La Mama hosts the great Germaine Acogny

Germaine Acogny, "Mother of Contemporary African Dance,"
performs SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
(photo: Thomas Dorn)

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
by Germaine Acogny and Mikäel Serre
FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival
La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre
September 26-28

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING--a US premiere for Crossing The Line Festival by renowned Senegalese/French contemporary dance artist Germaine Acogny and director Mikäel Serre--unfolds as if it were dreamt, a full-sensory haunting both sustained in time and elusively fluid in nature. A rich soundscape makes the viewer feel surrounded, engulfed. Visual design tucks things far out of reach or behind layers of other images, or suddenly zooms them large or slips them back into darkness, seriously messing with rational sense of space.

Its fascinating and troubling text, adapted for the stage by Serre, is often spoken in French by Acogny while also running in English as supertitles. If you do not comprehend French, this regularly pulls your gaze up and away from the stately moving sculpture that is Acogny.

You make your choices here; they're difficult, disruptive, regretful and the only ones you're allowed. At almost every turn, she and her creative team suspend us in a phenomena from which we cannot turn away. Even the smell of baby powder and the tickle of tiny, airborne feathers will eventually reach our unguarded selves.

A stage-spanning string curtain serves as a scrim onto which ghostly images may be projected and into which solid objects (and our beloved dancer) can be swallowed out of sight as if dragged below waves.

Like the simple props that will gather dramatic meaning--an open notebook, its white pages reflecting light; a pillow the dancer hugs to her chest, a heavy rock--Acogny contains the brooding power of history, of secrets, a complicated narrative with webs of connection to the Greek Medea and the tragedy of today's refugees seeking safety in Europe.

One surprise discovery, among many, in a diary--the words "Power is passed down from woman to woman." How to access that inheritance? Does it come from things--a set of formidable butcher knives passed along to the wrong person? Or is it knowledge, the force of truth about oneself that can purge the evil wrought by colonialism, patriarchal religion, racism, male supremacy?

Now in her 70s, Acogny--choreographer, performer and educator--has been called "Mother of Contemporary African Dance." Watch as she makes startling use of Johnny Cash's recording of "Hurt" with its evocation of self-inflicted pain and "empire of dirt," and you will grasp why this artist can claim worldwide reverence. Do not miss her historic performance at La MaMa.

Concept and direction: Mikäel Serre
Choreography: Germaine Acogny
Set design: Maciej Fiszer
Costumes: Johanna Diakhate-Rittmeyer
Music: Fabrice Bouillon "LaForest"
Video: Sebastien Dupouey
Lighting design: Sebastien Michaud

Talkback moderation: Okwui Okpokwasili
Translation: Courtney Geraghty

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING runs through tomorrow evening at La MaMa with performance at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For information on other events in Crossing The Line, an annual presentation of French Institute Alliance Française, click here.

La Mama (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan

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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.

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Taking Pride! La MaMa's Squirts Festival

Congratulations to Dan Fishback (Director of Helix Queer Performance Network) for another evening of exceeding already high expectations with his annual La MaMa's Squirts festival of queer performance. Fishback, a valiant writer and performer, says the standard Pride Month hooplah--magnified this year with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion--makes him a bit queasy. But he found his happy place at La MaMa in these gatherings of some of our community's most scintillating talents.

"This," he declares now, "is the queer world I always wanted to live in."

Convened by a sharp team of invited curators, Squirts performers span performance genres, generations, races and cultures; this year, it is, says Fishback, "100% curated by transwomen!" Also new this year: 100% free admission. And, honey, you get a lot for that nice price.

Last evening's weekend opener was curated and hosted with unmatched charm by storyteller, actress and health activist Cecilia Gentili. Her sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous entr'acte patter both introduced us to her personal story--living under dictatorship in her native Argentina; embracing the freedom in New York she had envied from afar; learning hard lessons about the dangers transwomen face in the U.S.--while smoothly ushering in one after another of her performers. Most compelling on the bill were Linda LaBeija, delivering spoken word, and Afro-Latin rapper Auset Bennu, each representing Bronx aesthetics in their own commanding, sharp-edged way.

Squirts curators mean business. (I know. I was one last year.) So, I suggest you find out what's up this evening (curated by Charlene Incarnate) and Sunday evening (curated by Mizz June).

One note of caution: The weather outside might be warmish this weekend, but take a sweater and maybe even a cap. La MaMa, for reasons I could not fathom, A/C'ed its theater like a meat locker. Chilled to the bone, I finally, reluctantly and most regretfully fled before the show ended. Still recovering from a wicked cold that had knocked me out since the previous (holiday!) weekend, I was in no shape to withstand La MaMa's deep freeze.

La MaMa's Squirts continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 7pm. Click here for information and tickets.

La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan

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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.

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A meditation on Ni'Ja Whitson at La MaMa Moves

Ni'Ja Whitson (above) and Stacey Karen Robinson (below)
perform The Unarrival Experiments #4', described as
"a ritual digging into the 'vaporous body'
via relationships between astronomy, cosmology, time,
Blackness, and premature death." 
(photos: Theo Cote)

Opacity is in the very nature of what award-winning dance artist Ni'Ja Whitson created in The Unarrival Experiments #4, a presentation of La MaMa Moves at The Downstairs.

