"The Firebird, A Ballez" at Danspace Project

This lesbian princess expects this Firebird to perch on her finger! (Photo: Christy Pessagno)

I think what I love most about Katy Pyle's queer appropriation of The Firebird--in the Firebird, A Ballez, concluding tonight at Danspace Project--is that almost nobody's trying terribly hard to live up to critical standards, to tailor themselves to any outsider's approval.

The first person we meet, the Narrator (Sacha Yanow) isn't declaiming her lines in a well-trained theatrical voice. She's just talking. She could be your lesbian girlfren' from around the block with a big grin and bit of gossip on her tongue. From what I can see, she's having a quick word with an audience filled with people who are a lot like her. So, yeah, she is your lesbian girlfren' from around the block!

Pyle, herself, for all her training in ballet, isn't the princess you might expect from the traditional Firebird tale and its balletic renderings. In this "ballez," she chooses to look like a cross between an animated ragdoll and a cake left out in the rain, but she shows no hesitation in stalking her desired "tranimal" Firebird (Jules Skloot) or lifting him numerous times like a stevedore--a stevedore with blue and purple hair. Dance technique- and plot-wise, she's more will than grace.

I love the chorus of lez and trans princes* in their ballet school black tights and white t-shirts and don't want them to aim for "perfect." Their earnestness and willingness and sense of togetherness in all things move me like little else can. That's a team any princess--this one included--would be lucky to gather close.

I love the space that Pyle and Skloot, with his modest charm, make for ballet to contain imperfection and feeling by reeling it back from mechanical exactitude and just plain giving it to the people. So that when the vampirish Sorceress (Cassie Mey) finally makes her electrifying entrance, with flapper-like bob, velvet, floor-sweeping coat and barely-there costume of straps and rhinestones, we see her flashy technique as a cold, heartless, relentless, manipulative thing with no room for love.

There's also the fancy of Hedia Maron's video, projected on the church's altar wall. It conjures a sense of place--a formidable castle rising on craggy heights; a classic garden with statuary and orange trees; a raging pyre--that we might find illustrating a volume of kid's fairytales. This naivete turns my heart over and turns me childlike. The excellent Queer Urban Orchestra, conducted by Nolan Dresden, brings the Stravinsky in a thrilling performance from St. Marks's balcony.

This evening-length version of The Firebird, A Ballez--long in the dreaming and making--has arrived. Tonight's performance (8pm) is sold out, but it's definitely worth a try. The wait list starts at 7:15pm.

[*Princes: Effie Bowen, Zari Esaian, Ariel "Speedwagon" Federow, Leah Hafezi, Sam Greenleaf Miller, Francis Rabkin, Mary Read, Lindsay Reuter, Lollo Romanski, Silky Shoemaker, Sacha Yanow and Nyx Zierhut]

Danspace Project
Second Avenue at 10th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Peggy Shaw returns to the stage at COIL

Peggy Shaw

Certain to be a highlight of Performance Space 122's COIL Festival, Ruff marks the return to the stage of the great Peggy Shaw--actor, producer and playwright--since her 2011 stroke.

Co-presented with Dixon Place,

Ruff pays tribute to the host of crooners, lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands and eccentric family members who have kept Shaw company, living inside her, for the past 68 years. Guided by longtime collaborator Lois Weaver, Shaw throws off the stigma of age and embraces the joy—and necessity—of creating new work, post-stroke, aided by new technology and even deeper courage. Shaw is the recipient of the 2011 Ethyl Eichelberger award.

See Peggy Shaw in Ruff, January 10, 16, 18, 19 at 7pm; January 11, 19 at 10pm; January 12 at 6pm; January 15 at 9pm. For more information and ticketing, click here or call 212-811-4111.

Dixon Place
161-A Chrystie Street (between Delancey and Rivington Streets), Manhattan
(directions)

Getting better all the time...(dance community-style!)

Members of New York's dance community come together to offer messages of support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth through the It Gets Better video campaign.

View the Group Message here.

