Forever hunger: Kimberly Bartosik at BAM Fisher

Joanna Kotze in Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you
(photo: Jim Coleman)

Lighting designer Roderick Murray's fluorescent tubes hang from the ceiling inside BAM Fisher's Fishman Space, colder and more severe than stalactites. Two dancers--Christian Allen and Lindsey Jones--step into the bare space of Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you. You can almost hear raptor wings, so forceful is the way they will lunge and beat and spin against the air. Arms lifting and rotated. Heavy breath audible. Heads and chins tilted upward. Torsos arching as they drop to a knee.

Burr Johnson, Dylan Crossman and Joanna Kotze--raptors, too, or perhaps angels, if angels have feet to strike mountainous earth--come in and churn and lash against the empty space as well. Back and forth, they cross it, overlapping in time and close pathways, until their labors clearly take a toll. Watching them, too, provides an initial sensation of exhilaration followed by exertion. When they stop--just stop and stand and shift inside and gasp--you feel the same internal wooziness, everything inside one's own body saying, "Hold up. Can we just settle back into order?"

I hunger for you plays with the risk of release--the kind of dropping of form and letting go that we experience in extremes of sensual and spiritual ecstasy--without guarantee of connection. Or guarantee that connection achieved will stay or will satisfy. A partner backs off or quietly quits the space entirely. The one remaining might freeze in a pose of hopelessness--arms wrenched forward from a torso bent as if in abject submission.

Much of the inspiration for the piece comes from the choreographer's religious upbringing, and it's interesting that she has cast her own child, Dahlia Bartosik-Murray, as a silent witness to some moments of Kotze's dancing as well as, later, a figure of release, coursing around the space like a wild filly.

Choreography: Kimberly Bartosik in collaboration with the dancers
Music: Sivan Jacobovitz, with arrangement by Kimberly Bartosik
Costume design: Harriet Jung
Sound Engineering: James Bigbee Garver
Dramaturgy: Melanie George

I hunger for you continues a sold-out run through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information, click here.

Also, Friday's audience is welcome to an informal post-show discussion, facilitated by Melanie George with Bartosik and company in BAM Fisher's Lower Lobby.

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

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

Subscribe in a reader

Kimberly Bartosik: In close quarters at Gibney Dance

Lance Gries and (in background) Joanna Kotze
perform alone in Gibney Dance's Agnes Varis Performance Lab.
(photos above and below: Scott Shaw)

If you're lucky enough to get in--I almost was not!--your first experience of Étroits sont les Vaisseaux might be the shock of nearly bumping into its two dancers already standing, breathing heavily and eyeing each other just inside the studio door. Well, there's not a lot of "inside' to the lobby studio at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. Choreographers seem to be increasingly drawn to its challenge.

For this world premiere by dance artist Kimberly Bartosik and lighting, sound and set designer Roderick Murray (Kimberly Bartosik/daela), audience seating must stop at around twenty. Chairs and cushions fill skimpy corners of the narrow space with the performance area marked off by tape strips. Dancers Joanna Kotze and Lance Gries don't get a lot of room to roam, but their powerful actions make that little space ring like church bells. Their more intimate actions make space disappear entirely.

Étroits sont les Vaisseaux ("Narrow are the vessels") draws inspiration from an Anselm Kiefer sculpture that is long, narrow (like the Gibney space) but also rough, forbidding, even violent in form. The performance runs precisely 24:50, with an 8pm performance recapped each evening at 9. That sounds short but proves to be just enough. We're sealed in--door closed; shade to the street window mechanically lowered--and so close to the performers as to be able to focus on individual sweat beads, strands of hair and fingernails.

Each dancer's focus varies--deep, quiet interiority; attempts to glimpse something other than each other; close engagement, loving and erotic in its implications. The spiky, birdlike Kotze gazes upward a lot, Gries, more compact and intense, often looks elsewhere. But then they do regard each other, almost touch, touch and guide, use one body as another's support, or melt away together towards the floor. Subtle sounds--thunder? crashing waves? a distant train?--imply an unseen environment that holds these two, perhaps an imagined or remembered "outside" to this radically confining "inside." We don't know who they are, but we can infer how they are, how they might have been and how they might yet be.

Leaving them is not easy, but when the time comes and the window shade draws up to once again reveal a mundane city street, we're literally shown the door (by Bartosik) and given access to our checked coats and bags. We leave Kotze and Gries to themselves and their lives. For all we know, these two beautiful dancers could have been in that narrow room forever and will remain so.

