What we have in Commons: The Commons Choir at BRIC

Daria Faïn
in her mayday heyday parfait at BRIC House
Below: members of The Commons Choir
(photo: Ryan Muir) 

You find yourself surrounded by resonant sneezes, explosive farts, otherwise unidentifiable big or more subtle expulsions of air from a multitude of gesticulating bodies.

No. Not the subway system.

It's the sonic opening of mayday heyday parfait, a new 90-minute work presented by The Commons Choir at BRIC House. This large, multifaceted, multicultural ensemble, co-directed by choreographer Daria Faïn and poet Robert Kocik, represents artists spanning disciplines from dance to poetry to song.

For the first several minutes, the audience stands in the middle of the performance space with performers darting or weaving through them. Every sound has a clear launchpad within a moving body. You watch--and feel--it being produced. To experience this at maximum intensity, keep your eyes on Faïn's clenched movements. But every dancer contributes to a variable soundscape that pulls the standing, slightly shifting audience together into one organism--like a forest with sounds whistling through its canopy and rustling through its understory.

After a time, the watchers can take seats on the space's perimeter, and the story continues with words spoken by a man, a woman and a young girl. In his opening remarks, the man mentions Brooklyn--BRIC's home, of course, and a symbol of historic, if threatened, class and cultural diversity. I forget now what the woman said--and my scrawled notes are of minor help--but the youngster wrapped up by thrice intoning three words, like a mantra and admonition: Change what happens.

Those words combine a sense of inevitability (shit happens and will happen) with a directive: Do your magick. The ensuing performance continues the interdependency of physical movement and vocalization testifying for the body as a site of individuality, intelligence, will, communication and meaningful interaction. The vocalizing is varied. Dancer Saúl Ulerio, for instance, gradually rolls onto his side and front while quietly emitting a kind of musical moan--un-ing. At other moments, strings of words like "uninhabitable worst-case scenario invaluable" float by in an enigmatic stream.

As the movers move, the arrangements look like drifting patchworks of individual bodies doing individual things and putting sound into a site, and that seems okay because no one is impinging on the space of another. I wrote--and think I actually heard someone say--"You can only be who you are." Co-existence and working together do not render us all exactly the same. Cannot. Should not. How could it? Why would it?

Sometime later, Ulerio says something else that sticks with me: "That which I can't know about myself is you."

Writing my notes, I was one of a handful of people who did not opt to reassemble in the middle of the space for the work's resolution and, once again, become bathed in sound. This time, people sat in a large, round bunch like herded cows, and they were ringed by the performers, vocal music rising, falling, burbling, reverberating. At the end, the performers announced their names: Martita Abril, Massimiliano Balduzzi, Ilona Bito, Yoon Sun Choi, Lydia Chrisman, Ichi Go, Alvaro Gonzales Dupuy, Antígona González, Michael Ingle, Aram Jibilian, Anaïs Maviel, Jean Carla Rodea, Saúl Ulerio, Drew Devero, Cecilia Woolfolk and Fay Victor.


Daria Faïn: Co-director and choreographer
Robert Kocik: Co-director and librettist
Darius Jones: Composer
Anaïs Maviel: Composer & Musical Director
Tuce Yasak: Light Designer
AshakaGivens: Costume Design
Eternal Polk: Video Design
Dov Tiefenback: Sound Design
Saúl Ulerio: Assistant choreographer

mayday heyday parfait continues through Sunday, November 12 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BRIC Arts Media
647 Fulton Street (entrance on Rockwell Place), Brooklyn
(directions)

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Strolling with Faïn and Kocik and "E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E"

Somehow I never before considered that a preamble could be visualized--embodied, really--as an actual milling about of performers before a show begins. Such is the pre-ambulating perambulation at New York Live Arts this week where, after the historic Hurricane Sandy postponement, Commons Choir/Daria Faïn & Robert Kocik finally got a chance to open E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E.

As the audience enters the theater, the aisles seem clogged with extra bodies just standing there at the entrances to rows of seating. It turns out that they're members of choreographer Faïn and poet/librettist Kocik's Commons Choir hovering over you and casting pleasant gazes at you and one another, maybe going up or down a few steps. A little unnerving, irritating even--although, as time and the piece goes on, this gets more normalized and is nothing compared to their startling reactive outbursts of movement in at least one row that I could see (reserved for a few of these choir members) in the middle of the piece.

E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E spills up from a stage filled with people of notable racial and ethnic diversity into the audience because--as I understand it, and I'm not saying I've got it right--it is meant to grab all of us up in its experiment. It is about us--the human race--and how we got to be as we are, where we might have taken a particular unfortunate turn and how, if we retraced our steps and looked at the origin of language, breaking it down into its component bits and sounds, we might want to start fresh, we might deconstruct and construct new structures, we might do things very differently. Program notes describe this work as "an epic, town hall musical that calls upon a panoply of reparative tones, tunes and intentions to plead the case for a more compassionate economy, proposing, with Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, money as everyone's." A hybrid of continuous movement and vocalization, the ensemble work is, the creators say, performed in the idiom of "Re-English," since English might be "an inherently commercial, mercenary, discursive, duplicitous tongue," one that they have cleverly attempted to "re-tune, detox and de-delude."