A ritual to which you have been invited and for which you have not prepared.

A space in which you are kept in the literal (mostly) and metaphoric (almost always) dark and in which you learn, deep into 90-or-so uninterrupted minutes, that it's all about darkness.

A dark in which much happens to which you are not privy, like the engulfing dark of the ocean at night or at its greatest depths. Or the dark of the vastness of space between stars.

With their audience scattered in clusters, Whitson, dressed in white, begins the evening by beating large fronds against one of the theater's risers. The rhythms of these strikes are clear but keep changing so much that you begin to listen for a language-like pattern, a message. Straining for this might be your first mistake. If this effort wears you out a bit, good. Just stop it.

Stacey Karen Robinson is also in the space with her supple, musical voice. She takes Whitson's dense text on a long, long stream of a flight. (Whitson will also perform a few soliloquies.) She molds it like clay. But, like the rhythms Whitson beat out at the start, her words slip right by you as you reach to grasp them.

I tried. In the middle of jotting down a sentence, I'd lose the rest of it. I'd labor over the start, and the remainder would evaporate, and Robinson would be way past floundering me, on to something else and something after that and more after that. And even what I thought I had managed to capture in my darkened-theater scrawl turns out to be no good to me today. A senseless, hopeless tangle. Or gone. Mostly gone.

Not all, though:

It is not every day I die, not every day I find me a new body....

These walking glories, these transmigrators....holding the North in themselves....the only direction was free!

He broke her. He broke her.

It seems like a contest. Who is the more distracting?

Robinson--distracting us from the largely fugitive Whitson in their dim environment or in darkness or scurrying out of audience view, so that when we catch sight of Whitson again, faint white clothing peeking out from a different part of the space, we're momentarily startled? Maybe momentarily reassured?

Or do Whitson's movements, weighty while enigmatic, distract from Robinson's speech?

To which artist do we owe our attention, our witness, our loyalty?

Body? Or Voice?

And what of that moment when a shredding blast--sounding random, meaningless--obscures both artists?

We, audience, may cup the used space--be space-holders in a way--but we appear to matter only in the way cosmic bodies matter to one another. It doesn't feel personal. It feels functional. Even arbitrary.

A strange feeling. One I'm on the fence about. It's a provocative ask of an audience. But I found myself wondering about (and resisting) all the literal and metaphoric darkness. I felt we had been abandoned. Stranded in space.

And something more. At one point, Whitson drew a ball of twine from beneath an audience member's chair. Whitson unraveled it, spider-like, stringing it between the legs of some of our chairs.

I noticed immediately. I was right next to this action and felt the twine as it touched my ankles. I reached down and ran my fingers over it. I noticed where it connected. I wondered what it meant.

When the piece concluded, I happened to remain in my seat for a few moments and watched as two women--hastening to leave, an impulse I must admit I shared but resisted--nearly stumbled because they did not notice (or perhaps remember) the twine at their feet. Oddly, it took a few moments more before a staffer finally warned the audience to be careful of the twine.

Hard to know if this was deliberate--yeah, in a way, I could see that fitting this piece--or an oversight.

What we don't know could fill a multiverse. Whitson's text offered a brief crack of light for me in a few places--the most dramatic being their mention of how infinitesimally huge is the place of black darkness in the cosmos.

How little there is, really, that we can say with certainty we know, define and control.

Sound design and performance: Jeremy Touissant-Baptiste
Lighting design: Tuce Yasak
Lighting and Sound Supervisor: Hao Bai

The Unarrival Experiments #4 concludes tonight with a 7pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa (The Downstairs)
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan

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Who is this body? Anabella Lenzu at La MaMa Moves!

Anabella Lenzu
(photos: Anabella Lenzu Dance)
"This is my body. The dance is coming from my body,
not the body of a 25-year-old."
--Lenzu in her post-show conversation with director Daniel Pettrow

What I most appreciate about Anabella Lenzu (Anabella Lenzu/Dance Drama), whom I have known since she took my dance writing course at New York Live Arts, is how fully she inhabits the moment. She's all there, a force of self-determination, and that serves her well in her vivid new solo, No more beautiful dances, a world premiere for La MaMa Moves!

It's a generous presence in which Lenzu--plunging headfirst into performance after a long time focused on making work for others--ramps up what it means to be a dancer. It means your body speaks for you; it is your art, one vulnerable to the judgment of others as well as your own, offered up for display and assessment. Lenzu aims to stay honest about all that. With the audience as witness, she desires to serve, too, as her own outside eye.

She marks thick lines in menstrual red around her feet and thighs, outlines she will then fill with the same color and with furious energy. She allows two live-streaming cameras--one from above, one from below--to snoop around every surface and crevice of her 42-year-old body. This reads a bit like feminism of the My Body, My Self kind, an effort to take look at herself, journal what she observes, understand and come to grips with the changes undergone with the years and after giving birth to her two kids.

