"THE DAY" arrives

Cellist Maya Beiser with Wendy Whelan
performing The Day
(photos: Hayim Heron, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow)

THE DAY

by Maya Beiser, Lucinda Childs, David Lang and Wendy Whelan

October 22-27

at The Joyce Theater

In all honesty, when I hear that the events of September 11, 2001 inspired a piece of art, I note and then turn away from that detail, hoping for an alternative reason to connect. The excellence of THE DAY's principal collaborators--cellist Maya Beiser, dancer Wendy Whelan, choreographer Lucinda Childs and composer David Lang--drew me to The Joyce this week for this work's New York premiere. (I went, in particular, for Beiser, and please hurry to her site's video page and share my new obsession.) Thinking back now, I find myself drifting between certainty that THE DAY reflects a moment in our history and, at the very same time, wavering certainty about what my eyes and ears testified as I gazed from my seat in the audience. Thus, for me, it might be the perfect evocation of the experience of witnessing 9/11.

Performed without intermission, the interdisciplinary work consists of two parts--The Day and World To Come, named for music previously composed by Lang for Beiser--and contemplates the aftermath of a soul's separation from its body. The width and height of the Joyce stage, backed by Joshua Higgason's video projection, contribute to THE DAY's monumentality and hallucinatory depth of field and dreamy elusiveness.

In the opening part, Beiser and Whelan occupy separate, opposing territories--cellist and cello crowning a translucent incline; white-draped ballerina starting off artfully perched on a stool as if posing for a fashion shoot. Sara Brown's minimalist, abstract set--angled lines suggest subtle demarcation--works in tandem with the strength, and severity, that Childs' ideas bring out in Whelan's deft improvisations which, at times, evoke an iconic rendering of the architectural proportions of the human body. She creates, and exists within, pristine, divine abstractions.

Lang crafted the voiceover text for Part 1, Beiser writes in her program notes, out of numerous statements crowd-sourced from the Internet, each phrase completing his own phrase "I remember the day I...." Each statement is separated from the next by six seconds, giving the text a hypnotic rhythm, like a prayerful litany, and I found it fascinating to find that he had carefully alphabetized the statements.

I stopped speaking. I stumbled. I switched. I talked. I talked to myself sternly.

Each statement, taken out of context, could sound as if it captured a mundane moment in time. But, in fact, Lang intends each to mark a significant turning point in a person's life. Carefully strung on a silver thread of breath, each statement takes its moment to shimmer in light before giving way to the next. So, in a way, each is extraordinary but no one surpasses any other. Each stands in as a symbol of human consciousness, symbol of human experience--and, it is painful to remember, a single loss out of many.

Some of the sonic and visual atmospherics of THE DAY tease the audience while also being unsubtle--a long, muffled, engine-like roar; two white lengths of fabric suspended from the stage's fly space suddenly rippling to the floor; the video speeding bodies into spectral visitations blurred across an interior space; Whelan increasingly wrapped by shroud-like fabric as her body rolls down the incline.

But the music. Beiser's strong, exacting control of her instrument; the energies generated and invoked in her playing. This mastery at the core of THE DAY anchors everything, gives everything else here a reason for being.

Sound design: Dave Cook

Lighting design: Natasha Katz 

Costume design: Karen Young

The Day concludes today with a performance at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(directions)

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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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46th Dance on Camera Festival, July 20-24, Lincoln Center

Between Yourself and Me--a documentary on the innovative immersive theater works of Third Rail Projects--will screen at the 46th Dance on Camera Festival this month at The Walter Reade Theater.

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For most of its 80 minutes, Lucinda Childs, Great Fugue by Beethoven (France, 2017) stays confined within the studio bubble, offering outsiders a dry, if rare, insider's view of the making of a contemporary ballet by one of the queens of New York postmodern dance. French filmmaker Marie-Hélène Rebois captures the choreographer at work with Lyon Opera Ballet to master the challenging surprises of a Beethoven piece. Dancers' sleek bodies skim across a tall, wide expanse of window panes in cool, fluid, friction-less partnering (which, with just a touch of daring, easily could have been rendered same-sex and gender-nonconforming). Happily, the final twenty-or-so minutes give us a handsome finished work--intricate for all its quiet lack of fuss; airy and shot through with light. World premiere Monday, July 23 (6pm) at the 46th Dance on Camera Festival, co-presented by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Dance Films Association.

