Sounding off with Miguel Gutierrez at The Chocolate Factory

Center: Dance artist Miguel Gutierrez
brings his new work,This Bridge Called My Ass,
to The Chocolate Factory Theater
(photo: Paula Lobo)

Miguel Gutierrez
This Bridge Called My Ass
American Realness at The Chocolate Factory Theater
January 9-19

Before the messy mound of fabric scraps, chairs, step stools, electric cords and other discards at center space gets picked through for eccentric props; before festively-colored lights blink on and draw attentions to unexpected places; before dancers, without a shred of self-consciousness. display more and more bare flesh and sexual inclinations, there is sound.

In the beginning of This Bridge Called My Ass, there is the word--or many, really--some written by Miguel Gutierrez. A Spanish call-and-response--all the performers are of Latin American heritage--and a kind of chant that seems derived from an elementary school classroom or a language lesson for the non-Spanish speaker. The pacing and forceful energy of the choral readings of this text sound like a choir filled with conviction. But not a choir without the capacity to be flippant; if you were placed just right, you would have noticed a sly gaze-and-grin passing between Gutierrez and Oakland burlesque dancer Xandra Ibarra.

As things spread out--and lordy, how they do spread out--so does resonant sound of voice, music, props making bizarre impact against the floor and each other. As things spread out, they sometimes come in precarious contact with other things or nearly so. I worried much over the safety of so much unprotected flesh in the presence of hard metal wielded with abandon and also fretted over the safety of a MacBook with a rather large step stool weirdly balanced on the edge of its opened cover. Who takes this kind of risk?

Sprawling over the mess, toying with it, the dancers get tangled apparently without any of the fear I, from the relative safety of my front row seat, was feeling. Nor do they inhibit themselves or others. Soft and hard things are just things. Things are just things, and you might find yourself hallucinating that the inanimate is animate, and very much vice versa. These juxtapositions are truly audacious, monstrous connections. You have to give yourself over to the in-the-moment pointlessness and futility of it all, because the dancers definitely do.

Presented without intermission, the piece is about 90 minutes and feels really endless. Towards the end, though, there's an interesting shift that I resist interpreting. In fact, I resist interpreting anything here. All I will say is that the execution of it has--again, the best words I can find for this show--energy, resonance, to an impressive degree. There's something here that lives beyond the initial mess.

Created by Miguel Gutierrez and performed by Gutierrez with Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, nibia pastrana santiago and Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez

Dramaturg and assistant director: Stephanie Acosta
Lighting design: Tuçe Yasak

This Bridge Called My Ass runs through January 19. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 48th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/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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Swallowing her whole: Volmir Cordeiro at Danspace Project

Volmir Cordeiro in Inês
(photo: Cristiano Prim)

One day, I met a woman named Inês. I wasn’t satisfied with just looking at her – I wanted to get closer. I immediately put aside my role as an observer and began to live with this “being of flesh.” It wasn’t enough to capture her; I had to swallow her whole.  -- Volmir Cordeiro

The figure you see in the photo above is Inês.

Or perhaps I should say it is Brazil-born dancer Volmir Cordeiro encasing the being of Inês in his rangy, barelegged body in a study named, Inês, presented by and at Danspace Project with Performa.

That's already a lot surrounding a woman who is not there, and this does not even take into account the audience also surrounding a woman who is not there.

Inêssssssss.  The cry of her name issues from Cordeiro's lips like an invocation of an orixá. Or a viper's hiss. Or a spray of rum from the mouth of a macumba priestess. Or all of these things at once.

Inês lives. Yes, an actual person, a sexagenarian and mom. By word of Cordeiro (and a useful post-show Q&A with Miguel Gutierrez and translator Patricia Hoffbauer), we know two other things: 1) She wants to get on a reality TV show. 2) She has had "a radical amount of plastic surgery," as noted by Gutierrez, to make herself a better candidate for elusive and likely ephemeral celebrity.

We must imagine what she looks like. What Cordeiro looks like borders on the wolfish. And when he strides right up to the edge of the audience's front row, right up to the eyeballs there, he can intimidate. Especially since he holds that place of dominance for a long time. Even when swiveling his limbs, or moving sideways along the row or venturing inside an aisle, he's a force that seems to want to pin you in your seat. You don't know what, in the very next second, could burst from him. And you don't want to know.

In your own head, you're walking on eggshells.

Is that Inês?

If so, she seems unbalanced enough to achieve the reality TV stardom she desires.

He/she is reckless with his/her body--especially when Cordeiro tapes his eyelids shut--in ways that make empathic/empathetic people like me cringe.

Is that Inês?

A useful tidbit from Danspace Project's material on Cordeiro (now based in Paris):

Volmir Cordeiro...is currently working on a PhD thesis on figures of marginality in contemporary dance at Paris VIII University. His studies and time spent in the favelas of Rio with Lia Rodrigues’ company reflect a desire to bring to life those who are “condemned to weaken, disappear, derail.” In previous works Cordeiro has explored the physicality of marginal and underprivileged figures.

Inês fascinates her observers, even as she scares them. How strange that her dream is such a flimsy thing, far flimsier than she herself must be.

Final performance of Inês: tonight at 9pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

"Dance Criticism in New York" -- Thank you so much!

