Melanie Maar premieres "Our Other" at Danspace Project

The resonance body of this space holds light, sound, visitors, inhabitants and our time spent together.

--Melanie Maar, from program notes for Our Other

Although, on occasion, I have held back descriptive details that might spoil the freshness of experience for new viewers, I have never felt the need to stay mum about almost everything I witnessed. But here we are--with Melanie Maar's Our Other, an arresting vision of alternate selves and Otherness itself within the environs of St. Mark's Church, home of Danspace Project.

What dare I tell you about Our Other so that Maar can share it with you without my interference? A few things.

When you enter, you may sit anywhere around three sides of the performance space and--although, on opening night, few people took the choreographer's invitation--you're free to move to alternate viewing locations at will. Maar, Laurel Atwell and Marilyn Maywald perform the 45-minute piece but, in a way, the church space performs it, too, in unexpected dances of light and shadow. Manipulation of lighting, at times, brings out the beauty and potential drama of a venue that might have become, for most of us dance fans, familiar in an obscuring way.

Its quirky drama perches on a fence between elusiveness and specificity, between repetitive tedium and subtlety. Our Other leads you to question: Am I sure that what I'm looking at is ordinary or as artificial as it sometimes appears to be? Does it become more real with the performers' distance or with their closeness? Is there something here that I recognize, that I remember, that seduces?

I am seduced by Maywald's "flight"--you will see what I mean--because it is well-observed and true, the truest thing about something that could be, and usually is, rendered with lazy banality.

With lighting by Carrie Wood and Maar; costumes by Maar with assistance from Ede Thurwell; composition by Maar with additional live sound compositions by Abraham Gomez-Delgado

See Our Other tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 8pm. Click here for information and tickets.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (corner Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Late-night Hennessy: special DTW deal

Keith Hennessy/Zero Performance is working a late-night gig--featuring Hennessy's solo, Antibody--at Dance Theater Workshop on Friday, April 3 at 10:30pm. What's more, if you already have a ticket for DTW's Hennessy/Melanie Maar shared program earlier that evening, you can see Hennessy in Antibody at the recession-friendly price of $5. All others pay $10.

Information and ticketing, or call 212-505-0426.

Antibody is live performance research, testing the potential of art as a liberating force, as transformative ritual, as rhetorical pedagogy, and as pleasurable entertainment.By calling the performance-action Antibody, Hennessy links the one-time-only event to a personal lineage of improvised performances, spontaneous choreographies, and real-time dancing. Costumes might change. Objects might appear. There will be talking, maybe singing, and lots of movement, dance, and physical action. Antibody has been performed in variations of 15 to 75 minutes in theaters and studios since 2000, most recently at The Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago, October 2008.

By calling the performance-action Antibody, Hennessy links the one-time-only event to a personal lineage of improvised performances, spontaneous choreographies, and real-time dancing. Costumes might change. Objects might appear. There will be talking, maybe singing, and lots of movement, dance, and physical action. Antibody has been performed in variations of 15 to 75 minutes in theaters and studios since 2000, most recently at The Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago, October 2008.

Nothing is scripted or choreographed in advance, but Hennessy will have access to 30 years of performance habits, training, making, and watching. It is likely that the economic disaster will be addressed. It is unlikely that Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will be mentioned or even referred to. Formal considerations will focus on the ritual bending of time and space, the potential for embodied intelligence to be revealed through improvised performance, and the role of the artist-audience relationship in a country at permanent war. Antibody is a performance ritual in which symbolic action in one world is intended to affect another. The goal is a lucid dream in which the body and the theatrical context become metaphors for re-visioning our personal and social fears, doubts, desires and ambitions.

Keith Hennessy is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer. He dances. Hennessy was born in Canada, lives in San Francisco and works often in Europe. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, spectacle, ritual, and public action as tools for investigating and re-visioning political realities. Alone and with others, Hennessy makes politically engaged, soul-touching performance. Hennessy directs Circo Zero Performance, a performance-making company that sometimes includes circus arts in a cross-disciplinary and body-based approach to performance art. Click here for more information.