Also, check out the festival's world premiere of Between Yourself and Me (USA, 2017; 28m), co-produced with Dance Films Association, a look at acclaimed immersive theater troupe Third Rail Projects (Then She Fell) and Gravity Hero (USA, 2018, 70m), Trey McIntyre's reflection on his decision to shut down his successful, ten-year-old Boise, Idaho dance troupe.

Dance on Camera runs from Friday, July 20 through Tuesday, July 24 with all films screening at The Walter Reade Theater. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue), Manhattan

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"Dance": a Lucinda Childs revival at The Joyce

Dance (1979) by Lucinda Childs,
presented in the second week of
Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater
(photo: Sally Cohn)

I wonder if everyone feels that kick of anticipation whenever, after much agitation, the stage hangs empty in Lucinda Childs's Dance, the 1979 masterpiece now revived at The Joyce Theater. It's like being suspended high above the ground before your ride descends...or your parachute, hopefully, opens.

In Dance, the dozen skimming, twirling live dancers--and their looming predecessors in the Sol LeWitt film--create a hallucination so intense, do audacious that it wears down any rational desire for it to end. Gridded surfaces for dancing float, tilt at crazy angles, appear and disappear--as ghostly as the live and filmed dancers themselves in Philip Glass's whirlpool of music. And, later, the goddess herself--her image pure, as stately as an ancient temple--stands in floor-length raiment, arms flat against her thighs, staring out into the audience and freezing her votaries in place. We must give her her due. Brava to this dangerous woman!

Lucinda Childs Dance Company 's Program B--Dance--continues at The Joyce through December 11.  For schedule details and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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The Joyce opens first week of Lucinda Childs repertory

The Lucinda Childs Dance Company’s
Caitlin Scranton, Patrick John O'Neill,
Sharon Milanese and Matt Pardo
in Canto Ostinato
(photo: John Sisley)

Katherine Helen Fisher
in Pastime
(photo: John Sisley)

More than a few times, as I sat watching the Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater last evening, I thought of abstract painter Agnes Martin. Seeing the Martin retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, which continues through January 11, demonstrated what I'd always heard about her painting but could never detect from reproductions in books and magazines. Calling her a minimalist doesn't tell the whole story.

You can read between Martin's meticulous, repetitive lines, read the energy, and there's so much there--a range of feeling, of humanity in its complexity painted in, not everything as perfect as first glance might suggest nor is it meant to be so. If you sincerely ask, the works will often show you where to look and what to listen for.

In the case of Lucinda Childs, the cool, remote severity of her physique and persona and her aesthetic of precise grids, repetitive motion and continuously slipping, interweaving geometric patterns might also have been a distraction, albeit a dazzling one. Her dancing, and her dancers's dancing, were and are like airy, graceful cursive script written across space with the aid of frictionless implements. The company, like a surface glance at Martin's brush strokes, reveals no hint of human individuality. In fact, when music drives the dancing--and Childs favors music that roughly upends or irresistibly and endlessly propels things--it can often suggest we read each member of the corps as sleek, high-grade machinery on the move. But what else is present?

The Joyce Theater season's first week highlights five decades of work from repertory as old as Pastime (1963), a Childs solo from her Judson Church days, and as current as this fall's Into View, premiered at UCLA. The second week's program, which I will see on Tuesday, features Dance (1979), the masterful collaboration of Childs, Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt where LeWitt's film of the original cast in action, jumbo images spanning the stage, plays over and with the current troupe.

The selections for this first week are instructive. One draws an impression of an American with that legendary sense of entitlement to open space; one who knows how to hook audiences with springy, lighter-than-air bodies, feet barely claimed by gravity; one winking at people who share her love for the unadorned inner systems of American ballet and Cunningham and, likely, Astaire; people who respond to the wry, sometimes surreal turns of a brilliant mind. All of this looks as glamorous as all get out (see 1993's Concerto, especially). It can knock you over. And the dancers, an elite corps, are on it.

