Meet Gabri Christa's "Magdalena" at Theaterlab

Gabri Christa in her new multimedia solo, Magdalena
(photo: Kevin Yatarola)

Having spent the early afternoon at 92Y Harkness visiting Pino-Latino's intersection of Asian and Latinx cultures, I headed to Midtown West for Gabri Christa's multimedia solo, Magdalena. I found the Curaçao-born dance artist/filmmaker greeting people arriving at Orietta Crispino's tiny studio at Theaterlab, carefully guarding a square of white performance space surrounded on three sides by a string of light bulbs from heedless, bull-in-china-shop audience members.

Towards the rear of the demarcated space, a baby doll of fragile, chocolate-brown porcelain sat atop an ancient valise. At the start of her hour-long performance, Christa, a woman of mixed races and cultures, began her storytelling by pointing to the Black doll and relaying its history. (How did this toy, so rare in the Europe of her Dutch mother Magdalena's youth, come into her family? From an auntie who'd gotten it as a present from her Black, and married, lover.) As in the best stories, that single point and gaze would steadily open up many vibrant channels of memory, history, questions, feelings. We would be introduced to a family, to a war, to Catholic schooling, to interracial love, to the Black Caribbean, to adventurous vitality and, finally, to aging and dementia. For this is a story moving towards her mother's state of forgetting, and it is an act of loving discovery, recall and reclamation.

A gifted storyteller, Christa employs many supportive tools--among them, a treasure trove of archival visual imagery, some of it from personal family materials. But none of that would matter if the interconnected tales themselves--as in Bennyroyce Royon's new piece for Ballet Hispánico--did not rest on a foundation of humanity.

Conception, writing and performance: Gabri Christa
Direction: Erwin Maas
Design and Dramaturgy: Guy de Lancey
Radio play performed by Wayne Miller and the Spotlight Theater
Music: Izaline Callister and Vernon Reid

Magdalena continues through Saturday, September 22, but hurry. Seating is extremely limited. For information and tickets, click here.

Theaterlab
Third Floor
357 West 36th Street (west of 8th Avenue)
(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Your next must-see: Khadijah Queen's "Non-Sequitur"

Congratulations to Khadijah Queen, winner of the 2014-15 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers! Her play, Non- Sequitur, is a delight, and I can see why it won the judges' unanimous approval.

Presented by THE RELATIONSHIP at TheaterLab, now through December 20, and directed by Fiona Templeton, Non-Sequitur unfolds in the compressed, narrow confines of a tiny runway of sorts flanked by audience seating. Over just one hour, the play introduces a cavalcade of characters, each with "voices on multiple registers: the voices in our heads, under our breaths, on our voicemail, hard to have to listen to, hilarious voices, blurted voices, bodily voices." Oh, yes, depictions of such anthropological acuity--each one perfectly captured as if within a flash of lightning--such absurdity and such glee, scarcely leaving us time to breathe, that the nonstop shocks can keep a silly grin plastered on you face from start to finish.

For my dance folks out there, just go see this thing. The well-chosen cast includes a few dancers you know and love who prove to be wonderful actors. Of course! But they would be an asset to Queen's play anyway. The heightened physicality of the characters is as eloquent, stunning and giggle-producing a factor in this work's effectiveness as are the words.

With performances by Lenora Champagne, Stacey Karen Robinson, Helga Davis, Dawn Akemi Saito, Yon Tande, Zselyke Tarnai and David Thomson.

Non-Sequitur continues through December 20. For complete schedule and ticketing information, click here.

Click here to learn more about the late Leslie Scalapino and here to read more about the biennial award named in her honor.  Non-Sequitur, the book, is available here.

Theaterlab
357 West 36th Street, 3rd Floor (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)