Artists Reach Out: Nejla Yatkin

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Nejla Yatkin

Nejla Yatkin
(photo: Enki Andrews)

Dance artist Nejla Yatkin conducts embodied research and creates storytelling through movement, engaging culturally with her ancestral roots as a German-Turkish-American raised and educated in Berlin, Germany. Working professionally for over 30 years, her career as a performer, educator, and choreographer has taken her around the world. Currently based in Chicago, Yatkin is an independent choreographer. She creates solo and ensemble works for the stage and constructed or natural sites both indoor and out; is an active guest educator at the professional and university levels; and is a sought-after guest choreographer.

The topics of her work explore diverse cultures and histories, inspired by significant dates, places, and cultural figures in the world. Her notable creations include The Berlin Wall Project (2008) and Oasis: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Middle East but Where Afraid To Dance (2013); Dancing with Cities (2007), a site-specific work that took place in New York, Washington, DC and Berlin and Dancing Around The World (2015) which has traveled to 20 cities around the world. In addition to creating for her own project-based company NY2Dance, Yatkin has choreographed works for Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, Dallas Black Dance Theater, The Modern American Dance Company, River North Dance Company and Washington Ballet among many others.

In all her projects, Yatkin seeks what British philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin refers to as an “awareness of the deep currents”--a comprehension of the connection between all things, an awareness of the present as well as that which transcends time and space. The New York Times says "Ms. Yatkin is after more than choreography. She is a magician, telling tales and creating worlds with understated images and movement." Her skill and depth of feeling has been recognized by numerous awards and grants from entities including the 3Arts Foundation, the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, the National Performance Network, the Illinois Arts Council, The Chicago Dancemakers Forum and many more. For more information visit www.ny2dance.com.

Moving Nature Dreams by Nejla Yatkin
(photo Enki Andrews)

Oasis by Nejla Yatkin
(photo: Enki Andrews)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Yes, I have been working on a solo entitled The Other Witch with support by the Chicago Dancemakers Forum and the Chicago Department For Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and I had some open showings with critical feedback sessions scheduled at the Chicago Cultural Center for March. For April, I was awarded a 3Arts artist residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France to continue the rehearsal process. After, I was scheduled to travel to Spain, Portugal and Germany for informal sharings of the work. This all got cancelled due to Covid-19 and, like everyone else, I am homebound, but I am grateful to be in the safety of my home and grateful that we have tools like this blog where we can share with each other and learn from each other's experiences.

I was thinking about previous pandemics like the Spanish flu and the Black Death and feeling appreciative that we have the technology to stay connected and even get daily briefings. I am grateful that we can communicate with loved ones through so many channels.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I became an artist because the arts—dance especially—offered so many of the things I wanted in my life. Creativity, cooperation, optimism, humility, grace. Dance allows me to be vulnerable, experiential and curious. I never stop learning, I feel like I am always in process, growing and changing. Dance encourages dialogue, and discipline, strength, and resilience! It taught me patience, and the thing that really brought it all home for me is that it teaches empathy. Dance moves us to want to know the Other.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

Currently, I am practicing listening, listening to my body, listening to my thoughts. I follow the impulses of my body and move to the rhythm of my breath in the comfort of my living room. I am listening to my partner, I am listening to my plants and listening to the world. I wake up meditating and envisioning a healed and just world where everyone has healthcare and access to basic human needs and where people are kind and stand in solidarity with each other. I am envisioning more wisdom where people come together to work together and collaborate to find solutions to our current challenges of climate change, equality, racial and social justice.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I deeply care about humanity, I care about nature and the planet, I care about equality for all, for social justice but I also care about balance. I wake up and reflect on how I can contribute and adjust my behavior so that it aligns with what I care about. I alone can’t change the world, but I can inspire people through my own actions and behavior.

In my art, I am drawn to the power of human connections and, because I care about humanity, I have been focusing on collaborative community-based site-specific performances around the world (see here). They are like planting seeds in places to spark new ideas and empower people to imagine new possibilities. I try to make my dances available whenever it is possible through free presentations in streets, galleries, parks, prisons, theaters and social media.

I care about our environment and other sentient beings so I am a Vegan. How can I practice non-violence if I don’t include or consider other species? I am also a Reiki practitioner, and I daily send healing energy to Mother Earth. I try not to use a car whenever I can. I walk, bike or take public transportation. These actions are like a butterfly flapping its wings, and you never know what string of escalating events it will inspire….

