Look around us: 600 Highwaymen presents "Manmade Earth"

Teen performers in Manmade Earth by 600 Highwaymen,
presented by Crossing the Line Festival
at The Invisible Dog Art Center

Manmade Earth
by 600 Highwaymen
Crossing the Line Festival
at The Invisible Dog Art Center

We would like you to think about who is surrounding you. How you feel surrounded by the people around you.

-- Performers of Manmade Earth 

Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone (known, together, as 600 Highwaymen) spent a year building Manmade Earth with eight American teenagers of various cultural backgrounds, including immigrants from Malaysia, Somalia, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The work incorporates movement and text with a modular set design by Eric Southern and Deb O deftly utilized and reconfigured by the performers.

Audience seating is arranged in rows at the sides of a long strip of performance space--like a high-end fashion runway--covered in off-white canvas. Performers, one by one, introduce their participation with a model-like solo turn under the lights, whether in contrasty athletic-wear or a delicate, elegantly-draped hijab. The audience gazes at each young stranger as one and then another proceeds to voice a series of questions to the unseen Other that might be us.

Questions asked without emotional expression, with the matter-of-fact manner that models employ on their walks. When speaking, each one gestures or strikes poses with no motion wasted. The audience looks on, listens, tries to figure them out.

Some of the questions:

"Do you think I look smart?"

"When you look at me, what do you see?"

"What makes you laugh? Do we all laugh at the same things?"

"Does that seem fair? Is being fair important to you?"

"Should I take my shoes off before I come in?"

"Should I eat with a fork or my hands?"

"Do you wish that things were different? Do you want me to change?"

There are some "This is..." statements, too, in a section before these individuals shift gears, folding the canvas into a protective tarp so they can laboriously mix and produce a round slab of cement for which there is no apparent use.

Perhaps it is the quiet ritual of the buckets and water containers and stirring sticks that bears more weight than the actual final product. What seems to come of all this activity--this dedicated teamwork--is an awareness of interdependence. It leads on to the construction and activation of an ingenious environment of corrugated sheets and upturned ladders. There the performers engage in a rapid line game with frequent player eliminations, done in fun while revealing things that cause each of these youngsters to be afraid.

I have no doubt they have all experienced fear, for any number of reasons, but I take note of the focus, poise and precision with which each one of them meets the considerable, if often subtle, demands of Manmade Earth's script and movement.

Performers:

Nur Aisyah
Nasra Ali
Raiza Almonte
Dimyana Angelo
Amanda Barsi
Augustin Bonane
Jeanvier Nkurunziza
Diaaeddin Zabadini

Original music and sound design: Michael Costagliola

Production design: Eric Southern and Deb O

Manmade Earth continues with performances tonight and Sunday at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here. For more information on FIAF's city-wide Crossing the Line festival--devoted to the creative work of French, Francophone and American artists--click here.

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith Street and Boerum Place), Brooklyn
(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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Jen Rosenblit presents "Clap Hands" at The Invisible Dog

Jen Rosenblit in Clap Hands
(photo: Maria Baranova)

In Jen Rosenblit's Clap Hands, I first notice color. A choreography of color. Color dancing across a wide space. Yellow. Red. Black. White. A fractured medicine wheel of color of sorts pulling attention every which way. Because that's what's dancing. Piles of tomato red felt neatly folded and stacked or unfolded and scattered or placed just so here and there. My eyes go to this and the spotless white of Effie Bowen's fencing uniform, the sunny, satiny yellow of Admanda Kobilka's wrestler unitard, the black that wraps Rosenblit, which she eventually sheds.

Clap Hands--hosted by The Invisible Dog Art Center , co-presented with New York Live Arts--was conceived as a complicated solo (add or remove quote marks as you will) performed by three people. And, actually, there's a fourth--the "supportive" alexia welch, whose role seems to be to hold a boom mic for Rosenblit and look impressively butch dykey with her laden toolbelt.