View the complete playlist of NYC dance community videos here.

Join the conversation on Twitter at #IGBdance #SKYNOVA.

Chavela Vargas, 93

Mexican singer Chavela Vargas dies aged 93
BBC News, August 6, 2012

IT GETS BETTER. Here's one way.

On June 5, 2012, the New York City dance community came together at the Gibney Dance Center to record message of hope, inspiration, and encouragement for LGBT youth.

The stories were beautiful, moving and heartfelt; the messages were powerful; and the day was an uplifting experience spent with friends. 

This is Eva Yaa Asantewaa's message.

****

All of that's great, but--omg!--I still think I look funny on video!

But I've always wanted to do one of these, because I don't think any youngster should feel alone and suffer in silence. So I thank the production collaborators (#SKYNOVA, Dance/NYC, Edwards & Skybetter | Change Agency, Fractured Atlas, Gibney Dance Center, JenEd Productions, and Jordan Isadore) for this opportunity. I look forward to seeing the rest of the videos from our community when they go live later this week (and I'll post the link or links).

If you're in San Francisco, get ready. The It Gets Better Dance Community team is heading your way. They'll be videotaping on Friday.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Heroes, Villains and the Invisible 
Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center
by Stephen Holden, The New York Times, June 14, 2012

It Gets Better: NYC Dance Community Edition

I'm going to record my It Gets Better video on Tuesday, June 5 with other members of New York City's dance community! Are you?

Join us in offering hope to LGBT youth.

Find out more and sign up (free!) here:

It Gets Better: NYC Dance Community Edition

Adrienne Rich, 82 [UPDATE]

Adrienne Rich
(Photo: Robert Giard/Norton)

Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died
Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2012

A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, March 28, 2012

Queer/Art/Film

Queer/Art/Film Series at IFC Center Continues Gay Film Legacy
by Erik Piepenburg, The New York Times, March 17, 2012

Filmmaker France tells the history of ACT UP [UPDATE]

How To Survive A Plague
USA 2012; 110 min.
directed by David France
A Sundance Selects release

Peter Staley in action. Photo: William Lucas Walker

That's Peter Staley--former Wall Street bond trader; later, ACT UP's rock-star activist--who not only talked the eloquent talk but walked the kickass walk along with many comrades, putting the media, pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers and politicians on notice that a community terrorized by AIDS was not going to sit quietly, simply hoping for attention and help. It was going to get in people's faces and demand the research and treatments it needed to survive.

David France's exhilarating and moving How to Survive A Plague relates the boisterous history of ACT UP--all the triumphs and missteps--with a personalizing focus on several of its leading activists. These include Staley and Mark Harrington as well as the late Bob Rafsky who died from AIDS complications in 1993. Rafsky will be remembered by most for his confrontation with presidential-hopeful Bill Clinton that led to the famous "I feel your pain" non-answer.

That scene, from a Clinton fundraiser, is highlighted in France's documentary along with many others that retell the progression of HIV/AIDS in New York's gay male community and that community's dramatic, intelligent responses. Although a sprinkling of women and people of color are shown or interviewed, France has concentrated on assembling footage and gathering oral history that reflect ACT UP as an initiative emerging from well-educated gay white men with an inherent sense of empowerment commensurate with their rage and compassion. Along the way, we do get to see and hear from female advocates and activists--media-savvy Ann Northrop, future journalist Garance Franke-Ruta and pharmaceutical chemist Iris Long, PhD, among a few others.

Essential history can easily be lost. In a climate of right-wing backlash, it can get twisted. New generations of social activists working on marriage equality, transgender rights, immigrant rights and many other progressive issues today need to learn about these shoulders upon which they stand. And we all need a blade of truth to disrupt the nasty fog of culture war that has arisen once again in our country.

[Update: Frank Bruni writes about this documentary in the March 17 New York Times--The Living After the Dying.]

