It's also okay to take time to grieve.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

It's also okay to take time to grieve.

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody


Hey, friend! How are you doing? How are you faring in this new reality?

Me? It's different from moment to moment, day to day. And that's the way I've learned to take it. Because that's the only way it's going to work. The information and guidelines and rules we're getting evolve as this coronavirus pandemic sweeps across the world, our state and our city, and we inch along towards an unknown future. We're all trying to do our best.

Well, some of us, actually, are doing our usual. Which is not helpful. It's a time for responsibility. And I'm livin' in the USA where gun sales are rising and young people have to be forced to stay away from bars.

Anyway, my fellow Americans, my fellow New Yorkers, my fellow arts folks, here's where we find ourselves.

Lord love us, the virus struck, our daily habits and plans and expectations got shut down but--damnit!--we got busy. Right away!

We've now put a flood of videos and livestreams out with everything from opera performances to yoga and meditation and cooking classes to art museum tours. Oh, thank goodness we've got the Internet and social media and the same electronic devices we'd just spent months and months complaining about and trying to spend more time away from so we could have authentic experiences with our loved ones IRL.

Now, we're finally making good on those old resolutions to study French or learn to knit or...I don't know...maybe master brain surgery on YouTube. And there's just so much out there to dig into while we wait for the world to turn right-side up again (or what we thought was right-side up...that's debatable).

There's more and more and more online content every day for the stuck-at-home. I've got friends and colleagues busy making some of it. And even this blog post! Because we're resilient, we're creative, we want to keep active before we lose our natural minds. It's really fantastic, isn't it?

It's also exhausting.

All the time in the world now to catch up with the tons of unread books I have here, the millions of unread articles I have saved in the Pocket app, the podcasts people keep telling me I have to hear, my Netflix list, my bag of knitting supplies, my personal writing, the two free Coursera courses I've just signed up for and--Godx, help me--my lifelong practice of introversion. And yet....

I can't. Anyone else feel me on this? I just can't.

I wish I could put this enforced isolation time to good use. But....

It even took me a while to realize I could write a post like this to share with you how I'm feeling.

Because we're supposed to spring into action as if nothing, absolutely nothing could ever slow us down.

We're Americans, damn it!

We're New Yorkers, damn it!

We got through 9/11 together, and we'll power through this trauma.

And I actually think, as much as artists and folks who work with artists--particularly dance artists--are marginalized in this society, most of us have a keen sense of responsibility to community and world, a sense of generosity and mission, that moves us to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, start all over again. Right away!

I'm here to admit I'm both feeling it (that natural urge) and not feeling it.

I'm leaning in...and swerving away.

And, yeah, all of the labor I normally do (and dearly love) is dependent upon either:

1) getting wonderful artists into spaces where they will perform live in front of, I hope, densely-packed audiences (curation)

2) attending and reporting on live performances amid often densely-packed audiences (dance writing).

So, right. I've got lots of new time on my hands. But my proudest achievements, lately, involved strategic grocery shopping and the complete reorganization (and subsequent re-stuffing) of my pantry.

My newly-unfolding Spring season at Gibney is in tatters; my calendar for other New York City happenings is suddenly wiped cleaner than a subway pole first thing on a March morning. And I miss every one of you I used to encounter all the time on my sidewalk, in the lobbies and aisles of performance venues, in the corridors and studios of my workplace.

I miss you. I'm grieving. It's okay to take time to grieve a little. It's okay to take a look around and realize you don't know what to do next. You just don't know what to do. You feel overwhelmed and helpless in the face of unimaginable uncertainty. And you're no expert on any of this.

Take even just a minute. You can spare a minute.

2020. Remember when we thought this was a fresh new year with a cute name? Little did we know it was coming for us. Threatening our health, our businesses, our incomes, our socializing, our freedom to greet one another with a warm hug in the time-honored manner.

Last night, when I couldn't even relax with a Met Opera video (free!) because, I guess, the system wasn't strong enough for all the new demand on it, I threw in the towel. I went to bed, read a little, went to sleep. Sleep is also free and, occasionally, you feel refreshed when you wake up from it.

Lately, waking up from it has also been a proud achievement.

Productivity is as American (and as capitalist) as apple pie. And this Virgo, of course, would love to feel useful and productive. This blog post is actually a tilt in that direction. Look, I'm communicating with you again! But what I'm communicating is about making space for my feelings--and yours. I hope you can feel it's okay to do the same.

