Mariana Valencia offers "Bouquet" at The Chocolate Factory

Mariana Valencia (right)
with collaborator Lydia Okrent in Bouquet
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Mariana Valencia
Bouquet
The Chocolate Factory
April 18-27

Created and performed by Mariana Valencia, Bouquet examines authorship within the premise of transmission, relation, alliance and ensemble. Her body is the main archive as she quotes dances by Alvin Ailey, Trisha Brown, Frank Conversano and nia love, as well as Eurhythmics and Garifuna dance forms. Valencia also quotes sections of her old dances that were made with her longtime collaborator Lydia Okrent, who has also artistically directed Bouquet with an attunement to ensemble and reference. Valencia’s choreographic retrospective is partnered with her own body as she moves various objects about the space. A smattering of fake fruits, a net, a large piece of glass and a plinth -to name a few- accompany Valencia as she moves her way through a sound score of origin stories. The sound score is a series of letters that circumnavigate her creative path in New York, weaving also through her adolescence and stories from her early 20s. These reveal a vast range of serious, tender and humorous growing pains that lend her abstract movements a foundation that anchors them to the plurality of creation. Valencia fleshes out these movements, histories and influences, as if this timeline of encounters were the sole reasons for producing any work of art. In Bouquet, Valencia invites the audience to traverse a dense field of collective reference.

-- promotional text for Bouquet

What is it?

First thought as you take your seat inside The Chocolate Factory's performance space and look across the floor at a large, ungainly parcel wrapped in a net and resting on a long white base.

It's oddly shaped, and a gap in the tied net that displays an inner wrapping of pale aqua. There's also something small, squarish, equally mysterious stuck between this aqua surface and the netting.

As you continue glancing across the space, you notice the back wall sports a painting of a vase of flowers. A bouquet is a collection of flowers--a collection of things deliberately chosen for aesthetic effect for yourself or others to savor. By the end of Bouquet, you will understand Valencia sees herself as a bouquet.

She enters suddenly--Hi! Thanks for coming!--a radiant apparition, amusingly modest and yet a little larger than life. The red of her matte lipstick pops as does the metallic cobalt blue of the unitard she wears under dark khaki-tan slacks. She speaks. Her gesticulation--big, sharply delineated gestures--click into place with satisfying assurance even as they remain elusive in meaning. There's charm, a connection with her audience. But, over time, the verbal stream becomes choppy, broken into haltingly-delivered bits--word by word, syllable by syllable, incomprehensible sound by sound--as if, intermittently, she's withdrawing or retrogressing.

But check her face a bit later as she begins to unwrap and unpack her parcel. The singing and speaking voice you hear now is in the air, recorded, maybe comes from where the revealed items come from--the past, the archive.

"The game is on/Give me a call, boo/My love is strong/Gonna give my all to you."

Whatever you've expected the lumpy package to contain, it turns out to hold simple items which Valencia sets out in a clear, pristine arrangement and identifies--"a bandanna, a pillow, a mat...pomegranate, plinth, tempered glass"--without narrative explanation. They are, simply, "some of my favorite objects," and you're wise to accept these talismans as they are.

She does mention that the floral bouquet painting was made by her dad--"a Sunday painter."

A body is a mass of stories, each body unique in its collection. But that emergent individuality continuously circles back into the multiplicity of its sources. So, Valencia gives her all--or, at least, a fair representation of what all might be. And then she leads an exercise that draws the audience into this multiplicity as well. Now you, too--all of you--have joined her ensemble, joined with her voice, become her history and her future.

Made in collaboration with dramaturg Lydia Okrent
Sound: Jules Gimbrone
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Bouquet continues through Saturday, April 27 with Thursday-Saturday performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

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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.

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Making space sing: Anna Sperber at The Chocolate Factory

Anna Sperber in Wealth From The Salt Seas
(photo: Brian Rogers)

The costumes for Anna Sperber's Wealth From The Salt Seas--a duet with vocalist/musician Gelsey Bell--display at least two variations on a theme of chocolate brown. (Sperber's pants, hard to make out in the lighting, might be of a hue between dull dark brown and charcoal.)  More than a possible sly reference to the work's venue, The Chocolate Factory Theater, the color has immediate effect--low-key and calming, earthy without being overly sensuous or overbearing, not stark like black. This, as it turns out, is a deep-brown dance.

It's appropriate for the choreographer who might easily go unnoticed when making her quiet, unremarkable first entrance with dark-brown hair pulled back from a scrubbed, serene face. She's just suddenly there, settled in place for a moment.

Sperber eventually drifts from one corner to another, positioning herself at one or another end of a row of viewers, slowly tracing hands over her face and neck and around her waist and hips. Her awareness is internal; you can feel that as easily as you feel the weight and slight friction of hands on skin and fabric.

Sperber's enigmatic, repetitive actions bring attention to the margins of the space and gather stillness and silence there like a gift. You might notice the difference this makes and think: Have I ever looked at performance space--or a performance--in quite this way?

Bell's entrance introduces sound--a voice that momentarily heightens in volume and shrillness. The sound score for the hour-long dance is produced by recorded and live voicings; the impact of feet on the floor; the strange effect of crouching and howling into the corner between two walls; the haunting bells played by the women as they bend their faces to them; and the reverberation of metallic sheets rattled and filling the air between Sperber and Bell as if, like whales, they signaled each other across an expanse of sea.

Curious props appear--a long, thick cable that Sperber manipulates; the odd-looking bells cast in blackish metal; a tarp of golden plastic; small, wooden scaffolds at either diagonal end of the space where the women climb and store their equipment. Curious, too, those moments when you swear you just saw one or the other dancer but she's suddenly out of sight, then she reappears as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Wealth From The Salt Seas continues through Saturday, March 31 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City
(map/directions)

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Jennifer Monson's iLAND premieres "bend the even"

bend the even
danced by Mauriah Kraker (left) and Jennifer Monson
Below: Monson (left) and Kraker
(photos: Ryutaro Ishikane)

This work allows for the possibility that movement disappears and leaves only sensation, an emanation that is experienced through the skin and ears, not so much through the eyes. In bend the even this asks the viewer to release what might be tangible about the experience in preparation for what is newly emerging.
--from publicity for bend the even

Most of New York's dancemakers struggle to secure space to develop their work. But, for Jennifer Monson's latest piece, nature has provided...provided a place for research and exploration...provided motivation, inspiration, even, in its way, partnership.

bend the even--now in its premiere run at The Chocolate Factory Theater--is an experience of an Illinois prairie that we cannot (or maybe can) see. It is darkness and dawn at a beach we cannot (or maybe can) feel beneath our feet. It comes to life in a small loft studio in Long Island City but is intended to take us somewhere to wait for the unexpected and unforeseeable to become apparent to us.

To label it as a dance, and specifically a duet between Monson and Mauriah Kraker, is to lop off two of its essential limbs--the live soundwork of Jeff Kolar (electronics) and Zeena Parkins (acoustic harp); the lightwork of Elliott Jenetopulos, performed in the breath of the moment. (Costumes are by Susan Becker; scenic design by Regina Garcia.) It seems important to this team that their contributions be noted then removed from that hook and released. Something else, we've read, will come to "emanate at the edge of kinesthetic perception."

The research for this project was started in February 2017 with weekly rehearsals at dawn. These rehearsals have generated material connections between light, music, and movement – not as a representation of the liminal states of dawn but as a way of accessing new frameworks for emanating presence and animacy through the three mediums. This work allows for the possibility that movement disappears and leaves only sensation, an emanation that is experienced through the skin and ears, not so much through the eyes. Through the choreographic process, the collaborators will research the physics of sound, light, and movement on multiple scales – both scientific and experiential – drawing on atmospheric science as well as particle physics to inform the dawn practice.

Monson proposes something new, not so much relinquishing the choreographer's role--for the movement in this piece is fascinating and appealing as it is willful and wayward--as redirecting us to an unacknowledged result of choreography, a different purpose for it and for its fusion with other stimulants. I feel that I'm quite stuck on the edge of this desire, instinctually sympathetic with it while what's aimed for remains elusive. As audience members, we're habituated to focus on looking and listening for things and to appreciate (and, yes, interpret and judge) what we see and hear. bend the even intends disruption, or some form of liberation, but I'm caught up in its sensations.

What did we do with the sudden, absolute stillness that broke out on occasion? Did we check for external or internal vibes, or did we tick the seconds, wondering what we were supposed to be feeling and when the dancers might finally move again? Did that time feel more awkward than destabilizing? What about Jenetopulos's precipitous jolts in the lighting or other changes in sound and the dynamics of motion? Did we just "even" the bends right out and get back to our usual way of taking things in?

All that's to say, I'm not sure the bends in any even did more than point to a barrier we should know about. It did not lower that barrier--at least, not for me, not last evening. But maybe that pointing is, in itself, a useful beginning.

bend the even, running through Saturday with performances at 8pm, is sold out, but there is a waiting list. For information, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
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World premiere: Ivy Baldwin Dance presents "Keen [No. 2]"

Choreographer Ivy Baldwin performs in Keen [No. 2],
a new work for her ensemble, Ivy Baldwin Dance, at Abrons Arts Center.
Set design is by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen.
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Eleanor Smith (left) and Katie Workum
perform a duet in Keen [No. 2].

Below, an ensemble scene
(photos: Maria Baranova)

Grief is a force that seizes the body from within and works its way--by covert pathways and on its own timetable--throughout and through. Although humans have devised various rites for directing and honoring its expression, there's no controlling its urges and its dimensions. As such, grief has much to teach the conscious mind that humbly attends to it.

In Keen [No. 2]--in world premiere at the Abrons Arts Center, co-commissioned with The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Joyce Theater as part of Joyce Unleashed--Ivy Baldwin and her dancers dwell within a space of grief. They boldly ask us to pay attention to so much--in Katie Workum's opening solo, in front of that gorgeous, wow-inducing set by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen, a surprising, sometimes halting, even awkward exploration with no interest in pleasing our eyes; in the ensemble's lengthy passages of repetition, often numbingly even in tone; or the same ensemble indulging itself in excesses of release and of obvious uses of imagery and theatrical space, all of it given unconditional permission.

Among other things, I thought of valkyries and angels in flight. I thought of Isadora Duncan, that passionate force of nature, and her grief at the sudden death of her two young children. And I thought of furious tantrums in response to the unexplained, the unfair, the unbearable. It's significant that the dancing sometimes evokes the animal world in shapes, moves, rhythms, sounds, herd-like and unguarded behaviors. Grief connects us to our bodies in ways that can make us remember our basic animal selves and force us to let go of constructed, functional personas. Who better to demonstrate this for us than a chorus of dancers, artists who study the many intricate, wild truths their bodies hold?

Lawrence P. Cassella--who, in 2015, succumbed to a rare immune system disorder after brief illness--was a member of Ivy Baldwin Dance from 2003 to the end of his life. Keen [No. 2] is dedicated to this beloved member of our dance community and informed by Baldwin's experience of losing and grieving him. I watched it with a flow of questions: Is Workum, the work's initial soloist, testing the remaining abilities of a body she no longer trusts? Or could she be testing the powers of a new "body" beyond physical form--rotating her wrists to see if she can lift a leg, twining her hands to generate a new set of fingers? When dancers duet, their bodies coming into sync, can we know who is lost and who is mourning? Or is that interconnection, that blurring of distinction, that temporary inability to let go, regain and shelter in one's own, separate energy and identity, at the very heart of grief? Might it be, for dancers, even harder than for the rest of us to let the physical bodies of their loved ones and colleagues go?

Like the process of grief itself, Keen [No. 2] makes no appeal to what a viewer might want or accept. It is unreasonable and unruly in nature, but it is true to its own purpose and logic, presented with admirable conviction by Baldwin, Eleanor Smith and Katie Workum with Katie Dean, Dia Dearstyne, Heather Olson, Kay Ottinger, Marýa Wethers (June 1-4), Tara Willis (June 8-11), Tara Sheena and Anna Adams Stark.