See a screening of How to Survive A Plague at the 2012 New Directors/New Films Festival at the following locations:

Saturday, March 24, 9pm
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Monday, March 26, 6pm
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53r Street (between 5th And 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

How to Survive A Plague Web site

How to Survive A Plague Facebook page

Information on New Directors/New Films

Your next read: Jeanette Winterson

This book sounds fantastic!

Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’
by Dwight Garner, The New York Times, March 8, 2012

Stephen Petronio Company at The Joyce [UPDATE]

Barrington Hinds in The Architecture of Loss
Stephen Petronio Company
(Photo: Steven Schreiber)

My guest and I spent entirely too much time scheming how one or the other of us would take possession of Stephen Petronio's shiny copper shoes by any means necessary. Then again, we had lots of time to dwell on this because Petronio was doing this queer-New Yorker-in-London spin on Steve Paxton's Intravenous Lecture (1970). Petronio turned Paxton's tale of censorship of nudity into an epic of wearing the wrong shirt at the wrong time in front of the wrong bobby and winding up in jail. Petronio talked to us while a male nurse hooked up to an IV drip and later drifted around the stage, dancing and gesticulating, as an assistant wheeled the IV pole just so and quietly gazed at him. Dancing Petronio--the Rubberband Man--was as amazing as his story's pacing and tone. And it turned out to be possible to stop coveting those shoes long enough to think how great it would be to force Rick Santorum to watch this man work.

Gia Kourlas writes an interesting assessment of Petronio's season in "Explorations of Loss, the Personal and the Public" (The New York Times, March 7), although I certainly don't agree with her preference for practice clothes over wearable art. It just wouldn't be Petronio without the sartorial drama. What's more, the new piece--The Architecture of Loss, scored by Valgeir Sigurdsson--presents the perfect integration of movement, scenic design and costuming. Even more than City of Twist (2002), The Architecture of Loss speaks to me of the atmosphere of 9/11. By that, I don't mean just the images of smoke smudging, and later billowing, across the three background panels, but also the strained, shredding and torn costumes (by Gudrun & Gudrun), as fragile as cobwebs, tinted in ash and charcoal, and the movement that seems to be all incessant, risky transition, even when one or another dancer does not move. This dance embodies insecurity. Nothing looks safe. Everything looks violated. And every action exacts more and more of a price.

In the Ethersketch I solo from Underland (2003), guest artist Wendy Whelan--in gleaming gold fringe and necklace and a crotch-high black skirt--seems to be colliding centuries in her costuming. As for her dancing, the sound equivalent of it would be a trumpet's blast--alarming, exciting and over way before you can ever settle down and get used to it.

UPDATE: Petronio has added three more performances of Ethersketch I--one tomorrow and two on Sunday.


Stephen Petronio and Company continues at The Joyce Theater through Sunday, March 11. Click here for schedule and ticket information.

The Joyce Theater
Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Haring mural restored at LGBT center

A Joyful Mural, Born in a Time of Shame and Fear
by David W. Dunlap, The New York Times, March 6, 2012

Dixon Place presents Diana Crum and Katy Pyle

The Don't Miss of The Week

Kim Brandt--curating Dixon Place's Brink program--has the winning entry in this week's just-made-up-out-of-thin-air Don't Miss contest!

With everything popping on the dance scene lately, it's easy to overlook some interesting work getting a little less publicity--like Katy Pyle's gender-blurring, species-blurring take on The Firebird with its cool, lyrical ballet and hot romance. Word-of-mouth should help, though, since this is a natural for THE Dyke Date of The Week (another contest I should launch, maybe?). The considerable charms of this queer fairy tale--with Pyle as the Lesbian Princess and Jules Skloot as the Firebird--will lift your spirits.

if I tell myself I have enough time, then I can be with you, Diana Crum's duet for Erin Cairns Cella and Kathy Wasik, opens the evening. The brightly-costumed dancers move like Crayola calligraphy across DP's white wall and gray floor to the textured drone of Peter Kerlin's guitar. Even with eyes closed, even stumbling, they appear to be lucid and in confident control. The work plays with ideas of parallel but rarely synchronous times sliding past one another and sometimes intersecting. Its concept might be a touch too subtle--"the layering of experiences presents viewers with opportunities to both witness and exist inside of different time scales, perhaps even simultaneously," Crum's publicity tells us--but the clean, clear performances are a pleasure.

