Souleymane Badolo's "Benon" premieres at Danspace Project

Souleymane Badolo
(photo by Peggy Jarrell Kaplan)

In a manner of speaking, Benon, the new hour-long duet from Souleymane Badolo at Danspace Project, has a foot in one world and another foot entirely elsewhere. Yes, Badolo, originally from the West African nation of Burkina Faso, flourishes at an intersection of strong cultural tradition and searching innovation. He has done so for a few decades within his own choreography as well as the work of Nora Chipaumire, Reggie Wilson and other artists. But what I'm thinking about now has nothing to do with what's age-old and what's contemporary but rather the crucial difference between what's extraordinary and what's merely ordinary.

The title of the piece alludes to the harvest celebrations of Badolo's homeland. But the piece begins not with displays of abundance and communal joy but with the ominous sight and grating sound of discarded commercial plastic. Crates crammed with empty spring water bottles occupy polar corners of the space. Scrunched-up lengths of plastic trash bags form a vest-like mesh around Badolo's bare torso, and he clutches a stack of plastic cups in his arms. Charmaine Warren wears a full, flowing hooded cape of translucent plastic with a trailing skirt made of black trash bags, a costume of surprising regal beauty. She wears it well. With Warren firmly attached to his back and following his every move, Badolo gravely treads the space, dropping or tossing cups onto the floor.

This, then, is our harvest, our plenitude. The thought arises: "You will reap what you sow." Badolo has turned the idea of harvest upside down and ventures into the realm of the prophetic, the extraordinary.

Warren's extended solo work in this duet is indeed extraordinary, her severe manner and gaze perfectly recalling Symbolist portraiture. From the placement of her feet to the raptor-like expanse and dry, decisive swirls of her arms, she brings focus and grandeur and a compelling weirdness to each movement in the space and each moment. And the returning Badolo, donning braces of blond straw that extend from his back like a body halo, seems ready to set a new, solemn phase of action and meaning in motion.

But as the work continues, the spell breaks. Once broken, there's no return. Badolo appears to move farther from his purpose and farther from the extraordinary into a regrettably ordinary plane.

Why walk up and stare into an audience member's eyes, as Badolo does, twice? Those stares should pack more power than they do here. The gesture recalls the way a ritual dancer, possessed of a god or spirit, might transmit the energy of that ethereal being to the gathered assembly. But here the jump of electricity from dancer to watcher goes missing. We don't feel it. We don't learn from it. We merely wonder, Why did he do that? What does it serve?

Overall, the presence and contributions of saxophonist Jeff Hudgins do not appear to be well defined. Why layer his bleats and honks over recordings of Burkinabé songs? Why, as the dance moves into its later passages, have him drift into the space and around the dancers? He is not dancing, nor is he adding anything to the dancing. This maneuver, in itself not especially fresh, reveals no significance unique or essential to Badolo's project.

Benon's initially tight coil loosens, and--rather than presenting a definitive ending--the end dancing becomes engulfed by darkness in a way that suggests an artist's resignation rather than choice.

Lighting: Carol Mullins
Costumes: Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya
Set design and construction: Tony Turner

Benon concludes tonight at 8pm. For program and ticket information, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

(directions)

The Apollo celebrates James Brown in dance: my review for TDE

The amazing Derick K. Grant
in Live by Otis Sallid
(photo by Shahar Azrari)

I reviewed the just-closed James Brown: Get on The Good Foot, A Celebration in Dance show at The Apollo Theater for The Dance Enthusiast, and you can find my review by clicking here.

Get a sneak peek at new work by Souleymane Badolo

Souleymane Badolo
(photo by Vaughn Brown)

Bessie Award-winning dancer-choreographer Souleymane Badolo will hold an Open Studio/Work-in-Process showing of his upcoming dance work, BENON, a new piece inspired by the Burkinabé tradition of dancing to celebrate the harvest. In BENON, which roughly translates to "harvest," Badolo explores the essential nature of food, sharing, and giving thanks. This new work premieres at Danspace Project, February 13–15, 2014.

