35th Annual Bessie Awards announced at Skirball

2019 NY DANCE AND PERFORMANCE AWARD

RECIPIENTS AND CITATIONS

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN DANCE

Joan Myers Brown

For helping shape American dance over six decades spent choreographing, training, and mentoring dancers at Philadanco. For championing and creating spaces for the work of African American choreographers through the formation of such seminal organizations as The International Association of Blacks in Dance. For doing it all with grace, generosity, artistry, and leadership.

OUTSTANDING SERVICE TO THE FIELD OF DANCE

Louis Mofsie

For his tireless and visionary service for more than half a century: preserving and keeping vibrant the dances, songs, and ceremonies of multiple Native American tribal traditions. Serving as leader, teacher, scholar, and emcee extraordinaire with his Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, he has toured to all 50 states, sharing and collecting dances that would otherwise be lost to history.

BESSIES ANGEL AWARD

Laurie Uprichard

For decades dedicated to dance artists and the creation of new dance works. For her stewardship of The Bessies, aiding in their inception and sustaining them for many years after. For being a leader and beloved member of every dance community she has touched.

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTIONS

Nick Cave
The Let Go at Park Avenue Armory

For creating a ritual using colorful full-body masks, a moving stream of mylar, the choral uplift of the Sing Harlem choir, and Francesca Harper’s inspired choreographic structures, the piece invites us to lose ourselves and find each other in this divisive time.

nora chipaumire
#Punk 100% POP* N!GGA at The Kitchen and Crossing the Line Festival

For a radical and passionate blast of sound, movement, confrontation, and choreographed chaos. For working at the intersection of art, politics, and social commentary to create a devastating rendering of the politics of race.

Merce Cunningham with stager Patricia Lent and Merce Cunningham Trust
Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

For bringing Merce Cunningham’s work to new and expanded life on his centennial. Opening his work to the bodies of brilliant dance artists from all genres to create a mesmerizing event brimming with brilliance, generosity, unity, and trust.

Tania El Khoury
As Far As My Fingertips Take Me at Under the Radar/The Public Theater

For bringing the experience of migration and border control to our most intimate place—the body. For filling the audience’s ears with a story of displacement, while drawing the journey on their arm. reaching unseen and unprotected through a wall: a global crisis is brought home in indelible ways.

OUTSTANDING PERFORMERS

Leslie Cuyjet
Sustained Achievement with Jane Comfort, Niall Jones, Juliana F. May, Cynthia Oliver, Will Rawls

For her ability to combine technical precision, astonishing energy, humor, and raw theatrical power to consistently illuminate the choreographer’s vision.

Gabrielle Hamilton
in Oklahoma!’s Dream Ballet choreographed by John Heginbotham, at St. Ann’s Warehouse

For bringing her full self to expand the boundaries of a classic American play, and its iconic dream ballet: She is powerfully sensual, fully in control, moving with intelligence, fearlessness, and aplomb.

Taylor Stanley
in The Runaway by Kyle Abraham, New York City Ballet, at the David H. Koch Theater

Combining exceptional technique, clear musicality, and a fierce devotion to the choreography, he brought down the house with a piercingly revelatory solo performed with raw abandon and emotional purity.

Shamar Watt
Sustained Achievement in the work of nora chipaumire

For expressing, embodying, and extending the choreographer’s vision, while remaining forcefully himself. For inhabiting the worlds created with a riveting coiled energy that creates a dynamic and urgent NOW in every work.

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done
Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, and Simone Forti, curated by Ana Janevski at the Museum of Modern Art

A critical and pivotal exhibit featuring live performances that shined a light on a moment of radical invention in the history of American modern dance. Placing the work in the larger social and political context in which it was made, and giving it new relevance in the current moment.

OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN / MUSIC COMPOSITION

Conrad Tao and Caleb Teicher for More Forever by Caleb Teicher at Guggenheim Works & Process

Employing an unexpected mix of timbres—a toy piano, a computerized harp, the sound of scraped sand—composer and dancer introduce sophisticated sounds into the tap landscape. The improvised score pays homage to the very roots of the dance form, as it enriches the possibilities for its future.

OUTSTANDING VISUAL DESIGN

Design Team: Jeanne Medina and Ni’Ja Whitson (Costumes), Gil Sperling featuring artworks by Wangechi Mutu and Gavin Jantjes (Video), Tuçe Yasak (Lighting)
for Oba Qween Baba King Baba by Ni’Ja Whitson, co-commissioned by Danspace Project and Abrons Arts Center

For its innovative use of projection and light, using ceiling, wall, floor, audience, and dancers’ bodies as vessel and canvas. For mixing live performance, recorded and live video, and shape-shifting costumes to create a world of beauty, power, myth, and reality.

BESSIES JURIED AWARD (Presented in July 2019)

Alice Sheppard

For boldly and authentically inventing new movement vocabularies full of supercharged physicality and nuanced detail. Working with gravity, mechanics, human connection, and momentum, she creates work of power and empowerment.

OUTSTANDING BREAKOUT CHOREOGRAPHER (Presented in July 2019)

Daina Ashbee

For using the elemental female body itself as a means to excavate and expose layered histories of violence against women. Using repetition, painful ritual, and raw and resilient bodies, her work draws the viewer into a journey of insistence and transformation.

WATCH THE BESSIES!

If you missed the awards show, catch it on Sunday, November 17, at 8pm on WNET’s ALL ARTS, a broadcast channel, streaming platform and website dedicated to arts and culture 24/7.


ABOUT THE BESSIES

The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 35 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize outstanding work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League as members and participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. For more information about The Bessies, visit www.bessies.org.

The 2019 Bessie Awards Steering Committee, responsible for setting policy and providing oversight for the Bessie Awards throughout the year, is comprised of Cora Cahan, Beverly D’Anne, Jeanne Linnes, Stanford Makishi, Nicky Paraiso, Carla Peterson, Gus Solomons jr, Paz Tanjuaquio, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Laurie Uprichard, and Martin Wechsler.

The 2018–2019 Bessie Awards Selection Committee: Ronald Alexander, Elise Bernhardt, Charles Vincent Burwell, Diana Byer, Tymberly Canale, Alexis Convento, Parijat Desai, Maura Donohue, Boo Froebel, Angela Fatou Gittens, Diane Grumet, Brinda Guha, Joseph Hall, Mai Lê Hô, Iréne Hultman, Celia Ipiotis, Koosil-ja, Fernando Maneca, Lydia Mokdessi, Harold Norris, Craig Peterson, Doug Post, Rajika Puri, Tiffany Rea-Fisher, Susan Reiter, Walter Rutledge, George Emilio Sanchez, Andrea Snyder, Sally Sommer, Risa Steinberg, Carrie Stern, Catherine Tharin, Tony Waag, and William Whitener.

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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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The Bessies: honors to Joan Myers Brown and Louis Mofsie

Joan Myers Brown

The NY Dance and Performance Awards, The Bessies, New York City’s premier dance awards honoring outstanding creative work in the field, has announced the recipients of two special awards to be given out at its 35th annual ceremony on October 14.

2019 Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance:

Joan Myers Brown, Founder and Artistic Director of the Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO), in recognition of decades of choreographic influence on and support of the work of Black American dance artists.

Louis Mofsie

2019 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance:

Louis Mofsie, Director of Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, whose work has kept Native American dance forms alive for generations of young people.

Join the celebration at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Monday, October 14 (7:30pm). Get information and tickets here.

See the full list of nominees and previously-announced awards here.

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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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The Bessies in pictures!

The 2017 Bessie Awards

in Pictures

All photos by AK47 Division

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (left) with presenter Dianne McIntyre

Lela Aisha Jones (far left) greets Eva Yaa Asantewaa at pre-show tribute to nominees.
To right of Eva, Nia Love and Kayla Hamilton of Skeleton Architecture collective.
In far background, another Skeleton Architecture member, Leslie Parker

Members of Skeleton Architecture take a knee
after receiving one of the four Outstanding Performer awards.

Fearless leader Lucy Sexton,
Executive Director of The Bessies,
welcomes the crowd.

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer

Bridgman
with presenter Reid Bartelme

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
dances Bitter Tongue (1987)

The evening's hosts:
left, James Whiteside of American Ballet Theatre
with performance artist Shernita Anderson
Below: backstage with James and Shernita

Daaimah Taalib-Din of Abdel Salaam's Forces of Nature

Will Rawls and Ishmael Houston-Jones

Above and below: Thomas F. DeFrantz
presented an award to Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Anna Schön

Bedazzled audience at the 2017 Bessies

Now, do you want to see Bessies 2017 in action? Check out the livestream video on The Bessies' Facebook page here!

List of award winners

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News from the Bessies for 2017!

Dance artist Lela Aisha Jones is among four nominees
for this year's Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer.
(photo: Alex Shaw)

The NY Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies) organization has announced four nominees for the 2017 Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award:

Lela Aisha Jones
Niall Jones
Will Rawls
Katarzyna Skarpetowska

In addition, Abby Zbikowski will receive the 2017 Juried Bessie Award.

These two awards will be presented on July 12 (6-7pm) at a press conference at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, preceded by a ticketed cocktail party (5-6pm).  The organization will also announce nominees for Outstanding Production, Outstanding Revival, Outstanding Performer, Outstanding Music Composition or Sound Design and Outstanding Visual Design.

Information on the July 12 cocktail party and press conference: click

And hold the date for the 33rd Annual Bessie Awards: Monday, October 9, at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts!

