Queer NY presents Mamela Nyamza's "HATCHED"

South African dance artist Mamela Nyamza
in her solo, HATCHED, at Abrons Arts Center
 (photos: John Hogg)

Did I hear right?

It took several years of effort for Shay Wafer's 651 Arts--now co-presenting with Queer New York International Arts Festival--to finally bring South African dancer Mamela Nyamza to New York?

And for only one night?

Curated by Marýa Wethers, Nyamza's HATCHED introduced an artist I wish more New Yorkers could have experienced. Attendance was sparse. Every seat in Abrons Arts Center's Playhouse theater should have been claimed.

(photo: John Hogg)

Abrons has smaller, less formal and more flexible spaces well-suited to alternative dance and performance. But Nyamza pointedly mixed the classically formal (tutu, pointe work, port de bras, Saint-Saëns) with the unexpected (blood-red laundry, looking, for all the world, like flayed flesh or butcher cuts, that she hung to dry on a line strung between the wings). She needed honest-to-god proscenium space for the razzle dazzle of her visual imagery and lighting. She created a jarring, split-awareness for audience members first to take their seats before the show began. We listened to The Dying Swan and gazed out on Nyamza's bare back, shaved head, waves of crimson fabric engulfing her white tulle as, beyond the hall's flung-open doors, stragglers continued their loud chatter.

From the outset, HATCHED announces itself as both forbidding and irresistible--and sacred--very much in its own space, which we must focus to approach.

And it was no surprise when, during the post-show Q&A with Wethers, Nyamza revealed that, in performance, she goes into her "zone," communing with her deceased mother and other ancestors, and that she aims to welcome us into the work while maintaining an unbreachable distance.

Dramatically reflecting the tension between Nyamza's ballet training--with which she maintains a complicated relationship--and her Xhosa heritage and artistry, the solo suggests a search for her true self beyond all external structures, expectations, appearances. Her work is sourced in her life. Married and a mother, Nyamza left her husband for a woman and now exults in her life as an out lesbian. The personal is the political is the poetic.

Let's hope for more chances to see what Nyamza, an artist of arresting skill and a woman of much charm, might have to offer. I hope it will not take long for her to return to New York's venues.

HATCHED is closed, but for other events in the 2016 Queer New York International Arts Festival--running through October 2 at various venues--click here.

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South Africa's Mmakgosi Kgabi finds her light

Mmakgosi Kgabi, above and below,
in Shades of a Queen
(photos: Thomas Aurin)

For New York--a city that (thinks it) has seen it all and many times over--Johannesburg's Mmakgosi Kgabi is an startling original. Sad to say, her solo performance of Shades of a Queen--curated by Marýa Wethers for Queer New York International Arts Festival--ran only one evening. You really ought to catch this performance artist and, perhaps, some smart programmer will bring her back to New York.

Performed last night at Abrons Arts Center's Experimental Theater, Shades of a Queen imagines the complications of coming out queer while African. Or, at least, in Kgabi's uncommon mind, coming out queer when the name your Botswanan mother gave you implies a singular status. Mmakgosi translates to "The Mother of the Chief," and, for the purposes of this piece, Kgabi's dramatic persona rocks a pinched, high-pitched British accent with the Cockney tag innit lashed to the end of sentences like a subversive tic. Who is this creature? Well, she calls herself Her Majesty the Queen.

When we first meet Her Majesty, a mysterious figure dressed in black tights and a diaphanous black cape, she's singing softly to herself and drifting around the sparse furnishings of the darkened space. A white couch faces away from the audience, and occasionally Kgabi will take a moment to comfortably settle there, still singing. A matching armchair, at a short distance, is toppled onto its side and remains so. We have no idea why. An open notebook rests on a small white table with several e-devices lining its shelf. These will play an amusing role in the proceedings as Her Majesty carries on several improvised conversations with "callers"--some clear, some clueless, some creepy--each successive call detaining her from carrying out her stated intention to leave the apartment and go to the thee-AY-tah!

Her voice. A harsh, stringently pretentious one matched by precise, insistent, increasingly impatient physicality. A finely-trained Kgabi masters it all.

"We're going to the thee-AY-tah, darling!"

"You have to put your best foot forward."

"You have to relax, speak properly...."

"You bless them with the knowledge of who you are, darling!"

"Where's that spot? Where is my light?"

"You find your light, dear. You find your presence."

With the knowledge that Shades of a Queen is riffing on the idea of coming out as queer, we begin to hear Kgabi's dialogues and actions as internal exhortations, disturbances and, ultimately, diversions. The interfering shades are a Shadow Self not easily laid to rest. Her rumblings with the external world trigger rumbling within, upending the familiar comforts and confines of home. Luckily for us, they also bring about an entertaining evening and the introduction of a confident and fascinating artist. More, please!