Brink featuring Katy Pyle and Diana Crum closes tonight with a performance at 7:30pm. For information, cick here, and for ticket reservations, click here.

Dixon Place

161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan

(directions)

Charles Rice-Gonzalez talks about "Chulito"

Charles Rice-Gonzalez--known to many of us as an activist and Executive Director of BAAD!--discusses his new novel, Chulito, about a young gay Puerto Rican man living in the South Bronx, in this wonderful interview with Maria Hinojosa of NPR's Latino USA.

Tough Love (12:03)

Tim Miller censored by Villanova

Villanova Cancels Gay Artist's Workshop
The Huffington Post, February 21, 2012

Rudi van Dantzig, 78

Rudi van Dantzig, Provocative Dutch Choreographer, Dies at 78
by Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times, January 26, 2012

Jewelle Gomez set to bring new play to NYC

Jewelle Gomez (Photo by Diane Saben)

The Robert Chesley/Jane Chambers Playwrights Project of TOSOS

will present

A staged reading of Waiting for Giovanni

Written by Jewelle Gomez 

(writer, activist, and author of the double LAMBDA Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories)

Directed by Mark Finley

Saturday, January 28, 7pm

Waiting for Giovanni is Jewelle Gomez's imaginative, funny, and moving dream play about author James Baldwin, as he grapples with emotional and professional obstacles to completing his landmark 1956 novel, Giovanni's Room. The cast includes K. Todd Freeman (Song of Jacob Zulu, The Brother/Sister Plays) as James Baldwin, and Desiree Burch (52 Man Pickup, Tarbaby) as Lorraine Hansberry. The play was originally staged at San Francisco's New Conservatory Theater Center (Ed Decker, Artistic Director).

Ripley-Grier Studios

Studio 16T

520 Eighth Avenue, (between 36th and 37th Streets)

(directions)

Free and open to the public. No reservations required.

Information

Dan Fishback's got what you need

BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange

presents

Needing It: Performance in the Queer Community Tradition

a workshop with Dan Fishback

Tuesdays, February 28-April 10 (7pm-9pm)
FREE - participants must apply by January 3
Note: no class on March 20, additional class on Wednesday March 14 

Students will develop solo performances based on their personal obsessions and political impulses, all the while exploring the recent history of queer performance in New York City. Performance artist and instructor Dan Fishback will work closely with students to move beyond conventional notions of "self-expression" and "autobiography" to something more primal and satisfying.

Using traditional queer performance as a reference point, students will be encouraged to find new artistic language to stage their most vital urges. This seven-session class will be followed by a public live performance at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange on Saturday, April 14, where each student will present finished work.

Learn more here.

Eligibility:

Students of all ages, races, genders and sizes are encouraged to apply. Unfortunately, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, which is on the 2nd and 3rd floors of its building, lacks an elevator and cannot accommodate students with mobility issues. Students must be prepared to work on assignments outside of class. All students MUST attend every session AND the public performance on April 14. Students do not have to identify as queer, as long as they identify as being part of a queer community.

Application Instructions:

Please write a letter to the instructor, Dan Fishback. Explain why you want to take this class, and give a brief history of your artistic pursuits. (You will not be judged by the quantity or stature of your achievements.) If you do not identify as queer, please explain how you relate to queer community or queer performance tradition. Include your name, email address and phone number.

Please write or paste your letter into the body of an email, and send that email baxfishbackclass@gmail.com with the subject heading "APPLICATION FOR DAN FISHBACK CLASS."

BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange
421 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Navajo: Gender not binary

The Navajo Culture's Four Different Genders
by Whitney Jefferson, Jezebel, June 15, 2011

Two Spirits -- a film by Lydia Nibley
Independent Lens: a film festival in your living room