RoseAnne Spradlin marks her Joyce spot with "X"

L-r: Dancers Asli Bulbul, Connor Voss and Kayvon Pourazar
of RoseAnne Spradlin/Performance Projects
(photo: Glen Fogel)

 A quadrille is an 18th century dance performed in a rectangular configuration and viewed from four sides. To kick off its 2016/17 season, The Joyce Theater will be transformed for the NY Quadrille, a sensational two-week engagement created by renowned choreographer Lar Lubovitch and commissioned by The Joyce featuring a specially constructed platform stage designed to create viewing from four sides. Following through with the spirit of “four,” Lubovitch has selected four exciting choreographers—Pam Tanowitz, RoseAnne Spradlin, Tere O’Connor, and Loni Landon to create contemporary dance works on four sides. Each quadrille will be performed on its own program, with each program performed four times over the course of the two weeks. This transformation of The Joyce is sure to challenge audiences to embrace a new concept of the theater’s physical space and to appreciate the artistry of the four choreographers chosen to participate in this exciting event.

 --for promotional material for NY Quadrille

Lar Lubovitch's design and curatorial experiment, NY Quadrille, has landed on The Joyce Theater like an alien mothership scorching circles into a cornfield.

I hear that square performance platform now eating part of the regular stage area and part of the regular audience seating cost the Joyce a lot of coins. My first sight of it--from the vantage point of one of the remaining front-facing seats--made me think I must have overshot the mark and ended up a few avenues away at The Kitchen. Or maybe really overshot and ended up at BAM Fisher. To be honest, this was both exciting and unsettling. And that disturbing ambivalence only intensified when I saw what RoseAnne Spradlin had created for her turn at the quadrille--X, a trio for contemporary dance stars Asli Bulbul, Connor Voss and Kayvon Pourazar, all of whom deserve a hefty pay raise.

Kudos to Lubovitch for giving multiple Bessie-winning Spradlin her Joyce debut. NY Quadrille, on the whole, is an intentional risk. One Times writer, previewing the two-week series, actually called out the Joyce for habitual "staleness," and Lubovitch's initiative certainly throws open a new set of windows. But how will it play with the typical Joyce-goer?

I don't know how Tanowitz fared or how O'Connor and Landon will fare during their runs, but dance press seemed to outnumber civilians at Spradlin's opening night. And, yes, I'm wildly exaggerating, but you get the picture. Someone in the Joyce lobby wondered aloud if City Center's more affordable, aesthetically-accessible Fall for Dance might have drawn the usual Joyce fans uptown.

The evening did not go easy on those who took up the challenge. Spradlin's audience grew quite fidgety--in one man's case, openly surly. Even early on, people started bailing out of the show. And with Joe Levasseur's lights keeping dancers and their gawkers in constant view of one another, those departures were not exactly subtle.

X deserved better, certainly its dancers did, maintaining prodigious concentration and composure even in the face of one man crying out, "Just stop!" But, hey, I'm a downtown girl. I've sat through gnarlier (and less rewarding) stuff. Spradlin is kind of my jam.

Still, even for me, the hour-and-change with X was not without struggle. The audience annoyed me. A lot. I did not want to see or hear them. Glen Fogel's sound work reminded me too often of the less-decorous aspects and processes of life in a body. The repeated and repeated and repeated use of "Love's Theme"--Love Unlimited Orchestra's era-evoking instrumental--got under my skin. The dancers' stately, ritualized tasks of lifting and shifting and rearranging their gymnastic bars--suggesting, by rapid turns of association, heavy gym weights, portable ballet barres, monkey bars and barricades--eventually wore me out, too.

Yet these X-cesses read like a poem meant to burrow its way under the viewer's skin. A continuous push-and-pull between what cannot be easily controlled--human bodies in the wild--and the overlaying, controlling law of structure. Shifts and returns, both unexpected and, of course, expected. Voss's supple, sylph-like form rendered strangely weighty and awkward by Pourazar lifting and handling. Pourazar's unexpected reverse of this pattern--all floaty, slidey grace as he slips his body around Voss's with just a lightly-firm pressure from Voss's hand. Metal rods that, straddled first by Bulbul then by the others, combine the utilitarian with the suggestive. Sniper maneuvers mimicked, with dead seriousness, over disco sound: I'm never, ever gonna quit/'Cause quittin' ain't my stick.

Pourazar, Voss and Bulbul don't quit--even when some viewers do--'cause quittin' ain't their stick. With and for Spradlin, they refuse to compromise for our love but work damn hard for our respect.

X continues through October 2. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

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Pam Tanowitz at New York Live Arts

Read my review of Pam Tanowitz's The Spectators (New York Live Arts, May 15-18). Click here!

Celebrating women in dance

Jean Freebury and Brian Lawson in Femina by Pam Tanowitz (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

Reviewing a 2007 concert of work by choreographer Pam Tanowitz, I noted that,

"[Tanowitz] makes ballet-modern dance hybrids–an effort not unique to her but one that she achieves with uncommon grace and gusto. Balletic movements, performed with affectionate care and not in jest, might look exotic on the modern dance stage, but they are simply as valid as anything else in Tanowitz’s overall scheme. She is a garrulous, multilingual poet of the art of dance...."

Pam Tanowitz troupe (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

See Tanowitz's latest--the world premiere of Recorded forever in between the cracks with real passion--on the special, one-night-only presentation of Working Women at the Gotham Dance Festival at The Joyce Theater, Tuesday, June 5 (7:30pm).

Showcasing work by contemporary American women dancemakers, this concert will benefit programs of the Gotham Arts Exchange. In addition to Tanowitz, the artists include Kate Weare (The Light Has Not The Arms to Carry Us), Camille A. Brown (solo from Mr. Tol E. Rance), Carolyn Dorfman (Keystone), Loni Landon (Don’t Forget to Go Home, a world premiere), Jodie Gates (duet from Delicate Balance), Jane Comfort (excerpt from Beauty) and Monica Bill Barnes (excerpt of Love, Oh Love).

Regular tickets start at $10. Premium seating ($100 and $75) for Working Women includes center orchestra seats and a special post show reception with the artists.

For more information and ticketing, call 212-928-6517 or click here.

For information on other programs of the Gotham Dance Festival, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

Catching up with New York

Back from the powerful earth of Arizona, I managed to haul my jetlagged self to Hoofers' House at The Kitchen (curated by Rashida Bumbray and MC-ed by Jason Samuels Smith) on Friday night and to La MaMa Moves Festival's "Dancing Divas" evening on Saturday evening (curated by Nicky Paraiso and Mia Yoo and featuring works by Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick, Pam Tanowitz, Barbara Mahler, Sally Silvers and Sara Rudner). Lovely, sensitive and interesting moments were in good supply at La MaMa Annex, but the mamadiva who moved us most had to be Rudner, one of my dance-crushes from way back, whose Positions--The All Star Variation was a true, openhearted gigglefest. I loved its extravagant size, its combination of the serene and the silly, its total lack of taking itself seriously. My kind of extravaganza with amusing performances from John Scott and Chris Yon among a bevy of downtown dance beauties, Rudner among them. Look for my Hoofers' House review on DanceMagazine.com sometime down the line.

Pam Tanowitz Dance in “Forevermore”

Photo credit:
Pam Tanowitz Dance
"Forevermore"
Pictured: Melissa Toogood and Daniel Madoff
Photo by Steven Schreiber
Pam Tanowitz Dance

review by
Eva Yaa Asantewaa

What a lovely, cool and clear evening for a stroll down to Joyce Soho! I took the East Village streets at my ease, finally arriving at the intersection of Mercer and Houston Streets. But when I glanced across Houston, I noticed a police barricade and lots of people just standing about.

We’d just had that terrifying steam pipe explosion in midtown Manhattan a few days ago. What now?

Silly me! I’d forgotten Harry Potter! The witching hour was approaching, and the Pottermaniac book-buyer line snaked all up and down Mercer Street. I have to say this was the merriest-looking queue of New Yorkers I’ve ever seen, and–being a Hogwarts addict myself, but one quite willing to wait for my next and final fix–I was delighted for them. But I had a job to do, as always: Sitting my butt down in front of dance. Happily, the dance I sat my butt down in front of was as refreshing as my walk and nearly as magical as J. K. Rowling’s imagination.

Pam Tanowitz makes ballet-modern dance hybrids–an effort not unique to her but one that she achieves with uncommon grace and gusto. Balletic movements, performed with affectionate care and not in jest, might look exotic on the modern dance stage, but they are simply as valid as anything else in Tanowitz’s overall scheme. She is a garrulous, multilingual poet of the art of dance, and I’m eager to hear whatever she has to say.

Forevermore, her new four-part ensemble piece, is one of the most handsome productions I’ve seen at Joyce Soho in recent memory, and every element of it just seems right. For some reason I can’t explain, I was immediately, oddly cheered to notice the low barrier with which set designer Philip Trevino separated dancers from their perhaps all-too-close watchers. (Dancers step over this boundary to enter and exit and, eventually, two of them temporarily crush it beneath their supine bodies.) I liked the understated midnight elegance of Kathy Kemp’s costumes and the subtle moods of Julie Ana Dobo’s soft, cool-tinted lighting. I savored the wildflower bouquet of music: Henry Cowell’s mournful Ensemble for Strings, a jangly old Cheap Trick hit, and the chiming, thrumming picketty-pocketty-pock of Dan Siegler’s Light bulb Variation 1 and Light bulbs All Along. Everything held the four sections of counterintuitive movement in a firm embrace.

Guest artist Posy Knight led the way in “Forevermore Solo” with her springy turns and off-kilter stances and transitions. In “The Shades,” Daniel Madoff eventually merged with a trio of women by creeping backwards while holding a strained, precarious balance. The moves unfurled, stretched and glowed within a pristine physical environment and tense atmosphere.

The dancers could be seen whole; in their abstract movements, they resembled insects illumined and magnified as if under a lens. We examined details that were repeated and slowed or speeded for our inspection. In “Forevermore Duet,” when Madoff’s rested his hand on Melissa Toogood’s waist and she deftly snapped that hand into place, she delivered an unforgettable byte of data about their relationship.

The ballet-ness of Forevermore is represented in far more than the occasional clickety-clack of pink pointe shoes on the Joyce Soho floor or even the inclusion of classical port de bras or footwork. It’s in the clarity of movement–a clarity nevertheless affording room for release and expression by an admirable corps of dancers.

Forevermore ends tonight. If last evening was any indication, tickets will be hard to come by, by, but you can try calling 212-334-7479. To visit Pam Tanowitz Dance online, click here.

(c) 2007 Eva Yaa Asantewaa