Imprinting (Dan)space: Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha

Left: Tendayi Kuumba (photo: Angie Vasquez)
Right: Samita Sinha (photo: Aram Jibilian)

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha
Danspace Project
April 25 and April 27, 2019

collective terrain/s is a collective research process into sounding in the body. How does the body open up possibilities for voice and resistance? What resonances in the voice and body exist beyond language?

 --from Danspace Project

As part of an evening organized by collective terrain/s, composer and vocalist Samita Sinha--with numerous collaborating vocalists of cultural diversity--creates a force field of sonic energy to surround an audience informally positioned at the center, not the perimeter, of the performance space. Infinity Folds is vocal music in motion, a lovely, luscious gift that makes you the focus of a meditative sonic bath and massage, your aura tingling. It's marvelously coordinated as the circle of vocalists shape and move breath--moans and drones, trills and low roars--into the outer air, using softly-adjusted bodies as tuning devices. You absorb the circling and circling soundscape that builds, pulses, overlaps, presses towards listeners and then ebbs, flares in spots, sometimes drops away entirely. Set in the sacred and justice-conscious space of St. Mark's Church, this loving ritual feels and sounds so right. You might never want it to end. [Performed by Regina Bain, Rina Espiritu, Fana Fraser, Yingjia Lemon Guo, Chaesong Kim, Risha Lee, Okwui Okpokwasili, lily bo shapiro, Samita Sinha, Sheena Sood and Helen Yung]

Somewhere in the midst of U.F.O.:(Unidentified Fly Objects), made and performed by Tendayi Kuumba in creative collaboration with Greg Purnell, an intermittent projection flashes against an upper corner of the church's wall. It images a patch of cloudy sky lit up by the glow of lightning. Kuumba's formidably quirky self-presentation gives way to something simply majestic, and you realize: this unpredictable, kinda scary woman is lightning. Folding, writhing, recoiling, she lights up the night with pure energy coursing through every stretch of her without impediment. The piece--accompanied by Purnell, seated at a desk, working a soundboard and providing a strong, rumbling ostinato--also features Kuumba's vocals. In body and voice--and soul--she is jazz.

We already whole, she sings. Even through the rain/somehow we always maintain.

We already home.

Purnell sings with her.

Can't break my soul.

Now hear that!

Choreography: Tendayi Kuumba
Creative concepts, lighting, dramaturgy, set design and songwriting/musical composition created with collaborator Greg Purnell

collective terrain/s is organized by Lydia Bell, Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum. To learn more about collective terrain/s's activities and the series' publication--designed by collective please--click here.

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha concludes tomorrow (Saturday) with a performance at 8pm. For the best effects, come a bit early to get a prime seat in the center, though you can also sit along the church's risers. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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COIL: Dean Moss premieres "Petra" at Performance Space New York

Dean Moss fuses a notorious Fassbinder character
with headless, blood-spurting Hindu goddess Chinnamasta
in his new work, Petra, at Performance Space New York.
(photo courtesy of COIL Festival)

APAP might be long gone, but COIL keeps on coiling, offering new chances to take the measure of Performance Space New York, this new--or, I should say, renovated and blandly re-branded--East Village entity. There's not a bit bland, though, about the current PSNY occupant, Dean Moss, and his newest interdisciplinary piece, Petra. Here's this world premiere production has been described:

A masochistic autobiographical meditation on desire, Petra examines race, sex, and power through the lens of service and unrequited love. Directed by Dean Moss, with music performed live by Composer Samita Sinha, and inspired by the Rainer Fassbinder film “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant”, Petra merges the imagined and real lives of its all women immigrant cast, drawing parallels between theirs, his, and the film’s queer, anxiety-laced explorations of ambition, subjection and dispossession. Simultaneously, (taking inspiration from “She whose head is severed” - a Hindu goddess associated with self-sacrifice, spiritual awakening, and the power of the erotic - Moss questions the institutional processes of diversity management, highlighting not only its aspirational goals, but also its self-serving strategies, the implementation of which both support and undermine projects not unlike his own.

I remembered it was mischievous Moss--invited into Parallels, Ishmael Houston-Jones's 2012 Black avant-garde platform for Danspace Project--who raised eyebrows by titling his curated program Black Dance though his selected artists were actually Korean-American, Latinx and white. Petra's adoption and adaptations of characters and visual and narrative elements from Fassbinder's film provide a striking framework for Moss's agenda. Here he battles assumptions and restrictions in arts support and presenting that, as he sees it, can manipulate and hamstring creativity.

Much of Petra contains clues about how Moss feels about his complicated place as a Black artist in a white-dominated downtown performance community where, nevertheless, he has gained recognition and respect. He surrounds his imperious alter-ego, Petra (theater artist Kaneza Schaal), with efficient minions--dancers Mina Nishimura, Sari Nordman and Paz Tanjuaquio. (The women represent different cultural backgrounds: Schaal is of Rwandan ancestry; composer/performer Samita Sinha is Indian; Nishimura, born in Japan; Nordman, in Finland; Tanjuaquio, in the Philippines.) Moss's three "Marlenes"--Nishimura, Nordman and Tanjuaquio--snap to fulfill the stately, glamorous Petra's every barked order. They quietly submit as she towers over them, pulling one after another into a smothering slow dance. The way Schaal clasps and carefully positions that first head (Tanjuaquio's) at her bosom tells us everything we need to know about power imbalance. Sinha, glittering in gold, is Petra's much-desired "Karin," everything an artist’s ego longs for and is often denied. You can't always get what you want.

The numerous Fassbinder parallels can be fascinating, but the work turns far more pointed as it winds down with a solo for Tanjuaquio with Sinha leading three audience members in a vocal chorus. Their text, intoned in unison, rolls out familiar lines of institutional interrogation meant to discern an artist's or cultural project's degree of attention to programming diversity and community engagement. Tanjuaquio's dance--saying nothing particularly translatable to the linear, anxious mind--pushes ever onward. The dancer skims right over the surface of this score just as, I suspect, Moss wants us to know he will always prefer to do.

Concept, Direction, Choreography, Audio/Visual Design: Dean Moss

Performing Collaborators: Mina Nishimura, Sari Nordman, Kaneza Schaal, Samita Sinha and Paz Tanjuaquio

Video Collaborators: Julia Cumming, Cassie Mey, Marya Warshaw and Asher Woodworth

Lighting Design: Zack Tinkelman

Original Music: Samita Sinha

Petra continues with 7:30pm performances tonight through Saturday, January 27. For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets, 4th Floor), Manhattan
(directions)

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