Can I get a witness? Viewing mayfield brooks at JACK

Performance artist mayfield brooks
(photo: Amar Puri)

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych)
by mayfield brooks
JACK
January 30-February 1

In the tiny storage room, where the pungent aroma of earth and rose petals prickles your nostrils, I stand in a single line of people skirting the edge of a funereal bier covered in colorful decaying foliage. I see a bare foot sticking out from this cover, even as I hear mayfield brooks' voice on a looping recording (calling for "a witness") and tamp down a feeling of being trapped. I notice a thin, dry stalk, its end lightly poking the sole of brooks' foot, and I wonder if brooks feels it, is irritated by it. I wonder if I shouldn't pluck it away. But I dutifully stand, like everybody else, listening, looking in this solemn enclosure. Finally, I carefully--so as to not startle brooks or draw anyone else's attention--reach for the stalk and pull it off brooks' flesh.

In small groups, the audience will cycle through that opening viewing room then gradually assemble in a larger but still intimate space nicely set up to encourage comfort and seating choice. This feels more like a funeral parlor than a performance space. Merging two of brooks' works, Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) is every bit as much a memorial service, a participatory ritual, a raucous channeling and a party with festive cakes (by Susannah Simpson) as it is a performance.

Attend and you will have ample time to gaze or move around the space and commune with the dead (brooks' and yours). Inspired primarily by the late Black gay activist and Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson, this evening introduces us to brooks' ongoing practice of writing heartfelt letters to this role model and would-be mentor and gently suggests we take up a similar practice with our own ancestors of blood or mind.

Will you also see strong, compelling performance in this space? Oh, yes. brooks' collaborating team--a water bearer, a tea maker, a florist, a guide and various viewing hours caretakers--establishes and eases us into the fluidity of the space, but brooks rules the space and gives a master class in commitment, responsiveness, fervent aliveness.

The evening, nearly two hours of sensory richness, is well worth the sometimes frustrating task of navigating subway travel to, from and around Brooklyn. (As of last night, the "C" in C train stands for "cusswords.") Maybe just give yourself at least 15 minutes more than you think you might need to get there, then don't fret because the opening of the piece is experienced in shifts. Relax with some tea in the lobby.

Technical Director/Creative Consultant: Niko Tsocanos

Curated by Stacy Grossfield as part of her IMAGES // LANDSCAPES series and JACK's Reparations365 series.

Letters to Marsha with Viewing Hours (a diptych) continues with 8pm performances tonight and tomorrow. For information and ticketing, click here.

JACK
18 Putnam Avenue, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
C to Clinton-Washington or Shuttle to Franklin Avenue

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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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Oren Barnoy premieres a new dance trio at JACK

Paul Hamilton in a new work by Oren Barnoy
(photo: Scott Shaw)

You'll find the name of the new trio by choreographer Oren Barnoy if you click on this: (symbol). I'm told there is no official pronunciation, but there might be a rhythm. The glyph resembles something from one of those unauthorized offshoots of Reiki, but the dance itself--which left Paul Hamilton, Candace Tabbs and Molly Lieber dripping and glistening in sweat after its 25 minutes--is more-marathon workout than soothing. The aim is spiritual, though, described as Barnoy's "version of a daily prayer through movement" and a "continuous action...unrelenting ritual...towards transcendence."

Performed in the simple, aluminum-foil surround of Brooklyn's JACK, the piece's exertions bear the same twisty, swirly hieroglyphics of the enigmatic title and its look of a complicated infinity. Dancers, dressed in unremarkable black clothing, come and go, thrusting and retracting with low-dipping torsos and reaching, scooping, swinging, windmilling arms. I imagine some viewers might get into this while others eventually begin to tune it out when it does not appear to be turning into anything. For me, visual drama happened whenever two bodies were at play--at prayer?--in proximity to one another, activating shape and energy in the negative space between. I found my attention snapping to these interactions. On the whole, though, the entire ride can be enjoyable.

(symbol)--part of JACK's Images//Landscapes series, curated by Stacy Grossfield--continues tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn (C or G to Clinton-Washington)

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"a fragile son": Matthew Rogers solos at JACK

Dance artist Matthew Rogers
Below: performing a fragile son
(photos: Nika Brunova)

Startlingly clear images from a fragile son--a solo performed by dancer-choreographer Matthew Rogers at JACK--have lasting power. I can attest. I woke up in the middle of the night, and they were right there, in my mind, complete and fresh.

There's something nondescript about Rogers himself. Take the fair, wispy, wayward tresses that, at times, blur his delicate, Southern white guy features. But, lit by Tuce Yasek, he can bring things into focus and bury them deep in the mind even as they retain their enigmatic nature.

He opens by first trotting up to a riser opposite the audience and telling us a few things about his family--related to Thomas Jefferson on his granddad's side; the men marked by a rare genetic disorder that thickens their palms and limits their fingers' flexibility. That "son" is part of the title implies we'll likely be dealing with father-son stuff, and "fragile" points to some sort of fault line.

Before the piece began, Rogers personally handed each of his watchers a copy of a missive that begins "Hlelo Dad," nearly every word containing misplaced letters. It's written to a long-absent father, ultimately an act of taking account of, and responsibility for, his own life and happiness.

Some of the indelible imagery involves a thick rope drawn out straight across a diagonal, a rope like an orderly measurement of time, the unfolding of a path. Then rippled, wriggled, lashed, its oscillations invoke a rodeo act, expert and--since we are so close to the performer in this intimate space--a little unsettling at times. Whistling through the air, the rope also calls up images from slavery.