Take good care of yourself and all who are precious to you and a comfort to you in this difficult moment. I send much love and wishes for your safety and well-being!

Eva

******

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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Danspace Project presents Reggie Wilson's Platform 2018

Left to right: Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez,
Angie Pittman and Edisa Weeks--artists who participated in
The Dossier Charrette in Reggie Wilson's platform at Danspace Project.
(Photo courtesy of Danspace Project)

Reggie Wilson’s Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018 at Danspace Project) is laden. It is complex. It is stuffed with history and geography and architecture and cultures and ancestral energies and choreography and ideas and imagery and walking around neighborhoods and...stuff. As Black as one of my Bajan family’s festivities--the full range of meat and fowl, desserts and drinks, music and dancing and that one eccentric cousin holding court, as always.

How to take it in? How to make sense? How to interact and respond? Choose to sit on the outskirts and gaze from a critical distance? Or follow your curiosity, your empathy, your bravery, throwing yourself into the deep? Sink or swim, baby!

Maybe it’s wiser to break off a piece, here or there, to work with or be worked over by. You’ll have so many from which to choose.

During part of last Saturday’s Bell & Water: a symposium--for which I performed a brief spiritual ceremony to open the afternoon--Wilson and his Danspace Project associates offered a guide to “How to Navigate the Platforms.” This concluding panel presented an overview of Executive Director/Chief Curator Judy Hussie-Taylor’s groundbreaking curatorial initiative and a rundown of what to expect from Wilson’s current platform programming and its engaging catalogue. What it did not do--what perhaps could never be done--is extend a comforting, reassuring hand to anyone who might need to have things defined and neatly arranged for quick, easy consumption.

I’m thinking, this morning, about Wilson’s post-show conversations with his artists and how, each evening, he insists on passing around the dossier commissioned from historian Prithi Kanakamedala to inform and possibly inspire the platform’s artists and how that document--which I have never held in my own hands--somehow always fails to make it all the way from one end of the audience to the other. I don’t know why Wilson insists in having people try to hand it around in the allotted time. Maybe to demonstrate that it--written down and lasting, central and centering--really exists? That there is an intellectual blueprint, if you want to call it that? Is that really necessary? To glance at a page or two for a few moments--though, clearly, people have been taking longer--before passing it to the guy to your right?

I’ll take the radical view that Wilson--who has said, any number of times, that he’s resistant to the way our Westernized worship of the written word demotes other ways of knowing and communicating--might relax a little and consider stepping back from this practice as well as from the practice of post-show discussions entirely.

Stop right there. Don’t be horrified. And make no mistake: I love Wilson and am a huge fan of his from way back. This is not a criticism. But after seeing each of a couple of the performance events in this platform, I would have been immensely grateful for complete silence--and even private time for recovery--so strong was the impact. I also sensed some hesitation and reticence in some of the artists as they attempted to answer questions and in most of the audience folks as they were asked for questions. Maybe everyone needed time for more than a few breaths to re-group, re-ground and let the energies and ideas inside the works settle in. Settle in and continue the work that the best of dance can do.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe post-show talks are totally cool. But these seem forced. I don’t want to hear about and be directed by...so much...not just yet. But, you’ll say, you’re the woman who says she sat down and read the catalogue from cover to cover. Yes, in my own time, and in my own space, in privacy, so I could concentrate and take in and sift stuff. And the catalogue is a verbal as well as visual collage--mirroring what’s best about the platform format--and I could have read and gazed upon those pages in any order I desired. This time, I just chose to be all compulsively Virgo about it.

Go see the performances. There’s electricity and surprise and vivid performance--thinking now of dancemaker/performers like Jonathan Gonzalez, Angie Pittman, Ni’Ja Whitson and Same as Sister/Briana Brown-Tipley and Hilary Brown--and a real feeling of works with open, organic life which will continue to bring out new things to share and ponder. Works not only glancing at once at history and into the future but gazing from the vantage points of multiple temporal, cultural and personal dimensions. Just find a portal that looks interesting and jump right in.

For full information on Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance, click here.