I don't pretend to understand the demarcation, differentiation and meaning of the line up of four acts (here identified as "amulets") and their so-called "(intermission)"--which happened exactly when?, since we went straight through the work's too-lengthy-feeling 90+ minutes--or who represented the characters named in the notes--"Uzume," "Souffleur," "Perineum, "Thrasymachus," et al. But Faïn and Kocik's imagination, particularly with words, charms the hell out of me. The work breathes like one organism formed of many individual ones that rise and fall in levels of intensity, organize themselves alone or in the company of others, remain stationary or move, perform clear, if enigmatic, seed sounds and simple gestures, sometimes orchestrated into seamless rhythmic sense and harmony.

Although everyone--and this is a big cast, including Faïn and Kocik--figures into E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E, the work contains singular moments of transcendent boldness. Larissa Velez-Jackson, who incessantly wields then breaks her wooden saber, triggers shrieks of laughter from the crowd, but then you sense that she is skillfully drawing this harsh music out of them like a conductor or, perhaps, a shaman. Levi Gonzalez hangs onto monologues with heroic earnestness while shrinking and scrunching his body in various punishing ways. Faïn goes right up to Peter Jacobs, a self-contained and self-assured Ayn Rand type, with forthright, gentle and, always, precisely applied movement remedies.

A vague memory from the 60's of anti-war poster showing a a rifle-bearing soldier being offered a flower stays with me. There's a whiff of this innocence in E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E, and something of the (for worse or for better) foolhardiness of it. But to watch Faïn with Jacobs, just in those moments, is to let go and fall in love with her entire project.

Faïn and Kocik's performers demonstrate palpable unity and commitment. In addition to Velez-Jackson, Gonzalez and Jacobs, they are Christina Andrea, Maximilian Balduzzi, CC Chang, Hazuki Homma, Whitney Hunter, Aram Jibilian, Dora Koimtzi, Mina Nishimura, Jaime Ortega, Peter Sciscioli, Kensaku Shinohara, Samita Sinha, Emily Skillings, Ben Spatz, Despina Stamos, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Julie Ulehia, Saúl Ulerio and Katherine A. Young who also composed the instrumental music performed by Jen Baker (trombone) and Sam Sowyrda (percussion). Lighting is by Carrie Wood.

E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E has two remaining performances--tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

There will be a post-performance Stay Late Discussion this evening, moderated by Carla Peterson, Artistic Director of New York Live Arts.

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

Poets with your pie

Movement Research Spring Festival 2011

presents

Poetry Dinner

Sunday, June 5 (7-10pm)

Four & Twenty Blackbirds
439 3rd Avenue (at 8th Street)
Gowanus, Brooklyn
F or G train to 4th Avenue/9th Street
M or R train to 9th street/4th Avenue

Four poets intimately related to dance and performance read during a three-course visual feast created by Chef Sam Richman and Four & Twenty Blackbirds.

Readings by Willa Carroll, Robert Kocik, Thom Donovan and Eva Yaa Asantewaa.

Wine generously provided by Jenny & François Selections.

Very limited space. Buy tickets early! Click here.

Singing the body prosodic

Movement Research presents
Two PROSODIC BODY events

The Prosodic Body - Language as a Somatic Practice

HOW DO WE KNOW WHERE WE ARE AND WHAT TO SAY AND DO BY USING THE SAME BRAIN ALL AT ONCE?

Monday, May 4, 5pm -- Free

Judson Memorial Church Gymnasium
55 Washington Square South, Manhattan

Conceived by and moderated by Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik

As part of the Studies Project Series, choreographer Daria Fain and poet Robert Kocik will engage neuroscientist André A. Fenton in a dialogue about the multiple types of memory and the mental representation of space and experience. In particular, the focus will fall on the brain's polyglotism--the coordination of multiple processes by rapid 'switching' or 'doubling up.' The dialogue will wend its way into a consideration of language. Perhaps some light will be shed on the unanswerable question 'is language acquired or hardwired?' Kocik will trace a broader physiology of language by involving the hypothalamus, glands and organs. Faïn will attempt to extend the findings into movement by experimentally acting out the questions and conundrums surrounding the hippocampus as presented by Fenton.

André A. Fenton is a neuroscientist at SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn. His research focuses on spatial memory and the hippocampus as model structure for understanding all parts of the brain. His SUNY team is responsible for the recent discovery of a very promising 'memory molecule'.

Movement Research at the Judson Church

The Phoneme Choir
by Daria Faïn Robert Kocik
Monday, May 4, 8pm -- Free

Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South, Manhattan

The Phoneme Choir is an orchestrated performance of the forty phonemes that are the English language's most basic structural units. Speech sounds such as vowels and consonants are examples of phonemes. In performance, The Phoneme Choir will bring the subtleties of our language to life through a musical composition of sound, rhythm, unison, and discord. As philosopher Rudolf Steiner wrote, “The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end.” This is the second public presentation of The Phoneme Choir, a work that Faïn and Kocik are developing through the Movement Research Artist In Residence. Faïn and Kocik conducted a series of four workshops leading up to this performance.

Faïn and Kocik: transformative space

Daria Faïn (choreographer) and Robert Kocik (architect/sculptor/poet) have had the good fortune to visit and soak up the atmosphere of ancient healing sites on the isle of Amorgos in Greece. Their new work, The Extent to Which, evokes the resonant geometry and history of the temples, baths and ampitheaters in which the Greeks cleansed bodymindsoul. As part of The Prosodic Body--Faïn and Kocik's overarching project--The Extent to Which re-links art and health in our modern-day awareness with an aim to create true transformation, not mere spectacle.

As spectacle, though, Extent has its beauties and its intensities, certainly not separate from its purpose. Performed inside and around an open enclosure of plexiglas and wood, with a stream of increasingly primal sounds both remote and startingly near, the hour-long work abstracts the experience of sitting in the ancient structures and witnessing the ritual arts. In one captivating passage, we watch dancers orbit the center of the performance space, and one another in shifting arrangements and pathways, with their arms and hands forming various hieratic gestures and their bare feet making a soft, dry, shuffling sound.

Another segment takes a less soothing approach as dancers pitch painted rocks at the barriers. There's a fascinating theatrical tension between the crash of rocks smacking into plexiglas--not far from audience members looking on from risers on those sides of the space--and the total control of dancers who, though dashing precariously around one another, toss those rocks with the power and disciplined, studied grace of Olympian athletes.

At the end of the performance, I felt more than a little spacey, as if I had been transported to another world.

The Extent to Which, a joint presentation of Danspace Project and CPR--Center for Performance Research, features Faïn's troupe, Human Behavior Explorers: Benjamin Asriel, Charlotte Gibbons, Alexandra Martorell, Valerie Samulski and Peter Sciscioli. Other members of the collaborative team include Rodrick Murray (lighting), Matt Dick (costumes), Michelle Nagai (music), and Kenta Nagai (live sound performer). The show runs through Sunday with two performances tonight, Friday and Saturday (7pm and 9pm) and a 3pm performance on Sunday.

CPR
361 Manhattan Avenue, Williamburg, Brooklyn
Just a short walk from the L train at Graham Avenue

Information and reservations or 718-715-1500

Below, in the precious dark

I recommend The Prosodic Body: Building A Perineum, the new project that Daria Fain (choreographer) has been presenting with Robert Kocik (poet/architect) in association with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space program.

Yesterday--after getting an orientation to the project--I spent an hour in Fain and Kocik's Anechoic Darkroom, a comfortable, tiny womb they've created below ground in a bank vault in a Wall Street skyscraper. Imagine that!

Sealed off from light and stretched out on a bench with two pillows beneath my head, I opened my eyes to the velvety darkness and mentally chanted Hindu mantras to calm my racing brain and to fully open to the experience. I heard the subway rumbling nearby and had a profound and abiding sense of the verticality of the building. Although I maintained awareness of my body--especially the beating of my heart--all sense of my body's boundaries vanished. At once, I felt aligned with the building and its nervous system and protected and nurtured by the dark. I remembered that some years ago I had experimented with using psychic practices in pitch darkness and found that very powerful.

Fain imposes no directions about what to do in this chamber. Each visitor is on his or her own, and everyone's experience will be unique. Once my brain settled down, I merely enjoyed relaxing into the dark, sensing the faint odor of its wall's wool padding, and connecting to the reality of the building. On two occasions, clairvoyant and clairsentient information came to me, and I experienced a sensation of my legs and feet being stretched from within, followed by the immediate relief of one foot's chronic ache.

I lost conscious sense of time in the darkroom, but I'm used to waking up in the morning on time without an alarm clock. So, no surprise: at a certain point, my body suddenly signaled that it was time to shift around, stretch and sit up. No sooner did I do that than I heard Fain making small noises outside the chamber so that she would not startle me. Soon after, she asked permission to open the door, and she interviewed me about my experiences. We chatted about the creative and healing potential of this chamber and various parallels with ritual practices across cultures.

Sorry to say, this darkroom will be dismantled after tomorrow, Friday, but Fain and Kocik hope to find ways to further develop their work with it and with other aspects of The Prosodic Body.

Click here for complete details about the Anechoic Darkroom. You can also schedule time in the darkroom and receive the full schedule of activities of the Prosodic Body--including a talk this evening at 6:30--by calling 718-450-1356 or emailing humanbehaviorexplorers@earthlink.net. All events require reservation.