With the help of director Daniel Pettrow and the mentors she will cite after the show, this "journal" has been distilled down to about 40 minutes. But it encompasses so much--all that can be seen and all that needs to be imagined upon reflection of the viewer's own history. It stretches across the walls of The Downstairs theater's waiting area where blown-up, drawing-enhanced selfies of the dancer have been hung. It includes Lenzu's sturdy, expressive movement, of course, and her husband Todd Carroll's video projections but also Lenzu's speaking and songs recalled from her Argentinian youth--all to recapture a grounding sense of a self almost lost here in a new land.

In her post-show chat with Pettrow and the audience, Lenzu answered the inevitable question about her title, No more beautiful dances, by calling it a warning: "This dog will bite you."

Oh, yeah, I get that. When I first read the title, I thought of it as: "No more beautiful dances...for YOU, MISSY!" I also could not help but hear a poignant question: "Am I no longer able to make beauty?"

But I think an audience member figured out something better, something true of Lenzu when he offered this:

"No more pretty dances. Ah, but beauty...!"

Costumes: Jennifer Johanos
Lighting design: Hao Bai

No more beautiful dances has a final performance tonight at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan

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June 8-10: La MaMa’s Squirts: Generations of Queer Performance

Madison Krekel, left, with musician Isaiah Singer (photo: Nina Fleck)
and (below) Bessie-winner Jasmine Hearn (photo: Scott Shaw)
will appear in this year's La MaMa's Squirts festival, June 8-10

I'm thrilled to announce that I've curated one of this year's La MaMa's Squirts shows, and I want you to come out, represent and support!

The annual festival of queer performance, created by Dan Fishback's Helix Queer Performance Network, will feature three evenings curated by Linda LaBeija, Shannon Matesky and myself, performed at La MaMa's The Downstairs theater, Friday-Sunday, June 8-10, all at 7pm.

I'm showing up for all three shows, because they're going to rock, and I hope to see you there!

Here are your details:

Friday, June 8, 7pm: Q(here)magiQUE

curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Q(here)magiQue is an evening of improvisation, manifesting multidimensional queer space for queer spirituality, casting spells through dance and the word.

Featuring:

Antonio Ramos
iele paloumpis
Jasmine Hearn
Madison Krekel (with Isaiah Singer)


Saturday, June 9, 7pm: The LaBeija Showcase

curated by Linda LaBeija

You can glimpse the House of LaBeija in great films like The Queen and Paris Is Burning but, in The LaBeija Showcase, peek into the life and history of the House and where it is today, with an evening of collaborative, devised theater. Through vogue and modern movement, original music, and lip sync performances, bear witness to the performative talents and fashions of this iconic collective. Learn who they are and learn what they stand for. Learn it and learn it well!

Commentator/Co-Director: Leggoh LaBeija
Choreographer and Dancer: Monster LaBeija
Sound Director: Skyshaker

Featuring:

Rozay LaBeija
NYC Father Legendary Freddie LaBeija
Krystal LaBeija
Egyptt LaBeija
and more!

Sunday, June 10, 7pm: Four Questions

curated by Shannon Matesky

Shannon Matesky, creator and curator of Queer Abstract, curates an evening of theatrical performances highlighting queer artists as they grapple with four pivotal questions in honor of Nina Simone's “Four Women."

Featuring:

Regie Cabico
Gary Champi
Aviva Jaye
Ni'Ja Whitson
Shannon Matesky

For information and tickets--including your 3-performance 50% discount pass!--click here.

La MaMa (The Downstairs)
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan

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Meet your doom--maybe--with Split Britches at La MaMa

Above: Lois Weaver
Below: Peggy Shaw
Split Britches brings Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)
to La MaMa for its US premiere.
(photo: Matt Delbridge)

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), a US premiere from famed lesbian theater duo Split Britches (Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw), takes inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's political satire Dr. Strangelove (1964). It works from a similar wackadoodle take on the threat of nuclear disaster within reach of itchy Twitter--I mean, trigger--fingers. A top-flight general (Shaw) is stationed by a desk and computer monitor where he keeps track of time and apparently takes calls from gal pals. Weaver, referred to by Shaw as "Madame Mr. President Sir," initially slumbers at a far curve of circled "Situation Room" tables. They communicate via landline phones, although sometimes the phone rings, it's not Weaver, and Shaw breaks into randy old pop songs.

The situation at La MaMa, then, is less tense than Shaw's tracking of the countdown clock might suggest. Yes, the show itself must finish by the end of sixty minutes, but Billy Ward and the Dominoes's "60 Minute Man" is one of those randy songs, and there seems to be plenty of time for studly Shaw to bop out to that. Yes, something must be done about the impending doom we're trying to track on confusing overhead monitors, but there's lots of time to field a council of elders from among the oldest of us in attendance. And, no, although lined up with other greyheads, I failed to make the cut.

Directed by Weaver and written by the pair with Hannah Maxwell, the show contains clever text aligned like precision-cut puzzle pieces (best delivered by saucy Shaw) and room for whatever unpredictables the elders might bring to the table. (One woman seemed obsessed with the mysterious whereabouts of one Tiffany Ariana Trump, offspring of Marla Maples and POS...oops, I mean, POTUS. Now that I think about it, Tiff does seem to have been out of the public eye for a suspiciously long time...hmmm.)

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) is more chuckle-provoking and captivating than Kubrick--well, of course! it's lesbian!--with the additional benefit of encouraging the audience to determine not only how the play will go but also, you gotta hope, how the rest of our lives will go. Folks came up with some really good stuff!

Part of The Public Theater's now-closed Under the Radar Festival, and originally scheduled to end last weekend, Unexplode Ordnances (UXO) fortunately continues tonight, Saturday, at 8pm and Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa -- Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Under The Radar: The furious diaspora of "Panorama"

Above: Perry Yung
Below: Maura Nguyen Donohue
in Panorama at La MaMa Downstairs
(photo courtesy of La MaMa)

Panorama
presented by La MaMa and Motus as part of The Public Theater's Under The Radar Festival


We can look at the word panorama in two ways: One offers an immediate, seamless view of an entire field of vision--a landscape, say, or a seascape; the other breaks that view into its components, revealing a piece at a time, gradually delivering the whole. In the case of Panorama--an evening created by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò, directors of Italy's Motus Theatre Company, with actors of the Great Jones Repertory Company at La MaMa--numerous components scroll or zoom into view, overlap, masquerade as one another, tumble together, bombard the senses and wreak dizzying, amusing, endearing confusion. The whole, we might conclude, is far more interesting than any single part, though the parts can also be fascinating.

How you look at the panorama of Panorama is part of the puzzle and the fun, with live players before you and a number of video monitors showing recorded or live action with actors playing themselves or adopting the biography of someone else in the cast or taking over live from where they began presenting themselves on screen in intimate close-ups. It's eye-popping and colorful and only grows more so--all the way from distracting to hallucinogenic--as the allotted 80 minutes roll out.

The fabric of this panorama interweaves threads of diverse cultures, genders, sexual orientations and life histories--some exceedingly dramatic--of being uprooted, replanted in unfamiliar territory and, of necessity, reinventing one's self. Through vivid performances and visual excess, the show celebrates theater as model for how we all might survive and thrive--"inclusive and 'migrant'...a real space of welcoming and freedom." It charms us into feeling and understanding the method of its madness as further laid out in the company's program notes:

Panorama puts to the test every attempt at irrevocably fixing people, nationalities, genders, professions in hierarchical and unchangeable categories. It is a furious diaspora.

Furious, yes. Self-indulgent, yes--often and without reservation. And yes, ultimately, a panorama of joy.

Performers: Maura Nguyen Donohue, John Gutierrez, Valois Mickens, eugene the poogene, Perry Yung and Zishan Ugurlu; on video: Billy Clark, George Drance, Gian Marco Lo Forte, Onni Johnson, Julia Martin, Matt Nasser, Patrick Ssenjovu, Shigeko Suga, Christopher Wild and Mia Yoo

Dramaturgy: Erik Ehn and Daniela Nicolò
Music: Heather Paauwe
CultureHub and Seoul Institute of the Arts Production Team 
Video Design: Bosul Kim, Sangmin Chae and Billy Clark
Set Design: Seungho Jeong
Illustration and Animation: Bosul Kim 
Technical Direction: Yarie Vazquez 
Production Assistant: Youngsun Lim

Panorama continues through Sunday, January 21 with performances Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7pm, Sundays at 2pm. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

For schedule and ticketing information of other events in The Public Theater's Under The Radar Festival, click here.

La MaMa (The Downstairs)
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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BAM's Joseph V. Melillo to receive a Bessies honor

Joseph V. Melillo
(photo: Jesse Winter)

The NY Dance and Performance Awards (The Bessies) has announced the recipient of the 2018 Bessies Presenter Award for Outstanding Curating--Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer, since 1999, of Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Melillo will receive the award at the Bessies Presenters Gathering on Sunday, January 14 (5-7pm), at La MaMa's Downstairs Theater.

“The Bessie committees wanted to recognize Joe Melillo for his visionary curation for more than three decades,” said Bessies Executive Director Lucy Sexton. “Joe has made sure dance has a place on the stages of BAM—from the grand Howard Gilman Opera House to the adventurous Harvey Theater to the intimate space at the Fisher. He has brought so many international choreographers to New York City and lifted up generations of American dance artists on the world stage. We are thrilled to be honoring him with this award.”

The celebration of Melillo's award is free and open to all in the dance and performance community. Please click here to make your reservation.

La MaMa (Downstairs Theater)
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

ABOUT THE BESSIES PRESENTER AWARD

Established in 2017, the Bessies Presenter Award for Outstanding Curating recognizes a presenter or curator of work performed in the New York City area. It is presented to an individual or curatorial team whose work has had a palpable impact on artists, audiences, or the dance and performance field in general. While the award can recognize sustained achievement in curating or presenting over time, it can equally recognize a particular project, festival, or season that occurred in the past year. Visiting or guest curators, as well as full-time curators and presenters are eligible. The first Presenter Award (in 2017) went to Judy Hussie-Taylor, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Danspace Project. 

ABOUT THE BESSIES

The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 33 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize outstanding work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League, as members participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. The Bessies are produced in partnership with Dance/NYC. For more information about the Bessies, visit www.bessies.org.

