chop up that time any way I want."

She slices the air with a cleaver-like right hand. 

"I chop it the way I want," she says with relish, an invitation to celebrate.

***

Danspace Project presents the premiere of Deborah Hay's new solo, No Time to Fly, tonight through Saturday at 8pm, with lighting by master designer Jennifer Tipton. No Time to Fly is part of Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2010: Back to New York City, curated by Juliette Mapp.

Information and ticketing at Danspace Project or 866-811-4111

Danspace Project

St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues), Manhattan

In the huddle with Forti

Now in her mid-70s, Simone Forti looks less like an esteemed elder from dance's radical Judson wing--which, of course, she is--and more like a pixie, slim in form and potentially mischievous in bright red boots. Though somewhat tentative in speech, she takes to movement with a breathtaking combination of instinctual eagerness and soft ease, a kind of "come on in, the water's fine" approach that makes you believe in yourself, even as a person just watching in admiration.

Baryshnikov Arts Center's BAC Flicks series presented Simone Forti: An Evening of Dance Constructions (2009), which documents the 2004 re-creation of some of her early works at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles).  The program, introduced by Forti, concluded with a Q & A and delicious live performances of Huddle (1961) and Scramble (1970).

While it was interesting to swivel one's attention between dances running simultaneously on two screens--besides Huddle, these dance-sculpture pieces included Slant Board, See Saw, Rollers and a few more--the live works stole the show. Huddle and Scramble might hail from the touchy-feely, playful days of the '60s--evoking the groovy group-mind in motion--but their ideas and looks don't in the least feel ancient or alien to me. Their subtleties sing.

Huddle is just what its name says it is--a mound of dancers, with upperbacks bent and arms linked, who form a sensitive, living "rock" upon which one or another of them will clamber up, crawl across and climb down. The dancers below and the one above seem to orient themselves through listening to their bodies, not looking with their eyes. I loved, most of all, the way the dancers' hands, grasping for purchase and gently kneading the bodies below, seemed more like lizards' claws and the way each crawler eventually blended into the "rock" as another emerged from the huddle to climb. At BAC, most of the audience, seated on the floor surrounding the huddle, was close enough to feel pulled in and hypnotized.

With Huddle, as in other pieces, dancers escape the tyranny of propulsion by leg and foot--the walking, running, skipping, leaping into horizontal space so commonly, conventionally identified with the idea of dancing. By doing so, Forti expands our experience beyond the human into all of nature.

I could say something similar about the challenging distension of time in Accompaniment for La Monte's 2 sounds, a solo performed by Forti in the film. And it may be true. Forti takes us into a different dimension, a different living of time as she quietly dangles from a thick rope, sometimes slightly twisting and swaying. But I am a Black woman, and when I see that image--surely intended to be abstract--time reverts for me to the era of lynching.

Scramble--a dance as responsive in real time as Huddle--resembles a meeting of two schools of fish passing through each other, twisting in and out, towards and away. Dancers peeled off to the sidelines, eventually leaving a small, tight group that became wonderfully rambunctious.

Simone Forti explaining herself:

"Everywhere I looked, I looked at something designed by people, and I felt I was in a house of mirrors."


"Chubby Checker's 'Twist' brought a lot of us together!"

"Sometimes when I saw a dance, I'd say, 'There's so much movement, I can't see the body!"

About Huddle: "The weight passes through everybody else's body. The weight passes to the ground through this structure. We learn to not be afraid. Put your foot on somebody. Spread your weight."

Click for information on Baryshnikov Arts Center and its Spring 2010 season