Singing with spirits

On Saturday, February 22, 2020, I was joined by Okwui Okpokwasili and David Thomson in leading an opening ritual for Danspace Project's platform, Utterances from the Chorus, conceived and curated by Okwui and Judy Hussie-Taylor.

As the audience settled into seats in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery's parish hall, David and Okwui began to hum and vocalize as I read an invitation. It opened with a question derived from Okwui's exploration for the new platform which, regrettably, was interrupted and scrapped as the coronavirus pandemic shut our city down.

Here, I offer a new version of this invitation. As we now struggle with multiple traumas--the pandemic, the economic crisis, the murder of our Black kin--and dedicate our lives to justice, may you find this ritual healing, strengthening and motivating.

I invite you to perform it privately or in groups, as you find it useful.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: D. Feller)

Okwui asked:

What does it mean to weave a collective song?


And so, let us ask:


What does it mean to weave a spirit song on Lenape land? 

What does it mean to sing with the African souls?


What does it mean to be guided?

What does it mean to be activated?


Today, charge this space with the energy of sound.


Seek and find your name inside your cells,

inside your veins,

inside your bones.


Sit or stand with the energy of your name circling inside you until you hear its song.


Bring that energy out into this space on the flow of breath and flow of melody.


What is your name?

Sing your name.

Sing your true name.


Find a melody that transports your name into this space.


Keep singing your name into the space.

You can get loud with it.

You can get soft.


You may pause if you’d like to rest,

and you may resume at any time.


You may raise your votive candle above your head at any time, and that gesture will mean whatever it wants to mean.


You may extend your votive candle in front of you at any time, and that gesture will mean whatever it wants to mean.


Feel and sing or chant the name of ancestors of your family blood or ancestors of your mind.


Find the melodies that transmit their names into this space--loud or soft.


Keep singing their names into this space.

Keep singing their names into this space.

Keep singing their names into this space.


Return at any time to the song of your own name.


Sing. Sing out.

Sing. Sing it out.

Keep singing.

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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For Colored Girls...yesterday, today, tomorrow

Cast of the 2019 production of Ntozake Shange's
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf
at The Public Theater
(photo: Joan Marcus)

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf

The Public Theater

October 19, 2019

When, in the mid-1970s, I first saw Ntozake Shange’s Black feminist choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf--back then, if I recall, all the letters in that title were still stylishly lower-cased--my Greek-American boyfriend emerged from the theater in a state of shock and horror. As for me--a colored Caribbean-American girl for whom the queer rainbow was yet to be enough--I relished the sheer moxie of it.

As it happened, one of my editors had already given the boyfriend a look-over and quickly summed him up as “not mature enough for you,” but it took me a bit longer to figure that out for myself.

That Shange, though. In For Colored Girls, she had handed me a clue. She handed so many of us a clue.

She had dreamed forth seven women who, through experiences of pleasure and of struggle, figured things out for themselves. Adorned in a rainbow of colors--each in blue, brown, orange, red, yellow, green or purple--her “colored girls” burst into the consciousness of early 1970s New York and proceeded to spin a web of influence in the theatrical arts that has never come to an end. I have since seen Shange’s aesthetics reflected in performers and choreographers I dearly love like Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Maria Bauman, Andrea E. Woods Valdés, Sydnie L. Mosley, Camille A. Brown and countless other dance, performance and spoken word artists.

Shange’s choreopoem first hit city bars, then The Public Theater for its formal premiere, then Broadway and then--maybe for worse rather than better--television and film. Now in 2019, welcomed back to The Public--under graceful direction by Leah C. Gardiner and with Camille A. Brown’s vivacious and accessible choreography--these legendary "colored girls" inhabit a small, intimate set-up encircled by audience seating. Gardiner and Brown's fantastic ensemble includes Sasha Allen (Lady in Blue), Celia Chevalier (Lady in Brown), Danaya Esperanza (Lady in Orange), Jayme Lawson (Lady in Red), Adrienne C. Moore (Lady in Yellow), Okwui Okpokwasili (Lady in Green) and Alexandria Wailes (Lady in Purple).

