For Jack Ferver, "Everything Is Imaginable"

Choreographer Jack Ferver
premieres Everthing Is Imaginable
this week at New York Live Arts.

So...where are we?

Sometimes, that's a useful way to begin looking into a dance.

Jeremy Jacob's visual design frames, while never neatly containing, Jack Ferver's Everything Is Possible--a bifurcated evening at New York Live Arts. The first part of the work features an old-timey set, theatrically artificial and cartoonish in its vague pastel flourishes. For the second, Jacob substitutes an unpainted model of the set which Ferver--petite as he is--looms over. The indistinct look of both sets and the Alice in Wonderland-like shift in size open the possibility that we have quit daytime reality and fallen into a queer space where time dissolves, where things and identities overlap, intersperse or become malleable.

The first act features four solos built around the childhood icons of each of their dancers, starting with ballet star James Whiteside's take on the beloved Judy Garland--resplendent in her spangled dress, physically expansive and exuberant just short of flying to pieces. She looks as some of us will remember her on tv in the early '60s. Cole Porter's "I Happen to Like New York," especially Judy's version, strikes just the right clunky note of intensity--sort of "I'm telling you I like it, but I'm gonna break it--and you--before it breaks me." But Whiteside ends up flopped on his back, as will all the dancers to come.

Martha Graham dancer Lloyd Knight--in a shapely standout performance--gives us an exquisite portrait of Graham over the dance rebel's voice--for instance, her thoughts on how "spontaneity" and "simplicity" in dance require years of grueling work, "costing no less than everything." Garen Scribner invokes figure skater Brian Boitano--an Olympics champ from the '80s who came out as gay in 2013. Ferver slows down or fragments or zooms in on details of a skating routine; Scribner's energy reflects the mix of exhilaration and amusement his viewers might feel. And Reid Bartelme, in a bizarre--if still adorable--twist, trots out as the lavishly pink-maned My Little Pony.

The end of intermission brings on apprehension. We've learned that, during an accident in rehearsal, Ferver tore his calf. Now, turned from the audience and towards the model of Jacob's set, he relates that story, painful to hear. It's worse to watch him make his way through revised choreography; though avoiding jumps and other demanding moves, he really dances far more than anyone might have expected and looks grimly determined as he keeps talking. The injury brings up memories of betrayal, trauma and loneliness, transparently shared. His long exposition throws a different light on the earlier solos; it renders damage and lingering vulnerability all too imaginable.

Costumes: Reid and Harriet Design
Lighting: Lauren Libretti

Everything Is Imaginable continues with performances tonight, Friday and Saturday at 8pm; and Friday at 10pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Subscribe in a reader

ADI/NYC presents new Jack Ferver dance at The Kitchen

Jack Ferver in I Want You To Want Me
(photo: Paula Court)

Jack Ferver,
writer, choreographer, director
and rather terrifying star of
I Want You To Want Me,
running now at The Kitchen

I thought I would try to make something for everyone. You know, like ballet or a good subscription audience kind of play. I consider myself a populist, but some people really hate my work. They even hate me they hate my work so much. So I thought: ‘Well, why don’t I make a really pretty ballet or a play about a straight couple and their issues?’ So that’s what I’m going to do. Oh, I also just wanted to say, that not everyone is going to make it. I don’t mean make it to the show. I mean make it out of the show alive.

– Jack Ferver on I Want You To Want Me

To whom does ballet technique belong? Katy Pyle--with her intersectionally queer ballez--joyfully throws its age-old doors wide open to pretty much everyone. Jack Ferver, with his premiere of I Want You To Want Me, claims it for the camp camp with a mixture of love and sheer wickedness.

Presented by American Dance Institute/NYC at The Kitchen, this hour-long quartet samples classical technique and stagecraft--puffs of fake fog amusingly mist Reid Bartelme's authentic danseur noble stylings--combined with a wry plotline, all infused with enough melodrama to outdo the likes of Black Swan and Flesh and Bone. A wide-eyed American ballerina (Carling Talcott-Steenstra) quarrels with and ditches her boring, resentful boyfriend (Ferver) for opportunity in France and gets far more than she bargained for.

Above: Carling Talcott-Steenstra
partnered by Barton Cowperthwaite
below: Reid Bartelme
(photos: Paula Court)

There she meets the Ferver-embodied Madame M, an American expatriot so counterfeit in her new self-presentation that she can never decide whether to give words their English or French pronunciation. The role triggers every Ferver skill in speech, gesture, anguished vulnerability and killer stare while offering this fun performer a variety of classy, sultry looks in an adjustable, midnight black gown by Reid & Harriet Design (Bartelme and Harriet Jung).

The lovelorn and lusting Madame--equal parts Graham, Duncan, Liza Minelli, Bette Davis and Nosferatu--has a way of controlling her dancers (Bartelme and Barton Cowperthwaite) even from what should be a safe distance. Observe her standing at the barre, demurely gazing into the mirror, one lower leg cocked and twirling behind her while, some feet away, the handsome boys just happen to be flicking their own calf muscles more times than is absolutely necessary. No good will come of this.

I Want You To Want Me continues tonight at 8pm and Saturday at 2pm and 8pm. For information and tickets, click here or call 855-263-2623.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

On the APAP Trail: Jack Ferver

Fred Herko was a dancer, an actor, a choreographer, and he took a bath and got out and danced naked in front of his friend to Mozart, finally dancing out of a window to his death. I am a dancer, an actor, a choreographer, and I love taking baths and I have danced naked though have yet to jeté out a window. I have often talked about suicide with my childhood friend Reid Bartelme. Reid will join me in the work. Reid is a beautiful dancer. Reid will make sure I don’t jump.

– Jack Ferver

I'd say there you have it in a nutshell, except there you don't have it.

Jack Ferver's duet with Reid Bartelme, Night Light Bright Light--an American Realness presentation at Abrons Arts Center--runs faster than you can and will leave you panting. It is death-ridden but keeps its audience chuckling. Chock-full of play and humor, nevertheless it harbors the terrible and the irrevocable. It dwells in absurdity as well as precision, grandiosity as well as sincerity, trauma as well as release. There's so much splicing (convulsions of narrative, of tone) from moment to moment that one can get rather annoyed at Mr. Ferver even while marveling at his adorableness. I'm convinced that, with every performance, Ferver must turn his audience into his collective therapist, and that his actual one is somewhere out there in the night, grappling with confusion and doubt and self-medication.

Ballet, sex, torture, anxiety, singing, laughter, death, Tennesee Williams. These things belong together? Well, of course they do!  But see for yourself as the wondrous Night Light Bright Light repeats tomorrow night at 10pm and Sunday, January 18, 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For details about other American Realness festival events at Abrons Arts Center and beyond, click here.

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

On the "Glitter" trail at Abrons

Rebecca Warner's dancers (photo by Steven Schreiber)

Summer's here and the time is right...for glitter. Lots of it.

It's in the spirit of play, of independence, of risk and change, of eros, ecstasy, the unknown and the burgeoning.

Ben Pryor's got glitter--namely, Festival TBD: Emergency Glitter, the first summer festival to arrive from the founder of winter's annual, critically-acclaimed American Realness fest. If you've slipped into a creative funk or a rut or a case of the way-too-serious, pick up some emergency glitter at Abrons Arts Center, now through Sunday, where Pryor will showcase Niall Jones, Emily Wexler, Rebecca Patek and other young creative talents in contemporary dance and performance.

Rebecca Warner and Burr Johnson's shared program, which opened last night and repeats tonight at 8:30pm and Saturday at 4pm, is a beaut. Both artists lavishly honor the Abrons main stage with the glitter of theatrical excitement. Both bring the thrill of open, brisk, upbeat, clearly designed movement to this theater as audience members, seated onstage, watch closely from within the perimeter.

This intimate closeness produces pure magic, acting like a magnifying glass on everything. Warner's Into Glittering Asphalt distills entertainment dance (Broadway, movies and the like) for the big, expansive moments and movements that rev up energy in performers and viewers alike. Alone or in unison, dancers skim, turn and skate across the floor in numerous arrangements and repeating patterns. The last to join in, Siobhan Burke introduces an especially coltish element, but her colleagues--Evvie Allison, Rachel Berman, Ashley Handel and Juri Onuki--are also sharp and exhilarating to watch.

Johnson's gorgeous duet with Reid Bartelme also uses the stage in reverse, also directs the stage-bound audience's gaze towards bits of action in the theater aisles and seats they would normally occupy. (By the way, Miguel Gutierrez tried this same subversive trick at Abrons years ago, and I loved it then, too.) But unlike the theater-centered feel of Warner's ensemble piece, Johnson's Shimmering Islands conjures a beach scene out of thin air, pulls memories and images over the stage space like a rippling net.

Dressed in colorfully printed jumpers (designed by Bartelme) that feminize their sleek, sculpted, perfectly aligned physiques, the dancers invoke spaciousness as they prance, bound, lunge and leap. The modest space does not seem sufficient to contain everything that they bring to it--from the wingspan of pelagic birds to the sensuous and powerful tumbling of surf. The lighting reflected off Abrons' shiny white floor alters along with the temperature of the music--from Robyn's "Indestructible" to Dvorak's New World Symphony, that latter choice encoded with connection to the Apollo moon landing. (Neil Armstrong took a recording onboard.) Shimmering Islands looks like optimism, joy and the marriage of the pleasures of this world with the promise of breakthrough to worlds yet unexplored.

For tickets and information on this and all other Festival TBD: Emergency Glitter events, click here.

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