Back to APAP: Regina Nejman at Dixon Place

Above, Brazil-born choreographer Regina Nejman
in Beautiful Figure
Below, Ryan Tully at piano and Julie Miller with Nejman
(photos: Julie Lemberger)

This past weekend, felled by the bad cold that's going around town, I missed some APAP-season shows I had long looked forward to seeing. I'm back now, and a full week it will be--culminating on Sunday with The Gathering, Camille A. Brown's annual event for Black women dance artists, scholars, educators and allies!

Last night, I made it to Dixon Place for a showing of Regina Nejman's work in progress, Beautiful Figure. I won't say too much about Beautiful Figure since it is, after all, still "in progress."  But it's worth keeping watch for an official launch. Ambitious in concept and design, though compact in length, this piece fully reflects the painstaking effort already invested in its development.

Nejman tackles the notion of beauty as conceptualized through historical and contemporary Western societies. Late in the piece, she also satirizes today's digital obsessions and hookup culture.

She opens with a duet danced with Julie Miller under dim, sculpting light, both women draped in rippled lengths of slate gray fabric. Ryan Tully, the work's composer, sits at his piano, playing spare, quiet notes that, in time, will build and recede in intensity. The women move through a string of languorous poses--twisted, arched, splayed, crossed--as if at the behest of an invisible painter. Later, each will gather a length of fabric to herself, flip it around with her feet and make a grand whirlpool of energy. The dance takes the women (and their fabric) through various transformations, and even draws Tully into an undertow coursing down centuries to the age of hip hop and sexting.

Cast-wise, Beautiful Figure is a cleverly expandable thing. As noted before, Tully gets swept up into movement and dialogue, an expansion that, amusingly, does not stop with him. Nejman demonstrates her ability to coordinate activity on intimate and large scales and shows a creative range--from exquisite to athletic, from quiet to raucous, from meditative to absurd. There's palpable tension beneath all the beauty on display--always--and an evident desire for freedom. She's convincing in most things, though perhaps not yet convincing in the way she appears to conclude with a note of hope for the arrival of that freedom.

Early on in the piece, before Nejman branched into text and satire, I noticed something interesting about her approach to movement. She made us see her and Miller's bodies as human first and foremost. Not abstractions. Not symbols. Not even tools for a choreographer, trained to deliver the assigned steps and shapes. I was struck by this: Here were women. Dancing. And, yes--despite our imagination of the imaginary "artist" sketching or painting them--these were women's bodies speaking for their lives as bodies. Real ones. And Nejman's insistence on giving us even a small glimpe of the human being within the choreographed body was...well, I can only call it beautiful.

Closed. For further information on Regina Nejman & Company, click here.

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Regina Nejman's new "story" emerges at Dixon Place

There's rippling vigor in Regina Nejman & Company in Nejman's new work, "...and this is the story thus far". The dancers--including Alicia Dellimore, Kristin Licata, Lindsey Mandolini, Julie Miller, Oscar Santana and the choreographer--enjoy themselves and their Dixon Place environs so thoroughly that one can imagine them hanging out long after the audience has left for the cold, Lower East Side streets.

One can imagine them continuing to loll on the balcony, dangling and fluttering their legs through the railings; continuing to melt, slip and swoosh against the theater's back wall; continuing to slither up and down the stairs between sections of audience seating. In our absence, they could give one another, instead of us, double air-kisses, shimmy to the musical recordings from the dancemaker's native Brazil, whirl on the floor on their sides as if dropping capoeira moves in a different dimension, and scatter about like football players. (That's soccer, of course, to all you US folks.) Nejman's film might go on running, too, so that she and her friends could convince themselves that they really are rolling along a rough, bush-lined road to a beach. Once there, they could find themselves helplessly mesmerized by the ocean's glow.

As a title, "...and this is the story thus far" certainly suggests an unfinished narrative. Much of this episodic, meandering piece seems tentative as well as dreamy in the way of early, easygoing dreams floating just below the surface of consciousness. Dreams from which you quickly awaken only to dip into another. There appears to not be a lot going on except, perhaps, the desire to touch something of home when far away from home.

Most of the tension--and I mean that in a good way--comes through sometimes fiery accompaniment by rock guitarist Britt Reagan. Nejman wisely folds Reagan, and his original music, into the action in interesting, physical ways, and there's a particularly loud, cacophonous scene in which dancers shout over one another--What's happening?, It doesn't make any sense! and the like--while Reagan's music growls back.

At times, you might want to ask the same questions of "...and this is the story thus far" but politely, because it doesn't matter that much. You're warm and having a pleasant time.

"...and this is the story thus far" will have one more performance--tonight at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey), Manhattan
(directions)

Nejman reveals

A dance film choreographed by Regina Nejman and performed by her company, Reveal is a meditation on privacy in the modern age, exploring the ways we interact with one another and how it might effect our psyche (directed and edited by Alan McIntyre Smith).

Regina Nejman: Body and Soul podcast

Brazil-born/New York-based Regina Nejman will bring "Reveal" to the Merce Cunningham Studio, May 1-4. This new dance-theater piece explores the meaning of privacy in today's technology-driven world, delving into the relationship between privacy and technology, and the impact of this relationship on everyday life.

BIO

Regina Nejman has been creating her own choreography since 1993. She formed Regina Nejman and Company in 1997. Recipient of the Outstanding Choreography Award at the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival for the premiere of "The Velocity of Things," Regina and her company have been steadily touring Brazil for the past two years, where the company has been received with standing ovations. Regina is a 2007/08 Artist in Residence at Joyce SoHo and has been awarded a Dance Theater Workshop Outer/Space residency for next summer. She has received commissions from Princeton University, The Yard and The New Jersey City University, and her work has been presented at Jacob's Pilow Dance Festival, Symphony Space, Joyce SoHo, The New York Film Academy, The New York International Fringe Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project and Merce Cunningham Studio.

EVENTS

Visit an open rehearsal of "Reveal" with Regina Nejman and Dancers on Friday Apr 18 (12–2pm) at Joyce SoHo. Regina invites audience feedback and will dialogue with the audience on the issue of privacy. Free admission with reservation at 646-792-8377.

See "Reveal" at Merce Cunningham Studio, 55 Bethune Street (11th Floor), Manhattan, May 1-2 (9pm), May 3-4 (8pm). Information and reservations at 212-714-9116.

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(c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

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