Where: Building 110: LMCC's Arts Center at Governors Island

When: Monday, November 4, (2pm–4pm)

Free and open to the public, RSVP required

Info: www.lmcc.net/calendar/event/open_studios_-_souleymane_badolo/

RSVP: http://www.tfaforms.com/303316

Souleymane “Solo” Badolo is a choreographer and dancer originating from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In 1993, Badolo founded the Burkina Faso-based troupe, Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dances with western contemporary dance. He has choreographed for Company Phoénix de Yaoundé (Cameroon), Cie Gabero de Niamey Company (Nigeria), and The National Ballet of Burkina Faso, among others. Souleymane developed a dance program at The Center of Dance, Music and Theatre in Rome that focused on the fusion of theatre and dance in contemporary performance and participated in a trans-African program initiative that set up creative collaborations for dancers from multiple African countries. He and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the widely-screened documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa which documents the continent’s emergent experimental dance scene.

Souleymane Badolo and Cynthia Oliver at New York Live Arts

I've always found that I like the encounter with a new or a developing dance to surprise me. I'm neither a prospective presenter nor a funder nor even a prospective ticket-buyer with an unsparing budget. I don't write for the paper of record. Basically, I can go and have fun at these things. So I don't require having things spelled out to me. All of that can be interesting but confounding, too, when you find yourself searching high and low for the specific things you read about. Which is not to say that what you read about isn't there, somewhere, but that sometimes the advance warning gets in the way of live experience, introducing a sense of passive expectation or distracting anticipation. Maybe not knowing is, in the long run, the better path to knowing.

Cynthia Oliver (left) and Leslie Cuyjet in BOOM! (photo by Ian Douglas)

Souleymane Badolo in Buudou, BADOO, BADOLO (photo by Ian Douglas)

This is by way of saying that I'm not sure that I saw the Boom! duet, a seed work choreographed, written and directed by Cynthia Oliver for herself and Leslie Cuyjet, as advertised: "negotiating and renegotiating the rules of personhood, fate and consequence...." and "simultaneously reveals, resists and submits to the structures and shape of a performance."

The fault might be entirely my own, I will admit. But I will also admit to being captivated from the moment I heard an upstairs door bang and the darkened theater's left aisle fill with the bubbling voices of two women as half-bright blotches (the near-invisible dancers wearing over-sized white shirts) descended through the dark towards New York Live Arts' bare space. Once in place, side by side, the women took up that space--expansive in action, splayed off-kilter, owning the land and air rights and, when grounded, gazing sideways like don't-mess-with lions at rest. Hereafter, Oliver and Cuyjet will be "Tried Patience" and "Unwavering Fortitude."

In motion, their confident gestures and phrases seemed like some kind of Black diasporan Tai Chi--an enigmatic but resonant long form I longed to learn. The genius and appeal of these two dancers grew from their musicality and sure-of-themselves radiance. And the surprise--for anyone who had not seen the previous version of Boom! offered during Danspace Project's great Parallels series--came from the fierce spoken word conclusion of the duet which, I think, intended to uncover who these two entities might be. They might remind each of us, in unique ways, of specific people or types or even groups. Who in your life has the power to raise you up at one moment and strike you down in the next? You should leave Boom! feeling a little shaken, a little stirred, even if you're not immediately sure why.

The English equivalent for the Gurunsi word barack is, roughly, "gratitude." With Barack, dancer-choreographer Souleymane Badolo pays tribute to those who helped him along the path from dance training in his native Burkina Faso to celebrity on the US contemporary dance scene. Edith Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is such a strong, recurring color on the dancemaker's florid palette for this solo--a work that displays external and internal struggle--that we can't help but imagine that that passage has been marked by profound difficulty. Nothing regretted, though, neither the bad nor the good. But perhaps we're not looking at "Solo" (this dancer's nickname) so much as glimpsing an embodiment of African experience, a capacious grail within the capacious memory palace of the human body--in this case, a body with massive, heavy wings that unfurl awkwardly as its feet struggle against slippery or unstable ground. An eagle touched down on a river-washed, floating log. Or on smoldering ash. Badolo is some kind of eagle, though. He keeps a wonderful balance. It's like a game with delicate calibrations of the shift of weight for functional as well as visual effect and an outburst of puckish joy to the music of the Congolese singer-musician Tabu Ley Rochere.