At center: Alexandria Wailes (Lady in Purple)
(photo: Joan Marcus)

Okwui Okpokwasili (Lady in Green)
(photo: Joan Marcus)

With every finger snap, every hand clap, every stomp, every swirl, every satisfied press and slip of hands against their own bodies, Shange’s characters insist that attention finally be paid to Black women marginalized and endangered by racism and patriarchy. Because they have learned to pay attention to themselves. Know themselves. Enjoy themselves. Famously, find god in themselves. They speak the truths life has taught them.

Choreography connects the cast through a percolating, expandable cypher that protects childlike play--the inevitable “Little Sally Walker” clapping game--the embodied relaying of amusing, sexy or harrowing stories and the communal, compassionate laying on of healing hands. Movement turns poetic text vividly three-dimensional; through physical expression, memories become all the more shareable with an audience willing to be moved. Bring tissues. I needed a few.

Scenic design and lighting create an atmosphere of permission (the disco balls at first retracted above the stage), a space for sensory indulgence (those clustered hangings of abstract stalactites rotating through lights of deep colors). Original compositions by American Roots and soul artist Martha Redbone and hits from generations past--”Dancing in the Streets,” “Stay in My Corner”--underscore and heighten the narratives’ driving intensity.

Sasha Allen, an exciting singer,
portrays Shange's Lady in Blue.
(photo: Joan Marcus)

It's time to discover--or rediscover--the joy and potency of For Color Girls. Go and discover Wailes, a deaf actor and dancer of eloquent charm and fluidity who absolutely dazzles. Rediscover Okpokwasili, a star of contemporary dance and performance, whose trenchant, urgent presentation of one of Shange's most famous soliloquies reminds us--us colored girls, at least--that there's still always going to be someone new trying to walk off wid alla our stuff.

Scenic design: Myung Hee Cho

Costume design: Toni-Leslie James

Lighting design: Jiyoun Chang

Sound design: Megumi Katayama

Understudy: D. Woods

Director of American Sign Language: Onudeah Nicolarakis

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf has been extended through Sunday, December 8. For information and tickets, click here.

The Public Theater

425 Lafayette Street (at Astor Place), Manhattan

(directions)

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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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La Mama hosts the great Germaine Acogny

Germaine Acogny, "Mother of Contemporary African Dance,"
performs SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
(photo: Thomas Dorn)

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
by Germaine Acogny and Mikäel Serre
FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival
La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre
September 26-28

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING--a US premiere for Crossing The Line Festival by renowned Senegalese/French contemporary dance artist Germaine Acogny and director Mikäel Serre--unfolds as if it were dreamt, a full-sensory haunting both sustained in time and elusively fluid in nature. A rich soundscape makes the viewer feel surrounded, engulfed. Visual design tucks things far out of reach or behind layers of other images, or suddenly zooms them large or slips them back into darkness, seriously messing with rational sense of space.

Its fascinating and troubling text, adapted for the stage by Serre, is often spoken in French by Acogny while also running in English as supertitles. If you do not comprehend French, this regularly pulls your gaze up and away from the stately moving sculpture that is Acogny.

You make your choices here; they're difficult, disruptive, regretful and the only ones you're allowed. At almost every turn, she and her creative team suspend us in a phenomena from which we cannot turn away. Even the smell of baby powder and the tickle of tiny, airborne feathers will eventually reach our unguarded selves.

A stage-spanning string curtain serves as a scrim onto which ghostly images may be projected and into which solid objects (and our beloved dancer) can be swallowed out of sight as if dragged below waves.

Like the simple props that will gather dramatic meaning--an open notebook, its white pages reflecting light; a pillow the dancer hugs to her chest, a heavy rock--Acogny contains the brooding power of history, of secrets, a complicated narrative with webs of connection to the Greek Medea and the tragedy of today's refugees seeking safety in Europe.

