Ritha Devi, 92

Ritha Devi, Indian Classical Dancer and Teacher, Dies at 92
by Amisha Padnani, The New York Times, September 22, 2017

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Circus at APAP: Acrobatic Conundrum (Seattle), Company Oktobre (Paris)

Dance, theater, performance folks, scoot over a bit, won't you? Circus has arrived, taking its place among the city's vast APAP-related offerings. The mission? To make visionary, contemporary circus as thriving an artform in the US as it is abroad. For the second year, Circus Now--the community's support and advocacy organization--has partnered with NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The festival features six troupes and runs for three nights.

Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Exposure 2016 opened last evening at Skirball with performances by Acrobatic Conundrum, a Seattle ensemble founded in 2012, and Company Oktobre, an accomplished trio of Parisian performers. Essentially two shows in one, the program ran over two hours. If you're going to program like that, I question the need to have festival MC Sxip Shirey--a musician and veteran of circus--consume time delivering two circus-boosting intros, each with its musical performance. One wild-haired man, his toys and his electronics can sound like a party in full throwdown, but a little of this goes a long way. Next time: One and done.

Acrobatic Conundrum's piece, The Language of Chance, frustrated me. The clear talents of the company--most notably, amiable and multi-skilled Ty Vennewitz--were not matched by signs that anyone grasped the potential dynamism of activating the entire stage space, not just filling it with decor, and the importance of pacing and smooth transitions. Performers often simply crouched or lurked within the set like deadweight while one or another person performed in the center. Contemporary circus can offer a more holistic, integrated stage with people and things cleverly interconnected and interacting. Done right, that makes for truly magical, unforgettable experiences in the theater. Acrobatic Conundrum has produced five shows and made it to this prestigious festival but, by evidence of The Language of Chance, it needs to step up its game.

After Acrobatic Conundrum, intermission, and Shirey Part II, I would have liked to come to Company Oktobre with something approaching freshness of eye and ear.  But that was not to be, which I regret because the sophisticated Oktobre--created by its performers, Eva Ordonez-Benedetto, Jonathan Frau and Yann Frisch and director Florent Bergal--deserves better attention. When you're presenting farce, your technique and timing must be razor-sharp. You have to quickly get your audience invested in your people--total strangers, usually--with their weird and tickling idiosyncrasies, their little sleight of hand tricks and struggles with props. In the case of Oktobre, you're asking watchers to toggle between baffling behavior and English supertitles that only deepen the absurdity. In all things, Company Oktobre is completely on point, and I look forward to any chance to see them again.

Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Exposure 2016 continues tonight and concludes tomorrow night. Here's the lineup:

FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 8pm

Water on Mars (Sweden)
Andréane Leclerc/Nadère arts vivants (Canada) — Whore of Babylon
Barely Methodical Troupe (England) — Bromance

SATURDAY, JANUARY 16

Aloft (US) — Dinner of our Discontent
Water on Mars (Sweden)
Barely Methodical Troupe (England) — Bromance

For complete festival information and tickets, click here.

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts 
566 LaGuardia Place (south of Washington Square Park), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Fight fire with fire: Byrd's "The Minstrel Show Revisited"

Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance Theater
in The Minstrel Show Revisited
Below, l-r:
Fausto Rivera, Alex Crozier and Alexis "Tilly" Evans-Krueger
(photos: Ian Douglas)

The black-faced mask of minstrel shows is a lingering image from America's past that still inflicts wounds today through its psychic hold...In the future if we are to be free from its terrible grip we must confront it boldly and courageously by staring back into its face and laughing at the absurdity of its representation until it no longer has the power to hurt us. Only then will it be vanquished and we are free to be. -- Donald Byrd

You might have thought Donald Byrd would bury the tough stuff somewhere down inside The Minstrel Show Revisited and gradually ease you into it. But this dance-theater piece--sourced in Byrd's provocative 1991 Bessie-winner, The Minstrel Show--opens with the problem right before your eyes: a white male dancer singing that classic rag, "A Hot Time in the Old Town," in blackface and Afro wig. It doesn't ease anything when more blackfaced dancers from Byrd's multiracial Spectrum Dance Theater join in--peppy entertainers whose high kicks and high jinks, tumbling and sexy hip-pumping establish a through-line from 19th Century minstrelsy to today's musical theater.

In the program for The Minstrel Show Revisited's run at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, Byrd reprinted Scott Delahunta's essay for the original production. Delahunta argues that stereotypes are a survival mechanism, making complexity less challenging and reality less threatening. They worked for white Americans faced with an African population they could no longer define and claim as property. They still work, today, for white Americans faced with the looming prospect of no longer being the majority group in this country. And that's just for starters.

