Mariana Valencia offers "Bouquet" at The Chocolate Factory

Mariana Valencia (right)
with collaborator Lydia Okrent in Bouquet
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Mariana Valencia
Bouquet
The Chocolate Factory
April 18-27

Created and performed by Mariana Valencia, Bouquet examines authorship within the premise of transmission, relation, alliance and ensemble. Her body is the main archive as she quotes dances by Alvin Ailey, Trisha Brown, Frank Conversano and nia love, as well as Eurhythmics and Garifuna dance forms. Valencia also quotes sections of her old dances that were made with her longtime collaborator Lydia Okrent, who has also artistically directed Bouquet with an attunement to ensemble and reference. Valencia’s choreographic retrospective is partnered with her own body as she moves various objects about the space. A smattering of fake fruits, a net, a large piece of glass and a plinth -to name a few- accompany Valencia as she moves her way through a sound score of origin stories. The sound score is a series of letters that circumnavigate her creative path in New York, weaving also through her adolescence and stories from her early 20s. These reveal a vast range of serious, tender and humorous growing pains that lend her abstract movements a foundation that anchors them to the plurality of creation. Valencia fleshes out these movements, histories and influences, as if this timeline of encounters were the sole reasons for producing any work of art. In Bouquet, Valencia invites the audience to traverse a dense field of collective reference.

-- promotional text for Bouquet

What is it?

First thought as you take your seat inside The Chocolate Factory's performance space and look across the floor at a large, ungainly parcel wrapped in a net and resting on a long white base.

It's oddly shaped, and a gap in the tied net that displays an inner wrapping of pale aqua. There's also something small, squarish, equally mysterious stuck between this aqua surface and the netting.

As you continue glancing across the space, you notice the back wall sports a painting of a vase of flowers. A bouquet is a collection of flowers--a collection of things deliberately chosen for aesthetic effect for yourself or others to savor. By the end of Bouquet, you will understand Valencia sees herself as a bouquet.

She enters suddenly--Hi! Thanks for coming!--a radiant apparition, amusingly modest and yet a little larger than life. The red of her matte lipstick pops as does the metallic cobalt blue of the unitard she wears under dark khaki-tan slacks. She speaks. Her gesticulation--big, sharply delineated gestures--click into place with satisfying assurance even as they remain elusive in meaning. There's charm, a connection with her audience. But, over time, the verbal stream becomes choppy, broken into haltingly-delivered bits--word by word, syllable by syllable, incomprehensible sound by sound--as if, intermittently, she's withdrawing or retrogressing.

But check her face a bit later as she begins to unwrap and unpack her parcel. The singing and speaking voice you hear now is in the air, recorded, maybe comes from where the revealed items come from--the past, the archive.

"The game is on/Give me a call, boo/My love is strong/Gonna give my all to you."

Whatever you've expected the lumpy package to contain, it turns out to hold simple items which Valencia sets out in a clear, pristine arrangement and identifies--"a bandanna, a pillow, a mat...pomegranate, plinth, tempered glass"--without narrative explanation. They are, simply, "some of my favorite objects," and you're wise to accept these talismans as they are.

She does mention that the floral bouquet painting was made by her dad--"a Sunday painter."

A body is a mass of stories, each body unique in its collection. But that emergent individuality continuously circles back into the multiplicity of its sources. So, Valencia gives her all--or, at least, a fair representation of what all might be. And then she leads an exercise that draws the audience into this multiplicity as well. Now you, too--all of you--have joined her ensemble, joined with her voice, become her history and her future.

Made in collaboration with dramaturg Lydia Okrent
Sound: Jules Gimbrone
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Bouquet continues through Saturday, April 27 with Thursday-Saturday performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Making space sing: Anna Sperber at The Chocolate Factory

Anna Sperber in Wealth From The Salt Seas
(photo: Brian Rogers)

The costumes for Anna Sperber's Wealth From The Salt Seas--a duet with vocalist/musician Gelsey Bell--display at least two variations on a theme of chocolate brown. (Sperber's pants, hard to make out in the lighting, might be of a hue between dull dark brown and charcoal.)  More than a possible sly reference to the work's venue, The Chocolate Factory Theater, the color has immediate effect--low-key and calming, earthy without being overly sensuous or overbearing, not stark like black. This, as it turns out, is a deep-brown dance.

It's appropriate for the choreographer who might easily go unnoticed when making her quiet, unremarkable first entrance with dark-brown hair pulled back from a scrubbed, serene face. She's just suddenly there, settled in place for a moment.

