On the avenue. Second Avenue...

Second Avenue Dance Company--resident dance troupe of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts--is showing off a whole lotta training and no small measure of pizzazz in several works presented this week in its annual spring season.

Above and below: Second Avenue Dance Company in Aszure Barton's Rookery
(Photos: Tony Dougherty)
 

Two programs interweave work by student dancemakers Matthew Flatley, Mariel Lugosch-Ecker, Allison Schieler and Austin Tyler with world premieres by Sydney Skybetter, Aszure Barton, Seán Curran and Kate Weare. I saw Program A last night.

Barton's got the edge on edge in Rookery, and the NYU students seem to have a handle on her style's striking blend of wired mania and stretchiness and odd locomotion. Skybetter catches them on the other end of things with the clean, cool, continuous reconfigurations of Little Boy. They look great in Mark Koss's costumes and Skybetter's exquisite choreography. Lucky, lucky, lucky students to have such exciting mentors as they set off into the professional sphere.

Above and below: Second Avenue Dance Company in Sydney Skybetter's Little Boy (Photos: Tony Dougherty)

I can't help it: Curran's Oh sleep, why dost thou leave me prompts the answer, "Dude, because you've got all those people dancing around you!" And Weare's Pura Vida makes me long to see Weare's own marvelous dancers get a crack at it.

Performances run through April 2, all at 8pm. For reservations and information, call 212-998-1982 (Monday-Friday, 1-5pm only).

NYU Tisch School of the Arts
111 Second Avenue, 5th Floor
(directions)

Future of media...and dance?

@sydneyskybetter tweeted:

Piece on deficits of imagination / failure to evolve brokn models. Takeaway: this is no time for incrementalism in dance.

Read what led Sydney to this provocative thought:

Future of media: This is no time for incrementalism
by Mathew Ingram, Gigaom, June 12, 2011

Skybetter's magical (dance) history tour

Dancer-choreographer Sydney Skybetter takes us on a whirlwind tour of dance history in this creative slide presentation.

From Medici to Jooss: Four Centuries of Crazy Incestuous Dance Action

View more presentations from Sydney Skybetter.

Cyberspace for dance

Dancing in a Vacuum: The NEA Says Get Online

by Jennifer Edwards, The Huffington Post, July 6, 2010

National Endowment for the Arts report -- Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation

Making bite-sized dance

Ever sit and watch some hyped, hyper-funded, bloated and disappointing production and wonder whatever happened to modest and incisive dance pieces?

Robin Staff, artistic director and producer of the DanceNOW NYC Festival, believes that size matters--small size, that is--and is prepared to put some money behind that notion.

Her festival artists will be challenged to "create a new work or present a repertory work seven minutes or less, that offers a concise, clear, and complete artistic statement."

Hooray!

The fest's announcement continues:

The artist that best meets the DanceNOW Challenge will be awarded a week-long residency at Silo at Kirkland Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, along with a $1000 residency stipend and a paid teaching opportunity at DeSales University, with whom DanceNOW has partnered since 2006 to bring New York City-based choreographer/educators to Bucks County/Lehigh Valley, to teach and perform. The artist will be selected during the Festival by a panel of administrators, educators, and peers.

Performances are scheduled for September 8-11 at Dance Theater Workshop.
As summer winds down, artists such as Kyle Abraham, Sydney Skybetter, Nicholas Leichter, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Camille Brown, Stefanie Nelson, Gina Gibney, Ellis Wood and Paul Singh will proffer what they hope you'll find to be good things in small packages.

Connect with DanceNOW NYC and its 2010 festival plans here.

It's all about CLASSCLASSCLASS

LOTSLOTSLOTS happening with CLASSCLASSCLASS, from March 1 to June 12!

Too much to tell you here. You'll have to check it out yourself.

But I will drop a few names of which I am perpetually enamored: Kyle Abraham, Hilary Clark, luciana achugar, Sydney Skybetter, Walter Dundervill, Aynsley Vandenbroucke...

 CLASSCLASSCLASS nurtures a continued future of dance pedagogy in New York City by engaging and developing a new generation of dance and performance artists as they teach their craft, while simultaneously making the act of taking and teaching class affordable for all. This year CLASSCLASSCLASS is partnering with Movement Research, but will continue to be a separate entity maintaining our own mission, goals, and modus operandi. We are hoping that this relationship fosters a very fertile space for newer teachers to experiment with their craft under the umbrella of an established organization.

Sounds cool. And so do the fees: classes $10; 

workshops $15.

First come first served. No reservations.

