The Joyce's American Dance Platform: UBW and DCDC

Chanon Judson of Urban Bush Women
(photo: Gennia Cui)

American Dance Platform: Urban Bush Women and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
January 7 and 12

If it's true what they say about how viewers' mirror neurons respond when audiences look at dancers moving, and you attended The Joyce on Tuesday night for American Dance Platform, your mirror neurons likely got a serious workout. Evidence for that, from me, is how exhausted I felt the next morning as if even every toe nail and eyelash I possess were worked to max from watching Urban Bush Women (UBW) and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC), two troupes of extraordinary physical daring and power. More evidence came from the way the opening night audience responded in the moment. I'm not talking about the expected, and justified, standing Os and rousing cheers; I mean those very Black mmmhmmms, the audible sighs, the cries, the groans and other unrestrained vocalizing that greeted DCDC dancers killing it during Abby Zbikowski's Indestructible (2018) with apparently zero fear of bodily wear-and-tear. If, in a sense, we all danced along with UBW and DCDC as we witnessed them, I await my Bessie nomination.

With the very recent departure of Du'Bois A'Keen, UBW is back to being an all-woman company. My favorite on the evening's bill (to be repeated this coming Sunday) was UBW's Women's Resistance, an excerpt from les écailles de la mémoire (Scales of Memory) with choreographic direction from founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Germaine Acogny with additional choreography from eight former and current UBW members. It takes a village. And, indeed, looks like a village...of disciplined women warriors demonstrating their earth-sprung, spring-loaded battle-readiness within a sonic environment where shredding mechanical rhythms suggest both how formidable these women are and how menacing are the forces they are up against. UBW paired this ensemble with Zollar's 1989 I Don't Know, But I Been Told, If You Keep On Dancin' You Never Grow Old, which now includes segments from visible (2011), made by nora chipaumire and Marguerite Hemmings. And, yes, there is a definite connection and throughline--similar resourcefulness, ingenuity and high skill even in the midst of play that some might unwisely consider trivial.

UBW performers: Courtney J. Cook, Melissa Cobblah Gutierrez (Understudy), Jasmine Hearn, Chanon Judson (Co-Artistic Director), Love Muwwakkil, Samantha Spies (Co-Artistic Director), Elaisa van der Kust, Makaila Ware

Taking on Indestructible, Ohio's venerable DCDC--founded in 1968 by Jeraldyne Blunden and now directed by her daughter, Debbie Blunden-Diggs--was right in tune with the night's audacious mood. The main difference is, with Abby Z high-impact, daredevil choreography, neither you nor the dancers get a chance to chill. So, again, those mirror neurons.... Add occasional blasts from the electronic, industrial hip hop band Death Grips. The evening wrapped up with DCDC's excerpt from Donald Byrd's The Geography of the Cotton Field (2014) which paints, with an elegant hand, a canvas at once sweepingly abstract and epically specific.

DCDC performers: Devin Baker, Qarrianne Blayr (Associate Artistic Director), Breanna Dorsey, Alexandria Flewellen, Michael Green, Steve Lamblin, Robert Pulido, Elizabeth Ramsey, Nile Alicia Ruff, Nabachwa Ssensalo (Actress), Quentin Apollovaughn Sledge, Matthew J. Talley, Countess V. Winfrey

One show remains--this Sunday at 7:30pm--but tickets are sold out.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(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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Dorrance Dance: The Joyce does it again!

Josette Wiggan-Freund
plays Clara's Mother and Sugar Rum Cherry
in The Nutcracker Suite.
(photo: Matthew Murphy)

Dorrance Dance
The Joyce Theater
December 17-January 5

The Joyce closes out the 20-Teens with another tap triumph--this time, a three-week run by Dorrance Dance, the superb troupe headed by 2015 MacArthur Fellow Michelle Dorrance. Dorrance has been showing three separate programs, each crowned--I can find no better word for it--by the world premiere of The Nutcracker Suite, set to the Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn arrangement of Tchaikovsky and designed like you've never seen it before.

The actual title--as rendered in the program notes, if not on the Joyce's website--is as follows:

WE PRESENT TO YOU: THE NUTCRACKER SUITE OR, A RHYTHMATURGICAL EVOCATION OF THE SUPER-LEVIATHONIC ENCHANTMENTS OF DUKE AND BILLY'S SUPREME ADAPTATION OF TCHAIKOVSKY'S MASTERPIECE THAT TELLS A TALE OF A MISUNDERSTOOD GIRL WHO KILLS A KING AND MEETS A QUEEN AND DON'T FORGET OOOO-GONG-CHI-GONG-SH'-GON-MAKE-IT-DADDY AND THAT IT AIN'T SO BAD AFTER ALL

Okay?

But we'll certainly call it The Nutcracker Suite for short.

In the program I saw (B), it followed the cool and spacious Elastic Time, also a world premiere, by the company's Associate Artistic Director, Nicholas Van Young, who is also a drummer, with sections of improvisation by the dancers and wonderful live music. Elastic Time and The Nutcracker Suite are like night and day. The first: abstract, rhythmically complex and transparent so that you marvel at the spare, dynamic architecture of its design and zoom in on its dancers' clean technical abilities, with Warren Craft bringing spunk and playfulness to an exciting tap suite that feels, nevertheless, to avoid the element of swing. The second: all swing all the time, winkingly queer, drenched in and bursting with color (lighting by Kathy Kaufmann, costumes by Andrew Jordan, scenic design by Christopher Marc--all of whom, like Dorrance, should clear a shelf for awards).

Dorrance's jazzy charm offensive starts right off centering a jitterbug couple and proceeds to woo us with a pocket-watch-hypnosis chorus line and a trio of Sugar Rum Blossoms (Elizabeth Burke, Carson Murphy and Maddie Murphy, led by Sugar Rum Cherry Josette Wiggan-Freund) who evoke Harlem showgirls. With its mayhem (seriously brawling rats) and bustling merriment (Russian trepak dance with some b-girl moves from Ephrat "Bounce" Asherie), this Nutcracker is non-stop, over-the-top entertainment giving good value for the price of your ticket.

Dorrance has the skillz. See this show, and you'll see why she could (and should, if desired) follow Camille A. Brown to Broadway. You will love The Nutcracker Suite, and you'll want to see it again and again. May this show become an annual tradition. Make it so, you geniuses at Dorrance Dance and The Joyce. Make it so.

Dorrance Dance continues through Sunday, January 5. For program and schedule information and ticketing, click here.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(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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Dormeshia and friends swing out at The Joyce

Dormeshia
(photo: Eduardo Patino)

And Still You Must Swing
by Dormeshia
at The Joyce Theater
December 3-8

No hype. Dormeshia has been crowned Queen of Tap and, while some might find the notion of regal hierarchy in the arts a bit distasteful, there's no denying the evidence of one's eyes and ears. Mastery is mastery. Moreover, the refined ability of this artist to make and switch up minute mental/physical calculations with every passing microsecond qualifies her for superstardom. Go see And Still You Must Swing, one of Aaron Mattocks' great tap presentations at The Joyce this season. All hail the Queen.

Dormeshia's show, which premiered in Summer 2016 at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, teams her with veteran dancers and frequent running buddies, Derick K. Grant and Jason Samuels Smith, of whom we can never ever see enough. The tap firepower is strong with this endearing trio, as we've come to expect. But look who's also in the house: Camille A. Brown, top-notch performer and in-demand choreographer of contemporary and Broadway dance. Her unmatched embodiment of Black culture and legacy adds a distinct, dedicated underpinning of wokeness/awareness to this seamlessly entertaining show.

From left to right:
Derick K. Grant, Dormeshia, Camille A. Brown and Jason Samuels Smith
(photo: Christopher Duggan)

Jason Samuels Smith
(photo: Christopher Duggan)

And Still You Must Swing, a 75-minute suite of dances and musical interludes, has a tight, intermission-less structure with generous fun but no time for fluff. Choreographed and "improvographed" solos, duos, trios and quartets each aim, jump and achieve high spots you think can't possibly be topped, all supported by a vivacious jazz band as sumptuously warm as it is driven--musical director and pianist Carmen Staaf, drummer Winard Harper, bassist Noah Garabedian and percussionist Gabriel Roxbury. And the linkage between the lush, expressive fluidity of swing in dance and swing in music--and the roots of all this in Black experience and sensibility--comes across clearly without being forced. If you can't imagine why a djembe, the iconic West African drum, deserves to get a highlighted moment in the middle of a tap show, no one will get up and tell you. But just wait for Brown's solos; she channels the innovations of enslaved African taking back the power of intense vibration and rhythm, preserving and expressing this freedom through the body. Drums, you see, were forbidden to a stolen people but never truly silenced.

Brown adds outrageous gutsiness and quirk to Dormeshia's lineup. The charming bros--often bookending sleek, slithery Dormeshia--add hoofericious heft while dazzling us with the possibly limitless variety of ways heels, toes and sides of feet can ring changes on the meeting of metal and wood. Legs and feet fly like the digits of a 75 wpm typist.

Breathless, you eventually stop thinking How'd they do that? and surrender to your own connection to the music.

Good. They got ya.

Original music: Allison Miller and Dormeshia
Lighting design: Sue Samuels/Divine Rhythm Prod./Event Systems & Design Inc.
Costume design: Javier Pedroza

And Still You Must Swing continues through Sunday, December 8 (Wednesday, 7:30; Thursday and Friday, 8pm; Saturday and Sunday 2pm and 8pm). If any tickets remain--and that's chancy--grab them here. In the event of sold-out shows, there will be a ticket line for hopefuls starting one hour before curtain time.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(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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"THE DAY" arrives

Cellist Maya Beiser with Wendy Whelan
performing The Day
(photos: Hayim Heron, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow)

THE DAY

by Maya Beiser, Lucinda Childs, David Lang and Wendy Whelan

October 22-27

at The Joyce Theater

In all honesty, when I hear that the events of September 11, 2001 inspired a piece of art, I note and then turn away from that detail, hoping for an alternative reason to connect. The excellence of THE DAY's principal collaborators--cellist Maya Beiser, dancer Wendy Whelan, choreographer Lucinda Childs and composer David Lang--drew me to The Joyce this week for this work's New York premiere. (I went, in particular, for Beiser, and please hurry to her site's video page and share my new obsession.) Thinking back now, I find myself drifting between certainty that THE DAY reflects a moment in our history and, at the very same time, wavering certainty about what my eyes and ears testified as I gazed from my seat in the audience. Thus, for me, it might be the perfect evocation of the experience of witnessing 9/11.