About the Bessies
 The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 33 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize outstanding work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League, as members participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. www.bessies.org

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Aakash Odedra Company brings "Rising" to Skirball Center

I want to keep my memories of dancer Aakash Odedra killing some James Brown funk three years ago in his joyous, Bessie-winning performance at the Apollo. And I want to forget Rising--his program of solos made by Akram Khan, Russell Maliphant, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and himself, brought to New York this week at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

Back in 2011, Rising marked a turning point for this British performer trained in classical Indian dance--his debut as a choreographer and commissioner of works in a contemporary vein. It draws heavily on the lush, picturesque qualities of his dancing and onstage design. It draws and draws, in fact, until both those wells run dry which, in the absence of anything more sustaining, takes just moments.

There appears to be a formula for Rising: a haze-filled stage; murky lighting; a vaguely mystical aura; and fluidity of movement that turns, time and again, to twirling and sinuous undulation. Odedra's own Nritta is the bland template for this pattern. Khan at least attempts a somewhat different direction for his handsome comrade in the next piece, In The Shadow of Man, invoking a screaming, yipping animal self that heaves and arcs and rotates off its axis. Maliphant's Cut locates Odedra in the triangular gap between two dark, framing curtains, yet again engulfed in billowing haze, bright light catching only splashes of his busy hands or forearms in a visual flamboyance that Alwin Nikolais surely would have admired. I thought, too, of David Parsons's Caught, the signature piece and perennial crowd-pleaser where flashing strobes make a leaping soloist appear to fly and fly and fly.

For Cherkaoui's Constellation, numerous globe-like light bulbs, sort of pomegranate-sized, hang on cords suspended from the flies. Individual lights can be moved from above like marionettes. That's lovely, but the design execution and the dancer's engagement with one or another dangling star only add up to pretty display. But I could not resist this thought: How many dancers does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. But that bulb has to want to change.

Rising is closed.

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Circus at APAP: Acrobatic Conundrum (Seattle), Company Oktobre (Paris)

Dance, theater, performance folks, scoot over a bit, won't you? Circus has arrived, taking its place among the city's vast APAP-related offerings. The mission? To make visionary, contemporary circus as thriving an artform in the US as it is abroad. For the second year, Circus Now--the community's support and advocacy organization--has partnered with NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The festival features six troupes and runs for three nights.

Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Exposure 2016 opened last evening at Skirball with performances by Acrobatic Conundrum, a Seattle ensemble founded in 2012, and Company Oktobre, an accomplished trio of Parisian performers. Essentially two shows in one, the program ran over two hours. If you're going to program like that, I question the need to have festival MC Sxip Shirey--a musician and veteran of circus--consume time delivering two circus-boosting intros, each with its musical performance. One wild-haired man, his toys and his electronics can sound like a party in full throwdown, but a little of this goes a long way. Next time: One and done.

Acrobatic Conundrum's piece, The Language of Chance, frustrated me. The clear talents of the company--most notably, amiable and multi-skilled Ty Vennewitz--were not matched by signs that anyone grasped the potential dynamism of activating the entire stage space, not just filling it with decor, and the importance of pacing and smooth transitions. Performers often simply crouched or lurked within the set like deadweight while one or another person performed in the center. Contemporary circus can offer a more holistic, integrated stage with people and things cleverly interconnected and interacting. Done right, that makes for truly magical, unforgettable experiences in the theater. Acrobatic Conundrum has produced five shows and made it to this prestigious festival but, by evidence of The Language of Chance, it needs to step up its game.

After Acrobatic Conundrum, intermission, and Shirey Part II, I would have liked to come to Company Oktobre with something approaching freshness of eye and ear.  But that was not to be, which I regret because the sophisticated Oktobre--created by its performers, Eva Ordonez-Benedetto, Jonathan Frau and Yann Frisch and director Florent Bergal--deserves better attention. When you're presenting farce, your technique and timing must be razor-sharp. You have to quickly get your audience invested in your people--total strangers, usually--with their weird and tickling idiosyncrasies, their little sleight of hand tricks and struggles with props. In the case of Oktobre, you're asking watchers to toggle between baffling behavior and English supertitles that only deepen the absurdity. In all things, Company Oktobre is completely on point, and I look forward to any chance to see them again.

Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Exposure 2016 continues tonight and concludes tomorrow night. Here's the lineup:

FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 8pm

Water on Mars (Sweden)
Andréane Leclerc/Nadère arts vivants (Canada) — Whore of Babylon
Barely Methodical Troupe (England) — Bromance

SATURDAY, JANUARY 16

Aloft (US) — Dinner of our Discontent
Water on Mars (Sweden)
Barely Methodical Troupe (England) — Bromance

For complete festival information and tickets, click here.

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts 
566 LaGuardia Place (south of Washington Square Park), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Fight fire with fire: Byrd's "The Minstrel Show Revisited"

Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance Theater
in The Minstrel Show Revisited
Below, l-r:
Fausto Rivera, Alex Crozier and Alexis "Tilly" Evans-Krueger
(photos: Ian Douglas)

The black-faced mask of minstrel shows is a lingering image from America's past that still inflicts wounds today through its psychic hold...In the future if we are to be free from its terrible grip we must confront it boldly and courageously by staring back into its face and laughing at the absurdity of its representation until it no longer has the power to hurt us. Only then will it be vanquished and we are free to be. -- Donald Byrd

You might have thought Donald Byrd would bury the tough stuff somewhere down inside The Minstrel Show Revisited and gradually ease you into it. But this dance-theater piece--sourced in Byrd's provocative 1991 Bessie-winner, The Minstrel Show--opens with the problem right before your eyes: a white male dancer singing that classic rag, "A Hot Time in the Old Town," in blackface and Afro wig. It doesn't ease anything when more blackfaced dancers from Byrd's multiracial Spectrum Dance Theater join in--peppy entertainers whose high kicks and high jinks, tumbling and sexy hip-pumping establish a through-line from 19th Century minstrelsy to today's musical theater.

In the program for The Minstrel Show Revisited's run at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, Byrd reprinted Scott Delahunta's essay for the original production. Delahunta argues that stereotypes are a survival mechanism, making complexity less challenging and reality less threatening. They worked for white Americans faced with an African population they could no longer define and claim as property. They still work, today, for white Americans faced with the looming prospect of no longer being the majority group in this country. And that's just for starters.

Rather than shrink from mindless and noxious stereotyping, Byrd wallows in it for the sake of doing exactly what popular entertainment is not supposed to do--hold a merciless mirror up to the people who have paid to be distracted from problems. "We like to laugh, to cry and not have to 'think too much' and in doing so we become complicitous in the process of stereotyping," Delahunta wrote. Thus the tension in The Minstrel Show Revisited. The choreography and performances are skillful and dynamic. But, if you pay close attention, you become aware of how hollow and shallow the stage picture, for all its activity, looks and feels.

Over the course of the hour, Byrd's dancers not only dance a lot but also line up to tell an alarming number of offensive jokes aimed at a diversity of targets. But reworking 1991 also gives Byrd the chance to open the piece to audience participation, inviting several folks up on stage to tell the last racist joke they heard. (When I saw it, most of his volunteers happened to be youngish people of color.) This strategy encourages the watcher's Inner Performer to come out and play. It's safe, and it's not safe. It's bad...but it's permitted.

How will the volunteers respond to that invitation? How will the rest of us--sitting not so safely in our chairs--respond to what we're about to hear?  It's complicated!

How quickly the volunteers learned just the right intonations and body language for their brief interaction with Byrd. How easily they remembered and told their jokes.

OMG! Look at all these people running around with offensive jokes in their heads! And what was the last offensive joke I heard?

We giggled some because the tellers were cute and brave, and we knew they didn't mean what they said. It felt okay--sort of. That is, until the final and truly cringe-making one, which--whoa!--brought everybody up short.

And even then Byrd wasn't finished with us. He looked out over the house and urged people in the seats to write down a stereotypical joke to be collected and used later. Since I did not stay for the post-show Q&A--the theater seemed unusually tardy in getting it started--I can't say how that worked out.

In his pre-show talk, Awam Amkpa (NYU Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis) noted, "Art does not just reflect culture; it makes it." Byrd accepts his responsibility, as artist and entertainer, to highlight how the arts have served to deliver, spotlight and perpetuate stereotypes, making them not only useful but seductive and addictive. His work work offers no solution but a tap on the shoulder: Now, your turn.

Closed.

For more information on Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance Theater, click here.

For information on upcoming events at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, click here.

Schumacher's BalletCollective opens at Skirball in November

Here's a taste of Invisible Divide by BalletCollective, 

shot during BalletCollective's Summer 2015 residency in Telluride.

Choreography and direction: Troy Schumacher

Music: Ellis Ludwig-Leone performed by Indie vocalist Violetness

World Premiere: 

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts

November 4-5

 For information and tickets, click here.

Flamenco great Farruquito comes to NYU Skirball, June 21-22

World Music Institute

presents

FARRUQUITO

in his first NYC performance in over ten years

at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts

Saturday, June 21, 8pm

Sunday, June 22, 7pm

HOME from FARRUQUITO on Vimeo.

Son of the singer El Moreno and dancer La Farruca, Farruquito is the chief proponent of the unique dance style founded by his grandfather, El Farruco. Farruquito made his Broadway stage debut at age five, starred in Carlos Saura's film Flamenco at twelve, and was directing his own shows by fifteen. After years of successes—and some personal tragedies—he makes a ­triumphant return to NYC after more than a decade. He’ll present his new work, Déjà vu.