Follow the Bessies on Facebook / #theBessies / @bessieawards

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Your Christmas alternative: "Gemini Stars/Scorpio Stars"

 Daniel Diaz (above) and Fleur Voorn on video (below)
in Gemini Stars/Scorpio Stars
(photos: Theo Cote)

Pull up a chair, sip some white wine and kick back with Gemini Stars/Scorpio Stars, your all-queer Christmas fête from writer/director Gian Marco Lo Forte and the Pioneers Go East Collective at La MaMa/The Downstairs. This 70-minute music-theater show dips into YouTube's vlogging trend to explore LGBTQ identity, culture, struggles, triumphs and the joy--and sheer relief--of being surrounded by family-of-choice at holiday time.

Our technology grows slicker by the minute, but humans remain a species eager to tell and consume stories--a truth manifest in phenomena like StoryCorps, The Moth and YouTube vlogs. Gemini Stars//Scorpio Stars features personal stories contributed and shared by its performers--Daniel Diaz, Jess Barbagallo, Fleur Voorn, Michaela Reggio, Niko Tsocanos and Ryan Leach, all live; Julia Dobner-Pereira and Chloe Li Piazza on video. Not all of its tales land with equal effectiveness. But there is often charm, humor and poignancy enhanced by spirited, if easy-going, presentation along with music, movement and decor.

Best of the batch: The hilarious Diaz has vivid recall of meeting a hunky firefighter near the muumuu racks in the musty basement of a vintage clothing store; Barbagallo and Reggio amusingly and affectionately reflect on a road trip that sounds like their relationship in microcosm. And you probably shouldn't miss the tender ballad performed by musical guest Ombro de Oro and dedicated to one "Blanca Ivanka."

Perversely, all of this made me flash back to those Andy Williams  Christmas tv shows in the 1960s. You remember Williams, right? Smooth-singing Republican who, nevertheless, championed Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern? Whose politics corroded with age--foe of Obama ("a Marxist!"), fan of Limbaugh and Beck? I'm trying to imagine what might have been--some alternative much like Gemini Stars/Scorpio Stars.

Gemini Stars/Scorpio Stars continues through December 17 with performances tonight and Saturday at 7pm and on Sunday at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa (The Downstairs)
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Native feminist troupe Spiderwoman is 40! Party!!!

Spiderwoman Theater's Gloria Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock)
with daughter Monique Mojica
(photo: Nicky Paraiso)

Spiderwoman's Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) at left
with Oneida-Oswegan songwriter Lacey Hill
who performed at the celebration.
(photo: Star Black)

LU! LU! LU! LU! 

An Evening Celebrating Spiderwoman Theater’s 40 Years

On Tuesday evening, La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre hosted a warm, down-to-earth gathering of family, friends, colleagues and fans of Spiderwoman Theater in tribute to the renowned troupe's 40-year milestone. Founded by three intrepid sisters of Kuna and Rappahannock lineage--Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel and the late Lisa Mayo--Spiderwoman is fundamental to the development of New York's avantgarde and feminist theater movements. With forthright, woke politics of resistance and bawdy, boisterous humor, the Spiderwomen have long been revered role models for generations of artists on the downtown scene like Taylor Mac, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Alessandra Belloni and Carmelita Tropicana who participated in the celebration and benefit.

The fun evening was capped by a dance party presided over by First Nations electronic group A Tribe Called Red.

Musicians Ian Campeau, Tim 2oolman and Bear Witness of
A Tribe Called Red working the after-party
(photo: Star Black)

SiverCloud Singers
(photo: Star Black)

On screen, Spiderwoman's Lisa Mayo (1924-2013)
remembered at La MaMa
(photo: Star Black)

Laura Ortman of the all-Native Coast Orchestra
and Brooklyn's Stars and Fleas
(photo: Star Black)

Above: choreographer Elizabeth Streb
with Carey Lovelace (Loose Change Productions),
co-producer of the Spiderwoman benefit
Below: Zach Morris and Tom Pearson, co-artistic directors of
award-winning Third Rail Projects theater troupe
(photos: Star Black)

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Family life, fantasy life: Tamar Rogoff at La MaMa

Cover of Cherry Ames, Student Nurse (1943),
the first volume in Helen Wells's popular novel series for girls.
(from Collection of the Museum of Health Care)

Core cast members of Grand Rounds, a world premiere by Tamar Rogoff
Center: Cadence Rotarius
At left: Morgan Sullivan, Glen Heroy, Cyndy Gilbertson
At right: Jake Szczypek and Emily Pope
(photo: Asya Danilova)

In the 1950s world of Grand Rounds, a 10-year-old inspired by the adventures of Cherry Ames, nurse and amateur sleuth, turns her perceptive gaze on the rituals of family life. What goes on behind closed doors and on the radio is fodder for her scientific reckonings. Rogoff invites audiences to sit bedsides to share the intimacy that propels her protagonist on a rescue mission of her own. 

-- from publicity for Grand Rounds

Core cast in rehearsal for Grand Rounds
(photo: Asya Danilova)

"They are the greatest cast I've ever worked with," said choreographer/director Tamar Rogoff after her world premiere of Grand Rounds at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre.