In Canto Ostinato (2015), narrow, vertical lines of light, sliding across the backdrop at varying speeds, create elusive illusions of each member of the ensemble moving in a spatial groove of his or her own depth. Following those hallucinations, Into View--with its unsettling visual image of a tiny, distant sun surrounded by dusty orange haze--appears dynamic enough to be diverting but not much more, a good-enough Lucinda Childs piece. But here I noticed something happening between dancers that I had not seen before. It was fleeting but clear--eye contact and interaction with an unspoken purpose but a force readable past many rows of watchers. Again, I flashed back to Martin, to the feelings carefully stored within the shielding rigor or deflecting haze of her surfaces. I wondered again at the artist's presence: Who goes there?

Lucinda Childs Dance Company continues at The Joyce through December 11 with the following programs:

Program A: Lucinda Childs: A Portrait (1963-2016), now through December 4. Curtain Chat: Wednesday, November 30

Program B: Dance (1979), December 6-11

For schedule details and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Looking at Lucinda, then and now

Scenes from Dance (2009) by Lucinda Childs
(photos: Sally Cohn)

I regret missing Barnard College Dance Department's recent evening with Lucinda Childs and French filmmaker Patrick Bensard, director of the 2005 documentary, Lucinda Childs. Just short of an hour, the film traces notable influences and milestones in the dance artist's career--her exposure to the aesthetics of Cunningham and Cage, explorations with her fellow Judson iconoclasts such as Yvonne Rainer, magisterial flights through the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson universe.

It is Wilson, interviewed by Bensard, who best sums up the multitude within Childs, the mixed feelings she and her elegant, minimalist aesthetic can stir in a viewer. He describes a being at once soft and severe, hot and cold, and he appears to love her every polarized contradiction. The film includes wonderful excerpts of Childs, Mikhail Baryshnikov and other dancers performing her choreography--skimming the floor and slicing through air like figure skaters, earth and its gravity mere playthings to these mercurial figures.

Worth any price of admission are the brief glimpses of her solo Carnation, made in 1964 when I was 12 and a decade away from starting to write about dance. Maybe only a woman as frosty-looking as Childs could be this wickedly clever, surreal and funny in her ritualistic precision, crowning herself with a flexible strainer basket, carefully stuffing kitchen sponges into her mouth and fanning the stack open like a duck's bill.  How I wish I could see it performed live now.

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See the fall season of The Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater, November 29-December 11. The first week's program includes the New York premiere of a Joyce commission, The Sun Roars Into View (2016), and the second week features Childs's signature work, Dance (1979) with a commissioned score by Philip Glass and the original film decor by Sol LeWitt.

For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Get your free email subscription

to InfiniteBody.

Click here!

Garry Reigenborn, 58

Garry Reigenborn, Dancer and Educator, Dies at 58
by Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times, April 17, 2011

Giving themselves away at every moment...

A luminous summer evening. Dancers slip through breezecloudsmusic at the river's edge. I still get a powerful little thrill as I look through my photographs.

We Give Ourselves Away at Every Moment: An EVENT for Merce

July 26, 2010--First anniversary of the death of Merce Cunningham

"...we come together to nod in his direction through the ritual of dance itself."

Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City esplanade

a program of the River to River Festival, co-presented by Arts World Financial Center and the Battery Park City Authority

featuring choreography by Jon Kinzel, Lucinda Childs, Susan Marshall, Faye Driscoll and Bill T. Jones. Live music by David Eggar, Geoff Hersh and Kotchy.

curated and produced by Annie-B Parson and Will Knapp

Five plan major tribute to Merce

Five Choreographers to Honor Cunningham at River to River Festival

by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, July 1, 2010

BAC Flicks screens documentary on Lucinda Childs

Lucinda Childs (2006)--a documentary by Patrick Bensard, Director of Paris's La Cinémathèque de la Danse--will be screened on Thursday, April 9, 7:30pm, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. This 52-minute portrait of the influential choreographer and dancer will be followed by a discussion with Childs and Bensard.

Tickets are $10. For more information and reservations, call 646-731-3200.

Howard Gilman Performance Space
Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street, Manhattan