Artists Reach Out: Tatyana Tenenbaum

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody


Tatyana Tenenbaum

Tatyana Tenenbaum
(selfie courtesy of the artist)

Choreographer/composer Tatyana Tenenbaum works with breath, voice, fascia and musculature to excavate spaces of power and transformation. Weaving embodied aleatory with deconstructed song, she has created numerous original interdisciplinary works for her own group, as well as collaborated with other artists as a sound designer and performer. Tenenbaum was a 2017-18 Movement Research AIR and recipient of commissions from The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project and Temple University, among others. She has worked with artists Yoshiko Chuma, Daria Faïn, Jennifer Monson, Emily Johnson/CATALYST, Levi Gonzalez, Juliana May, Andy Luo & lily bo shapiro, Hadar Ahuvia, and Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Together with Lydia Bell and Jasmine Hearn, she co-organized the collective terrain/s mini-platform on voice and choreography at Danspace Project. In conversation with Peter Sciocioli and Pyeng Threadgill, she co-instigated the Sounding Body workshop series at Movement Research. www.tatyanatenenbaum.com

Tatyana Tenenbaum and collaborators
Rebeca Medina, Emily Moore, Pareena Lim, Jules Skloot and Saúl Ulerio
(photo: Ian Douglas) 

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Yes, and no. This period of isolation actually coincided with an intentional moment of pause and tilling of my ongoing creative practice. I have been creating and facilitating collaborative group work--pretty consistently for the last 12 years. Both personally and financially, it was necessary for me to pause and nourish my practice in new ways. One of the undercurrents that has supported my work since 2014 is my relationship with artist Hadar Ahuvia. Descendants of twin diasporas (Hadar’s Jewish family settled in Palestine around the same time my Jewish family immigrated to the US), we have served as special eyes and ears for one another’s work. More recently we’ve begun to co-author text, music and lyrics, and to articulate a more expansive collaboration around folklore, ritual, memory, song and dance. Nicky Paraiso invited us to present work for La MaMa Moves! in June, but everything is up in the air. In the meantime, we are continuing our dialogue remotely.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I was excited to read Kayvon Pourazar’s response to your questions, and to find out that we both read David Abram! For me, I was studying music composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, which turned out to be a simultaneously life-changing and traumatic educational event. I grew up steeped in musical theater, so my musical training largely came through participating in high school musicals and listening obsessively to the music of Stephen Sondheim. Oberlin exposed me to the beauty inherent in atonal dissonance, timbral and rhythmic complexity. These experiences were profoundly embodied. However, I was encouraged by my (white) male professors not to trust my body anymore--as it contained my pre-existing habits--and to approach music-making as a largely cerebral and conceptual practice. I was young and impressionable, and this was devastating. Reading Abram reassured me that all language is embodied. A hunger to reunite myself with a corporeal knowledge of sonic vibration led me to dance, and to unfurl the practice I have been building for the past decade.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

My practice engages the voice as a corporeal material; as magical; as medicinal; as inter-generational; as communicative. I am practicing listening to myself, to others, to my ancestors, and to the world around me. A desire to feel “interconnectedness” is something that quite literally comes into being when sounding. Vibration resonates the physical body, but its sound waves move perpetually outward to resonate the space around us. Sound does not exist in a vacuum. Sound is healing! Lately, I have been returning to a practice of songwriting. I have been returning to the music of Stephen Sondheim and writing songs to him. I released a short EP of songs shortly before this epidemic. In these songs I am tracing the lineages of secular Jewish thought and assimilation that have impacted me and my body. I am speaking to various “thought ancestors” in their flawed fullness, seeking resource: Sigmund Freud, Rodgers & Hammerstein…Lynn Riggs. Maybe they’ll hear me.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I mentioned my collaborative work already. It’s something we don’t acknowledge enough: this intentional labor of collaborative making. It is the building and nurturing of trust, shared language and ethics that runs under the soil of a work. I am fortunate to have many long-running collaborative relationships and am now seeing babies being born in my process. This fall, thanks to the organizing of collaborator Rebeca Medina, I decided to jump on a chance to perform in Bogotá, Colombia. We were able to perform at DIY artist-organized festival Pliegues y Despliegues. I was nervous to share my work in South America, but it translated powerfully--both the aleatory / deep listening aspects of the work, and the embodied critique of musical theater--which we were told evoked larger echoes of US cultural imperialism. Performing in another hemisphere and showing up in our collectivity caused us to clarify intentions deep into our bones. Leveraging all my resources for this trip is part of what necessitated a personal “pause,” but I don’t regret it. Especially in light of the Covid-19 shutdown. Because it brought my work and its collaborative relationships many levels deeper.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I am still tuning in to answer that question…but I think, as we constantly re-tune our bodies and listen, the answers will come. It’s not going to happen quickly, and that’s okay. I think the world has been changing for some time. Many people cannot afford to go to dance class every day. Artists have been building these very virtuosic practices that can change and propagate themselves in many circumstances. We must keep our creativity alive as a daily effort, large or small (see self-care tip below). One thing that I have been thinking about, with all the incredible organizing going on with Covid-19-related relief $ for artists, is having some real conversations with myself about where I need to be. Where am I in relationship to precarity, privilege and inter-generational wealth? Where does my energy and voice need to be right now? This is real, this is not a rehearsal. One thing that this mini “shut-down” of the art market has made clear, is that we NEED to be in this together.

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

Less effort. Slow down and feel all the parts of the movement. I always tell my performers this when it’s the performance because I noticed that they would push too hard in performance and the whole thing would be out of tune…. I always say, “with your voices, pretend you're just marking it.” Then it will sound perfect. I am trying this attitude on for size in my daily life as I can. Thank you to the Feldenkrais Method (particularly Belinda He, my first magical teacher) for seeding this practice into my body over the years. I am still a beginner.

