Dance artist yon Tande views that "Unicorn"

yon Tande
(photo courtesy of the artist)

For many observers, Memoirs of a... Unicorn--Marjani Forté-Saunders's recent premiere at The Collapsable Hole for New York Live Arts--proved to be an earth-shaking highlight of New York's Fall 2017 arts season (reviewed here by me). Not so much for the chief dance critic of The New York Times. Contrasting it to another dance artist's work he deemed to be "a real piece," Alastair Macaulay dismissed Memoirs as "an intensely personal piece with which I could make few connections" and "choppily incoherent," sparking a blaze of reproach on social media.

I'm happy today to welcome dance/performance artist yon Tande as guest writer. He contributes the following poetic reflections on Memoirs of a... Unicorn.

***

Marjani Forté-Saunders performs Memoirs of a... Unicorn.
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Memoirs of a... Unicorn: Reflections on an Imagined s/p(l)ace of memory, revelation and trauma.

This text is written as a response to the notion of being simultaneously present and absent. As an interviewed subject in the process, removed for technical reasons, but still feeling and knowing my presence and participation, not only as an audience member, an interviewee, but as a native to this society of magical creatures so “gloriously damaged.”

In reflecting on the imagistic creation of Marjani Forté-Saunders and collaborators, one question that remains is “What has been deleted or negated?” In the title written, “Memoirs of a... Unicorn,” the ellipses suggests that something in the title, perhaps in the world, has been negated, left out, deleted, denied. Do ellipses also function as denial?

Cleanse your Feet, for upon this terrain you will meet much filth. But, if you have been cleansed, you will be carried.

Follow the Action - staying engaged and connected to the artist. The agency of sight is precious. Curiosity is enabled and made possible by journeying through the various spaces. The interaction of Marjani, the objects and the spectators, stirring up scopophilic remembrances, and ultimately feelings tied to wonder and concealment. Getting so close to the action that psychic interconnectivity is palpable and its impact unnerving.

Enter the Room(s): a nucleus networked through memory where decentralization and fragmentation create a universe by which such “destruction” yields clarity.

See and Hear the video projections and sound imagery speaking to the slices of living which comes and goes like the long-passed joys and torments that memory realizes. The “jam” which makes you jump to your feet in cultural knowing, the strut that recalls a familiar coding of strength and vitality, and a projection of a “mother” who gives permission to revel in mundanity with the hope that a greatness and complexity may be revealed. Through the constructed collage, the view of fragmentation as wholeness.

“Confined body” - under the staircase speaking with a child’s voice. A vivid reminder of both the communal joy offered and the paralysis-induced desperation as a result of incest. Perhaps the ellipses implies all the possible affects of the unicorn, both making the unicorn what it is and recognizing that it is.

“Garden of the Golden Horn” - so dangerously provocative like a mine field waiting to destroy and delight. How can the image of a golden, dildo-ladened room instill so much fear? Desire has an evil twin called recollection. This room tempting the “outing” of the revelation of discovery and the potentialities of unearthing the makings of what it means to “feel good.” How and when does one first begin to know penetrative sensation...?

“Daddy’s Pyramid”- the mythological place to which one may escape and be born unto. The sledgehammer when tooled to destroy just two sections of the pyramid conjures up the possibility by which a removal from a place and state may be possible. Simply slide into it, like a grand garment, stand and away you go. Launch yourself into the ether never to return to this “place” again.

A Prayer:
Upon these horns, I sacrifice myself to the void of knowing and remembering, being and becoming. I consult, in a secret tongue, the oracle of the void for guidance and direction, in the hopes that one day, I may be resolved.

--yon Tande

***

yon Tande (Whitney V. Hunter) is a dance/performance artist/culture worker and BLACK SEED Native committed to #cultureascatalyst. His work centers around nurturing and cultivating individual and communal spirit through performance, education and curation. He has worked with the Martha Graham Dance Company, Rod Rodgers Dance Company, Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, Martha Clarke, Ralph Lemon, Fiona Templeton, Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik, John Jesurun, Kankouran West African Dance Company, Yass Hakoshima, Preach R Sun, Najwa Dance Corps and others. He was a Movement Research Artist in Residence (2013-15), a founding member/curator of Social Health Performance Club, and is co-creator of Denizen Arts: with Jude Sandy.