One surprise discovery, among many, in a diary--the words "Power is passed down from woman to woman." How to access that inheritance? Does it come from things--a set of formidable butcher knives passed along to the wrong person? Or is it knowledge, the force of truth about oneself that can purge the evil wrought by colonialism, patriarchal religion, racism, male supremacy?

Now in her 70s, Acogny--choreographer, performer and educator--has been called "Mother of Contemporary African Dance." Watch as she makes startling use of Johnny Cash's recording of "Hurt" with its evocation of self-inflicted pain and "empire of dirt," and you will grasp why this artist can claim worldwide reverence. Do not miss her historic performance at La MaMa.

Concept and direction: Mikäel Serre
Choreography: Germaine Acogny
Set design: Maciej Fiszer
Costumes: Johanna Diakhate-Rittmeyer
Music: Fabrice Bouillon "LaForest"
Video: Sebastien Dupouey
Lighting design: Sebastien Michaud

Talkback moderation: Okwui Okpokwasili
Translation: Courtney Geraghty

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING runs through tomorrow evening at La MaMa with performance at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For information on other events in Crossing The Line, an annual presentation of French Institute Alliance Française, click here.

La Mama (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan

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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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Okpokwasili and Born's "Adaku's Revolt"

Okwui Okpokwasili
(photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Adaku's Revolt
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
Abrons Arts Center
March 14-24

One young black girl becomes alert to her inner signals, finds the strength to resist expectations, and revolts against efforts to straighten her hair. -- from Abrons Arts Center's website

Out of the blue, a thought visited me over breakfast today:

No, you can't touch my hair. My hair is part of my body. I do not give you permission to touch my body. So, why do you think you can touch my hair?

I'd swear I don't know where that came from, but I do know it's something I should have said, years ago, to one man--the husband of a fellow dance critic--whose white hand shot out and touched my woolly head. Happened so fast, I didn't have time to cringe, flinch or launch a preemptive strike, which I now so wish I had done.

And I also know Okwui Okpokwasili (with director/designer Peter Born) must have triggered something with a new ensemble work, Adaku's Revolt, just opened at Abrons Arts Center. It's not about white people touching Black people's hair, the site of both painful and glorious historical experience and culture. But it is about how white aesthetics touch Black people's hair...and bodies...and values...and lives.

Dear Okwui, as you must imagine, I know all about the perils of getting the "kitchen" straightened with a hot comb. I think you must have reached out and touched a nerve.

Urban Bush Women's dancers are also looking at the Black hair thing this season with Hair & Other Stories. But Okpokwasili's concept and Born's visual design appear to have the potential to help Adaku's Revolt work down into the subconscious in a way that UBW's far more direct piece--with audience participation that keeps our conscious minds centered and on high alert--might not.

Above: Dancer AJ Wilmore as Adaku
Below: Wilmore with Okwui Okpokwasili
(photos: Ian Douglas)

The audience is directed to its place on the stage of Abrons's theater through a back channel and instructed to take seats lining three sides of the performance space. As we enter and get settled, the scene has already been set, a compelling visual atmosphere already built. Before a white screen, four dancers lie on the floor with torsos stiffly arched and heads thrown back. Above them, a large windsock of pearly-white gossamer continuously flows out from a big fan, its hypnotizing, watery fabric reaching for another dancer, our Adaku (AJ Wilmore), who writhes, wriggles, tilts, chops and revs up as she sits in a chair. A dense assemblage of what appear to be ordinary desk lamps lights the area.

Within Born's vision, Okpokwasili's placement and movement of individual and group bodies take the shape of dreams with nonlinear but soul-tugging storytelling. White fabric engulfing and molding itself across faces. Bodies emerging from beneath pulsating fabric. Hips and feet twisting, pelvises rocking and left hands raised high in the air over a captivating--and destabilizing--polyrhythm of music and women's voice-overs and live singing.