Performed without intermission, the interdisciplinary work consists of two parts--The Day and World To Come, named for music previously composed by Lang for Beiser--and contemplates the aftermath of a soul's separation from its body. The width and height of the Joyce stage, backed by Joshua Higgason's video projection, contribute to THE DAY's monumentality and hallucinatory depth of field and dreamy elusiveness.

In the opening part, Beiser and Whelan occupy separate, opposing territories--cellist and cello crowning a translucent incline; white-draped ballerina starting off artfully perched on a stool as if posing for a fashion shoot. Sara Brown's minimalist, abstract set--angled lines suggest subtle demarcation--works in tandem with the strength, and severity, that Childs' ideas bring out in Whelan's deft improvisations which, at times, evoke an iconic rendering of the architectural proportions of the human body. She creates, and exists within, pristine, divine abstractions.

Lang crafted the voiceover text for Part 1, Beiser writes in her program notes, out of numerous statements crowd-sourced from the Internet, each phrase completing his own phrase "I remember the day I...." Each statement is separated from the next by six seconds, giving the text a hypnotic rhythm, like a prayerful litany, and I found it fascinating to find that he had carefully alphabetized the statements.

I stopped speaking. I stumbled. I switched. I talked. I talked to myself sternly.

Each statement, taken out of context, could sound as if it captured a mundane moment in time. But, in fact, Lang intends each to mark a significant turning point in a person's life. Carefully strung on a silver thread of breath, each statement takes its moment to shimmer in light before giving way to the next. So, in a way, each is extraordinary but no one surpasses any other. Each stands in as a symbol of human consciousness, symbol of human experience--and, it is painful to remember, a single loss out of many.

Some of the sonic and visual atmospherics of THE DAY tease the audience while also being unsubtle--a long, muffled, engine-like roar; two white lengths of fabric suspended from the stage's fly space suddenly rippling to the floor; the video speeding bodies into spectral visitations blurred across an interior space; Whelan increasingly wrapped by shroud-like fabric as her body rolls down the incline.

But the music. Beiser's strong, exacting control of her instrument; the energies generated and invoked in her playing. This mastery at the core of THE DAY anchors everything, gives everything else here a reason for being.

Sound design: Dave Cook

Lighting design: Natasha Katz 

Costume design: Karen Young

The Day concludes today with a performance at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(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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Ayodele Casel and Arturo O'Farrill team up at The Joyce

Tap dancer Ayodele Casel
(photo: Michael Higgins)

Ayodele Casel + Arturo O'Farrill
The Joyce Theater
September 24-29

As I take my seat at the Joyce, a couple of audience members to my left peruse their programs, making note of the fact that tap artist Ayodele Casel has cast herself among her ensemble in all nine dances on the bill. It doesn't faze me. I know Casel. That one--given the Yoruba name for "joy has arrived"--has energy to burn.

This season's particular display of joy, though, surely comes from the victory of sharing her prestigious first full-length program at The Joyce with six-time Grammy-winning Afro-Latin jazz musician Arturo O'Farrill. The woman who once created a solo tap show called While I Have the Floor (Spoleto Festival, 2017) took another floor this time to foreground cultural pride (she is Black and Puerto Rican). Both Casel and O'Farrill are in top form here--as introduced by Scalular, the sharp-edged, scintillating world premiere ensemble piece that opens the night. Their respective arts clearly grow from the same seed. The deep, intuitive communication and affection between these master artists could be easily read throughout the theater.

If you need any reason to be convinced that tap belongs in a bond with Afro-Latin jazz, buy a ticket to this show. As offered by O'Farrill and Casel, the combined music endlessly cascades like a crystalline stream over a long stretch of rocks, sparkling, glinting in sunlight. It gives life. Casel, in particular, finds innumerable delicate, exquisite facets to bring forth in sound--nothing expected or stale or slapdash; her discipline is steely--and she's joined by a diverse, talented young ensemble that includes Naomi Funaki, Dre Torres, Luke Hickey and Andre Imanishi. If I wished for anything at all, it might be a second program with juicy challenges for spirited artists like Hickey or Imanishi, in particular. Both look game for anything, grounded in good training and inspiration.

But I do love this program with its easy-going interlude where Casel tells of going from being a Ginger Rogers fan girl to her revelation at Fazil's--legendary, dearly-departed dance studio--when the entry-level tap she'd mastered fell embarrassingly short of the hoofer's mark. And with its feminist shout-out to Girl Power everywhere and, especially, to the once-overlooked women of color in tap's history, like Jeni LeGon. And O'Farrill and Casel's embrace of everything from Bach (Chromatic Fantasy in D Minor) to Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck and Wayne Shorter.

A grand new leap forward in Casel's career, this show is a must-see if you can manage to get a ticket. I suggest you don't delay.