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

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For Gina Gibney, Space Is the Place

For Gina Gibney, Space Is the Place
Long-time Choreographer, Entrepreneur, and Visionary Receives Dance/USA’s 2017 Ernie Award

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, From the Green Room, Dance/USA, May 23, 2017

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Laurie Carlos, 67

Laurie Carlos, performer, director and poet, dies at 67
by Sharyn Jackson, Star Tribune, December 31, 2016

Workshops: Dance Without Walls (the nia love underground)

Dance Without Walls (the nia love underground)

co-facilitators:

Nia Love, Jesse Phillips-Fein and Benin Ford

Nia Love
(photo: Nia Love)

Gestures are atoms that make up the sheets of our memory...tissue that travel with us from light years away...traveling on our trajectory biding us both greetings and farewells! 

-- Nia Love

Jesse Phillips-Fein
(photo: Jeca Rodriguez)

Benin Ford
(photo: Nia Love)

This movement-based, multimedia living art workshop creates space where “we the people” can study ways to perform meaningfully, powerfully and truthfully through improvisations at the intersections of dance, nature, and urban structures. With movement, discourse, journaling, drawing, and building small ecological sculptures, we manifest new ideas about about ourselves from which communal and global solidarity can radiate. This work is built on foundation of deep support and trust; we help each other to fertilize our thoughts clearly and to use our bodies as both a landscape and a tool that excavates our power as a people, activates our well-being, and engenders collectivism. Our aim is to create malleable networks that bond and aid us in on-going practices of liberating and reclaiming what lies dormant in our mind-bodies. 

Friday July 17, 6-9pm

Saturday, July 18, 10am-1pm

Sunday July 19, 10am-1pm

$50/1 day

$95/2 days 

$135/3 days

Sliding scale for parents available

Sign up a friend and receive a 25% discount!

We are especially interested in “non-dancers.”

Multiple outdoor locations throughout New York City:

Day 1: River Bank State Park, 145th and Riverside (Manhattan)

Day 2: 98 4th Street between Hoyt and Bond (Brooklyn)

Day 3: Ball Field at 214 Street (The Bronx)

To register, email: undergroundstudiesnyc@gmail.com

Note: the underground is a seasonal event.
there will be a Fall Edition, dates TBD.

Harold Feinstein, 84

Harold Feinstein Dies at 84; Froze New York Moments in Black and White
by William Grimes, The New York Times, June 29, 2015

Upper Manhattan's dance advocates speak out

Look who's speaking out for dance!
Above: Nia Love
Below: Charmaine Warren

47 notable leaders and local residents of Upper Manhattan--including choreographer Nia Love, Yuien Chin of Harlem One Stop, Mikki Shephard of the Apollo Theater, Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation--tell what they value about the art of dance in Dance/NYC’s NEW YORKERS FOR DANCE video campaign.

Here are a few samples from the series: 

Nia Love

Charmaine Warren

Mikki Shepard

All videos are now live on DanceNYC.org website and YouTube channel.

Dance for everybody: See "PS DANCE!"

Ana Nery Fragoso and students in PS DANCE!
(photo: Christopher Duggan)

Movement unlocks the body and heightens the spirit. -- Paula Zahn

Documentary filmmaker Nel Shelby has crafted a love letter to the power of dance and the power of learning with her new film, PS DANCE!

Narrated by veteran TV journalist Paula Zahn, the hour-long film takes viewers inside several New York City public schools (K-12) that incorporate dance programs into their educational vision--still a rarity in US schools.

We meet a host of lucky students and their gifted teachers--among them, Patricia Dye of Brooklyn's Science Skills High School for Science, Technology and the Creative Arts and Catherine Gallant of Lower Manhattan's PS 89--who make a persuasive case for the value of dance in the curriculum, with clear benefits far beyond the boosting of academic performance. Yes, teachers can use creative movement to reinforce class material students need to learn, but dance also enhances imagination, body awareness and wellness, confidence, the ability to give and take respectful feedback and to collaborate with others as dance artists do. Students need not aim for professional careers in dance to acquire habits and skills that will serve them well in all aspects of life.

Watch PS DANCE! 

THIRTEEN -- May 15, 10:30pm

WLIW21 -- May 17, 3:30pm and 10pm

NJTV -- May 26, 10pm

Click here
for more information about PS DANCE!

And join the movement to bring quality dance education
to every student nationwide:
Click here.

