Spring Gaga

Saar Harari 

of LeeSaar The Company 

announces

Gaga Classes in New York

Starting on May 12, we will have new Gaga/people and Gaga/dancers classes at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn:

Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE) (Brooklyn):Gaga/people (starting 5/12). Saturdays, 11am-Noon – taught by Lee Sher

Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE) (Brooklyn) – Gaga/dancers (starting 5/12). Tuesdays, 8pm-9:15pm – taught by Jye-Hwei Lin; Thursdays, 3pm-4:15pm – taught by Candice Schnurr; Sundays, 12:30pm-1:45pm – taught by Hsin-Yi Hsiang

Mark Morris Dance Center (Brooklyn) – Gaga/people (ongoing). Wednesdays, 8pm-9pm

Classes at Mark Morris in May will be taught by Navarra Novy-Williams and Lee Sher.

The Gaga Summer intensive will be led by Adi Salant, Associate Artistic Director of the Bat Sheva Dance Company. August 18-24, 10am-5pm, in our studio in Park Slope.

For registration for the Summer Intensive, click here.

LeeSaar at La MaMa

There should be more butts in the seats for LeeSaar The Company--at The Annex Theatre at La MaMa, continuing tonight at 7:30pm and ending with a 5pm peformance on Sunday. If you don't go, you're missing One day, a duet with Taiwan-born Jye-Hwei Lin and Hsin-Yi Hsiang--intense, exacting channels of an intense, exacting vision, two performers who clearly have inspired Lee Sher and Saar Harari to sharpen all their tools. Both women are fairly recent recruits to the company; Lin's performance in the company's March 2008 work, Geisha, was one of the highlights of last season. The evening includes Little Island, a brief play by and featuring Sher as a woman whose isolation--amid the pleasantness of an all-too-quiet house--compels her to reach out in odd and sometimes amusing ways.

Information and tickets at La MaMa

Out of Israel

92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival at The Ailey Citigroup Theater. Whew! When I was writing those damned "Footnotes" for The Village Voice, that would have taken up just about all of my word allotment! (Glad that's over!) Here are a few more words to throw into that mix: LeeSaar The Company & Netta Yerushalmy: Out of Israel. One work apiece by young Israeli choreographers of note.

Bilocale--come close please...,Yerushalmy's duet with choreographic collaborator Toni Melaas, benefits from the intimate arrangement of its audience around the edges of the theater's performance space. We feel the energy of the two women as they bound towards us or when one paints the other's back in slashes or dots of scarlet and slams her down onto a sheet of paper--surely an alarming form of printmaking. Over 25 minutes, the movement involves quirky, rubbery effects and various clinches and entanglements, suggesting volatile inner states and external connections. Boundaries will be violated. There will be blood.

For Geisha--presented by writer/actress Lee Sher and dancer-choreographer Saar Harari
--the audience is returned to conventional theater seating. There's no formal intermission between the companies--just a pause while our folding chairs are removed from the performing space. Keeping the audience seated that long doesn't work to the advantage of a piece that might be too long anyway. But Geisha has extraordinarily confident solo turns by Jye-Hwei Lin--topless in jeans and full of vivid, cinematic characters--who also duets with the always provocative and brooding (and identically-attired) Harari. Sher wears a kimono-like robe in her interspersed solos. Resembling a cross between Carrie Fisher and Celine Dion, she lipsyncs a couple of Israeli pop songs, regarding us with oodles of saccharine "sincerity" and strolling past the front row, grabbing our hands. Sher's tackiness stands in contrast to her equally showy yet cool and really out there colleagues. The lighting by Joe Levasseur on bare flesh is--no big surprise--terrific.

Out of Israel runs through Sunday afternoon, March 9. The festival continues through March 16. For a schedule and ticketing information, click here or call 212-415-5552.