Sperber eventually drifts from one corner to another, positioning herself at one or another end of a row of viewers, slowly tracing hands over her face and neck and around her waist and hips. Her awareness is internal; you can feel that as easily as you feel the weight and slight friction of hands on skin and fabric.

Sperber's enigmatic, repetitive actions bring attention to the margins of the space and gather stillness and silence there like a gift. You might notice the difference this makes and think: Have I ever looked at performance space--or a performance--in quite this way?

Bell's entrance introduces sound--a voice that momentarily heightens in volume and shrillness. The sound score for the hour-long dance is produced by recorded and live voicings; the impact of feet on the floor; the strange effect of crouching and howling into the corner between two walls; the haunting bells played by the women as they bend their faces to them; and the reverberation of metallic sheets rattled and filling the air between Sperber and Bell as if, like whales, they signaled each other across an expanse of sea.

Curious props appear--a long, thick cable that Sperber manipulates; the odd-looking bells cast in blackish metal; a tarp of golden plastic; small, wooden scaffolds at either diagonal end of the space where the women climb and store their equipment. Curious, too, those moments when you swear you just saw one or the other dancer but she's suddenly out of sight, then she reappears as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Wealth From The Salt Seas continues through Saturday, March 31 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Beth Gill premieres "Catacomb" at The Chocolate Factory

From Catacomb, a new site-specific work
by Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill
at The Chocolate Factory
(photos: Brian Rogers)

It's not every day that I read all the fine print on a dance show's program, the part where thanks are given to collaborators, friends, presenters, funders. But I had a little time before seeing Beth Gill's new work, Catacomb, at The Chocolate Factory, and my eyes were drawn to that part of the page. Anyone who knows me, knows my intuition rules. So, I read.

I'm beginning this way just to note that I'm in awe of the village it takes to get any dance up and running--from the folks who provide space and time and technical assistance to the folks who fork over the funds. Sometimes--as in Gill's case--it takes more than one New York City borough, just for geographical starters. Each dance, often starting with vague stirrings, undertakes a twisty journey to manifestation. The dance network consists of numerous guiding hands along the way, and it's incredibly moving to think about all of this.

In Catacomb, Gill appears to have been drawn by intuition to sub-regions of the self where sharp reason must yield to things unnamed and dimly understood.
The hour-plus piece, performed by Maggie Cloud, Jennifer Lafferty, Heather Lang, Stuart Singer and Marilyn Maywald Yahel, evokes any journalist's primary questions: Who? What? When? Where? and Why?

We're in the upstairs theater of The Chocolate Factory but--really--where are we? And, maybe from your angle, you won't be able to name the identity or even just the sex of the two bodies, conjoined and at first motionless, pressed against the floor. When these bodies do move--at once sluggishly slithering against each other as they creep along the floor--their interaction appears sexual in nature. If so, it is a very sleepy act of sex organically, unconsciously repeated again and again--the bodies sliding over each other in and out of place--until a certain catalyst draws them out of that pattern. It will be a long, long while before we gaze upon two upright forms and expressionless faces as if glimpsing models of the first human inhabitants on Earth.

Catacomb, described as site-specific, handsomely uses three points of entry into the theater--variously lit by Thomas Dunn to frame dancers for peak drama and strangeness. Dunn's work, along with Gill's interest in glacial pacing and in the marginal placement of one or another dancer--sometimes watching, sometimes ignoring the pair, sometimes stationed against or tucked along a wall--were, for me, the most distinct and fascinating elements of the production.

It is a terrain of risk, which Gill accepts even as she invites company in the risking. I bore that in mind as my mind occasionally wandered or withdrew from Catacomb, which, regrettably, feels longer than it is.  The invitation to take time to look deeply into the fabric of this dance does not come with a guarantee of anything but unfolding territory to explore--an experience, not a conclusion. We enter in media res. We leave, it seems, when Gill is finished with our being there. Its beginning and possible end might not have anything to do with us.

With sound by Jon Moniaci and vocals by Rachel Kara Perez and Peter Sciscioli

Catacomb continues through May 28, Wednesdays-Saturdays with performances at 8pm plus an added show at 8pm on Tuesday, May 24. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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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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Adrienne Truscott: a fool in the king's court

Dance/performance artist Adrienne Truscott writes that when, in the early stages of exploring stand-up comedy, she booked her fledgling act on a lesbian cruise, she ran into a little trouble. A feminist telling jokes about rape to a staunchly feminist audience? What could possibly go wrong?