Étroits sont les Vaisseaux continues through Saturday, April 30 with performances at 8pm and 9pm. Contact boxoffice@gibneydance.org to inquire about ticket availability and standing room. For other information, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

New dances by Bartosik and Crossman at Abrons Arts Center

Above and below:
Scenes from Kimberly Bartosik's Ecsteriority4 (Part 2)
(photos: Ryutaro Mishima)

In a human environment, propulsion--willed by the self or coerced by outside forces--means you're bound to stray through someone's airspace, run up against another body and do damage. Kimberly Bartosik creates that supercharged, contested, treacherous space in her world premiere ensemble, Ecsteriority4 (Part 2), a trio for Dylan Crossman, Melissa Toogood and Marc Mann.

Crossman and Toogood, like Bartosik, had distinguished careers with Merce Cunningham. Guyana-born Mann has his own illustrious history, including Principal and Soloist roles in the Martha Graham Dance Company and work with Bill T. Jones and Susan Marshall. While handsomely sleek, nimble in force and timing, these three performers share a reckless drive in Ecsteriority4 (Part 2). They are up for anything.

Roughly a half-hour in length, the piece takes full advantage of the dramatic confines of a small, spare chamber, Abrons Arts Center's Black Box Experimental Theater. Bartosik's audience should sense the desperate impact of bodies against walls and the risk of those bodies colliding with the Fourth Wall, too. Believe me, we do.

It opens with a slice of chaos. At first, houselights dim only slightly, leaving watchers exposed. Bartosik's torrential soundscape, much of it, could be songbird tweets on Fast Forward. Don't imagine that would sound pretty at all. To the keening sound, dancers thrash against the black backdrop, careen wild splashes of movement around the floor.

This action had already begun when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a person quietly close the door to the space, closing us in. The timing seemed oddly late but perhaps deliberate and had real psychological power.

Gaze at Toogood's face. Her eyes reflect vulnerability, apprehension, perhaps shock, even while she stays in motion. But she not only stays in motion, she survives and with unexpected aggression, red in tooth and claw. At one point, the dancers engage in staged combat without real contact; the air takes the kicks and blows. Crossman ends up on the ground with what appears to be two victors astride him, closely eyeing each other. Who will haul away the spoils?

In a scene near the end, Toogood's eyes lock onto Mann's, staring him down, literally; he backbends away from his overpowering competitor. Toogood then looms over Crossman and deftly strips the shirt from his torso. As Crossman, in particular, repeatedly discovers, there's no easy way to break or scale the wall that contains this dance's violence and furtive sexuality. Yet everything ends with a decisive choice made by each combatant.

Above and below:
Scenes from Dylan Crossman's BOUND
(photos: Ryutaro Mishima)

Crossman's own world premiere, BOUND, opened the evening. (Both works are part of Abrons's new TRAVELOGUES dance series curated by Laurie Uprichard, former director of Danspace Project and of Ireland's Dublin Dance Festival). Of BOUND, a solo, Crossman writes that it "questions emotional (in)dependence--how real freedom may lie in recognizing what binds us, what we have already freed ourselves from, and what ties will always be with us."

To convey this might not absolutely require white cords anchored to the walls and attached to Crossman's ankle, elbow and back, but this design element works well, both visually--subdividing and moving against the murky space--and as a suggestion of living as someone or something else's marionette.

Interestingly, Crossman, like all three dancers in Bartosik's work, commands more agency than you might first realize. The first sign, for me, was in the care with which he positions his bound body--particularly, the firmly pointed feet--which seems a choice, though straight out of classical ballet. At times, he clearly aims to float and to fly, and he can and does release or re-position his attachments at will. He can lash his arms as if wielding weaponry, and he can push into the space and noisily claim it. Only the abruptness of this solo's end suggests one controlling tie that none will ever remove.

Bartosik and Crossman's shared program continues nightly through Saturday with performances at 8pm. There will be a post-performance talk with the artists, moderated by Uprichard, on Saturday, May 23.

For more information and tickets, click here. The box office opens a half-hour prior to the performance. All seating is general admission.

Black Box Experimental Theater
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

UNCSA graduating dancers show Pluck

University of North Carolina School of the Arts
dance students perform a work by Kimberly Bartosik.
All photos by Peter Mueller

Students of the 2015 graduating contemporary dance class of University of North Carolina School of the Arts are excitedly preparing to perform next month at New York's Ailey Citigroup Theater-The Joan Weill Center for Dance. UNCSA's annual Pluck Project opens opportunities for students to jump-start careers by forging connections to established choreographers and other professionals in the field. This year, in addition to student-created solos, the culminating presentation features an ensemble piece by noted New York dance artist Kimberly Bartosik.

"The students financed the entire trip themselves through grassroots fundraising to pay for theater rental, transportation and more," Bartosik says, marveling at their ingenuity and commitment. "They're even responsible for rehearsing my piece in my absence--without any faculty oversight. And many of them haven't ever been to New York!"

Developing The Palpable Space in Between with UNCSA students stretched her practice.

