Yamamoto curates the unseen

Guest curator Nami Yamamoto named her Food for Thought evening at Danspace Project "something/someone that you haven't seen." In my case, the "someone previously unseen" were two young Japanese dancer-choreographers--Michiyo Akamatsu and Yoko Maruyama--who call themselves Akamarukyugyosho. A couple of cartoonish, hard rock'n'rolling kittens from hell, they have energy to burn. I really liked the humor and raw force of their duet, Rise vs Fall, and its clever depiction of support and competition. And, coming right after I spent a couple of hours up at MOMA's On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century show, it made me want to swing by the nearest Staples and buy a bagful of markers. I hope we'll see more of Akamarukyugyosho.

Karen Sherman and Morgan Thorson--who showed part of a work-in-progress--have been seen many times before, though not often enough since making their home in Minnesota. I'm looking forward to the finished piece and whatever they care to bring us when they're next in town.

Another Minnesotan/ex-New York couple--Chris Yon and Taryn Griggs--are also dearly missed, and they were looking good in The Very Unlikeliness (I'm Going to KILL You!). Mostly, I love watching how on top of things they both are despite the off-centered nuttiness of their mission; they're a couple of artists who--like the best comics, verbal or physical--know precisely what they're doing at any given moment. After a while, you notice, with pleasure, their musicality, and it's particularly fascinating to watch them move in unison, side by side, and see how differently they approach the same moves and gestures while remaining in delicious harmony. Fun, fun, fun!

There's one more Food for Thought show this season--tonight at 8pm. Curated by Will Rawls, this one is called appearing and erasing and features work by Sahar Javedani (tranquility in the presence of others), Liliana Dirks-Goodman (Dance #3: Duet for Two Buildings, with Chorus) and Kennis Hawkins with Jocelyn Ladd (Lost in Space).

Food for Thought is Danspace Project's semiannual canned-food drive. Admission is $5 with two cans of food or $10. (details)

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church
2nd Avenue at 10th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

D'Amour and Pearl bring us "Terrible Things"

A bunch of bright lights worked on Terrible Things, which you can enjoy at Performance Space 122, now through December 20. Written by longtime partners-in-crime-and-OBIE, Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl, choreographed by Emily Johnson, the piece is wonderfully performed by Pearl, Johnson, Morgan Thorson, Karen Sherman and a couple of amiable wrestlers (Rudy De La Cruz and Adrian Czmielewski).

If you're typically overwhelmed at this time of year--by the bigness, the brashness, the commercial-ness of it all--you might appreciate the compact intimacy of Terrible Things. Compact, yes, but big in personality. Just like Pearl, its undisputed star.

Everything/everyone here seems to be located somewhere in Pearl's busy cranium, a place bustling with memories, like the legion of plump marshmallows aligned with impeccable, subatomic regularity across the theater's floor. In the opening, dancers carefully, efficiently move through this strange, snowy field, delicately scooping aside some marshmallows with their elongated, velvety arms and making shapes of small quantities of the sweets. This sets the stage for the space to open up and light up with room to move freely, the vividness of primary colors, Pearl's non-stop, embodied storytelling, and the mystery of parallel--but not perfectly sync-ed--worlds in the time-space continuum.

Terrible Things is a modest delight, a fine corrective for the excesses of the season.

Schedule details and ticketing here.

Thorson: Taken to "Heaven"

Heaven--the lacerating ensemble piece by Minnesota's Morgan Thorson, presented at P.S. 122--was just the thing for a chilly night and a cold, frostily-lit performance space. Not that Heaven managed to heat things up, not even when pushing dancers' ecstatic rituals to manic extremes.

With its white and shiny decor, its hive-mind drone and eerily-beautiful slowcore score, played live by Low's Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, Heaven delivered a sense of driven longing for a place and state of being way, way north of here, something as close to austere, rigorous purity and perfection as humans can manage. The work is inhabited by several dancers who, initially, keep their eyes lowered and huddle together while slowly trodding a repetitive path with simple steps. They're a repressed--and self-repressed--community.

They're not only dressed in white, they are themselves all white--at least, I'm assuming by appearance alone. Whether or not this apparent racial purity was intentional--and it might well have been--it proved to be a fascinating theatrical element and one perhaps fully justified by the cultural specificity of the work's electrifying conclusion. Transformative religious practices of varying kinds can come from a similar place of searing extremes--and here, I'm thinking of the role of possession in African and Afro-Atlantic spiritual culture--but they ultimately produce different phenomena.

Thorson grips us in that place of extremes where beauty and madness overlap. I'm intrigued by one of Thorson's statements about the work's relationship to "our love for the theater and its parallels to worship."  This puts me in mind of the ancient origins of theater, very much connected to that place of wild extremes meant to shock the viewer out of his or her habitual condition.

While watching Heaven, though, I never felt totally sure that the perfection sought is ultimately worth the repression and pain. Thorson, I think, lands on the fence and perches there. But the performers make a vivid, unforgettable experiment of it. They are the aforementioned Sparhawk and Parker, Karen Sherman, Justin Jones, Jessica Cressey, Elliott Lynch, Max Wirsing, Chris Schlichting, Hannah Kramer and Renee Copeland--all sometimes scary and always scarily good.

Heaven closed last evening but deserves an encore. Let us pray...

The audacity of Leichter

The Barnard Project--a collaboration of Dance Theater Workshop and Barnard College's dance department--brings students together with some of the foxiest choreographers around. The artistic residency program culminates in a season of new and developing works at DTW, and this year's lineup features pieces by Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis), Nora Chipaumire, Susan Rethorst and Nicholas Leichter.

Thorson's Monuments and Other Points of Interest: A Revisionist Construction of Closeness deploys an ensemble of bare-legged, skittering, sloshing women in bonnets that look like a soft-blue version of what the Sisters of Charity nuns wear in Doubt. There are also long tables wrapped in blue ruffled skirts, and I really can't tell what's going on here, but I enjoyed the tickling, eccentric musicality of the movements. Chipaumire's bismillah (which means, "in the name of Allah") evokes a tight-knit community of women. Among its subtle graces is the way the choreographer--herself, an extraordinary performer--has taught her young dancers to articulate the muscles in their torsos. Rethorst has shaped her corps of dancers into an ecosystem in a piece marred only by a tendency towards cutesiness. All three of these choreographers seem to be dreaming up societies and have shaped respectable, if not yet exciting, works out of these imaginings.

And then there's Leichter's Waltzes, Wonder and First Choice--made "with additional choreography and assistance by Aaron Draper"--which is a little bit different.

For one thing, it has a high-charged pop soundtrack--Mariah Carey and John Legend's "Born Again," Alicia Keys's "Falling," First Choice's "It's Not Over" and more. It has young men in business shirts and ties paired with women in--uh-oh!--midnight-blue party dresses. And you know exactly what's going on when it starts off with two of these dancing at--instead of with--each other, coldly missing opportunities to touch, hold and connect.

As the businessmen confront their dates--and, sometimes, one another--the mood becomes hectic, desperate and sometimes downright mean. The movement--broad and often awkward to a cartoonish extent--challenges each member of the hardworking corps with the speed and complexity of its isolations. I think Leichter, in working with these fledgling dancers, got the project precisely right. His work always strikes me as raw, almost like outsider art. He tosses street and club and folk stuff in with the fact of doing theatrical dance on a stage, and he refuses to smooth it back. I think these young Barnard dancers click with something there and grab hold and go with it.

The Barnard Project continues this evening at 7:30 and concludes with 2pm and 7:30pm performances on Saturday. Click here for information and ticketing.