I wish I could attend Badolo's Shared Practice event tomorrow afternoon at New York Live Arts but--in a breathtaking example of synchronicity--I, too, will be sharing and teaching a form of divination at the same time. Mine is called Tarot, but Solo's, from his Gurunsi heritage, is called bagger. This practice divines by interpreting thrown cowrie shells, and Badolo uses it to build the structure of his dances. (To understand this, think Cage/Cunningham/I Ching--but just for a moment.) In his impressive new solo, Buudou, BADOO, BADOLO, he uses the operations of bagger to invoke not just any hazy future but, rather, the powerful through-line connecting him to his male ancestors in the long-ago and to his son in the rich, multidimensional present.

Souleymane Badolo and Cynthia Oliver's shared program continues this evening and tomorrow 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
(map/directions)

It's almost Bessies' time! See you there!

The New York Dance and Performance Awards

 produced in partnership with Dance/NYC

Monday, October 15

at The Apollo Theater

 

2012 Host: Elizabeth Streb

Presenters include Marina Abramovic, luciana achugar, Ron Brown, Brenda Bufalino, Archie Burnett, Bebe Neuwirth, Charles Reinhart, David Thomson, and Wendy Whelan, among others.

Paul Taylor will receive the 2012 Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance, and Alice Teirstein will be honored with 2012 Bessie Award for Service to the Field of Dance.

The ceremony will also feature live performances by the Trisha Brown Company, recipient of last year’s Bessie for Lifetime Achievement, and Souleymane Badolo, the 2012 recipient of the Juried Bessie Award, known for his contemporary interpretations of traditional African dance. 

Doors open: 7pm
Award ceremony: 8pm

Food and drink available in the theater

Tickets $10 
Available at the Apollo box office and at www.apollotheater.org

Click here for more information on the 2012 Bessies and the pre-show benefit cocktail reception and after-party. 

The Apollo Theater  253 West 125th Street, Manhattan (directions)

Bessie Awards 2012 press conference (AUDIO)

New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies)

Lucy Sexton, Director

Lane Harwell, Chair, Bessies Steering Committee

2012 Press Conference at French Institute Alliance Française

Wednesday, July 18

To listen to an mp3 of the complete Bessies press conference, click here. [40:32]

Highlights

Opening performance by hip hop dancers Noel Rodriguez and Noah Cabrera from KR3TS, the company of 2011 Bessie winner Violet Galagarza

Juried Bessie Award to choreographer Souleymane Badolo by the 2012 jury--choreographers Lar Lubovitch, Yvonne Rainer and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Badolo will be presented by Nazareth Dance Festival, an inaugural Bessies partner. In addition, a new Bessies partner, DanceForce, a statewide network of dance activists dedicated to linking artists and communities across New York State, will help to generate residencies, performances and educational events around the state for Badolo.

The Bessies will return to Harlem's historic Apollo Theater on Monday, October 15 at 8pm. "How could we not have the Bessies back at the Apollo?" asked Mikki Sheppard, the theater's Executive Producer. "We intend for them to be there forever!" Sheppard also announced that Bessie winner Badolo has already been engaged to present a major work at the Apollo in October 2013.

Click the audio link above to hear announcements of nominees for each of the following categories:

Outstanding Production (of a work performed in a larger capacity venue of more than 400 seats)

Outstanding Production (of a work that stretches the boundaries of a traditional or culturally specific form)

Outstanding Production (of a work performed in a smaller capacity venue of less than 400 seats)

Outstanding Production (of a work not technically considered dance but happening in and influencing dance in New York)

Outstanding Revived Work

Outstanding Visual Design

Outstanding Sound Design or Composition

Outstanding Emerging Choreographer

Outstanding Performer (of a work performed in a larger capacity venue of more than 400 seats)

Outstanding Performer (of a work that stretches the boundaries of a traditional or culturally specific form)

Outstanding Performer (of a work performed in a smaller capacity venue of less than 400 seats)

Outstanding Performer (of a work not technically considered dance but happening in and influencing dance in New York)

The Bessies: The New York Dance and Performance Awards,

produced in partnership with Dance/NYC

For further information, click here.

