Deborah Hay Dance Company at Danspace Project

As Holy Sites Go/duet--presented at the multiply-holy site of Danspace Project--often reminds me of the time I first saw a baby giraffe fold its spindly legs to sit on the ground. Deborah Hay's black-clad dancers--the sturdy-thighed and light-footed Jeanine Durning and severely-neat, delicately-spidery Ros Warby--also reminded me of marionettes without benefit of puppeteers. Maybe they've come alive at midnight and spied each other across the hushed, gaping yet resonant space (and time, yes, when little or nothing occurs) between lines of slender columns. Maybe their handlers have worked them side by side in rehearsals, but only the most basic inclinations remain in their arms and legs to give a ghostly momentum. They move at and close to each other and make tenuous, offbeat connections that look eerie, even creepy, because they don't seem to be based in conscious intent--or, at least, readable intent. They sing sweetly and incomprehensibly and not at all together and yet overlapping. Hay says the dances perform "catastrophic acts of perception," a thought to chew on while you're watching.

Deborah Hay Dance Company continues its run at Danspace Project tonight and Saturday at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Happy 70th, Meredith Monk!

I'm wishing a grand, happy birthday to Meredith Monk who got the surprise of a charming little cake last evening at Danspace Project but really gave us all the most beautiful gift.

The special program, Pioneer Days, part of Danspace's PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now programming, included a screening of filmmaker Robert Withers' reconstruction of Monk's breakthrough 16 Millimeter Earrings Judson Memorial Church performance of 1966, filmed excerpts from the transcendent site-specific Songs of Ascension (2008), and reworked selections from pieces from the early '70s, constructing mosaics out of choice, unearthed shards from the past. The early Monk prepared the way for artists who now readily cross boundaries of genre and modalities and for audiences hungry for immersion in total experience and stimulation of all modes of perception.


Her art is more than voice, but even just her voice--or, rather, voices swooping, stretching, ululating, mewing, fluttering in rapid succession--can entice listeners to journey. Monk reminded us that her project is to heal the unnatural rifts between the arts unique to the modern Western approach and to counter our tendency to rely upon secondary experiences through cyberspace. Instead, she would have us engage with the "blood, guts and nerves" of live art where "we're all in the same space at the same time."

"Nothing can substitute for that," says this sage and shaman.

Judson When?: Trajal Harrell at Danspace Project

Yeah, I love Bryan, too.

Yes. 

If I have to come home with an earworm, 

I want it to be this song. 

Every day and all days. 

So, thank you, Trajal Harrell.

So...on to Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now:

Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (M2M)

This mouthful of a title--crafted by dancer-choreographer Trajal Harrell--tells me a few things: Harrell is a man with much on his mind, much of it overlapping, much that does not get thrown away. The Judson Church pioneers are in there, somewhere, and the theater of ancient Greece and the voguing balls and all of the variously-sized (XS, S, M, jr., L, XL) manifestations of his preoccupation with the concept of a collision between queer Harlem and the glory days of downtown postmodern dance. There's also an inclination to play with our heads: I'm going to tell you something or show you something "in all sincerity" and then I'm going to pull it out from under you. You know that thing that just happened? It wasn't what you thought it was. You know that thing I just said? Forget it.

This last trait is slightly annoying but has its place. Harrell seems, simultaneously, to want to seduce and to ward off intimacy. In hallowed St. Mark's Church, which already bears its own extensive arts history, he has overlapped ancient theater, Judson Memorial Church--home of early postmodern dance titans, and the ballrooms of Harlem. With this unlikely theatrical mélange for a moody setting, he performs the (forced) marriage of ironic distancing to emoting, virtuosity, passion and potential catharsis. 

He will just sit there, looking pained, along with dancer Thibault Lac, looking blank, while we simply listen to the entirety--the entirety!--of Adele's "Set Fire to the Rain." When was the last time that happened in a dance show? Audacious spliced with irritating (and I like Adele; I like Harrell, too).

It makes me think of my own youthful musical obsessions, not too far from this (and some of them I still claim) and how they fired creativity. And then I think I get a little more about Harrell.

It's all a bit much. Interjections of words--impassioned, yet kind of silly. Some dancing--ecstatic, yet trailing into the ordinary. The blues sitting there like the smug papa of all of the other music Harrell has gathered around it. Lengthy, lulling passages of things like Ondrej Vidlar intoning this command--"Don't stop"--stretching those words and playing with the inflection and tone (muttered, gentle, insistent, menacing) while a pained-looking Harrell sits and squirms. Harrell's unexpected, confident singing is too much--luscious and indulgent in equal measure. At times, he reminds me of Antony; at others, a holy-roller getting that (really, really) old-time religion.

I've grooved to Harrell's succulent dancing more in other works than here. In this piece, Thibault Lac, nearly walks off with everything. Though impossibly gawky in appearance, he transforms himself into a voguing superstar with slippery back, crazy legs, arms moving like whips, batons, propellers that blaze into near invisibility. (Don't think! WERK!!! WERK!!! Don't think!) Yes, please. More Lac.

The three men, draped in filmy, flowing black "vestments" (by Complexgeometries) could be ancient ritual celebrants or high-fashion models in little black frocks. These roles crash and clash. I'm waiting for these strutting priests/priestesses to "take us there"--to that place of catharsis--but it's not happening because the models, of course, are making us hold back and just look, sit back and just watch.

Oh...one more great earworm from Judson Church is Ringing. Love it.

Trajal Harrell at Danspace Project tonight and tomorrow, 8pm. Sold out, but there's a wait list. Click here for information.

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

Mac Low's collection

Highly, highly recommended: Spend your weekend with Clarinda Mac Low and a whole bunch of friends at Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now. Mac Low presents 40 Dancers do 40 Dances for the Dancers, based on a text by her dad, the poet Jackson Mac Low, with dancemaking responsibilities parceled out to a variety of "downtown dance" notables. She calls it "a love letter to my dance community, and a recreation of a child's eye view of the 1970s New York 'avant garde' arts world."

In this nomadic (wear comfy shoes), episodic experience, you'll marvel at bodies elastic, unpredictable, intoxicated by space (that last, particularly inspired by dancer Abigail Levine, but it could be any and all of them). You might wonder aloud with the poet, like delicately beautiful Simone Forti, "What's the point of all this art?" Or, with the alternately thoughtful and unruly David Thomson, ponder the consequences of molecular exchange between dancers. Less a formal concert than a lively village, 40 Dancers is family-friendly--in fact, family-inclusive--and has a way of turning even seniors into tiny kids. So go--tonight or tomorrow at 8pm--and have fun.

Info and tickets

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (corner of Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)