Arturo O'Farrill (pianist/composer)
Keisel Jiménez (percussion)
Zack O'Farrill (drums)
Ivan Renta (saxophone)
Bam Bam Rodriguez (bass)
Kali Rodriguez-Peña (trumpet)

Carolina Gonzalez Mama (vocals)

A Broadway Foundation Leaders-in-Training (2019-2020):

Sasha Arteaga
Samaria Dalling
Karime De La Cruz
Mckayla Faye
Jasmine Mendoza
Vanessa Pavia Fuentes
Amani Varney

Betsy Chester (lighting)
Daniel Erdberg (sound)

Ayodele Casel + Arturo O'Farrill continues through Sunday, September 29 with 8pm performances through Saturday and a 2pm Sunday matinee. For information and (hurry!!) tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 8th Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(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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Savion Glover returns to The Joyce!

Tony-winning tap great Savion Glover
has a new show at The Joyce Theater.

LADY 5

@

SAVION GLoVER's

BARoQUE'BLAK

TaP Café

by Savion Glover
at The Joyce Theater
July 2-7, 2019

The letters flip up and down--kind of like hoofers' heels and toes--in the titles tap icon Savion Glover gives things. The off-kilter rhythm of the letters jingles and jangles...and jars. Skim across a program page, and your eyes might get snagged on a particular letter or the oddly-true sound a whimsical word makes inside your head. What, exactly, is Half-Our or I Can Here Myself? Tell me there's no part of you smiling at this thought: "Well, I kinda know what that might mean!"

As noted above, the title of Glover's new ensemble production--running now through Sunday at The Joyce Theater--is rendered in his program notes precisely this way:

LADY 5

@

SAVION GLoVER's

BARoQUE'BLAK

TaP Café

It has been several years since Glover, a popular man at The Joyce, has brought a show there. (The Joyce, by the way, is on a roll with tap--now through early January--with luminaries like Ayodele Casel, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards and Michelle Dorrance waiting in the wings. And a tip of the hat to my dear colleague Aaron Mattocks for that programming.) LADY 5 looks nothing like your conventional tap extravaganza. It's so many things and soooo much. It's an illustrative tribute to a wide range of music genres and artists. It's a way of proving to us that dancers are musicians--and that we see through hearing and hear through seeing, or something like that. And it's a transparently messy, headlong plunge into an artist's overflowing psyche.

I count almost twenty sections in the 90-minute show, including one where a male tap shoe foot puppet (yes, you read that right) chats up a female footless-tight foot puppet (yes...) at a café table, and another binary-boosting segment (What Kind of MaNz) where aggressive male tap dancers seem to be all but literally humping their slithering female jazz dancing partners. I need to scold Glover for engaging superb dancers like Natrea Blake, Samantha Berger, Monique Smith and Megan Gessner (the last introduced by Glover as "our token white person") in cheesy moments like this. A finale set to Stevie Wonder's "Another Star" ends up slaughtering poor Stevie under Glover, Marshall Davis Jr. and Darrell Grand Moultrie's jet-propelled and amplified drilling. Maybe a single dancer--or these three without amplification--would have been kinder to the singer and his gorgeous song.

As noted before, with LADY 5 one must push aside any longing for the conventional. Glover takes you on a journey that, for reasons not exactly or convincingly clear, opens with a display of antique costumes arranged along a metal walkway above a café-like setting. Along the way, you'll see Smith dancing to spoken word (the brilliant Jae Nichelle on recording) about what it's like to live with anxiety; various and sundry face-offs between ballet and tap or ballet and jazz; and surrealistic vignettes with Glover apparently haunted, obsessed and traumatized by a ballerina's disembodied tutu descending from above. A dancer might be doing her thing downstage while a shadowy figure creeps along the high walkway in the background. The Dalai Lama makes an appearance. (Just dropping that here. Don't fret about it.) There was an impressive, spiky contemporary solo (PHuQSPaCE) performed by Gessner to the stylings of Bjork, and there is the lovely warmth of Blake's solo work in Everything Must Change.

So...a lot. And, although I am far from the kind of critic who needs the conventional, I must say I was grateful for a segment with fabulous, straight-up tap dance to Latin jazz that met percussion with percussion, fire with fire, spotlighting virtuosity in a way nothing else in the show really touched.

A show with turbo-charged ambitions and oddities, and not everything works. But, hey...Savion Glover at The Joyce. It took several years for that to happen again.

LADY 5 @ SAVION GLoVER's BARoQUE'BLAK TaP Café continues through this Sunday with matinee and evening performances. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue (between 18th and 19th Streets), Manhattan
(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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Ballet Hispánico: all that and a stack of bowlers

From top: Bennyroyce Royon, Edwaard Liang
and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa

Ballet Hispánico
Works by Edwaard Liang, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Bennyroyce Royon
The Joyce Theater
March 26-31

The women of Ballet Hispánico
and their Magritte-inspired bowlers
in a work by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa
(photo: Paula Lobo)

For this Joyce Theater season, Ballet Hispánico bookends a cheeky, all-female performance of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's Magritte-inspired Sombrerísimo--a 2013 work made for men--with world premieres by two Asian-American dancemakers. With El Viaje, Taiwan-born Edwaard Liang has gifted this ensemble with a meditation on immigration and the journey towards love, community and hope. What's the connection to this troupe's Latinx profile? Literally, the historic migration of a Chinese diaspora to the shores of Cuba; yet, beyond that specific backstory, the work--lucid and moving--will prove accessible to anyone with a heart. For music, Liang selected Academy of St. Martin in the Fields's sublime recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis--a performance that has always given me chills. With designers Danielle Truss (costumes) and Joshua Paul Weckesser (lighting), he has turned the Joyce stage into a jewel box displaying every elegantly-sculpted facet of individual movement, partnership and grouping. The dancers are profoundly supple and expressive. One cannot help but get swept up in the energy of Liang's searching and threshing of stage space.

Bennyroyce Royon's gift to Ballet Hispánico draws upon his Filipino heritage and his culture's Spanish/Asian intersection. As in El Viaje, but without the exalted poetics of Liang's dancemaking, Homebound/Alaala, suggests a variety of interpersonal relationships and environments in flux and in possibilities. This robust ensemble will be remembered most for a colorful, cleverly adaptable set design of large boxes developed, in collaboration, by Amanda Gladu and Royon. Continuously rearranged and re-purposed by the dancers, the boxes aid in the telling of stories of leave-taking and travel, of containers holding history and identity, of erecting and dismantling barriers between people.

Ballet Hispánico continues at The Joyce through Sunday, March 31. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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SPECIAL EVENT:

I'm also excited to announce that Eduardo Vilaro (Ballet Hispánico's Artistic Director and CEO) will join choreographer Bennyroyce Royon for a conversation and screening of excerpts from Homebound/Alaala at Gibney on Wednesday, April 17, 6:30-8pm.

This Sorry I Missed Your Show program is free, but seating is limited. So, please RSVP soon. Learn more here.

Gibney
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(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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Camille A. Brown's superheroes write their names in "ink"

Maleek Washington and Timothy Edwards
performing ink by Camille A. Brown
(photos: Christopher Dugan)

ink
Camille A. Brown & Dancers
The Joyce Theater
February 5-10

Do not trifle with Camille A. Brown. The woman knows her mind, and her secure creative imprint has been felt, now, not only on dance stages but on television and Broadway. Ask her a question--as folks did during her audience dialogue at The Joyce's opening night for ink--and, without any hesitation, you get Direct Camille. Her movement might appear, to some, a chain of several interlocking dance genres, but it is not thoughtlessly or simplistically so. Nor can we shove it under a safe, defining label. What to call what she crafts in her work? "It's me," Brown says.

ink exemplifies that. For about 75 uninterrupted minutes, it energizes the Joyce stage under two weathered-looking billboards of collaged images designed by David L. Arsenault. There's the startling thwack of percussion that opens the evening, and a typically atypical solo for Brown whose raptor-like power, adept control of physical isolations and ability to adapt her shape to handle any environment or condition are markers for the intricacies of Black intelligence and creativity, skills for surviving and thriving under duress.

Above: Camille A. Brown's opening solo
Below: Catherine Foster
(photos: Christopher Duggan)

And then comes the spill of movement from her six dancer/collaborators, accented with gestures that have come to bear private meaning, a language accumulating maturity from one dance to the next. It is this precious, complex language, she might say, that gives her people--my people--a fighting chance to stay alive. With movement drawn from the Black diaspora--traditional, contemporary and invented--this artist clears room to write her manifesto across the air, rewriting the lies of so-called history, the stereotypes and limitations thrown on Black bodies and Black culture. Following the previous works of Brown's trilogy--Bessie-winning Mr. TOL E. RAncE and the Bessie-nominated BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play--ink uses solos and duets to expand the way we think about Black possibility, especially as it relates to gender and how people exist with one another.

Juel D. Lane (left) with Beatrice Capote in ink
(photo: Christopher Duggan)

With no boxes around the way souls and bodies are "supposed" to behave and respond to life, there is freedom, and there is caring where division, competition and violence might have been expected. The trilogy ends with an embodied wish for our future, a lesson in what we will need to get there.

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Director/Choreographer: Camille A. Brown in collaboration with the dancers

Dancers: Beatrice Capote, Timothy Edwards, Catherine Foster, Juel D. Lane, Yusha-Marie Sorzano, Maleek Washington and Camille A. Brown

Music Director: Allison Miller

Musicians: Juliette Jones, Allison Miller, Scott Patterson, Wilson R. Torres

Dramaturgs: Daniel Banks, Kamilah Forbes, Talvin Wilks

Lighting and Scenic Design: David L. Arsenault

Sound Design: Justin Ellington

Costume Designer: Mayte Natalio

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ink continues at The Joyce through Sunday, February 10. Hurry and click for schedule information and tickets!

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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Rosie Herrera work featured in Limón season at The Joyce

Limón Dance Company performs The Unsung
(photo: Beatriz Schiller)

Amid the historic repertory of José Limón--Missa Brevis, premiered in 1958, and The Unsung, from 1971--Limón Dance Company has added an edgy splash of color and razzledazz to Program A of its new season at The Joyce Theater. It's the New York premiere of Querida Herida (2017), a women's trio by Rosie Herrera, a Miami-based, Cuban-American choreographer. Its clever title translates as dear (or beloved) wound, and its mischief stands out in a program that otherwise underscores the Mexico-born José Limón's earnest focus on the heroism embedded in our common humanity.