There are also cords, the red of blood and undeniable bloodlines, sometimes stretched between Rogers and an audience member willing to hold an end. Sometimes Rogers wraps himself in the grip of a cord then unwraps his body. It is a slight, wiry body with sufficient knowledge of itself to be deliberate and surprisingly graceful; to tumble hard and flail loosely; to bound up steps as nimbly as "Bojangles" Robinson; to offer itself up as a blank sheet for audience members to mark; to be naked and fragile.

In the genesis of a fragile son, there might have been some work around a literal father, or a lineage of fathers of fathers. But the piece moves in less than literal space and, if you will, can take in the whole idea of place and home, the whole idea of heritage, the whole idea of white patriarchy and masculinity, and what it means to be a body, a mind and a spirit moving in and out of orbit of those ideas.

A few years ago, Rogers uprooted himself from his familial roots in Virginia and his more recent dance roots in New York--dancing in the work of major artists such as Tere O'Connor, Ivy Baldwin and Pavel Zuštiak--and relocated to Slovakia and Germany. Traces of that relocation and possible struggles around it move through a fragile son.

Curated by Stacy Grossfield for her Images//Landscapes series, a fragile son continues through February 12 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Brave the cold tonight: BRINK at Dixon Place

Last night's frigid cold was not enough to keep progressive dance luminaries--from Movement Research, Chocolate Factory and the like--from turning out in support of Kathy Wasik and Stacy Grossfield, both choreographers showing works-in-progress at Dixon Place. These pieces couldn't be more different.

Wasik's low-key Real things, things, and ghost things (whose title might slip over onto Grossfield's dance without doing it much violence) utilizes a nearly bare space and two casually be-jeaned dancers (Wasik and Cara Angela Liguori) colliding in competition over attempts to build a house of cards. (Speaking of which, check this out.) As you might guess, the arc of Real things rises and falls on the two women's often tickling runs at and avoidance of building a personal connection. I most enjoyed watching Wasik's face--big, dark eyes full of potential warmth peering at Liguori, mouth sometimes evenly set, registering faint but detectable amusement, restrained sarcasm or genuine interest. If nothing else, this is a dance that proves that faces--and their gazes--dance.

For Grossfield's Red, Pink, Black, the audience gets displaced from its front-on arrangement--mainly, as far as I could tell, so drummer Anders Griffen could commandeer one of our seats and, also, so we could catch a good view of the theater's balcony. A nightmarish and interestingly childlike drama unfolds--visually and aurally overblown, like a pretend medieval carnival with ratty, makeshift costuming--performed by Grossfield, Nicole Daunic, Rebecca Warner and a hyperactive, amusingly menacing Joey Kipp.

DP's BRINK program, curated by Kim Brandt conclude this evening with a show at 7:30pm. Check in here for complete details and ticketing.

Dixon Place
161-A Chrystie Street (between Delancey and Rivington Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Stacy Grossfield: In your dreams

As the red summer sun sets over Sunset Park, we're ushered up the stairs into 283 47th Street and funneled into a warm, narrow room that smells, faintly, of paint. I gingerly tuck my feet, backpack and tote bag out of the way of a dancer already seated just about an inch away from my reserved folding chair, nearly blocking me from taking it. Dressed in a shiny black wig and a simple black dress with a plunging back, she bends low over a piece of drawing paper, finishing an ink sketch.

Another dancer clings to the left wall like a barnacle. She's covered, head to fingers and toes, in skintight, royal-blue fabric and also wears a lush, silky wig of a sea-green color I might associate with mermaids. Long bangs dip below eyes that are probably covered in fabric; I'll never see them. There's an opening for her mouth but, as far as I can tell, not for her nose.

When "Black Wig" rises, makes her way to the door of the room and opens the door, we can see someone crouched in the hallway. "Black Wig" steps out and closes the door behind her, leaving the sightless, languid "Sea Creature"--these are my nicknames for them, for convenience sake--to sprawl, to rut, to curl up like a fetus or sleepily slide her limbs across the wall or floor, to pulsate and writhe to electronic music that sounds as if its singer were being held under water. Later, another "Sea Creature" will emerge, as the slithers along the wall, a kind of Changing of the Guards.

The door opens. A nearly-nude man in an ironically translucent blindfold moves to a far corner of the room, breathing with audible exaggeration and dancing with restless, hyper-dramatized elegance and force as if compelled to dance ballet in a sci-fi movie scene where the walls are closing in. Meanwhile, "Black Wig" sits at a mirror in another corner, fixing her makeup. She doffs her wig and changes her clothing to loose, pink-and-white sleepwear.

At some point, a tall man in a bear costume ambles past the open door--an apparition! Did we really see that? Yes, because he reappears with a woman in a floral summer dress, stopping to chat with her. Later, we see her alone, silently crying. At other moments, the two flit and dart about. Then we see them confront each other and argue, out of earshot, in the brightly lit hallway. They never enter the room but exert a strong magnetic pull on Stacy Grossfield's Sugar doesn't live here, roughly 45 surrealistic minutes of moving collage that makes the most of restrictive space, framing (that doorway) and barebones or mundane sources of lighting. The other dancers, close to us, are strange, for sure, but not nearly strange enough. What you want to know is what's going on with the Woman and the Bear.

Performances by Grossfield, Laura Grant, Joey Kipp, Heather Olson Trovato, Bennett Harrell and Tracy Jennissen. Music design by Tei Blow. Sculpture by Eric Fertman. 

Sugar doesn't live here continues, Wednesday-Friday at 8pm through July 29 with a final performance at 3pm on Saturday, July 30. Ticketing information by email here or online here.

at The Studio
283 47th Street, Brooklyn
(Take the R to 45th Street, then cross under the BQE. Or take the N or D to 36th Street, then R to 45th Street. Cross under the BQE.)