Clap Hands diffuses "center" and focus, allowing us to hold fast to nothing, especially our need to hold fast to something. So much there, so little there. At the same time, it feeds us, immerses us in color, texture (that fabric, the rabbity fur of the mic's windsock), shape (all that scarlet felt in folds, rolls, drapery, mounds, trains of a makeshift gown), sound (even the almost volumeless flow of air from Kobilka's yellow-red-black melodica), voice (Rosenblit's clear, resonant speaking). When Bowen dresses Kobilka in a bright pink turtleneck sweater, she adds a new, irrational splash of color. It first looks like an assault--the fabric restraining his throat, a sleeve bunched up tight around his arm. Then she unwinds it, draws it over his body in the normal way before, for good measure, slipping a red felt vest over his already burdened torso. You sense an uncomfortable heat, reminding you of his body...and yours.

But disappearance, I think, is the one through line and ironic touchstone--references to a disappearing ship, disappearing hair, escape routes, departures. Generally speaking, bodies, and their grounding force, aren't key here...until they are. Rosenblit, matter-of-factly nude, going about her workmanlike business, uninflected. Bowen, in her fencing gear, introducing skilled physical alignment, precision. Rosenblit folded up on a table before audience members whose metal bleacher row has been reoriented to place them just a few feet away from naked skin. Rosenblit, again, with a half-chewed strip of yellow plastic dangling from her mouth, dancing like...I can only call it the rustling of seaweed...with her gaze wild.

Here is something she would like us to consider:

How do we continually locate ourselves and what is it to deal with the haunting nature of remaining alone? Clapping hands is a phenomenon we do together, to celebrate, mark or culminate. Clap Hands is something we have to sit alone with, to recall being together.

--from publicity for Clap Hands

Clap Hands concludes tonight with a performance at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(directions/map link)

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"Atlantic Terminus": Jon Kinzel's residency at Invisible Dog

Jon Kinzel
(photo: Erica Freudenstein)

Out of the blustery night, I arrived at The Invisible Dog Art Center around 7:15 only to find the space behind its streetfront windows pitch-dark. Puzzled, I reached for the doorknob anyway. It yielded to me.

For some reason, I'd had the start time for Atlantic Terminus, Jon Kinzel's performance, as 7:30, not 7pm. Even so, as I peered around the ground-floor space, it looked as it nothing was shaking. A faint glow emanated from something on the floor, but where was the audience? Had I made the trip from Manhattan in vain?

As it turned out, people were standing in random spots around the space, but it was a while before Kinzel lit a small light revealing himself, guest artist Jodi Melnick and a smattering of watchers.  I felt much relieved to see them but dismayed that I'd clearly arrived late.

Some context:

Atlantic Terminus rests on the pretext of using Kinzel’s own belongings as a set. Evolving over two weeks, he will sustain an onsite multi-faceted studio practice in the gallery creating new work daily. He aims to disclose his particular history of making connections between visual art and performance since 1988. Invited guests, collaborations, and set and improvised performances will contribute to the process and over all installation. Integral to the show will be the task of cataloguing and exhibiting some of his 25+ years of works on paper: drawings that informed his shows at The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, PS 122, Danspace Project, and Dixon Place among others. This will also serve to provide an unprecedented opportunity to share — a retrospective gesture — his ongoing interest in how kinesthetic and visceral sensibilities can be brought into engagement with visual thinking.

Kinzel is open-mined [sic] about ways in which a consensual relationship between audience and performer can allow both parties to engage in an atmosphere in which a very special “social” equilibrium is possible. He sees his work as collaboration between performer and audience, and as such there will always be unknown and uncontrollable elements, which provide a desirable tension to the experience on both sides.

That "open-mined" might be accurate. He's open to mining his journey and--with appropriate lighting--we could see evidence of an extensive engagement with paper and marking, including a table of supplies and tools in strict, neat arrangement. It was also nearly impossible, as an audience member, to wander about without coming into contact with drawings collaged on the floors or posted or stacked elsewhere. Much delicateness and vulnerability here in this open-mining.

Of course, for me, the performance was truncated. I only got to see both dancers vigorously swiping at taped-up drawings with wooden sticks as if whacking piñatas; Kinzel wriggling a long Mylar streamer in a kind of ribbon dance; Kinzel raising a charming paper cutout "sail" and moving a light around it; and Kinzel repairing to another part of the space to dance a bit of movement which, interestingly, made him look a bit like a charming paper cutout "sail." And, with perhaps no more than ten minutes of that, the performance was over.

Atlantic Terminus's remaining performances are tonight at 7pm and Saturday, February 13, at 7pm. Remember: 7pm, not 7:30! For information and tickets, click here.

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(directions/map link)

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Niegel and Todd and ten willing participants

THIS IS IT!

InfiniteBody,

launched on March 29, 2007,

has just reached its 5,000th post!

Thank you so much for your support along the way.

Now, back to our regularly-scheduled review!

*****

Niegel Smith and Todd Shalom

Oh. One more thing to celebrate...

Happy 10th anniversary of "artnership" to Niegel Smith and Todd Shalom who opened their latest collaborative gig, Dream State of Affairs, with sly toasts over sparkling cider and an invitation to their watchers to become doers. Presented by The Invisible Dog Art Center in partnership with Shalom's Elastic City, this dream state has a whimsical premise and a spine of steel.

We’ve scored a performance: a where-we-are but in your shoes. There are written prompts that overlap–a set of tasks that form a fairy tale weee invite you to complete.

We’ll play with race, lust, consent, underpaid labor and childhood shit; the cat and the meow. You’ve a choice: consent to be on stage or around it, as you will. We will take care of you.

Not to be overly paranoid, but "we will take care of you" is a promise that can be read different ways, and I ended up relieved that I did not volunteer to be one of ten participants. Sure, I would have gladly held the orange tabby (see photo above) but last night, the second of the two-night run, there was no cat in sight and no meow to be heard.

Instead, there was an orchestral structure involving a score with instructions set up on a semicircle of music stands, precision timing regulated by digital clocks set up around the space. Participants had to read and then leave their timed instructions on the stands and enter the performance space just at the right moment to not strand one or another of their fellow players working off their own set of directions and schedules.

In one of a few efforts to ease any pre-performance jitters, though, Shalom told his willing participants, "There's absolutely nothing you can do wrong tonight. Whatever you do is the right thing to do."

Well, that's not exactly the case. In one instance, action had to be stopped and clocks reset for another go with a guy, stretched across a broken-legged sofa, saying "What if nothing is too serious to be joked about?" And there remained the possibility that someone from the audience-audience (unwilling non-participants) might stop the proceedings and the clock (by calling "Hold" into a dangling mic) to critique what had gone before.

And yes, that happened, although only once, the unwilling being particularly unwilling. But when it happened, it was a doozy.

One of the players, to the shock and amusement of the audience, had just finished pelting the wall and windows with half a dozen eggs. Smith showed up with a bucket of water and sponges, but one woman wasn't having it. She got up and took the mic.

"I want to see the white man clean up," she said, indicating Shalom and excavating what could have been buried deep in the minds of others. I chuckled and snapped because--you GO, girl!--that was top of mind for me. This directive from the audience-audience required a momentary negotiation between Smith and Shalom, but they managed it.

Now, mind you, that was a white woman. Most of the audience, unsurprisingly, was white. Most, I'm guessing, were artist types, performers even--which is why the willing participants seemed to look like they could well handle both the surreal theatrical activities of Dream State of Affairs and its controlled, highly-choreographed unfolding.

But one player, a white woman, seemed to balk at her next set of directions. She muttered something about not being sure she could do this before approaching one watcher and beckoning for him to come into the performance area. As she came up to me, I motioned towards my notebook, and she got the message.

She moved on, but it was a while before I figured out what was up. She had been instructed to pick out the Black people in the room. All five of us.

Without me, then, her meager haul was four. Once arranged in front of everyone, the Black people found out their fate. Again apologizing under her breath, she ordered them to turn around and stand with their arms against the wall and legs spread while the rest of the players, all of them white, whimpered in guilt. In short order, I swear to you, Smith turned all of this into the Hokey Pokey.

What if nothing is too serious to be joked about, indeed? The places your childhood memories take you? The rough debris of racial history and all the "crazy shit"--to quote Shalom's bio--that happens now? The sensuality and sexuality that only you can define? The struggle to survival and make your work in a tough market?

[Closed] For information on future events at The Invisible Dog, click here.

I love you Raja Feather Kelly

Raja Feather Kelly
has been doing some more thinking
about Andy "Drella" Warhol.
(photos by Andy Toad)

The name of this winning and humorous ensemble piece from dance artist Raja Feather Kelly might be The Feath3r Theory Presents: Andy Warhol's DRELLA (I Love You Faye Driscoll), as it appears in promotional materials, or The Feath3r Theory Presents: Andy Warhol's DRELLA (I Love You Faye Driscoll) Black by Popular Demand, as it appears in the black-on-pink program notes. Either way, you get the picture: a mashup of race, gender, the cult of personality, runway models in white face, drag and house culture, karaoke, mad juggling of archetypes and stereotypes and ebullient ballet steps performed in dirty ankle socks. Let's call this craftily messy beauty Drella for short--that name itself a shortening of Dracula and Cinderella and an invocation of Warhol.



For a few additional clues, I snipped this passage from the artist's statement on the beloved Faye Driscoll's Web site:

I am obsessed with the basic problem of being "somebody" in a world of other "somebodies," and in my work I attempt to pull apart this daily performance of self. I do this by enacting it in excess, blowing it up to the extreme in order to reveal its edges and create more space, more possibility for who we can be.

Likewise, Raja Feather Kelly is about creating more space and, from the looks of things, he knows exactly what to do with it.

Last call to see The Feath3r Theory in Drella at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn is tonight, 7:30pm. The show runs 70 minutes, and there's not a dull minute among them.

Seating is very limited. Check here for possibilities or, if you can't get in, do as some neighbors did last night: Catch it all through the center's storefront window!

Drella afterparty tonight at 9pm (free and open to the public). Information here.

The Invisible Dog
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Mysteries of light: new work by Anne Zuerner at The Invisible Dog

from Anne Zuerner's Light House

The floor is raw; the temperature, nippy. Windows on the upper floor of this former belt factory--Brooklyn's Invisible Dog Art Center--look out on leafy branches bending to a strong evening wind. The sudden, dramatic shift in weather on Anne Zuerner's opening night cooperates more with the choreographer than with her audience, casting the trees dancing just beyond the glass as perfect backdrop to her own supple undulations.

This solo, Prelude, opens as Zuerner, flashlight in hand, rotates like the beam of a lighthouse; light travels across the space's whitewashed bricks. That would be a banal lead-up to a trio entitled Light House, except that Prelude has a bit more than that going on--including the spooky cool patch of light trained on part of Zuerner's face as she slowly pours blue-dyed water over her head, face and clothing and then repeatedly lashes her head forward and back. Later, with her long, brown hair obscuring head and neck, her body will look weirdly reversed and endlessly reversible, even amphibian. Galen Bremer's dense, engulfing soundscore, performed live, contributes to this surreal atmosphere.

Light House, Zuerner has said, "began as a simple idea: the image of a light in the darkness. In a time in my life when I was feeling overwhelmed by darkness, creating Light House was a way for me to look for sources of internal and external illumination."