Glitter valentine, East Village
(c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

T H A N K  Y O U !

to everyone from Gibney Dance, especially Craig Peterson,  Margaret Tudor,  Julia Vickers,  Paul Galando and the entire team

to my esteemed panelists--Rose Anne Thom,  A Nia Austin-Edwards,  Jaime Shearn Coan,  Siobhan Burke,  Charmaine Warren and Marissa Perel

and to all who attended or participated online

Dance Criticism in New York was an unqualified success with our six panelists sharing diverse experience and perspectives, each speaker demonstrating professional commitment to honest, responsible work on behalf of this art that we all love. We can all agree that our writing thrives on the dynamic energy of multiple worlds--our immediate, one-to-one encounter with artists and their work; our own histories and inner landscapes; and our life OUT THERE in our communities with readers who value dance now or might recognize its worth through our special insight and passionate example.

Moving on, we need to look at the power we invest in dance criticism, who claims access to that power and to what ends, who is denied access and the consequences of that exclusion. We need to create alternative, but adequately supported, venues for dance writing, and we need to value and compensate the dedicated time, skill and labor of that writing.

I hope our conversation will continue in many forms, generating new ideas and collaborations. Please reach out to me with your thoughts and suggestions. I am ready to partner with you.

If you missed this event or its livestream, you can access the recording here.

In the meantime, here is the text of my introductory remarks.

******

In his 2002 essay, “The Perfect Dance Critic,” Miguel Gutierrez wrote, “The perfect dance critic does not exist.” [http://www.miguelgutierrez.org/words/the-perfect-dance-critic/] And then Miguel went on to tell us the many, many qualities, abilities, tendencies and working conditions that would make it possible for that mythical unicorn, The Perfect Dance Critic, to exist.

But, perhaps, what we should be looking for in dance criticism is progress, not perfection.

Convening tonight’s panel is my way of asking, Can we get a little progress here in New York, a city that remains of great importance in dance’s history, its growth and innovation and, I trust, its future? A little progress, if not perfection?

Can we, as critics, be a meaningful part of this community? Or do we stay at the sidelines? Do we, as dance critics, have a meaningful place out in the world beyond dance? A world of beauty and also a world of inequities and injustice? Can we bridge the gap, bringing that world in, bringing dance out to that world?

Rather than perfection, can we seek humanity?  Rather than cool and lofty distance from the artist, can we respond to art and to artists with empathy?  Can we meet the poetry of dance with the poetry of words?  Rather than complacency, can we have insurgency? Provocation? Transformation? Shamanism? Can we value the diversity and complexity of a changing world in which we do not fear those changes nor fear how they require us to rigorously examine ourselves, to question our assumptions and to evolve? Can we foster communion, perception, intuition? Can we honor deep and broad experience and knowledge without resisting new questions, new tools, new pathways?

Do we truly love dance enough to give it the respectful attention and witness that it deserves?

I’m wondering. I’m hoping. And that is why we are here tonight.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

(c)2015, InfiniteBody

"It's time for courage." Rodabaugh + Orange = DoublePlus

DoublePlus, the smart new artist-curated performance series at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center (280 Broadway), is quickly coming into focus as a space for risk-taking by everyone from maker to presenter to watcher. Without advancing a narrow aesthetic agenda, it is breaking lesser-known artists into potentially wider exposure. More than just a chance for Gina Gibney to host formal performances--still restricted at her original 890 Broadway studios--DoublePlus is shaping up as a contender in the crowded New York dance scene, serving up adventure in a sophisticated container.

Last evening, guest curator Miguel Gutierrez introduced us to the work of Alex Rodabaugh and Rakiya A. Orange.

Alex Rodabaugh with cast of g1br33l
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Alex Rodabaugh channels the archangel Gabriel
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Rakiya A. Orange in her solo, Aziza
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Rodabaugh's ensemble piece, g1br33l, looks like a nightmare that might well start off with spooky space music, cheesy, makeshift costumes, ritual gestures and exhortations to "Breathe and let go" but end in Manson-like bloodshed. Actually, no New Agers are harmed in the making of this movie, but it does veer from Rodabaugh's oft-cited comfort zone into unexpected, suggestive and subversive territory. I think Rodabaugh's channeled alter ego, the archangel Gabriel, might have spent some earthbound time occupying Wall Street as well as a few queer dives. And I found one of his pronouncements intriguing: "We can't change government, but we can change our reaction to government" echoes a familiar spiritual nostrum for all kinds of complicated personal and social ailments. Gabe, as embodied by Rodabaugh, is a modest-looking archangel but with a detectable modern edge, and I think "reaction" might be the word to focus on in that sentence. (Visit Rodabaugh's page here.)

Rakiya A. Orange
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Let me cite the DoublePlus description of Orange's extraordinary solo, Aziza:

...a complicated investigation of self and identity, foregrounded by Stephanie Leigh Batiste’s idea that “The performing black body is material and metaphorical, real and unreal.” Orange’s body becomes a site of infinite feedback, reflecting the gaze of the spectator. She foregrounds her ambiguous status—as a real person, a theatrical representation, and a sociocultural construction—to explore, expose, and explode definitions of blackness.

Orange, when we first see her, dances atop a triangular platform of ludicrous dimensions. It's kind of the size of an American flag folded and handed off to a war widow. But you don't need a lot of space for strip-club moves. Later, she will indeed take the whole of the floor space, and forcefully, but she starts off pinned to this tight spot like the specimen she is for the audience's gaze. And still looks completely in charge. A beautiful woman and dancer, she invites the gaze and is quite good at feeding it while clearly enjoying the rush ride of her powers and savoring music that is nothing short of inviting and wonderful. She's all over a spectrum of being ours and being her own. Her skill, creativity and confidence are clear but complicated by the mundane and exploitative uses to which they are usually put. The world is not necessarily her friend. In silent, strange moments, she might end up upended like a beetle, legs flailing. She seems, at times, to follow ideas and try things out as she dances, raising questions like, Because she smiles, is everything always all right? She seems to be asking questions, too: Is this one thing enough? Is it good enough? How far do I need to go? Can I enjoy this? Can I let you see me enjoying this? Can I let you enjoy this? Who's watching me? Are you WATCHING ME?!!

Orange and Rodabaugh continue tonight through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. Tonight's show will be followed by a Q&A with the curator and choreographers. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

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

DoublePlus: impressive launch for new series at Gibney 280

Sean McElroy (left) and Tei Blow
of Royal Osiris Karoake Ensemble
in The Art of Luv (Part 1)
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Time will tell if DoublePlus--presented at Gibney Dance Center's new Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center near City Hall--proves to be more than the sum of its parts. But last night's performance, the first for this new dance series, represented a bold move by programmer Craig Peterson and his first artist-curator, Annie-B Parson.

Not springing from any centralized aesthetic, each segment of the six-week DoublePlus season has been curated by a different dance artist invited by Peterson. In addition to Parson, the curatorial lineup for Fall 2014 includes RoseAnne Spradlin, Miguel Gutierrez, Donna Uchizono, Jon Kinzel and Bebe Miller. Each have invited two emerging or mid-career choreographers to share a four-evening program. Parson's program introduces works by the multidisciplinary Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (the partnership of Tei Blow and Sean McElroy) and dancer-choreographer Audrey Hailes and continues through this Saturday with all shows at 7:30pm.

Blow and McElroy of Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble, working in multimedia performance installation, describe themselves as "a musical priesthood that explores the metaphysics and mythologies of love, desire and courtship at the end of the 20th century." Nice...and bland...but that doesn't quite prepare you for The Art of Luv (Part 1), for being wafted on a nonstop magic carpet ride through a live and video landscape of New Age meditations, channelings, video blogs for makeup and jeans, and hyped-up self-improvement infomercials, all seamlessly connected to one particularly sinister video centerpiece. ROKE's stated aim--take it as sincere or, given the hokey costumes, decor and projections, ironic or possibly both--is to heal the world, particularly where masculine insecurity is concerned. Maybe everything seen and heard here shares a certain underlying pathology. And maybe, through the wizardry of highlighting those toxic interconnections, these dedicated karaoke masters are among the best healers going.

Hailes calling herself "a so-called theatre artist" seems fitting, given my overwhelming sense of her, in Death Made Love to My Feet, as someone often thrown into space and landing at odd angles, weirdly and precariously attached to things like stools or columns or just air, as if these things had just arrested her fall. I also locate her as she appears to locate herself--as an artist amid decades of sticky social and entertainment history. A Black woman in the arts who finds herself walking past or through energy fields that contain things like Ailey's Revelations, and Beyoncé, and Miss Mary Mack-style clapping games (with co-performers Jasmine Coles and Alison Kibbe), and Barbara Walters training her laser eyes on a ravaged Richard Pryor. There are women warriors in there, too. Do I see Hailes because of these layers or despite them? Or both? And it is just wild when the door to the theater's greenroom opens in a burst of light, and we get our first glimpse of Coles and Kibbe--or, really, just parts of them--while Hailes soldiers on right in front of us. Where to look? The light from that room is undeniable--also, the mystery of who the hell these other people are. What the hell are they doing? Confusion ensues. And I kind of loved it all.

For more information and tickets for this program and all upcoming DoublePlus shows, click here.

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

Love is crazy...or so says Justin Vivian Bond

CDs by singer/performance artist
Justin Vivian Bond

It's no small matter that two people--myself and an arts presenter I know--exclaimed the same words as we left Justin Vivian Bond's one-night concert, Love is Crazy, at FIAF: "So inspiring!"

On the subway trip back downtown, we conferred and agreed: It's the kind of performance that makes you want to look for and bring out your own best. I remember watching Ben Kingsley act in Gandhi and quitting a soul-snuffing job the very next day. I'm not yet sure what Bond's example--or any other part of FIAF's Crossing the Line fest--might inspire me to do in coming days, but V, I'm all ears.

Loosely strung around a theme of love, Love is Crazy found Bond (aka V) in warmly relaxed and sincere, if glamorous, form. V opened with the '40s jazz standard "Angel Eyes," the singer allowing this boozy torch song an unadorned reading, quite right, that only faltered in its final moment. Without an ending note to tether it, "Excuse me while I disappear...." really did seem to dissipate into the ether. But inspiration need not require perfection, as V laughingly proved throughout the show.

