Art museums make new space for live performance

When the Art Isn’t on the Walls
Dance Finds a Home in Museums
by Hilarie M. Sheets, The New York Times, January 22, 2015

Dance New Amsterdam has some bright ideas for you

IDEAS CITY explores the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are essential to the vitality of urban centers, making them better places to live, work, and play. Founded by the New Museum in 2011, IDEAS CITY is a major collaborative initiative between hundreds of arts, education, and community organizations. This year’s theme is Untapped Capital, with participants focused on resources that are under-recognized or underutilized in our cities.

Quite appropriately, then, Dance New Amsterdam (DNA) will partner with IDEAS CITY 2013 for a full day of performance, engagement and fun. Learn more here and get involved!

For complete program and schedule information for IDEAS CITY, click here.

House of Harrell

How nice to get let into a performance space well before a show begins and be able to enjoy the quietly cheerful presence of its star-to-be as he greets friends. Last night at the New Museum, the stellar soloist in question--Trajal Harrell—started the show by handing out impeccably-printed cards with the lineup of twenty voguing “looks” to be performed over fifty minutes in the museum’s intimate theater space, surrounded on three sides by audience.


The piece is called Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (S)—the S representing “small”; reportedly, there are XS, M, L and XL versions. Besides the museum, Harrell’s savvy co-presenters include Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line festival. You have one more chance to see the exquisitely-performed (S): Go tonight!

Using a sextet of metal folding chairs—draped in pieces of clothing--as his dressing room, Harrell dons a changing, mix-match array. From Preppy Schoolboy (West and East Coast versions) to Legendary Face and Basquiat Realness, Harrell walks, embodying his long-imagined collision of Judsonian postmodernism (the party of NO!) and the aesthetics of the Harlem ball scene (YES! to glamour, YES! to theatricality, YES! to seduction). In fact, it is a big YES! to the importance of surface impressions and a hearty embrace of making magic (and magick) theatricality in postmodern dance.

For the most part, Harrell avoids the gleaming runway, created by artist Franklin Evans, taped over the theater’s floor. It’s there, but he’s elsewhere, breaking up not only the way we can look at him but the way he looks at everything with a gaze that sometimes draws the watcher in and sometimes evades or wards off the watcher, but is always pulled together and deployed like a serious and irreversible hoodoo spell.

This performance—a pleasure to witness--combines wit, patience, subtlety, awesome fluidity and grace and even some room for amusingly tacky effects (kitchen apron turned superhero’s cape with the help of an electric fan, for instance). The man’s keen taste in music and sure application of it for color and atmosphere are simply delectable. Harrell has always been an interesting thinker and creator. This piece, though, should make him legendary.

Tonight, 7pm, at New Museum, 235 Bowery, at Prince Street between Stanton & Rivington. 212-219-1222. Information also at Danspace Project.

The HOT! and Festive Keckler and Steele

Joseph Keckler and Max Steele

I totally loved this queeralicious HOT! Festival show, presented by Dixon Place offsite at The New Museum for Contemporary Art, regrettably for one night only. Both of these monologuists take audiences to dark, Scorpionic places, although Max Steele's sweet, ditzy, CyberGeneration persona subtly tricks you into thinking that, at worst, you've stumbled into typically dicey fairy tale territory when, in reality, you're in way deeper than that. You have never had a relationship from hell like the one that Steele had with the likes of one "Scott Panther," who sounds like his surname is more than just a little descriptive. Here's a charming Interview magazine video clip of Steele.

Joseph Keckler--a charismatic, astonishingly gifted performer all around--masters a wealth of faces, voices and sounds as he unspools strange/wacky stories or sings his songs, catching you up in silky, sticky webs of wonder and emotion. He commands a versatile vocal range, at times reminding me of Freddie Mercury, or Rufus Wainright, or Antony. As a storyteller, he's an action painter of fallen rainbows and dog-chewed Crayolas. How dangerous a spider is this Keckler? Ask the fan who found an out-of-control wireless mic inadvertently lobbed in her direction. "That's what qualifies this as peformance art," said momentarily unnerved Keckler. "The element of danger!"

Indeed. Oh, brave queer world!

Something new at the New

...Museum, that is. Dance comes to the New Museum on Friday, June 13 (7:30pm) with Mesmerized by Vangeline Theater and Ray Sweeten. The performance will take place in the museum's brand new 182-seat white box theater, the first time that this space has played host to a dance performance.

"The artists in create dances and musical compositions that move at extremely slow speeds, aspiring towards profundity with near-microscopic subtlety. The culminating effect is mesmerizing and stunningly dramatic.

"Vangeline Theater fuses the traditions of Butoh dance (characterized by exaggerated, even grotesque, isometric movement) with an aesthetic inspired by glammed-out science-fiction movies like Blade Runner and Liquid Sky. Ray Sweeten processes music through an oscilloscope—an instrument that allows voltage signals to be viewed graphically—translating shifting claustrophobic sonic environments into a mysterious new kind of sign language."

Admission: $8/members, $10/general public

New Museum
235 Bowery Street, Manhattan