DANCE NOW's final bow

Today, DANCE NOW’s Founders and Board announced in a letter to artists, audiences and supporters that they had made the difficult decision to shutter operations as of December 31, 2021. The full text of the letter is shared below.

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Dear Beloved DANCE NOW Community,

DANCE NOW started in 1995 as a wild experiment to bring artists and audiences together through unconventional and accessible programs as a catalyst for creativity and exploration. From a small program in the Soho Arts Festival to a widening network of performance, creative development, and educational opportunities, DANCE NOW (DN) has been steadfast in our love for dancemakers and their ability to tell stories, to connect and provoke, to move and inspire. It is with a heavy heart, but also tremendous pride and gratitude, that DN shares that this is our final bow. The combined challenges of the COVID epidemic, the uncertainties around live performance, and loss of some foundational income has led the Board to this necessary decision. While the leadership announced the close of programming
by December 31st, DANCE NOW is honoring all existing commitments to artists through 2022, including the commissioning fees of 22 digital works and a creative commission for Kyle Marshall. The Fall On Demand program, featuring short dance works by The Davis Sisters, Davalois Fearon, Paul Singh, Rourou Ye, Audrey MacLean, and The Bang Group, will premiere at a virtual Watch Party on November 4, 2021 and will serve as the final performance event for DN.

Over the years, DN presented dance in more than 25 traditional and unconventional venues throughout NYC, and became the fall kick-off to the dance season. In 2003, DN created the Dance-mopolitan series, using the intimate setting of Joe’s Pub at The Public to inspire creativity and to give audiences an up-close and personal cultural experience. In the past decade, DN has diversified its programming to help start, expand, and  advance the careers of artists through residencies, teaching and performance opportunities, including more than 25 evening-length works for Joe’s Pub. DN constantly grew our community of artists, seeking out new voices, while continuing to support and promote existing artist
relationships across many generations. In response to the challenges of COVID, DN celebrated our 25th Anniversary through a new digital platform and interactive artist-to-audience celebrations. DN has presented the work of 1,000+ choreographers and more than 10,000 performers have graced our
stages and screens.

To our partners, funders, and audiences, thank you for your faith, investment and support on this exciting adventure. To our staff, Board and advisors, thank you for helping to steer the ship over the years. To Lauren, thank you for going above and beyond in every role you’ve taken on to realize the DN vision for 13 years. And to our beautiful, brilliant and passionate community of artists, thank you for 25 years of extraordinary dance and magic.

It has been our honor and privilege to have been an ally, accomplice, advocate, and ringleader. We look forward to seeing how we can all continue to dance outside the box!

With much love,

Robin Staff, Founder & Artistic Director
Tamara Greenfield, Founder & Board Chair

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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For Colored Girls...yesterday, today, tomorrow

Cast of the 2019 production of Ntozake Shange's
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf
at The Public Theater
(photo: Joan Marcus)

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf

The Public Theater

October 19, 2019

When, in the mid-1970s, I first saw Ntozake Shange’s Black feminist choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf--back then, if I recall, all the letters in that title were still stylishly lower-cased--my Greek-American boyfriend emerged from the theater in a state of shock and horror. As for me--a colored Caribbean-American girl for whom the queer rainbow was yet to be enough--I relished the sheer moxie of it.

As it happened, one of my editors had already given the boyfriend a look-over and quickly summed him up as “not mature enough for you,” but it took me a bit longer to figure that out for myself.

That Shange, though. In For Colored Girls, she had handed me a clue. She handed so many of us a clue.

She had dreamed forth seven women who, through experiences of pleasure and of struggle, figured things out for themselves. Adorned in a rainbow of colors--each in blue, brown, orange, red, yellow, green or purple--her “colored girls” burst into the consciousness of early 1970s New York and proceeded to spin a web of influence in the theatrical arts that has never come to an end. I have since seen Shange’s aesthetics reflected in performers and choreographers I dearly love like Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Maria Bauman, Andrea E. Woods Valdés, Sydnie L. Mosley, Camille A. Brown and countless other dance, performance and spoken word artists.