Ticket information

Farruquito Web site

NYU Skirball Center
566 LaGuardia Place (south of Washington Square Park), Manhattan
(map/directions)

NYU to host panel on contemporary dance in China, February 18

Building a Movement: 

A Conversation on Contemporary Dance in China

panel discussion

at NYU Tisch School of the Arts

February 18, 6-7:30pm

Contemporary dance in China, its history and evolution, its relationship to traditional Chinese dance, and its current role in Chinese society

Panelists:

Patricia Beaman, Dance History, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
Tao Ye, Artistic Director, Choreographer and Founder of TAO Dance Theater
Alison M. Friedman, Founder and Creative Director, Ping Pong Productions
Aly Rose, Producer and Choreographer
Xiaoxiao Wang, Dance MFA Candidate, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
Stephen Xue, Company Manager, Shen Wei Dance Arts
Hou Ying, Choreographer / Artistic Director, Hou Ying Dance Theater

Free and open to public with required RSVP to skirball.education@nyu.edu

NYU Tisch School of the Arts (Dean's Conference Room, 12th Floor)
721 Broadway (between Waverly Place and Washington Place, south of 8th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Also of interest:

In New York, a Showcase for Chinese Performers
by Rachel Lee Harris, The New York Times, February 14, 2014

Cirque Éloize's "Cirkopolis" rises at Skirball

Members of Cirque Éloize
perform a banquine act in Cirkopolis
photo (c)2012 Productions Neuvart/Valérie Remise

Right before the curtain rises on Montreal's Cirque Éloize--now at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts through January 5--discordant music starts grinding and growling. Houselights flash; the curtain swirls with blobs of light, and whatever lies behind that veil could be radioactive. A startled audience gives up its first flurry of applause. And when that curtain lifts, watch out!

Cirkopolis, featuring a gifted, versatile troupe from Montreal, is what Fritz Lang (of Metropolis fame) might whip up from a big heap of contemporary circus acts, a dollop of music-theater choreography and a dash of Magritte. Instead of Lang, though, we have Cirque Éloize's Jeannot Painchaud and co-director/ choreographer Dave St-Pierre mischief-making with Robert Massicotte (sets/video), Alexis Laurence (video), Nicolas Descoteaux (lighting) and Stefan Boucher (music), just to name a few of the numerous co-conspirators responsible for this spectacle. Together, they have constructed an impressive, if also menacing, vision of urban life with views of towering, zooming architecture, a mass of mechanical gears that endlessly churn, and business men and women as soulless in their workaday existence as their yard-high stacks of paperwork. But that's not all.

Somewhere beneath this city of driving energy lies a more magical, more seductive one, no less driven. A city of expressive freedom, of romance, where men and women of cultivated power and skill display not only physical daring but also sensitivity and whimsy. In other words, a city of circus.

Cirque Éloize in the juggling pins scene of Cirkopolis
photos (c)2012 Productions Neuvart/Valérie Remise

Over the course of 80 minutes, Painchaud and St-Pierre offer no straightforward narrative but utilize "big number" stagings--like a wildy imaginative ensemble dance with juggling pins--as context and lightbox for circus acts like trapeze work, banquine, contortion and clowning. The pace is variable but mostly lively, with only Lauren Herley's scarily-good but overextended corde lisse (aerial rope act) dragging out longer than necessary. From the sheer poetry of Angelica Bongiovonni's intricate twirling with and within a life-like Cyr wheel--I believe she can fly!--to the more macho posturing of a male sextet slipping around inside the German wheel, Cirkopolis is a nearly overwhelming thrill. Make time for Cirque Éloize this season!

Performed by Maude Arseneault, Angelica Bongiovonni, Dominique Bouchard, Mikael Bruyere-L’Abbe, Ashley Carr, Samuel Charlton, Myriam Deraiche, Lauren Herley, Reuben Hosler, Ugo Laffolay, Yann LeBlanc, Frederic Lemieux-Cormier and Francois Saussus (alternating with Carr in the clown act)

Through January 5. For complete schedule details and tickets, click here.

Skirball Center for the Performing Arts

Kimmel Center for University Life

New York University (at Washington Square)

566 LaGuardia Place, Manhattan

(map/directions)

The Black Arm Band: music of Australia's indigenous experience

"dirtsong" from The Black Arm Band on Vimeo.

NYU Skirball Center presents the U.S. premiere of dirtsong--traditional music and new songs from Australia's Black Arm Band.

Friday, February 22, 8pm 

The Black Arm Band brings together many of Australia’s premiere Aboriginal musicians. They hail from across the country and represent diverse musical, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Performed predominantly in Aboriginal languages, against a backdrop of evocative film imagery, the U.S. premiere of dirtsong comprises a series of musical “conversations” in which the artists reflect on their country. The result is a deeply moving show that conjures not only a sense of geographical place, but encounters, memories, obligations, community and nature. Combining traditional music and newly commissioned songs inspired by the beloved indigenous author Alexis Wright (Carpentaria), dirtsong offers a conceptual and emotional map of Australia's heartland.