"I created the piece when I spent a semester at UNCSA--my alma mater--in fall 2013," she says. "It totally changed my perception about what was possible with young dancers and led to a much deeper exploration of form than I had ever experienced. I experimented with ideas I normally censor from my professional work but which, I felt, had a place here--unison movement, uncomplicated beauty. It was really invigorating, and I'm still learning from it."

The Palpable Space in Between, Bartosik says, connects to her concerns about the violence in our culture.

"These kids were so young that I couldn't ask them to take the same emotional risks that I ask of my professional performers. However, they went far and deep and totally got it."

See The Palpable Space in Between at a free presentation on Monday, March 9, 7pm at Ailey Citigroup Theater-The Joan Weill Center for Dance. Reservations are recommended and can be made by email to mountj@uncsa.edu. Show your support with a tax-deductible donations here.

The Pluck Project Class of 2015

Graham Cole

Javier Colon

David Ferguson

William Fowler

Margaret Jones

Shyanne Ramsey

Bailey Reese

Shelby Ring

Nick Rodriques

Casey Sauls

Kellyn Thornburg

Ailey Citigroup Theater-The Joan Weill Center for Dance
405 West 55th Street (at 9th Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Mentorship is key: dance artists Rosenblit and Patek win new award

New Award Recognizes Two Young Choreographers
by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, April 30, 2014

Kimberly Bartosik's intriguing duets at New York Live Arts

Roderick Murray (left) and Kimberly Bartosik
in You are my heat and glare
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Singers Dave Ruder (left) and Gelsey Bell
in You are my heat and glare
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Last night, I joined the second wave of audience members led up to the studio space at New York Live Arts to see You are my heat and glare, a U.S. premiere by Kimberly Bartosik/daela. After the first group took the elevator up, my group followed vocalists Gelsey Bell and Dave Ruder by the stairs and found seats as our guides, dressed in casual white clothing, continuously sang and circled the performance area. I tried to capture the lyrics, many slipping away even as they repeated and repeated. But, as Bell and Ruder moved in their gentle gait, I felt their voices--especially, Bell's softly soulful one--sowing themselves into another part of my awareness, and I caught one strong line: "Love is the mystery inside this walking."

You are my heat and glare, inspired by Anne Carson's writing, presents a landscape of love, mystery and risk. Moving, often in darkness, a lover might encounter danger or grace. Bartosik and her husband and lighting designer Roderick Murray carve out a space charged with intense lighting and physical energy and suggestions of erotic and volatile emotional states. Sharing that space at close quarters feels raw, almost too much to bear.

They made the right decision to present this evening-length piece in the studio, not the ground-level theater, and I can see this strategy working well for other dance groups with finished pieces best appreciated in a less formal setting, not just studio works-in-progress. It would be interesting to see more of these types of presentations at New York Live Arts.

The couples interacting here may be facing the end of the world--referenced in Bell and Ruder's haunting song--or the end of the world as they know it. At times, to this New Yorker's ear, the soundscape--roar of aircraft engines?--seems "extremely loud and incredibly close." But instead of distracting specifics, Bartosik's creative team dwells in the poetic--pitch-black darkness disturbed by shards of light or warmed by human breath and song; a planet in its long, lonely orbit of a star; a heron striding through the twilight stillness of a marsh; a spider climbing an orange web of electrical cording; a prisoner under interrogation; a most precious jewel set apart in a container of startling light, protected and constricted. In one stunning, slow-motion duet, Joanna Kotze and Marc Mann, with muscles trembling in furious tension, unleash a silent and truly terrifying argument.

You are my heat and glare is both intimate and harshly revealing, tender and aggressive, minimalist and monumental--a work of intriguing beauty.

You are My Heat and Glare runs now through Saturday, March 1 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and ticketing, click here.

Thursday, February 27, 6:30pm: Come Early Conversation: Comprised of Duets: Considering the Performance of Intimacy, moderated by Nicole Birmann Bloom (Program Officer, Dance and Theater, French Cultural Services)

Friday, February 28, post-performance: Stay Late Discussion: Creating You are my heat and glare moderated by Dean Moss in conversation with Kimberly Bartosik

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
212-924-0077
(map/directions)

Kimberly Bartosik discusses her new work for New York Live Arts

Hunger And Rage, Heat And Glare
By Brian J. McCormick, Gay City News, February 19, 2014

heat, glare, Bartosik

Let me take a moment, between APAP shows, to remind you to keep posted on a work-in-development from dancer-choreographer Kimberly Bartosik, You are my heat and glare, set to premiere in the fall of this year. The choreographer and artistic director of Kimberly Bartosik/daela offered 55 minutes from her evening-length ensemble piece today at Gibney Dance Center for APAP. The work has greatly intensified and darkened, intriguingly, since I saw early versions of a couple of its segments last year.