For instance, in The Unsung's signature opening ensemble, Limón envisioned a ceremony of beautiful men, each dancer named for an indigenous warrior chief--Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Tecumseh and so forth--something that might raise eyebrows if created today, say, by a white dancemaker. The gorgeousness of the group's work, though, is unquestionable. The patterns of their communal dancing are rich in rigorous geometric structure, and their well-ordered footfalls provide the only music, a bracing percussion reminiscent of Native American drumming.

Missa Brevis--set to Zoltán Kodály's Missa Brevis in Tempore Belli--salutes the endurance of survivors of war-torn Poland and what Limón called their "heroic serenity." He said, "I'm going to do a dance about it--in the ruins I found a dance." He forged a prayerful congregation who become their prayers, whose bodies transform into rung church bells. Made by artistic director and former Limón dancer Colin Connor, The Body is a House without Walls (2017), with its atmosphere of heroic grief and release, fits well with Limón modern dance aesthetics while lacking the boldface visual clarity that makes Limón's craft still affecting even as contemporary dance speaks to us in newer ways.

Which brings me around to Herrera and her beloved--artfully concealed, artfully revealed--wounds. How to take a work that careens between being barely there and over-the-top? Where two women cling to each other, dancing slow drags to Cuban music as if half-asleep, periodically unzipping parts of their skintight, midnight-black gowns as if slicing satiny, raspberry-red gashes into each other's flesh? Where, one minute, there's fake nudity (a dancer stripped down to a pale-colored leotard), and another, the women suddenly cavort in gleaming, gold-spangled party dresses? Where the lovers grapple and shove, leaving one vanquished and abandoned? Where an arterial ribbon of red spans the stage like a guide wire as a third dancer crosses that space in increasingly whimsical ways? How to take a work that makes some viewers chuckle at absurdity while others cringe at violence? And where some might very well do both at the same time? Where can we locate Herrera's fugitive tone and her intent?

Like the bright, picturesque wounds its dancers inflict upon each other, Querida Herida ruptures the sobriety and solemnity of Program A. Is this a good thing? Perhaps. Is it a different take on life and humanity from a Latinx artist of a new generation, new outlook? Something to ponder. Audiences who attend Program B and C--which, respectively, introduce New York premieres by Adam Barruch and Yin Yue--will get to ponder how these young choreographers affect the overall balance and alchemy of the Limón season.

Limón Dance Company: Jacqueline Buines, Terrence D. M. Diable, Angela Falk, Tanner Myles Huseman, David Glista, Logan Frances Kruger, Alex McBride, Brenna Monroe-Cook, Jesse Obremski, Frances Samson, Savannah Spratt, Mark Willis; apprentices Deepa Liegel and Malik Williams

Guest dancers: Carolina Avendano,Terry Springer, Kristen Foote and Julian Nichols

Limón Dance Company continues through Sunday, May 13 on the following schedule:

PROGRAM A:
Thursday at 8pm
The Unsung (José Limón)
The Body Is a House Without Walls (Colin Connor)
Querida Herida (Rosie Herrera)
Missa Brevis (José Limón)

PROGRAM B:

Friday at 8pm and Saturday at 2pm (family matinee)
The Unsung (José Limón)
The Body Is a House Without Walls (Colin Connor)
Conjurations (Adam Barruch)
Missa Brevis (José Limón)

PROGRAM C:

Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm
The Unsung (José Limón)
The Body Is a House Without Walls (Colin Connor)
No Room For Wandering (Yin Yue)
Missa Brevis (José Limón)

For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eight Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
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His A.I.M. is true: Kyle Abraham's Joyce season

Claude CJ Johnson, Connie Shiau and Catherine Ellis Kirk
of A.I.M. perform Kyle Abraham's Drive.
(photo: Ian Douglas)

No half-measures. No uncertainty. Kyle Abraham is at The Joyce Theater this week with his newly-renamed troupe, A.I.M., doing things to the max.

This season--which makes room for dances by Doug Varone and Bebe Miller, world premieres by Andrea Miller and Abraham as well as the Joyce commission of his first solo performance in nearly a decade--feels like a bold announcement of a new phase in the life and career of this award-winning artist. In an opening-night audience packed with New York's dance notables and media, it also felt like the place to be.

Program A opens with the Miller trio, state, where a knife-sharp trio of Black women--Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk and Marcella Lewis, with whom Miller collaborated--splash their stark images, live or via looming shadows, against the pale glow of a backdrop. They resemble stylish fashion models distorting their bodies out of mundane functionality into nifty abstractions for the eye of photographers and magazine readers; a fascination grows with the hypnotic observation of their physical capabilities and precision design, their aggressive flair. Reggie Wilkins's music underscores a certain sci-fi otherworldliness in this picture as does Nicole Pearce's lighting design--but she's got even more astonishing ideas for Abraham's solo, INDY.

