Keep an eye on CULTUREMARTists

HERE's CULTUREMART festival concludes this evening with a shared program featuring samples of two promising works-in-progress:

Shaun Irons, Lauren Petty and Mei-Yin Ng consider their multimedia performance work--Keep Your Electric Eye On Me--to be at a very early, very sketchy stage of development. I'll have to take them at their word, although KYEEOM already brings enough ominous razzle dazzle to make me wonder what radical changes, as the creative team calls them, we'll be blown away by when the final product debuts. Irons and Petty contribute the lysergic video and sound, and Ng, the enigmatic choreography and performance, in an already well thought out, well structured display that nevertheless seems to emanate from inside one damaged or very disturbed head. While I can't wait to see what this one becomes when it grows up, I'm a little scared, too.

I saw an early rehearsal of part of Alexandra Beller's other stories at the Gibney Dance Center, and that experience drew me to this CULTUREMART showcase where Beller is showing an excerpt. This interesting ensemble piece, set to premiere at Joyce SoHo in April, comes with three unique features.

The first is a video view into the window of a building in Manhattan's Flatiron District, a voyeuristic monitoring of a couple's unheard, but clearly troubled, conversation.

The second is a big white portable structure designed by Brian Ireland--a clever abstraction of a house with a simple rectangular cutout for a door and an external, embedded ladder. "Stories"--in the form of mystifying allegiances, provocations and conflicts--smoothly drift in and out of this house. (If you go, for a view into the house, where there's always something going on, avoid sitting at the extreme left end of the audience.)

The third, and most exciting, is the guest drop-in collaborator from among the royalty of New York's contemporary dance scene. Here's how Beller describes the collaborator's role:

Every show features a different guest artist...[who] works with us for 1 hour to one day, depending on the event. Their role is structured improvisation, which is then set and developed live during the course of the performance.

So, of course, for that to work, your company must be perceptive and game and, in that, Beller can thank her lucky stars. (Performers for the HERE showing, besides Beller and the guest artist, include Lea Fulton, Toni Melaas, Kendra Portier, Edward Rice, and Simon Thomas Train.)

At GDC, I saw the troupe stirred by the guesting Paul Matteson who moved clean and elegant as an angel on a mission. Last evening, the springy, lusciously flexible Luke Gutgsell gave this vanguard role a far scruffier, feral edge and seemed to rouse an uncommon animal intensity in the company at the conclusion. Alex Springer will perform tonight.

Look for this work when it comes to Joyce SoHo, April 4-21.

The final presentation of this shared program runs tonight at 8:30pm. For program information, click here for Irons/Petty/Ng and here for Beller. For general ticket and box office information, click here.

HERE
145 6th Avenue, Manhattan
(Enter on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street.)
(map/directions)

Jaroslow: a meditation on partnership

The Partner Project/Scene in Public--a world premiere by Risa Jaroslow & Dancers at Danspace Project--is a dream of a dance, my idea of dance heaven, a seemingly bottomless cornucopia of good things. It lasts only 50 minutes but seems an eternity--and I mean that in a good way. I did not want it to end.

The Partner Project/Scene in Public is an apt, if unfortunately clunky, title. Partnership--and how human interactions appear to, or are shaped by, those who witness them--is indeed the project. But this title represents a dance filled with grace, relatedness and sensitive response. Jaroslow explores many journeys of human connection, and her discoveries are fresh, never literal or obvious, always evolving in surprising, quirky ways. Her dancers are so alive in their movement and in their interactions that you clearly detect the flow of subtle thoughts and feelings, not only actions.

It is a flow of dancey dance (and a profoundly dancer-loving dance) performed by some of the craftiest, most supple, most illuminating performers in the contemporary art--most notably, Luke Gutgsell, Elise Knudson, Rachel Lehrer and Paul Singh, the core quartet of the ten-member cast. (Composer Robert Een and percussionist Hearn Gadbois also perform Een's atmospheric original score live.) And so, if you have friends who are a little shy of dance or who might be willing to venture beyond The Nutcracker and Revelations this season, take them to this. But you'll have to move fast, since The Partner Project/Scene in Public, which opened only last night, closes tomorrow night.