Rather than shrink from mindless and noxious stereotyping, Byrd wallows in it for the sake of doing exactly what popular entertainment is not supposed to do--hold a merciless mirror up to the people who have paid to be distracted from problems. "We like to laugh, to cry and not have to 'think too much' and in doing so we become complicitous in the process of stereotyping," Delahunta wrote. Thus the tension in The Minstrel Show Revisited. The choreography and performances are skillful and dynamic. But, if you pay close attention, you become aware of how hollow and shallow the stage picture, for all its activity, looks and feels.

Over the course of the hour, Byrd's dancers not only dance a lot but also line up to tell an alarming number of offensive jokes aimed at a diversity of targets. But reworking 1991 also gives Byrd the chance to open the piece to audience participation, inviting several folks up on stage to tell the last racist joke they heard. (When I saw it, most of his volunteers happened to be youngish people of color.) This strategy encourages the watcher's Inner Performer to come out and play. It's safe, and it's not safe. It's bad...but it's permitted.

How will the volunteers respond to that invitation? How will the rest of us--sitting not so safely in our chairs--respond to what we're about to hear?  It's complicated!

How quickly the volunteers learned just the right intonations and body language for their brief interaction with Byrd. How easily they remembered and told their jokes.

OMG! Look at all these people running around with offensive jokes in their heads! And what was the last offensive joke I heard?

We giggled some because the tellers were cute and brave, and we knew they didn't mean what they said. It felt okay--sort of. That is, until the final and truly cringe-making one, which--whoa!--brought everybody up short.

And even then Byrd wasn't finished with us. He looked out over the house and urged people in the seats to write down a stereotypical joke to be collected and used later. Since I did not stay for the post-show Q&A--the theater seemed unusually tardy in getting it started--I can't say how that worked out.

In his pre-show talk, Awam Amkpa (NYU Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis) noted, "Art does not just reflect culture; it makes it." Byrd accepts his responsibility, as artist and entertainer, to highlight how the arts have served to deliver, spotlight and perpetuate stereotypes, making them not only useful but seductive and addictive. His work work offers no solution but a tap on the shoulder: Now, your turn.

Closed.

For more information on Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance Theater, click here.

For information on upcoming events at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, click here.

Decolonizing mind, language, history

Clockwise from left:
Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi (photo: Ben Carver),
Tommy Pico (photo: Tommy Pico),
Mette LouLou von Kohl (photo: Laura Bluher)

Hosted by artist-activist Dan Fishback, DECOLONIALLY QUEER drew quite a crowd to a small studio--legal capacity: 78, and things were kept legal, more or less--at NYU's Performance Studies department. The program--a collaboration of The Helix Queer Performance Network, Queer Union-NYU and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics--featured three queer artists of indigenous heritage and offered a bracing corrective to the week's traditional Columbus Day commemoration. In fact, if performers Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Tommy Pico and Mette LouLou von Kohl could agree on an anthem for Decolonially Queer, it might well be Fuck Columbus and The Ship He Rode Over In, a sentiment the evening made abundantly clear.

Each artist rallied the strength of resistance and self-definition. Kumeyaay poet Pico, self-described "weirdo Indian faggot" living in Brooklyn--opened with wry defiance of typical expectations that he'd deliver a poem about nature--like "anemones and shit," "fodder for the Noble Savage narrative" before dazzling us with cracked wit and torrential delivery. Nature emerged in Pico's own time, on his own terms, giving us images of hills with "backs that love being stroked by our eyes" and the sky as the sole "stellar inheritance" shared by himself and his ancestors.

Lady Dane--accomplished singer, dancer, writer and ritualist--declared herself "the mother of a verbal revolution" powered by the complex experience of being a trans woman at the intersection of African, Cuban and indigenous American cultures. "Growing up, I was told by my elders, 'You have to read people who look like you.'" Stripping off her high-heeled sandals--"I'm decolonizing my feet, bitches!"--she wove a partly-sung incantation designed to shake listeners awake. Later, in the talkback moderated by Marlène Ramírez-Cancio of the Hemispheric Institute, Lady Dane spoke of her influences--outspoken singers like Nina Simone and Abby Lincoln, formal gestures recorded in Egypt's ancient hieroglyphs, rich ancestral practices disrupted by colonization and now reclaimed. In her work, she confronts English, crafting ways to turn that language into a protective and healing force.