Created with composer-pianist Jerome Begin, INDY is a work of emergence, search and breakthrough, as moving as it is beautiful to behold. It reveals itself slowly, literally coming out of mist. In its early moments, I see aspects of the dancer I remember from way back: part b-boy/part voguer, the latter's effortlessly slinky moves a form of catnip for this audience. (Let me pause, a minute, to throw a few !!!s behind the name of designer Karen Young whose black slacks/top costume, with its thick bands of fringe, throws more than a few !!!s around Abraham's gyrations: Karen Young!!!). But with the spreading of his arms and the parting of the black curtain behind him, Abraham moves on from this image of himself.

We find him shuddering, his arms locked behind his back as if his wrists are handcuffed. Pearce's lighting, here and throughout, arrives from the oddest places and in the strangest ways. She is a fount of surprises, stepping up to the challenge of choreographer ready to surprise himself and all who follow him. Begin's sound chamber suddenly erupts in an audio clip of a voice announcing Abraham's BFA graduation. The dancer strips down to briefs to move around like an awkward, broken marionnette.

The work's fully-revealed, eye-popping visual design suggests a well-ordered cosmos--external and containing the dancer or internal and generative of his evolution, perhaps both. The Abraham we see now has unshackled himself from our and, likely, his own expectations.

With Meditation: A Silent Prayer, another Abraham world premiere, made in collaboration with his performers, the choreographer returns to a concern that has informed his works in previous years--the precarious existence of Black lives in white supremacist society; specifically, the unrelenting roll call of deaths of Blacks at the hands of police. The ensemble gently performs moments of human connection before Titus Kaphar's backdrop-spanning mural of what, at first, might seem to be looming images of three distinct Black faces. Instead, you come to realize, the three are blurs made to look like multiple, overlapped and moving faces. We hear a litany of ages, family roles and names, written and read in voiceover by artist Carrie Mae Weems. In addition to Kaphar and Weems, the notable creative team for Meditation includes Craig Harris (music), Dan Scully (lighting) and Young (costumes).

This program--as well as Program B--ends with Drive, an Abraham collaboration with A.I.M. which was a hit of the 2017 Fall for Dance Festival at City Center. More tight work by the ensemble, more stunning lighting by Scully, and the asserted conviction that--when ready--you can just pick up and go wherever you choose to go. A.I.M. is ready.

Performers:

Kyle Abraham, Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk, Marcella Lewis, Tamisha Guy, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, Jeremy "Jae" Neal, Matthew Baker and Claude "CJ" Johnson

****

A.I.M.'s Joyce season runs through Sunday, May 6 with two programs and varying start times as follows:

Program A (approx. 1hr 40 min)

Tuesday (7:30pm), Friday (8pm) and Saturday (2pm)

state (World Premiere) by Andrea Miller
INDY (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Meditation: A Silent Prayer (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Drive by Kyle Abraham

Program B (approx. 1 hr 20 min)

Wednesday (7:30pm), Thursday and Saturday (8pm) and Sunday (2pm)

Strict Love by Doug Varone
Habits of Attraction by Bebe Miller
Meditation: A Silent Prayer (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Drive by Kyle Abraham

For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
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Joy at The Joyce: Celebrating Cabuag and EVIDENCE

Arcell Cabuag of Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE
(photo: Bill Hebert)

Above: Cabuag (left) with Ronald K. Brown
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)
Below: Brown with Annique Roberts of Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE
(photo: Ayodele Casel)

Two decades ago, a Filipino-American dancer from California joined Brooklyn's Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, going on to become not only one of Brown's most iconic and beloved performers but also a dancemaker, educator, administrator (Associate Artistic Director) and Bessie winner in his own right. Last evening, Brown paid joyful tribute to his colleague, Arcell Cabuag, sharing the stage with him in Den of Dreams during the launch of the troupe's season at The Joyce Theater.

In addition to this new duet, opening night included three selections from Brown's repertory--Come Ye (2002); March, an excerpt from Lessons (1995), part of Carnegie Hall’s The ’60s: The Years that Changed America festival; and Upside Down, an excerpt from Destiny (1998).

The most thrilling moments of all came in the finale of Come Ye, set to Fela Anikulapo Kuti's furious protest song, "Coffin for Head of State." The work's opening passages offer viewers an uncluttered, transparent tutorial on Brown style--a hybrid movement style reflecting the legacy of being and dancing Black across two hemispheres and many cities. But it is, the last section, with Fela's insistent, irresistible Afrobeat, where we can watch the handsomely-trained ensemble take off as never before, at the top of its game.

Brown is less an assured shaper of theatrical landscape than a liberator and enlivener of the dancing body from head to feet. His landscape is there--in the roiling, rippling shoulders, the pitch of the back, the give of the knees, the expansive pumping, slashing arms, the way the body sings the music it hears and tells of the multitudes it contains. In each body, actually--among the many individual bodies on stage--we see a village, many villages, Fela's avenging warrior angels. This finale, a masterpiece, is one of the most beautiful ways to connect with Brown's aesthetic, to connect with his commitment--to connect with dance, period. If I were a professional dancer, I would beg to live inside this work and crave nothing more.