For ticket information, click here or call 212-352-3101

NYU Skirball Center
566 LaGuardia Place (at Washington Square South), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Jake Shimabukuro, ukulele virtuoso, to play NYU Skirball

It is rare for a young musician to earn comparisons to the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis. It is even harder to find an artist who has entirely redefined an instrument by his early thirties. Jake Shimabukuro has already accomplished these feats and more on the ukulele. Yes, the ukulele.

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts will present An Evening with Jake Shimabukuro, the blazingly talented musician who has turned the traditional Hawaiian ukulele into a sensitive instrument capable of channeling any music thrown at it--from rock to jazz to flamenco.

If you're not already hip to Shimabukuro, here are some lovely YouTube videos:

Official Jake Shimabukuro EPK

Blue Roses Falling

Official Jake Shimabukuro YouTube channel
See him on Friday, November 30 (8pm). Click here for details and tickets.

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 LaGuardia Place, Manhattan
corner of LaGuardia Place and Washington Square South

(map/directions)

This American Dance: Monica Bill Barnes & Company at Skirball

This is sort of a follow-up to Yeah. What Ira Said. So, read that first. Then hurry back....

Okay, welcome back!

So, as I left NYU's Skirball Center last night, Ira Glass had just retaken the stage after the concert and was asking the audience how many of them had been dance fans before tonight, how many dance shows they had attended in the last year, and the like. I'd wondered about that, too, since it looked more like an NPR audience--his NPR audience--and it probably was.

In any case, it's well known that Glass and his audience now love Monica Bill Barnes & Company since Glass welcomed Barnes and troupe into a This American Life event shown in "more than 600 movie theatres across the US, Canada and Australia." Barnes & Co. did so well with that audience, that what was originally planned as a one-shot appearance--and a kind of victory lap-- at Skirball has been extended: If you can still get a ticket (try here), you can see MBB & Co. with Ira Glass today at 3pm.

If you do get to go, I hope you like glitter, because you'll see lots of it glinting from Kelly Hanson's costumes and gusts of it flying through the air. So much that Glass--unexpectedly, because he'd missed a crucial email--had to get on stage and vamp for four minutes--with a nifty balloon trick and one awkward story--while stage hands cleaned up half the stage.

I happen to love glitter and soul music and perfectly calibrated physical comedy. So, when it comes to Barnes, all good. Give up your leisurely Sunday if you agree.

Anna Bass and Monica Bill Barnes dance Luster (photo by Christopher Duggan)

There's something about Anna Bass, Barnes's partner in crime, that reminds me of Carol Burnett; both have genius. Barnes, I can't quite describe. She is a performer unto herself. Barnes and Bass often dance side by side, at great length, in related though not identical movement. I just realized last night that I must choose. I can just go ahhhh and settle into enjoying the talented Bass or I can stay on high alert for all the rapidfire, formidable changes Barnes goes through and try to figure her out. I can switch, but I can't watch both.

The nearly two-hour program includes two lively Barnes/Bass duets--Luster (a New York City premiere) and I Feel Like--you know, the one with the James Brown sex machine song? It also features Mostly Fanfare (a 2010 trio with Christina Robson and chairs gorgeously held aloft in the dancers' jaws) and Everything Is Getting Better All The Time (a 2011 quartet including Robson and an adorable Giulia Carotenuto). Because, for Barnes, the glamor of the stage and its performers is clearly something to be celebrated even while she's poking affectionate fun at it all, lighting designer Jane Cox makes a fantastic team player. 

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 LaGuardia Place, Manhattan
(between Washington Square South and West 3rd Street)
(map/directions)

Yeah. What Ira said.

Monica Bill Barnes & Company in Thank You and Good Night (photo by Steven Schreiber)

The utterly charming Monica Bill Barnes & Company will be at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts with This American Life host Ira Glass tomorrow and Sunday (but this is not an announcement--because you already know that, right? And, if not, you can find out more here.)

I'm bringing this up because Glass said something about his experience of seeing Barnes' troupe for the first time that I'd like to share. I'll explain why later. Here's his quote:

NPR's Ira Glass

I was inspired to make our recent cinema event after seeing MBB & CO. in June 2011. I'll be honest, I don't go to a lot of dance, but her show was the most charmingly alive dance performance I've ever seen. Literally, while it was going on, all I could think was, ‘I want to see this again. How do I see this again? How do I bring everyone I've ever met to this?’ So I created that cinema event in May 2012 where we performed an episode of our show onstage at Skirball and beamed it into movie theaters, with dances by MBB & CO. Afterwards, the most common question I was asked was 'Who were those dancers?' People kept coming up to me saying 'I don't like dance. I don't go to dance. I want to see them again.' Which, yes, is a weird thing to say about an entire art form, but the point is, they won a lot of fans that night and I think when people see a full MBB & CO. show, they'll be even more wowed.