Sunday evening potluck/teaching forums (Fort Greene)

CLASSCLASSCLASS participating studios: 

BRAZIL (Bushwick)

The Chocolate Factory (Long Island City)

lululemon athletica (SoHo)

Studio 5-2 (Flatiron District)

Get complete info here.

Motion? Yes. Mavericks? Uh...

By the end of last year's presidential campaign, the perfectly blameless word maverick was left standing around in shredded underwear, a glazed look in its eye, nobody willing to give it the time of day. And I'm thinking that dance fans might do well to be skeptical once again whenever they see that word used to characterize and promote dancemakers. I'm thinking that, particularly, after a respectable, pleasant but not earthshaking hour at La MaMa Moves festival which sampled the work of several choreographers designated as "Mavericks in Motion."

In motion, they certainly were. But there were only a couple of moments that made me sit forward, and they belonged to Bergen Wheeler (dancing in Sydney Skybetter's The Personal and in her own Lone) and Kim Jones (partnered by Edgar Cortes in Cortes's Lagri Mar).

Jones and the Portuguese-born Cortes both hail from Graham backgrounds, and the romantic Lagri Mar gives them plenty of Graham-like archetypal gravitas and glamour to chew on. And Jones gives herself over to glamorous dancing like nobody's business.

Wheeler's the dark-haired, compact, incredibly supple dynamo who regularly takes Skybetter choreography--a striking combination of angularity and flow--to stratospheric levels because she's got not only exacting skill and focus but undeniable star quality. Bringing up the rear in Skybetter's Schubert suite of four solos, she is literally a precise, perfect art song in motion. Then, without much of a pause, Wheeler returns to launch a two-part solo of her own creation. Lone's first segment--set to Verdi's "Chi il Bel Sogno Di Doretta"--actually rocks steadier than her rocking out to Led Zeppelin's "Ramble On" but, at the end, her audience rightly greets her like the rock star she is.

There's still more La MaMa moving to see, from tonight at 8pm through Sunday at 8pm. If you're lucky, you'll catch Bergen Wheeler on Sunday night's program. Also, the "American Hybrids" program, running through Sunday looks fresh, promising, even potentially mavericky, with works by Monstah Black and Nicholas Leichter, Minneapolis's HIJACK/Kristen Van Loon and Arwen Wilder, and Bessie-Award winner Tom Pearson. And generations of Cunningham dance artists will take the stage from May 29-31.

Company and schedule details and ticketing

Box office: 212-475-7710

Artists emergent and urgent

Nice, nice show at Dance Theater Workshop last night--Emerging Artists. Very strong showing from Camille A. Brown who...listen, doesn't she, by now, make you begin to look sideways at that word, emerging? In her new Matchstick, set to piano music composed and performed by Brandon McCune, she creates a physical and emotional environment in which four Black men in post-Civil War/pre-civil rights America--future leaders of a community--gather around a table strewn with papers to strategize, argue and perhaps resolve differences. Their movement--expressionist and often jarring--gives us a sense of their conflicts and their vital connection to one another. It was a joy to see Kevin Guy, Otis Donovan Herring, Juel D. Lane and Keon Thoulouis dancing at DTW, giving their all to this intriguing and powerful piece. Later, Brown told me that, although this was a world premiere performance, she's still developing Matchstick and has plans to expand it. Good!

Sydney Skybetter. Oh, wow. If he's still "emerging," will someone please light the fuse and blast him out there? Some better-known choreographers working a similar aesthetic vein get high praise for their musicality whether their work indeed has true musicality or much else to recommend it. This man actually deserves the kudos he's received. And the clarity of execution in his poetic, sophisticated craftsmanship, married with contained passion, makes him a standout. There's never a dull moment in Potemkin Piece (2007) or The Cold House You Kept (2008). And you must see Bergen Wheeler who appears in all three Skybetter pieces on the program but solos in an extravagant excerpt from The Personal (2008), dancing around a pliable axis of beauty. She's a dancer's dancer, an extraordinary instrument with star quality.

Jessy Smith's pop-culture -loving, all-female troupe, POW! offered refreshing retro with a chik-a-boom kick in Pow! And The Bedazzlers, The Gimme Muney Hunnies and, especially, Let's Get Tangled. That last one, which closed out the program, managed to hold its own against the potentially-upstaging song it's danced to--Outkast and Janelle Monae's hilariously-delivered, if hair-raising, Call the Law. Jacob Peter Kovner and Anna K. Whaley premiered Adjacent People and Other Problems. Its elusive subtlety made it a little recessive in the company of all these heavy hitters, and I might not relish long dances set to music that lulls me. But there's something about Kovner and Whaley's sensibilities that can't be easily dismissed. I'd like to see more.

Catch the final night of Emerging Artists at DTW by clicking here.