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

In the last couple of weeks, while homebound, I have been connecting virtually with artist friends and family and just talking, laughing, grieving, crying, dreaming together. I also have days where I just use my hands a lot to bake bread, clean my home, knit and cook to be present in the here and now.

In between the daily tasks, I am trying to listen to how best I could share with the rest of the world my movement practice. So I started sharing weekly very simplified short dance wisdom exercise tools on YouTube. It’s for anybody who wants to take a break to explore movement concepts from the comfort of their home. I believe that dancing and moving are very powerful. They connect you to that inner light that lies deep within your core.

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

Every evening I hum and sing to myself. Humming not only lifts your spirits, it clears your head. I practice singing in Italian, German, Turkish, English, French and Spanish. By singing everyday, I am tuning my frequency but also practicing languages I have learned and don’t usually get to practice daily.

According to physics, everything vibrates: the chair you’re sitting in, the food you eat, the rocks and trees. Whether or not we hear it, everything has a frequency, a vibration of its own. That vibration is called resonance, the frequency at which an object naturally vibrates. Each part of our bodies has its own natural resonance, and I am practicing this as a daily tuning of myself to send the loving frequency of the world.

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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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Annual Between the Seas festival explores dance

Between the Seas Festival 2014 offered a "preview performance" of a solo by Nejla Yatkin (Turkey) who has forged a broad international career in dance and choreography. What dreams may come, its title sampled from Hamlet's meditation on death, bears Yatkin's stylish stamp. Even at its most mystifying and overextended, it is inhabited by an expressive performer who grasps the visual power of the stage even when she chooses to leave it for a curious walkabout in audience space.

When she first appears, backed by a cavernous soundscape of amplified exhalations, Yatkin can barely be recognized for the low lighting and the stretchy, jet-black cloth that wraps her upperbody. (We're left to ponder the contradiction of this piece of fabric that evokes an anonymizing chador while its bearer goes barelegged.) She pulls against the fabric, which is attached just beyond a doorway onto the stage, and its shadow and hers expand and loom across the back wall. Sometimes star-like flecks skitter across these inky masses. She writhes, twists, folds to the floor, lunges, bends her spine like a bow, makes wings and snakes of her arms to a gentle flow of Near Eastern-sounding melody. Eventually, she frees herself from the restrictive length of cloth, which snaps back into the doorway. The dervish spins, which soon come, seem pat, but if making a lovely impression is what the incredibly striking Yatkin is after, she succeeds.

Does "preview performance" mean that this solo is a work-in-progress or planned as part of a larger work, or that its premiere will happen elsewhere? That's not clear, but brevity would heighten its impact. The segment where where Yatkin appears to test out some potential dancing partners before twining herself around a few unfortunately seems tacked on, coming late in the piece. These interactions--tentative at first, then more comfortable, and finally generously flowing in a duet with a female dancer obviously planted in the audience--convey feeling and a growing desire to connect and be known.

Italy's ASMED-Balletto Teatro di Sardegna presented the world premiere of ARAGOSTA (Lobster), a trio by the Sardinian-born, London-based choreographer Moreno Salinas. Danced in the nude from start to almost finish by Francesca Assiero Brà, Anna Paola Della Chiesa and Rachele Montis, it's a fashion show, of sorts, introduced as such--which creates a bit of a shock when the first "model" strides out completely bare. The models stroll towards and away from the audience, drawing even more attention to their nakedness with nearly continuous (and increasingly monotonous) polyrhythmic body percussion. Variations include poses, gestural and facial expressions and occasional speech in Italian. Like Yatkin's solo, the piece feels overlong but benefits from its performers' focused strength. Salinas' inspiration, designer Elsa Schiaparelli--she who collaborated with Salvador Dalí on her famous Lobster Dress--would be tickled by their moxie and audacity.

Between the Seas, New York's summer festival of performing arts based in the diverse cultures of the Mediterranean, continues through Sunday at The Wild Project. For a schedule and ticketing information, click here.

The Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/direction)

FringeNYC: Nejla Y. Yatkin's Oasis

Every Fringe fest--stuffed to the gills with lots and lots of stuff--also has its must-see, unforgettable shows. This year brings us NY2Dance in Oasis: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Middle East but were Afraid to Dance--a work-in-progress by dancer-choreographer Nejla Y. Yatkin and some wonderful collaborators. The 70-minute ensemble piece--at once more serious, more powerful and more delicate than its subtitle would suggest--is showing at Theater 80 a few more times before the festival closes this weekend.

Oasis, inspired by the Arab Spring revolts, takes on difficult subject matter that others have tried on in dance theater and often fumbled--oppression, exploitation, rape, torture as well as the complexity of women's sense of personal identity and autonomy in repressive societies. Yatkin and her fellow dancers--Shay Bares, Sevin Ceviker, Ahmaud Culver, Jean-Rene Homehr, Rachel Holmes and Fadi Khoury--deliver a work that sears while daring to be exquisite, sensual and, during a fashion show devoted to hijab couture, even cheeky.

The modest East Village theater is clearly not the best location for Oasis, yet it presents little obstacle to this work's effectiveness and polished look--top-notch choreography enhanced by lighting design (Ben Levine), music (Shamou), animation (Iga Puchalska and Julien Smasal) and costuming (Ursula Verduzco and Yatkin). The seven dancers manage the small stage with ease, although this work needs, and will work well, in roomier surroundings.

A series of segments flow one into another, leaving no time for the viewer to recover from the dreamy spell or emotional devastation of the preceding one before becoming swept into the next. At the outset, animated silhouettes of a young girl conversing with her wise grandfather introduce the element of innocent curiosity. We might also ask, with this youngster, why we have created a world of so much pain? How did we lose our souls? How can we recover them?

That first bit of animation gives way to a swift, voluptuous duet between Yatkin and Iraq-born Khoury--both of them lithe and sinuous, continuously meeting and intertwining to the sound of muffled percussion and tinkling chimes. The dance is stylish, romantic and so engrossing that it takes a while before you notice something wrong: They're both wearing blindfolds. This segment yields to an anguished, frenzied solo for Khoury before a well-staged episode where masked men confine and torture him.

Yatkin can be a fiery dancemaker, but sometimes cool-and-quiet gets the job done--as in another section where Khoury lays out a serving tray and glassware along Bares' abject back and takes sips while calmly gazing at the young man who is so clearly his property and sexual conquest. And again, when Bares, alone and shyly trying out the finger cymbals that seem to manifest out of nowhere, slowly builds a deeply undulating solo--think of a Nijinsky, maybe, discovering bellydance--that speaks of the dawn of an inner power, a sexuality that is defined by self, for self.

I was shaken by much of Oasis. In the post-show Q&A, dancers revealed how deeply and personally it had affected them. Their investment in it clearly went far beyond getting the steps down.

Yatkin plans to tighten Oasis in advance of its premiere at next year's Bates College Dance Festival (Lewiston, ME). The Turkish Cultural Foundation will sponsor a presentation of Oasis at New York Live Arts (dates to be announced). Catch it this week at Theater 80 (Thursday, August 23 at 2pm and Sunday, August 26 at 1pm) or keep watch for these upcoming presentations of the finished piece.

Get more information and reservations on this and other New York Fringe Festival shows here.

Yatkin's "Wallstories": dancing to freedom

There's a moment, late in the hour, when Wallstories--a Fringe Festival multimedia work presented by Nejla Y. Yatkin's NY2Dance--takes flight. Prior to this point, the production seems an earnest, generically energetic ensemble based in thoughts about the Berlin Wall and the eventual passing of the Cold War era.

Opening with a blaring voice-over and a very narrow horizontal strip of film imagery of workers laying bricks, the dance employs a multicultural cadre of performers in short, rumpled raincoats who repeatedly bunch together and collapse one moment and, at another, make big, jazzy gestures like a Broadway chorus line of mimes. Their dancing, set to music by Bach and Pink Floyd, runs from lunges, stretches, dashes and collisions that give an impression of restlessness and inevitable release to sharply-rendered solos that convey the essence of an individual's recollections and emotions. Occasionally--as in the sixth section, "Dorothea's ?uestions," set to Pink Floyd's "Blue Sky"--the movement achieves a rapturous flow.

Yatkin's fifth section--superfluously titled "The Government, Mother Russia, my Mother, your Mother"--feels like the first clear evidence that Wallstories aims to operate on a level of psychological and universal insight beyond its aesthetic and historical concerns. But it isn't until one of the final sections, when Yatkin suddenly rises from her front-row audience seat to move in sync with one of her dancers, that the work comes home. As a member of the audience, she stands on the cusp between us and the dancers, bridging temporal, physical, emotional and psychological divides. She visually identifies herself, finally, as the heart of this piece.

A Berlin native of Turkish-Egyptian descent, now living and working in the States, Yatkin is a tall, sinewy, strong-featured wonder, a gifted dancer's dancer whose every performance is living sculpture. Watching her move last evening offered the thrill and, simultaneously, the poignancy that Wallstories had previously withheld despite the admirable effort of its other hard-working performers. It located Wallstories squarely in Yatkin's body and in her experience as a descendant of immigrants, and that touched off connections to issues roiling Western Europe in the present day.

A joyous coda brings the evening to a close, but Yatkin's presence brought it to its height.

Performed by Ahmaud Culver, Shay Bates, Sevin Ceviker, Rachel Holmes, Fadi Khoury, Karina Lesko, Marissa Maislen, Derek Crescenti, Nejla Y. Yatkin and Ehizoje Azeke

Lighting: Caroyn Wong

Video Design: Michael K. Rogers and Nejla Y. Yatkin

Photography: Nejla Y. Yatkin

Text: Nejla Y. Yatkin, with original interviews with Germans from the East and West

Wallstories is a presentation of the New York International Fringe Festival and runs through Sunday, August 28 at Dixon Place. For specific schedule details and ticketing, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey), Manhattan
(directions)

Burnt Sugar/DANZ at BAC

Last evening, Summer Stages Dance/Baryshnikov Arts Center Artist Residency participants Greg Tate (music) with Germaul Barnes and Gabri Christa (dance) presented an invitation-only, informal showing of their improvisatory Burnt Sugar/DANZ project. In a music/movement jam called La Celestina, the trio continued earlier explorations of this question:

Why can't choreographers come together and create spontaneous new ensemble work the way musicians do?

Of course, they can. Of course, they did.

And given that most of the dance artists involved last night have sizzling dance skills and presence, that sugar was burning. Conductor Tate's ensemble--which included vocals by Latasha Diggs and Somi--hit some sweet spots at times, too. But the evening belonged to extraordinary, imaginative movers like Barnes and Christa and like Daniel Gwirtzman, Kyle Abraham, Ayo Jackson, Catherine Cabeen, Nejla Yatkin and Christian von Howard, who know how to get a groove going or take full advantage of whatever's already happening on the floor.

As in any improvisation, sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. But, in Burnt Sugar/DANZ, the entirety is fun, stimulating and a welcome experience of some exceptional performers exercising their creativity on the spot. So, if you hear of other chances to witness this project, jump right in!

burnt sugar...danz

some sugar

some solid pliability 

energetic calligraphy

hive gathers gestures 

sparrows call spasm

family movements

determined undetermination 

conducted spheres of action 

baton for music baton for dance 

mass of singularity

scampering steady chime 

dignified hectic traffic

(c)2010, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Summer Stages Dance

Baryshnikov Arts Center

Yatkin launches discussion series

Goethe-Institut New York hosts Nejla Yatkin: Words on the Wall--a free, public discussion--on Monday, June 19, 6pm.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, internationally recognized choreographer Nejla Yatkin is working on a new group piece entitled Dancing with the Berlin Wall. As part her creative process, Ms. Yatkin will be conducting monthly discussion groups on The Wall and our experience of it at the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building.

The series will continue on July 31, August 21, September 25 and October 30.

Goethe-Institut New York Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan
212-439-8700

Yatkin: Breaking through barriers

Visit dancer-choreographer Nejla Yatkin's elegant and informative new Web site for details on The Berlin Wall Project, her tri-part commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

• a short “dance-on-camera” film in collaboration with filmmaker Mike Rogers
  

• a site-specific installation about the Wall to be performed the day of the anniversary at two gallery spaces at the Goethe Institute in New York City in collaboration with photographer Astrid Riecken
  

• a touring dance concert work to be performed in New York City, Washington, DC and Los Angeles

She'll take Manhattan...

Nejla Yatkin's Solo with New York City-Times Square