A warm(er) New York City welcome for APAP

This year, New York has welcomed the annual APAP (Association of Performing Arts Presenters) conference with the kind of "winter weather" that makes chasing down performances and showings all around town a whole lot easier than anticipated. I like that I can take post-dinner strolls across town to The Joyce for FOCUS DANCE--the series offered by Gotham Arts Exchange and the Joyce and curated, this year, by Jodee Nimerichter (director, American Dance Festival). I'll only get to the first two of FOCUS's four programs, but I'd like to shake the hand of the man or woman who can manage to get to everything invited to or, for that matter, worth seeing during APAP season.

Last night's show at the Joyce featured work by Jodi Melnick and Stephen Petronio. Melnick's Solo, Re(Deluxe), Version (2012), premiered last spring at New York Live Arts and set to the ecstatic, jagged chugging of Steven Reker's rock band, People Get Ready, finally came into focus and took off for me when the choreographer teamed up with another outstanding dancer, Hristoula Harakas. The two women proceeded to slip within and against the space with moves of silk and sophistication, switched on and attuned to one another's force and timing. Everything on that raw stage suddenly warmed up. It looked like love and intuition and mad stellar skill. Also, mad stellar are Gino Grenek and his fellow dancers from Stephen Petronio Company who offered excerpts from three sculpted pieces--Like Lazarus Did (LLD), a work in progress, The Architecture of Loss (2012) and Underland (2011). I'm always drawn to this ensemble's earth-angel quality: You can see how disciplined they are, but they show honor to the body and materiality--and humanity--by playing with gravity, never straining to escape it. Whatever they're dancing, they are sharing this specific time and place with us. Something so arresting and emotionally moving in this for me.

Tonight? Camille A. Brown & Dancers--to see where Brown's going with the provocative Mr. TOL E. RAncE--and Brian Brooks Moving Company (7:30 at The Joyce Theater). For information on the remaining FOCUS DANCE programs through January 13 at the Joyce--including work by Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, Doug Varone and Dancers, Eiko & Koma and John Jasperse--click here and here.

The Joyce Theater
Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Get ready for Reker at New York Live Arts

 

Above and below: Steven Reker wrecks his own scenery (photos by Ian Douglas)

 

When it comes to stretching a note, Steven Reker--shown above with a ripped-up floor panel from his new work, Specific Ocean--really, really knows how. The rock musician/dancer/choreographer and his band of dancing musicians and musician/dancers, People Get Ready, are tearing it up at New York Live Arts this weekend. Reker's driving indie rock has a heady intensity, and his choreography, an uncomplicated playfulness and gusto. I wish I could have made out all of the lyrics (or had a lyric sheet), but that's not an insurmountable problem: Just go with it. I'm thinking the sound/movement stuff with the floor panels (like the swinging of corded mics in a previous Reker work) doesn't actually add much though, as you can see from the terrific Ian Douglas photos above, it can be picturesque).

Above: Aaron Mattocks's pas de deux with guitar. Below: Some of the 7-member People Get Ready crew (photos by Ian Douglas)

The band's first album is now available from Brassland Records at Bandcamp! Click here. The show is available at New York Live Arts tonight at 7:30pm, tomorrow at 9:30pm. Info here. If there are tickets to be had, you can get them here.

New York Live Arts

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)

Body and Soul: Listen.: Steven Reker

Steven Reker (photo by Liliana Dirks-Goodman/New York Live Arts), above and in a video clip from WNYC's SoundCheck

                  
Click here to subscribe to Body and Soul podcast in iTunes and listen to the multitalented Steven Reker (dancer, choreographer, musician, songwriter) talk about "creating sonic landscapes" with his band of musicians and dancers, People Get Ready.

People Get Ready/Steven Reker will present the world premiere of Specific Ocean at New York Live Arts (October 18-20). Prior to the October 18th show, there will be a conversation about 'Where Contemporary Dance and Pop Music Intersect in NYC Today" at 6:30pm, moderated by Michael Azerrad. Information and tickets are available here.

Steven Reker bio

People Get Ready Web site

People Get Ready artist page on Brassland

To subscribe to Body and Soul podcast, click here.

Your donation will help keep Body and Soul together. Please get in touch, and I'll happily send instructions. Thanks!

(c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody (http://infinitebody.blogspot.com)

Reker's "People Get Ready"

Tonight’s your last chance to see People Get Ready, a performance named for Steven Reker’s tribe of indie musician/dancers, at The Kitchen. So listen up.

Musically, Reker’s mixtape certainly has appeal. What starts off with Reker’s very low-key singing and plinking guitar notes and the gang stomping out the rhythm like trained horses counting with their hooves quickly expands into this primal heartbeat--full-force, deliciously melodic, deeply layered rock. One drawback to totally loving it is, at least in this setting, the indecipherable lyrics. (”a Squandering,” sung very deliberately and clearly, is the exception.) It’s all quite danceable, although the group’s collective and often whimsical choreography and awkward, ineffectual way with video and props--usually manipulating unorthodox light sources--shows no evidence of confidence in the overall design.

But, dance-wise, People Get Ready has high points. The energetic Reker, a well-loved stalwart of “downtown” performance, provides some of that interest in Red Skeleton where he performs a kind of meditative, stop-motion hip hop while plastered against the back wall, a white hipster suspended against its charcoal bricks as if stuck by Velcro. And there’s that boyish smile. Microphone’s dance--a swinging-corded-microphones-like-lassos number choreographed by Reker and his drummer Luke Fasano--has strong, uncomplicated visual impact but wastes it by going on too long and abusing people's tolerance for grating noise. Side Saddle brings together the kickass women of the troupe--Jen Goma, Jessica Cook and Megan Byrne as Reker’s backup singers, perhaps deliberately arranged in line with him, not behind him, for chorus moves that, for the first time, happily align with the pumping, pounding, expansive waves of Reker’s music.

Other members of the troupe include musicians James Rickman and Eddie Crichton who, though generally integrated into the flow of things, mostly stick to making music on the sidelines.

People Get Ready concludes its run tonight at 8pm. For tickets, click here.

Sample songs by People Get Ready on Myspace.

Sample a 2009 performance of People Get Ready at The Kitchen.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Steven Reker listens

Steven Reker: ‘American’ songwriter
Mapp International Productions blog, December 14, 2009