Well, they are certainly an interesting cast with individual backgrounds in everything from clowning for the Big Apple Circus to living with Parkinson's Disease. Working with all kinds of folks--even those without training in performance--is nothing new for the adventurous Rogoff. But while the unusual diversity of this cast, as well as their individual skills and all-in commitment, gives the work strength, none of that feels like enough. Even the expansive staging falls short of moving Grand Rounds from a curiosity to a consequential work of art.

Before seeing the show, I checked up on its title:

Medical Definition of grand rounds:  rounds involving the formal presentation by an expert of a clinical issue sometimes in the presence of selected patients (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Grand rounds: A formal meeting at which physicians discuss the clinical case of one or more patients. Grand rounds originated as part of residency training wherein new information was taught and clinical reasoning skills were enhanced. Grand rounds today are an integral component of medical education. They present clinical problems in medicine by focusing on current or interesting cases. They are also sometimes utilized for dissemination of new research information. (MedicineNet)

You could say Rogoff brings her "patients" 'round to us--though, instead of hospital beds, we get a close-up view of beds in a family's home. The beds suggest a modest home and the relationships within.

Rogoff grew up the daughter of a doctor, and her research and work have led her to an understanding of the dual nature of her mission as an artist--transformation and healing. In this new work, she foregrounds a child--a stand-in for herself, one would assume--whose attraction to the Cherry Ames books, popular from the 1940s through the 1960s, leads her to examine family life with the avidity of a smart young sleuth. The happenings here are her "grand rounds," too.

To start, some of the audience members are made to sit on cardboard boxes for sitting shiva in traditional discomfort--clever, that--positioned around the performance space so that we face one of several makeshift beds. The characters--a young girl, her parents, her grandparents--will shift from bed to bed. But, at first, we don't know that. So, as dancers in front of you perform a long series of movements in and around a bed, you might find your interest drifting away to catch what's happening elsewhere, particularly when the noise over there distracts you.

But when I saw Grand Rounds last night, we only learned from Rogoff's Q&A that she had wanted each of us to stay focused on the bed directly in front of us. Since these initial performances rotate among the beds and repeat, she explained, we eventually get to see everything that each character does--the young soldier/brother handily slipping right beneath his bed and repeatedly lifting it like a set of weights, the grandparents coyly approaching each other and dancing to swing music, the parents (superb Emily Pope and Jake Szczypek) in stylized and tense, faintly erotic conflict.

So, are we mourners? Are we doctors on grand rounds? Or are we--each of us--that little blonde girl who shows up everywhere to eye, or maybe imagine, influence, remember--what happens in each instance? The answer could be any or all of these things, but the problem, as I see it, is that it ultimately does not matter. Intimations of mortality--for instance, in the doleful soundscore, in the eventually overused shiva boxes--lead to events too predictable, and to drawn out, to land with emotional force.

And what of the rest of the staging, a sort-of fantasy placed at a remote distance from all of us and perched high on the theater's usual seating risers, where hospital scenes with cutesy doctors, student nurses and a patient could have been excerpted from a Broadway musical?

Neither here nor there: I had some Cherry Ames books when I was a child. I don't remember a thing about them except having once thought, "Why don't I have Nancy Drew books like everybody else?"  This slight resentment that might or might not have been justified. I have no idea. We can talk, another time, about how my seamstress mother and aunt chose to adorn me relative to what every other girl was wearing at the time.

Grand Rounds continues through May 14, Wednesday to Saturday at 7pm; Sunday at 4pm.  For information and tickets, click here.

La Mama (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)


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Charles Bobo Shaw, 69

Charles Bobo Shaw, Avant-Garde Jazz Drummer, Dies at 69
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, January 20, 2017

APAP SEASON CHOICES: Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo

Members of Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo
perform Custodians of Beauty
(photo: Maria Baranova)

At some point in a dance work by Pavel Zuštiak (Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo), you will find yourself physically, helplessly connected to the surreal, demanding goings-on. In Custodians of Beauty, for instance, you might be chosen to literally occupy the floor for a stretch of time that feels like it's stretching on forever. On another occasion, you might remain in your seat--safe, you'd think, until you notice your ears assaulted by high-pitched sound or your heart racing from the speeding visuals and sonic thunder. Or, in BASTARD / The Painted Bird: Part 1, you might "see" the likes of yourself in a crowd of "just folks" picked up locally by Zuštiak, merged with his professionals and coached into miraculous efficacy as a team. "That's me over there," you think as you feel yourself first saunter then pelt through space, just missing collisions with others in near-chaos, then placidly lowering your body to the floor, again and again and again. The theatrical veil between the worlds, as conceived by Zuštiak, is always gossamer-thin and, ultimately, ripped aside. You have pressed close to some kind of edge and its dangers. You have glimpsed something you cannot name.

This week, La MaMa is reviving Bastard, first seen in the US at this theater in 2010, and PS 122 is presenting Custodians of Beauty at La MaMa as part of its COIL Festival. Both offer concentrated immersion into the world of this bold, Slovak-American dancemaker, a multiple award winner, who gets that theater's power is in the way artists' and audiences' bodies dream together. And if I haven't already sent you running for cover, let me encourage you to step to La MaMa for this opportunity to be moved, to be affected, to be transformed by dance with music by Christian Frederickson and lighting by Joe Levasseur, both master craftsmen in demand and frequent Zuštiak collaborators. Dancer Jaro Viňarský reprises his 2013 Bessie-winning role as the soloist/persecuted outsider in Bastard, inspired by Jerzy Kosiński’s novel, The Painted Bird. In making Bastard, Zuštiak might have been thinking of his own identity as an immigrant to an overwhelming, not always congenial new land and his struggles to make and sustain art. But Bastard returns to us now in a time of heightened social relevance.

Remaining performances of BASTARD / The Painted Bird: Part 1 run tonight at 8pm; Saturday at 2:30pm and Sunday at 6:30pm. Running Time: 75 minutes. For information on this and other La MaMa events, click here.

Remaining performances of Custodians of Beauty run today at 5pm, Saturday at 5:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. Run time: 85 minutes. For information and tickets for this and other COIL Festival events, click here.

La MaMa
(The Downstairs)
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between Bowery and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

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John Vaccaro, 86

John Vaccaro, Iconoclastic Director, Dies at 86
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, August 11, 2016

Spiderwoman: "Material Witness" to violence against women

Gloria Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater
in Material Witness at La MaMa
(photo: courtesy Spiderwoman Theater)

I leave the door open for the spirits to walk about freely.

I welcome all the guardians to our space.

--Gloria Miguel in Material Witness

I never saw Spiderwoman Theater's original Women in Violence--the first production by this legendary Native American troupe, premiered in New York in 1976. But, last night at La MaMa, I got a good look at its rambunctious offspring, Material Witness, a piece designed to reach out to today's young women. It aims to remind them, and all of us, that physical, sexual and emotional abuse has not been eradicated from Native communities and that silence about it remains a deadly force.

Material Witness is directed by Spiderwoman co-founder Muriel Miguel, co-written by its six-woman cast with Miguel, and co-presented with Aanmitaagzi, an indigenous, interdisciplinary troupe from Nipissing First Nation, Ontario.

The 90-minute work bears all the hallmarks of Spiderwoman--communal, community-minded theater, story-based exposition, rollicking physical humor often reminiscent of vaudeville and slapstick comedy, and strong musical drive. The 1976 tune from AC/DC, "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"--its chorus cheekily woven into a narrative about deeds most dirty--meets up with Lady Gaga's "Til It Happens to You." But, of course. And its new generation--the radiantly charming and kickass Cherish Violet Blood, Penny Couchie (choreographer), Donna Couteau, Ange Loft and Tanis Parenteau--share the stage with veteran Spiderwoman Gloria Miguel who serves as witness to their struggles and stories, setting and holding the space for them, collaborating in their honesty and victories. The music is dance-club loud, Soni Moreno's costume and decor colors and combos are eye-popping, and the performers' energy rocks the house.

Let me issue a standard trigger warning:  Some stories related here can be uncomfortable for anyone, especially survivors of violence, to hear. But I must also leave you with this laughter trigger warning: Spiderwoman's commitment to humor as a disinfectant has not and will never quit.

Material Witness continues through May 29 with performances Thursday to Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. Panel discussions are scheduled following certain performances. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa

74A East 4th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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Moving past "the feast" with dance artist Tiffany Mills

Mei Yamanaka and Tiffany Mills
in After the Feast
(photo: Julie Lemberger ©2016)

Kyle Marshall and Emily Pope
in After the Feast
(photo: Julie Lemberger @2016)

Hot on the dazzling tail of Ballez, the Tiffany Mills Company lights up this year's bustling La MaMa Moves festival with another must-see production--the world premiere of After the Feast. Marking Mills's fifteenth anniversary season, the hour-long sextet propels the artist and her fellow dancers through a harsh, ruined environment. The past is shattered. Now survival demands guts, transparency, cooperation and--most of all--the will to keep moving.

Mills is joined by Kyle Marshall, Jordan Morley, Kenneth Olguin, Emily Pope and Mei Yamanaka, giving all-in performances, deeply committed to the striking physical volatility and human intimacy of the work. Other collaborators include Jonathan Melville Pratt (music), Dennis O'Leary (visual design), Mary Kokie McNaugher (costumes), Chris Hudacs
 (lighting) and Kay Cummings (dramaturgy).

After the Feast runs Thursday, May 12 through Sunday, May 15. Thursday-Saturday performances are at 7pm with a 4pm performance on Sunday. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa
at Ellen Stewart Theatre and The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Ballez: La MaMa Moves presents ballet on the wild side

Khadija Griffith (left) and Deborah Lohse in
Sleeping Beauty & The Beast,
a Ballez world premiere
(photo: Theo Coté)

Ballez is performance, company, class and community, that invites everyone to witness and celebrate the history and performances of lesbian, queer, and transgender people.

Ballez dancers claim our inherent nobility and belonging within, around, and on top of a form that has historically excluded us. 

Ballez celebrates the virtuosity of complexly gendered embodiment, energetic eloquence, queer coding, and the magical adaptability of expression that Ballez dancers have cultivated through their lives as a way to survive and thrive.