"It was an incredibly 'safe' space as a woman and an unpredictably conservative space for a comedian," she writes in her "Creator's Note" for Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else.

No comic or anyone else for that matter wants to be told what they can or can't say, nor should they be. It is often a comic's job to utter the unutterable; that doesn't mean that they (we?) are beyond rebuke. Comedy is bold, powerful and supple but not unassailable. There is a difference between a fool and the fool in the king's court....

Now through October 3, you can watch this court fool perform a show that gives new meaning to the word chatterbox, a show where Truscott manages to be, at once, giddy and spot-on.

Hosted by Brooklyn eatery and comedy club The Creek and The Cave, co-presenting with The Chocolate Factory and Performance Space 122, Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It gives Truscott a platform to land important points about rape culture, victim shaming and right-wing hypocrisy while dissolving her audience in laughter. And there's even more educational value! Science nerds will enjoy detailed lessons in duck anatomy and gerbil crisis management. It all works, and while I'm still baffled by the gears in this machine, I'll note that if I told you a single joke out of context, that funniness might fall apart. The wholeness of Truscott's performance is the thing that works.

Truscott's exuberant persona is wildly nonstop, relentless, irresistible and, famously, naked in the netherparts region. Yikes! No wonder she likens this stand-up act to an act of rape!

The most real danger you'll face from Truscott, though, is the likelihood of getting smacked by a denim jacket ripped off and hurled from the stage--my face stung from a slight graze--in one of her acts of divestment. Let's just say, if Trickster Truscott were Salome dancing for Herod, she'd be working 70 veils, not seven.

What she's stripping at, though, is our tendency to avert our eyes and stay silent about things that upset the state of order. (It took a long time for some people to snap out of the Cosby Show trance, didn't it?) But there's absolutely no escaping when pussy's got something to say, damn it, and she will not be denied!

Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It runs tonight at 8pm and this Saturday at 7pm. It continues Wednesday-Saturday, September 30-October 3 at 8pm. For information, visit The Creek and The Cave's Web site here.  To purchase tickets, click here.

The Creek and The Cave
10-93 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions: scroll to bottom of page)

Won't stop: Jeanine Durning's new "To Being"

Jeanine Durning, Julian Barnett and Molly Poerstel
(photo: Ian Douglas)

With To Being we are asking: What is at stake? Where is the end? What does it take to stay in action? And how can we give more when we feel that we’ve met our limit? 

-- Jeanine Durning

When you're about to do what Jeanine Durning and her partners do in To Being, it's more than reasonable to ease your way into it. After all, what you plan to do will take force and stamina to a maniacal degree and, in excess of an hour, demand your complete mental and physical will. To Being--which just opened at The Chocolate Factory--requires something of the same from the empathic viewer. In the presence of these dancers, you might flip from feeling startled to feeling tickled to feeling absolutely spent.

Durning calls her process "nonstopping," and she first gave audiences a taste in her solo, inging (2010), where it was largely a phenomenon of the voice or "unscripted nonstop languaging," as she would have it. In the new work, To Being, Durning, Julian Barnett and an impish Molly Poerstel--accompanied by sound designer Tian Rotteveel--bring us nonstopping as disruptive acts of the body.

Audience seating is scarce and widely scattered around the edges of the theater's bright white space. You come in and take any chair. One or more of the performers might drift through, sometimes ambling by to say hello or give a hug to an audience member. And this amiable, apparent nothing-ing goes on for a while until the performers suddenly vacate the space, and one theater light fires up, signaling...what exactly?

In the absence of an immediate something, the audience's coughs and rustling amplify, and that stretches on for another awkward while. Then: a loud bustle from beyond the entrance, from the metal staircase. What?

From the moment the dancers burst through the entrance, they're on, violently, with little transition or drop in energy. If they were sounds--aside from their audible gasps--they would be blaring dissonance. They disturb the atmosphere with their jutting, threshing arms, lashing torsos, jabbing elbows. Being that refuses to stop.

One gets why Durning rejects the word "continuous" as a description of her movement qualities. That word indeed sounds too soft and flow-y. Nonstopping looks--feels, to the empath--like battle, like resistance to the very idea that you cannot do what you will to do.

As Durning wrote in her program notes, "nonstop points to the critical nature of what it takes to keep going in the midst of, and despite, questions, doubts, limitations, and, of course, inevitable failures." She came to this practice after many questions, some of them regarding why she continues to make work and if she should.