A few thoughts on the 2015 Dance/NYC Symposium

I attended just one complete session at the Dance/NYC Symposium held yesterday at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. No surprise--given what is surely my explicit/implicit bias--it was the three-panel Power, Privilege, & Perception: Voices on Race and Dance session curated by Dance/USA Executive Director Amy Fitterer and former Dance/NYC Director Michelle Ramos-Burkhart.

Before attending those panels, I did manage to catch maybe the final ten minutes of Department of Cultural Affairs commissioner Tom Finkelpearl's presentation on Diversity & NYC Cultural Leadership, just enough to note that there's a serious disconnect between what neighborhoods, small, homegrown institutions and independent artists need and what city government can imagine and support. Under repeated questioning by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega (founder, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute) and other audience members, Finkelpearl--former Queens Museum ED and president, well regarded in that post--sounded lightweight and defensive. I thought back to Bill de Blasio's lackluster performance at a 2013 mayoral candidates forum on the arts when, as a potential mayor, he clearly had one thing on his mind: the looming contract battles with city unions. De Blasio seemed reluctant to engage with the arts community, even under the constrained and very safe arts-are-wholesome-for-schoolkids premise that governed that forum. I also thought back to the recent New York Times item announcing that children and families of the South Bronx would soon benefit from "films, music, dance, opera and more from Lincoln Center’s resident organizations’ great and talented artists." As if the South Bronx has not long nurtured its own artists and initiatives worthy of much more exposure, funding and other resources that make creativity and survival possible.

As introduced by Fitterer, Power, Privilege, & Perception sounded far more promising. Panelists would examine how racist power and privilege within the arts ecology cannot be dealt with while ignoring systemic, societal racism. Moreover, panelists would be encouraged--as they were, repeatedly--to offer practical solutions.

In her opening section, My Lens, My Dance, Ramos-Burkhart argued that everyone harbors implicit bias which may be detected through a cognitive test. Earlier in the day, she had administered this test to two dance artists--a white woman and a Black man, both of whom joined Ramos-Burkhart at her presentation. The white dancer-choreographer confessed that the test had made her deeply uncomfortable; the Black artist recalled tensing up as he grappled with the test. We were left to imagine the test's content as Ramos-Burkhart reported that the white artist's test results were inconclusive while the Black artist's results showed a slight bias in favor of Black people. The white artist interpreted her results as a sign of ambivalence due to her wanting to not be, as she called it, "a bad white person." Ramos-Burkhart issued no judgement of the results, which was fine, but her silence around the Black artist's results troubled me.

This idea that everyone has bias might have merit (especially dear to a self-serving racist) but is merely part of the story. After all, why shouldn't this Black artist have, at the very least, some small bias in favor of Black people given what we have experienced under white supremacy? All things are not equal until they are. The white artist's possible bias (even as she struggled to not be a bad white person) would not be equivalent to the Black artist's bias.  I would expect the Black artist to embrace and struggle for his people. Racism, naturally, has created in people of color a spectrum of resistance from mild to militant. It has also shaped a people who, when truly healthy of mind and heart, love themselves fiercely and seek to uplift their own whenever possible.

BTW, I'd be delighted to see the typical New York dance critic or culture desk editor take Ramos-Burkhart's test. That could prove revealing--and useful--but that's a matter, perhaps, for another day.

Ramos-Burkhart also directed several people in a demonstration showing the limits of how we think about diversity and privilege, how we fail to take into account how possession of privilege shifts as the social context changes. Like, say, when a white actress, wielding her new Oscar, declares that it's time for gay people and people of color (all presumed to be men, I guess) to fight for women's rights as hard as women (white?) have surely fought for theirs.

Tammy Boormann, chair of Urban Bush Women's board, is a white ally to a venerable dance troupe founded by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, a Black choreographer and educator grounded in commitment to social justice. In Boorman's panel--National Voices--Fitterer and Ramos-Burkhart were joined by Denise Saunders Thompson (chair and ED of International Association of Blacks in Dance) and Carlton Turner (ED of Atlanta-based Alternate ROOTS). Boormann made repeated efforts to solicit solutions but, in this, the panel came up short. Instead, we learned how difficult it is to revise the Dance/USA mission statement in a meaningful, progressive way without alienating the organization's board.

