One more to see: Rennie Harris gets funky at New Victory

Performers from
Rennie Harris: Funkedified,
a world premiere at New Victory Theater
(photo: Brian Mengini)

Two acclaimed Philadelphia dance crews--Rennie Harris Puremovement and The Hood Lockers--are tearing up the stage at New Victory Theater, now through June 10. If you love popping, locking, breaking and all things street dance, go see Rennie Harris: Funkedified.

The premise of this expert world premiere production is a remembrance of the funk music and dancing of the 1970s--think James Brown and Soul Train--that set Harris on his path to becoming one of the world's best-loved masters of hip-hop artistry. A marvelous five-piece band, led by guitarist Matt Dickey and drummer Doron Lev, brings the funk in a big, joyous way. Several cloth panels, hanging above the band like a quilt, capture projected imagery--some hazy, some abstract, some psychedelic--as well as Bob Steineck's luscious, saturated lighting as we hear Harris's musings on his cultural past. His voice--echoey and phantasmal--seems to emerge from out of a cloud or the depths of a dream--but the ingenious, passionate dancing and music speak for themselves.

The New Vic is a family-oriented theater and, at this Saturday matinee, most folks in the audience were small kids in booster seats sitting quiet and polite throughout the show. I kind of longed for an audience of Black teens who'd know just what to do with what we were seeing and hearing! It took a while for any heads to start bopping to the fantastic music--and they were adult heads. I just hope there were youngsters in the audience checking out, in particular, Puremovement soloist Leigh “Breeze-Lee” Foaad whose fluidity, range and poignancy should prove a powerful inspiration.

Rennie Harris Puremovement: Shafeek Westbrook, Katie Cruz, Joshua Culbreath, Phil Cuttino Jr., Tatiana Desardouin, Leigh “Breeze-Lee” Foaad, Mai Lê Hô-Johnson and Yuko “Uko Snowbunny” Tanaka

The Hood Lockers: Ricky “Glytch” Evans, Joshua “J Peazy” Polk, Andrew “Riot” Ramsey and Marcus “Epic” Tucker

Musicians: Shareef Clayton (trumpet), Matt Dickey (Music Director; guitar), Doron Lev (Music Director; drums), Nicholas Marks (keys), Osei Kweku (bass) and FKAjazz (saxophone)

Sound design/composition/production: Darrin Ross
Visual design: Jorge Cousineau
Lighting design: Bob Steineck

Rennie Harris: Funkedified runs through Sunday, June 10. For information and tickets, click here.

New Victory Theater
209 West 42nd Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Uplifting Black choreographers: Gesel Mason

Gesel Mason
(photo: Enoch Chan)

Whoops!

Showing up 45 minutes into a concert because I, somehow, had the wrong curtain time just feels awful. More awful is when it's a historic, keenly-anticipated program like Gesel Mason's No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers.

I missed nearly everything in the first half of the show--works by Bebe Miller, Kyle Abraham and Donald McKayle. <<sound of critic kicking self--hard and repeatedly>> I managed to slip in at a break to catch Rennie Harris's You Are Why! (2014) and watch Mason dance the hell out of it alongside Lisa Engleken and Mahayla Rose. The second half featured works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Bent, 2004), David Roussève (Jumping the Broom, 2005) and a piece by Mason (No Less Black, 2000) with her poetry and MK Abadoo's solo performance. This program has been fifteen years in development and represents both a tribute to a diverse range of Black choreographers and an ongoing gift to dance's future.

Happily, the entire program--a presentation of Gesel Mason Performance Projects, co-presented by 651 ARTS and RestorationART at Brooklyn's Billie Holiday Theatre--will be accessible through the digital archive Mason plans to establish to preserve the legacy of Black artistry in dance. The documentation, just like the concert, will include personable video interviews of the choreographers, revealing the context for understanding how these artists saw and felt about their works when first created and how they view them now.

