APAP SEASON CHOICES: Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo

Members of Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo
perform Custodians of Beauty
(photo: Maria Baranova)

At some point in a dance work by Pavel Zuštiak (Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo), you will find yourself physically, helplessly connected to the surreal, demanding goings-on. In Custodians of Beauty, for instance, you might be chosen to literally occupy the floor for a stretch of time that feels like it's stretching on forever. On another occasion, you might remain in your seat--safe, you'd think, until you notice your ears assaulted by high-pitched sound or your heart racing from the speeding visuals and sonic thunder. Or, in BASTARD / The Painted Bird: Part 1, you might "see" the likes of yourself in a crowd of "just folks" picked up locally by Zuštiak, merged with his professionals and coached into miraculous efficacy as a team. "That's me over there," you think as you feel yourself first saunter then pelt through space, just missing collisions with others in near-chaos, then placidly lowering your body to the floor, again and again and again. The theatrical veil between the worlds, as conceived by Zuštiak, is always gossamer-thin and, ultimately, ripped aside. You have pressed close to some kind of edge and its dangers. You have glimpsed something you cannot name.

This week, La MaMa is reviving Bastard, first seen in the US at this theater in 2010, and PS 122 is presenting Custodians of Beauty at La MaMa as part of its COIL Festival. Both offer concentrated immersion into the world of this bold, Slovak-American dancemaker, a multiple award winner, who gets that theater's power is in the way artists' and audiences' bodies dream together. And if I haven't already sent you running for cover, let me encourage you to step to La MaMa for this opportunity to be moved, to be affected, to be transformed by dance with music by Christian Frederickson and lighting by Joe Levasseur, both master craftsmen in demand and frequent Zuštiak collaborators. Dancer Jaro Viňarský reprises his 2013 Bessie-winning role as the soloist/persecuted outsider in Bastard, inspired by Jerzy Kosiński’s novel, The Painted Bird. In making Bastard, Zuštiak might have been thinking of his own identity as an immigrant to an overwhelming, not always congenial new land and his struggles to make and sustain art. But Bastard returns to us now in a time of heightened social relevance.

Remaining performances of BASTARD / The Painted Bird: Part 1 run tonight at 8pm; Saturday at 2:30pm and Sunday at 6:30pm. Running Time: 75 minutes. For information on this and other La MaMa events, click here.

Remaining performances of Custodians of Beauty run today at 5pm, Saturday at 5:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. Run time: 85 minutes. For information and tickets for this and other COIL Festival events, click here.

La MaMa
(The Downstairs)
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between Bowery and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

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This Spring, look sideways with choreographer Pavel Zuštiak

ART OF LOOKING SIDEWAYS

Making work: Ideas, Practice and Process

A workshop with Pavel Zuštiak

Artistic Director of Palissimo

designed for choreographers, dancers, actors, 

artists working with body as medium

at Abrons Arts Center

Tuesday-Friday, Apr 22-25, 12-3pm 

(NOTE: Wednesday, April 23 12:30-3:30pm)

Fee: $180 ($120 if booked before April 1)

“You cannot change something unless you know what you are doing.” -- Moshe Feldenkrais

How to start? What is material? How to use improvisation /scoring? What to set? What to leave open?

The objective of this workshop is to set participants free from the notion of originality as something that did not exist before. It will introduce ways of getting away from the planned, comfortable and familiar in dance making. Four three-hour sessions are meant to unveil and develop existing ideas and motions brought to the class by participants, and help them address some of the questions regarding their own creative process.

The workshop focuses on developing conscious presence while improvising in performance; connecting technique to composition and improving skills in this area; exploring tools useful in developing and crafting the work. Attention will be given to creating structures for dance; generating movement material, editing and deconstructing it; relationships between composition and improvisation; and introducing elements of chance. Each session starts with a guided physical warm up that opens the senses, stirs up imagination and heightens physical and mental awareness and exploration of body systems that then leads to exploration and ultimately to composition.

For complete information, click here.

To register, click here. (NOTE: April 1 is the deadline for a $60 discount on the regular $180 fee!)

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

Zuštiak's apocalypse now

Dancers of Palissimo in Endangered Pieces
all photos © Jeff Woodward

We seem helplessly drawn to dark visions of apocalypse in our art and even our entertainment--perhaps because, as a species, we've done so much to seed and hasten it. Or perhaps it is because we face down doom not only on a planet-wide scale but in every private life and, potentially, in every personal moment of those lives. In Tarot, the image of the Wheel of Fortune turns without cease, bringing the high and mighty to the depths and raising new victors who, themselves, will be supplanted.