I appreciated Turner's stark, contextual perspective: Why would we expect a society that does not value our lives to value our art? For Turner and Alternate ROOTS, the bottom line is transformation, and the choice is clear: You either contribute to societal transformation, or you do not. Not every artist is going to make explicitly political work or participate in overtly political actions, and yet, as artists make and share their work, they can consciously choose to strive to serve progress towards equity and justice.

Turner moderated the session's concluding panel, Making Change: Artist Voices, which included representatives from three major troupes--Dance Theater of Harlem (Virginia Johnson), Ballet Hispanico (Eduardo Vilaro) and American Ballet Theater (Richard Toda). In addition, Sydnie Mosley (Artistic Director, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances) and Alice Sheppard (independent dancer and choreographer) brought more of an urgent, activist, community-invested experience of resisting silence and invisibility. Mosley's work as a performer, choreographer and educator deals provocatively with issues of race and gender; Sheppard's work affirms the capacity and rich language of dancers with disabilities. Much more could have been learned, especially from these last two artists, had we had time to examine details of their ideas and projects. I would argue that Dance/NYC would do well to offer an expanded version of Turner's panel with indepth presentations by artists like Mosley and Sheppard on how to innovate around the challenges and opportunities of difference.

For the purpose of this afternoon's program, the Gibney theater proved to be fatally formal with the audience seated in rising rows opposite panelists lined up behind a long table. Off in the far distance, sheets of paper covered the theater's wall of mirrors, but few people accepted the many invitations to take markers and share their evolving thoughts and feelings. It seemed a little awkward to get up from your seat and cross in front of the panel to reach the paper. Maybe, for future events, each participant can be issued a sheet of paper or a few index cards or grab a few sticky notes to capture words or sketches while listening. We can then hand them in or tack them up when the event is finished--a better way to draw out spontaneous responses and feedback.

******

For information about Dance/NYC Symposium's full day of programming, click here.

De Blasio announces housing, workspace plans for artists

De Blasio to Unveil New Artist Housing, Workspace
by Brigid Bergin, WNYC News, February 02, 2015

NYC Cultural Affairs chief to launch diversity survey

Measuring Diversity in City Arts Organizations
Department of Cultural Affairs Embarks on Diversity Survey
by Jennifer Smith, The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2015

The cupcake-ization of New York: Penny Arcade speaks out

Penny Arcade on the Professionalization of Performance Art
by Geraldine Visco, Hyperallergic, December 31, 2014

Pop-up pas de deux

Metropolitan Diary: Free Ballet at Columbus Circle
by Jules Cohn, The New York Times, December 14, 2014

Report details drop in corporate giving for dance

The most telling thing about this article in Crain's New York Business might be that, since being published a few days ago, it has received no comments.

Support for dance companies takes a tumble
Corporate donations that help sustain dance companies in the city have dropped precipitously.
by Theresa Agovino, Crain's New York Business, December 10, 2014

Read Dance/NYC 's complete report,

State of NYC Dance and Corporate Giving,

here.

Wynn Chamberlain, 87

Wynn Chamberlain, an Artist in Paint, on Screen and in Novels, Dies at 87
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, December 6, 2014

Arthur Leipzig, 96

Arthur Leipzig, a Photographer Inspired by Everyday Life in New York, Dies at 96
by William Yardley, The New York Times, December 5, 2014

#BlackLivesMatter

Emily Johnson: A vision board for neighborhoods

Emily Johnson

What a treat to take part in Emily Johnson's Community Visioning workshop at Gibney Dance Center 280 Broadway this afternoon! It was totally fun.

All photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Born in south central Alaska of Yup'ik descent, Johnson is an internationally acclaimed performer and choreographer on the Minneapolis scene. She won a 2012 Bessie for The Thank-you Bar (Outstanding Production) and made another deep impression last year with the beautiful Niicugni at Baryshnikov Arts Center (read here). Now Johnson is building a New York edition of SHORE--originally presented in June in Minneapolis--for next spring at New York Live Arts. As part of her local research and development process, she offered today's free workshop, an event of Gibney Dance Center's Community Action Hub, inviting participants to think about where we live and work and what parts of our city hold special meaning for us.

Johnson started us out with black-and-white maps of the five boroughs taped to the wall, but they soon came alive with color as we decorated them with stickers (for our place of residence) and doodles (for places that strongly resonate with us).

