What's CURRENT: the CURRENT SESSIONS returns to Wild Project

Curated and produced by Alexis Convento, this season's edition of the CURRENT SESSIONS at Wild Project features performers exploring the concept of embodied resistance. I attended last evening's hour-long show, REFUSE, solos by three artists of color--NIC Kay, Samantha CC and Jonathan Gonzalez.

Of these, only Samantha CC kept us staring at the stage and confined to our seats and the building itself the entire time, which seemed appropriate. After all, her gentle, mellifluous singing, in Sanctuary--second work on the bill--invoked the condition of being settled into the physical state, Black and female, sanctuary for an ethereal soul, a home offering stability, place, placement to something that would otherwise easily flap away, a home offering visibility and audibility and, presumably, power. "I know that the body is a temporary home...a temporary home...a temporary home for my soul." Which brings up this thought in me: While you've got it, use it.

From our temporary perches, we watched this quiet exultation issued from a woman who first presented herself panting and costumed in plastic trash bags she clawed and scraped from her limbs to reveal a body stocking, underwear, one breast covered by the doves' feathers. If we passed her outside on an East Village street, she would be the homeless person famous for incoherent mumbles or formidable rants. Here, she is sweet-voiced, lucid, illuminated and illuminating. A New Age medium.

Sanctuary was described as "a multi-media performance speaking to technology's ability to both restrain and liberate." Honestly, I can't say I saw that, but I did see the body's ability to both restrain and liberate--an idea I found more intriguing.

The evening opened with the audience suddenly, inexplicably uprooted from the seats we'd just sunk into. We were directed, instead, to the sidewalk where it took a while to notice an unassuming figure turned from us and leaning with forehead pressed against the building's white-washed brick wall. Standing under the building number, 195, was this dancer in a sleeveless unitard of black with star-like speckles. White strings from several buoyant balloons--translucent milky white save for one Mylar silver pillow balloon--coiled around the dancer's neck. It was NIC Kay beginning Get Well Soon!, a dance that would gradually move them over the sidewalk, out into traffic, across the street to the edges of a dumpster and finally back to the lights of the Wild Project stage.

Described as "a loose meditation on the often used wish of recovery"--and what self-care, recovery and wellness mean in the context of the perennial trauma and threat to Black lives--Get Well Soon! played a serious game with the mind. Kay uses limber flow to sprawl around space and a crunchier, jerking motion to re-position limbs and torso, both strategies rigorously controlled by this skilled performer. Their form is profoundly elegant while bold in assertiveness; their body--crouching, lunging, squatting, splaying--embraces gravity while those well-anchored balloons brightly incline heavenward. The body is like, "I'm doing what I'm doing, regardless." The balloons are heedless of this. They are pretty, a little silly in a way but...yeah, pretty, especially in this mellow summer night on an East Village street. You can't take your eyes off any of this. And you can't help some ambiguity about what you're watching. I can't see this Black body with cords wrapping around the neck and extending up into the air and not think about lynching.

Kay is wicked smart, an exacting performer with a divx quality I will dare call classic glamour. Catch them next chance you get.

I also like Jonathan Gonzalez because I never know what to expect from this guy.
This time, for Ikarus, he showed up in blackface, wearing a shiny Mylar-silver jacket and carrying a huge, scarlet Valentine balloon he ultimately draped around an audience member's neck. A lot of bizarre things happened in Ikarus including a chilling version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky"--yippie yi ooh yippie yi yay--and some foolery in which Gonzalez hid out of viewing range and some of us shot out of our seats to try to find him only to be stymied by the theater's lights flipping on and off, and then he returned in a duck mask to dance his ass off and quite well, mind you, having his own divx quality. Can't say what any of this was about but the short version of his description reads "Escape is exactly the distance between a dirt bike and the will to leave." Oh, and something like that happened, too, ending the show with the audience once again up on its feet and gazing from the lobby out onto Third Street.

As always, I have no idea exactly what you'll encounter if you venture over to the CURRENT SESSIONS for the series' last show tonight, since it's a different draw of artists. (The first evening, RESCUE, offered works by Gregory King and Megan Young; Raha Behnam; and Elena Rose Light.) But Alexis Convento has keen eyes and provocative taste. She always takes risks, and it's worth your doing so, too.

The CURRENT SESSIONS: Volume VII: On Resistance concludes this evening with RESTRICT, featuring works by Dalel Bacre, Dorian Nuskind-Oder and Simon Grenier-Poirier, and Tina Wang and Tingying Ma at 8pm. Click here for information and tickets.

Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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California dreaming: Roya Carreras at the wild project

This weekend, Roya Carreras shows The Big Balloon at the wild project.
(photo: Jason Knade)

Choreographer Roya Carreras welcomes us into dreamy interiorized exteriors and minimized, constrained interiors in her childhood-memory piece The Big Balloon. Curated by Alexis Convento for her performance series, The CURRENT SESSIONS, Carreras multidisciplinary work will have its final show today at the wild project where aspects of it take over even the surface of a floor (film projection) and the surround of the lobby gallery and restrooms (soundscape).

Our complete immersion, executed by Carreras' team, is greatly enhanced by the close quarters of the space, the numbers of enthusiastic first-night fans and, ultimately, the convenience of a bar right there at the box office. Arrive for the roughly half-hour dance installation prelude--performed by the impeccable Fana Fraser--grab a drink, and you feel as if you have wondered into tiny East Village gallery opening.