But try to get to the Billie Holiday tonight-- the show's final evening--for so many, many reasons. Among them is Jumping the Broom with its chilling imagery, prescient warning and the heartbreak of Mason's performance. In the short amount of time he allows himself, Roussève not only conjures vivid scenes in our imagination, he taps our empathy and our sense of foreboding. It is dance as an act of conscience, responsibility and courageous love.

Of course, I cannot speak of Mason's dancing in all of the program's pieces, but I do know she should rank high on your list of artists who jump into the fire of a work with the nimbleness and rigor to survive its flames. She's all up in the Zollar solo (an edgy, dissonant portrait of the extreme state of mind in addiction) and the Harris trio (with its unrelenting movement multiplicities upon complexities upon multiplicities). It's almost unbelievable that she would--and could--program demanding works like these two on the same bill as the Roussève piece. She says, now, that she will never do this again--herself, personally, though the works could be danced by others--and that much is believable.

But, for now--at least this evening--you've got a chance to see a great one at the height of her powers. Go!

For information and tickets to tonight's show (7pm), click here.

The Billie Holiday Theatre
At Restoration Plaza, 1368 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Brazil's passinho dancers in US debut at LC Out of Doors

A Batalha do Passinho dancers
Below: Batalha host Zuzuka Poderosa
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

When New York's summer weather cooperates, as it certainly did last evening, Lincoln Center Out of Doors can be a great way to soak up and savor the positive energy of arts from nearly everywhere in our world. Last night's show brought an organized group of performers of passinho, the Rio de Janeiro party dance, in their US debut together with Rennie Harris Puremovement, the celebrated Philly troupe that revolutionized a sophisticated blending of hip-hop moves with more conventional dance theater techniques and aesthetics.

Three luminaries of New York's urban and contemporary dance scene
served as the passinho battle's judges.
Left to right: Rokafella, Akim Funk Buddha and Doug Elkins
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

A Batalha do Passinho dancers (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
The showcase was created in 2011 by co-artistic director Julio Ludemir
after this Rio favela dance trend went viral on YouTube.

Opening the two-hour show, the Brazilians burst on the stage with a rawness and sense of adventure and fun that would be hard to top. Rapidfire twisting of their feet made their bent legs look like massive, lethal grinders. The daunting contortions of flexing and bone breaking, the smooth illusions of moonwalking, b-boying acrobatics, Cossack folkdance and even voguing all flow through passinho, offered in a spirit of good-natured competitiveness. The batalha (battle) format of the Brazilian presentation, facilitated by the merry host, Zuzuka Poderosa, gave the Lincoln Center audience an active investment in the proceedings as we watched closely to make distinctions between the competitors' styles and specialties.

Marcelly Miss Passista,
champion of the Lincoln Center batalha
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The Brazilian dancers trained our eyes for a kind of reckless derring-do that seem combed out of the silky, glamorously sexy Puremovement with Harris's oddly safe, placid approach to arranging dancers across a stage--line them up, slide the frontal lines side to side. It's funny to come away feeling that I would have preferred to see Puremovement "where they belong now"--in formal, and well-managed, indoor staging. Put a frame around them.

The interesting encounter and dialogue of troupes that could have been did not pan out. Maybe next time both crews could be tossed together in a residency to experiment and cook up something surprising.

New York knows and loves Rennie Harris's endless seductions, the way his dancers' bodies bounce like rubber against air as if it were a hard surface; the way they float inside and around the edges of music's rhythms, each body addressing multiple, discrete segments of time in individual ways even when everyone's working the same moves. Puremovement demonstrates the basic silliness of trying to make dance where everyone looks exactly like everyone else, where visual homogeneity is privileged. Everything offered up is going to be a little different, according to who gives it, and that's a fine, instructive thing.

*****

There's much more to come from the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival, running through through August 10--all programs absolutely free. Click here for a schedule of events including tomorrow's 1pm Family Day dance class with dancers from A Batalha do Passinho!

Lincoln Center Out of Doors
Damrosch Park Bandshell, Lincoln Center
West 62nd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Let's dance! Rennie Harris rules the Joyce

 

Top: Kyle Clark, Bottom: Ryan Cliett
of Rennie Harris Puremovement
(photos by Brian Mengini)

Rennie Harris Puremovement's just-opened retrospective at The Joyce Theater, running through Sunday, finds Philadelphia's fiery hip hop ensemble dropping knowledge about the best way to stream street and club dance moves through conventional dance venues. We're talking two different worlds here, mainly because of who pays attention to the social, vernacular sphere vs. who pays attention to contemporary theatrical dance and how they pay attention and respond. If those aesthetic borderlines have gotten more porous for dance artists since Harris founded RPHM in 1992 and went on to win strong popular and critical success, give credit to the man for meticulous leadership--laying down a foundation of technical authenticity and skill.

Watching b-boying, voguing and related arts of the body in an official Hall of Dance shifts one's way of seeing: You're looking for a less sporadic and less frontal presentation, something more kaleidoscopic and something with interesting context. You're also looking for kinds of variety and subtlety that the excellent Harris crew are perfectly prepared to show you over a leisurely stretch of time--rhythmic precision, uncommonly supple physicality, footwork that can rival tap dancers for agility and complexity, and a gymnastic approach to the body that utilizes more body surfaces and levels and directional orientation and speed that we're used to. Crazy stuff. It's particularly great to watch the ensemble's women dancers--Danita Clark, Katia Cruz, Mai Le Ho Johnson and Mariah Tlili--no less forceful for adding a gleeful, distinctive juiciness to their propulsion.

The Joyce program, nearly two hours with an intermission, includes the 1997 Rome & Jewels (Harris's striking, award-winning take on Romeo and Juliet crossed with West Side Story, Shakespeare filtered through the ways and lingo of a couple of "star-crossed homies"), Continuum (1997), P-Funk (1992), March of the Antmen (1992) and Students of the Asphalt Jungle (1995).

Rennie Harris Puremovement continues at the Joyce through Sunday, February 2. For schedule and ticketing details, as well as the January 29 Dance Chat and January 31 Master Class information, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

My review of Philadanco at The Joyce Theater

Here's my review of Philadelphia's great dance troupe, Philadanco, just posted on DanceMagazine.com: Click here.

Ailey goes Gaga!

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's Artistic Director Robert Battle, Associate Artistic Director Masazumy Chaya and Company members. (Photo: Andrew Eccles)

Get ready, New York! Minus 16--a 1999 work recycled from bits of other Gaga-licious dances by Ohad Naharin--is about to get the Ailey treatment, and vice versa.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, under Robert Battle's new leadership, opens its 2011 New York City Center season later this month. Minus 16, arguably the most anticipated company premiere, will find these dancers--noted for majestic technique and entertaining sass--suddenly incorporating things like audience interaction, improvisation, abstract oddities, and a fevered articulation from the inside out that makes their entire bodies bristle with alarming energy.

The piece was taught to the Ailey dancers by Danielle Agami from Naharin's Batsheva Dance Company (Tel Aviv). Its Ailey premiere honors the memory of Mari Kajiwara, Naharin's late wife and an Ailey star for many years.

Yesterday, the company welcomed a select audience for a studio preview of excerpts from Minus 16. While numerous dancers mysteriously huddled in the distance, a soloist treated us to sly, twisty movements that rapidly and endlessly rippled and flicked through his sinewy form from top to bottom, front to back, and side to side. Set to a perky mambo, it was dance as a spreading itch. Gradually, the space accumulated more and more dancers, each rooted in his or her own discrete patch of floor, each obsessed with this movable itch that can never be scratched away.

In another section, a large corps formed a massive semicircle, each dancer set in a wide-legged stance, their movements as propulsive as the recorded Israeli music and vocals. They barked out one of the song's lines each time it came around, and they moved with an unexpected aggression that's going to rock the house. The Ailey crowd will never be the same!

