The cinematic Sally Silvers: "Actual Size" opens at Roulette

Dylan Crossman and Melissa Toogood
in Sally Silvers's Actual Size
(photo: Karen Robbins)

Of course, if you want dancing most immaculate, you'll do no wrong by turning to artists like Melissa Toogood, Dylan Crossman, Alicia Ohs, Carolyn Hall and Luke Miller. The internal, shifting, watery evanescence of a piece like Actual Size--an hour-long fantasia on a theme by Alfred Hitchcock--requires something steady to grab hold of, even if only for a moment. These dancers take the best of what choreographer Sally Silvers has on offer here--the clear shapeliness of her Hitchcock-evocative movement and interactions--and makes that even more vivid as bodies drift or struggle in a noirish snow globe of evocative sound snippets, atmospheric lighting, and projected imagery including, at times, photos of their oversized, incongrously grinning faces. To borrow words from Bruce Andrews's puckish and self-conscious voiceover text, Actual Size exists as "a closeup of confetti" and a blurring of motives."

Crossman and Toogood
(photo: Karen Robbins)

I think I'm not supposed to say here which avant-garde luminary will be on hand as guest dancer--a different one each night--but you'll find the complete list of all of them right there in your program. For opening night, Silvers "surprised" us by dancing with Pooh Kaye, which introduced a different way of being with Hitchcock--two little scamps or kittens tussling underfoot in a darkened living room, making their own fun, heedless of everyone else's fascination with North by Northwest.

Video: Ursula Scherrer
Text/sound: Bruce Andrews
Music: Michael Schumacher
Lighting: Joe Levasseur
Costumes: Elisabeth Hope Clancy

Actual Size continues through Friday, November 7 with performances at 8pm.

Roulette
509 Atlantic Avenue (corner of 3rd Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

That surprising Sally Silvers

How would you like to see a mess of new dances made from scratch right before your eyes?

How about if I told you some of the makers would be Alexandra Beller, Donald Byrd, Gabri Christa, Mark Dendy, Ishmael Houston-Jones, RoseAnne Spradlin and Susan Rethorst?

And the dancers? How about a lineup that includes Benjamin Asriel, Pat Catterson, Maura Donahue, Alex Escalante, Marjani Forte, Patricia Hoffbauer, Sarah East Johnson, Jonathan Kinzel, Jodi Melnick, Luke Miller, Omagbemi Omagbitse, Antonio Ramos, Sarah Skaggs, Arturo Vidich, Edisa Weeks, Kathy Westwater and many, many more?

Then Sally Silvers has a lot of surprises in store for you--including a "Surprise Big Deal Guest" on Saturday night--at her Surprise Every Time, a two-day festival of "live choreography" at Roulette.

Saturday, September 28, 4:30pm and 8pm

Sunday, September 29, 3:30 pm and 7pm

Two sets per day, 3 half hour projects per set, with different choreographers & performers in each project. Come to one or come to all with special prices for more than one show.

Get complete information here, or visit the Facebook event page.

Roulette

509 Atlantic Avenue (corner of Atlantic and 3rd Avenues), Brooklyn

(map/directions)

Sally Silvers really takes the "Prize"

Andy Horwitz of Culturebot said it all: You really can't beat the lineup of choreographers and theater directors involved with this new project--A Prize Every Time--created by the sage Sally Silvers:

Choreographers: Monica Bill Barnes, Jane Comfort, Pat Catterson, Terry Creach, Wally Cardona, Douglas Dunn, Maura Donohue, Keely Garfield, Neil Greenberg, Patricia Hoffbauer, Sarah East Johnson, Pooh Kaye, Jonathan Kinzel, Bebe Miller, Rosalind Newman, Sarah Skaggs, Gus Solomon, Jr., Muna Tseng, Arturo Vidich and Bill Young

Directors: John Jesurun, Young Jean Lee, Matthew Maguire, Theresa Buchheister, Damien Gray, Dan Safer, Gayle Stahlhuth, Tony Torn, George Emilio Sanchez, Scott Lyons and Jeffrey Jones and others

Hooray!  Read on about A Prize Every Time at Roulette October 12–16.

Belladonna*: "Body of Words"

When the spoken word and the dancing body smack up against each other, what these two vital forces can open up, for our experience and consideration, is not necessarily an easy space. The Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist literary collective, created that dynamic, uneasy space last night at Dixon Place with Body of Words, a fascinating program of four developing works by Lauren Nicole Nixon, Rosamond S. King, Sally Silvers and Alexandra Beller's collaborative troupe.

It was an evening devoted to "performances without boundaries," as its manifesto proclaims, a gathering of "bodies that are both themselves and quoting." The program was curated by Emily Skillings, and Saifan Shmerer moderated the post-performance discussion.

The Beller troupe's finely-wrought, coolly-danced excerpts from other stories gave the most conventional pleasure as an invitation to feel the juicy and intelligent writing of bodies curving, jutting, twisting and springing as they absorb and interpret one another's movements. They seemed to both channel and complicate elusive stories revealed and concealed by the disjointed voice-over text.

Nixon's solo, fresh batch, opened with the charming poet/dancer approachinig the audience, proffering a tray of mini-cupcakes and whispering in each taker's ear. It is a Big Bang of taste (those cupcakes), sound, music (from Brenda Lee to Marvin Gaye and points in between), film clips of Angela Bassett getting vengefully evil in Waiting to Exhale and Nixon's own rambunctious self moving and talking. She is an irrepressible talker, and her piece takes off from her own sense of frustration about secrets, specifically the things family members refuse to say to one another. So much to take in--and Nixon just throws it out there and lets us work the puzzle of it.

King's Spectacle/SPECTACULAR offers a juxtaposition of voguing and minstrelsy, live performance and video, as well as a dead serious, deeply embodied, affecting performance of text that references race and racist objectification. Of the four works, hers is the one in which text and body seem firmly locked together and grounded in purpose and methodology. Spectacle/SPECTACULAR is, at once, satisfying and disturbing, mainly because she happens to be one hell of a performer.

FIX IT--with text and dancing by Sally Silvers (read by Corrine Fitzpatrick) and music by pianist Connie Crothers--makes no attempt to mediate the meeting of elements and make sense of it all. Silvers said it best in the post-performance discussion: "The word 'pinball' comes to mind. Different layers of possible meanings just pinball off each other." And so do the words, the music and her playful dancing.

In my experience, much of this evening demanded that I either hold my ground as viewer--deciding which competing element would get my attention--or simply surrender, in any given moment, to whatever was strongest. When things blended together--as they did in King's solo--I felt that I could settle down and catch my breath, even as I was horrified by what I was hearing. Happily, although sometimes feeling tugged this way or that, I never found myself withdrawing. All of these works will be worth tracking in the future, although I'm most interested in seeing what Nixon and King will do. 

Body of Work also put me in touch with the fact of my own hybridity as a writer in the world of dance, a writer whose understanding of the dance before me starts first in the body and the intuition, not the intellect.

Click here for information on Belladonna*, and here for Dixon Place and its upcoming programs.

Dancingwordwordingdance

Slow-dancing the Poem: Body of Words @ Dixon Place
by DJ McDonald, Culturebot, February 13, 2011

Sally Silvers is out of her mind!

OUT OF YOUR MIND (AND IN YOUR BODY): 

A MOVEMENT WORKSHOP FOR WRITERS

with Sally Silvers

Tuesdays (7-9pm), beginning October 12 for 10 sessions

This is a movement workshop for writers who want to explore creating movement out of words and writing out of movement. No dance, theater, or athletic ability/experience is required. Dancers or choreographers who want to work with language and with untrained movers are also very welcome. We’ll start with a physical warm up designed to fire up your senses, center you in your body, and get your creative juices flowing. We’ll explore ways of writing inspired by movement. We’ll look at people moving on video (from Jerry Lewis, and Robin Williams to sports to break dancing, from Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Dunn, Bill T. Jones to my own dances) with an eye toward new kinds of writing: texts to accompany performance, to combine poetry with documentation, that designs movement or is energized by it. We’ll look at some texts that have inspired or accompanied dance & performance (from Emily Dickinson to Vito Acconci to John Cage, etc.) And we’ll especially look at our own writing to imagine performing it & putting it in motion. Through collaborations, talking about videos, writing and editing together and alone, we’ll create performances that spotlight the experiments that start with our bodies. When you stimulate your body, your creative process comes alive in ways that will amaze you. Let’s open some new horizons for your writing. Did I already say no movement training or dance experience necessary? Wear or bring comfortable clothes & shoes.

Sally Silvers is writer/ choreographer who has been making dances and texts for 30 years. Her first group work featured non-dancer poets. She also currently dances for Yvonne Rainer. 