Fraser's solo--performed just inside the lobby entrance, in the confines of a plywood enclosure filled with wonderfully-fragrant planting soil and decorated with a patch of artificial grass--interested me the most. Her relationship to the rich earth ranged from delicate and meditative to searching to aggressive. A few times, she ventured out onto the sidewalk to pick up a pot of geraniums to replant in the soil, but she herself seemed more the planted than the planter. Carreras' imageful work takes inspiration from her childhood in California where, I would imagine, the Iranian-Hispanic artist must have found solace in her family's garden.

What happens soon after the stroke of the hour, when we've wandered into the theater proper, is another matter--suggestive and fleeting, and I will not say more. Before the lights go down, Carreras allows us a hint in the stage decor that she shows and which, as the dance proceeds and ends, will perhaps become more meaningful to viewers. The dance itself--well performed by Caitlin Taylor, Elise Ritzel, Eloise DeLuca, Gregory Dolbashian and Maleek Washington--disturbed me in the way it depicted relationships between men and women. I found myself quite often checking out. But it's possible that Carreras' intent was to show us exactly what it was that turned me off.

That's a wild stab. I cannot say for sure. And I ended up not staying for the post-show Q&A. Having gotten tangled in the mob of people getting more drinks and lining up for the restroom, on second thought, I opted to just make my way home.

The Big Balloon concludes this afternoon and evening: lobby installation at 5:30pm, performance at 6pm followed by a wrap party at 7. Proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the National Iranian American Council. For information and tickets, click here.

the wild project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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the CURRENT SESSIONS: Currently at wild project

Choreographer Fana Fraser presents work this weekend
along with other artists for the CURRENT SESSIONS at wild project.
(photo: Quyn Duong)

Movement Currency will focus on how bodies produce, exchange, and perform within systems of value, drawing on figurative and ethnographic practices to consider the lineage of choreographies which qualify our social identity.

--from promo for the CURRENT SESSIONS's new season Volume VI, Issue II: Movement Currency

With New York's fall dance season looming up ahead--and, believe me, it's looming--we can enjoy a breather for a few more weeks. But if you're still craving dance with some bite to it, Alexis Convento's team, the CURRENT SESSIONS, might have just the thing for you.

Last evening's presentation was organized around the concept of Risk--"from fragility to preservation, harm to survival...risk as a performative dimension which trades personal safety for choreographic opportunity." Tonight's show will tackle Debt, and tomorrow's 3pm matinee and 7pm performances, respectively, spin off from Savings and Credit. Each feature a concise mix of emerging artists guest curated by Ali Rosa-Salas, Justin Cabrillos and Sasha Okshteyn.

Risk--well-paced and clocking in at 45 minutes without break--offered work by dance artists Katrina Reid, Jessica Pretty and Amanda Hunt and filmmaker Ben Hagari. Of these four, all intriguing, I found Pretty and Hagari the most compelling.

Hagari's tour de force, Potter's Will (2015), is a sensuous and yet nightmarish ballet for wet clay, hellish fire glow, a man's clay-smeared body and the madly swirling camera of cinematographer Boaz Freund. Set, quite appropriately, to Ravel's La valse, it draws the viewer ever closer to danger--immolation, extinction and perhaps, at this great cost, unimaginable transformation.

Pretty's solo, the third., images a powerful wanting and not having. The dancer is a Black woman with hands often splayed in front of her gentle face, shielding her squinting eyes from the fierce glare of an imagined light source. She moves and folds and shapes her body like a tangle of brambles in big expenditures of energy and motion. She's a powerful, satisfying dancer--all the more reason that the empty platform stage seems confining, as does that invisible light source. Sudden, insistent bursts of song--Kanye West's "Nobody to Love," with its weird exhortation to just "grab somebody" from the party--both kind of name her situation and fragment it into any number of problematic realities.

Movement Currency's series resets the lineup for each show, with some repeats. So, your experience may be different but always an opportunity to discover, engage and be challenged.

Volume VI, Issue II: Movement Currency continues through Sunday, August 21. For programming information and ticketing details, click here.

wild project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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What's current with The CURRENT SESSIONS?

Gearing up for the upcoming dance season? Flex your dance-viewing muscles now at the latest edition of The CURRENT SESSIONS's choreographer showcase, running this weekend at The Wild Project. That small East Village house offers good looks at some new visions by early and mid-career choreographers and movement-based artists.

Like any omnibus presentation, The CURRENT SESSIONS's VOLUME IV, ISSUE II program can be an uneven mixed bag. You'll likely find some works in these 90 minutes more absorbing than others. Go for the variety and the possibility of discovery.

EmmaGrace Skove-Epes (photo: Ian Douglas)

Check the weekend schedule for EmmaGrace Skove-Epes's of milk, of fresh snow, of the margins of this page, an edgy, strongly-performed solo arising from "the place of angst in art-making within a context of white female sexuality, white privilege, narcissism, and examining the dilutive qualities of whiteness." (Her title and blurb alone are works of art.) of milk seems an invitation to look at covert discomfort with and dissociation from a body that, despite all that, is going right on asserting itself--at least, that's what I, a Black female, took away.

Troy Ogilvie's solo, performed by Andrea Murillo, makes me wonder anew how to tell the dancer from the dance--both are mighty and slick, stretched to distortion but always in control. It's a dance/dancing with size and attitude. (Imagined conversation, Murillo to Ogilvie: "I got this.") The Gil Scott-Heron recording that accompanies the piece adds an intriguing layer of texture and tension.

Oh, one more thing: Since you'll be dressed for summer, take a wrap. The Wild Project's A/C was strong enough to defeat even the trusty sweatshirt I had slipped over my shoulders.

Check here for more information about The CURRENT SESSIONS's VOLUME IV, ISSUE II and a schedule of performances 7:30pm tonight and tomorrow at 3pm and 7pm.

The Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map)