Shange’s choreopoem first hit city bars, then The Public Theater for its formal premiere, then Broadway and then--maybe for worse rather than better--television and film. Now in 2019, welcomed back to The Public--under graceful direction by Leah C. Gardiner and with Camille A. Brown’s vivacious and accessible choreography--these legendary "colored girls" inhabit a small, intimate set-up encircled by audience seating. Gardiner and Brown's fantastic ensemble includes Sasha Allen (Lady in Blue), Celia Chevalier (Lady in Brown), Danaya Esperanza (Lady in Orange), Jayme Lawson (Lady in Red), Adrienne C. Moore (Lady in Yellow), Okwui Okpokwasili (Lady in Green) and Alexandria Wailes (Lady in Purple).

At center: Alexandria Wailes (Lady in Purple)
(photo: Joan Marcus)

Okwui Okpokwasili (Lady in Green)
(photo: Joan Marcus)

With every finger snap, every hand clap, every stomp, every swirl, every satisfied press and slip of hands against their own bodies, Shange’s characters insist that attention finally be paid to Black women marginalized and endangered by racism and patriarchy. Because they have learned to pay attention to themselves. Know themselves. Enjoy themselves. Famously, find god in themselves. They speak the truths life has taught them.

Choreography connects the cast through a percolating, expandable cypher that protects childlike play--the inevitable “Little Sally Walker” clapping game--the embodied relaying of amusing, sexy or harrowing stories and the communal, compassionate laying on of healing hands. Movement turns poetic text vividly three-dimensional; through physical expression, memories become all the more shareable with an audience willing to be moved. Bring tissues. I needed a few.

Scenic design and lighting create an atmosphere of permission (the disco balls at first retracted above the stage), a space for sensory indulgence (those clustered hangings of abstract stalactites rotating through lights of deep colors). Original compositions by American Roots and soul artist Martha Redbone and hits from generations past--”Dancing in the Streets,” “Stay in My Corner”--underscore and heighten the narratives’ driving intensity.

Sasha Allen, an exciting singer,
portrays Shange's Lady in Blue.
(photo: Joan Marcus)

It's time to discover--or rediscover--the joy and potency of For Color Girls. Go and discover Wailes, a deaf actor and dancer of eloquent charm and fluidity who absolutely dazzles. Rediscover Okpokwasili, a star of contemporary dance and performance, whose trenchant, urgent presentation of one of Shange's most famous soliloquies reminds us--us colored girls, at least--that there's still always going to be someone new trying to walk off wid alla our stuff.

Scenic design: Myung Hee Cho

Costume design: Toni-Leslie James

Lighting design: Jiyoun Chang

Sound design: Megumi Katayama

Understudy: D. Woods

Director of American Sign Language: Onudeah Nicolarakis

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf has been extended through Sunday, December 8. For information and tickets, click here.

The Public Theater

425 Lafayette Street (at Astor Place), 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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Harold Guskin, 76

Harold Guskin, Acting Coach Who Nurtured Stars, Is Dead at 76
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, May 16, 2018

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Meet your doom--maybe--with Split Britches at La MaMa

Above: Lois Weaver
Below: Peggy Shaw
Split Britches brings Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)
to La MaMa for its US premiere.
(photo: Matt Delbridge)

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), a US premiere from famed lesbian theater duo Split Britches (Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw), takes inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's political satire Dr. Strangelove (1964). It works from a similar wackadoodle take on the threat of nuclear disaster within reach of itchy Twitter--I mean, trigger--fingers. A top-flight general (Shaw) is stationed by a desk and computer monitor where he keeps track of time and apparently takes calls from gal pals. Weaver, referred to by Shaw as "Madame Mr. President Sir," initially slumbers at a far curve of circled "Situation Room" tables. They communicate via landline phones, although sometimes the phone rings, it's not Weaver, and Shaw breaks into randy old pop songs.

The situation at La MaMa, then, is less tense than Shaw's tracking of the countdown clock might suggest. Yes, the show itself must finish by the end of sixty minutes, but Billy Ward and the Dominoes's "60 Minute Man" is one of those randy songs, and there seems to be plenty of time for studly Shaw to bop out to that. Yes, something must be done about the impending doom we're trying to track on confusing overhead monitors, but there's lots of time to field a council of elders from among the oldest of us in attendance. And, no, although lined up with other greyheads, I failed to make the cut.

Directed by Weaver and written by the pair with Hannah Maxwell, the show contains clever text aligned like precision-cut puzzle pieces (best delivered by saucy Shaw) and room for whatever unpredictables the elders might bring to the table. (One woman seemed obsessed with the mysterious whereabouts of one Tiffany Ariana Trump, offspring of Marla Maples and POS...oops, I mean, POTUS. Now that I think about it, Tiff does seem to have been out of the public eye for a suspiciously long time...hmmm.)

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) is more chuckle-provoking and captivating than Kubrick--well, of course! it's lesbian!--with the additional benefit of encouraging the audience to determine not only how the play will go but also, you gotta hope, how the rest of our lives will go. Folks came up with some really good stuff!

Part of The Public Theater's now-closed Under the Radar Festival, and originally scheduled to end last weekend, Unexplode Ordnances (UXO) fortunately continues tonight, Saturday, at 8pm and Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa -- Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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SPAC's "Mugen Noh Othello" at Japan Society in sold-out run

Japan Society, celebrating its 110th anniversary,
and The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival
present Satoshi Miyagi's Mugen Noh Othello.
(photo: Takuma Uchida)

Front left, Micari (Desdemona)
Front right, Maki Honda (Pilgrim from Venice)
with chanters (l-r): Kotoko Kiuchi, Yoneji Ouchi, Asuka Fuse,
Kazunori Abe, Fuyuko Moriyama and Haruyo Suzuki
(photo: Richard Termine)

Mugen Noh Othello

North American premiere

presented by Japan Society (NOH-NOW SERIES, PART IV)

part of The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival

Satoshi Miyagi and his acclaimed Shizuoka Performing Arts Center center and elevate the role of Shakespeare's Desdemona in Othello in Mugen Noh Othello. Seen through the tradition of mugen noh theater, the warrior Othello's wife and victim becomes the potentially disruptive shade trapped between life and definitive death until she can work through her story in front of the living. This crucial process for moving on and finding ultimate rest is, in a real sense, a form of theater as ritual to release her soul. Unlike most otherworldly beings in mugen noh, though, Miyagi's Desdemona is a more humble than formidable figure, appealing to the audience's sympathy.

As the tragic ghost, Micari, silkily, eerily skims the stage on feet we never see, voluminous robes concealing what surely must be casters bearing a body that admits no articulation, drawn forward as if by magnetic force. In her thin, delicate crown, she's a doll, the very model of perfection, but our final sight of her--oh, that parting gesture!--might reveal how much her devastating fate will always define her.

The full-bodied percussive music has power. As kneeling members of the superb chorus, arranged at stage left, chant the story, you will have to scan and stare hard at each mouth to determine the source of each utterance. Supertitles provide English translations, but I bet you'll find it tough to tear your eyes from the stately beauty on stage.

Script: Sukehiro Hirakawa
Original music: Hiroko Tanakawa (arranged by the actors)
Costume design: Kayo Takahashi
Lighting design: Koji Osako

Remaining shows of Mugen No Othello (tonight and Sunday) are sold out. Wait list lineup starts one hour prior to curtain. For information, click here.

Japan Society
333 East 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Under The Radar: The furious diaspora of "Panorama"

Above: Perry Yung
Below: Maura Nguyen Donohue
in Panorama at La MaMa Downstairs
(photo courtesy of La MaMa)

Panorama
presented by La MaMa and Motus as part of The Public Theater's Under The Radar Festival


We can look at the word panorama in two ways: One offers an immediate, seamless view of an entire field of vision--a landscape, say, or a seascape; the other breaks that view into its components, revealing a piece at a time, gradually delivering the whole. In the case of Panorama--an evening created by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò, directors of Italy's Motus Theatre Company, with actors of the Great Jones Repertory Company at La MaMa--numerous components scroll or zoom into view, overlap, masquerade as one another, tumble together, bombard the senses and wreak dizzying, amusing, endearing confusion. The whole, we might conclude, is far more interesting than any single part, though the parts can also be fascinating.