"There's a lot of reaching back and pushing forward," Battle said of his inaugural programming which pays tribute to the Ailey tradition while stretching the performers, young ones and seasoned ones alike, in challenging new directions. Other notable features include the world premiere of Rennie Harris' Home, derived from stories of people living with or affected by HIV, and the company premiere of Paul Taylor's Arden Court.

For information on schedule and ticketing for the upcoming Ailey season (November 30-January 1), click here.

New York City Center
West 55th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, Manhattan
(visitors information, map and directions)

Apply now for Dance & Performance Summer Institute!

Makeda Thomas's Roots & Wings Movement! Dance & Performance Institute is accepting applications now for 2012 Artist Residencies.

The Dance & Performance SUMMER Institute - New Waves! (July 18-August 2, 2012) will bring 50 international dance artists to Trinidad. The two-week Summer Institute offers intensive master classes and workshops in contemporary dance, Caribbean dance, hip-hop, composition and repertory with an outstanding faculty of international dance artists.

Through informal dialogues and Institute programs, participants create community, build connections with other dance professionals, and experience the unique cultural landscape of Trinidad & Tobago. Classes and workshops are held, primarily, at the University of Trinidad & Tobago, Academy for the Performing Arts, held within the National Academy of the Performing Arts in the heart of the nation's capital, Port of Spain.

FACULTY INCLUDE: Makeda Thomas, Chris Walker, Ananya Chatterjea, Dyane Harvey-Salaam, Rennie Harris, Sonja Dumas, Ras Mikey C, and Delton Frank.

Professional dance artists/scholars may apply through October 1, 2011. So, hurry! Click here.

About Makeda Thomas

Feet don't fail: Tamango at Town Hall

Tamango's Urban Tap, a one-night show at Town Hall, was an argument for the revival of '60s values in the new age of the '00s. (Let's bring the people of the world together to share their musical licks and boogie down!) And the production's stage-spanning video projection by "Naj" Jean de Boysson--with live camerawork by Carlos Motta--created such a color-soaked acid trip that viewers should have checked their cough drops for signs of tampering.

Overall, the dancing was swell. Impressively lithe and jazzy, Tamango occupies a quirky galaxy all his own. When NASA finally finds life in outer space, they will probably send some jiveass former jet pilot instead of big-hearted Tamango who'd be the right man to make sense of things. Mistake.

Wing-footed Roxane Butterfly--who can be relied upon to cross refined footwork with funky fluidity--was in top form. Rennie Harris-- head of Philadelphia's PUREMOVEMENT)--made an astonishing surprise guest appearance, portraying a hulking b-boy remote-controlled by Tamango's increasingly challenging tapdancing. Some will remember Vado Diomande, the choreographer and drummer felled by inhaling anthrax from animal skins a few years ago. As Tamango's towering, squawking stiltwalker, he revved up the crowd with his acrobatic performance, drawing gasps, cheers and ululations. Another highlight was a too-brief solo by Colombian harpist Edmar Casteneda whose percussive approach turned the instrument of the angels into something quite devilish and sexy.

Unfortunately, the theater did not serve this show well. The sound was muddy, ruining the potential tastiness of the assembled multicultural band as well as the precision of dancers' tapwork. I had an odd seat--pretty close to the stage but at a diagonal, with heads and amps obscuring my line of vision--but I was probably far from alone in having difficulty seeing dancers' feet. Now, one might think that hearing tapdance would suffice but, for a true lover of the form, seeing precisely how those sounds are made is an integral part of the delight. Nevertheless, when I noticed what a good time Tamango was having throughout the show, I relaxed and felt happy for him and for his collaborators to whom he showed tremendous generosity.

Keep up with Tamango here. And if you haven't yet heard my Body and Soul interview with him, you'll find it here.