As it turns out, I feel this way about a lot of the dance and movement-based performance I see--I want to "bring everyone I've ever met to this." I want a lot of what I see to not fade away so fast--like after a night or a few nights or, if the artists are lucky, a couple of weekends. I want it to be seen by more than the usual suspects. And I want it to be pondered and processed and taken to heart and argued about and remembered. I want it to influence things beyond dance, beyond the arts. I want it on the American breakfast table and at the water cooler and on the supermarket queue and in the neighborhood bar and in the board room and in the war room.

Good going to Barnes for getting Glass's attention and his joyful response. Her efforts are good for her, of course, and possibly good for us all. What do you think, maybe in 2013 and going forward more of us can step up our magic(k) creativity and raise the outside world's awareness about what's doing in these excellent, essential little villages we call the dance communit(ies)? Let's work on ways to bring everyone we meet to this.

This *dancing* American Life!

Guess who's coming to This American Life on Thursday, May 10? Monica Bill Barnes & Company!

Yeah, that's right: A dance troupe. No, not on the radio. It's a live show from New York's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, screened in select movie theaters, and here are all the details.

I saw this amazing dance performance by Monica Bill Barnes' company, and I thought - that is totally in the style of our radio show. But obviously you can't have dance on the radio. Then I realized, we have to do another cinema event! We've built this lineup of stories mixed with super visual things, including the dancers I saw, so it's going to feel like the radio show but also totally unlike anything we've done before. I really can't wait to see how it turns out.”

-- Ira Glass, Executive Producer and host, This American Life

José Maya at Skirball

It's rare for me to abandon a show at intermission, even if I'm not having a good time. Last night, as I grappled with a tenacious respiratory infection, I decided to bail out on José Maya and Company midway--partly due to physical discomfort and partly because I was still waiting to be blown away by the man repeatedly described as "one of the most explosive dancers in Spain today."

I've seen enough flamenco in New York, among enough flamenco audiences, to recognize that almost every flavor and approach to the art can find an enthusiastic niche audience here. The folks gathered at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts for World Music Institute's ¡Festival Flamenco Gitano! certainly seemed wowed by Maya and receptive to what I found to be a fair-to-middling production padded out with lengthy, if undistinguished, music and vocal segments. WMI has brought far better.

Much is made of the fact that Maya has opened for the likes of Marc Anthony, Beyoncé and Björk. Think about that for a moment. He really does belong in the world of pop and not in the world where, as you keep digging beneath the surface of a dancer's moves, you find true grit.

I had high hopes for the evening--called Red, after the gitano word for network, or community, and the color of life and survival. It opened with simple, but marvelous, staging--the performers clustered downstage around a small, wooden table, rapping out intricate, rolling flamenco rhythms with their fingers, knuckles and palms. Gorgeous sounds!

I also wanted to like Maya as he initially took minced sideways, dashed in a few pivots and slow burns, and whipped off legwork so rapid and evanescent--a flurry, a thrust--that it seemed something I might have imagined not seen. But, unfortunately, the man went on to rely too much on his loosened, flowing hair, a tomato-red suit, and zapateado that seems disconnected from his body, which is engaged in its own showy, rock star thing. His overplayed footwork drama reminded me of how a few of my college students referred to flamenco footwork as "tapping" until I corrected them. What he's doing really does seem more like tap, but you can definitely find tap with more duende, more soul, than this.

As usual, World Music Institute has a dizzying array of programs coming up over the next several months. Today's Skirball-hosted Water is Rising: Music and Dance Amid Climate Change (where "performance and purpose collide") sounds great as do shows by the magnificent singer Lila Downs (November 15) and legendary composer-guitarist Paco Peña (March 31), both at Carnegie Hall. Whether you're in love with Celtic ballads, Cape Verdean morna, the music of the Sufis or the Garifuna, or pretty much anything your ears can imagine, WMI has something for you. Click here for complete details on WMI's 2011-2012 season.

Circus in extremis

Circa--featuring acrobatic dancers based in Brisbane, Australia--presents hyper-edgy New Circus stripped to abstraction. Forget fanciful story lines. Forget expensive, dazzling sets and shimmering costumes. Lighting effects aggressively sculpt the stage; harsh, blaring music comes on like a tsunami. But other than that, Circa is all about gravity and quirky movement--catnip for pure dance-lovers, genuinely mind-blowing. Why, it looks ten times as dangerous as Spider-Man at a fraction of the cost!

Artistic director Yaron Lifschitz's 80-minute production, now having its US premiere at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, twists and splays and pulls and pushes and propels the bodies of seven outlandishly skillful men and women to punishing extremes. It often makes them look desperately manic and self-destructive or at least absurd. Anything to force our hearts into our mouths. And the strategy works: Skirball's audience gasped and shrieked and chuckled and rose in ovation.

I felt somewhat more ambivalent. On the one hand, Circa's overall weirdness, the tension they create, their hip hop attitude and their frequent elements of surprise can't be topped. Circus really is kind of strange, and these performers absolutely rule by being as strange--and as strained--as they want to be.