Von Kohl's performance incorporated dance, photography, video, audio and voice in a poetic and moving evocation of her Palestine at a time before Israeli occupation. With Lebanese/Palestinian (mother) and Danish (father) ancestry, she speaks only English and French; we hear speaking French as she portrays her cigarette-smoking grandmother. Unlike her grandmother, though, von Kohl speaks no Arabic, and that disconnection pains her.

In silence, she crushes an orange she had carefully, tenaciously grasped between her jaws--juice, pulp and seeds falling at her feet. "To remember is to resist," she later tells us. With that precious orange, she calls attention to the richness of the land, the once-earthy wealth of Palestine before Israeli occupation, when her parents were orange farmers. "This is not about nostalgia," she says. "This is about memory as a weapon, as noise for the silenced."

All three artists grapple with the limitations and creative possibilities of language. For queer artists of color, indeed, this struggle has high stakes, meaning the difference between erasure and empowered presence. Pico remarks that he had to "flush all the ideas I had about poetry" and, instead, focus on "how do I sound?" Lady Dane studies, she says, "who I was before colonization; that's at the heart of everything I do."

The inspired and inspiring DECOLONIALLY QUEER ran for one night only, but you can keep up on Helix Queer Performance Network's future activities by clicking here.

BIOS:

LADY DANE FIGUEROA EDIDI

“The Ancient Jazz Priestess of Mother Africa” is an African, Cuban and Indigenous American performance artist, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, Author (Yemaya’s Daughters, Brew, Baltimore: A Love Letter), playwright, healer, cohost of Inside Out Radio Show, a member of Trans Women of Color Collective Leadership Team, a volunteer at Casa Ruby, and a founding member of interdisciplinary theater company Force/Collision. She began producing her own cabarets at the age of seventeen. In 2013 she became the first trans woman of color published author of a work of fiction in DC. She has also written the book and lyrics to Roaring The Musical.

TOMMY PICO

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is the author of absentMINDR (VERBALVISUAL, 2014)—the first chapbook APP published for iOS mobile/tablet devices—was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, and [PANK]. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and with Morgan Parker co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) @heyteebs

METTE LOULOU VON KOHL

Mette Loulou von Kohl was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. Currently based in New York City, Mette Loulou is a mixed-race queer femme, born to a Lebanese/Palestinian mother and Danish father. She has lived in New York, Romania, Morocco and Denmark. She is fascinated by the intersection between her personal identities as a jumping off point to reveal, dismantle and rebuild realities and dreams. Mette Loulou weaves movement, words, and her love for the unexpected into the exploration of her embodied histories. Mette Loulou is a graduate of EMERGENYC- the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program and participant of EmergeLAB and Needing IT ALL at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She is the co-founder of the performance collective A Beautiful Desperation and has performed both nationally and internationally in Canada and across Europe.

THE HELIX QUEER PERFORMANCE NETWORK

The Helix Queer Performance Network is a collaboration between La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics, seeking to nurture emerging queer performers, empower diverse queer communities, and celebrate the legacy and lineage of queer performance in New York City. Through educational initiatives, innovative stage productions and challenging public conversations that prioritize justice across age, race, class and gender, Helix aims to foster an inter-generational, multi-racial, multi-gender performance community where artists can document a broad spectrum of queer experience in the context of a rich artistic history.

Assia Djebar, 78

Assia Djebar, Novelist Who Wrote About Oppression of Arab Women, Dies at 78
by Maïa de La Baume, The New York Times, February 13, 2015

NYU, Jennifer Homans to launch Center for Ballet and the Arts

Think Tank to Ponder a Future for Ballet
New Center at N.Y.U. Focuses on Dance and the Arts
by Michael Cooper, The New York Times, September 2, 2014

Political performance artist Tania Bruguera to speak at NYU's IFA

A lecture by

Tania Bruguera

Tania Bruguera, Immigrant Movement International Pin
(photo courtesy of the artist)

at The Institute of Fine Arts

Tuesday, April 8, 6:30pm

RSVP required*: Click here.

*Seating in the Lecture Hall is on a first-come, first-served basis with RSVP. 
There will be a simulcast in an adjacent room to accommodate overflow.

About the artist

Tania Bruguera is one of the leading political and performance artists of her generation. Focused on the application of art to everyday political life, she works to transform the condition of "viewer" to one of active citizenry, shifting social affect toward political action. Bruguera's long-term projects, such as Immigrant Movement International (conceived 2005, initiated 2010), are intensive interventions in the institutional structures of collective memory, education, and politics.

The recipient of numerous awards including the Prince Claus Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bruguera is part of the original Occupy Wall Street movement and has been an advisor in cultural rights and artistic freedom to the United Nations Human Rights Council. She is currently at work on a book on the collaborative art process with Claire Bishop.

The Institute of Fine Arts
1 East 78th Street (near Fifth Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

For more information on the Artists at the Institute lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts, click here.

NYU to host panel on "Circus: from Egypt to Éloize"

Duncan Wall
Author of The Ordinary Acrobat

Duncan Wall of the US advocacy group Circus Now, Suzi Winson of Long Island City's Circus Warehouse and their colleagues from the field are way cool. Here's a chance to hear all about the roots of circus and its contemporary flourishing and innovations from the experts.

Thursday, December 12, 6:30pm

Click here for details.

La Maison Française
New York University
16 Washington Mews (at University Place), Manhattan

(map/directions)

212-998-8750

Shhhh! You're trying to read!

If you're following the renovation-displaced Performance Space 122 around in its various peregrinations these days, you know there's no telling where it or you will end up next. And that's a good thing. Breaking free of the legendary East Village nest, this resilient presenting organization now feels free to drop art down just about anywhere--a good model for the rest of us.

Unless you're a New York University student or faculty member, you probably haven't set foot in the upper reaches of NYU's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. Up until yesterday afternoon, I certainly had not. But a PS 122 event, a new collaboration with the ongoing PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, drew me into an upstairs reading room lined with tables filled with students gazing at laptops.

I was issued a mini iPod and headphones along with a simple, essential sheet of preliminary instructions in the use of old technology--a stack of three novels topped by a thin, spiral-bound notebook. Another visitor, paired with me, sat beside me before an arrangement of the identical reading materials.

And, yes, we were there for a performance. With a twist.

The performance happens, largely, between your ears. Conceived and directed by multimedia/autoteatro artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells, The Quiet Volume makes collaborators of its "audience"--two people at a time, sitting at a table in an active library. Each listener follows the instructions, remarks and reading passages whispered through his or her headphones, taking any indicated actions (pick up the Kazuo Ishiguro book; turn to page number X; follow the text with your finger as you hear it; visualize something on this blank page in the notebook, and so forth).

But there's more. The written and spoken text also messes with your sense of time. It effortlessly lifts you right out of your immediate location into awareness of the space and your reading partner and the students around you. It stimulates mental imagery. Eventually, the collided and collaged text creates tension and disorientation. It grows nearly impossible to read or comprehend under the shifting directions and the occasional sound effects, which sound both intimate (in the headphones) and distant (coming from somewhere in the surrounding room).

The Quiet Volume runs at NYU's Bobst Library through May 5, in reserved slots between noon and 8pm daily (1pm to 8pm on May 5).

It is also hosted by The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture through May 4 between noon and 8pm daily (10am to 6pm, May 3 and May 4).

Hampton's Cue China (Elsewhere, Offshore) will also run at NYU's Bobst Library, May 1-5, noon to 8pm (1pm to 8pm, Sunday).

Tickets can be purchased indivually or in pairs. For further information or to reserve a slot for performances in either of these two locations, click here.

The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
New York University
70 Washington Square South, Manhattan
(map/directions)

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Boulevard, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Artist-activists invited to apply for NYU's EMERGENYC 2013

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University is now accepting applications for its fourth year of EMERGENYC, the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program focused on “artivist” (artist/activist) performance.

EMERGENYC aims to support the development of “hemispheric” emerging artists through a program of workshops and events between April 20 and July 13, 2013.

We seek talented, committed and highly motivated young performers/activists/artists whose work functions as a vehicle for political expression and social change, and who examine the broad range of identities, practices and histories of the Americas (the western hemisphere, thus “hemispheric”) through genres such as spoken word, street performance, political cabaret, performance art, video performance, movement, and others.

Please forward this call to artists and activists that would be interested in the program. EMERGENYC welcomes applicants outside of the New York area, provided that they are able to be in the city during the full time of the program (April-July).  The Hemispheric Institute is unable to provide housing for out-of-state participants accepted into the program.

For complete information and the application download link, click here. 

Helaine GawlicaArchivist, NYUResearcher, Franklin Furnace

Jones and Sacks have big ideas for New York Live Arts

New York Live Arts Introduces Arts and Ideas Festival
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Live Arts, January 31, 2013

May it RESONATE! with you

RESONATE! African America in Sound and Story launches its after-school arts programming today at 4pm with song/spoken word artists Chandra Rule and Somi at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center.

Co-presented by Lincoln Center's Meet the Artist and New York University's Institute of African American Affairs, this series of four free events for high school and college students will also welcome the acclaimed singer/musician Toshi Reagon (April 13), dancer-choreographer Nora Chipaumire (April 20) and the And Lay Duo--two members of the Ethiopian funk/groove collective Debo Band (April 27).

Each performance, celebrating the rich cultural diversity and innovative artistry of the African diaspora, will be followed by a discussion and Q & A moderated by Ethiopian singer Meklit Hadero, Artist-in-Residence of NYU's Institute of African American Affairs.

Free! Reservations not required.

Wednesdays, 4pm-5pm
David Rubinstein Atrium at Lincoln Center
Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets, Manhattan
(directions)

A Celebration of Patricia A. Rowe

You are invited to a memorial tribute to Patricia A. Rowe, Ed.D. (August 11, 1924-June 3, 2010), innovative dance educator and advocate for dance. Dr. Rowe was chairperson of New York University's Department of Dance and Dance Education, which she founded in 1970.

Monday September 27, 6:15pm

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Manhattan

Speakers and performers include Danny Lewis, Nancy Meehan, Jim May, HT Chen and Dancers, Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, Sachiyo Ito, Jeanne Bresciani and others.

Free admission

Please RVSP to partribute@gmail.com.

Visit patriciarowe.com, and leave your remembrances.

The dance of Dalí

Dalí Today (April 12-June 12, 2010)


Dalí: Dance and Beyond Exhibition
curated by Frédérique Joseph-Lowery
April 12-June 12
Godwin-Ternbach Museum
405 Klapper Hall
Queens College, CUNY
65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing
718-997-4747

The museum is free and open to the public. For hours and other information, click here. For directions to Queens College locations, click here.


Dalí Today Symposium

April 22, 10am-5pm
Godwin-Ternbach Museum
405 Klapper Hall
Queens College, CUNY
65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing
718-997-4747

April 23, 10am-5pm
The Catalan Center, New York University
at King Juan Carlos I Center, Auditorium
53 Washington Square South (between Thompson and Sullivan Streets), Manhattan
212-998-8255


Eorasonnée Dance Performance
by Virginie Souquet
April 22, 7:30pm
Goldstein Theatre, Queens College
(corner of Kissena Boulevard and Horace Harding Expressway)
Directions


Book Signing

Catherine Millet, author of Dalí and Me
April 23, 6pm
The Catalan Center, New York University
at King Juan Carlos I Center, NYU, Atrium
53 Washington Square South (between Thompson and Sullivan Streets), Manhattan
212-998-8255

An education in human rights

Opposition Causes Thio Li-ann to Skip N.Y.U. Appointment
by Winnie Hu, The New York Times, July 23, 2009

Clearly an expert in her field and equally clued-in about the nature of New York City and NYU. Oh, my! What an incredible loss for the university! :-D

City fest to celebrate Muslim culture

Festival for New York, That Muslim City
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, June 5, 2009

Leila Haddad to debut in New York City

The Queen of Oriental dance--Le Parisien

Leila Haddad (France) and The Gypsy Musicians of Upper Egypt will perform at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York University, March 6-7, in a program presented by World Music Institute.

Haddad, one of the world's premier Oriental dancers, performs traditional dances of the little-known Ghawazee (Gypsies) of southern Egypt in the popular style. Born in Djerba, Tunisia to a Berber family, and now living in France, Haddad has studied many of the Arab world's dance forms by traveling from village to village. With her performances she has revived the dignity and tradition of Oriental dance and conveyed its latent sensuality as a tribute to femininity rather than subjugation to male images of women.

Her performances have taken her to major festivals and cultural institutions in Europe and the US. A highly respected teacher, she opened her first Paris Oriental dance class in the mid-1980s--a bold move at a time when the dance form was unknown or poorly understood.

Today she travels widely to teach dance and train new teachers. She was the first Oriental dancer to perform at the Salon de la Danse festival in Paris (1988). Her works include Dance of the Seven Veils, Rouh, A la Recherche de Tanit, Aquarelles, L'Orient d'une Danseuse - Rêveries sur le Nil, Nomades, and Zikrayat, her work in homage to Oum Khalsoum which premiered at the Théâtre Mogador in Paris (2000).

In the Trail of the Ghawazee was first shown in its current form in February 2006 at the Theatre du Trianon in Paris; it was later presented at the Images of Middle East Festival in Denmark, the Middle East Festival at the National Museum in Singapore, the Mediterranean Festival in Hong Kong, and many cities in France.

For tickets and further information on this program, call 212-545-7536 or click here.

For information on all Skirball Center events, click here.