Den of Dreams is a sweet moment of "I'm here to learn from you...I'm here to follow you...and, now, look at us: we are brothers." Sweet, too, to see Brown take the stage again (as he also did as part of the corps in Upside Down, scheduled only for opening night). As choreography, this brief duet might not hold its own, but it clearly speaks of memory, times of testing and response, comradeship and a journey set upon, continued and continuing with respect and affection--feelings the audience and I also share for these two veteran artists.

Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE continues at The Joyce through February 10 with performance tonight at 7:30 and Thursday through Saturday at 8pm with a Saturday family matinee at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
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The Joyce's American Dance Platform welcomes Caleb Teicher and BODYTRAFFIC

Dancer-choreographer Caleb Teicher
and below with dancer Nathan Bugh
(photos: Scott Shaw)

The powers-that-be are only offering you one more chance to catch New York's fantastic Caleb Teicher & Company along with BODYTRAFFIC, a dance ensemble from Los Angeles, at The Joyce Theater this season during American Dance Platform, curated by Christine Tschida. The entertaining ten-year-old LA troupe focuses on contemporary repertory from a variety of choreographers such as Kyle Abraham, Sidra Bell and Andrea Miller. On the ADP program, the dancers radiated charisma in works by Richard Siegal (The New 45, from 2015) and Matthew Neenan (the previewed A Million Voices) and demonstrated sturdy technique and fierce energy in Hofesh Shechter's dismal Dust (2015). They look thoroughly capable, ready and eager for any challenge a dancemaker might bring.

BODYTRAFFIC in Hofesh Shechter's Dust
(photo courtesy of American Dance Platform)

Nothing, though, charms quite as magically, quite as indelibly as the sight of two men--superb Caleb Teicher and Nathan Bugh--dancing romantic partnership like it has always and everywhere been just another part of life's scenery. And dancing it to the most delicious vocals by Ella Fitzgerald (Meet Ella, 2016), letting the smooth, graceful follow-through and crunchy nuttiness of their movement style ironically and ingeniously intertwine. This generous fantasia, originally shown at Gibney Dance in 2016, sparkles on the Joyce stage where the two bodies manage to write flourished signatures across unbounded space. I often thought of The Nicholas Brothers while watching Teicher, in particular, with his flash and fearlessness, his expansive angularity and impeccable jazz timing and flow. In Bugh, he has an all-in, springy and sassy partner in swing and humor and dance-scatting, both of them working musicality and surprise for all they're worth. Like some of my favorite dance artists, their deep knowledge of the music and their joy make me want to get up and dance, too. Really, what more can one ask?

On the program, too, a trio from Variations (2015), an intricate showpiece set to Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of The Goldberg Variations danced by Teicher, Brittany DeStefano and--watch, especially, for a mindboggling solo by this one--Gabe Winns Ortiz.

Caleb Teicher & Company and BODYTRAFFIC continues with a final performance on Sunday, January 14 at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For schedule information and tickets for other shared programs on the American Dance Platform series, on now through Sunday, January 14, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
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Happy Holidays! Trisha Brown repertory at The Joyce

Trisha Brown Dance Company in
Brown's Groove and CountermoveBelow: Geometry of Quiet
(photos: Stephanie Berger)

Imagine The Joyce Theater, or some other lucky venue, making Trisha Brown Dance Company an annual holiday-time tradition! Works like what the Joyce has aqcuired for this season--L’Amour au Théâtre, 2009; Geometry of Quiet, 2002; Groove and Countermove, 2002--possess both the late choreographer's postmodern-pioneer cred and her luscious, eye-pleasing appeal in a time when we all could use some reassurance and soothing. I can easily foresee a future in which Ailey and the usual Nutcrackers share the bounty of the holiday season with TBDC, now under the leadership of Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden.

This is work, too, that might aspire to heal the desperate rawness we feel now across the spectrum of gender. The dances persist in showing egalitarian interactions between and among bodies. L’Amour au Théâtre, set to excerpts from Rameau's opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, is particularly good with this as gender never determines who will grasp, lift and support whom. Brown seems to advise, "Just do the next thing that needs doing." Bodies quietly, efficiently align themselves to be as ready and humbly useful as possible, no one more powerful than another in an unpredictable landscape they create and re-create by their moving. No one flies tremendously high, literally or figuratively. One's virtuosity--if we choose to call it that--lies in the ability to go all quicksilver fluid and responsive in that space between heaven and gravity.

A duet of two women opens Geometry of Quiet, a quartet set to music by Salvatore Sciarrino, taking a different route to the same locale. The music--played live by flutist Sato Moughalian stationed at stage left--breathes, but it can also bark. Leah Ives and Amanda Kmett'Pendry, gleaming in white, each stretch out, front and back, from one firmly-grounded standing leg, a picturesque image. But they end up clasping each other like jigsaw pieces with only as much individuality to be able to fit and lock together perfectly. No surprise that Groove and Countermove's dancers, in their Crayola array of costumes, seem like drawing implements in the hand of a smart, happy child. Brown's choreography invites us to focus, breathe, be flexible, be surprised, take pleasure in the unending doing and discovering.

Trisha Brown Dance Company runs through Sunday, December 17. Tonight's program includes a "curtain chat" moderated by Wendy Perron, dance writer, educator and former Trisha Brown dancer. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
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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
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