Got to be real: "Star Crap Method" at American Realness '16

Star Crap Method is Larissa Velez-Jackson’s compositional methodology that complicates and redefines the skill set of the contemporary dancer and functions as an absurd exposé of the inner workings of the dancer in process. Performers Tyler Ashley, Talya Epstein and Larissa Velez-Jackson collectively compose the entire work in real time, including the sound score of live vocals and digital sound. Bessie-award-winning lighting designer Kathy Kaufmann improvises illumination throughout. The work is founded on Velez-Jackson’s improvisational practice that embraces technical brilliance and failure in equal measure, ushering in a form of interdisciplinary creative limitlessness with opportunities for great humor, and vulnerability.

I wanted to start off with that helpful promotional statement for Star Crap Method because if there's anything I'm sure of, it's that dancemaker Larissa Velez-Jackson is precise as heck about how she wants us to understand the power in any given mess. Sharing space with her and Epstein and Ashley yesterday at Abrons Arts Center was a workout, a vicarious exercise in trust and a parallel to the primordial dance of crap from which stars and planets arose.

Introducing Star Crap Method yesterday, Velez-Jackson called it "the complete encapsulation of my artistic identity" and, even more cheekily, "an emerging artist retrospective." It is definitely all about emerging. And what I take away from several hints sprinkled into live, improvised narration is just how much emerging has to do with breaking down.

Doing the thingness of my body. Thingness. One more time: thingness.

There are many people in me. Sometimes I am surprised who comes out front and who is left behind.

 I disintegrate for you....

I like the way Velez-Jackson encourages--no, requires--audiences to contribute to the crap without her being overbearing about it. She makes it fun. I like the way sincerity dances with satire, both partners quite nimble, ultimately inseparable. I like how the rigorous readiness of each of the three performers--their skills and charisma undeniable--supports and activates the rough materials of chaos. Abrons's space looked like what it is for Velez-Jackson and her collaborators: an ongoing workspace, with all manner of mystery debris--including a fourth person, hooded, masked, possibly sleeping--carelessly thrown against walls and into corners. I like that it's okay for us to see that, to give up any attempt to make things make sense and to give ourselves over to the electric flash of the moment, visual and verbal.

American Realness 2016 ends tomorrow, and you can try to get into the last performance of Star Crap Method tomorrow at 5:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Star Crap Method is presented in association with New York Live Arts.

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

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We're doing it again! Not The Master's Tools at Gibney!

I'm so excited that Gibney Dance Center will once again host Not The Master's Tools: Dance Artists Create Alternatives on Monday, December 7. Guess who's presenting and chatting with us this time?

André M. Zachery

Raja Feather Kelly

Jen Abrams

Larissa Velez-Jackson

Remember, hold Monday, December 7 (6-8pm).

These conversations are free and open to all.

Your pre-registration [CLICK HERE] will help us plan for the best space, but walk-ins are certainly welcome. Help us spread the word, and bring your friends and colleagues!

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

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

(map/directions)

"AUNTSforcamera" show opens at New Museum

Dance is an art of live bodies in charged space. If that space exists inside a machine, if the artist's delivery system is a screen, are the bodies in recorded time any less live to us, the space between us and them any less charged? Is the divide between viewer and do-er ever more distinct and unbridgeable? Is the work a discrete, permanent object, an owned commodity like anything else on display in a museum of visual art?

Test your responses to these questions at the New Museum, now through February 15, with AUNTSforcamera, an installation of dance-for-camera works created and filmed last September in a shared open-studio process at the museum.

The project, originally commissioned by Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and TrouwAmsterdam, occupies transitional, non-gallery space, dispersed around various locations from lobby to stairway to Sky Room. A handy map helps you find your way. In the flexible and inviting AUNTS way, you're left on your own to make of this show what you will, choosing to go in order or mix things up, stay in front of one monitor for as long as you'd like or zip around, catching bits and pieces of the art in action.

Anya Liftig's A Very Something or Other might be a strategy for dealing, literally head-on, with her admitted discomfort in front of a camera. Her screen, set on a counter tucked into a tiny alcove, frames an extreme closeup of her face, in florid color, and the continual contortions of her facial muscles. A chair beckons a single viewer to sit close to Liftig's screen--the best way to get that alchemical charge, I'd say--although you can certainly stand in the space or even linger at the door as a few visitors did.

Saturated color in Cara Francis's REMOTE might signify human individuality, but images of blindfolded bodies and depersonalizing AR drone aerial shots, jerky framing and limbs detached by editing pull things in a completely opposite direction. An interesting and ominous tension.

The member of Collective Statement (Felicia Ballos, Jean Brennan and T. Charnan Lewis) solve the logistical challenge of not all being available at the same time by using the "exquisite corpse" technique. Their dance, drawing a line with my body straight to you, plays out in supple imagery over a stack of three monitors, one for each section of the human body--head, torso, legs. Each body section has costuming, props and activity all its own. Yes, in this patchwork world, it's possible to blow up a beach ball and nurse a child at the same time.

Other works on show:

#auntsforcamera (Karl Scholz)

Level Up: The Real Harlem Shake (Salome Asega, Chrybaby Cozie, Ali Rosa-Salas) Note: Accessible only on Saturday and Sundays.

Dancing the Edits (Vanessa Justice)

Primary Source (video): AUNTS at the New Museum 2012, 2014 (Gillian Walsh)

Star Crap Method via Lens (Larissa Velez-Jackson)

STAGING STAGES (IMMA/MESS)

#trouwforcamera, #newmuseumforcamera (Karl Scholz)

AUNTSforcamera runs through February 15. Click here for hours and other visitor information.

For more on AUNTS, click here.

The New Museum
235 Bowery (one block south of Houston Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

The Larissa Show

Let me say it outright: I love Larissa Velez-Jackson. 

And you have one more night to see her troupe at Danspace Project--tonight, 8pm--where she's showing Holy Now! and Making Ends Meet as part of curator Trajal Harrell's PLATFORM 2010: certain difficulties, certain joy.

Harrell's concept of "difficulties" (Velez-Jackson's experiences with a broken toe or a broken heart) and "joy" (the choreographer's ebullient creativity and infectious sense of humor) is well illustrated here. Velez-Jackson is an injection of sunshine and courage.

I love how, in Holy Now!, she dares to create a lovely, honest-to-god altar (although a suspiciously pagan one) in the St. Mark's sanctuary and populate postmodern performance space with women having what appears to be ecstatic encounters with divinity. The work--performed by the choreographer and Sarah Holcman, Abigail Levine and Katy Pyle with soundman Jon Velez-Jackson--is poised on a fine line between seriousness and goof, a satire of bizarre, cultish behavior that locates (and enjoys) the cultish behavior in theatrical performers and their audiences.

Making Ends Meet seems spiritual, too--in the sense of the choreographer using every trick in her book to exorcise the demons that bedevil the process of making and presenting art--like self-doubt and bad reviews. How to do that? Well, start by advising your audience to loosen up: "Guideline #1: Enjoy!" Have a videographer (Ivo Serra) follow you around and turn his lens on the people in the seats. Those live close-ups of audience members' faces will knock 'em off guard. Package yourself in a format the audience has already embraced--the reality show--and maybe think about hiring a coach to bring some edginess out in your niceness.

"Don't hurt the artist," Velez-Jackson sings, over and over again.

Singing this, she parked herself right in front of me--me with my pen suddenly frozen over my notepad--and gazed into my eyes while the videocamera was trained, for painfully long minutes, on my face. 

(Oh, no worries, Larissa. You're barking up the wrong tree. The tree you really want, though, might be planted over on the other side of the room!)

Velez-Jackson's a charismatic, kickass artist who, with playfulness and protean skills as a physical comedian, establishes immediate rapport with her audience. Getting us right where she wants us, she's capable of delivering any kind of message or sting or bouquet of rare joy that she desires.

See Larissa Velez Performance Company tonight, 8pm. For information and reservations, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

Directions