Objects in the way--a speaker, a tangle of electric cords, a radiator, a wall--are commandeered and roughly used, often to create flashes of sound. You sometimes worry for a dancer's safety; you always admire the currency of thought and commitment.

With lighting by Joe Levasseur

To Being runs through September 19 with remaining shows this week tonight through Saturday and September 16-19, all at 8pm. Durning will reprise inging Wednesday through Saturday, September 23-26 with 8pm performances. Remember, seating is very limited.

For information on both productions and ticket availability, click here.

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

Covering up for Luke George

Dancer Luke George (above)
and a scene from Not About Face
(photos: Madeline Best)

Australian-born dance/performance artist Luke George has a pretty hearty notion of what audiences will tolerate. Never before have I been asked, as an audience member, to divest all of my belongings and don a bed sheet with eye holes that would make me look like a little ghostling who got terribly confused on her way back from Trick-or-Treating (with disconcerting, not so subtle visual echoes of chadors and KKK gear). George's current iteration of Not About Face, performed with collaborator Hilary Clark and, yes, every single person in attendance at The Chocolate Factory, has been described as:

An experiment in anonymous intimacy and fake belief, Not About Face questions the nature of the unspoken contracts between performer and audience, and accesses the supernatural and spiritual as a way to investigate how the yearning for belief can make people do many things. For this performance, audience members are robed in full-body shrouds and join a free-roaming and anonymous gathering in the performance space. We will come together. We will become anonymous. We will fake belief or believe in faking it.



Luke George
(photo: Madeline Best)

Funny thing about bed sheet ectoplasm: It underscores the earthly nature of the bodies underneath. Especially when you can easily recognize your friend or colleague or that downtown dance star by their height or their signature sneakers or snazzy boots. The quest for the intangible puts you smack up against the tangible when George directs you to huddle together ever closer, closer, closer to him and your neighbor runs into your toe.

The body also roars back into view with Clark's sudden crying jag, George's tantrums and, finally, George's lengthy, undeniably charismatic dance that concludes the performance. Transparency, here--used as a form of theatrics--is more spirited than spirit-ly.

I don't know about the "fake belief" thing or George's stated interest (see the program notes) in the behavior of crowds. Seems to me, it's pretty hard to see Not About Face, at least for its audience, as anything but an ordered experience that you consciously agree to participate in (with your paid ticket) to the extent of your comfort. Everyone covered up--that was the fun part--but not absolutely everyone followed every direction.

If you go, know that you will spend nearly ninety minutes mostly on your feet, milling around the space, wearing a heavy sheet that traps body heat. (Ah, yes, the body again....) Since it's cold out these nights, dress in layers and, before the show, leave most of them with that nice coat check person downstairs.

Sound/video/set/system programming: Nick Roux
Lighting: Benjamin Cisterne

Not About Face continues tonight and Saturday with performances at 8pm, and there's an additional show on Saturday at 5pm. Plan to arrive no later than 15 minutes before start time. For tickets, click here.

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

Marissa Perel dreams it out

Marissa Perel in More Than Just a Piece of Sky
at The Chocolate Factory
(photo: Madeline Best)

Marissa Perel seems so very far away.

Even in a smallish space where the white bed and bedding that cloak her hidden body are not only visible to all eyes but glowing in pristine, ghostly light.

When her audience enters the space, there might be a tiny sliver of skin to see. That's all.

Later, after Perel sits up in the bed, which she never leaves, we strain to hear her singing or speaking voice. But her alter egos--the dancers Lindsay Reuter and Jumatatu Poe, with whom Perel created More Than Just a Piece of Sky--extend her range into our world.

Choreographed and written by Perel, the performance fractures and refashions characters, text and--in one smart moment--vocal music from Barbra Striesand's 1983 movie, Yentl, itself sourced in "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy," a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yentl, you might recall from the film, is really a young Orthodox Jewish woman with a thirst for Talmudic knowledge in a culture that relegates women to home and family. Yentl's defiant self-disguise--her cross-dressing, name-changing strategy--works fine until... Well, just download Streisand singing "The Way He Makes Me Feel."

Presented at The Chocolate Factory as part of Queer New York International Arts Festival, the piece applies artfully arranged text, movement, video, music and lighting to invoke a dream state in which gender identity and roles shift like the moon through its cycles. I'm thinking especially of the delicate verbal and gestural exchanges between Reuter and Poe around a dangling microphone, but each instant of More Than Just a Piece of Sky is meant to show the many facets of difference as forms of sensual magic power.