I tried to jot down something Wilmore said before her turbulent yet mutually-supportive duet with Okpokwasili, and I think I got it right:

I'm going to open all the doors in my head.

Doors opening bring music and voices--both louder, brighter, undeniable--and the birth-like reclamation of bodies. I think the piece, just under an hour, seemed longer. For me, its conclusion fell short of grace or definitude. But something about it all clearly reminded me to revolt.

******

Choreographed and created in collaboration with Peter Born and performers Khadidiatou Bangoura, Peter Born, Audrey Hailes, Breyanna Maples and AJ Wilmore

Adaku's Revolt runs through March 24 with performances at various times. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)


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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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Marjani Forté-Saunders: The story we've always known

Marjani Forté-Saunders
dancing Memoirs of a... Unicorn
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Marjani Forté-Saunders
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Memoirs of a... Unicorn--a breathtaking work by dance soloist Marjani Forté-Saunders--fills the Westbeth underground now known as The Collapsable Hole. The space is rough, roomy, multi-leveled, multi-surfaced and multifaceted. You enter and look around, dreaming of all the talented artists who might dare to try it. But for now, presented by New York Live Arts, Forté-Saunders owns every corner and staircase, every recessed area and side room with intricate, unexpected treasures, every inch of concrete floor and brick wall. With her design team--including dad, Richard Forté--she has turned this basement into mythic space and immersed her audience in Black-centered story.

You reach it, appropriately, through labyrinthine corridors. But instead of confronting a minotaur, you eventually spot the Black unicorn concealed in her lair. Maybe not right away.

The installation opens to the public a half-hour before performance time, and you might wander the space unguided or get distracted by a noisy conversation with your buddies or just sit, stare at your phone and wait for something to happen not realizing that something already is.

At some point, you become aware of the unicorn, her fearsome vulnerability, her defining feature with its awkward, unreasonable length, its prickly yet delicate construction. A structure that will both confine and exalt this strange captive has been built (by Forté-Saunders's father) to endure. By the end, that reassuring durability, coupled with a long-remembered song by Gil Scott-Heron, might move you to tears.

The space, filled with a light haze, balances precariously between dark and light, looks a little dangerous for any number of reasons--among them, the painted spikes of wood affixed to a wall like metal studs. Forté-Saunders is similar--a mix of audacious power and trembling sensitivity, an archive of damage and of ingenuity, a warrior and a mother. She's a woman capable of channeling exacting, telling details of masculine personality, energy and movement, neither afraid for her body nor afraid of it. Her speech patterns emerge sly or wrecked and disrupted, her singing voice imperfect yet Sending Its Message. A fedora-clad figure, she can be a little scary and quite a bit seductive. Direct, elusive. Controlled as she loses control. She dredges up memories--some personal, some collective--that sometimes wound or sometimes soothe. She makes you chuckle with her determined yanking of a man's jacket over costume wings, those stiff yet flimsy things jutting out from collar and hem.

In a generous, informative chat with Okwui Okpokwasili, post-show, Forté-Saunders expressed gratitude for having unpolished space in which to tell her complex, miles-deep, centuries-deep story. To my eyes, not one element of the many, many here seemed out of place, and even excess felt like the right move in The Collapsable Hole. Forté-Saunders is a confident, important, extraordinary performer hitting a new high mark in Memoirs of a... Unicorn.

Medi design: Meena Murugesan
Original composition and sound design: Everett Saunders featuring violinist Juliette Jones
Set design: Mimi Lien
Set built by Richard Forté/Build with Forté and August Hunt
Lighting design: Tuce Yasak

Memoirs of a... Unicorn continues tonight through Sunday the 19th with performances at 7:45pm. Doors open at 7:15 for a gallery pre-show. For information and tickets, click here.

The Collapsable Hole
55 Bethune St (enter at Bethune and Washington), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Invisible made visible: Okpokwasili, Rossi present "Bronx Gothic"

"Bronx Gothic is about inhabiting the body of a brown girl
in a world that privileges whiteness."