How you look at the panorama of Panorama is part of the puzzle and the fun, with live players before you and a number of video monitors showing recorded or live action with actors playing themselves or adopting the biography of someone else in the cast or taking over live from where they began presenting themselves on screen in intimate close-ups. It's eye-popping and colorful and only grows more so--all the way from distracting to hallucinogenic--as the allotted 80 minutes roll out.

The fabric of this panorama interweaves threads of diverse cultures, genders, sexual orientations and life histories--some exceedingly dramatic--of being uprooted, replanted in unfamiliar territory and, of necessity, reinventing one's self. Through vivid performances and visual excess, the show celebrates theater as model for how we all might survive and thrive--"inclusive and 'migrant'...a real space of welcoming and freedom." It charms us into feeling and understanding the method of its madness as further laid out in the company's program notes:

Panorama puts to the test every attempt at irrevocably fixing people, nationalities, genders, professions in hierarchical and unchangeable categories. It is a furious diaspora.

Furious, yes. Self-indulgent, yes--often and without reservation. And yes, ultimately, a panorama of joy.

Performers: Maura Nguyen Donohue, John Gutierrez, Valois Mickens, eugene the poogene, Perry Yung and Zishan Ugurlu; on video: Billy Clark, George Drance, Gian Marco Lo Forte, Onni Johnson, Julia Martin, Matt Nasser, Patrick Ssenjovu, Shigeko Suga, Christopher Wild and Mia Yoo

Dramaturgy: Erik Ehn and Daniela Nicolò
Music: Heather Paauwe
CultureHub and Seoul Institute of the Arts Production Team 
Video Design: Bosul Kim, Sangmin Chae and Billy Clark
Set Design: Seungho Jeong
Illustration and Animation: Bosul Kim 
Technical Direction: Yarie Vazquez 
Production Assistant: Youngsun Lim

Panorama continues through Sunday, January 21 with performances Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7pm, Sundays at 2pm. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

For schedule and ticketing information of other events in The Public Theater's Under The Radar Festival, click here.

La MaMa (The Downstairs)
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Myrna Lamb, 87

Myrna Lamb, Feminist Playwright in an Unwelcoming Era, Dies at 87
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, September 22, 2017

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Michael Friedman, 41

Michael Friedman, Co-Creator of ‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,’ Dies at 41
by Michael Paulson, The New York Times, September 10, 2017

Michael Friedman, Composer of Broadway’s ‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,’ Dies at 41
Thom Geier, The Wrap, September 9, 2017

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Elizabeth Swados, 64

Elizabeth Swados, Creator of Socially Conscious Musicals, Is Dead at 64
by William Grimes, The New York Times, January 5, 2016

A valentine from David Parker at Joe's Pub

Jeffrey Kazin (left) and David Parker in Head Over Heels
at Joe's Pub
(photo by Yi-Chun Wu)

"I used to think of myself as a song-and-dance man manqué," said choreographer David Parker, as he welcomed a huge Valentine's weekend crowd to his latest show, Head Over Heels, created expressly for Joe's Pub and DANCENOW. "I've been able to realize my dreams here." Parker and his gang, The Bang Group, are perfectly happy to cram themselves into the Public Theater's little pie-wedge stage, and the cheerful nightclub setting serves them well.

The timely theme, this time, is love in all its ups and downs and uncertainties. That theme--surely you've noticed--owns lots of real estate across the artistic landscape and certainly plays out across all areas of great attraction to Parker: classic show tunes and romantic comedies, tuxedo-ed tap dance numbers and the like. Head Over Heels, with its intense "musical chairs" couplings--enacted in close quarters by Parker, Jeffrey Kazin, Amber Sloan and Nic Petry--marries conventional entertainment values to unconventional, and continuously shifting, romantic configurations.