--some statements from www.ballez.org

Sleeping Beauty & the Beast--the latest project of Katy Pyle (with Jules Skloot and members of Pyle's Ballez troupe) is big.

How big, you ask?

So big, it requires more than two hours and two--not one--theater at La MaMa to tell its story.

So big, it's really telling multiple stories, mashing up classical ballets and fairy tale archetypes with Lower East Side labor organizing history and with L.E.S. queer culture--resulting in a hot mess that is and isn't.

So big, Pyle needs two dozen versatile, well-trained and coached dancers (most playing multiple roles) and eighteen classical musicians (New York's Queer Urban Orchestra playing straight-up Tchaikovsky for Act 1) plus a DJ JD Samson's house music (Act 2) and even that's not enough.

So big, it Occupies the Ballet Canon; big enough for a look-in from Graham and Loie Fuller; too big for the gender binary; too big to behave.

So big, it can embrace sweetness, humor, revolutionary fervor, sexual heat of diverse and ever-shifting varieties, and the pain of loss.

So big that--well, you know those old timers who regale you with stories about being there when so-and-so made her stunning debut or first danced with Nureyev and knocked their socks off in that difficult role? One day, if you're lucky, you will be that old timer, unable to shut up about how you saw Ballez premiere Sleeping Beauty & The Beast at La MaMa Moves.

That big. Historic. Meaningful. Moving.

Pyle and company get so much joyfully right, starting with the complex precision work of Act 1's opening yarn weaving dance. But I'm going to let you discover the best of Sleeping Beauty & The Beast for yourself, because you're going, right?  You're going.

Sleeping Beauty & the Beast continues tonight and through May 8--Wednesday to Saturday at 7pm; Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa
at Ellen Stewart Theatre and The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between Bowery and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Elizabeth Swados, 64

Elizabeth Swados, Creator of Socially Conscious Musicals, Is Dead at 64
by William Grimes, The New York Times, January 5, 2016

Closing tomorrow: "Hildegard (vision)" at La MaMa

Multi-talented Marina Celander is the elegance central to Hildegard (vision), a curious interdisciplinary work running now through Sunday at La MaMa. Directed by Gian Marco Lo Forte with writing by Abby Felder and music by John Sully (Pioneers Go East Collective), the hour-long piece aims to offer insight into the physiological and emotional experiences of medieval German composer, scientist and mystic Hildegard von Bingen whose migraines triggered futuristic visions.

The immediacy of setting--a row of audience seats surround performers on three sides of the narrow, rectangular, brick-lined theater--provides the sensation of a dream externalized. Colors and textures feel intimate to viewers; the attractive, live green of the abbess's plants, the gleaming clear or dark amber glass of science beakers and bottles, are particularly striking visual elements. The space contains, all at once, everything it needs, collapsing the separation between one point in history and another era. We watch Hildegard, with assistant and same-sex lover Richardis von Stade, potting and tending the plants as they converse just as we clearly see centuries ahead to the commonplace of men and women side by side in their labs.

"We are vessels. We are women. How can we transcend so many barriers?" Celander asks shortly before von Stade (Nehprii Amenii) pulls out a videocam from out of somewhere and trains it on her abbess's face. The subtle interactions between these two--the dynamics of Celander's faint but detectable withdrawal, her self-containment, and Amenii's confused, quiet discomfort--drew me into the work. Regrettably, the text--in it plainness and in telling us what we likely already know--lacks the poetic vision to soar with Hildegard's celestial artistry.

Hildegard (vision) has two more performances: tonight at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. Seating is limited. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa: First Floor Theatre
74a East 4th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Taking a chance on Carol Mendes at La MaMa

Verso
Carol Mendes & Artists
(photo: Nicolas Pirata)

Carol Mendes & Artists--the young company premiering LANOTTE+VERSO at La MaMa--is new to me, a happy discovery. Brazil-born Mendes, a Tisch grad, has promising talent and self-assurance. Moreover, she's blessed with dancers who completely get her.

In LANOTTE, Liszt is the jam for a trio of corvid-like women--Frankie Fernandes, Lauren Elise Kravitz and Erika Wuhrer--winged in black evening dresses. With a few winks and a silent scream to boot, they invoke the likes of Isadora and all Romantic, emotion-laden impulse in modern dance. And that's fun. But I think what Mendes means to get at here is the double-edged stuff that lies beneath her own surface and the art she's making. She hints at that again in her Interlude|Intermission, interjected between the program's two works, where she dances with and for a volunteer from the audience. A little awkward in its setup, this segment nevertheless shimmers with strangeness and command of the moment.

Opening the evening, LANOTTE might be a fair enough intro to the troupe, at once highlighting the dancers' formal technique and their madcap, go-for-it! drive. But Mendes's real calling card is VERSO, a clearer representation of her eccentricities and a proving ground for her dancers. Pantherish and punkish, their whimsy alternates with intrigue.

LANOTTE+VERSO continues through tomorrow, September 13, with performances tonight at 7:30pm and tomorrow at 3:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The First Floor Theatre @ La MaMa
74A East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)