Lance Gries brings "IF Immanent Field" to Danspace Project

Dancer-choreographer Lance Gries
Below, performing in IF Immanent Field,
his new ensemble work with
original score by Ryan Seaton and lighting by Carol Mullins
(photos courtesy of Lance Gries)

As a member of The Trisha Brown Dance Company (1985-1992),
Gries won a Bessie Award and also received a 2011 Bessie nomination
for his solo evening, Etudes for an Astronaut.

Hands float, sneak, snake, dowse, elongate, coil, swirl and fuss, always leading the way through space bristling with energy. Encircled by watchers, Lance Gries and his fellow dancers come and go. An austere, sometimes billowing Jimena Paz; a deific, stately Diane Madden; and Juliette Mapp, alternately ethereal and wry, they infuse the space with a visualized music.

Gries's IF Immanent Field, premiering at Danspace Project tomorrow evening, draws from the choreographer's belief in a common awareness, "a primary field of shared conscious energy pervades and connects all things," and that dancers readily access and utilize.

You are invited to sit and contemplate and breathe it all in.

March 20-22, Thursday-Saturday, 8PM
Arrive around 7:45pm each night for pre-show entertainment.

TICKETS

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Freedom to MOVE: Dance and Alexander Technique

Freedom to MOVE: 2013

A conference on Dance and the Alexander Technique

developed by Ann Rodiger

presented by Balance Arts Center

May 17-19

***

Presenters:

Joan Arnold

Tom Baird

Rebecca Brooks

Nada Diachenko

Daria Fain

Emily Faulkner

Eva Karczag

Juliette Mapp

Katherine Mitchell

Rebecca Nettl-Fiol

Cynthia Reynolds

Ann Rodiger

Shelley Senter

Jennifer Sielicki

Erin Thompson

Luc Vanier

Deborah Weitzman

                             

Come join us for the third Freedom to Move Dance and Alexander Technique conference.

We will continue to explore how the Alexander Technique supports and complements dance technique and performance.

Movement freedom, ease, and coordination can be enhanced and taught through concepts and principles of Alexander Technique.  The conference provides experiences and exploration of many ways the Alexander Technique can be applied to dance – from tango to composition to research to performance.

You will also have time to share and exchange ideas as we work together.

All the conference presenters have had extensive experience both in teaching the Alexander Technique and in dance. The Alexander Technique has greatly influenced their thinking and approach to movement, how they teach, and how they create work. The variety of workshops speaks to the fundamental all-encompassing nature of the Alexander Technique and how the concepts are permeating many corners of the dance world.
Come join us and explore!

Pearl Studios
500 8th Avenue, 12th Floor (between 35th and 36th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Full conference schedule HERE
Register HERE
Registration by May 1st: $225
Registration after May 1st $250
Student rates and Single sessions available

Movement Research Studies Project studies curation, inclusion, community

Studies Project: Let Me In Let Me In Or I'll Blow This House DownCurators on Process and the Matter of Inclusion

Moderated by Juliette Mapp and Jen Rosenblit

Josie's
520 East 6th Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan

FREE

To feel a part of something. Communal, to have community. To be asked, invited in, to ask to be invited in. Access, entry. While the role of curator and the process of curation holds as much artistry as the making of dance and performance, we hone in on an equally important need for a touch of transparency surrounding the presentation of dance and the body. What issues and concerns arise inside of a shifting community where representation is crucial for belonging and sustainable support? What are we doing to reach out to more artists? Where are those artists? Who are those artists? What are the complexities that arise while supporting the sustainability of an artist? What responsibility do we have to an idea of cultivating and supporting "newness"? Where is the body inside all of this? How do we digest being on the inside or outside of something spiritually, aesthetically, emotionally and academically?

Participants include:

Ben Pryor (American Realness) 

Laurie Berg and Liliana Dirks-Goodman (AUNTS)

Rebecca Brooks

Barbara Bryan

Matthew Lyons (The Kitchen)

What's moving downtown, moving the Bronx

Look sharp!

There's dance moving all over town... 

La MaMa Moves Dance Festival

Chamber Works 1--featuring Dark Matter by Juliette Mapp; present.tense (progressive) by Maura Donohue; and So be it--not a piece--miniatures for five by Vicky Shick. May 11-13. La MaMa’s The Club, 74A East 4th Street, 2nd Floor.[information and tickets]

Beauty--Jane Comfort and Company. "...a gimlet-eyed look at the extremes women go to achieve impossible beauty." May 17-20, 7:30pm La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor. [information and tickets]

La MaMa
[map/directions]

Dancing While Black: Voices from the Bush
a presentation of BAAD!'s 2012 Boogie Down Dance Series

Thursday, May 17, 8pm

Featuring current and former dancers from Urban Bush Women--Maria Bauman, LoveForte (Marjani Forte and Nia Love), Paloma McGregor and Samantha Speis--who present their own brazen dance works as part of Dancing While Black, "an artist-led project/initiative that explores many questions including what does it mean to be a Black artist today in order to shift the power of contextualizing work and articulating aesthetic values into the hands, and bodies, of black dancers themselves."

For more information on this and all Boogie Down festival events and to purchase tickets, click here or call 718-842-5223.

BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance
841 Barretto Street, 2nd Floor, Bronx
(map/directions)

A meditation on "The Making of Americans”...and writing

Juliette Mapp’s The Making of Americans
by Maura Nguyen Donohue, Culturebot, April 21, 2011

Learning from Hay

Last evening, as I watched Deborah Hay's No Time To Fly--which has now concluded in its premiere season at Danspace Project--I felt a deepened understanding of how inspired structure and inspiring surrender work together in the process of creation. That was a bonus for taking in Hay's Lecture on the Performance of Beauty last Wednesday at Cooper Union. The opening of the new 50-minute solo in silence seemed to me steeped in remembered music (a foundational structure), and its unfolding or drifting suggested an unpredictable journey of discovery (surrender). Hay's adorableness--I say that, hoping she likes this work's costume better than she liked the original, whimsical costume for Beauty--easily draws us to her and to her project. But, to be sure, this is a formidable master teacher, one who offers artists and all those who treasure art a humble way to approach creativity. Her dancing prompts questioning that we can all take into our practice--as artists, as human beings--for a lifetime.

I am grateful to Danspace Project and to curator Juliette Mapp (PLATFORM 2010: Back to New York City) for...well, for bringing Hay back to New York City.

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

"Dancing was everything": Mapp breaks my heart again

Juliette Mapp's Anna, Ikea and I--the kinetic/aural memoir of her development in dance--is huge. Simply huge. And beautiful. And arguably the most assured, definitive presentation--and certainly the most emotionally affecting, as I see it--in this season's round of contemporary dance. Premiered last night, it concludes tomorrow evening, Saturday, at Danspace Project, and you should make every effort to get there (even in a snowstorm).

Here's the cast: Besides Mapp, there's Vicky Shick, Anna Sperber, John Jasperse, Wendy Perron, Diane Madden, Iréne Hultman, Layard Thompson, Levi Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez, Paige Martin, Anna Carpatayan, Natalie Green and Stacy Grossfield plus singer Nat Drake. I'd boldface all of these names, but then you'd see three lines of nothing else but dark black typeface--not so cool. Just know that they are all boldfaced in my heart. I kinda want to boldface Bob Dylan, too, since his recordings accompany two of the piece's most arresting segments--an insertion of Trisha Brown's Spanish Dance (1973), danced to "Early Mornin' Rain" and the easeful and perfectly perfect Shick/Mapp duet to "Corrina, Corrina."

InfiniteBody readers know that I'm increasingly antsy about dances that go on way too long. Anna, Ikea, and I goes on for 90 minutes without intermission. But listen up, kids: This is how you do it. At no moment--even during Mapp's extensive storytelling at the mic--did I want to be anywhere else. And when I got home, I still had almost too much energy to go to sleep.

What I loved about Anna, Ikea, and I: So much. Purity of movement. Voices arriving from on high...well, the balconies. The textural, multidimensionality of overlapping voices. Slight disturbances within stillness. Archangelic sign language. The cacaphony of voices set against serene movement. The steady, hypnotic rock of the lower body. Jasperse's set design. Jasperse whirling with his orange/fuschia comforter on his head, later looking like Chakaia Booker. Mapp's Viola Farber stories. Farber's keys. Brown's Spanish Dance--magnificent and funny. Layard Thompson. Layard Thompson. Layard Thompson. Have I mentioned how Layard Thompson redefines balance, fluidity and control? How does he do that? "What if every cell in your body had the potential to get what it needs...?" Deborah Hay. How Mapp and Shick--similar height and energy--look so great together. The film that's no film. The charm of this work as a whole and the generosity of it.

Visit Danspace Project for information on ticketing.