Parker (left) with Nic Petry and Amber Sloan
(photo by Yi-Chun Wu)

Made for the Joe's Pub space-time continuum--that pie wedge, those 60 minutes, that audience serviced with food and drink and then quickly ushered out before the next crowd arrives--Head Over Heels compresses a lot into its limitations. There are ten numbers, all linked to the letter "R": Restlessness, Retrenchment, Replacement, Reconciliation, Reconsideration, Recrimination, Resolution, Resilience, Relapse, Restoration. A little too cute, this, and I lost track of which "R" was which in any given moment, but that probably does not matter. The "What's New, Pussycat?" section of "Replacement" showed the tightest example of Parker's clever intricacy of craft, with Kazin and partner Petry confined to and spinning around an axis as if dancing and figure skating atop a turntable.

More generous and bubbly in nature than subversive, Head Over Heels is, nevertheless, every openly gay-positive show--on television, in the movies, on Broadway, on the ballet stage and on ice--that folks from my generation should have been fortunate enough to see when we were growing up. Parker goes back to go forward.

Head Over Heels has closed. Keep up with The Bang Group's activities by clicking here. For information about upcoming events at Joe's Pub, click here.

Susana Cook brings her "Caligula" to Joe's Pub

Joe's Pub 
presents

Susana Cook's

WE ARE CALIGULA

A show about Cruelty and Pleasure

November 19, 9:30pm

Susana Cook (photo by Lorie Novak)

Legendary downtown theatre auteur Susana Cook brings back Caligula, the meanest man in history, in this delightfully witty and savagely funny play. Caligula, the cruel and brutal man who thinks he's God, is dissected, lampooned and spliced with the everyday acts of normalized cruelty that people do in the name of entertainment, pleasure and protein - and because they taste good. There will be comedy, savagery and even an orgy or two - all to a musical score by Julian Mesri.

“Cook’s style is to employ chitchat and push it to extremes of absurdity. She’s really good at it.” -EDGE New York, New York

“With an entertaining blend of show tunes, massacres, and orgies, “We Are Caligula” explores just how our species justifies war, and racism, and homophobia, and all the other stuff that ends in us devouring each other (and animals) without a second thought.” -Gay City News

Info/Tickets

Joe's Pub
425 Lafayette (between Astor Place and West 4th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Rich man, poor artist: Nobelist Stiglitz on income inequality and the arts

The Public Theater's PUBLIC FORUM

presents

JOSEPH STIGLITZ ON THE RICH AND POOR

Monday, December 9 at 7pm

Joe's Pub at The Public

Featuring Nobel Prize-winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz on income inequality and what the artistic community can do about it

Followed by a conversation between Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC, Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, and Public Works Director Lear deBessonet

The new Public Forum Solo series is designed to bring great artists and theater audiences into contact with America’s most vital thinkers. In this event, Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University gives a talk about the most pressing issue of our time, and some of New York’s most socially engaged artists respond to his ideas about what the creative community can do to help.

Tickets for this event go on sale on October 31. For tickets and information about other current Public Forum events, click here.

Joe's Pub at The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street (just below Astor Place), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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PUBLIC FORUM presents the theater of ideas. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, this series of conversations and performances features leading voices in politics, media, and the arts. Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway, Cynthia Nixon, Sam Waterston, and former NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman have hosted its programs, which have featured the insights of Kurt Andersen, David Brooks, David Byrne, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Tony Kushner, Rachel Maddow, Wynton Marsalis, Francine Prose, Salman Rushdie, David Simon, Anna Deavere Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the culture writers of New York Magazine, and young veterans of the war in Afghanistan - plus performances by Christine Baranski, Matt Damon, Holly Hunter, Wendell Pierce, and Vanessa Redgrave, among others. Current Forum programs include Public Forum Drama Club, Public Forum Duets, Public Forum Solos, and the Public Forum Podcast.

Helen Hanft, 79

Helen Hanft, Master of Camp Way Off Broadway, Dies at 79
by Paul Vitello, The New York Times, June 5, 2013

Dance at the Delacorte!

Fall for Dance Festival Celebrates 10th Anniversary With Performances at the Delacorte Theater
by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, May 9, 2013

Celebrate with Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely!

TOSHI REAGON & BIGLovely

invite you to

 Toshi's Annual Birthday Celebration

January 18-20

at Joe's Pub

Musician Toshi Reagon

Friday, January 18 -- 9pm

Saturday, January 19 -- 9pm

Sunday, January 20 -- 7pm The Sacred Music Show featuring Bernice Johnson Reagon [SOLDOUT!]