Later, we brainstormed hundreds of ideas for fostering wellbeing for ourselves, our families, friends, streets and neighborhoods, and we turned the studio's wall into a candy-colored vision board. Choosing a few of these items at random, we gathered in small groups to further brainstorm individual actions that might help manifest those specific desires.

Visions take shape.
all photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

We had a great, and fairly sizable, bunch of folks, and our collaborative work took off right away with much good-natured laughter. It was wonderful to honor parts of New York that, though I might not have seen them in years, have shaped my life. I loved sharing, with everyone, a city's worth of hopes and dreams.

Learn more about Johnson and her upcoming projects at her Web site:

catalyst, dances by emily johnson.

The 2014 Bessie Awards...and Chirlane McCray! And Jessye Norman!

The 2014 Bessie Awards
returned to Harlem's Apollo Theater last evening
for a 30th Anniversary celebration.
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

I know there are some folks out there who don't quite get the Bessies or feel completely comfortable about any kind of awards thing. But that's not me.

I'm the one with the tear in my eye when I look at Arthur Mitchell.

And a smile on my face when I see Baba Chuck Davis. 

And nearly leaping out of my seat when I hear presenters read out names like Camille A. Brown and Nora Chipaumire and Aakash Odedra and Okwui Okpokwasili--all of whom won the Bessies I knew they'd win. 

It's for moments like these that I will always want to be at the Bessies. It just feels good.

Having said that, I've gotta add: Last night's award show was one of the feeling-goodest Bessie shows on record.

Chirlane McCray and Wendy Whelan
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

L-r: Faye Driscoll, Chirlane McCray and Omagbemi Omagbitse
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Let's start with Chirlane McCray. Thank you, First Lady of New York City, for gracing us with your presence and paying tribute to Frank Hatchett, who was your dance teacher in Springfield, MA, and who passed last winter. What a treat to learn how much you value your own experiences with dance.

I believe dancing is the most beautiful of all the arts. Not a translation or an abstraction of life, it is life itself.

--Chirlane McCray

Lisa Kron, thank you for being a really, really funny host visiting from "the land of theater." You only think you're not a dancer. (Talk to Baba Chuck. He'll fix you right up.) And I hope you and Crazy Legs have finally managed to work things out.

Crazy Legs and Joselle Yokogawa
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

L-r. Pau Atela, Aki Sasamoto, Sam Ekwurtzel,
Jessica Weinstein and John Bollingen
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

L-r, Mickey Mahar, Maggie Cloud and Gillian Walsh
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Jessye Norman, listening to you talk about Arthur Mitchell was almost as good as the time I was sitting in my aisle seat at the theater when someone came up and touched me on my knee to get my attention so they could get over to their seat, and I looked up, and it was...YOU.

BTW, I think someone's cellphone was ringing while Jessye Norman was speaking. Let's take a moment to pause and reflect.

This is the Bessies' 30th anniversary. I'm buying pearls for everybody.

Thanks for the fun!

Love,
Eva

2014 Bessie Award winners

Arthur Mitchell
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Lifetime Achievement in Dance: 

Arthur Mitchell

Dr. Chuck Davis (center) with (l-r) Dr. B. Angeloe Sr., Karen Thorto,
DeBorah Davis Gray and McDaniel Roberts
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Service to the Field of Dance: 

Dr. Chuck Davis

Juried Bessie Award: Gerard and Kelly, for the inspired use of a simple score of movement and text to create mesmerizing and moving duets in Timelining, and for bringing a fierce and rigorous intelligence to their work that never loses touch with the heart at its center.

Jen Rosenblit with Rebecca Serrell Cyr and Addys Gonzalez
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Outstanding Emerging Choreographer (previously announced): Jessica Lang for the formation of her own company and its inaugural season The Joyce

Also for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer (previously announced): Jen Rosenblit for a Natural dance at The Kitchen

John Jasperse
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Outstanding Production: John Jasperse’s Within between at New York Live Arts, for a feast of unpredictable kinetic imagination shaped by a sequence of dazzling light and soundscapes.

Also for Outstanding Production: Okwui Okpokwasili in collaboration with Peter Born for Bronx Gothic at Danspace Project, for creating a world within a world in which she embodied the fear, clarity and intelligence of a young girl; using text and movement to make public that which is intensely private.

Camille A. Brown
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Also for Outstanding Production: Camille A. Brown’s Mr. Tol E. RAncE produced by 651 Arts at Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts, for using the American vernacular dance forms of jazz, tap, and hip hop mixed with pop culture references and African-American stereotypes to question herself and her audience.

Also for Outstanding Production: Akram Khan’s Desh at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, for bringing a swath of Bangladeshi culture to life with a shape-shifting performance danced within a magical set that conjured a world of flora and fauna from muslin, movement, and light.

Outstanding Revival: Nora Chipaumire’s Dark Swan performed by Urban Bush Women at The Joyce, for re-imagining a severe and beautiful solo into an expanded emotional force field performed by nine powerful women.

Outstanding Performance: Stuart Singer in John Jasperse’s Within between at New York Live Arts, for a forceful grace capable of both commanding space and rendering delicate physical details with astonishing dynamic clarity.

Also for Outstanding Performance: Rebecca Serrell Cyr in Donna Uchizono’s Fire Underground at New York Live Arts, for a mesmerizing performance demanding precision, control, and a remarkable range of intense emotions and providing the strong quiet center around which the narrative of the piece revolves.

Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Sims
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Also for Outstanding Performance: Linda Celeste Sims, a major contributor for nearly two decades to the work of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, for being an expert interpreter of a vast range of styles who goes to the heart of chorographers’ visions and crafts countless tour-de-force performances.

Aakash Odedra
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Also for Outstanding Performance: Aakash Odedra in James Brown: Get on the Good Foot – a Celebration in Dance at the Apollo Theater, for a dynamically fluid translation of James Brown’s rhythms into kathak and bharata natyam expressions, turning traditional styles into original, contemporary, and captivating performance.

Outstanding Music Composition: Simphiwe Dana with Giuliano Modarelli, and Complete Quartet for Exit/Exist, choreographed by Gregory Maqoma and produced by 651 Arts at Kumble Theater for the Performing Art, for a tightly woven musical score, combining subtle guitar and traditional South African a capella choir singing, which movingly portrayed the struggle to maintain tradition in the face of colonialism.

Nicholas Young and Carson Murphy
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Also for Outstanding Music Composition: Nicholas Young at American Tap Dance Foundation’s Rhythm in Motion, for inventive percussion platforms integrating the tap dancer’s traditional hardwood floor with electronic sound technology to allow for a deeply layered, live composition.

Outstanding Visual Design: Peter Ksander, Olivera Gajic, Ryan Holsopple, Chris Kuhl, and Keith Skretch, for a theater set seamlessly doubled by video projections, echoing the role of memory with its odd tricks and resurrections in the profoundly unified and moving production of This Was the End by Mallory Catlett.

Mandallying Columbus Circle (for Karen Finley)

Mandallying Columbus Circle 

(for Karen Finley)

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

This is Karen Finley.
She is a performance artist.

Karen wants to know why Columbus Circle
has fountains styled after Bellagio Las Vegas.

None of us can answer.
Maybe there is no answer.
And that is the answer.

This little fella doesn't care.

It's bath time.

This leaf is quite through with its tree.
It's fall time.

This creature (wounded eagle?)
lives on a monument
ringed by traffic and glass.
Not quite used to it yet.

Columbus doesn't care.
He has conquered the ocean,
now stands on a phallus
hard by CNN, Time Warner.

The conquered ocean.
Really?

Karen tells us
the fruit of these trees
from North Carolina
hold poison.
Well, so does the fruit of conquest,
does it not?

Here is fountain water.
Before you learned it was fountain water,
it looked liberated, didn't it?

Here is Karen again.
She wants us to muse
on inner and outer circles
and leads us over a stone path
between flower plantings
where nobody walks.
Protected space.

A wondrous thing to know:
below our feet,
indigenous trail from Albany to Battery Park

The corpses we've drawn are exquisite,
it might turn out.
Or maybe not.
Hard to tell.

The Bike Rental guy
doesn't care.

Everything is going up at Columbus Circle

And on the rise at Central Park

And super-jazzed at Lincoln Center

 All photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

On September 26 at noon, performance artist Karen Finley led an Elastic City walk, Mandala: Reimagining Columbus Circle, co-presented with Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).

For information on future walks by Elastic City, click here.