BODY AND SOUL: Katrina Reid: Mercury Rx--Review, Redo, Renewal

Katrina Reid (photo: Kiya Marie Schnorr)

The headshot of Katrina Reid, a dark-skinned Black woman with very short and very blonde hair, is outside in a park, looking into the camera with a confident smile.

 

Listen to Katrina Reid: Mercury Rx--Review, Redo, Renewal

on my Body and Soul podcast here.

 

Katrina Reid (photo courtesy of the artist)

A photo of Katrina running down an empty street. Only the back of her body is visible, one leg is kicking back in a stride, and her arms are fully extended behind her. There are lush trees and verdant grass on both sides of the road, and her black shadow appears below. The sky above is blue, bright, and full of fluffy white clouds.

Katrina Reid (photo by Tia Byington-Noll)

A black-and-white photo of Katrina hanging and twisting from a ladder that is attached to a building outside. She is holding on with both hands. The camera’s focus is from above, and she has white protective markings painted on her face. Her eyes are closed and her brows are furrowed in contemplation.

Katrina Reid (she/her) is a dancer and choreographer who crafts art projects rooted in improvisation, experimentation, and storytelling. Select presentations of her work include the Queens Museum, ISSUE Project Room, the Knockdown Center, Current Sessions, DoublePlus/Gibney Dance, AUNTS, the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Florida A&M University, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX). As a collaborator, Katrina explores performance across dance, theater, music, ritual, and film. Most recent projects include [siccer] by Will Rawls, and the upcoming Spectral Dances by Jonathan González, as well as past works by David Thomson, Third Rail Projects, Kevin Beasley, Emily Johnson, Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Marguerite Hemmings, and Megan Byrne, among others. Learn more at katrina-reid.com.

David Thomson opens world premiere at Performance Space New York

Scenes from he his own mythical beast by David Thomson
Above and below: Thomson, at left, with Paul Hamilton
(photos: Maria Baranova)

he his own mythical beast interrogates the complexities of American culture and draws from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, James Baldwin, the confession booth, Claudia Rankine, high school fights, Judith Butler, baptism, Roland Barthes, and Trisha Brown. Venus, a character that flirts with black face, gender ambiguity and sexuality, becomes a guide on this journey. Part beast and part myth, Venus is named after the Hottentot Venus, aka Sarah Baartman – an enslaved black woman who was exhibited as an exotic in the early 19th Century London and Paris. This code-shifting chimaera is Thomson’s response to the post-modern performance aesthetic that historically privileged neutrality as a means of subverting the personal narrative.

--promotional material for he his own mythical beast, a world premiere at Performance Space New York 

At center, Jodi Bender (left) with Katrina Reid
(photo: Maria Baranova)

This week, David Thomson wraps up Performance Space New York' 2018 COIL festival with the world premiere of he his own mythical beast, a work he has developed and shown, in various iterations from Danspace Project to BRIC, since 2012. A quartet with video and projected text installation, it feels like something massive punching its way out of a confining container.

I hated, but also sort-of understood, the space it inhabits--a black coffin of a room with audience rows set up along one long and two short sides, and woe to you if you happened to be positioned on one of those short ends trying to figure out what's going on at a spot that seems many cold miles away, the dancers like austere, awesome planets and moons. From the distancing and darkness rose stark ring lights washing across dark faces and torsoes--Thomson's and Paul Hamilton's dark Black skin. The men turned their limbs into layered sculpture, feverishly churning within a square on the floor, its space and boundaries sealed by tape. Compressed, trained to be small and of controlled beauty, the dynamism, fluidity and complexity of these two men only grew more apparent.

Above and below: Thomson
(photos: Maria Baranova)

The solid core of Thomson's project, with its numerous sources of inspiration and extraordinary creative contributors over the years, is the situation of the Black body--his body and Hamilton's and Reid's, too, though this Black woman's role here seems perhaps deliberately secondary--within aesthetics and systems upheld by white postmodernism. In a straightforward sequence, Bender--the sole white dancer-- gets to humiliate and brutalize Hamilton over and over and over and over again and then some more. The viewer, appalled, might flash back to some of the hallway's projected text--a brief exchange, between two speakers, about slavery reenactments--that runs alongside the loop of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Does it help, here, to remember that the dastardly, Road Runner-chasing Wile E. Coyote always brought about his own undoing? Maybe. I can't help but think that a good part of that punching out I felt from the whole work was about punching the hell out of one's own mindset.

Fierce performances make this work special and memorable, but I also credit the striking visual and lighting concepts realized, respectively, by Peter Born and Roderick Murray.

he his own mythical beast continues with performances tonight and Friday at 7:30pm and Sunday, February 4 at 3pm. These performances include an installation, and you are invited to arrive early to view it. For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets, 4th Floor), Manhattan
(directions)

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the CURRENT SESSIONS: Currently at wild project

Choreographer Fana Fraser presents work this weekend
along with other artists for the CURRENT SESSIONS at wild project.
(photo: Quyn Duong)

Movement Currency will focus on how bodies produce, exchange, and perform within systems of value, drawing on figurative and ethnographic practices to consider the lineage of choreographies which qualify our social identity.

--from promo for the CURRENT SESSIONS's new season Volume VI, Issue II: Movement Currency

With New York's fall dance season looming up ahead--and, believe me, it's looming--we can enjoy a breather for a few more weeks. But if you're still craving dance with some bite to it, Alexis Convento's team, the CURRENT SESSIONS, might have just the thing for you.

Last evening's presentation was organized around the concept of Risk--"from fragility to preservation, harm to survival...risk as a performative dimension which trades personal safety for choreographic opportunity." Tonight's show will tackle Debt, and tomorrow's 3pm matinee and 7pm performances, respectively, spin off from Savings and Credit. Each feature a concise mix of emerging artists guest curated by Ali Rosa-Salas, Justin Cabrillos and Sasha Okshteyn.

Risk--well-paced and clocking in at 45 minutes without break--offered work by dance artists Katrina Reid, Jessica Pretty and Amanda Hunt and filmmaker Ben Hagari. Of these four, all intriguing, I found Pretty and Hagari the most compelling.

Hagari's tour de force, Potter's Will (2015), is a sensuous and yet nightmarish ballet for wet clay, hellish fire glow, a man's clay-smeared body and the madly swirling camera of cinematographer Boaz Freund. Set, quite appropriately, to Ravel's La valse, it draws the viewer ever closer to danger--immolation, extinction and perhaps, at this great cost, unimaginable transformation.

Pretty's solo, the third., images a powerful wanting and not having. The dancer is a Black woman with hands often splayed in front of her gentle face, shielding her squinting eyes from the fierce glare of an imagined light source. She moves and folds and shapes her body like a tangle of brambles in big expenditures of energy and motion. She's a powerful, satisfying dancer--all the more reason that the empty platform stage seems confining, as does that invisible light source. Sudden, insistent bursts of song--Kanye West's "Nobody to Love," with its weird exhortation to just "grab somebody" from the party--both kind of name her situation and fragment it into any number of problematic realities.

Movement Currency's series resets the lineup for each show, with some repeats. So, your experience may be different but always an opportunity to discover, engage and be challenged.

Volume VI, Issue II: Movement Currency continues through Sunday, August 21. For programming information and ticketing details, click here.

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

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