Through the looking glass...

NY Premiere of Looking Glass
by Third Rail Projects

Performed by Tom Pearson, Tara O'Con, Elizabeth Carena, Jennine Willett, Tori Sparks and Marisa Nielsen-Pincus

All photos (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Extraordinary Moves: A Celebration of Dance through Movement, Film and Art at the World Financial Center (River to River Festival)

O’Con loves a mystery

Underneath Where We Are--the latest enigma from the interesting mind of choreographer Tara O’Con--features a couple of marvelously self-controlled performances by Jodi Bender and Megan Madorin at The Chocolate Factory. These two have a very difficult and sophisticated task: to draw an audience into the fine, delicate details of movement and of tactile experience, to keep watchers sharply focused even when the information coming from the dancers’ bodies aims to bypass the logic centers of the brain. It’s a gamble for O’Con and her collaborating dancers, and they win.

At the outset, a low rumble slithers beneath the dark, like a train passing deep below the building’s foundation. Opposite the audience, against a distant wall, an indistinct shape writhes in heavy shadow. The faintest light dusts the top of it, and eventually we can tell it is two bodies splayed against the wall, two women entwined, stretching with and collapsing upon each other. Since this opening goes on a while, a thought comes: What if this were to be the entire dance--Bender and Madorin endlessly twisting, twining and sinking, wallflowers drooping from weak stalks--could that gamble work? Interesting to contemplate. I almost think it could. In more light, however, they collapse to the floor and rest.

This pause afforded a moment to reflect on the abstract work of art that is The Chocolate Factory’s interior. Most of O’Con’s dance is performed quietly, slowly, and with reference to the space and its unusual features--the dark, ominous-looking shaftway, helpfully labeled SHAFTWAY and barricaded with two horizontal metal bars; the patchy-surfaced sliding door; the thick, vertical pipe at one side. Dancers never--to my best recollection--look into our eyes; most often, they dance with their backs or sides facing us, and they emphasize only the life of the animal body, not the life of any identifiable ego. They attend to their own bodies or to the surfaces of the space, and that attention seems to have nothing to do with us--at least, on an intellectual level. But O’Con makes us feel the breathing of bodies--quite literally, at times, as when Bender pants heavily after her solo to the old Motown tune, “Who’s Loving You,” a singular eruption from the identifiable world of pop culture. We also perceive, strongly, the breathing presence and soul of place.

With lighting by Chloë Z. Brown and sound design and compositioin by Jason Sebastian

Underneath Where We Are continues, nightly at 8pm, through Saturday evening. Click here for information and ticket reservations.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue
Long Island City, Queens
718-482-7069
(directions)

Two beauties at Danspace

With Walk It Once, Tara O'Con (recently interviewed on Body and Soul) aspires to nothing short of the revelation of the body's experience, unfiltered by conventional understanding and utility. Valiant Jodi Bender and Carly Pansulla--later joined by O'Con--move in glacial and melty contortions, their faces hidden. Lighting wiz Kathy Kaufmann sculpts it all with a sensitive glow, and composer Jason Sebastian's looping sound design grows richer, more delicious over time.

Spare white framing and a rectangular patch of plastic lawn suggest suburban space in Standard Gravity, part 2b by Living Laboratory/Enrico D. Wey, an ensemble sharing the evening with O'Con's trio. Enrico D. Wey's offbeat and pitch-perfect performers arrange themselves within imagined horizontal, vertical and psychic layers of St. Mark's sanctuary in such a cool, detached way that the viewer dare not even breathe too deeply for fear of creating a disturbance.

These two challenging, rewarding and handsome works continue at Danspace Project tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 8:30pm. Click here for information and ticketing or call 866-811-4111.

Tara O'Con: Body and Soul podcast

My guest, the emerging choreographer Tara O'Con, will make her Danspace Project debut with the eerie, intriguing Walk It Once--a trio originally presented at The Chocolate Factory in June 2008. She shares a program with choreographer-puppeteer Enrico D. Wey, January 22-24, 8:30pm.

Tara O'Con graduated with honors in 2003 with a B.A. in dance and performance from Roger Williams University. Currently residing in Brooklyn, she has presented her work in showcases at Dixon Place, The Brooklyn Arts Exchange, WOW Café Theater, The Chocolate Factory Theater (Fresh Meat Festival), and by Dancenow NYC. In 2007, O'Con was among six emerging choreographers to be chosen for Dance Theater Workshop's Fresh Tracks Performance and Residency Program. She returned to The Chocolate Factory Theater for the presentation of the first full-length production of her work in June of 2008. As a dancer, she has enjoyed fruitful collaborations with Stephan Koplowitz, Ellis Wood Dance, Jillian Sweeney, Megan Sprenger/mvworks, Sam Kim, Red Metal Mailbox, Ben Munisteri Dance Projects, Mina Nishimura, Rocha Dance Theater, Shannon Hummel/Cora Dance, Tami Stronach, and Third Rail Projects.