Chipaumire and Zollar make it "Visible"

Three Visible Dancers: Left to right, Dancers Kota Yamazaki from Japan, Judith Jacobs from Holland and New Yorker Marguerite Hemmings, who also is a choreographer with Harlem Stage’s E-Moves program, make their visible moves. Photo by: Julieta Cervantes


Nora Chipaumire and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar--critically-acclaimed Bessie Award winners and two of the people I most cherish in dance--will present the world premiere of their collaborative project, Visible, at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse on October 12. This ensemble work deals with the struggle of being a foreigner in US society. 

“Visible attempts to reveal the conflicted nature of my experience, the loneliness of the foreigner, the constant push and pull between homeland and new frontier. It explores the idea of community versus the individual,” said the Zimbabwe-born Chipaumire.

Commissioned and nurtured by Harlem Stage, Visible features an international cast and creative team: 

Souleymane Badolo (Burkina Faso), former Urban Bush Women member Ca.Dé (Guadeloupe), Marguerite Hemmings (Jamaica), Judith Jacobs (Holland),  historian John O. Perpener II (Washington, D.C.), Kota Yamazaki (Japan), who also designed the costumes, and percussionists Bashir Shakur and David L. Alston.

Visible runs October 12-15 (7:30pm). For more information and ticketing, click here.

Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue (at 135th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

What a difference...

...a dancer makes.

I'm thinking of Katherine Crockett, that tall drink of water, brightening my evening as she defined the prophetic Chorus in Martha Graham's Cave of the Heart. She works that broad-striped fabric of her costume, unfolds it like a condor's wings and radiantly projects over what seems a vast distance in space and time with dire, desperate gestures that, for all their silence, "sound" to me like trumpets. I saw her, I heard her. There was no one and nothing like her on stage, then or later. Everything else seemed carefully managed and remote--even Bulareyaung Pagarlava's brand-new Chasing, a work that sets out to prove that Graham standard bearers can cut loose and frisk around. (Martha Graham Dance Company at The Rose Theater, now through Sunday. Click here for information and tickets.)

Souleymane Badolo (photo: Julie Lemberger for 92Y)

Speaking of difference, curating is something new and different for the great Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women fame. With her lineup for 92Y, running this weekend, she's offering a chance to watch distinctive performers like Souleymane Badolo, Lacina Coulibaly (his Burkina Faso compatriot), Maria Bauman, Samantha Speis and surprise guest Christal Brown bring ideas and space to gleaming life. The program includes works by Badolo and Bauman and two works inspired by Zollar's "Blind Date" invitation in which she matches pairs of dance artists for a last-minute creative relationship, just hours before the actual performance. If you, as a dance fan, look for the cohesion and depth that long-term creative process allows, this sort of thing is certainly a gamble, but the intelligence and power of these select artists reward Zollar's risk and your time. Having a chance to see a program with so much Badolo and Badolo choreography in it made me notice his uncanny relationship to performance space, the way he habitually dwells in or treads its periphery, rarely occupying its center or sending his dancers there. If memory serves me, I've seen this sort of thing in much of his work. Now I'm eager to find out why. (Jawole Willa Jo Zollar Curates, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, now through Sunday. Click here for information and tickets.)

"Outside you, there is no place"

Badolo and Chipaumire (photo by Elle Chyun)

Obo Addy with Chipaumire and Badolo
(photo by Elle Chyun)

Still fighting, tooth and nails, for survival, Dance New Amsterdam isn't going quietly into the new dance season. No, sir. Not with an opening program that features dancers Nora Chipaumire and Souleymane Badolo and the Ghanaian master drummer Obo Addy.

In two final performances, tonight at 8pm and tomorrow at 3pm, the artists present their DNA-commissioned collaboration--Art/Family/Our Lives: I Ka Nye. It's a charming, affecting portrait of the real-life romantic and creative partnership between two brilliant, stubborn and ultimately charming people--Chipaumire (born in Zimbabwe) and Badolo (from Burkina Faso). It is also something of an elusive, rambling story, told in the imagery of movement, words, percussion and soul music, that builds a captivating impression over time without ever landing on a definitive point. It comes off as a vivacious, even rambunctious, work-in-progress--the story, the relationship, I mean--inside a finished theatrical work.