A passage where Poe presses and slides his naked skin against a wall seems to slip into the ether, to evaporate, perhaps intentionally transient in its effect. Another sequence in which the dancers languidly roll across the floor in each other's embrace feels different, substantial, and is just gorgeous. But I suspect it is not a big deal to Perel to make an impact by making an impact. She might be more intent on charting an ephemeris of all that cannot be pinned in place.

More Than Just a Piece of Sky continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For more information, click here. For tickets, click here.

For a schedule of other events in the 2014 Queer New York International Arts Festival, click here.

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

Levi Gonzalez opens "The Craft of The Father" at The Chocolate Factory

Levi Gonzalez and Eleanor Smith in
The Craft of The Father
at The Chocolate Factory
(photo by Brian Rogers)

Levi Gonzalez's The Craft of The Father--his first evening-length dance since 2007's Clusterfuck--plays out before a small audience in a single row of chairs lining one wall at The Chocolate Factory. That familiar performance space will seem smaller and closer than ever when dancing gets going in earnest. Before that, though, it becomes a night-cloaked swamp filled with sounds--minute creaks of metal chairs; a neighbor's breathing; blurts and and moans and shrieks from three dancers tucked away in all-consuming darkness--for what stretches on for an unexpected amount of time. Space seems to stretch on, too, pulling you into a simultaneously close and vast place where the human body speaks its own language, free of rational identification. Ultimately, you don't know who's who or what's what, but you might come to feel that you're an inseparable part of the whole and relax into it.

So, now that you're in, what happens to you?

Mellow light comes, revealing agitated movers. Kayvon Pourazar's hands work so frantically around his jaw and temples that he seems driven to pull his own head off. Gonzalez pants from the exertion of wide-legged twirls. Eleanor Smith, twirling too, adds a rotation of her head, churning being a common thread as well as the sometimes awkward shifting of weight--both of the men have earthy physiques--or suspending weight and stretching movement in time. Incessant, the trio is dizzying to watch, and when these dancers separate across the room's length, you must swing your head to track the imagery and activities of one or another.

But are you truly in or are you out?

A meta moment, in which the trio huddles to discuss the dance and debrief, feels both welcoming and not. You hear their friendly conversation, but they're turned inward towards one another and away from their viewers. But you do hear them, and sometimes that makes you giggle. You feel kind of an insider and kind of not.

It's like that. The dancers entangle themselves in a fleshy ball, slipping around one another quietly, easygoing, then not so easygoing and not so quiet.

Things get a little strange around a Kate Bush song, "This Woman's Work," source of Gonzalez's title. (Please try this gorgeous performance by Maxwell.) I have no idea. Just that, maybe, anything alive--anything given life in this material world, a child, a work of art--has its own logic, illogic, direction, misdirection, welcome and refusal, presence and impermanence.

(photo by Brian Rogers)

With lighting by Natalie Robin and sound collected, assembled and performed by Tatyana Tenenbaum

The Craft of The Father continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Kaneza Schaal and the feather of the goddess Maat

Meet PS 122 RAMP resident theater artist Kaneza Schaal.

Kaneza Schaal is a New York City based theater artist. Best known for her work as an actor with The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, and Richard Maxwell, Kaneza will use RAMP to begin work on her first evening length piece using the Egyptian Book of the Dead as inspiration–seeking to cultivate performance that uses text as a jumping off point and equally values visual, physical, sonic and abstract expression.

“Drawing inspiration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a text originally intended to provide the living with a blueprint to the afterlife, we will explore light and shadow as a physical and metaphorical architecture. Using analogue projection, sound, text, and dance to animate a series of burial vignettes we will excavate this ancient text to create a new translation. Our inquiry will focus on the scroll’s central metaphor: the weighing of the heart against a feather of the goddess Maat on her divine scale of truth to test its moral worth. The performance proposes burial not as erasure but as offering restitution, performing rites, and creating space for the presence of the absent, the imagined and the longed-for.”

– Kaneza Schaal

Public Showings: April 11 and 12, 8pm

The Chain Theatre
21-28 45th Road, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

For complete information and ticketing, click here.

COIL Festival: Mac Wellman's "Muazzez" opens at The Chocolate Factory

Actor Steve Mellor sits at a small table and gazes at the audience with his doughy, oblong face and initially deadpan expression and begins to spill a torrent of words. This verbal current flows fast, faster, fastest without cease--miraculously, without tongue-twisting--and, at times, will rise to a level of dark bitterness. That Mellor--occupying The Chocolate Factory's earthly space as well as imagined interstellar space strewn with asteroids--introduces himself as an "abandoned cigar factory" with "a zygodactyly foot" is only part of the fun of Muazzez, a 45-minute monologue derived from short stories by known word wizard Mac Wellman.