Over the next 80 or so minutes, Bond pushed on, recovering voice, energy and wild mind. It's not every songwriter/chanteuse--transgender or otherwise--who would think to source Peggy Lee and Aleister Crowley simultaneously. Nor is it every singer who can build from a husky hush to a voice that makes you feel the scalding steam coming off Sinnerman's boiling seas and fear its devil.

Justin Vivian Bond sings a song by being alert and wholy alive within it. That's the teaching.

The set drew from V's Dendrophile (2011) and Silver Wells (2012) recordings, with selections like Mark Eitzel's furious "Patriot Heart" and Bambi Lake's "The Golden Age of Hustlers," fierce and picturesque dramas from the queer red light zone. We were also invited along quiet strolls through Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and The Cure's "Lovesong." In the latter, V's sensitive accompanists--Matt Ray (musical director/piano), guitarist Nathann Carrera and violinist Claudia Chopek--knew when to hold off and when to fill in and support the simple lyrics and wispy melody.

Bond clearly relished v's folkish duet with guest artist Miguel Gutierrez--better known as an award-winning choreographer--and even got a chance to display a few dance licks. The highlight of Gutierrez's segment was his version of "Smalltown Boy," an '80s hit by Bronski Beat; if you saw Marissa Perel's recent work, More Than Just a Piece of Sky, at The Chocolate Factory, you heard Gutierrez's recording of this song. Gutierrez, though no Jimmy Somerville, has a haunting shimmer to his voice and beautiful delivery.

Visit Justin Vivian Bond's site (photo, videos, the works) here.

For news of the Miguel Gutierrez universe, go here.

For details on FIAF's 2014 Crossing the Line Festival, which runs through October 20, click here.

Miguel Gutierrez talks about "West Side Story"

Following that headline, I think I need add nothing more than Location, Date and Time...but here's everything else anyway!

Queer/Art/Film presents

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ 

presents WEST SIDE STORY

at

IFC Center

Monday, September 8, 8:15pm

WEST SIDE STORY
1961. US. 152 min.
directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise

It took four of New York’s leading gay theater artists – Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents – to brilliantly update one of the most beloved straight love stories in history, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For our guest presenter, acclaimed choreographer Miguel Gutierrez (whose most recent show premiered at the 2014 Whitney Biennial) the Academy Award-winning film adaptation was his favorite film growing up, even though its “weird mix of codes” set him up for a “lifetime of confusion about being a queer, Latino dancer." If you’ve only seen it on TV, don’t miss the chance to see it on the big screen. Tonight, tonight...

Screening followed by drinks and discussion at Julius Bar (map/directions).

Get more information and screening tickets here.

IFC Center 
323 6th Avenue (at West 3rd Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Dancers Miguel Gutierrez (left)
and Mickey Mahar in costume for
Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/
(photo by Eric McNatt)

Miguel Gutierrez, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow in choreography, lives in Brooklyn and makes performances. His most recent show - Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/ -premiered in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. His work is presented frequently in NYC, across the country and internationally at venues and festivals such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Dance Theater Workshop, On the Boards In Seattle, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, PICA in Portland, Pompidou Centre in Paris, ImPuls Tanz in Vienna and many others. His video and performance work has appeared in the NYC MIX Festival. He has received support from Foundation for Contemporary Art, United States Artists, Lambent Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, MAP Fund, National Dance Project, National Performance Network, Jerome Foundation and Creative Capital. He has choreographed music videos for Diane Cluck, Holcombe Waller and Le Tigre, has released an EP as The Belleville, has performed several times at Joe’s Pub and has sung with Antony and the Johnsons and My Robot Friend. He teaches at Hollins University and Movement Research. His book WHEN YOU RISE UP is available from 53rd State Press and he maintains a blog at Stargayze.com about his emotional spinouts due to celebrity sightings. He invented DEEP AEROBICS, most recently used to warm up audiences for The Knife’s tour, and is training to become a Feldenkrais Method practitioner. 

The consequences of men: Gutierrez and Mahar at the Whitney

Dancers Mickey Mahar (l)
and Miguel Gutierrez (before he went fabulously blond)
(photo by Eric McNatt)

Some questions raised by an afternoon visit to Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:1/, a world premiere and Whitney Biennial commission by Miguel Gutierrez in collaboration with Mickey Mahar:

1. Do ten nails with freshly, perfectly painted "divine decadence" trump an offer of fluorescent hot pink polish?

Answer: Why, yes. They do. Refuse the offer.

2. Fluorescent hot pink strips pop off white walls and floors. Is this the queerest color of them all?

Yes. Inescapably so. Especially in a swimming suit and face paint on a newly bleached-blond, bearded choreographer.

3. Is 13 a lucky number?

Answer: Yes, if it's your 13th show.

4. I have a thousand and ten thousand things to say to you. My heart is full of futurity. What does this William Blake line (from a letter to Thomas Butts) have to do with anything?

Answer: We'll find out.

Some man got nervous--or something--yesterday at the Whitney, just as Miguel Gutierrez was winding down his affable introduction to Age & Beauty Part 1 in front of an audience jammed into a small, white-box performance space. The guy got up, mumbled an apology and left. Who knows why? Maybe all that gleaming white reflection was too much. Or maybe Gutierrez's hot (pink) look? In any case, he surely missed a thousand and ten thousand things.