The workshop fee is $350, which includes a one year Sustaining Poetry Project membership and tuition for any and all spring and fall classes. Reservations are required due to limited class space, and payment must be received in advance. Caps on class sizes, if in effect, will be determined by workshop leaders. 

If you would like to reserve a spot in any of the classes, you can sign-up here. You can also email us at info@poetryproject.org, or call 212-674-0910.

Silvers and friends advance feminism

For the closing performance event of the Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism Conference at CUNY, Sally Silvers will be improvising, creating a live choreography event and collaborating with very special guests:

Alejandra Martorell (dancer)

Peter Sciscioli (dancer)

Julie Patton (poet/vocalist/performance artist)

Marina Rosenfeld (live electronics)

Silvers writes:

"I will be choreographing/directing Alejandra and Peter in a gender focused phrase that I will make live and on the spot as if we are meeting in the rehearsal studio for the first time.

"Marina and Julie will be commenting--musically, vocally--to the development of the choreography as well as interacting with me improvising while the dancers are working things out.

"There are three other poetry, theater, music groups on the program and our group will be going second."

Friday, September 25, 6:30-8:30pm
All events are free and open to the public.

CUNY Graduate Center, Elebash Recital Hall
365 Fifth Avenue (34-35 Streets)

For full conference details, visit the following sites:

http://www.belladonnaseries.org/adfempobios.html
http://www.belladonnaseries.org/adfemposchedule.html

A great, big Yes!

Yessified!--by Sally Silvers & Dancers at Performance Space 122--is, as advertised, a dance about race, not racism. That's clear. Which is probably one reason I had such a good time watching it, although, at times, I found myself drifting in and out of certain segments where the apparently infinite Silvers stream of inventiveness got to be a bit too much.

But that didn't happen often. For the most part, Silvers and her multicultural fellow dancers--Javier Cardona, Liz Filbrun, Alan Good, Sara Beth Higgins, Takemi Kitamura, Alejandra Martorell, Miriam Parker and Keith Sabado--use their bodies to nonverbally argue for America as a place where races and cultures are already vitally and inextricably interwoven.

Silvers begins from base camp--from her life as a Appalachian-born white woman (who questions what white really means) and from her career in postmodern dance. Surrounding herself with a corps of prancing balletomodern sylphs, she clearly identifies as misfit and mutt. From there, she introduces her theme of the continuous, interlocked twirling of yin and yang and, from that foundational twirling, begins spinning her world-wide spider web of quirky and constantly readjusted interconnections.

Yessified! boasts numerous delicious duets and ensemble numbers and one adorable solo for Sabado. Everyone works very, very hard, especially since every moment is simply chock-full of stuff. This is the most stuffed hour of dance I've ever seen. I think Silvers might have been trying to convey the sense of pace and crowdedness of the city or, beyond that, the bigness and Whitmanesque complexity of America.

And any dance set to a score that--among many, many other rich things--evokes the likes of Otis Redding and Sam and Dave? Well, Sally, I'm there. The vibrant sound score conjured up by Bruce Andrews and Michael Schumacher--with its dissonance and its classic, perennial soul--is one of the most satisfying achievements of this season.

Yessified!--a joyful discovery--ends perfectly, just as I envisioned and wanted.

See Yessified! now through this Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 6:30pm. Tickets at Performance Space 122, or call 212-352-3101.

Catching up with New York

Back from the powerful earth of Arizona, I managed to haul my jetlagged self to Hoofers' House at The Kitchen (curated by Rashida Bumbray and MC-ed by Jason Samuels Smith) on Friday night and to La MaMa Moves Festival's "Dancing Divas" evening on Saturday evening (curated by Nicky Paraiso and Mia Yoo and featuring works by Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick, Pam Tanowitz, Barbara Mahler, Sally Silvers and Sara Rudner). Lovely, sensitive and interesting moments were in good supply at La MaMa Annex, but the mamadiva who moved us most had to be Rudner, one of my dance-crushes from way back, whose Positions--The All Star Variation was a true, openhearted gigglefest. I loved its extravagant size, its combination of the serene and the silly, its total lack of taking itself seriously. My kind of extravaganza with amusing performances from John Scott and Chris Yon among a bevy of downtown dance beauties, Rudner among them. Look for my Hoofers' House review on DanceMagazine.com sometime down the line.