"There's no drift to my thought," Mellor/Wellman tells us. "My thought is a rooted thing." Sure. No drift but definitely a well-greased sci-fi sequence on the move and speeding you along with it, scrambling your brain along with Wellman's mythopoetic play and scramble of words. We're invited to envision the high Eulalians of whom nothing is known except that they "builded" the cigar factories. We learn of the "primal radial symmetry" of "a series of spokes or spokey type spindles radiating from a deep and frosty central secret," which sounds kid of tasty. There are "non-self hedges and the hegemony of the self's perfect picture of the world" and something Wellman calls the "ambulatory frightwig of unappetizing complication," which strikes me as a useful insult to hurl at the next person to cross me. Yeah.

I am completely won over by this "succession a stratigraphic variorum," this "placing of jars and jarring of places" and Mellor's virtuoso performance that charges and populates nearly bare space with the high Eulalian magic(k) of words.

A COIL Festival co-presentation of Performance Space 122 and The Chocolate Factory, Muazzez runs through January 17. For complete schedule and ticketing details, click here.

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

O’Con loves a mystery

Underneath Where We Are--the latest enigma from the interesting mind of choreographer Tara O’Con--features a couple of marvelously self-controlled performances by Jodi Bender and Megan Madorin at The Chocolate Factory. These two have a very difficult and sophisticated task: to draw an audience into the fine, delicate details of movement and of tactile experience, to keep watchers sharply focused even when the information coming from the dancers’ bodies aims to bypass the logic centers of the brain. It’s a gamble for O’Con and her collaborating dancers, and they win.

At the outset, a low rumble slithers beneath the dark, like a train passing deep below the building’s foundation. Opposite the audience, against a distant wall, an indistinct shape writhes in heavy shadow. The faintest light dusts the top of it, and eventually we can tell it is two bodies splayed against the wall, two women entwined, stretching with and collapsing upon each other. Since this opening goes on a while, a thought comes: What if this were to be the entire dance--Bender and Madorin endlessly twisting, twining and sinking, wallflowers drooping from weak stalks--could that gamble work? Interesting to contemplate. I almost think it could. In more light, however, they collapse to the floor and rest.

This pause afforded a moment to reflect on the abstract work of art that is The Chocolate Factory’s interior. Most of O’Con’s dance is performed quietly, slowly, and with reference to the space and its unusual features--the dark, ominous-looking shaftway, helpfully labeled SHAFTWAY and barricaded with two horizontal metal bars; the patchy-surfaced sliding door; the thick, vertical pipe at one side. Dancers never--to my best recollection--look into our eyes; most often, they dance with their backs or sides facing us, and they emphasize only the life of the animal body, not the life of any identifiable ego. They attend to their own bodies or to the surfaces of the space, and that attention seems to have nothing to do with us--at least, on an intellectual level. But O’Con makes us feel the breathing of bodies--quite literally, at times, as when Bender pants heavily after her solo to the old Motown tune, “Who’s Loving You,” a singular eruption from the identifiable world of pop culture. We also perceive, strongly, the breathing presence and soul of place.

With lighting by Chloë Z. Brown and sound design and compositioin by Jason Sebastian

Underneath Where We Are continues, nightly at 8pm, through Saturday evening. Click here for information and ticket reservations.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue
Long Island City, Queens
718-482-7069
(directions)

Rogers and Best: select your memory

Selective Memory–presented by Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City–achieves a most eerie intimacy with its audience. To witness it feels, at times, as if one has fallen into what one is watching and weirdly exchanged places with or fused with performer and multi-faceted creative collaborator Madeline Best.

The roughly 50-minute performance takes place in flesh and blood–Best standing before us, nearly motionless or making slight, generally uninflected movements–as well as in projection of her image upon two screens (set design by Brad Kisicki). The first screen, hanging down like a shower curtain, traces a curving shape in the space, a little like the Greek letter omega lying on its back. The second screen is a narrow rectangle suspended several feet in front of the deepest inner curve of the omega.

Rogers sits to the left of the space behind a Mac, a panel of audio controls and a table-top keyboard. Best–wearing sensible shoes and a navy blue dress with fussy tiers of fabric–enters the space and stands just within the curtain’s curve. She’s holding something in her right hand that appears to be a remote control of some sort, but you’ll rarely catch her using it. Swirling sounds and faint voices are heard. Lights dim.

