Just come get this mess

Can you just clear it up? I need a little more clarity. -- Peter Richards in Para-dice (Stage 1)

When Patricia Hoffbauer auditioned for DTW's Fresh Tracks series, she says, David White argued that her dance was too messy and disorganized. But my guess is that mess is often the point. Because either you're going to have a tidy piece of work or you're going to have a real piece of work (meant in both senses of that term). Hoffbauer sees everything in terms of the mess.

And what she has going on now at Danspace Project--a phenomenon called Para-dice (Stage 1)--is messy to the max on purpose. Sprawling throughout space and time, it doesn't even have a discernible beginning or a definitive end. And oh, that middle!

Add the fact that Para-dice (Stage 1) is messily shoehorned into an evening with another phenomenon called The Adventure (instigator: Trajal Harrell), a nightly sample of choreographic research experiments-in-progress and, on the evening I attended, a thought-provoking party game for audience members followed by an invitation to stick around for wine. What's going on here?

If narrative is power, is there any coincidence whose narratives are visible? -- Patricia Hoffbauer in Para-dice (Stage 1) 

What seems to be going on is a kind of blasting open of assumptions about what it means to make and perform dance, what it means to try to give a lecture on dance and culture (with Hoffbauer and collaborators vividly referencing and mercilessly deconstructing Brazilian history, pop culture and stereotypes), what it means to consume art, what it means to critique it or to willingly live with it and participate in its meaning. It complicates everyone's safe story--and just what does it mean to have a crush on a smooth-singing, smooth-looking samba/funk star who turns out to have been an informer for the dictatorship devastating your country?--and it continuously interrupts "serious" art with entertainment and vice versa. And it does all these things with an almost unimaginable seamlessness and insouciance.

One of my favorite moments happens very early on: There's a smallish film screen set up on one side of the space, and some hazy imagery comes on for just a few seconds before the images inexplicably slide away onto the back wall of St. Mark's Church's sanctuary. Why in hell should the images stay on a little screen when they can more rambunctiously, even sacrilegiously, splash themselves, as in a movie theater, across far more impressive space? This filled me with cheer, and the oncoming dance--riddled with graceful humor among other good and smart and skillful things--kept me alert throughout.

The piece was created in collaboration with its performers--Peggy Gould (so deft and pleasurable to watch in her duet work and other interactions with Hoffbauer), Elisa Osborne, Peter Richards (whose visual contributions include samples from Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha) and George Emilio Sanchez (responsible for much of the text). Costumes are by Liz Prince, lighting by Kathy Kaufmann.

Every performance includes a different work from The Adventure. (Last night, for instance, dancer Anna Whaley "stole" Thibault Lac's solo, 2, Line, Science--simply constructing a sandpainting-like diagram of white powder on the church floor and dustbusting it up again, all to the strains of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine.") So go and see what adventure's in store for you this weekend. 

Patricia Hoffbauer's Para-dice (Stage 1) and The Adventure

continuing tonight through Saturday, 8pm

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church

Second Avenue and Tenth Street, Manhattan

Tickets

Conspire with Trajal Harrell

Trajal Harrell, dancer-choroegrapher and curator of Danspace Project's celebrated PLATFORM 2010: certain difficulties, certain joy will offer a 20-minute lecture on the current state of dance and performance.

"THE CONSPIRACY OF (Performance)"
Friday, October 29, 2pm

Admission: Free

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

The Larissa Show

Let me say it outright: I love Larissa Velez-Jackson. 

And you have one more night to see her troupe at Danspace Project--tonight, 8pm--where she's showing Holy Now! and Making Ends Meet as part of curator Trajal Harrell's PLATFORM 2010: certain difficulties, certain joy.

Harrell's concept of "difficulties" (Velez-Jackson's experiences with a broken toe or a broken heart) and "joy" (the choreographer's ebullient creativity and infectious sense of humor) is well illustrated here. Velez-Jackson is an injection of sunshine and courage.

I love how, in Holy Now!, she dares to create a lovely, honest-to-god altar (although a suspiciously pagan one) in the St. Mark's sanctuary and populate postmodern performance space with women having what appears to be ecstatic encounters with divinity. The work--performed by the choreographer and Sarah Holcman, Abigail Levine and Katy Pyle with soundman Jon Velez-Jackson--is poised on a fine line between seriousness and goof, a satire of bizarre, cultish behavior that locates (and enjoys) the cultish behavior in theatrical performers and their audiences.

Making Ends Meet seems spiritual, too--in the sense of the choreographer using every trick in her book to exorcise the demons that bedevil the process of making and presenting art--like self-doubt and bad reviews. How to do that? Well, start by advising your audience to loosen up: "Guideline #1: Enjoy!" Have a videographer (Ivo Serra) follow you around and turn his lens on the people in the seats. Those live close-ups of audience members' faces will knock 'em off guard. Package yourself in a format the audience has already embraced--the reality show--and maybe think about hiring a coach to bring some edginess out in your niceness.

"Don't hurt the artist," Velez-Jackson sings, over and over again.

Singing this, she parked herself right in front of me--me with my pen suddenly frozen over my notepad--and gazed into my eyes while the videocamera was trained, for painfully long minutes, on my face. 

(Oh, no worries, Larissa. You're barking up the wrong tree. The tree you really want, though, might be planted over on the other side of the room!)

Velez-Jackson's a charismatic, kickass artist who, with playfulness and protean skills as a physical comedian, establishes immediate rapport with her audience. Getting us right where she wants us, she's capable of delivering any kind of message or sting or bouquet of rare joy that she desires.

See Larissa Velez Performance Company tonight, 8pm. For information and reservations, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

Directions

Bouchra Ouizguen and "Madame Plaza"

A few thoughts on Madame Plaza (2009), curated by Trajal Harrell for Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2010, certain difficulties, certain joy and co-presented by FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival at Florence Gould Hall:

With her research into the cultural practices of the Aïta women singers and dancers of her native Morocco, dancer-choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen tells us that she intends to break free of conventional perspectives on the female body and its uses in dance. Madame Plaza, however, seems to me to be a sign of the sheer beginning, not the fruit, of experimentation. 

The strongest push of the envelope that this hour-long production offers--at least for an audience that, as usual, is almost completely white--is the sight of four brown-skinned women, three of whom are far heavier than conventional dancers Americans are used to and are, indeed, Aïta performers, moving in spare, often pedestrian gestures and patterns like old-school and, frankly, tedious "downtown" stuff. This made me wonder: If this work did not have the Moroccan context--or the short passages of ecstatic incantation, thrashing and a little bit of gender-bending that directly relate to the world of the Aïta--would we find it interesting, intellectually or sensually compelling enough to justify the time? I paid attention and sought engagement from Madama Plaza's first, langourous, dead-silent moments, when the women sit or recline on oblong cushions, occasionally rearranging themselves. It never sparked my interest.

There was a telling moment, at the conclusion of Harrell's post-show Q&A, when Ouizguen took a final question from the audience about a statement she'd made about breaking away from her training and all that dance was supposed to be. The questioner asked,"What did you think dance was?"  The choreographer thought for a second, then replied that she no longer knew the answer to that question, didn't know what she's originally meant--a quite apt answer from someone apparently still in a liminal state of search. Both ends of the search--past and possible future--seem fuzzy to me, but I'd love to see what she and the Aïta can do when it all comes into focus.

Madame Plaza--with performances by Fatima El Hanna, Naïma Sahmoud, Kabboura Aït Ben Hmad and Bouchra Ouizguen--completes its run tonight at 8pm.

FIAF's Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street (between Park and Madison Avenues), Manhattan

Ticketing

Now, about that elephant...

As part of its PLATFORM 2010: certain difficulties, certain joy--curated by Trajal Harrell--the innovative Danspace Project will offer a series of Saturday afternoon public forums addressing "topics in contemporary dance that often get superficial treatment or go undiscussed." Hence the title--The Elephant in the Room!

Free. Donations accepted at the door.

Location: Douglas Dunn Studio, 541 Broadway, 5th Floor, Manhattan

For complete program and schedule information, click here.