The duet with Mickey Mahar launches a new area of investigation for Gutierrez and, he says, "deals with the challenge of being a mid-career artist and the attendant questions of longevity, sustainability, aesthetic signature and burnout."

Its opening passage gives us ample time to compare the two men--different in ethnicity, age, physique, skin tone and garb--as they move in strict unison. It is all parade, a mechanical display of hotness--shimmying and shrugging shoulders, deep pliés, gestures of arms and legs growing in kinetic and linguistic intricacy--in sync with blaring, pounding house beats. Mahar's light, precise and detached approach contrasts, interestingly, with the choreographer's self-presentation. Gutierrez inhabits the movements in a way that seems to contain and constrain a thousand and ten thousand things just below the surface. (You're in there, Miguel. We see you!) This goes on and on but, in a little while, both men will achieve some moments of intense and impressive physical control and physical inevitability.

Further along, the individuality of each performer becomes more pronounced. Gutierrez is like hard rubber tumbling noisily; Mahar, equally turbulent but still somewhat delicate, strangely graceful in his awkwardness, like a baby animal.
And Gutierrez's text--a trenchant cross between spoken word and art song--wrenches an audience in so many directions in so short a space of time that the only possible response is sweat.

Age and Beauty Part 1 feels like entropy--a copious, detailed, rigorous language devolving into common and familiar, if passionate, expression, Mahar slow, dreamily writhing on the floor while Gutierrez runs or flails or belts a song into a white microphone.

At the end, Gutierrez calmly dismisses the audience: It's over; you can leave now, or words to that effect. Yesterday, the audience took a while to get that he was serious and to rise and file out. How strange to be told to leave at the end of a presentation but, remember, it was also kind of strange for Gutierrez to personally welcome us and introduce his own show. The feeling? Good and more than a little not so good. Friendly and maybe not so friendly. What is the choreographer saying about who we are and what we've been doing--and watching--for the last 55 minutes?

I could be wrong but, just below the surface, a thousand and ten thousand things, barely held in check, all sound like: Get the fuck out!

With additional dance material by Christoffer Schieche and Roman Van Houtven; set design by Miguel Gutierrez; lighting by Lenore Doxsee; costumes by Dusty Childers

Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/ runs through Sunday, May 4. Advanced ticket sales are closed. If available, tickets will be released each performance date at 11am. A stand-by line will form one hour prior to each performance.

For show information, click here.
For Biennial information, click here.
For general Whitney visitors information, click here.

2014 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Where ideas live and move

Dr. Oliver Sacks (left) in conversation with Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, New York Live Arts (photo by Ian Douglas). Jones says of the dance community, "I wish we were more curious in the big discussion."

New York Live Arts is where thinking and movement meet the future. -- Bill T. Jones

For a healthy, viable future for the art of dance in American society, that art must meet its potential public--a public that is increasingly diverse; a public continuously plugged into numerous and growing sources of information and entertainment; a public caught up, ready or not, by issues of climate change, malfunctioning government, ruthless abuse of children and women, the devaluation of labor, the rise and risks of cyber-technology and more real world concerns and disasters.

New York Live Arts' visionary festival--launched this season as Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, in celebration of the 80th birthday of the great neurologist and author--establishes a toehold for this turbulent world-at-large in one of our city's historic, beloved venues for innovative, contemporary dance. I salute this integration of the outside with the inside and, personally, it tickles me to enjoy the possibility of taking in so much of what has always moved my life--from artistic research to scientific inquiry, from informed citizenship to activism--in one convenient location. The mix--which is not strictly new but is newly presented here at the famously former Dance Theater Workshop--excites me and offers hope.

Some of it is just plain fun: Watching a video of NASA astronauts playfully demonstrating how the absence of gravity radically alters execution of everyday movements, while their very funny colleague, Marsha Ivins, shares her own experiences (panel on Disembodiedness: Body Image & Proprioception) or waiting for steam and F-bombs to shoot from artist Miguel Gutierrez while a philosopher torturously labors to define what dance supposedly is and is not (panel on Minding the Dancing Body). Gutierrez  knows that, when it comes to research in consciousness, dance--a mode of perception, as he defines it--has been excelling at this work for a long time now.

Marsha Ivins, retired veteran of five NASA Space Shuttle missions

Imagine spinning and never getting dizzy. 

Or moving a 700lb object with just a touch of your fingers. 

For more fun with zero g, check this out.

Dance artists have information, strategies and even wisdom that the rest of us could benefit from. Jones seems bent on getting this word out to society as well as making some beneficial connections for the dance field. At times, the dialogue seems a little stilted, a little awkward and even prickly, but as long as the various parties are in the same room, talking, who knows what good might come of it?

On the Minding the Dancing Body panel, choreographer RoseAnne Spradlin spoke of making dances as a way to help people see what is usually hard to see, a purpose that Alva Noë and Colin McGinn--the philosophers on hand--readily identified as the goal of their discipline, too. Later that evening, Donna Uchizono's new dance--presented along with her 1999 trio, State of Heads--illustrated this mission.