His works have been presented through RISD Museum, AS220, chashama, Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts, Washington Reflections Dance Company, La Mama, Grace Exhibition Space, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival and in the streets of NYC, Chicago and Detroit. His grants and commissions for the creation and exhibition of his works are numerous: New York State Council for the Arts, Puffin Foundation Grant, Harlem Stages, Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center, Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, Lumen Festival, and others.

He has taught nationally and internationally at Southside Cultural Center of Rhode Island, AS220, Peridance Center, Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre, Harlem School of the Arts, The Ailey School, Dance Institute of Washington, and Centro Nacional de Danza Contemporánea (MX), LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and Long Island University. His academic degrees include: B.F.A in Theatre Arts/Dance (Howard University), M.F.A in New Media Arts and Performance (Long Island University). He is presently a Ph.D. candidate and Driskell Fellow at Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

www.whitneyhunter.com

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Marjani Forté-Saunders: The story we've always known

Marjani Forté-Saunders
dancing Memoirs of a... Unicorn
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Marjani Forté-Saunders
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Memoirs of a... Unicorn--a breathtaking work by dance soloist Marjani Forté-Saunders--fills the Westbeth underground now known as The Collapsable Hole. The space is rough, roomy, multi-leveled, multi-surfaced and multifaceted. You enter and look around, dreaming of all the talented artists who might dare to try it. But for now, presented by New York Live Arts, Forté-Saunders owns every corner and staircase, every recessed area and side room with intricate, unexpected treasures, every inch of concrete floor and brick wall. With her design team--including dad, Richard Forté--she has turned this basement into mythic space and immersed her audience in Black-centered story.

You reach it, appropriately, through labyrinthine corridors. But instead of confronting a minotaur, you eventually spot the Black unicorn concealed in her lair. Maybe not right away.

The installation opens to the public a half-hour before performance time, and you might wander the space unguided or get distracted by a noisy conversation with your buddies or just sit, stare at your phone and wait for something to happen not realizing that something already is.

At some point, you become aware of the unicorn, her fearsome vulnerability, her defining feature with its awkward, unreasonable length, its prickly yet delicate construction. A structure that will both confine and exalt this strange captive has been built (by Forté-Saunders's father) to endure. By the end, that reassuring durability, coupled with a long-remembered song by Gil Scott-Heron, might move you to tears.

The space, filled with a light haze, balances precariously between dark and light, looks a little dangerous for any number of reasons--among them, the painted spikes of wood affixed to a wall like metal studs. Forté-Saunders is similar--a mix of audacious power and trembling sensitivity, an archive of damage and of ingenuity, a warrior and a mother. She's a woman capable of channeling exacting, telling details of masculine personality, energy and movement, neither afraid for her body nor afraid of it. Her speech patterns emerge sly or wrecked and disrupted, her singing voice imperfect yet Sending Its Message. A fedora-clad figure, she can be a little scary and quite a bit seductive. Direct, elusive. Controlled as she loses control. She dredges up memories--some personal, some collective--that sometimes wound or sometimes soothe. She makes you chuckle with her determined yanking of a man's jacket over costume wings, those stiff yet flimsy things jutting out from collar and hem.

In a generous, informative chat with Okwui Okpokwasili, post-show, Forté-Saunders expressed gratitude for having unpolished space in which to tell her complex, miles-deep, centuries-deep story. To my eyes, not one element of the many, many here seemed out of place, and even excess felt like the right move in The Collapsable Hole. Forté-Saunders is a confident, important, extraordinary performer hitting a new high mark in Memoirs of a... Unicorn.

Medi design: Meena Murugesan
Original composition and sound design: Everett Saunders featuring violinist Juliette Jones
Set design: Mimi Lien
Set built by Richard Forté/Build with Forté and August Hunt
Lighting design: Tuce Yasak

Memoirs of a... Unicorn continues tonight through Sunday the 19th with performances at 7:45pm. Doors open at 7:15 for a gallery pre-show. For information and tickets, click here.

