A "SPLICE" of life

In an intense, jam-packed season like this--and that's just what's happening on New York's dance scene--it's easy to overlook smaller events and developing artists who might not yet have the bucks and big p.r. power to push them. Keeping an eye on how dance is shaping up takes a lot of running around, but DNA certainly wants you to make it one of your go-to places.

Its latest SPLICE program--which brings together pairs of choreographers with a common thread--concludes today at 3pm with a work apiece by choreographers Joanna Kotze and Benn Rasmussen.

Francis Stansky and Joanna Kotze in "Between You and Me" (Photo: Erika Latta)

Benn Rasmussen and Arletta Anderson in "Black Ground" (Photo: Erika Latta)

Kotze's duet, Between You and Me, sports one of the most elegant and dazzling--and fragile! watch your step!--sets I've seen at DNA, and one that's quite nicely adaptable to DNA's columns. (The design is by Jonathan Allen and Kotze.) She has won some fans for her aggressive, space-grabbing style, but my favorite takeaway was actually something far more subtle--the horizontal ripple that, every now and then, runs through Francis Stansky's shoulders like some mischievous and sensuous contradiction as he trots forward. The demarcated performance spaces--his and hers--eventually give way to theirs, and there are the peripheries in which the energetic dancers veer close to audience, kind of a jolt.

I'm not at all sure I've got the key to Rasmussen's quartet, Black Ground--with its over-sized black books that cushion heads, connect hands and get slammed to the floor--but I do like the pristine visual style with which Rasmussen crafts that mystery, and his ambitious fledgling troupe, Ardent August, has very promising performers in Arletta Anderson, Julia Kelly and Edward Rice.

Final performance today at 3pm. Click here for information and tickets.

And while you're there, you can view photo portraits by multidisciplinary artist Ryutaro Mishima--Before and After the Performance--in DNA's Gallery, now through October 30. Click here for information.

DNA (Dance New Amsterdam)
280 Broadway, 2nd Floor (entrance on Chambers), Manhattan
(map and directions)

Much ado about...something

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Curator and artiste provocateur Tere O’Connor has given the City That Always Seems to Need One More Dance Festival a new festival in which choreographers start off with nothing–no concept, no music, no whatever–and come up with...something. (Funny, I thought that was the way it usually worked. In creativity, isn’t there always that moment right before the initial, germinating idea emerges?) This week and next, DTW’s showing The Nothing Festival (www.dtw.org for details and tickets) with work by Douglas Dunn, HIJACK, Sam Kim and Dean Moss (April 18-21) and Luciana Achugar, Walter Dundervill, Jon Kinzel and Susan Rethorst (April 25-28). On Saturday, April 21, DTW will host a panel discussion with O’Connor and the choreographers (1-4pm).

Opening night’s lineup included:

–the interminable but harmless and attractively danced Zorn’s Lemma, in which Dunn makes like a senescent, disoriented speedskater surrounded by fairies wearing wonderful Mimi Gross costumes,

–Colin Rusch and Angelina Jolie, in which the Minneapolis duo Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder (aka HIJACK), two clever, technically-gifted women who regularly subvert all of that, get a lot of mileage out of and put a lot of mileage into a very different form of social studies class,

--Sam Kim’s Cult, a tedious duet for the choreographer and her collaborator Justine Lynch in which these two–check out that hair, those scary fake nails–appear to be having the sleep-over party from hell, and

–States and Resemblance, a work-in-progress (collaborators/performers: Dean Moss, Ryutaro Mishima and Restu Kusumaningrum) that is such an accomplished, elegant piece of art at this point that you have to ask what the heck more they think they need to do to it. Yeah. Seeing this one dance again is all I want to do right now.

(c)2007, Eva Yaa Asantewaa