Donna Uchizono in Out of Frame (photo by Ian Douglas)

Out of Frame, commissioned for the Live Ideas fest, takes as its inspiration the young Dr. Sacks' observations in 1969 of eighty people who survived the 1920s worldwide occurrence of a brain inflammation called encephalitis lethargica. Working from Sacks' accounts of these "recovered" patients in his renowned book, Awakenings, Uchizono distills the characteristic lingering distortions of body, personality and perception of time and space, even persistent immobility, into a solo performed on a tall ladder in the middle of a bare stage. On its own, this staging says so much--the rarity of the condition, the isolation of those who cannot look or function according to the norm, the extremity and precariousness of their situation even under medication, the mystery of a disease whose cause and prospects for resurgence remain unknown.

The solo is strangely beautiful and bizarre and fascinating; one of Uchizono's initial images presents her hand as if it were the clenched bulb of a carnivorous flower or a slowly rippling sea creature. The piece traps memory and heightened sensations within an altered state in which the body might not be perceived as a stable or singular entity...or even one's own. Josh Higgason's video layers an image of the dancer's body onto her flesh, helping us see what it's like to feel that something is very much, well, off.

Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks continues through Sunday evening, April 21. For information on all remaining events--including the encore of Donna Uchizono's dance program on Saturday at 4pm--click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People at BAM Next Wave Festival

A soft, glowing globe--like a goddess breast of white, translucent parachute cloth--looms over cramped performance space carved out by three angled thrusts of audience seating, their front edges cutting right into that surface in BAM Fisher's Fishman Space. Miguel Gutierrez hasn't given himself--or his dancers...or us, for that matter--much room to maneuver. And yet, during its 90 minutes, And lose the name of action aims to channel big, hefty other worlds and states of being and perception.

L-r: Luke George, Miguel Gutierrez, Ishmael Houston-Jones and K.J. Holmes (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Performed by Gutierrez with a stellar cast of collaborators--Michelle Boulé, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Luke George, Hilary Clark and K.J. Holmes--And lose the name of action takes its premise from the choreographer's interest in neuroscience and the senses and, in particular, what he sees as the absence, in any discourse on philosophy and innovations in neuroscience, of any mention of what dancers know about the body. On a deeply personal level, though, it is also influenced by his father's struggles with a neurological disorder.

His program notes for the piece (worth a read, if you get a copy) conclude,

Along the way, I became intrigued with seemingly irrational ideas from the paranormal field, with their focus on insubstantial bodies, and I created a link between this field and my experiences performing and watching dance, which itself constantly disappears and haunts, and the hallucinatory experience of watching my father and family undergo a change I could never have predicted and only barely understand now.

From the outset, even before the performance begins, something is in the air. A heavy, soapy scent, actually. I can't swear this is deliberate--not something an audience member was wearing--but Gutierrez is interested in the senses. And so...maybe. And there's a very low-level sound thing going on, too. Something chiming, some voice or voices barely detectable beneath the audience chatter and the usher's anxious seating instructions.

The piece, itself, goes on to wink and wobble and lurch so much that it sometimes dumps and spills us out of its disoriented/disorienting state as much as it envelopes us. The relatively brief audience participation in a kind of seance presided over by a smarmy Houston-Jones seems especially wink-y--and yet, also, genuinely intense with all the dancers chanting and stiffly splaying their limbs in spirit-infused rapture.

Gutierrez either contains or explodes energy, feeling, thought. Sequences of hand gestures are performed with great calm despite a sense of obsessive and/or sacred ritualization--playing a piano runs into typing runs into chopping runs into declaiming without words and bigger, formal, ritualistic movements in duets or groups. In inexplicable but interesting spotlit-moments, Houston-Jones makes like a ninja sprite and Boulé, like a drunken Isadora. Dancers spill into the space, flowing, flopping, sloshing, stuttering, stumbling, twirling, negotiating near collisions like suddenly agitated molecules. A voice mumbles a musical "Fuck you," so barely discernible that you check, again and again, to be sure that you're really hearing it. There's pregnant talk of "a gesture of bad faith." The space fills with mad Ophelias. A bearded guy (actor Paul Duncan) appears in a video that, depending on your seat, you can see or not see. Deck chairs on the Titanic get rearranged...okay, well, not the Titanic...or maybe...but the very special, restricted white chairs interspersed among the front audience rows and commandeered by dancers play a heavy role in all of this and take a good deal of the brunt.

With a soundscape often lulling us into an altered state (and possibly slumber), And lose the name of action can switch between graceful and graceless, sharply envisioned and disorganized (deliberately or not), ludicrous and alarming. I doubt that it will come to count among my favorite Gutierrez works, but it does remind me of my first--and abiding--impression of his work, that gut feeling that I'm in the middle of an earthquake.

With lighting by Lenore Doxsee, sound design by Neal Medlyn, video and writing by Boru O'Brien O'Connell, costumes by David Tabbert and dramaturgy by Juliana May

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People perform And lose the name of action at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space) through Saturday, December 8 at 7:30pm and December 7 at 10pm.

Seating is limited. Sold out, although people on last night's waiting list were able to get in. So, give it a shot. For information, click here.

BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

O, Hay! Dancers talk about working with Deborah Hay

Watch three dancers--Luke George, Michelle Boulé and Miguel Gutierrez--talk about working with choreographer Deborah Hay in this video from Walker Art Center. Click here.