Additional guest and concert information here

(c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File

The persistence of O'Con

Tara O'Con presented the brief and intriguingly eerie Walk It Once this past weekend at The Chocolate Factory. In this little slice of surrealism, Jodi Bender, Carly Pansulla and O'Con slow-w-w-w-ly crept across the floor, contorted in a way that hid their faces while revealing the curvature of their spines. They resembled misshapen sci-fi critters and Dali's melted timepieces fashioned in flesh, radiant under Holly Ko's lighting. I'm not convinced that Jason Sebastian's accompanying music, as in a lot of today's dances, needed to be so lulling. (Is it all only about not clashing or competing with the movement?) And some tentative video play across a dancer's back promised an important turn in the piece but never delivered. But my sense of O'Con is of a young talent quickly developing confidence in her physical and visual ideas and assertive vision. Not knowing what the title means--where's the walking, after all?--only adds to mysterious effect.

This Woman's Work: Ellis Wood by Tara O'Con

Editor's Note: Besides being an accomplished performer, Tara O'Con is a talented young writer who participated in my first Writing on Dance group this spring at Dance Theater Workshop. She contributes this piece, an appreciation of dancer-choreographer Ellis Wood.


(Ellis Wood, leading her company in Flat Affect,
Dance New Amsterdam, April 2007. Photo: Steven Schreiber)

This Woman’s Work: Reflections on a conversation with Ellis Wood, Artistic Director of Ellis Wood Dance

By Tara O’Con

To inhabit the world that Ellis Wood creates through dance is to experience the complexities of life--its struggles, confrontations and celebrations, governed only by the senses. The porous line between pleasure and pain, sexy and grotesque, tenderness and violence, is blurred; pushed just beyond the reaches of cognition. This world is navigable only by one’s gut and piloted by the body. According to Wood, this is her work at its most pure and desired state. Like a drug, to move in such an honest, primal and unabashed way is a high. For herself, and for her dancers, communicating from within this hyper-real, hyper-physical ecosystem allows them to get euphorically close to their true selves. For audience members, should they choose to accept the invitation, a profound visceral experience awaits.

Visually, that which informs Wood’s creations is articulated by riding the fine line between control and freedom in movement. Wood however, is quick to explain that her goal is not to blindly explode and express. This may have been the case years ago, when at 3AM, she would find herself dancing around her apartment alone to crazy music in order to satiate the bubbling urge for uninhibited raw self-expression. Now, twelve years into directing her accomplished dance company--she is a 2007 recipient of the coveted BUILD grant, awarded to dance companies by the New York Foundation for the Arts for infrastructure development--that same potent creative expression is honed by a constant self-awareness session comprised of three artistic goals: take personal risks, stay true to herself and examine the way each work is crafted in order to best serve the clear articulation of her ideas. Each goal comes with its own set of struggles, confrontations and celebrations--the criteria of which have been, and will continue to, change over time. For instance, what was once a personal risk at age 30 is no longer a risk at age 42. Such is life. Consequently, such is the mirror through which this woman’s work is reflected.

The need for assessment and re-assessment of these goals comes head to head with the id of creative expression--a scenario Wood likens to a never-ending drama that occupies every part of life and synonymously, ever part of dance. Why put does she put herself through this daily grind? (Feel free to stop here and re-read the first paragraph to this article.) The pure exhilaration and endless possibilities sparked by sheer physical intensity serves as both bedrock for ultimate personal truth, and the enticement to keep going. As Wood puts it, “the body drives the work.” From a director’s standpoint, when Wood is on the outside looking at her work and feels what is happening is not genuine, she will step in, next to her dancers, and live in it for herself until it gets it to that raw place.

Everyone has their element--something that they can live in and, for that moment, feel completely at home with themselves; their infectious energy in some way touching everyone around them. For some people it could be finance, cooking, teaching, etc. For Ellis Wood, it's dance.

(c) Tara O'Con, 2007

Kids take on the greats

[Editor's Note: In addition to being a dancer and choreographer, Tara O'Con is a graduate of my Spring 2007 Writing on Dance course at Dance Theater Workshop. Here's a snippet of her feature piece about Kids Company, a project of Diane Jacobowitz's Dancewave, just published in the Brooklyn Eagle. Click here for the complete article.]

clipped from www.brooklyneagle.com from "A Modern Dance Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Tara O'Con Make no mistake, the terrain of the teenage years is nothing short of a battlefield. However, if adolescence is such a battle, then time spent with Dancewave’s Kids Company can be thought of as a cease-fire. Quite simply, when ambitious and talented teenage dancers, ages 12-18, are put into a room with a renowned professional dance artist, a transformation happens.