The trio--danced by Erin Cairns Cella, Phoebe Rose Sandford and Zoe Rabinowitz--takes place on a smooth surface set down in the other half of Invisible Dog's floor. The dancers are first seen reclining on the floor, sliding and otherwise manipulating several fluorescent tubes (lighting design by Haejin Han) as they fold, unfold, arch and ripple in crisp, synchronized geometrics to Bremer's softly industrial, hydraulic music. Carefully coiffed and dressed alike in deep blue unitards covered by a loose skin of translucent fabric (designed by Emma Hoette), they are nearly identical, mechanical and anonymous in look and behavior. Light House seems to stretch on for the sake of making a respectable length for a major dance presentation, but I found much of it visually captivating.

Light House runs through Saturday, May 31 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Invisible Dog
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Review of Rebecca Lazier's "Coming Together/Attica"

Click here to read my DanceMagazine.com review of Rebecca Lazier's presentation of Coming Together/Attica at The Invisible Dog Art Center.

This Earth, our home: Siobhan Burke interviews Jill Sigman

SOON THE EARTH WILL BE IN THE SQUARE
Jill Sigman with Siobhan Burke
by Siobhan Burke, The Brooklyn Rail, May 2013

APAP Diary: Nails on blackboard

Choreography for Blackboards by Michael Kliën with Steve Valk at The Invisible Dog Art Center, a presentation of PS 122's COIL Festival:

"Choreography is not to constrain movement into a set pattern, it is to provide a cradle for movement to find its own patterns." -- Michael Kliën

In this case, the "cradle" European conceptual choreographer Michael Kliën has set up, with dramaturgical instigation from Steve Valk, resides in a raw and rather chilly arts space--grab some tea while you're there--where the audience can circulate and watch several people vigorously drawing, altering and erasing chalk doodles on standing blackboards in what Kliën calls "a series of precisely rehearsed choreographic instructions and procedures."

Said instructions and procedures were, to my eye, as invisible as the dog who inspired the name of this arts space. But no matter. It was occasionally interesting, even hypnotic, to witness the rise and obliteration of forceful abstractions at the hands of Kliën's dancers--if they are to be called that--who variously hail from the worlds of theater, poetry, physics, academia and Occupy activism. It was like watching Hindu deities--the kind of Hindu deities that might show up in seriously droopy jeans--continuously building and destroying the universe. But with chalk. And bowls of water. And a mop to clean up spills. And arm chairs for when one or another of them might need a break.

This might be a good point, though, to express my general frustration with precious, impenetrable, head-hurting language like: "These [those instructions and procedures] involve developing and exchanging insights and individual expressions in analogue and codified forms, weaving relations into a concentrated collective dance of minds" and "Choreography for Blackboards outlines a vision of dance that not exclusively understands itself as an art form, but as a constituting principle, a technology of the self at the edges of modern consciousness."

Please explain. I do not understand. And I don't think I'm alone.

Choreography for Blackboards continues tonight at 8pm and tomorrow at 6pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(map/directions

For information on PS 122's COIL Festival performances, which run through January 29 at various locations, click here.

Messing around with the French

PLAYING WITH CINEMA
AMERICAN PERFORMERS EXPERIMENT WITH FRENCH FILMS

Saturday, October 22, 6:30 

Miguel Gutierrez
The National Theater of the United States of America
Annie-B Parson
Dan Safer 

Melissa Anderson, host

Co-presented with The Invisible Dog Art Center and Les Subsistances

American artists will use a few minutes of a French movie (Godard, Tati, Demy, Melville) as the basis of their performances, experiencing the tension between images and bodies on stage and questioning the affinities between the imaginative world of movies, and the imagination of a performer. What kind of relationship can a performer have with an image on stage? Moving pictures can have an intense presence and catch the eye, and even compete with the physical presence of the performers. The performers then have to deal with it, either through appropriation or rejection: pictures on stage impose some form of negotiation.

FREE!

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(directions)

theinvisibledog.ny@gmail.com