The performers incorporates within their own behavior suggestions of what traditional circus usually offers--"animal acts," "clown acts," maybe even "freak side shows" distilled to their most abstract dynamics and rolled out in way that makes them effective both as circus and as dance. One diverting solo evolves from an audience-interactive finger-snap-along to a display of how to be funny with just your hands or your dangling feet. Pluck the gorgeously crafted and interpreted choreography from its context, and it could be a brilliant, award-worthy dance in and of itself. Similarly, aerial ribbon dance and terrestrial multiple hula hoop numbers strengthen the impression of these performers as supremely focused with a measure of grace to go along with their guts.

But I cared less for watching women frequently tossed and flung about like rag dolls or stuffed sacks. While the male performers--a couple of them quite buff--sometimes allow themselves to look ridiculous, the women take the brunt most of the time. A little more imagination--and respect--please. Okay, well, there is that one long segment in which a woman wearing glittering cherry-red stilletos--at last, a dazzling costume detail!--climbs all over one guy's bare skin. Sweet revenge, perhaps.

Last two performances: tonight at 8pm and tomorrow at 3pm. Information and tickets

Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 LaGuardia Place (at Washington Square South), Manhattan
(directions)

Bonnefoux and McBride to receive Ilona Copen Award

On March 22, at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York International Ballet Competition (NYIBC) will celebrate the life and achievements of Ilona Copen, late Founder and Executive Director Emerita. The evening will feature performances by dancers from American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theatre of Harlem Ensemble, Joffrey Ballet, Limón Dance Company, New Jersey Ballet and North Carolina Dance Theatre, including several NYIBC alumni, followed by a Dinner/Dance.

A highlight of the event will be the presentation of the first Ilona Copen Award to Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and Patricia McBride, in honor of their contributions to the lives and artistry of young dancers, and to the world of dance in general. The Award will be presented by Virginia Johnson, Artistic Director of Dance Theatre of Harlem.

Click here for more information on this event and ticketing. 

Patricia McBride and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux
(photo courtesy of NYIBC)

Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux was born in France and began his dance training at the age of 10 at the School of the Paris Opera Ballet. At age 14 he joined the company, and by age 21 was named Danseur Etoile. Bonnefoux danced with the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets before being invited by George Balanchine to dance with New York City Ballet. After 10 years with NYCB, Bonnefoux joined the School of Music at Indiana University as chairman and artistic director of the ballet department. Since 1983 he has been the artistic director of the ballet company and school at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua NY. In 1996 he joined North Carolina Dance Theatre as artistic director and was named president in 2003.  He and his wife, Patricia McBride, have added new works to NCDT's repertoire, have attracted talented dancers from all over the world, and championed the effort to build a new facility for the company. In June of 2010, NCDT opened the Patricia McBride & Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance.

Patricia McBride began her ballet training in her hometown of Teaneck NJ, before receiving a scholarship to the School of American Ballet. Within a year of joining the company, she danced a solo in The Figure in the Carpet, created for her by Balanchine. McBride attained the rank of soloist in 1960 and by 1961, at age 18, she became the youngest principal dancer in NYCB. She spent 3 decades with the company, and created leading roles in many memorable ballets, including Harlequinade, Tarantella, the "Rubies" section of Jewels, Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, Coppelia, Union Jack, Who Cares?, and Vienna Waltzes. Jerome Robbins choreographed principal roles for her in his Dances at a Gathering, In the Night, The Goldberg Variations, Dybbuk, Opus 19 and The Four Seasons. Her years of performing under Balanchine's direction have gained her the expertise necessary to restage many of his master works. McBride has been associate artistic director of NCDT since 1996 and also serves as a master teacher at NC Dance Theatre School of Dance and Chautauqua Ballet's School of Dance. She is married to Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and they have two children.

New York International Ballet Competition

Educating, mentoring and providing performance and career advancement opportunities since 1984.

Founded by Ilona Copen and Igor Youskevitch

New York International Ballet Competition (NYIBC) is a three-week intensive professional training, performance and artistic education program for forty-eight talented young dancers from countries around the world, all of whom receive full scholarships. NYIBC nurtures promising dancers aged 17 to 24 from all ethnicities, providing them with an exceptional opportunity to completely focus on training to perform at their highest artistic level. The contemporary duet form and the classical pas de deux are the core of the repertory NYIBC participants learn from world renowned coaches under high standards of fairness. In addition, NYIBC attracts hiring artistic directors and choreographers who are confident that a dancer who has been mentored and trained at NYIBC can endure the rhythm of work and life in a ballet company. Beyond having access to extraordinary performance and career advancement opportunities, during their time at NYIBC the dancers form a versatile international company in which lifelong associations are born.

For more information, visit the NYIBC website.

Shift that PARADIGM

Gus Solomons Jr. dancer / choreographer / writer / actor / PARADIGM - shifter
by Jennifer Edwards, The Huffington Post, January 12, 2011