The world premiere of Endangered Pieces, a trio by choreographer Pavel Zuštiak of Palissimo, occasions these thoughts.

As the audience files in, the open, raw mainstage at Abrons Arts Center reveals a naked man (dancer Jaro Viňarský) lying face up and motionless on the floor. Electronic music (by collaborators Christian Frederickson and Bobby McElver) fills the air with a dense, chugging texture. Three tall metal poles with heavy bases have also been toppled. A gate of corrugated metal rises just high enough to show us the shins of a second dancer (Matthew Rogers) and then to allow the choreographer to emerge and pull a lighting cord from its socket.

In this stark, industrial environment, Zuštiak and Rogers go about with expressionless, workman-like calm, standing up the poles and attempting to keep the corpse-like Viňarský on his feet. Each time they raise him and release him, he softly slips to the floor. They flip him vertically, horizontally, sling him over Roger's shoulders, drape him over Zuštiak's thighs like Jesus of the Pietà, only face down, ass outward. In these moments and throughout the hour-long piece, Joe Levasseur's eccentric lighting enhances a dreamlike, even Daliesque feeling, adding at least one or two extra dimensions to the 3D of moving beings that sometimes do not resemble humans like us.

Behind the metal gate, the wall of a recessed area has been covered in short planks of wood snuggly fit together and warmly lit. One or another dancer will sometimes enter this modern cave then slip from view, but its shelter is not long for existence.

Voiceover material instructs us to "imagine the last man" and to question what he does and "Does he even understand what he is doing?" A lot of imagining went into the powerful look and sound and performance of this piece. If it sometimes drags (as during the "let's just experiment with all these planks from the busted-up wall" segment), it also sounds an unavoidable alarm.

See Endangered Pieces at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse. Remaining shows: October 4-5, 10-12, 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center

466 Grand Street (corner of Pitt Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

Another ticket discount offer for "The Painted Bird" -- but hurry!

From Pavel Zuštiak's The Painted Bird (photo: David Kumerman)

A NEW SPECIAL OFFER!

On  Thursday, June 20 (from midnight to midnight),
you can purchase tickets to the entire trilogy for only $35!

Note: Discount applies to performances on 
Saturday, June 22 and Sunday, June 23 only.

When ordering your tickets, 

enter the promotional code: 

JAY

To purchase tickets, 

click here. 

Again, this is a limited time offer. Don't miss it!

The acclaimed dance trilogy, The Painted Bird, will be shown in New York in its entirety (four hours with two intermissions) for the first time as a highlight of the 2013 La MaMa Moves! Festival!.

A presentation of Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo Company, the work addresses themes of "displacement, otherness and transformation," taking its impetus from the 1965 controversial novel by Jerzy Kosinski. Previously, New Yorkers have seen individual sections--Bastard, Amidst and Strange Cargo--at various venues as the piece developed. La MaMa will offer tickets for the complete trilogy or for individual sections.

This should prove to be a hot ticket. Put it on your calendar now (June 21-30). For a schedule and complete ticketing details, click here.

La MaMa (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Special ticket offer for Zuštiak's "The Painted Bird" at La MaMa [UPDATE]

From Pavel Zuštiak's The Painted Bird (photo: David Kumerman)

SPECIAL OFFER

On Wednesday, June 13--from midnight to midnight--buy one ticket and get another at half-price!

Note: Discount applies to first weekend only.

When ordering your tickets, 

enter the promotional code: 

FALCON

To purchase tickets, 

click here. 

Again, this is a limited time offer. Don't miss it!

The acclaimed dance trilogy, The Painted Bird, will be shown in New York in its entirety (four hours with two intermissions) for the first time as a highlight of the 2013 La MaMa Moves! Festival!.

A presentation of Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo Company, the work addresses themes of "displacement, otherness and transformation," taking its impetus from the 1965 controversial novel by Jerzy Kosinski. Previously, New Yorkers have seen individual sections--Bastard, Amidst and Strange Cargo--at various venues as the piece developed. La MaMa will offer tickets for the complete trilogy or for individual sections.

This should prove to be a hot ticket. Put it on your calendar now (June 21-30). For a schedule and complete ticketing details, click here.

La MaMa (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan
(map/directions)