With dancing by Chellamar Bernard, Marcos Duran, Briana Fails, Courtney Jackson, Anne Merrick and Laurel Snyder

With video by Barbara M. Bickart, lighting by Carol Mullins, costumes by Amanda Bujak and set by Jon Pope

The Partner Project/Scene in Public--tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm (information and ticketing)

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church

131 Est 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

In search of mavericks

John McClain might say he never claimed to be one. Sarah Palin might give it a bad name. But La MaMa still loves mavericks. This week, you can visit the La MaMa Moves Festival and see who--among a bevy of choreographers across four shared Mavericks in Motion programs--deserves to wear the label with pride.

I'm going to cast an early vote for a couple of handsome Cunningham dancers, Rashaun Mitchell and his collaborator/dance partner Silas Riener, who showed Nocturnal Excerpts, a work-in-progress. Telfar Clemens's costumes turn them into a couple of vaguely disheveled, modern-day Pierrots, and Mitchell's movement ideas disturb and contort any conventional notion of what human bodies can do. Riener, in particular, is a compelling presence and mover, and it will be interesting to see where these guys take this duet.

If you missed Mitchell and Riener last night, try for Saturday's show (8pm), which also includes offerings by Benjamin Asriel, Myra Bazell w/ SCRAP, David Capps, Luke Gutgsell (partnering the fascinating Elise Knudson), and Lionel Popkin & Robert Een.

Mavericks in Motion programming concludes this Sunday evening. The festival continues through June 20.

Complete La MaMa Moves festival schedule

Tickets

La MaMa E.T.C.
First Floor Theatre
74a East 4th Street (near 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

"Tomorrow's Legs" last night

There's a lot to admire in Tomorrow's Legs--a new ensemble piece presented by well-regarded choreographer Tiffany Mills this week at Danspace Project. Foremost, it's blessed with performances with courage, resonance, and an air of mystery. Jeffrey Duval, Luke Gutgsell, Whitney Tucker and Petra van Noort are versatile, appealing dancers who deepen and mature into the piece as we watch. Naoko Nagata has contributed some of her most flattering--while still quite quirky--costumes for the two women. And Mills's flashy visual style and rough-hewn movement attack make an irresistible mix. This woman doesn't just use space. She takes charge of it.

I was less convinced by Tomorrow's Legs as an intention and a whole package--an enigmatic collage pieced together from the fragmented fabric of memories associated with various cities--than I was by substantial swatches that felt like they could come from nobody else but Mills. Watch what unfolds when Duval begins to tug Gutgsell's arm; the entire process of getting to the resulting gutsy, risky sequence bursts and reveals itself in your mind. That sequence simultaneously drew me in and distressed me. Likewise, a charged duet involving Duval (obsessed with a science article) and van Noort (glamourously engrossed in dancing the memory of lost teenage love) lucidly articulates their differences and difficulties.

The work, running 60 minutes without intermission, can be seen again tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 8:30pm. Click here for ticketing and further information on Mills's Danspace Project season, and here for her company's 2009 calendar.

Jaroslow's "Sixty"

[Note: Correction of closing date.]

For the life of me, I cannot understand how most Americans--even some smart ones--miss the exceptional value of dance and dancers. One could not ask for more from art and performance than we are receiving from Risa Jaroslow & Dancers in Sixty, this week, at Danspace Project.

In 2007, prior to her sixtieth birthday, Jaroslow solicited dance ideas from a range of people she'd known. From their varied ideas, she selected nine, worked them over and came up with a surprisingly seamless, if frequently nutty, blend of fifteen sections in sixty minutes. Sixty is a work of ferocity, wit and charm. It's a symphony of relationships rendered with full-tilt intensity and sensitivity by Jaroslow and her delicious, gustsy company--Gabriel Forestieri, Luke Gutgsell, Elise Knudson, Rachel Lehrer and Paul Singh--plus a large corps of guests, including Vicky Shick.

Do your heart a favor and go. There's just one more show--tonight at 8:30pm.

Tickets (or 866-811-4111)

Risa Jaroslow & Dancers Web site
Jaroslow's journal: notes on the creation of Sixty