******

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.

******

Subscribe in a reader

Imprinting (Dan)space: Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha

Left: Tendayi Kuumba (photo: Angie Vasquez)
Right: Samita Sinha (photo: Aram Jibilian)

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha
Danspace Project
April 25 and April 27, 2019

collective terrain/s is a collective research process into sounding in the body. How does the body open up possibilities for voice and resistance? What resonances in the voice and body exist beyond language?

 --from Danspace Project

As part of an evening organized by collective terrain/s, composer and vocalist Samita Sinha--with numerous collaborating vocalists of cultural diversity--creates a force field of sonic energy to surround an audience informally positioned at the center, not the perimeter, of the performance space. Infinity Folds is vocal music in motion, a lovely, luscious gift that makes you the focus of a meditative sonic bath and massage, your aura tingling. It's marvelously coordinated as the circle of vocalists shape and move breath--moans and drones, trills and low roars--into the outer air, using softly-adjusted bodies as tuning devices. You absorb the circling and circling soundscape that builds, pulses, overlaps, presses towards listeners and then ebbs, flares in spots, sometimes drops away entirely. Set in the sacred and justice-conscious space of St. Mark's Church, this loving ritual feels and sounds so right. You might never want it to end. [Performed by Regina Bain, Rina Espiritu, Fana Fraser, Yingjia Lemon Guo, Chaesong Kim, Risha Lee, Okwui Okpokwasili, lily bo shapiro, Samita Sinha, Sheena Sood and Helen Yung]

Somewhere in the midst of U.F.O.:(Unidentified Fly Objects), made and performed by Tendayi Kuumba in creative collaboration with Greg Purnell, an intermittent projection flashes against an upper corner of the church's wall. It images a patch of cloudy sky lit up by the glow of lightning. Kuumba's formidably quirky self-presentation gives way to something simply majestic, and you realize: this unpredictable, kinda scary woman is lightning. Folding, writhing, recoiling, she lights up the night with pure energy coursing through every stretch of her without impediment. The piece--accompanied by Purnell, seated at a desk, working a soundboard and providing a strong, rumbling ostinato--also features Kuumba's vocals. In body and voice--and soul--she is jazz.

We already whole, she sings. Even through the rain/somehow we always maintain.

We already home.

Purnell sings with her.

Can't break my soul.

Now hear that!

Choreography: Tendayi Kuumba
Creative concepts, lighting, dramaturgy, set design and songwriting/musical composition created with collaborator Greg Purnell

collective terrain/s is organized by Lydia Bell, Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum. To learn more about collective terrain/s's activities and the series' publication--designed by collective please--click here.

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha concludes tomorrow (Saturday) with a performance at 8pm. For the best effects, come a bit early to get a prime seat in the center, though you can also sit along the church's risers. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

******

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.

******

Subscribe in a reader

Tatyana Tenenbaum's "Untitled Work for Voice"

Cast of Tatyana Tenenbaum's
Untitled Work for Voice
(photo: Liz Charky)

Choreographer/composer Tatyana Tenenbaum
performs in her work.
(photo: Simon Courchel)

I'm fairly sure I saw Shirley Temple's ghost at St. Mark's Church last night. Long, diaphanous curtains descended from the sanctuary's balcony and draped along the side risers. The faint, spectral image of Hollywood's tapdancing white child star shimmered over the sheer fabric and against the wall near the entrance. At least, I think it was Shirley, her spirit briefly hovering--a blessing? a warning?--before Tatyana Tenenbaum premiered a new, hour-long ensemble piece, Untitled Work for Voice, for Danspace Project.

As the title indicates, the work involves not only movement but vocalization and, indeed, blends the two so much that it becomes clear that, for Tenenbaum, one's entire body, not just one's vocal chords, speaks and sings. I've read an interview where she talks about having lived from the neck up, a way of being she connects to her Jewish heritage (self-described, in her program notes, as white and assimilated). Untitled Work for Voice might offer a series of fitful attempts to break through, not by circumventing her situation but by mining it for any tool that might serve her purpose.

We sometimes hear a single word pronounced as if by dissection: courage rendered as kohr-raj-geh. We watch dancers dryly launch jazz dance (sort of) movement phrases and halt them before the payoff. There are moments of call-and-response that seem, at once, meaninglessly secular; because we are trained to expect beauty and sacredness in this format, we hear sacred beauty. Three of the dancers carry out and rattle thunder sheets--a theatrical device to simulate an awesome force of nature in a place where it is not.

An auburn-haired apparition in a white gown dotted with green pompoms softly mewls and sings and turns and twists in the air. Who or what is she?

Sentences might fragment, or start and get rethought and reset: "We had a fight...no, it wasn't a fight. We had an argument." Each element seems like a desperate grasp or stab at something. And dancers confidently intone made-up lyrics to Glenn Miller's, "A String of Pearls," a World War II swing hit best known as an instrumental. The actual lyrics--I Googled this morning to check--are something else again.

Untitled Work for Voice--perhaps "untitled" because how to settle on something that might keep shifting?--did not seem to be building towards anywhere or anything. But--to my surprise and, admittedly, my relief-- it really did with a swirling, gradually expansive solo for dancing, singing Jules Skloot.

Breakthrough.

Created and performed by Marisa Clementi, Pareena Lim, Emily Moore, Skloot and Tenenbaum
Costume design: Claire Fleury
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann

Untitled Work for Voice continues tonight and Saturday with performances at 8pm. There is no late seating. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (off Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader