"Y" premiered by RoseAnne Spradlin at New York Live Arts

Y is perhaps a chromosome. Or maybe the fork in a choreographic road, a place of duality and uncertainty. In any case, in all its moody sensuality, Y comes to us this week from award-winning choreographer RoseAnne Spradlin who is the 2017-19 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts.

My initial reading of Annie Heath, Ainesh Madan, Athena Malloy, Claire Westby, Connor Voss, Doug Lecours, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes and Thomas Welsh-Huggins, as they streamed down NYLA's aisles and spread across the stage, was of eight dynamic bodies serving as building blocks piled up and tumbling over one another. Weighted, tilted and propelled, they enlivened the air around them with a wonderful freedom. A few mics, stationed close to the floor, captured the sounds of their footfalls--a sounding that registering presence and marking a place for oneself. I pondered how the distance from viewers or the type of footwear or the cover of music or the nature of technique (as in, say, ballet) usually masks this aspect of the labor, and assertiveness, of dancers.

Dim glow from a row of lights placed low to the floor gave the space an eerie, somewhat illicit atmosphere. A torso and pelvis might suddenly and broadly undulate like a creature giving birth or glide over a partner's supine body. The pale outer costumes dancer Voss designed for his colleagues give only illusory coverage.

Stripping down to undies and near- and full-nudity featured heavily later on in the hour-or-so piece as did images of buttocks openly groped with no shame on the faces staring back at the audience--or, really, any display of feeling--as partners embraced. It's interesting that, when the dance was over and performers appeared for their bow, it seemed only men had had time to slip on a bit of clothing. This might mean nothing to Spradlin. It might be a coincidence. I have no idea. But it is curious.

If we always ask ourselves--and we should--what manner of world have we entered when we enter a dance, this world seems transitional and perhaps reflects something of our own transitional time. It is brazen and discomforting. We can take either road branching away from that Y. Which road will it be? And why?

There is, as yet, no answer to that question.

Production and sound design: Glen Fogel
Lighting design: Roderick Murray
Audio engineer and sound design: Ben Manley
Costume design: Connor Voss
Dramaturgy: Susan Mar Landau

Y continues through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

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RoseAnne Spradlin marks her Joyce spot with "X"

L-r: Dancers Asli Bulbul, Connor Voss and Kayvon Pourazar
of RoseAnne Spradlin/Performance Projects
(photo: Glen Fogel)

 A quadrille is an 18th century dance performed in a rectangular configuration and viewed from four sides. To kick off its 2016/17 season, The Joyce Theater will be transformed for the NY Quadrille, a sensational two-week engagement created by renowned choreographer Lar Lubovitch and commissioned by The Joyce featuring a specially constructed platform stage designed to create viewing from four sides. Following through with the spirit of “four,” Lubovitch has selected four exciting choreographers—Pam Tanowitz, RoseAnne Spradlin, Tere O’Connor, and Loni Landon to create contemporary dance works on four sides. Each quadrille will be performed on its own program, with each program performed four times over the course of the two weeks. This transformation of The Joyce is sure to challenge audiences to embrace a new concept of the theater’s physical space and to appreciate the artistry of the four choreographers chosen to participate in this exciting event.

 --for promotional material for NY Quadrille

Lar Lubovitch's design and curatorial experiment, NY Quadrille, has landed on The Joyce Theater like an alien mothership scorching circles into a cornfield.

I hear that square performance platform now eating part of the regular stage area and part of the regular audience seating cost the Joyce a lot of coins. My first sight of it--from the vantage point of one of the remaining front-facing seats--made me think I must have overshot the mark and ended up a few avenues away at The Kitchen. Or maybe really overshot and ended up at BAM Fisher. To be honest, this was both exciting and unsettling. And that disturbing ambivalence only intensified when I saw what RoseAnne Spradlin had created for her turn at the quadrille--X, a trio for contemporary dance stars Asli Bulbul, Connor Voss and Kayvon Pourazar, all of whom deserve a hefty pay raise.

Kudos to Lubovitch for giving multiple Bessie-winning Spradlin her Joyce debut. NY Quadrille, on the whole, is an intentional risk. One Times writer, previewing the two-week series, actually called out the Joyce for habitual "staleness," and Lubovitch's initiative certainly throws open a new set of windows. But how will it play with the typical Joyce-goer?

I don't know how Tanowitz fared or how O'Connor and Landon will fare during their runs, but dance press seemed to outnumber civilians at Spradlin's opening night. And, yes, I'm wildly exaggerating, but you get the picture. Someone in the Joyce lobby wondered aloud if City Center's more affordable, aesthetically-accessible Fall for Dance might have drawn the usual Joyce fans uptown.