Featuring Judith Casselberry, Stephanie McKay, Marcelle Davies Lashley, Adam Widoff, Robert Burke, Fred Cash, Jason Walker, Josette Newsam Marchak

Tickets can be purchased online at joespub.com, where customers are able to select their seat from an interactive seat map when purchasing, by phone at 212-967-7555, or in person at The Public Theater Box Office (1 PM to 6 PM) located at 425 Lafayette Street, NYC.

Directions to Joe's Pub

We hope to celebrate, but even if...

Toshi Reagon

Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely

invite you to a

Post Election Show 

No Matter What!

Friday, November 9 (9:30pm)

@Joes Pub

featuring Judith Casselberry, Marcelle Davies Lashley, Stephanie McKay, Fred Cash, Adam Widoff, Bobby Burke

Tickets and info here

About Toshi Reagon and BigLovely

Joe's Pub
425 Lafayette Street, near Astor Place (Manhattan)

APAP Diary: "Word Becomes Flesh"

Okay, so this video of spoken word artist B. Yung at a 2009 poetry conference is here because, thanks to Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project's Word Becomes Flesh, I have now become a B. Yung fan. Word Becomes Flesh (2003)--running now at The Public Theater's Under The Radar Festival in association with 651 Arts--takes an audience deep into the experiences, thoughts and feelings of a young Black man dealing with realities of the streets, the system, sexuality, relationships and fatherhood. All six men who deliver Joseph's "choreopoem" or "spoken world" are talented and committed performers. But Yung, from his first moment on stage, takes command with an immediate "on" and firm grounding in the material and emotional roots of the work. It's a smooth and beautiful performance arising from the rough, complex context set out in the piece--strife, anger, alienation, self-doubt, self-delusion, longing, wild hope.

Scene from Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Word Becomes Flesh
Photo (c)Jati Lindsay

Some sections of Word Becomes Flesh have more punch than others, but the whole work and its individual performers gain authority as they proceed, and the fiercely assertive movement and acting rock steady. So go meet Yung and his five colleagues Dahlak Brathwaite, Daveed Diggs, Dion Reiner-Guzman, Khalil Anthony and Michael Wayne Turner III.

Word Becomes Flesh runs through January 15. For information and ticketing, click here.

The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street (just below Astor Place), Manhattan
(map/directions)

AUDIO PREVIEW: David Parker

Delightful dance artist David Parker talks about his new collaboration with Jeffrey Kazin--Misters & Sisters: A Love Story in Song and Dance--in this audio preview.

Click here to listen.

David Parker and The Bang Group 

Misters & Sisters: A Love Story in Song and Dance

Joe's Pub
at The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street

(between Fourth Street and Astor Place)

Manhattan

Thursday through Saturday, June 2-4, 7pm

Misters and Sisters, a new work by and about David Parker and Jeffrey Kazin and their performing alter egos, represents a new way of working for Parker. This show─a kind of autobiographical fiction─is inspired by and dedicated to Parker’s father, mystery novelist Robert B. Parker, whose words “Don’t look for yourself in your work, look for your work in yourself,” Parker pays homage to here. Delving into their lives together, Parker and Kazin, joined by Nic Petry and Amber Sloan, cut a swath through an array of romantic standards from the American songbook as they chronicle their life together in song and dance. Misters and Sisters includes dramaturgy by Anne Davison and musical direction by Anna Ebbeson.

Ticket information and purchase: 212-967-7555, online or in person at The Public Theater box office from 1-6pm, and at Joe’s Pub from 6-10pm daily.

a DanceNOW [NYC] presentation

Belarus Free Theatre returns to New York

Belarus Free Theatre (BFT)--unable to safely return to Belarus, Decidedly UnFree--continues its sojourn around America. La MaMa and The Public Theater have brought the company back to La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre where it exemplifies the artistic and political courage that Stewart welcomed and championed for decades. In a time of widespread social upheaval in many lands, the travails of China’s detained provocateur Ai Weiwei and the exiled Belarusians remind us of the critical, if dangerous, role artists play in speaking truth to power.

