Together: Nugent and Matteson at New York Live Arts

Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson
in their duet, another piece apart
at New York Live Arts
(photo: Ben McKeown)

I regret that I haven't seen Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson dance together for a long time. I well remember considering them among my favorite downtown performers--profoundly thoughtful, sensitive and moving in their artistry. Last evening, I went to New York Live Arts, excited to get reacquainted with these two Bessie winners and dance heroes of mine. I caught the New York premiere season of their duet another piece apart. Please do yourself a favor and go tonight--your last chance this time--if you can still get a ticket.

Nothing will distract you from these bodies. Now and again, that sort of spareness can be refreshing. Let us focus, for a minute, on the genius of the body.

Their low-lit performance space is completely bare and yet does not seem vast around them. They compel our eyes and subdue that gaping space. Labored breath and occasional, mostly muffled asides to each other provide raw, human sound to a space empty of accompanying music or soundscape. They are not even dressed for admiring gaze; items of dance-wear, stripped down late in the piece, suggest increasing vulnerability, increased transparency to each other.

And we don't even need that visual metaphor, really. From the moment Nugent first backpedals into the space and Matteson soon touches his forehead to hers, these two operate like limbs (and heightened senses) of one body. Locking, arching, twisting in and out and back into connection with one another, they each move with elastic, springy, sticky qualities as if puzzle pieces in 3-D animation. But, if they are pieces of a puzzle, they are polished ones that fit just so, with just the right knowing.

For most of the time, their intimate world is so tenderly quiet that I feared the scratch of my pen on my notebook paper would be heard in every corner of the theater. We are each exposed by their dancing.

This visual poetry of their duet's conclusion.... Well, let me leave it at that.

Lighting design: David Ferri

Another Piece Apart concludes with a 7:30 performance this evening. For tickets, click here.

PARTNERING WORKSHOP: October 13, 2-5pm

A toolbox of methods for partnering exploring negative space, interdependent support, responses to touch, and various ways of harnessing momentum. By a quick bridging of improvisation into set work—followed by imaginative reconstruction steps—we develop dances that embolden personal voice within kinetic collaboration.

For information on Nugent and Matteson's partnering workshop, click here.

New York Live Arts

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Keep an eye on CULTUREMARTists

HERE's CULTUREMART festival concludes this evening with a shared program featuring samples of two promising works-in-progress:

Shaun Irons, Lauren Petty and Mei-Yin Ng consider their multimedia performance work--Keep Your Electric Eye On Me--to be at a very early, very sketchy stage of development. I'll have to take them at their word, although KYEEOM already brings enough ominous razzle dazzle to make me wonder what radical changes, as the creative team calls them, we'll be blown away by when the final product debuts. Irons and Petty contribute the lysergic video and sound, and Ng, the enigmatic choreography and performance, in an already well thought out, well structured display that nevertheless seems to emanate from inside one damaged or very disturbed head. While I can't wait to see what this one becomes when it grows up, I'm a little scared, too.

I saw an early rehearsal of part of Alexandra Beller's other stories at the Gibney Dance Center, and that experience drew me to this CULTUREMART showcase where Beller is showing an excerpt. This interesting ensemble piece, set to premiere at Joyce SoHo in April, comes with three unique features.

The first is a video view into the window of a building in Manhattan's Flatiron District, a voyeuristic monitoring of a couple's unheard, but clearly troubled, conversation.

The second is a big white portable structure designed by Brian Ireland--a clever abstraction of a house with a simple rectangular cutout for a door and an external, embedded ladder. "Stories"--in the form of mystifying allegiances, provocations and conflicts--smoothly drift in and out of this house. (If you go, for a view into the house, where there's always something going on, avoid sitting at the extreme left end of the audience.)

The third, and most exciting, is the guest drop-in collaborator from among the royalty of New York's contemporary dance scene. Here's how Beller describes the collaborator's role:

Every show features a different guest artist...[who] works with us for 1 hour to one day, depending on the event. Their role is structured improvisation, which is then set and developed live during the course of the performance.

So, of course, for that to work, your company must be perceptive and game and, in that, Beller can thank her lucky stars. (Performers for the HERE showing, besides Beller and the guest artist, include Lea Fulton, Toni Melaas, Kendra Portier, Edward Rice, and Simon Thomas Train.)

At GDC, I saw the troupe stirred by the guesting Paul Matteson who moved clean and elegant as an angel on a mission. Last evening, the springy, lusciously flexible Luke Gutgsell gave this vanguard role a far scruffier, feral edge and seemed to rouse an uncommon animal intensity in the company at the conclusion. Alex Springer will perform tonight.

Look for this work when it comes to Joyce SoHo, April 4-21.

The final presentation of this shared program runs tonight at 8:30pm. For program information, click here for Irons/Petty/Ng and here for Beller. For general ticket and box office information, click here.

HERE
145 6th Avenue, Manhattan
(Enter on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street.)
(map/directions)

re-Jones/Zane

New York Live Arts has launched its inaugural season with Body Against Body, an exhilarating program of early works by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, performed by Jones's current troupe members and dance celebrity guests such as Janet Eilber, Vicky Shick, Richard Move and Matthew Rushing. I attended last night's opener, the first of two discrete programs that run through September 25.

Reasons to check in with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at this juncture are many. Body Against Body revisits conceptual works--such as Monkey Run Road (1979) and Continuous Replay (1977), with its full-on, un-selfconscious nudity and lightly ritualistic accumulation and repetition--that remain startlingly airy and clear in structure and delightful today. The troupe season's title can imply a cluster of meanings--the sensuality of flesh against flesh, the playfulness of adept physical instruments directed by equally top-level minds, the supple and sturdy support of one partner for the other. All of these meanings and values can be found in the works on display here as throughout the best of the art Jones has made as survivor of his personal and professional relationship with Zane, who passed in 1988.

Jones and Zane did the one-on-one format especially right. So, if you can still manage to grab a ticket, be sure to see Monkey Run Road (with the choreographers' casually elegant, harmonious roles taken by Talli Jackson and Erick Montes) and Valley Cottage: A Study (1980/1981) with a rotating cast of partners. Last night's pair included Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent, Jones/Zane troupe members and "downtown" dance celebrity artists in their own right. Matteson and Nugent will also appear in Program B's Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction).

Perhaps, by breathing new life into these historic duets, Jones intends to work some subliminal mojo on any remaining skeptics as he begins his own grand partnership with the former Dance Theater Workshop, host of the original productions of two of these seminal works. It's good to be reminded of where Jones came from, this searching, breakthrough choreographer who now, with Carla Peterson and the rest of the NYLA team, hopes to break down barriers for other artists. His new season should serve as a blessing on NYLA's ambitious venture.

Company performers: Antonio Brown, Talli Jackson, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, LaMichael Leornard, Jr., I-Lin Liu, Paul Matteson, Erick Montes, Jennifer Nugent and Jenna Riegel. Guest artists vary by performance.

With costumes by Liz Prince and lighting by Robert Wierzel


The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in Body Against Body continues tonight and September 20-24 at 7:30; Sundays September 18 and September 25 at 5pm. Pre-show Talk: September 21 with dance critic Marcia B. Siegel and Bill T. Jones.

Post-Show Talk: September 23 with Bill T. Jones, Carla Peterson, Janet Wong and the dance company

Check the box office for ticket availability: 212-924-0077

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