"I am asking you to see the brown body."

"Maybe Bronx Gothic creates visibility for the invisible."

--Okwui Okpokwasili,
from the film Bronx Gothic, directed by Andrew Rossi

Photos courtesy of Grasshopper Film

Now ask yourself: Are you awake?

--Okwui Okpokwasili, Bronx Gothic

Christians have a gospel story about Jesus, aware of his fate, praying in the garden of Gethsemane on the night before his crucifixion. All around him, his disciples--whom he had asked to merely keep watch with him--sleep deeply, leaving him alone with his agony.

I thought of this scene as I watched Okwui Okpokwasili in the documentary Bronx Gothic (2017, 91 min.), a film with superb direction by Andrew Rossi and killer editing by Andrew Coffman of Bryan Sarkinen and Rossi's daring cinematography. Launching its world premiere theatrical engagement on July 12 at Film Forum, the film provides deep insight into the motivation and process that guided Okpokwasili's magnificent solo performance piece of the same name. It delves into her experiences, thoughts and feelings as she takes the show on its final tour and holds discussions with members of her audience.

As the film opens, Okpokwasili is in mid-performance, dressed in the color of congealed blood, tears pooling and dripping from her luminous eyes as the persona she inhabits recalls life-changing incidents from a Bronx childhood. I was reminded of the frequent, insistent sobbing in Kyle Abraham's ensemble dance, Dearest Home, and also how, like disciples at Gethsemane, not every viewer will necessarily have the will to stay awake--available, vulnerable, connected, "woke"--when Black artists ask for empathetic witness.

Both Dearest Home and Bronx Gothic--denying any demand for performance to stay within narrow, acceptable confines--make messy vulnerability and intense pain visible, in particular Black pain. Both works reach into as well as beyond their makers' personal history of being Black in America to suggest characters and narrative that should move anyone of heart and conscience.

Okpokwasili was raised within a large, middle-class Nigerian-immigrant family in the comfortable Parkchester section of the Bronx in the 1980s. (Her charming parents, whom we meet late in the film, make an indelible impression.) Describing her solo as "semi-autobiographical" allows it to partake of her extraordinary imagination and her empathy for the pre-teen girls she observed in her youth. She remembers them, remembers their pleasures and their struggles, channels them and serves them with intensely committed soul and physicality. The film's audience is spared little of how violently this haunted performance has wrenched its performer's psyche and body.

Having seen two iterations of Bronx Gothic live (Danspace Project, 2012 and 2014), I can tell you that the film, generously sampling the live performance, only slightly misses the electrifying force of Okpokwasili live. There's nothing quite like being in a close, tent-like enclosure with her as she quakes head to toe, shares sexual secrets, scrapes her bare feet and smacks her bones against a punishing floor.

"Black flesh has deep meaning in this culture," Okpokwasili remarks at one point as she discusses her intentions for Bronx Gothic. All the vivid imagery--the dark and the light, the glistening sweat, the luxurious undulations and seizure-like trembling--serves to underscore this uncomfortable, complicated truth.

As she thinks about how her performance confronts and nearly overwhelms her audience, the artist is also both overwhelmed and intrigued. Recalling her experiences in the role, she asks an imaginary watcher, "Is my Blackness getting on you? Am I getting on you? Can you take on the pain?"

Not for nothing is the genre-spanning Okpokwasili one of our most respected artists, a Bessie-winner to boot. I hope Rossi's portrait of her will be seen widely. I rank Bronx Gothic up there with Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro as another urgent, earthshaking documentary that must be seen and must be discussed.

Showings at 12:30, 2:30, 4:40, 7:00 and 9:10
Wednesday, July 12 through Tuesday, July 25

Q&As with Okpokwasili and Rossi at the 7pm shows
Wednesday, July 12, Friday, July 14 and Saturday, July 15

For information and tickets, click here.

Film Forum
209 West Houston Street (west of Sixth Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Shadow dancing: Okwui Okpokwasili at New York Live Arts

Katrina Reid (left) and Okwui Okpokwasili
in Poor People's TV Room
(photo: Paul B. Goode)

Follow me, follow me....

A gentle, haunting refrain concludes Okwui Okpokwasili's Poor People’s TV Room, shown now at New York Live Arts. The sweetness of that final plea cuts to the soul. The artist, with her multitude of tools and methods, draws us closer to a forgotten people and removes some of the false comfort of distance and ignorance.

For this complex, 90-minute piece, Okpokwasili drew impetus from the resistance of Nigerian women against British colonialism and, more recently, their organizing for the return of 300 girls kidnapped by the militant group, Boko Haram. Teaming up again with director/visual designer Peter Born, with whom she shares two Bessie Awards, Okpokwasili reshapes not only the stage space at New York Live Arts but the way in which the meaning of a potentially didactic history can be artfully conveyed through an assured blend of movement, text, song and imagery.

Born's set hacks a wedge of space out of the wide NYLA stage and litters it with things the eye works hard to identify or, if identified as they are used, resolve into an overall coherence. His lighting ranges from withholding to assaulting, mostly making us aware that there's so much we will not see, cannot interpret, might never reach. Like Okpokwasili singing "I am the face beneath the sand...," or a figure draped entirely in jet black cloth somehow twinkling from Born's harsh light, the visual space of the work tantalizes us with the possibility and impossibility of discovery. Or the unreliability of discovery.

For my part, I will long carry the image of a woman--Okpokwasili, it turned out--pressed into the far side of a wide stretch of translucent fabric, rising into elusive visibility like ectoplasm. I struggled with the violent mechanical sounds, which viewers readily feel within their own bodies. And I wondered at the tiny skitter steps of elder Thuli Dumakude, South African-born star of music and stage, and the precise, if arcane, gestures performed by the younger Black American artist Katrina Reid. Both bodies, at the epicenter of violent force, confront and defy the oppressive sound. Or so it seemed to me.

Poor People's TV Room is a robust creation transcending category for real and not just in the academic talk we've come to expect. But it's thrilling to know that an artist of the body, a dancer, envisioned and guided this achievement.

Performers:

Thuli Dumakude, Okwui Okpokwasili, Katrina Reid and Nehemoyia Young

Poor People's TV Room continues with performances April 21-22 and April 26-29, all at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Thinking with/talking back to Lemon's "Scaffold Room"

Above: April Matthis
Below: Okwui Okpokwasili
performers in Ralph Lemon's Scaffold Room at The Kitchen

musings...about how B/black artists choose quilting/sampling where materials--visual, verbal, aural; humble or dear--are many and close to hand. moms mabley and kathy acker; ben webster and david bowie (totally pimped out on soul train and wasn't even embarrassed). when you unroll and stretch this fabric out its seams run thick as scars. does cold, unforgiving space crush art? or does it set it off like jewels on velvet in vitrine? what's up with footwear for women here: white nursing clogs? patent leather red spike heels? or none at all, just barefoot? admitting guests to nearly-barren space where most must stand for two hours...or so they think. actually starting the performance first and then interrupting to pass out folding chairs? what...hostility? inhospitality? chaos? how is performance like a scaffold--for exhibition, for execution? what is B/black womanhood? janis sang baby i know just how you feel in little girl blue? did she? know just how you feel, i mean? did amy know? what if beyoncé--whose teeny screen image one must bow to see--is actually not the vortex of every last person's universe? which universe are we talking? subtle pauses and tilts of the head, matter-of-fact voice...is okpokwasili artificial, a simulacrum, an impersonation of an impersonation folded in upon herself like nested alternate universes? april matthis singing and mumbling to herself in a distracted, helium-ated voice or screaming in different registers for what seems like ten minutes or six centuries...has she found freedom in the body, meeting it on its own terms...freedom shockingly beautiful and also dreadful?

*****

Conceptual artist Ralph Lemon opened Scaffold Room (multimedia installation, readings and performances) at The Kitchen on October 30 in collaboration with Kevin Beasley, Jim Findlay, Paul Hamilton, Malcolm Low, April Matthis, Roderick Murray, Naoko Nagata, Okwui Okpokwasili, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Katherine Profeta, Marina Rosenfeld, Mike Taylor and Philip White. Performances and readings concluded yesterday, November 10, but the installation remains open through Saturday, December 5  in the 2nd floor gallery. Hours are Tuesday-Friday 12-6pm, Saturday 11am-6pm. Admission is free.

For information, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Hurray! Okwui Okpokwasili plans her return to Danspace Project!

Okwui Okpokwasili in Bronx Gothic
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Okwui Okpokwasili, who had to curtail her January run of the astonishing Bronx Gothic at Danspace Project due to ill health, will return with the acclaimed solo for a short run, May 8-10.

Read my review of one of her Danspace Project/COIL Festival performances here.

And be sure to watch the Danspace Project site for ticket information. Tickets are sure to go quickly!

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Okwui Okpokwasili's "Bronx Gothic" at Danspace Project

Okwui Okpokwasili in her solo, Bronx Gothic
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Okwui Okpokwasili's Bronx Gothic--an arresting work-in-progress shown during Ishmael Houston-Jones's PLATFORM 2012: Parallels--has now returned to Danspace Project as a complete, evening-length masterpiece. Commissioned by Danspace Project and Performance Space 122, it had its world premiere as part of COIL 2014 and will continue through February 1.

But before you read on about Bronx Gothic, I'd like you to read my post on Dana Michel's Yellow Towel if you have not done so already. You'll find that here. Go and come back. Promise?

You're back? Great. Now I can tell you about Part Two of my evening.

So...I made it through almost all of Michel's show at Abrons then raced out to try to catch a bus uptown. I just missed that particular bus and ended up reaching Danspace Project with maybe two minutes to spare. By the time I made it down from the restroom--no way was I going to sit through 90 minutes more without a pit stop--Okpokwasili had already launched her solo, coursing a continuous orgasmic tremor through her entire body, her liquid muscles, her long, expressive arms. As I slipped into one of the remaining seats, I realized that the dancer's director and designer, Peter Born, had enclosed the space and her entire audience in white curtains similar to the ones Michel had used for her own solo. That was a moment.

For Bronx Gothic, Okpokwasili, raised by her Nigerian immigrant parents in the Bronx, had turned to her youth for inspiration--just like Michel--and mined painful memories of friendship, treachery and despair. Her text--by turns, witty, delicate and lacerating--takes us right back there through the device of a running record of notes surreptitiously passed between an 11-year-old girl and her more worldly school pal. Yes, what kids did before texting.

Sex is the topic of concern and fascination for these two preteens. Their language is frank; the implications of some of the talk--the unstated likelihood that the pal is being abused by her mother's boyfriend--is worrisome. But along with great pain, Okpokwasili finds humor and a certain powerful glamour in female strength, even when it's just fronting, and something literally tidal, earthshaking, in longing and anger.

I had seen Okpokwasili's performance at DP's Parallels and looked forward to Bronx Gothic in finished form. I can report that, since Parallels, this artist has achieved a rare balance between physical and vocal tours de force. These performing modes run parallel throughout the piece, doubling the required prodigious control and stamina. There should be not only a Bessie but Olympic gold for what Okpokwasili has now accomplished. The fact that, in the midst of this great feat of performance, she breaks your heart, absolutely slays you with the poetry of it, makes it all the more remarkable.