Sound design: Justin Jones
Lighting design: Chloe Z. Brown
Costumes: Mindy Nelson

Keen [No. 2] continues through June 11 with performances Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm. For information, click here. For ticketing, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (near Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Beth Gill premieres "Catacomb" at The Chocolate Factory

From Catacomb, a new site-specific work
by Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill
at The Chocolate Factory
(photos: Brian Rogers)

It's not every day that I read all the fine print on a dance show's program, the part where thanks are given to collaborators, friends, presenters, funders. But I had a little time before seeing Beth Gill's new work, Catacomb, at The Chocolate Factory, and my eyes were drawn to that part of the page. Anyone who knows me, knows my intuition rules. So, I read.

I'm beginning this way just to note that I'm in awe of the village it takes to get any dance up and running--from the folks who provide space and time and technical assistance to the folks who fork over the funds. Sometimes--as in Gill's case--it takes more than one New York City borough, just for geographical starters. Each dance, often starting with vague stirrings, undertakes a twisty journey to manifestation. The dance network consists of numerous guiding hands along the way, and it's incredibly moving to think about all of this.

In Catacomb, Gill appears to have been drawn by intuition to sub-regions of the self where sharp reason must yield to things unnamed and dimly understood.
The hour-plus piece, performed by Maggie Cloud, Jennifer Lafferty, Heather Lang, Stuart Singer and Marilyn Maywald Yahel, evokes any journalist's primary questions: Who? What? When? Where? and Why?

We're in the upstairs theater of The Chocolate Factory but--really--where are we? And, maybe from your angle, you won't be able to name the identity or even just the sex of the two bodies, conjoined and at first motionless, pressed against the floor. When these bodies do move--at once sluggishly slithering against each other as they creep along the floor--their interaction appears sexual in nature. If so, it is a very sleepy act of sex organically, unconsciously repeated again and again--the bodies sliding over each other in and out of place--until a certain catalyst draws them out of that pattern. It will be a long, long while before we gaze upon two upright forms and expressionless faces as if glimpsing models of the first human inhabitants on Earth.

Catacomb, described as site-specific, handsomely uses three points of entry into the theater--variously lit by Thomas Dunn to frame dancers for peak drama and strangeness. Dunn's work, along with Gill's interest in glacial pacing and in the marginal placement of one or another dancer--sometimes watching, sometimes ignoring the pair, sometimes stationed against or tucked along a wall--were, for me, the most distinct and fascinating elements of the production.

It is a terrain of risk, which Gill accepts even as she invites company in the risking. I bore that in mind as my mind occasionally wandered or withdrew from Catacomb, which, regrettably, feels longer than it is.  The invitation to take time to look deeply into the fabric of this dance does not come with a guarantee of anything but unfolding territory to explore--an experience, not a conclusion. We enter in media res. We leave, it seems, when Gill is finished with our being there. Its beginning and possible end might not have anything to do with us.

With sound by Jon Moniaci and vocals by Rachel Kara Perez and Peter Sciscioli

Catacomb continues through May 28, Wednesdays-Saturdays with performances at 8pm plus an added show at 8pm on Tuesday, May 24. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

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Juliana F. May's "Adult Documentary"

A two-toned carpet--dull brown and beige intermingled splotches--now covers a springy floor and seating risers at The Chocolate Factory. For some reason, just the sight of that carpet switches anxiety to HIGH and seems to make the ceiling feel like it has descended a foot or two and might press even lower. I can't swear this isn't the case.

Luckily, this setup (designed by Sara C. Walsh) won't last forever, although the season for Juliana F. May's new production, Adult Documentary, will continue its stretch over two weeks, a rare blessing for a choreographer and a rare chance for you, the viewer. Get your butt over to Queens and into one of those tightly-packed folding chairs. As another choreographer advised me last night, "Just surrender."

That won't be easy. A delicate, pixyish, ultimately irritating Connor Voss drifts into the space and begins lavishing the audience with high-pitched, childish babble obsessively repeated; fussy, high-strung gesturing; a startling screech for no apparent reason; a tendency to fold their body and gently tuck it at the end of an audience row. Listen carefully, and you eventually sense you're listening in on something of critical, telling import. Voss's lengthy, bravura performance is, at once, gorgeous and worrisome. Is it permissible to be tickled at times? Or to be alarmed by some aspects of it? Should we even be watching it?

Things grow more adult in this "documentary" first with the entrance of Kayvon Pourazar, intensifying the energy in the room with gruff sound and violently jutting movements. His screeching, lumbering presence seems to send Voss into orbit in a madhouse kind of way. You get more of the picture, and you shrink back. But we're just at the beginning.

May's concern with "the form of trauma" and "the trauma of form" takes clear shape as other dancers--Lindsay Clark, Talya Epstein and Rennie McDougall--complete the picture. What ensues next looks like a court dance staged inside a massive cuckoo clock--impersonal, cyclical movements neatly efficient, athletic, mechanically synchronized; the regular, clicking or striding rhythms; the repeated lines of text that hint at a story before spraying it with buckshot. Sharp barks replace words at frustrating places, making you wonder. Nudity, full and partial, insinuates something, falling short of declaration. Periodic variations on things you come to expect keep you off guard.

Integrated with vocal performance, the ensemble's dancing is damned amazing as physical phenomenon, imagery and durational performance. And it takes its toll. I have rarely seen a troupe of dancers line up for their curtain call with such looks of drained exhaustion, no smiles. May smiled--as she should. Her dancers went all out for her vision, and they scored.

With music by Chris Seeds, lighting by Chloe Z. Brown and costumes by Mariana Valencia

Adult Documentary runs through March 12, Tuesday-Saturdays, 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

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Adrienne Truscott: a fool in the king's court

Dance/performance artist Adrienne Truscott writes that when, in the early stages of exploring stand-up comedy, she booked her fledgling act on a lesbian cruise, she ran into a little trouble. A feminist telling jokes about rape to a staunchly feminist audience? What could possibly go wrong?

"It was an incredibly 'safe' space as a woman and an unpredictably conservative space for a comedian," she writes in her "Creator's Note" for Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else.

No comic or anyone else for that matter wants to be told what they can or can't say, nor should they be. It is often a comic's job to utter the unutterable; that doesn't mean that they (we?) are beyond rebuke. Comedy is bold, powerful and supple but not unassailable. There is a difference between a fool and the fool in the king's court....

Now through October 3, you can watch this court fool perform a show that gives new meaning to the word chatterbox, a show where Truscott manages to be, at once, giddy and spot-on.

Hosted by Brooklyn eatery and comedy club The Creek and The Cave, co-presenting with The Chocolate Factory and Performance Space 122, Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It gives Truscott a platform to land important points about rape culture, victim shaming and right-wing hypocrisy while dissolving her audience in laughter. And there's even more educational value! Science nerds will enjoy detailed lessons in duck anatomy and gerbil crisis management. It all works, and while I'm still baffled by the gears in this machine, I'll note that if I told you a single joke out of context, that funniness might fall apart. The wholeness of Truscott's performance is the thing that works.

Truscott's exuberant persona is wildly nonstop, relentless, irresistible and, famously, naked in the netherparts region. Yikes! No wonder she likens this stand-up act to an act of rape!

The most real danger you'll face from Truscott, though, is the likelihood of getting smacked by a denim jacket ripped off and hurled from the stage--my face stung from a slight graze--in one of her acts of divestment. Let's just say, if Trickster Truscott were Salome dancing for Herod, she'd be working 70 veils, not seven.

What she's stripping at, though, is our tendency to avert our eyes and stay silent about things that upset the state of order. (It took a long time for some people to snap out of the Cosby Show trance, didn't it?) But there's absolutely no escaping when pussy's got something to say, damn it, and she will not be denied!

Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It runs tonight at 8pm and this Saturday at 7pm. It continues Wednesday-Saturday, September 30-October 3 at 8pm. For information, visit The Creek and The Cave's Web site here.  To purchase tickets, click here.

The Creek and The Cave
10-93 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions: scroll to bottom of page)

Won't stop: Jeanine Durning's new "To Being"

Jeanine Durning, Julian Barnett and Molly Poerstel
(photo: Ian Douglas)

With To Being we are asking: What is at stake? Where is the end? What does it take to stay in action? And how can we give more when we feel that we’ve met our limit? 

-- Jeanine Durning

When you're about to do what Jeanine Durning and her partners do in To Being, it's more than reasonable to ease your way into it. After all, what you plan to do will take force and stamina to a maniacal degree and, in excess of an hour, demand your complete mental and physical will. To Being--which just opened at The Chocolate Factory--requires something of the same from the empathic viewer. In the presence of these dancers, you might flip from feeling startled to feeling tickled to feeling absolutely spent.

Durning calls her process "nonstopping," and she first gave audiences a taste in her solo, inging (2010), where it was largely a phenomenon of the voice or "unscripted nonstop languaging," as she would have it. In the new work, To Being, Durning, Julian Barnett and an impish Molly Poerstel--accompanied by sound designer Tian Rotteveel--bring us nonstopping as disruptive acts of the body.

Audience seating is scarce and widely scattered around the edges of the theater's bright white space. You come in and take any chair. One or more of the performers might drift through, sometimes ambling by to say hello or give a hug to an audience member. And this amiable, apparent nothing-ing goes on for a while until the performers suddenly vacate the space, and one theater light fires up, signaling...what exactly?

In the absence of an immediate something, the audience's coughs and rustling amplify, and that stretches on for another awkward while. Then: a loud bustle from beyond the entrance, from the metal staircase. What?

From the moment the dancers burst through the entrance, they're on, violently, with little transition or drop in energy. If they were sounds--aside from their audible gasps--they would be blaring dissonance. They disturb the atmosphere with their jutting, threshing arms, lashing torsos, jabbing elbows. Being that refuses to stop.

One gets why Durning rejects the word "continuous" as a description of her movement qualities. That word indeed sounds too soft and flow-y. Nonstopping looks--feels, to the empath--like battle, like resistance to the very idea that you cannot do what you will to do.

As Durning wrote in her program notes, "nonstop points to the critical nature of what it takes to keep going in the midst of, and despite, questions, doubts, limitations, and, of course, inevitable failures." She came to this practice after many questions, some of them regarding why she continues to make work and if she should.

Objects in the way--a speaker, a tangle of electric cords, a radiator, a wall--are commandeered and roughly used, often to create flashes of sound. You sometimes worry for a dancer's safety; you always admire the currency of thought and commitment.

With lighting by Joe Levasseur

To Being runs through September 19 with remaining shows this week tonight through Saturday and September 16-19, all at 8pm. Durning will reprise inging Wednesday through Saturday, September 23-26 with 8pm performances. Remember, seating is very limited.

For information on both productions and ticket availability, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Covering up for Luke George

Dancer Luke George (above)
and a scene from Not About Face
(photos: Madeline Best)

Australian-born dance/performance artist Luke George has a pretty hearty notion of what audiences will tolerate. Never before have I been asked, as an audience member, to divest all of my belongings and don a bed sheet with eye holes that would make me look like a little ghostling who got terribly confused on her way back from Trick-or-Treating (with disconcerting, not so subtle visual echoes of chadors and KKK gear). George's current iteration of Not About Face, performed with collaborator Hilary Clark and, yes, every single person in attendance at The Chocolate Factory, has been described as:

An experiment in anonymous intimacy and fake belief, Not About Face questions the nature of the unspoken contracts between performer and audience, and accesses the supernatural and spiritual as a way to investigate how the yearning for belief can make people do many things. For this performance, audience members are robed in full-body shrouds and join a free-roaming and anonymous gathering in the performance space. We will come together. We will become anonymous. We will fake belief or believe in faking it.



Luke George
(photo: Madeline Best)

Funny thing about bed sheet ectoplasm: It underscores the earthly nature of the bodies underneath. Especially when you can easily recognize your friend or colleague or that downtown dance star by their height or their signature sneakers or snazzy boots. The quest for the intangible puts you smack up against the tangible when George directs you to huddle together ever closer, closer, closer to him and your neighbor runs into your toe.

The body also roars back into view with Clark's sudden crying jag, George's tantrums and, finally, George's lengthy, undeniably charismatic dance that concludes the performance. Transparency, here--used as a form of theatrics--is more spirited than spirit-ly.

I don't know about the "fake belief" thing or George's stated interest (see the program notes) in the behavior of crowds. Seems to me, it's pretty hard to see Not About Face, at least for its audience, as anything but an ordered experience that you consciously agree to participate in (with your paid ticket) to the extent of your comfort. Everyone covered up--that was the fun part--but not absolutely everyone followed every direction.

If you go, know that you will spend nearly ninety minutes mostly on your feet, milling around the space, wearing a heavy sheet that traps body heat. (Ah, yes, the body again....) Since it's cold out these nights, dress in layers and, before the show, leave most of them with that nice coat check person downstairs.

Sound/video/set/system programming: Nick Roux
Lighting: Benjamin Cisterne

Not About Face continues tonight and Saturday with performances at 8pm, and there's an additional show on Saturday at 5pm. Plan to arrive no later than 15 minutes before start time. For tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Marissa Perel dreams it out

Marissa Perel in More Than Just a Piece of Sky
at The Chocolate Factory
(photo: Madeline Best)

Marissa Perel seems so very far away.

Even in a smallish space where the white bed and bedding that cloak her hidden body are not only visible to all eyes but glowing in pristine, ghostly light.

When her audience enters the space, there might be a tiny sliver of skin to see. That's all.

Later, after Perel sits up in the bed, which she never leaves, we strain to hear her singing or speaking voice. But her alter egos--the dancers Lindsay Reuter and Jumatatu Poe, with whom Perel created More Than Just a Piece of Sky--extend her range into our world.

Choreographed and written by Perel, the performance fractures and refashions characters, text and--in one smart moment--vocal music from Barbra Striesand's 1983 movie, Yentl, itself sourced in "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy," a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yentl, you might recall from the film, is really a young Orthodox Jewish woman with a thirst for Talmudic knowledge in a culture that relegates women to home and family. Yentl's defiant self-disguise--her cross-dressing, name-changing strategy--works fine until... Well, just download Streisand singing "The Way He Makes Me Feel."

Presented at The Chocolate Factory as part of Queer New York International Arts Festival, the piece applies artfully arranged text, movement, video, music and lighting to invoke a dream state in which gender identity and roles shift like the moon through its cycles. I'm thinking especially of the delicate verbal and gestural exchanges between Reuter and Poe around a dangling microphone, but each instant of More Than Just a Piece of Sky is meant to show the many facets of difference as forms of sensual magic power.

A passage where Poe presses and slides his naked skin against a wall seems to slip into the ether, to evaporate, perhaps intentionally transient in its effect. Another sequence in which the dancers languidly roll across the floor in each other's embrace feels different, substantial, and is just gorgeous. But I suspect it is not a big deal to Perel to make an impact by making an impact. She might be more intent on charting an ephemeris of all that cannot be pinned in place.

More Than Just a Piece of Sky continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For more information, click here. For tickets, click here.

For a schedule of other events in the 2014 Queer New York International Arts Festival, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Levi Gonzalez opens "The Craft of The Father" at The Chocolate Factory

Levi Gonzalez and Eleanor Smith in
The Craft of The Father
at The Chocolate Factory
(photo by Brian Rogers)

Levi Gonzalez's The Craft of The Father--his first evening-length dance since 2007's Clusterfuck--plays out before a small audience in a single row of chairs lining one wall at The Chocolate Factory. That familiar performance space will seem smaller and closer than ever when dancing gets going in earnest. Before that, though, it becomes a night-cloaked swamp filled with sounds--minute creaks of metal chairs; a neighbor's breathing; blurts and and moans and shrieks from three dancers tucked away in all-consuming darkness--for what stretches on for an unexpected amount of time. Space seems to stretch on, too, pulling you into a simultaneously close and vast place where the human body speaks its own language, free of rational identification. Ultimately, you don't know who's who or what's what, but you might come to feel that you're an inseparable part of the whole and relax into it.

So, now that you're in, what happens to you?

Mellow light comes, revealing agitated movers. Kayvon Pourazar's hands work so frantically around his jaw and temples that he seems driven to pull his own head off. Gonzalez pants from the exertion of wide-legged twirls. Eleanor Smith, twirling too, adds a rotation of her head, churning being a common thread as well as the sometimes awkward shifting of weight--both of the men have earthy physiques--or suspending weight and stretching movement in time. Incessant, the trio is dizzying to watch, and when these dancers separate across the room's length, you must swing your head to track the imagery and activities of one or another.

But are you truly in or are you out?

A meta moment, in which the trio huddles to discuss the dance and debrief, feels both welcoming and not. You hear their friendly conversation, but they're turned inward towards one another and away from their viewers. But you do hear them, and sometimes that makes you giggle. You feel kind of an insider and kind of not.

It's like that. The dancers entangle themselves in a fleshy ball, slipping around one another quietly, easygoing, then not so easygoing and not so quiet.

Things get a little strange around a Kate Bush song, "This Woman's Work," source of Gonzalez's title. (Please try this gorgeous performance by Maxwell.) I have no idea. Just that, maybe, anything alive--anything given life in this material world, a child, a work of art--has its own logic, illogic, direction, misdirection, welcome and refusal, presence and impermanence.

(photo by Brian Rogers)

With lighting by Natalie Robin and sound collected, assembled and performed by Tatyana Tenenbaum

The Craft of The Father continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

COIL Festival: Mac Wellman's "Muazzez" opens at The Chocolate Factory

Actor Steve Mellor sits at a small table and gazes at the audience with his doughy, oblong face and initially deadpan expression and begins to spill a torrent of words. This verbal current flows fast, faster, fastest without cease--miraculously, without tongue-twisting--and, at times, will rise to a level of dark bitterness. That Mellor--occupying The Chocolate Factory's earthly space as well as imagined interstellar space strewn with asteroids--introduces himself as an "abandoned cigar factory" with "a zygodactyly foot" is only part of the fun of Muazzez, a 45-minute monologue derived from short stories by known word wizard Mac Wellman.

"There's no drift to my thought," Mellor/Wellman tells us. "My thought is a rooted thing." Sure. No drift but definitely a well-greased sci-fi sequence on the move and speeding you along with it, scrambling your brain along with Wellman's mythopoetic play and scramble of words. We're invited to envision the high Eulalians of whom nothing is known except that they "builded" the cigar factories. We learn of the "primal radial symmetry" of "a series of spokes or spokey type spindles radiating from a deep and frosty central secret," which sounds kid of tasty. There are "non-self hedges and the hegemony of the self's perfect picture of the world" and something Wellman calls the "ambulatory frightwig of unappetizing complication," which strikes me as a useful insult to hurl at the next person to cross me. Yeah.

I am completely won over by this "succession a stratigraphic variorum," this "placing of jars and jarring of places" and Mellor's virtuoso performance that charges and populates nearly bare space with the high Eulalian magic(k) of words.

A COIL Festival co-presentation of Performance Space 122 and The Chocolate Factory, Muazzez runs through January 17. For complete schedule and ticketing details, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Will Rawls: Shuttling between "downtown" and Serbia

Dance artist Will Rawls

In 2008, I went to the Balkans for the first time and, in some ways, never came back. It was also the summer that Obama was running for president.

The Planet-Eaters is a choreographic investigation of folklore to encounter ourselves as different kinds of performers who are neither here nor there, neither expert nor amateur, both singular and plural, both ancient and new.

--Will Rawls, excerpts from program notes for The Planet-Eaters

In the exceptionally elegant body of American dancer Will Rawls, the folkloric dance rhythms and rituals of the Balkans reveal a lush complexity. Rawls and his musical collaborator, Chris Kuklis, duet in The Planet-Eaters: the dancer entering the realm of music via a twisty, vocalized system of counting beats and his pulled-up posture and lighter-than-air trotting, prancing, pivoting; the musician sharing physical space and elaborate movement and even aggressively manipulating props. Both men go where they "don't belong," and they do so heartfully and beautifully.

With the few audience rows forming a broad crescent curved around one long side of The Chocolate Factory's performance space, and the dancers getting particularly rambunctious in the latter part of the work, you might say there's even community involvement in all this. Come expecting a solo dance turn by a star of the "downtown" arts scene--a strange expectation here, since folk dancing is a communal kind of thang--and you actually become part of a highly textured fabric of witness and support. And then there's the matter of your own feet and the way an eventually sweaty, panting, slip-sliding Rawls might ram right into them. And Kuklis? At one point, he flaps and thrashes a huge patch of Astroturf in your general direction. It gets to be a hot mess up in there--especially when everything takes a turn into a cross between house culture and Old Europe shamanism--assisted by Saša Kovacevic's fanciful costuming--in a suddenly darkened space. About the only weak link is Rawl's lengthy spoken word passage in the middle of the show; the narrative is intriguing, but his voice could use more oomph.

with lighting by Bessie Award winner, Madeline Best

The Planet-Eaters continues through Saturday evening: SOLD OUT. For complete information on this program, click here.

For information on future presentations at The Chocolate Factory, including Jon Kinzel's Someone Once Called Me A Sound Man (December 4-7), click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Just you and I, forever and a day: Rob List's "Play By Ear"

As the audience arrived, Rob List--slender, bearded, professorial-looking,  American ex-pat based in Amsterdam--stood quietly just inside the door to The Chocolate Factory's performance space in silent welcome. He was dressed more like some of us and could have been one of us, just in off the street. He did not look like a man set to perform something called Play By Ear for the next 70 minutes.

When we had settled in, he casually strolled over to say, "So, welcome. Thanks for coming...." I don't remember if he said anything more before dropping into a crouch and, with pieces of charcoal in each hand, drawing delicate black squiggles on the white floor. A shape--clearly, a head--emerged, and then shoulders, as he worked in near silence. The only sound came from the squeak of the charcoal and his shoes as he made way for the elegantly rendered, now tapering image. I was struck by List's gentleness and drawn in by his total concentration and the minimalist dance of hands and charcoal.

At last, he stood, gazed at his drawing and turned his back on it. The space has another doorway into what must be a small greenroom, and a woman appeared, flipping a switch to throw the space into darkness. A second later, the light came back on, and List crouched again, this time facing away from us. Although his body cast its own, natural shadow, the drawing looked like a constructed, static shadow as he made minor rearrangements in his crouch--shifting a knee, a foreleg; slightly wriggling his upperback--and let his fingers dip down or take brief "walks" along the floor, making a "shusshing" sound as they dragged. Poised over one flexed foot and one kneecap, his upperbody sloshing side to side, List seemed profoundly human and un-dancey, yet strangely mesmerizing. He brought us into each moment with him. I thought I heard a morsel of music in the air, coming from some far source, or perhaps I imagined it.

It was a long passage. By the time the audience got the sense of knowing that man's back quite well, List threw us a surprise box of loud, colorful weirdness by way of Tian Rotteveel (who dances and also designed the nightmarishly cinematic sound score) and the thoroughly engaging dancing of Constance Neuenschwander. What he didn't count on was an unexpected finale from a cricket who somehow--I feel, appropriately--found its way into the space.

Last week, Brian Rogers, The Chocolate Factory's artistic director, urged me to check out what List had to offer. In turn, I am urging you. I can't promise you a cricket, but you never know.

Rob List's Play By Ear continues tonight and tomorrow at 8pm. Information and tickets here and 212-352-3101.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

luciana achugar at Abrons Arts Center

I read Gia Kourlas's interview with dance artist luciana achugar (Time Out New York) in which the two discuss the resurging interest in real theaters, as opposed to alternative spaces, as sites for performance. This fits with what I perceive to be achugar's distinctive focus on a sensory opulence that achieves theatricality without being conventional in any sense. The new--and intentionally self-descriptive-- FEELingpleasuresatisfactioncelebrationholyFORM continues her exploration of visceral resonance. She hypnotizes her audience over lengthy stretches in which otherwise bare women--achugar with her dance collaborators Rebecca Brooks, Jennifer Kjos and Melinda Lee--gently dip, bob, twist or sway heads and upper bodies obscured by long, thick hair, sometimes pushing towards and against one another as if sightlessly playing with mirror images.

achugar's imagery suggests a perverse conflation of a Christian penitent's self-punishing hairshirt (but with bothersome hair turned outward), Muslim burqas ironically made of women's hair and, unavoidably--since they are, after all, faceless, nearly nude women rocking nothing but voluminous hair--animated vaginas. An eerie, lulling score performed live by Michael Mahalchick, James Galbraith and Marisol Limon Martinez seeps into your head until the music gradually builds to thrilling, rock-show intensity for FEEL...FORM's final moments.

I think achugar, for the most part, makes the odd environmental stagings and Carrie Wood's manic-depressive lighting design work on her own terms up until that finale when the women--now dressed in jeans, faces visible and eyes smeared by colorful makeup--form a tight circle of heightened, ritualistic action. That finale, though, has neither the strangeness nor the excess nor the pull of the earlier material. As an ending, it seems more functional than meaningful, leading less to "celebration of experience" and "consummation of experience" than, simply, the end of the hour-long trip.

luciana achugar concludes her run at Abrons Arts Center--a co-presentation with The Chocolate Factory--with a performance tonight and Saturday, both at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Granoff's "intuition..."

intuition is preceding over my understanding., says dancer-choreographer Chase Granoff. Or, at least, that's the title of his latest show, just opened at The Chocolate Factory. In a way, I feel the same.

Consider this:

The door to the performance space slides back, and you're welcomed into a space devoid of traditional seating. What unfolds, then, is more like a very low-key art gallery opening than a dance concert. One by one, or in small groups, members of the arriving audience find their way to a blond-wood table laden with glasses for white wine and white plates awaiting slices of store-bought sourdough bread drizzled with olive oil. Standing behind the table, amiably drizzling the olive oil and pouring the wine, is our very own Granoff.

The offerings are comforting, the lights low. The audience chatter builds as people, left to their own devices, drift to various areas of the space. There are some artworks to look at in the space--a 2004 Andrew Miller video of a spare, carefully delineated Granoff performance, complete with headphones for sonic accompaniment; a poem by Thom Donovan, printed on nice beige sheets tastefully and meaningfully stacked near the sourdough bread; photographs by Paul Mpagi Sepuya; F.P. Boué's time-lapse video featuring various views and tiny temporal and atmospheric changes and flashes of human and vehicular traffic around what appears to be the wrought-iron structure of a greenhouse. Add to these laid-back visual stations the presence of a chandelier of sorts, created by Megan Byrne of glass containers, some sprouting delicate little green plants, clamped to metal rods.

"It is the simplest things that are/Easiest to forget," writes Donovan in his poem, "Two Dances for Leavening." The space acts as a container--a gallery, if you will--for a calm simplicity and subtlety in all things. It feels full of this subtlety as if something about Granoff has been externalized, visualized, embodied in things and the lighting upon things. He's so here. (Much, much later, I reflect on the Christian symbolism of consecrated bread and wine, offered to congregants, as a sacred, embodied presence.) So Granoff wouldn't actually have to dance, would he?

For the first twenty minutes or so, what I've described is all that happens. It's easy to suspect that this is all Granoff intends to do for the hour--have us eat, drink, converse and basically entertain ourselves. I get absorbed by the Boué video to some extent, but nothing else holds me, I am by myself, and the dim lighting precludes reading the poem. Just as I try to take one more gtab at grasping--or intuiting--the point of the Miller video, Granoff walks over and turns it off. He's about to dance after all.

He begins moving, close to the chandelier, developing soft twists through his body as he suspends himself by hooking one lifted arm onto thin air and marks the air along with Bill Dixon's avantgarde jazz calligraphies, filigrees and flutters. He dances within the circle of watchers but sometimes ventures beyond. He's a short, bearded man, barefoot, wearing nondescript black jeans and a cream-colored shirt that makes his chest and belly resemble an ample pillow. My students out at Queensborough Community College would not identify him as a dancer if they passed him on the street.

If you happen to be close enough at one particular moment, you can glimpse into the ruddy wells of his small palms. Even the way he holds these hands in this moment suggests a deep reserve of soul--again, with much subtlety--and this is something that could be easily missed but, if caught, is not so easy to forget. Something is here; perhaps a lot is here.

intuition is preceding over my understanding. goes out with a whisper. Yes, it's over. But the gallery display is still there and, hey, maybe there's some more of that bread left.

Here's what Granoff has had to say about the piece:

A solo performance of a landscape exploring an expression of time and place present and past. Interested in the movements of sustainability, slow and local and how they can be applicable to choreographic thought as expressed through improvisation and score. Inspired by the Steve Paxton quote "researched the fiction of cultured dance and the 'truth' of improvisation". Is choreography an aesthetics of change? How is my interest in bread making part of a dance (life) practice? Is dance a politics? This solo has something to do with becoming a father. Re-becoming a dancer.

intuition is preceding over my understanding. is a co-presentation by The Chocolate Factory and Abrons Arts Center, running through Saturday, November 19 at 8pm. Click here for more information and ticketing.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City
(map/directions)

Heather Olson's "Shy showoff"

I hear that the rest of The Chocolate Factory's run of Heather Olson's Shy showoff is sold out. But you could try calling 212-352-3101 and see if they've started a waiting list.

The choreographer's 45-minute trio, danced with Levi Gonzalez and Erin Gerken, strikes me as the kind of mystery box of quiet surprises that might make for a cozy idyll on a rainy weekend.

There's wit, a relaxed but distinct precision and even a little Chrissie Hynde (always welcome) when you least expect it. This abstract piece works its modest glamor through an airy, luminous clarity of form and performance. Its shy, showoff imagery melts on the tongue the way a dream, no matter how lucid in the moment, melts away into the night. You must attend--in both senses of that word. I hope you get in.

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

It's witchcraft

Somewhere in the midst of Suzanne Bocanegra's When A Priest Marries A Witch--that video and live "artist's talk" in which actor Paul Lazar verbally channels Bocanegra while being thoroughly Paul Lazar--I felt the artificial juxtaposition of channel and channelled fall away. Standing before me, just a few feet away, was neither Bocanegra nor Lazar alone but some deep, thorough cohesion of the two, and I fell madly in love. That's a condition, I assure you, not unfamiliar with regard to Lazar, but Bocanegra, a multidisciplinary artist, is totally new to me.

Up until that moment, though, I had already been well-entertained by Bocanegra's narrative, delivered by Lazar in a shallow space before a packed and cramped but chuckling Chocolate Factory audience on closing night. Through her genial mouthpiece, Bocanegra revisited her childhood in Pasadena, TX (oil- and NASA-loving country), where the artistic youngster dreamed of coloring for a living, and surveyed a transitional time for Roman Catholics like herself (Vatican II, folk masses, singing nuns, Sr. Carita's art, the Berrigan Bros). Having been raised in the church, too--although in oil-poor, astronaut-deprived New York--I'd lived or witnessed all of Bocanegra's Catholic cultural landmarks. I knew of which she spoke and felt her a sister soul.

On the soundtrack, we could hear her actual voice, at low volume, speaking the monologue just a few beats behind Lazar's voice, but her presence also loomed large in the hour's visual and verbal imagery--First Communion (wearing pink!); first outfit bought with her own money (black satin brocade suit paired with a cowgirl hat and an old pair of white go-go boots); checking out the art and architecture of her church and bemoaning the transition from nun-habit haute couture to the more humanizing but unacceptable dowdy ugliness of post-Vatican II sartorial reform ("the biggest fashion mistake of the 20th Century").

A "Catholic Mass groupie," she found the tradition gave her, "room to space out and think your own thoughts. Nobody can bug you. You're praying!" Later, the example set by a local designer in reworking the interior of her church--again, post-Vatican II, and in ways that seriously messed up Catholic habits, not the wearable kind--taught her that "you could make art, and it could be a grown-up thing, not just a kid thing, and you didn't have to work for an oil company."

So anyway, why did Paul Lazar have to be Suzanne Bocanegra? I don't know. But I also don't know why Paul Lazar shouldn't be Suzanne Bocanegra or why anyone who has to deliver an artist's talk shouldn't hire Lazar to step in and deliver it. I'd certainly do that.

But we are talking about a person--Bocanegra, I mean--whose Web site's home page looks like this, and I kid you not:

work
info

That's it. Seriously. A page, blank except for her name in a small, black font and those two links.  Visit http://suzannebocanegra.com/ and see for yourself.

While you're there, visit this page

http://suzannebocanegra.com/priestwitch1.htm 

and check out the still from Change of Habit (1969), which appears to be a towering monument to cheesiness. It starred Elvis Presley as a doctor and Mary Tyler Moore as a nun with the hots for him, a crushing ambivalence about her vows to Jesus, and an application of false eyelashes and shadow that might work perfectly for me but for a nun...? That section of When A Priest Marries A Witch has got to be one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.

Lord! What will The Chocolate Factory do next? Click here and find out.

Are we here?

This is where we are (or take arms against a sea of troubles), a new piece by K. J. Holmes, inhabits The Chocolate Factory in such an intimate way that I would blush if that were possible for me. It is less a multidisciplinary dance as a cluster of natural forces that ooze and rub and blow and explode around the raw architecture of the space. Being natural forces, they resist containment.

Your evening starts in the Choc’s narrow, stuffy waiting area as you stand, gazing up those familar metal steps into the building’s upstairs theater. A few madly-dressed dancers slither from the door and over the brick walls. Through the open door, you can see dramatic blue lighting and more dancing deep into the space. It looks wild, like something shaken a very, very long time ago and just now revealed.

Eventually, dancers lead everyone downstairs and scatter to all points, and seemingly, all crevasses in the semi-darkness as audience members take seats on folding chairs. The smell of pine fills the air; heaps of sad little Christmas trees and their chopped-off branches and slabs and curls of bark litter the space, a forest primeval animated by yodels, the shushing slip of feet across the floor, and the spare but resonant live music. A half-naked woman slowly swims across a wall. She becomes engulfed in and stained by a projection, trapped in a stained glass image, and later buried beneath pine branches as she and Holmes intone an indecipherable chant.

More occurs in this claustrophobic space, and then we’re pointed up the stairs and lined up in tightly spaced rows against a long wall. Here, as if we’ve climbed a mountain, the dominant feeling is one of acceleration, rushing air. Bodies, music, visual projections and spoken words, according to a program note, gathered from everywhere--from Socrates to Mother Goose, from Harold Pinter to Howard Zinn--whip up and spread throughout the space, sliced from their contexts. These elements sometimes split your focus around the room, or they collide.

There’s witchy beauty, and this ambitious production should be experienced. I must admit, though, that as the hour unfolded, I started to feel like a mother sitting with an exceedingly bright, curious child who’s excited to show me more and more and more and more precious, fascinating discoveries. It left me exhausted and dazed, certain of only one thing--sometimes all the words in the world are inadequate to explain where we are and why.

Performed by a strong cast including Holmes, Jodi Bender, Keith Biesack, Marin Sander-Holzman, Kathy Westwater, Devika Wickremesinghe

With musicians Doug MacKenzie, David Moss and Charlie Rauh; lighting and projection designer Tom Ontiveros; costume design catalyst Ella Veres. Recorded text by Julie Carr.

This is where we are (or take arms against a sea of troubles) continues through Saturday evening, 8pm. For tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City
(map and directions)

Give your junk to Sarah Maxfield

Here's a message to you all from the resourceful Sarah Maxfield. I wish I'd known about this before I recycled a collection of dance, theater and museum tickets--three year's worth!--and the usual annual assortment of press kits and programs! Oh, well... Sounds like a wonderful project. Get involved!

Hello dear friends,

I need your old junk.

I want to include your stuff in an exhibit of performance ephemera. The exhibit will be part of a public event I'm developing for The Chocolate Factory in March. I'd like the exhibit to include as many things as possible (from as many artists as possible), which represent our collective performance past in New York City. Do you have some things you would be willing to share for this purpose?

I'm particularly interested in collecting things like programs, postcards, tickets, fliers, and other things which include information that can be understood and recognized by relative "strangers" to the "performance community," as well as by the denizens of our little world. I'm less interested in costumes, props, etc., unless it is something relatively iconic (i.e. would be recognizable to your audience as well as those who were in your rehearsal room).

If you have some stuff to share, please let me know, and we can coordinate pick-up. Everything will be returned to you, unharmed.

I'm also collecting the following information for the project, so, even if you don't have any physical stuff to share, please consider emailing me your response to the following questions:

1. What is your favorite place in the City to meet someone for coffee?

2. What is your favorite place in the City to meet someone for a drink?

3. What is your favorite public place (street corner, park, crosswalk, etc.) in the City?

Thanks for considering these requests, and feel free to forward this on to your friends.

Cheers,

Sarah Maxfield (sarahmaxATgmailDOTcom)

sarahmaxfield.wordpress.com