Best takes a few steps, centering herself deep in the curve. The sounds intensify–a shrill rumble, an indistinct voice. Her face appears on the front screen. A faintly-troubled hush embraces this quiet face with its blinking, sensitive blue eyes framed by straw-colored shoulder-length hair and bangs. Slight, almost imperceptible shifts of her head can be detected the more one looks and looks and looks for long stretches of time. And so, with this most minimalist of minimalist choreography, Rogers begins his campaign of snaring watchers. Did you catch that minuscule twitch? Will she suck up her lower lip one more time? As she makes this next shallow pivot, will she suddenly break out in something a little less subtle, more macro?

It’s amusing to imagine someone thinking, “When will the dancing happen?” This is the dancing.

The face on the screen creates an illusion of Best being closer to each one of us that she could possibly be. And, as you think about it, you realize that’s because she strongly resembles a viewer looking out at a performer–expressionless, curious and expectant, perhaps suspicious, perhaps not daring to make a move, suspending the next breath. Best looks like your neighbors in the row, and like yourself. What, then, is she doing there? But this passes once you think about it too much.

You can imagine all kinds of things that could be happening. You can populate this stripped-down place with a multitude of effects and beings and meanings. That would be your memory, selected. Or you can leave it alone.

Rogers brings up a warm buzz or hum and, later, a short, melodic loop as the screen zooms in on a detail of Best’s face from the lower reaches of her bangs to just below her nose. Her eyes–always watchful, though placid--search us out as she shifts in slow motion. The encounter is hypnotic and an endurance trial. A new development–she turns, and we see the back of her head on the screen–seems like a major advancement in a story we still cannot identify, a new chapter. A close-up of her left ear and cheek and chin feels like a punctuation mark. But what was that sentence?

The thought returns: We’ve been motionless, expressionless, silent, blinking as we stare out at Best--as into a mirror-covered object–for close to 45 minutes.

The screen shows us a close-up of the collar of her dress, her chin, her lips. A real-time projection of her appears on the curtain behind her, just to the left of its center seam. (A new dimension!) In short order, we see multiple shifting, drifting Bests populating the space, only one of them made of flesh and blood. The finale–green, serene and dreamy–seems like it should be a breakthrough but feels unreal, surreal and definitely elusive for the flesh-and-bloods sitting in the seats. Best slips away from us, vanished by the devices that brought her to us and, perhaps, brought us to ourselves.

Selective Memory

Wednesdays-Saturdays, through September 18 (8pm)

The Chocolate Factory

5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

#7 subway to Vernon/Jackson Avenue

Information and reservations

LIC's Chocolate Factory seeks box office rep

JOB POSTING

The Chocolate Factory Theater
a not-for-profit corporation
Box Office Representative (employee, part-time)

The Chocolate Factory Theater, one of New York City’s premiere incubators of contemporary experimental performance, seeks a Box Office Representative for anywhere from 1 to 3 shifts per week. An integral part of The Chocolate Factory team, the Box Office Representative is responsible for the smooth execution of box office operations, interfacing with the theater’s staff, artists and audience. 

Shifts are approximately four hours, usually Wednesday through Saturday nights from 6:30-10:30pm, with about 22 weeks of performances from September to June each year. Shift pay is $50-$60.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• B.A. or degree completion expected within one year, preferably with a focus in the performing arts or arts administration; or equivalent experience.

• Experience working or interning for a non-profit performing arts organization.

• Interest in the performing arts, especially in contemporary, multi-disciplinary performance.

• Basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel.

• Proficiency with Mac computers.

• Ability to maintain a friendly and professional demeanor around all types of personalities.

• Excellent organizational skills and attention to detail.

• Excellent problem solving and “quick thinking” abilities.

If you are interested and meet the above qualifications, please email a letter of interest, your resume and 3 references who can be contacted currently, one of whom is a past or current employer to Alex Rosenberg at alex@chocolatefacorytheater.org. No phone calls, please. You will only be contacted if selected for an interview. Position must start immediately.

Application deadline: Thursday, August 26, 2010

What's cookin' at the Factory

Keeping It Small at Chocolate Factory in Queens

by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, May 25, 2010

On The Dream Express way to your heart

The Dream Express started with the sip of a drink, the wail of a distant train, and a kind of yelping, high-lonesome, tumbleweed song. The Chocolate Factory hosted a "journey to the end of the night" with its upstairs theater marvelously, if tackily, re-purposed as an honest-to-god cabaret for Obie-awardees Steve Mellor ("Spin Milton") and Deirdre O'Connell ("Marlene Milton"), known as, they kept telling us, The Dream Express, along with co-conspirators Len Jenkin (writer/director) and John Kilgore (composer).

At first glance, the formerly-married Miltons--hulking, vaguely surly Spin and slightly tipsy, vaguely slutty Marlene--looked like the kind of people you'd want to keep at arm's length. Please, god, do not let either of them come down off that stage and start messing with us. By the end of the roughly 90 minute act, a mashup of songs and stories, you'll find that you've relaxed. You've chuckled some. You've pondered some. You've learned to trust that Spin will rise from his keyboard, now and again, without actually assaulting anyone. What's more, the Miltons and their consciousness-streamings have managed to work their way under your skin. You've been seduced by Marlene's adorable, gutsy charm and roused by Spin's gusty vocal power. Who else has the skills to segue from Olivia Newton John to "A Whiter Shade of Pale" without inflicting terminal whiplash?

As the Miltons' dearly-departed "Uncle Wolfie" would say, "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em kiss ten bucks goodbye!"

In this case, it's 15 bucks and worth every single penny. Go see The Dream Express at The Chocolate Factory, Tuesdays-Saturdays  through December 19 (No performances 12/15-17). For details, travel directions and ticketing, click here.

Benefit for Valerie Green's burglarized studio

Legendary jazz club the Zinc Bar and Dance Entropy/Green Space invite you to a burglary benefit. The evening will offer drinks, light food, live music, DJ, raffle and dancing. Green Space Studio was severely burglarized on August 26th. Proceeds will go to helping the studio recover from their losses.

Wednesday November 11, 6pm to 9pm

Admission: $20 pre-sale online or $25 at the door

Zinc Bar
82 West 3rd Street, Manhattan
between Thompson & Sullivan Streets

Directions: By Subway: A, B, C, D, E, F, V to West 4th Street stop, Manhattan

Green’s ambitious and open – hearted dream of creating a working dance/music enclave in Queens is off the ground. – Attitude Magazine

Arturo's Moving Castle...

...and Aki's sock-draw puppetization continue tonight at The Chocolate Factory and, though you might have a hard time getting a reservation due to the limited space for this show, you ought to try.

Domestic Partner consists of two simultaneous installation/performance works: Secrets of My Mother's Child by Aki Sasamoto and A New Theory of Biology by Arturo Vidich. The latter includes a sound/video program by Howard Huang, and the whole thing concludes with a music set (tonight: the band of Matt Bauder and Aram Shelton).

Show up in comfortable shoes; you'll mostly be moving around and dodging the oncoming performers and their unruly props. The look and atmosphere is more hip gallery opening than dance concert. And if you don't immediately warm to this roughly blended fantasia of personal and global, micro- and macro-obsessions, put it in the pickling barrel.

Tonight, 8pm at The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(718) 482-7069

Listen to my Body and Soul podcast interview with Sasamoto and Vidich here.

Learn more about these artists here.

Aki Sasamoto and Arturo Vidich: Body and Soul podcast

Aki Sasamoto and Arturo Vidich of Culture Push discuss Domestic Partner--their provocative new installation/simultaneous performance, hosted by The Chocolate Factory (Wednesday-Saturday, April 8-11, 8pm).

Learn more about Aki Sasamoto and Arturo Vidich here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Street
Long Island City, New York
Complete information, directions and ticketing

Movement Research

(c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File

Brian Rogers: Body and Soul podcast

Brian Rogers talks about The Chocolate Factory--an influential multidisciplinary arts space and gallery in Long Island City, Queens--and about his new full-evening work redevelop (death valley).

Brian Rogers, a graduate of Bennington College, is the co-founder and Artistic Director of The Chocolate Factory Theater. His works for the company include 2 Husbands (2007), a collaboration with playwright Ken Urban; GUN PLAY (2006); and AUDIT (2004). Brian curates The Chocolate Factory's Visiting Artist Program and has collaborated as a sound, video and performance artist on numerous projects. He is also Director of Operations for Dance Theater Workshop and curator of the newly-renovated cabaret space at Queens Theatre in the Park.

See redevelop (death valley) on Thursday-Saturday, February 12-28 and Monday, February 24, all at 8pm.

Directions and further information

Ticketing or at 212-352-3101

(c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File