The Collapsable Hole
55 Bethune St (enter at Bethune and Washington), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Premiere by Marjani Forté & Works at Gibney Dance

Tendayi Kuumba in being Here.../this time
below, l-r: Kuumba, Jasmine Hearn and Ni'Ja Whitson
(photos: Alex Escalante)

Here's hoping you're one of the few people who will get to attend being Here…/this time, a new piece by Marjani Forté & Works. One of the few, because the space--Gibney Dance's Agnes Varis Performance Lab, the mixed-use studio right off the downtown center's lobby--seats so few. With a music and media station tucked into one corner and audience squeezed into two others, there's barely room for dancers to gallop through the middle. Yet they do. And how.

being Here.../this time concludes Marjani Forté-Saunders's unusual three-year project, a consideration of racial oppression, its resulting trauma and its consequences of poverty, mental illness and addiction. The work questions how we view these conditions and how our social policy has always, and quite deliberately, failed to confront them. A hefty load for dance, certainly, but Forté-Saunders does not bear it alone. Her accomplished team includes husband Everett Saunders (sound), Monstah Black (costumes), Wendell Cooper (media) and Howard Curry, who performs a pivotal voiceover as a good Christian advocate of slavery. Powerful dancers (Ni'Ja Whitson, Tendayi Kuumba and Jasmine Hearn) embody Forté-Saunders's Afrofuturistic aesthetic.

Tendayi Kuumba
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Forté-Saunders gulped when she first saw the space Gibney assigned to her, but limitation turned out to be her best friend. By compressing every element--us included--the tiny lab creates inescapable sensory immersion, as if the entire production takes place within one stressed body, one hallucinating mind. If you can walk out of this show feeling calm and unchanged, see your doctor.

After viewing a prelude out on Chambers Street and in the tiny lobby, audience members enter the studio, take seats and slip on headphones to hear Saunders's vivid 3-D soundscape. His choice splicing of voices, music and sound samples delivers information--sometimes disturbing or satirical, often loud--direct to one's ears and nervous system. There's no buffer, no mediation. Like Cooper's projections, and like the choreography, the sound shifts, and jerks us, from states of crystalline clarity to disorientation, from unnatural excitation to exhaustion. Black's costume design, too, fuses trash and beauty, the right partner for a dance channeling personae who flicker between states of mysterious and mystical nobility, belligerence, frantic struggle, and tenderness.

Kuumba (l) with Hearn
(photo: Alex Escalante)

The choreography--layered in complex, suggestive imagery--can buffet and distort the human body so that you wonder who's in charge. Maybe more than one driver, maybe not of this time or space but all being Here.../this time in this lab, in this pressure cooker, on this sacred and sacrificial altar.

Hearn (l) and Whitson
(photo: Alex Escalante)

being Here.../this time continues nightly through Saturday at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (entrance at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

For Marjani Forté-Saunders, dance and activism are one

Portrait of dance artist Marjani Forté-Saunders
by Ian Douglas

The following statement, written by dancer-choreographer Marjani Forté-Saunders, was presented for conversation at the most recent Movement Research town hall meeting, held at Eden's Expressway on October 6. Saunders was in California to receive a 2014 Princess Grace Foundation-USA fellowship award in choreography and could not attend the meeting. Her statement was read for her, and a brief--and, in my opinion, tentative--discussion ensued. Saunders has graciously granted permission for me to post her words here in hope of inspiring further exploration and dialogue.

*****

“The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”

-- James Baldwin

“Looks like what drives me crazy
Don’t have no effect on you–
But I’m gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.”

-- Langston Hughes

At the approach of MR’s Town Hall October 6, I ask the community of Movement Research what tensions are felt in the balance of Art, Activism, and living as an Artist.

Nothing’s Simple in September.

So much starts and ends.

The Autumnal Equinox, sitting directly at the Sun’s Center, at the precipice of an ending season into the beginning of another, there is simply no wonder why in this awe-filled happening, some believed earth was the center of the universe. Everything is changing, at least on this side of the country (says the California girl, where mostly everything stays the same), and when I say everything, I don’t just mean the trees. Really, everything is changing for me.

I’m anxious, unnerved, questioning, doubtful, indecisive, and turning 30. My calendar is all over the place, my dates are clashing, and at the end of the night I’m saying, “What the hell does dance have to do with any of it, anyway?!” So much putting out, I miss having time or energy to put in, to get engaged, in conversation, in exchange, in service, in ANYTHING beyond planning the next performance, residency, rehearsal, class, or grant application. And I feel guilty about complaining, because, as least I’m busy--right? I haven’t had time to fill up though, and I sense the void.

So my questions, at the end of the night, go like this:

Am I putting my energy in the right places? When is the next Community Board Meeting (can I make it--oh, it’s on my only day off of the week, shit). Should I vote in Cali or NYC? Sorry I missed your show? Where am I most needed, where am I most powerful? Is there a place I belong? What’s a downtown dance community, I live in Harlem?