Kgabi is a member of South Africa's multidisciplinary Stash the Suitcase Performance Arts Collective. Follow the collective's work here.

Queer New York International Arts Festival continues events at Abrons through September 26. For information and tickets for other QNYIAF events, click here.

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

Ecosexuals Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens marry that mountain

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
remake environmental activism for a sexy new era.

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle stand before all the world--tall in their funky platform boots--as proud, passionate ecosexuals. And they recruit. With those two, you're well aware, surely, of the sexual part. But what's with that eco prefix?

The couple answered that question--and more--last night at the New York City premiere screening of Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story, their 2014 documentary film about mountain-top removal mining in the Appalachians where Stephens was born and raised and has family. That's the eco part. We'll get to sex in a minute.

Hosted by Abrons Arts Center, the event helped launch the 2015 Queer New York International Arts Festival in partnership with MixNYC, the queer experimental film festival. The cheerful pair greeted the audience after having led an EcoSex walking tour of Central Park earlier in the day. They shared a list of "25 Ways to Make Love to the Earth."

"Talk dirty to her plants" and "Love her unconditionally even when she's angry and cruel" were two standout suggestions. So, if you have not pieced it together already, ecosexuality--a state of mind, identity and practice open to anyone regardless of gender or orientation--derives from the notion that Earth is not Earth, Our Mother but Earth, Our Lover.

"Mommy's not going to take care of us," Stephens warns. "Mommy's tired." We have much work to do.

Through giddy imagination and wit, Sprinkle and Stephens shift the balance of power to inspire us to take a more direct role in the well-being of our planet. As they see it, the key to this new form of activism is bonding with nature through enlivened senses and pleasure--the sensation of slippery mud and gnarly tree bark and chlorophyll on one's skin. The pair have traveled around, staging weddings in which they get married to mountains and snow and the moon and what have you. And, you know what? I have no idea what "cloud sex" is, but I'm all for it.

In Spain, they married coal. In Stephens's West Virginia, they married a mountain and helped local activists draw awareness to the coal mining technique that imperils natural beauty, biodiversity, health, community and heritage. Goodbye Gauley Mountain shows what they're up against--a powerful industry holding the whip hand of steady employment over many workers who envision no other way to feed their families. But Stephens interviews others who know all too well what's going on, and their intellectual resistance--and deep love of the land--is most clear and ultimately moving.

To learn how you can see Goodbye Gauley Mountain, contact Stephens and Sprinkle here.

Closed.

Queer New York International Arts Festival continues events at Abrons through September 26. For information and tickets for other QNYIAF events, click here.

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

Marissa Perel dreams it out

Marissa Perel in More Than Just a Piece of Sky
at The Chocolate Factory
(photo: Madeline Best)

Marissa Perel seems so very far away.

Even in a smallish space where the white bed and bedding that cloak her hidden body are not only visible to all eyes but glowing in pristine, ghostly light.

When her audience enters the space, there might be a tiny sliver of skin to see. That's all.

Later, after Perel sits up in the bed, which she never leaves, we strain to hear her singing or speaking voice. But her alter egos--the dancers Lindsay Reuter and Jumatatu Poe, with whom Perel created More Than Just a Piece of Sky--extend her range into our world.

Choreographed and written by Perel, the performance fractures and refashions characters, text and--in one smart moment--vocal music from Barbra Striesand's 1983 movie, Yentl, itself sourced in "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy," a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yentl, you might recall from the film, is really a young Orthodox Jewish woman with a thirst for Talmudic knowledge in a culture that relegates women to home and family. Yentl's defiant self-disguise--her cross-dressing, name-changing strategy--works fine until... Well, just download Streisand singing "The Way He Makes Me Feel."

Presented at The Chocolate Factory as part of Queer New York International Arts Festival, the piece applies artfully arranged text, movement, video, music and lighting to invoke a dream state in which gender identity and roles shift like the moon through its cycles. I'm thinking especially of the delicate verbal and gestural exchanges between Reuter and Poe around a dangling microphone, but each instant of More Than Just a Piece of Sky is meant to show the many facets of difference as forms of sensual magic power.

A passage where Poe presses and slides his naked skin against a wall seems to slip into the ether, to evaporate, perhaps intentionally transient in its effect. Another sequence in which the dancers languidly roll across the floor in each other's embrace feels different, substantial, and is just gorgeous. But I suspect it is not a big deal to Perel to make an impact by making an impact. She might be more intent on charting an ephemeris of all that cannot be pinned in place.

More Than Just a Piece of Sky continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For more information, click here. For tickets, click here.

For a schedule of other events in the 2014 Queer New York International Arts Festival, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)