Bronx Gothic continues with 8pm performances through February 1. For complete schedule details and to reserve tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

(directions)

New arts residencies announced by Park Avenue Armory

Park Avenue Armory Names Artists in Residence
by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, April 19, 2013

Skin in the game: Nina, Nora, Miriam

Stir Builds Over Actress to Portray Nina Simone
by Tanzina Vega, The New York Times, September 12, 2012

Should Zoe Saldana play Nina Simone? No. And that's neither a knock on the Dominican-Puerto Rican Saldana for not being African-American nor an assessment of her acting abilities. Simone's dark, dark skin and broad features--clearly not acceptable to Hollywood's image-makers and marketers even today--were essential to her experience in the world as a Black woman and to her politics. Casting a light-skinned actress with conventionally pretty features to portray Nina Simone would be as absurd as trying to turn a gay business associate into a heterosexual lover. Oh, wait....

Dance artist Nora Chipaumire, as I'm sure you've been hearing and reading about everywhere, has had another giant of Black music and activism much on her mind--the late Miriam Makeba. But don't expect Pata Pata, or anything remotely like it, from Miriam, Chipaumire's raw and provocative "solo for two people," set to music composed by Omar Sosa.

Performed at BAM's new 250-seat Fishman Space with Okwui Okpokwasili, this demanding, hour-long ritual digs beneath the surface of Black Woman as Icon (throwing in, less obviously, the Virgin Mary) to the archetypal id of imagination or, perhaps, reality. The intimate performance area remains quite dark almost throughout this experience, greatly magnifying the effect of sound (dripping water; heavy footfalls; a single voice ringing out or a welter of voices overlapping; orgasmic breaths, shrieks and moans) and, whenever it comes, the selective touch of light.

I was stunned to realize that Okpokwasili actually towers over Chipaumire--a majestic performer who looms larger in one's imagination than, perhaps, in reality. By the time Miriam concludes, in a blaze of light, you will have visited the place of the ancestral and archetypical intensities--desire, fear, shame, jealousy, anger. In other words, it is a hair-raising journey through the usually hidden end of the spectrum.

At the end, I stood to leave, struggling to adjust my eyes in a sudden shock of light. Meanwhile, two white women seated to my left immediately took up their pre-show chat precisely where they had left off, as if nothing at all had occurred in the interval. Unbelievable.

Directed by Eric Ting with lighting by Olivier Clausse, scenic design by Olivier Clausse/Hecho Mano, sound by Lucas Indelicato and costumes by Naoko Nagata

Nora Chipaumire's Miriam continues at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space) through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. Tonight's show will be followed by an artist's talk moderated by Simon Dove.

BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(around the corner from BAM's Peter Jay Sharp Building: map/directions)

Lee's LEAR: Beyond Shakespeare

A lot of critics have weighed in on Young Jean Lee's LEAR--closing Sunday at SoHo Rep--in which the controversial playwright has cherry-picked the younger characters from King Lear as a springboard for her own purposes, a matter of staring, with diminishing distractions and buffers, at unavoidable realities of conscience, aging and dying. Sold out now even into its extension, LEAR is a tantalizing dish, neither faithful to Shakespeare in its fashion nor an absolutely clean break. Some people are getting tripped up in the in-between and suggesting that Lee has tripped up there, too. But I think LEAR is sold out because people have heard that SoHo Rep's production really rocks. This meta-banal-Buddhist-absurdist piece with a bruised heart at its core boasts absorbing, skilled performances from the three women in the cast--April Matthis (Regan), Okwui Okpokwasili (Goneril) and especially, super-clever Amelia Workman (Cordelia), King Lear's daughters. The look of the show rocks, too--a depiction of constricted people appropriately encased on a narrow stage that is, nevertheless, decked out in Elizabethan finery (as are the characters in smashing costumes and jewelry), a lush setting that looks simultaneously plausible and fake. The 80-minute production includes excellent work by Raquel Davis (lighting), David Evans Morris (set), Roxana Ramseur (costumes) and Dean Moss (choreography and stage movement).

More on LEAR here

Hear Young Jean Lee discuss LEAR with SoHo Rep's Sarah Benson.