L-r: Oleg Sidorchik, Yana Rusakevich, Pavel Gorodnitski
and Marina Yurevich in Zone of Silence. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Last evening, BFT presented one of its three repertory pieces, Zone of Silence, at La MaMa, directed by Vladimir Shcherban and created by Schcherban with BFT founders Natalia Koliada and Nikolai Khalezin. The piece runs for 2-1/2 hours with one intermission. Spoken in Russian and Belarusian, much of the sense of it is hobbled by the projection of English supertitles too high over the heads of the actors during the first two chapters, making it hard for English-speakers to both watch the bodies of the talented performers and follow their essential narratives. Interestingly, the supertitles for “Chapter 3. Numbers” rest across a lower level of the white backdrop. Thank goodness, because you really shouldn’t miss a word.

“Chapter 1. Childhood Legends” opens with one actor erasing a jumble of troubling images (Nazi swastika, armored tank and more) from a chalkboard mounted on the backdrop. The stories that follow, though, reflect the inability to erase the trauma of experiencing brutality--authoritarian indoctrination, emotional abuse, separation from an imprisoned parent. BFT’s performers bring us these nightmarish situations in satiric-archetypal forms with dark intensity. The aggressor, the conformist, the victim and the rebel are all embodied in physical theater that owes much to a child’s love of costumes, props, play-acting and impersonation.

Yana Rusakevich in Zone of Silence (Photo: Joan Marcus)

 “Chapter 2. Diverse” forms a collage of personalities and stories of everyday Belarusians--a nation of people apparently diverse enough to include at least one Black gay man, a guy we later see gazing out at us from a video clip as if to prove his existence. On stage, though, the incredible Pavel Gorodnitski portrays this fellow with an outsized, crackling energy that--I swear--bridges the physical gap between the actor and those confounded supertitles. When Gorodnitski leans into his impersonation, you somehow also take in the written words (and, what’s more, you really want to). But how? He’s not even that tall! What an illusion!

These first two chapters provide a fair introduction to a troupe that, in its homeland under the regime of strongman Alexander Lukashenko, must perform in a kind of theatrical Underground Railroad. But “Chapter 3. Numbers” rips the gloves off. BFT and its now better integrated supertitles tell all.

Did you know that the Nazis wiped out one-third of the Belarusian population? Or that 72% of Belarusians find it difficult to define the word ‘democracy,’ that the average salary is $350 per month, and that every 4th Belarusian suffers a mental disorder? This chapter--the most physically-oriented of this physical theater triplet--opens with Gorodnitski, Oleg Sidorchik and Denis Tarasenko dressed in what might be their best, if misshapen and rumpled, suits and equipped with homely washboard, accordion and spoons to make a little folk music. Set against imagery of perky folkdancing (Marina Yurevich) and ecstatic, glowing pregnancy (Yana Rusakevich), which complete our stereotypes of Eastern Europe, are the alarming stories that unfiltered numbers tell--about the prevalence of miscarriage, divorce, the rapid dwindling of the population, the litany of the disappeared. All forbidden truths, spoken outright by citizens who now dare not try to return to their loved ones at home.

However, BFT chooses to leave us with a different and profoundly moving impression. The backdrop fills with name after name of celebrities, artists, esteemed scientists and others, some well-known, others more obscure, who share Belarusian origin or heritage: Marc Chagall, Kirk Douglas, Ralph Lauren, Harrison Ford, Larry King, Menachem Begin and many, many more.

Last night, when the actors took their bows, they looked as if they’d run a marathon, physically spent and emotionally raw. One could imagine questions hanging in the air: When can we go home? When will we go home to freedom and dignity?

Belarus Free Theatre at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre now through May 15. For complete program information and ticketing, click here.

La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street (between Second Avenue and The Bowery), Manhattan
(directions)

Kushner and Eustis on politics and theater

The Public Forum: Tony Kushner and Oskar Eustis in Conversation at the Public Theater

A Discussion of Politics and Theater in America

Hosted by Cynthia Nixon

Sunday, May 8 at 8PM

Details here

Directions and other visitor info here