The evening did not go easy on those who took up the challenge. Spradlin's audience grew quite fidgety--in one man's case, openly surly. Even early on, people started bailing out of the show. And with Joe Levasseur's lights keeping dancers and their gawkers in constant view of one another, those departures were not exactly subtle.

X deserved better, certainly its dancers did, maintaining prodigious concentration and composure even in the face of one man crying out, "Just stop!" But, hey, I'm a downtown girl. I've sat through gnarlier (and less rewarding) stuff. Spradlin is kind of my jam.

Still, even for me, the hour-and-change with X was not without struggle. The audience annoyed me. A lot. I did not want to see or hear them. Glen Fogel's sound work reminded me too often of the less-decorous aspects and processes of life in a body. The repeated and repeated and repeated use of "Love's Theme"--Love Unlimited Orchestra's era-evoking instrumental--got under my skin. The dancers' stately, ritualized tasks of lifting and shifting and rearranging their gymnastic bars--suggesting, by rapid turns of association, heavy gym weights, portable ballet barres, monkey bars and barricades--eventually wore me out, too.

Yet these X-cesses read like a poem meant to burrow its way under the viewer's skin. A continuous push-and-pull between what cannot be easily controlled--human bodies in the wild--and the overlaying, controlling law of structure. Shifts and returns, both unexpected and, of course, expected. Voss's supple, sylph-like form rendered strangely weighty and awkward by Pourazar lifting and handling. Pourazar's unexpected reverse of this pattern--all floaty, slidey grace as he slips his body around Voss's with just a lightly-firm pressure from Voss's hand. Metal rods that, straddled first by Bulbul then by the others, combine the utilitarian with the suggestive. Sniper maneuvers mimicked, with dead seriousness, over disco sound: I'm never, ever gonna quit/'Cause quittin' ain't my stick.

Pourazar, Voss and Bulbul don't quit--even when some viewers do--'cause quittin' ain't their stick. With and for Spradlin, they refuse to compromise for our love but work damn hard for our respect.

X continues through October 2. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
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Daria Faïn and Gillian Walsh share a Gibney DoublePlus

Daria Faïn, above and below, in is as if alone
(photos: Alex Escalante)

Gibney Dance Center's DoublePlus performance series, curated by invited dance artists, continues to fascinate. Last evening's show, repeating tonight and through Saturday at 7:30pm, presented the work of Daria Faïn and Bessie-nominee Gillian Walsh, curated by RoseAnne Spradlin.

Walsh, in Hasbro™ Procedures took the measure of the theater's bare space, treating it as the board of a kind of board game involving regular and formally regulated repositioning of game pieces/ dancers, it would seem, in accord with a script consisting of numbers that the dancers softly recite as they execute affectless steps, hops, lunges, shifts of weight and redirections. Notably, Walsh and her three dancers--Maggie Cloud, Mickey Mahar and Nicole Daunic--mostly do not face audience members; they never directly engage them. Nevertheless, some watchers might find themselves swiftly reeled in by this curious play.

Where, for instance, is the number 3? When I gradually became aware of its absence in the litany, I listened hard for it, subsequently hearing it intoned, I believe, only once. I have no idea what relevance that absence and momentary insertion might have, but I note it here to show that there are ways to get caught up in the gentle and esoteric nature of the game. Awareness comes along in unassuming moments like that. I have no idea what other bits and bytes of information my conscious perception might have missed.

Scenes from Gillian Walsh's Hasbro™ Procedures (photos: Alex Escalante) 

What a pleasure, what a revelation, to witness Faïn performing solo. The choreographer--who, along with poet-architect Robert Kocik, usually plays with big choruses of moving vocalists/vocalizing movers--here inhabits a roomy space and a dance on her own, and she is beautiful.

The piece, is as if alone, seems like a rite of emergence, starting with husky, dry sounds issuing from Faïn's mouth as she very slowly walks along the dance mirror at one side of the space, solo but doubled in the glass. Dressed in a long, silvery skirt and black halter top, under the cooling gleam of Kryssy Wright's elegant lighting, she looks both severe and glamorous. The feeling is "Take this as seriously as I do." She starts to sound like the north wind--serious, indeed.

She pinches, stretches, coughs and pumps syllables and vowels, enjoys a few variations on the word "wow," her arching, crouching body expressing itself in voice and enigmatic gesture. A more dancey segment finds perhaps her remembering to explore the interior of the theater's space, the middle space. There she shows us the beauty of going off center. Her maturity and her way with timing, with pacing, with shaping, lends itself to grace and power and strangeness. There are spectral visitations from Graham and, I suspect, infusions from the East--Japanese theater, Sufi spinning. And sometimes, a sentence might arise, fully formed, from Kocik's text.

With no room, nothing could have gone wrong for the better.

Like the absence/presence of the number 3 in Walsh's game, these words hook into me and stay.

For more information and tickets for this program and future weeks of DoublePlus shows, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis
Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
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New York Live Arts: RoseAnne Spradlin opens world premiere

RoseAnne Spradlin presents g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title) 
at New York Live Arts (photo: Ian Douglas)

It became quite clear, during parts of g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title), a world premiere by RoseAnne Spradlin at New York Live Arts, that the choreographer fully intended to keep on keepin' on. In her space-time groove. Doing it. Over and over. For whole audacious blocks of time.

And, of course, that meant that her dancers--Natalie Green, Rebecca Warner, devynn emory, Athena Malloy, Saúl Ulerio and, to a lesser extent, Asli Bulbul--would live within that groove, too, body and soul, until crawling bands of white light revealed the slick sweat of their staring faces.

And that set a challenge on the rest of us as well. Even to simply watch this hour of dance is to invest in it as Spradlin requires: in for a penny, in for a pound.

Here is a structure that, in theory, should produce tedium and the fidgeties but instead produces sparks of electricity and even wonder.

Spradlin, in her opening-night post-performance conversation with Tere O'Connor, had few theoretical/philosophical things to say about her process in making g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title), which, for my taste, was more than okay. She seems intuitive and practical about her practice rather than analytical. In trying things out, she finds and makes sense; she finds and makes the dance. What she has whipped up here is such a witchy spell, that when, at the end of things, it just sort of evaporates, lifts away from the stage without concluding punctuation--O'Connor called the end "profoundly uneventful"--you know things really haven't ended as far as you're concerned.

Time keeps on slipping into the future, dangerously alive because Spradlin and dancers have transmitted something into the viewer's nervous system.

It starts, in all innocence, with Green and Warner, dressed in shiny, transparent dresses, bounding and spinning about, arms flaring, like delicate but restless sprites--visions out of some ballet with a little Duncan or Loie Fuller touches mixed in. These creatures look pretty and inconsequential and familiar. (We are not yet afraid.) And, of course, they rewind and retract their steps at times, as you would imagine flitting sprites might do. Jeffrey Young's music--performed live by the composer and musicians tucked nearly out of sight at the side of the space--brings to mind the drone of flying insects or perhaps the sound that vibrating wings might make, undetected by our ears, as a hummingbird bird sups at a flower.

The blank white wall would create a sense of untouched space if it were not for the hovering presence of an enigmatic structure--Glen Fogel's kinetic sculpture Something (black)--that dominates one portion of the space throughout the piece and casts a shadow like a huge onion sliced in half. This sculpture will eventually rotate, pulse little streams of amber light and tease one's peripheral vision as dancers dance or film scenes run along the rest of the wall.

The sprites flit on, past the point at which you might logically expect a shift, and this is the first indication that Spradlin means to mess with time--and with us. The next comes when the dancers exit, and a projected film has ample time and space almost all to itself; there still is that sculpture over there, after all.

The film, a 1931 melodrama from China re-edited by Spradlin, races by in silence, its original ninety minutes of dramatic action and florid emotion compressed into a mere nine. Still, there is a lot of time in that nine. A lot. And we pick up its information, though, just not consciously. We might find ourselves peeking at Fogel's sculpture, now and again, or peeking at the film in order to keep an eye on that sculpture and understand it better. But, whatever our choice, we're absorbing data and rhythms from two distinct channels simultaneously.

Spradlin moves in for the kill with what she has called the "kicking section." (I love that while O'Connor calls it the "battement section," she persists in saying "kicking.") An enhanced corps of sprite-like beings--Green and Warner now joined by emory, Malloy and Ulerio--move about in synchronized step-kick-step-turn patterns that advance and swirl along the floor. Their basic steps, with percussive footfalls, gradually give way to directional and interweaving variations that, over long duration, allow occasional individual accents, such as a dancer raising a hand to her temple or to his throat or loosening her hair. These simple, momentary human touches remind us that industrial, even military, repetition is performed here by actual people. In each dancer, in different ways, the inner life of the body shows up, reveals something about itself and what it feels and wants in the moment.

By the time Spradlin is finished with this section of the dance--an 18-minute stretch--it is impossible to escape the entrainment of that sound of feet striking the floor. She's got us.

Original score for live performance: Jeffrey Young (composer, violin, live electronics), Hannah Levinson (viola), Mara Mayer (bass clarinet) and Lisa Dowling (bass)

Sculpture and projected visuals: Glen Fogel

Film re-editing: RoseAnne Spradlin

Lighting: Stan Pressner / Ben Hagen

Costumes: Walter Dundervill

g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title) runs through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Related programming:

Thursday, October 9: Come Early Conversation: Carla Peterson--Director of Florida State University's Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, MANCC--in conversation with RoseAnne Spradlin

Saturday, October 11, 1-4pm: Shared Practice: Process-focused workshop with RoseAnne Spradlin. $20, advance purchase recommended.

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

Where ideas live and move

Dr. Oliver Sacks (left) in conversation with Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, New York Live Arts (photo by Ian Douglas). Jones says of the dance community, "I wish we were more curious in the big discussion."

New York Live Arts is where thinking and movement meet the future. -- Bill T. Jones

For a healthy, viable future for the art of dance in American society, that art must meet its potential public--a public that is increasingly diverse; a public continuously plugged into numerous and growing sources of information and entertainment; a public caught up, ready or not, by issues of climate change, malfunctioning government, ruthless abuse of children and women, the devaluation of labor, the rise and risks of cyber-technology and more real world concerns and disasters.

New York Live Arts' visionary festival--launched this season as Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, in celebration of the 80th birthday of the great neurologist and author--establishes a toehold for this turbulent world-at-large in one of our city's historic, beloved venues for innovative, contemporary dance. I salute this integration of the outside with the inside and, personally, it tickles me to enjoy the possibility of taking in so much of what has always moved my life--from artistic research to scientific inquiry, from informed citizenship to activism--in one convenient location. The mix--which is not strictly new but is newly presented here at the famously former Dance Theater Workshop--excites me and offers hope.

Some of it is just plain fun: Watching a video of NASA astronauts playfully demonstrating how the absence of gravity radically alters execution of everyday movements, while their very funny colleague, Marsha Ivins, shares her own experiences (panel on Disembodiedness: Body Image & Proprioception) or waiting for steam and F-bombs to shoot from artist Miguel Gutierrez while a philosopher torturously labors to define what dance supposedly is and is not (panel on Minding the Dancing Body). Gutierrez  knows that, when it comes to research in consciousness, dance--a mode of perception, as he defines it--has been excelling at this work for a long time now.

Marsha Ivins, retired veteran of five NASA Space Shuttle missions

Imagine spinning and never getting dizzy. 

Or moving a 700lb object with just a touch of your fingers. 

For more fun with zero g, check this out.

Dance artists have information, strategies and even wisdom that the rest of us could benefit from. Jones seems bent on getting this word out to society as well as making some beneficial connections for the dance field. At times, the dialogue seems a little stilted, a little awkward and even prickly, but as long as the various parties are in the same room, talking, who knows what good might come of it?

On the Minding the Dancing Body panel, choreographer RoseAnne Spradlin spoke of making dances as a way to help people see what is usually hard to see, a purpose that Alva Noë and Colin McGinn--the philosophers on hand--readily identified as the goal of their discipline, too. Later that evening, Donna Uchizono's new dance--presented along with her 1999 trio, State of Heads--illustrated this mission.

Donna Uchizono in Out of Frame (photo by Ian Douglas)

Out of Frame, commissioned for the Live Ideas fest, takes as its inspiration the young Dr. Sacks' observations in 1969 of eighty people who survived the 1920s worldwide occurrence of a brain inflammation called encephalitis lethargica. Working from Sacks' accounts of these "recovered" patients in his renowned book, Awakenings, Uchizono distills the characteristic lingering distortions of body, personality and perception of time and space, even persistent immobility, into a solo performed on a tall ladder in the middle of a bare stage. On its own, this staging says so much--the rarity of the condition, the isolation of those who cannot look or function according to the norm, the extremity and precariousness of their situation even under medication, the mystery of a disease whose cause and prospects for resurgence remain unknown.

The solo is strangely beautiful and bizarre and fascinating; one of Uchizono's initial images presents her hand as if it were the clenched bulb of a carnivorous flower or a slowly rippling sea creature. The piece traps memory and heightened sensations within an altered state in which the body might not be perceived as a stable or singular entity...or even one's own. Josh Higgason's video layers an image of the dancer's body onto her flesh, helping us see what it's like to feel that something is very much, well, off.

Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks continues through Sunday evening, April 21. For information on all remaining events--including the encore of Donna Uchizono's dance program on Saturday at 4pm--click here.

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

Two looks at nudity

The Psychology of Nakedness
by Jonah Lehrer, Wired, November 30, 2011 

Naked Choreography
by David Parker, DanceMagazine.com, January 2012

Spradlin's 2010 mentoring group for choreographers

Choreographer RoseAnne Spradlin announces a new session of her NYC Choreographers Mentoring Group:

Saturdays, 10am to 12:30pm

January 23
January 30
February 6
February 13
February 27
March 6

plus a one-hour private consult

The group will address professional and personal issues faced by NYC-based choreographers in the development of their work and in navigating "the scene."

Price: $300

For more information, email RoseAnne here or contact her on Facebook.