"Making Work" with Miguel Gutierrez

MAKING WORK
Workshop with Miguel Gutierrez

Miguel Gutierrez (Photo by Ves Pitts)

Monday-Friday, December 17-21

10am to 2pm

New York City Center

$200

In this workshop we will focus on the creative process in making body/movement based performance. Participants will spend the week making short pieces, mostly solos. I first offered this workshop in 2003, and have enjoyed its various permutations throughout the years. This is the first time I lead it in NYC in over three years.

Originally my reason for creating this workshop was that I wanted to find out if it was possible to create the conditions to teach something that can’t actually be learned – how to make work. I discovered that through unequal parts making, discussing, improvising and watching the work of other workshop participants, you can uncover and deepen your individual interests, your process and your work.

My interest is in creating a space where inherited notions of dance and performance are critiqued, absorbed or discarded in the service of creating performance that comes from a vital, necessary place and that speaks to a contemporary context. There is no one way to make work.

My teaching is influenced by: years of teaching this workshop, years of seeing shows and talking with various artists about them, my experiences working with many extraordinary performance makers, my experience in making my own work in various scales and in a host of places/conditions, my pseudo-Zen/Feldenkrais belief system that tells me you can’t force anyone to change but can create the conditions for spontaneous learning, and my belief that everyone is a creative artist of potential brilliance and that “genius is as common as dirt.” (John Taylor Gatto)

This workshop is useful for artists who are anywhere in their trajectories as performance makers.

Workshop participation is limited and by selection only. If you are interested please send an email/doc, one page max (500 words or so), with some information about yourself and why you interested in joining the workshop to Miguel@miguelgutierrez.org.

Please explain if you have any schedule conflicts. Priority will be given to those who can attend all of the days and times.

Sensewalking with Miguel Gutierrez

I'm wishing Miguel Gutierrez great weather at The High Line tomorrow evening for Sensewalk #4: GIVE ME SOMEBODY TO SHOW!

Presented by Elastic City, dancer-choreographer Gutierrez has been leading small groups (16 people, max.) in intriguing and fun explorations of external and internal space, heightening awareness of our expanded palette of senses. Last Saturday, I took his Elastic City walk at the New York Public Library's 5th Avenue flagship building--a place I knew fairly well and loved in my young adult years--and was thrilled to see, hear and feel a whole lot more than I might have imagined. Previous locations included the Staten Island Ferry and Prospect Park.

If space is still available for tomorrow's High Line walk (6:30pm), give it a go!

Get complete information and RSVP (required) here.

Elastic City intends to make its audience active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit.

Artists are commissioned by Elastic City to create their own walks. These walks tend to focus less on providing factual information and more on heightening our awareness, exploring our senses and making new group rituals in dialogue with public space. (Read more here.)

Two looks at nudity

The Psychology of Nakedness
by Jonah Lehrer, Wired, November 30, 2011 

Naked Choreography
by David Parker, DanceMagazine.com, January 2012

Michelle Boulé in focus

I'm sharing a couple of very interesting items I received in the press kit for last week's Dance & Process program featuring, among other choreographers, Michelle Boulé at The Kitchen:

Michelle Boulé

by Samara Davis, BOMB, April, 2010

Performance in Process: Michelle Boulé

by Lauren Bakst, BOMB, December 21, 2011

MELT...with you

A sampler of the many imaginative workshops

from Movement Research's MELT Winter 2012 

(January 2-20)

Chris Aiken
An Eco-poetic Approach to Dance Improvisation and Performance

In this movement workshop we will explore awareness and intention through the development of perceptual acuity in relationship to our inner and outer landscapes. We will examine the delicate relationships between our poetic imagination and our sensory systems. The basis of my approach is that composition and performance are ecologically rooted acts. Our imagination grows from where and how we exist. Movement, story, image and gesture are imbedded in the relationships that are evolving all around us.  Come ready to dance, perceive, perform and imagine.

Keith Hennessy
Improvisation as Potential Shamanism     SOLD OUT/WAIT LIST OPEN

Five days of contemplative embodiment, intensive breathwork, fake healing, endurance shaking, post-contact, disco and séance, all in the attempt to invigorate improvisation practice for dancers, choreographers, and performance makers. Shamanism, in a general usage, refers to the ritual/spiritual practices of working with forces and energies, unseen and poetic, of transforming space and time to shift meaning and perspective, of communicating with the dead or not-human. Contemporary improvisation and performance practices often engages the same intentions. Let's dance in the borderlands of anti-systemic knowledge, magic, real and fiction, contagion and exchange, and various states of presence. Dance class is a ritual, potentially.

DD Dorvillier
Touch Move Talk Write: open studio practices

This workshop focuses on generating new practices through touching, moving, talking, and writing. We will shape each practice with simple rules and apply different sequences and durations, giving equal time to all four aspects. By pushing the notion of practice to extremes, one begins to understand assumptions about style, body, self, technique, unspoken rules, expertise, etc. etc... The aim is to proliferate unexpected results, to try many things quickly, and to foment revolution. Please don't come without a notebook and a pen.

Miguel Gutierrez
INEFFABLE INTANGIBLE SENSATIONAL

This workshop looks at some of the ways in which Miguel Gutierrez approaches a practice of movement and improvisation in his work. Working from the proposition that dance is a mode of perceptual inquiry, and working against the idea of dance as a non-verbal "language," students will be led through a series of movement explorations that prioritize sensation, non-rational action, and that trigger automatic, unprepared physical response. Some of the questions that guide this workshop are: What does movement "do" and how does it operate as a framework for complicated, nuanced, embodied meaning?

For full program, schedule and registration details about these and other MELT Winter workshops, click here.

Messing around with the French

PLAYING WITH CINEMA
AMERICAN PERFORMERS EXPERIMENT WITH FRENCH FILMS

Saturday, October 22, 6:30 

Miguel Gutierrez
The National Theater of the United States of America
Annie-B Parson
Dan Safer 

Melissa Anderson, host

Co-presented with The Invisible Dog Art Center and Les Subsistances

American artists will use a few minutes of a French movie (Godard, Tati, Demy, Melville) as the basis of their performances, experiencing the tension between images and bodies on stage and questioning the affinities between the imaginative world of movies, and the imagination of a performer. What kind of relationship can a performer have with an image on stage? Moving pictures can have an intense presence and catch the eye, and even compete with the physical presence of the performers. The performers then have to deal with it, either through appropriation or rejection: pictures on stage impose some form of negotiation.

FREE!

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(directions)

theinvisibledog.ny@gmail.com

Topiary's "Landscape"

I wasn't sure where the evening was headed when C. Ryder Cooley sat high atop a platform, strumming a ukulele and singing, in a twee folkie's voice, an elegy to the spirit of a slain goat. (The head of a Pyrenean ibex lay under her platform.) And I wasn't totally sure when writer/video artist/performer Samuael Topiary, dressed to suggest the Renaissance Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel, climbed down a ladder situated at the rear of the audience rows and started picking out potential models. Something about that seemed a little ordinary, a little...done. But trust quickly kicked in because, with Topiary, it soon became clear that we were in the hands of a multi-talented artist who knows what she's doing and why she's doing it.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, presented at Abrons Arts Center, is named for the Bruegel painting in which the mythic flyboy's disastrous splashdown is totally marginalized by the luminous environment dwarfing it. A consideration of this famous painting becomes Topiary's starting point for a deep, flowing meditation on the state of an America pitching towards 9/11 and economic turmoil.

In the course of guiding this Big Myth journey, Topiary assumes not only the role of Bruegel but also doomed high-flyers including explorer Henry Hudson, a bull she calls the Wall Street Minotaur, Amelia Earhart, David Rockefeller (who envisioned the World Trade Center) and, of course, Icarus, weaving connections among them that are both informed and intuitive. "It's pretty fucking meaty," as Miguel Gutierrez, Topiary's director, said during the post-performance Q&A, adding, "It's a show where you can really learn something." Indeed, and yet the learning comes through a fair amount of seduction. Most powerful in this regard are Jocelyn Davis's graceful, minimalist costumes, the eerie atmosphere created by Cooley's musicianship and Peter Kerlin's electronic soundscore and the gifted Topiary's vocal talents and physical authority.

Nothing's forced. It's as if Topiary is not only instructing us but excavating our memories and feelings with all the great care of a seasoned archeologist. No sudden moves. No aggressive jabs. Not right away, at least. Just steady work until, finally, something valuable emerges. Okay, now let's calmly, rationally examine it.

It's interesting to hear that she first conceived this work not terribly long after 9/11, when she was still in grad school and bore a skeptical attitude towards the imperial American overreaching that those two rather graceless buildings stood for. In the Breugel painting, she said, disaster is rendered as a fairly tiny detail in a larger context, whereas after 9/11, America had become obsessed with disaster and could not, would not, look at context.

"People got mad at me and thought I was blaming the victims." Not hard to imagine the flak she got. People were scared and pissed and having these human, understandable feelings worked up and manipulated to the max. Some of the "sacredness" associated with the site of the fallen towers--now complicating the building of an Islamic community center two blocks away--is as much about the supposed "sacredness" of the preeminent icon of corporate America as about reverence for a place where thousands of innocent people perished. With those two things--American power and American vulnerability--so firmly interlocked, will we ever be able to see clearly?

It's still not popular to bring this up, although Topiary's beautiful and intelligent Landscape probably reads differently to an audience of "downtown" artists and arts junkies like most of us and will (and should) be received well in its run at Abrons.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now through November 20, Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm 

Information and ticketing

Abrons Arts Center

Henry Street Settlement

466 Grand Street, Manhattan

(directions)

Collaborative challenge

Jenny Holzer and Miguel Gutierrez Collaborate

by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, July 20, 2010

About that powerful person

I love this tidbit from choreographer Miguel Gutierrez's "spring/summer spewsletter," recounting his encounter with a fellow 2010 Guggenheim fellow:

I TRIED TO EXPLAIN MY PROPOSED PROJECT TO A PLANT BIOLOGIST, WHOSE EYES SORTA GLAZED OVER. I GUESS EVEN THE INTELLIGENTSIA JUST WANT YOU TO TELL ‘EM THAT WHAT YOU DO LOOKS LIKE “SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE...”

Yes, well, have you ever tried to adequately explain a Gutierrez piece to someone outside the loop?

Well...have you?

Precisely.

Congratulations on that fellowship, Miguel!

Miguel's new site

Miguel's upcoming gig at Mount Tremper Arts