Juliana F. May's "Adult Documentary"

A two-toned carpet--dull brown and beige intermingled splotches--now covers a springy floor and seating risers at The Chocolate Factory. For some reason, just the sight of that carpet switches anxiety to HIGH and seems to make the ceiling feel like it has descended a foot or two and might press even lower. I can't swear this isn't the case.

Luckily, this setup (designed by Sara C. Walsh) won't last forever, although the season for Juliana F. May's new production, Adult Documentary, will continue its stretch over two weeks, a rare blessing for a choreographer and a rare chance for you, the viewer. Get your butt over to Queens and into one of those tightly-packed folding chairs. As another choreographer advised me last night, "Just surrender."

That won't be easy. A delicate, pixyish, ultimately irritating Connor Voss drifts into the space and begins lavishing the audience with high-pitched, childish babble obsessively repeated; fussy, high-strung gesturing; a startling screech for no apparent reason; a tendency to fold their body and gently tuck it at the end of an audience row. Listen carefully, and you eventually sense you're listening in on something of critical, telling import. Voss's lengthy, bravura performance is, at once, gorgeous and worrisome. Is it permissible to be tickled at times? Or to be alarmed by some aspects of it? Should we even be watching it?

Things grow more adult in this "documentary" first with the entrance of Kayvon Pourazar, intensifying the energy in the room with gruff sound and violently jutting movements. His screeching, lumbering presence seems to send Voss into orbit in a madhouse kind of way. You get more of the picture, and you shrink back. But we're just at the beginning.

May's concern with "the form of trauma" and "the trauma of form" takes clear shape as other dancers--Lindsay Clark, Talya Epstein and Rennie McDougall--complete the picture. What ensues next looks like a court dance staged inside a massive cuckoo clock--impersonal, cyclical movements neatly efficient, athletic, mechanically synchronized; the regular, clicking or striding rhythms; the repeated lines of text that hint at a story before spraying it with buckshot. Sharp barks replace words at frustrating places, making you wonder. Nudity, full and partial, insinuates something, falling short of declaration. Periodic variations on things you come to expect keep you off guard.

Integrated with vocal performance, the ensemble's dancing is damned amazing as physical phenomenon, imagery and durational performance. And it takes its toll. I have rarely seen a troupe of dancers line up for their curtain call with such looks of drained exhaustion, no smiles. May smiled--as she should. Her dancers went all out for her vision, and they scored.

With music by Chris Seeds, lighting by Chloe Z. Brown and costumes by Mariana Valencia

Adult Documentary runs through March 12, Tuesday-Saturdays, 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

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Michelle Boulé in focus

I'm sharing a couple of very interesting items I received in the press kit for last week's Dance & Process program featuring, among other choreographers, Michelle Boulé at The Kitchen:

Michelle Boulé

by Samara Davis, BOMB, April, 2010

Performance in Process: Michelle Boulé

by Lauren Bakst, BOMB, December 21, 2011

Boulé, Alexander and Lanz at The Kitchen

The Kitchen's current Dance and Process show, curated by Yasuko Yokoshi, features some impressively fluid moving by Lindsay Clark (in Michelle Boulé's duet of randomness and beauty, Hello, I need you); the absorbing, authoritative presence by Julie Alexander in her solo, From nothing real; and an ultimately gorgeous blend of the odd and the exacting in Martin Lanz's resonance... Each piece, in its own way, speaks to me of the value of an artist's eye, choice, commitment and rigor.

See the final performance tonight at 8pm. For complete information and ticketing, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Fresh and totally direct

Some quick impressions of four highlights from this season's Fresh Tracks showing at Dance Theater Workshop:

Goodbye Mr. B (Lindsay Clark in collaboration with the performers and Reid Bartelme; performed by Clark, Yve Laris Cohen and Stuart Singer): By far, the standout piece of an interesting evening. There's a sense of artistic assurance here--a calm mastery of space, light, sound and the energies of the body. Simple, clear, formal design is the best container for driven passion when "a tornado meets a volcano," as Eminem would say. You want to see this one so you can say you saw it when Clark goes on to rule, and rule she will.

EGO (by and for Marjani A. Forté): A reverberating, hallucinatory score (by Everett V. Saunders) forms the perfect sonic matrix for this vigorous, kaleidoscopic solo on an edge where assertion of self (or, really, the eruption of multiple selves) meets aggression. You'll note that Forté has learned well from Blondell Cummings, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Camille A. Brown, distinctive artists with whom she has worked. But what's especially convincing here is that she never loses control of the physical shapes or the impression she's making. Never. Never ever.

Duke (Yve Laris Cohen, in collaboration with Michael Mahalchick; performed by Cohen, Mahalchick, Joey Cannizzaro and Niall Noel): This is the second piece I've seen by Cohen; the first, presented at Dixon Place, also featured this transgender-identified, multidisciplinary artist with a bared chest, matter-of-factly revealing surgical scars beneath what was once female breasts. That work, as it unfolded, was forged in ritualized pain and endurance. This current piece adds a Sisyphean task for Mahalchick--a fleshy bear of a man who repeatedly clasps the small, boyish Cohen around the torso and ports him, and the heavy plank of wood he's carrying, from one place to another until the exertion of this labor becomes clearly audible and palpable. There's more to this piece, but this very long, repetitive section is, in a strange way, dazzling...and grueling...to witness. And frankly I long to chain a certain New York Times critic to a seat and, A Clockwork Orange-style, force him to watch it over and over and over again.

Jessica's Story (by and for Rebecca Patek): I don't know how I did it, but I seem to have spaced out and missed a lot of the original media frenzy around the Jessica McClure story--18-month-old Texas girl falls down a well and is later rescued, to great fanfare, in Reagan's America. I guess I just ignored it. But Patek wore me down anyway with her her pathologically unassuming manner strangely wedded to a wacko presumption to speak for "America's baby"--now 24 and a mother--who, according to Patek, refuses to have anything to say about this bizarro episode in her insanely famous toddler-hood. (Why, the nerve of her! Forcing Patek to create this dance!) A kind of brilliant video backdrop gives literal and archetypal context while temporarily overwhelming Patek's live action. Nevertheless, this satire stands as one of the daffiest, wickedest creations I've ever seen at DTW, and there's something downright admirable about that. It really should be the last piece presented under the historic DTW name. Really. Truly.

Catch the last night of Fresh Tracks tonight at 7:30. (Information and ticketing)

Dance Theater Workshop

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan