Melanie George reflects on (re)Source, new performance from Maria Bauman-Morales

Maria Bauman-Morales performs (re)Source.
(photo: Kearra Amaya Gopee)

I celebrate the abundance of this essay by guest writer Melanie George on (re)Source, a new immersive dance work by Maria Bauman-Morales co-commissioned by BAAD! and The Chocolate Factory. The solo premieres at BAAD! in its BLAKTINX 2019 series on September 25 and runs nightly through September 28. For more information, click here.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Getting By, Getting Through, Getting Over, and Making it:

Reflections on Maria Bauman-Morales’ (re)Source

by Melanie George

(re)Source is a work of blood and bone, of muscle and memory. It only lives in Maria Bauman-Morales, and will likely only ever be performed by her. In part, because it is an improvisational work, but also because the specificity within the thematic content – America, race, family, identity – can only be assembled by way of her understanding of her origin story and place in the world. She is tethered, literally and figuratively, as she navigates and negotiates her relationship to space, memory, and family lore. Her body is an interpreter of stories, individual and collective, detailed through the supple facility of her movement, and open curiosity of her gaze. I hesitate to use words like earnest and confrontational, as, too often, we associate them with the absence of complexity and nuance, but to deal with race in America is be smothered in complex nuances. The willingness to do so openly (but not fearlessly because our history with race is overflowing with the consequences of fear) is to be vulnerable and critical, for performer and audience. I find the work to be one of meaning-making, not statement-making. In her multi-hyphenate identity – as a queer, woman of color, artist, educator, anti-racism facilitator, womanist, wife, daughter, citizen – her sociopolitical values are realized and transparent so as to not to be proclamations. Lived truth and embodied identity speak volumes.   

As I attempted to locate (re)Source in contemporary art making practices, Maria pointed me toward the work of Amara Tabor-Smith, and her theory of Conjure Art. In Conjure Art, there are no boundaries between the spiritual and artistic practice. In fact, they serve as reciprocal conduits within the process of art-making. In defining the practice, Tabor-Smith explains, “Conjure artists believe in the forces of nature such as ancestor spirits, gods and/or deities found in indigenous cultures and recognize these energies as the guiding forces in their art practice.” Through the improvisational score that comprises much of (re)Source, we experience conjuring in real time. On multiple occasions in rehearsal, Maria noted that her deceased father had joined her during runs of the piece. This is not metaphor or allusion. In crafting (re)Source Maria makes room for her elders and ancestors to dance with her and through her, to receive impulses that guide choice-making during the performance. I was particularly struck by adaptation of Doug Varone’s “room reading” exercise to prepare to rehearse. As her line of inquiry is steeped in exploring non-proscenium spaces, she is negotiating her relationship to the stage and inquiring about the role of agency on uneven terrain. Her practice is guided by relationships to people, to environment, to identity. So, of course, there is a need to engage with all of these things before diving into the dance. 

For those inclined to over-academise the art-making process (I, too, can be guilty of this), the identification of Conjure Art is fundamental to receiving (re)Source as it is intended, rather than applying erroneous models to interpret it. Please note my identification of the academy. This is purposeful because of its predisposition to valuing Western-normative art-making models, and its function as a gatekeeper in our field. What does it mean to accept this work on its own terms? What is our role and responsibility in engaging with this dance? First, we must allow the artist to define the landscape of the work. In (re)Source, Africanist elements are centered, as is the importance of storytelling. This must be the terra firma from which we start our journey with the piece.  Maria is highly conversant in several dance languages. Chiefly, she values the weight, rhythm, dynamism, and spirituality that we recognize as essential to an Africanist movement lexicon. Her training in capoeira informs her movement vocabulary and is instrumental in her strength and use of space.  Additionally, she employs elements of movement abstraction that we associate with the choreographic tools of post-modernism. In her work, I see the intersection of multiples ways of knowing and claiming contemporary dance. Within one movement there may be a composite of physical textures, alternately competing and co-existing. In centering the names and stories of her ancestors - purposely keeping black folks present and visible in the work -  she is also centering her art-making practice. All are resources toward the making of the work. All are valid and do not require defense.

(re) Source is not a sentimental work. Maria may be conjuring her ancestors, but she is doing so in the age of Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and the rising tally of Black trans women’s deaths this year. There is little time for sentiment when you’re gathering your tools for survival. She sees (re)Source and her family history as “a microcosm for race relations” in this country. Within that history are black and white relatives, and white relatives that owned enslaved black people. Maria reckons with the weight of that knowledge through movement and text, and aligns it with the jarring shift in our political climate since the ascent of Donald Trump as a political figure. There is great responsibility in telling personal truths about one’s family. Maria endeavors to make the labor visible, but in doing so she does not wallow in the impact of that labor. Instead, her role, part oracle and part griot, is to synthesize the contrasting content into a locking archive. The set, which functions as installation, immersive theatrical design, and interactive playground for the performer, is both obstacle and portal. A series of interwoven strings and chairs resembling a human sized cat’s cradle, the bonds can be tenuous, supportive, pliable, or binding. Alternately highlighting positive and negative space, they function as a metaphor for taking up space, holding space, and moving through it. The seating arrangement interlocks so that perspectives are varied, but no one sits alone. Interdependence is also a theme of the work. Though it is a solo performance, through conjuring and the seating arrangement, Maria is never, truly dancing alone. (re)Source invests in telling truths about race. By design, the audience is implicated in her navigation of this content.

“Resources are tools. I want to make transparent that 

‘I am because we are’. 

I have resources because people have gone through worse.”

• Maria Bauman-Morales

Though I am writing about (re)Source, I feel it is important to note Maria is developing this new piece concurrently with another evening-length work, Desire: A Sankofa Dream. The processes for the productions are not related. Solo vs. Group. Fantastical vs. Non-linear Improvisation. Personal history vs. imagined biography. Though they are wholly individual works, the continuum between the two productions encapsulates a core underpinning in Maria’s artistic identity: Interconnectedness and the continuum between the intrapersonal and interpersonal. It feels significant that she is working on these dances concurrently. The duality of honoring the individual and the group is an Africanist element that is a resource for how she makes meaning in the world. This speaks to a larger, overarching theme in her work: Life as practice, and an embodied investment in the survival and thriving of black and brown folks. The processes used in the making of her art are enacted in comparable ways in all areas of her life, notably through her work with Urban Bush Women’s BOLD program (Builders, Organizers and Leaders through Dance) and as a facilitator of Anti-Racism training with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. The various roles Maria plays an artist-activist are not discreet from each other, they are in dialogue, as she is openly and actively in dialogue with us.

Melanie George is an educator, choreographer, and scholar. She is the founder of Jazz Is… Dance Project, and the Audience Educator and Dramaturg at Lumberyard Center for Film and Performing Arts. She is honored to be the Dramaturg for (re)Source.

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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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Sounding off with Miguel Gutierrez at The Chocolate Factory

Center: Dance artist Miguel Gutierrez
brings his new work,This Bridge Called My Ass,
to The Chocolate Factory Theater
(photo: Paula Lobo)

Miguel Gutierrez
This Bridge Called My Ass
American Realness at The Chocolate Factory Theater
January 9-19

Before the messy mound of fabric scraps, chairs, step stools, electric cords and other discards at center space gets picked through for eccentric props; before festively-colored lights blink on and draw attentions to unexpected places; before dancers, without a shred of self-consciousness. display more and more bare flesh and sexual inclinations, there is sound.

In the beginning of This Bridge Called My Ass, there is the word--or many, really--some written by Miguel Gutierrez. A Spanish call-and-response--all the performers are of Latin American heritage--and a kind of chant that seems derived from an elementary school classroom or a language lesson for the non-Spanish speaker. The pacing and forceful energy of the choral readings of this text sound like a choir filled with conviction. But not a choir without the capacity to be flippant; if you were placed just right, you would have noticed a sly gaze-and-grin passing between Gutierrez and Oakland burlesque dancer Xandra Ibarra.

As things spread out--and lordy, how they do spread out--so does resonant sound of voice, music, props making bizarre impact against the floor and each other. As things spread out, they sometimes come in precarious contact with other things or nearly so. I worried much over the safety of so much unprotected flesh in the presence of hard metal wielded with abandon and also fretted over the safety of a MacBook with a rather large step stool weirdly balanced on the edge of its opened cover. Who takes this kind of risk?

Sprawling over the mess, toying with it, the dancers get tangled apparently without any of the fear I, from the relative safety of my front row seat, was feeling. Nor do they inhibit themselves or others. Soft and hard things are just things. Things are just things, and you might find yourself hallucinating that the inanimate is animate, and very much vice versa. These juxtapositions are truly audacious, monstrous connections. You have to give yourself over to the in-the-moment pointlessness and futility of it all, because the dancers definitely do.

Presented without intermission, the piece is about 90 minutes and feels really endless. Towards the end, though, there's an interesting shift that I resist interpreting. In fact, I resist interpreting anything here. All I will say is that the execution of it has--again, the best words I can find for this show--energy, resonance, to an impressive degree. There's something here that lives beyond the initial mess.

Created by Miguel Gutierrez and performed by Gutierrez with Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, nibia pastrana santiago and Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez

Dramaturg and assistant director: Stephanie Acosta
Lighting design: Tuçe Yasak

This Bridge Called My Ass runs through January 19. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 48th 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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We all scream for "Screamers."

Molly Lieber in Screamers,

a film by Brian Rogers, screening now at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Brian Rogers)

More squirmer than screamer, Screamers--a feature film written and directed by Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory Theater--situates a vulnerable woman (Molly Lieber) inside a deconsecrated Catholic church that will now be her home in a small town where, we're told, "there's little to see and even less to do." You might as well ignore the dreary man moving into it with her (Andrew Dinwiddie) because this is Lieber's film. She is the dark matter at the center, the magnetic force, and she is magnificent in her role--visually, symbolically, emotionally. Everyone else seems like hallucinatory debris in orbit--from the smirky, smarmy priest (Jay Wegman) who used to celebrate mass there to the annoyingly inaudible handyman (Jon Kinzel) who leaves an oily black smear on Lieber's lips. And what's with the scenes of a hulking Jim Finlay punching out a hooded captive?

I appreciated the framing of Lieber by her haunted visual environment, but the sonic environment most captured my attention and imagination. Aside from Lieber, the stars of this show are the crisp sounds--everything from a creaking stained glass window to couch cushions that complain when compressed and released--amplified to an unnatural degree. Sounds with heft, with personality. It is as if we all had taken drugs, and the noises ordinary things make--usually in the background of awareness--are now sharing stories and opinions.

Rogers spent time alone in artistic residency at puppeteer Dan Hurlin's upstate house, a deconsecrated church, an experience that, he says, worked some strange changes. So Screamers and probably Lieber's character, to a degree I won't speculate about, contains a fair amount of Rogers. But, for me always, any American ghost story raises useful parallels to those ghastly ghosts of American history we try to avoid and which now are popping up all over the place.

Starring: Andrew Dinwiddie, Jim Findlay, Daniel Fish, Vallejo Gantner, Keely Garfield, Jon Kinzel, Quinn Larson, Molly Lieber, Jay Wegman

Writer/Director/Editor: Brian Rogers
Producer: Madeline Best
Director of Photography: Jeff Larson
Production design: Sara C. Walsh
Lighting: Jon Harper
Location Sound: Stephen Bruckert
Dramaturgy and Directorial Consultation: Madeline Best
Music by Brian Roger
Sound Design, Mix and Mastering: Jim Dawson
2nd Unit Director of Photography: Stephen Bruckert
Assistant Production Design: Jessie Bonaventura
Production Assistants: Youree Choi, Ben Demarest, Jonathan Ginter, Kenneth Olguin, Nicole Simonson

Catch the last screening of Screamers tonight at 7pm at The Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center (466 Grand Street, near Pitt Street, Manhattan). Click here for details, ticket information and directions.

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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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New Yanira Castro trilogy spans three spaces and boroughs

Left to right, Luke Miller, Darrin Wright and Kyle Bukhari,
three dancers among a revolving cast for Yanira Castro's new CAST,
running now at The Chocolate Factory Theater
(photo: Brian Rogers)

This month, choreographer Yanira Castro and her a canary torsi (name anagram) operation are making their mark, simultaneously, on three New York City boroughs--Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Claiming lots of physical and conceptual space and institutional support is, in my eyes, a terrific thing for a woman to do, a woman of color in particular and, even more so, a woman of dance. Go. Get. It.

The three institutions hosting the world premiere of Castro's ambitious trilogy, CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR, are:

• The Invisible Dog Art Center--where, each afternoon, AUTHOR invites visitors, one at a time, to wind their way inside an installation to a little room, remove their shoes, close the door, sit down at a laptop and...that's as far as it makes sense for me to go, because your experience of what Castro has set up and what it means will be unique to you. On view through Sunday, September 17, weekdays and Saturday, 1pm to 7pm; Sunday, 1pm to 5pm. Free admission. For information and directions, click here.
• The Chocolate Factory Theater--home to CAST, now through Saturday, September 23, which I attended last evening and will discuss in a little bit. Information and tickets here.
• Abrons Arts Center--hosting STAGE in the Playhouse, tonight through Saturday, September 23. Information and tickets here.

Now, to my experience of CAST at The Chocolate Factory Theater. From publicity materials about the performance:

CAST brings together a rotating cast of four performers, different each night, who negotiate a new script at each performance in front of a live audience. A computer generates a unique script culling from transcripts of over 100 hours of conversation with CAST’s 15 performers regarding casting, performing and the complexities of representation. It is a concentrated study of what constitutes a cast. 

Last evening's opening night performance set the audience up in a couple of rows of folding chairs on risers arranged in a kind of horseshoe shape around a constricted performance space. The fourth end of the theater was reserved for seating for the evening's quartet of dancers--devynn emory, Luke Miller, Sai Somboon and Darrin Wright, out of an available roster of fifteen performers--and a printer and a table laden with props.

As audience members gradually filled all available seats, Miller sat at another table within the performance area, his hand clasping a stubby pencil poised over a sheet of paper. His steady gaze implied a thinking process and, from time to time, he circled the pencil point just above the paper, all of this provoking a curious frustration in the viewer (well, this viewer).  To the left of him, a laptop screen greeted us with a stark HELLO in white letters and a fast-disappearing list of the evening's performers. The other cast members sat quietly reading scripts with randomly-assigned material they were seeing for the first time. At 7pm on the nose, the noisy audience members suddenly hushed as it became clear that something was starting to happen.

A computer-generated voice identified the script as #67, 404 (I believe, unless it was #67, 040--a number I think I heard later) and proceeded to cyber-stutter its way through the cast's names. It told us the source of the material (conversations at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) and the length of the performance (45 minutes, which would be accurately and usefully announced at its completion).

Wright rose, pulled Miller's table and chair out of the way, re-positioned two speakers and stretched out on the carpeted floor with a microphone. Not quite comfy, though. The script tasked him with a long monologue and the apparent pressure to read it quickly, forcefully and as if, by the time he reached the end of sentences, his throat was squeezed, struggling for the breath to continue. Among other things, allusions to race would surface, float off and disappear in the flood of verbiage and, after a while, a listener (well, this listener) surrendered to the possibility, the likelihood, that none of these words mattered. Whether they do or not, whether dance is about transcending or resisting words, addressing or skating around specific issues and should be or shouldn't be, it was just too much to deal with. The voice was strangulated. The man was gasping to speak and, finally, crumpling the script pages and tossing them aside.

Words on race slipped through later verbal material and complicated activity--the dancers taping paper, cardboard, Mylar and cloth around Miller's head and torso. "this white racist thing gender history seventies noise sorry like Athena body fascist line that identifieds you phallic queer body brain labor...." A misshapen monster, a captive, he struggled to rise and move around the space with all that had been stuck onto him, eventually ripping it off him--an action that looked satisfying to observers (well, this observer). The printer whirred to life and birthed new sheets.

devynn held up the first page, and the others followed suit, posing together and beginning to musically chant a series of scripts for solo or interwoven choral voices ("Ailey, when I was at the Ailey," "I considered Trisha feminine," "When we auditioned, I had really brown eyes" and the rapturous, amusing, repeated intonation of a single seductive name--"Bausch").

So, at this point, I want to stop describing all that went on from there--especially since a lot of it involved rapid, relentless and arbitrary introduction and rearrangement of props, movement and dancers' proximity to a vulnerable audience, a flow of thingy things, none of which we could or would be intended to worry over or hold onto.  Instead, I want to share a thought that popped into my mind as first I gazed at Miller and then at Wright.

Over the years, I'd seen each of these two guys dance in so many works by some of our most accomplished choreographers. Their bodies contain so much and such diverse information, so much imprinting and history, from disparate sources. And--I began to realize--so much wisdom. I began to see these two men as our knights and sages, and I know I don't live in a society that thinks of dancers as sages. But these guys are, and we have a wealth of more like them in our dance community, knights and sages of all genders and gender non-conforming.

I was also aware, towards the end of the 45 minutes, of a feeling of sacredness. I pulled back from this, a little bit, because it began to seem, even to me, a bit hokey. But I really started to think of the space as church. And I am not a church-goer.

Am I going too far with this? I don't know. I don't even know if Castro would care. But when the 45 minutes was dutifully (and cybernetically) announced, it truly felt as if the Mass was ended, and we could go in peace.

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