On the other hand (on with my rant) I’m frustrated with racism that is as American as Modern Dance and Apple Pie; the normalizing of white cultural aesthetics at the expense of black cultural innovators and revolutionaries, such as the teenagers on the train with the boomboxes, the real twerkers of Nigeria, Jamaica, and New Orleans. I’m even more frustrated that these aren’t new conversations. That Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and generations and generations of others have been singing the same song.

I’m as fascinated with aestheticism as much as the next artist, but I stagger in contemplation with what the hell it has to do with the stolen lives of Sam Hose, Emmett Till, Oscar Grant, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and so so so, many more.

I make art but I don’t feel like I have the freedom or the right to do so without reference to these crimes against humanity that continuously go, unchecked?

In this regard, reminded by my colleague and sister Paloma, I’m not alone in these questions or frustrations. I’m instead quickened by events such as Paloma McGregor’s Dancing While Black, Camille Brown’s The Gathering, UBW’s Convening, Jaamil Kosoko’s Black Male Revisited, The Requisite Mover’s Wellspring, all these intensives and gatherings that boldly discuss and strategize the galvanizing of resources to support black artists, voices, producers, writers, etc., to shift the lens and spaces in which our work is produced, reviewed, and heralded. Changing the tide, re-inventing, re-membering, re-cycling, re-birthing, and re-connecting.

It wasn’t until I joined Urban Bush Women in 2006 that I learned I could even do both, be an artist and activist. I had lived them as separate lives, under the umbrella of student-hood in college. Through UBW I learned about some of the intersections of Art and Activism, and later found those revelations echoed in the work of Nia Love’s BSD| Blacksmith’s Daughter, and Ebony Noelle Golden’s Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, and many many others. These folks rouse my questions as I live out the knotty narrative of artist/activist.

Lately, as everything changes around me, as I too, change with the shifting seasons, the looming whisper of cold weather, I throw on that sweater, pull out those scarves, and find that I’m in fact all bundled up with questions; the communities I’m apart of, the dance circles I traffic, the work I see and make, the artists I work with.

At the Convening we called upon the resources of our community as Black Female Choreographers. I now call upon the pool of information and resources in my MR Community: How are WE navigating Art and Activism? How does our work interact with our nation’s socio/ecological/economic/political contexts? At the approaching Town Hall October 6 at Eden’s Expressway, might I request this be among the conversation?

Forté-Saunders in performance
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Marjani Forté-Saunders is a Pasadena, CA native and Harlem resident.  She traveled as a performer with Urban Bush Women Dance Company for five years, and is now co-founder with Nia Love, of LOVE|FORTÉ A COLLECTIVE. Saunders is a 2014 Princess Grace Choreography Fellowship Awardee for new work commissioned by Los Angeles-based dance company CONTRA TIEMPO. For her work being Here…: a trilogy of works examining the intersections of mental illness, addiction, and systemic poverty, she’s received support from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts--Emergency Grant (2012), Puffin Foundation (2013), 651 Artists Development Initiative Artist (2013), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2014), and a New Music USA (2014) grant for a fifth collaboration with husband and composer Everett Saunders in the construction of a 3-D sound installation [www.being-here.org].   Saunders has also received support from the Jerome Foundation (2013, 2014), Mertz Gilmore Foundation with LOVE|FORTÉ (2013), Yellowhouse (2013), and the Harkness Foundation (2014).

Saunders’ work has been presented by Danspace Project, the Kelly Strayhorn Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA, Movement Research at Judson Church, New Orleans Mckenna Museum, Harlem Stage, Dance New Amsterdam, The Pillsbury Theatre in Minneapolis, Spelman College, Pomona College, and Hunter College (CUNY).   She has worked in residence at  Dance Theater Workshop (2010), Movement Research (2011-13), Brooklyn Arts Exchange with LOVE|FORTÉ (2012-2014), Dance Place (2013), Kelly Strayhorn Theatre (2014) and will begin a New York Live Arts Studio Series Residency in 2015.

Saunders is a passionate educator, having taught master classes and workshops across the US and beyond, including the American Dance Festival and ADF China.  She is also a member of Urban Bush Women’s BOLD Teaching Network, offering UBW’s unique approach to dance training and community engagement. Saunders is currently serving as Adjunct Lecturer, teaching Modern Contemporary Technique at Hunter College City University of New York and will be Guest Lecturer/Choreographer at Princeton University in the Fall 2014.  With deep gratitude, she moves onward in her work honoring that it stems from being born in and having engaged with culturally rich, vibrant, historic, and politically charged communities.