Like a book of strange, compelling short tales, You are my heat and glare presents enigmatic duos--Bartosik and Roderick Murray; Joanna Kotze and Marc Mann, who are exceptional and terrifying; and the engaging vocalists Gelsey Bell and Dave Ruder--whose relationships are contained, shaped, revealed or rendered inscrutable by Murray's in-the-moment lighting manipulations. And that's quite a bag of tricks Murray has, too.

Kimberly Bartosik/daela

APAP Diary: A Saturday on the run!

My APAP experience is as much about what I can't get to--inhabiting a human body without superhuman powers--as what I can and choose to attend. It includes smug self-satisfaction ("Oh, esteemed dance critic colleague, you ran to that media-hyped, cooler-than-cool, must-see production and ended up hating it? Well, good for you!") as well as feelings of mental weakness and overwhelm ("Gosh, no, actually, I didn't schedule any of your venue's showings. Frankly, in the crush of information about other events, I simply forgot!"). The cure for all of this personal and programmatic too-much-ness will soon arrive but, in the meantime, let's look at three nice things from yesterday--one of them non-APAP--when I became a mere blur in the lives of my cats who had already been abandoned by their other mother who was checking out the big Degas and The Nude show in Boston.

Michelle Boulé and Phillip Connaughton in Body Duet. Photo (c)Julieta Cervantes

 

John Scott and his Irish Modern Dance Theatre at La MaMa, The Club:

The pairing of dancers as smart, gifted and game as New York's Michelle Boulé and Dublin's Philip Connaughton made this showing catnip. In Scott's half-hour Body Duet, the collision and tangling of two headstrong body/minds appears to be an attempt to force the reconnection of odd-shaped fragments of a busted relationship--or of a busted self. Within the randomness and illogic of these quirky choreographic and physical juxtapositions, we can enjoy the clarity and fervor for life running through this dance and giving it its measure of hope. Body Duet also offered my very first view of a dance that includes a tablet--presumably an iPad--as prop, prompter and nearly dance partner. And that worried me, since the two humans clutching this electronic gadget between them were lashing around quite a bit. Body Duet will tour Ireland later this year, and Scott's New York fans can expect a new full-length at La MaMa in Spring 2013. See Body Duet this Monday at 3pm or Tuesday at 1pm. Admission is free, but reservations are recommended. For information, click here.

La MaMa
74A Est 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue & Bowery), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Cumbe: Center for African and Diaspora Dance:

After gobbling a quick lunch, I took an APAP-break and caught the R train out to Brooklyn to visit the new Cumbe: Center for African and Diaspora Dance on Fulton Street, a close neighbor to BAM Harvey, BAM Opera House and the Mark Morris Dance Center. For the center's Grand Opening weekend, all dance and percussion classes for adults and kids were free, and a dance party, featuring a live band and two DJs, was planned for the evening. Up winding flights of red stairs, I found co-directors Dominique Bravo and Jimena Martinez and artistic director Pat Hall with their hands full, greeting a bustling crowd of well-wishers and class-takers. I watched part of master teacher Baba Richard Gonzalez's inspiring Afro-Caribbean/Orisha Dances class, mainly from a big screen television, since the moderate-sized studio itself was packed to overflowing. Two studios and a music room will somehow contain the energy and goodness of Cumbe's program--including classes in Contemporary Dance (Ronald K. Brown), Bomba y Plena (Alma Cruz), Haitian Drumming (Frisner Augustin) and Afro-Colombian (Daniel Fetecua Soto) and so much more.

Cumbe: Center for African and Diaspora Dance
558 Fulton Street, 2nd Floor, (near Flatbush Avenue), Brooklyn
718-935-9700
(map/Subway 2/3/4/5 to Nevins, Q/R to DeKalb or 2/3/4/5/N/D/Q/R to Atlantic Avenue)

Kimberly Bartosik/Roderick Murray at Gibney Dance Center:

Bartosik showed a fragment of an evening-length work-in-progress, You are my heat and glare, in its very early stages. The finished piece, inspired by poet Anne Carson's "The Anthropology of Water," will be structured as three duets for dancer/designer, dancer/dancer and voice artist/voice artist. Its premiere is planned for 2013. In the segment shown yesterday for APAP at the Gibney Dance Center, the dancer pairs with Bessie Award-winning lighting designer Roderick Murray whose hands-on effects and installation bring out a severe, old-time movie star glamor in her natural elegance. The showing, though too fleeting to predict what will come of this work, was certainly lovely and intriguing enough to peak my interest. If you want to see what I mean, you have another two chances: Bartosik and Murray will bring their showing uptown to Barnard College today at 5:30pm and tomorrow, Monday, at 12:30pm. 

Barnard College, Barnard Hall, Studio 305
Broadway and 117th Street, Manhattan
(directions)