An odd couple. Chipaumire: cool, commanding one with a condor-like wingspan used to great effect. Familiar androgynous appearance and strength here tempered by moments of feminine softness and rosy nail polish. Dancer of sober, spare, sometimes halting moves. Can look at you (and at Badolo) with a wary, intense stillness that harbors godknowswhat. Badolo: the dancer as Trickster, as eternal smile-bringer. Agile, undulant. Whole body likely to erupt into a complexity of fast, frisky movements. The fussiness of it all likely to annoy his partner, who, in one moment of exasperation, interrupts to announce, "The problem is you dance too much...!"

Over the hour--with Addy providing rhythm, blessing, gentle counsel and irresistible encouragement by boogie-ing to James Brown's "Cold Sweat"--Chipaumire and Badolo engage and challenge each other. It is these vibrant challenge dances, these moments of honest sharing disguised as one-upmanship that delineate the differences between Chipaumire and Badolo, first separating them and then sealing them together in admiration and respect. These moments feel, to me, particularly African and Black in spirit within the contemporary context of this piece and methodologies of these exciting artists.

Get your tickets for Art/Family/Our Lives: I Ka Nye here or call 212-227-9856.

Dance New Amsterdam
280 Broadway at Chambers Street, 2nd Floor, Manhattan
directions

Lost and found at Danspace

Hello, out there! Yes, it's me again, wearing my dance blogger hat and getting pushy with you.

Today, I'm pointing you in the direction of Danspace Project and hoping you'll get there tonight or tomorrow night for the latest offering in the Platforms 2010: i get lost series, curated by Ralph Lemon.

i get lost: An Evening of Solos presents two 30-minute works by Judith Sánchez Ruíz (And They Forgot to Love) and Souleymane Badolo (Yaado), and if you crave the chance to spend time with singular, compelling performers, you'll want to make tracks.

Also, watching Sánchez Ruíz and Badolo last night, I came away with a much clearer idea of what Judy Hussie-Taylor (Danspace's Executive Director) intends to do with her Platforms initiative. From what I've seen thus far (David Zambrano, Sánchez Ruíz and Badolo, even the recent screening of Maya Deren's raw footage of voudon dancing in Haiti), it's evident that Lemon and Hussie-Taylor want to open out the way we look at mediated dancing, dance presented in a concert space or via media. Platforms proposes a shift of the paradigm that demands and privileges well-made, finished product--every detail of it stamped and controlled and often blown up to impress funders, presenters and a dazzlement-craving market.

But there's no flashback to Judson in this. Yes, we can have glamour, glitter, the drama of real human context and humanity in its splendid diversity. But we can also, in the instance of Sánchez Ruíz and Badolo, have soloists who don't seek to dominate the space--and, as a performance venue, St. Mark's sanctuary is, oddly, both intimate and formidable--but, rather, seek to draw you into the luminous physical and mental sectors that they occupy. They experiment with ways to make us look more closely, see more and see it more sharply.

A work of art is an invitation to a conversation. A conversation can start anywhere and go anywhere--live, unscripted, responsive in the moment. I understand that more now through i get lost. Badolo's solo, Yaado, underscores these truths by starting out with the dancer standing before us, in utmost simplicity and dignity, saying "Je suis Souleymane Badolo..." If someone introduces himself to you, unless there's something wrong, you're going to step into that space he's offering, open up and respond in kind. Can we get that that's what could/should be going on when we encounter a work of art?

Both solos here remind me of that (sometimes annoying) question: Would you rather be right or happy? As I see it, neither choreographer has put forth a piece meant to be earthshaking or satisfying in that mind-fattening way that makes dance critics snap their pens and notebooks closed and declare that it has met all the right requirements for being good. i get lost--as I see it--is not about being right but about being willingly and happily engaged in sharing something interesting in conversation. There's no need to be right--to snap a statement and tuck it away.

Now, let's see if critics can get that.

The conversation continues. Click here.