Darkness into light: Kota Yamazaki at Baryshnikov Arts Center

Julian Barnett in Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination,
Raja Feather Kelly and Mina Nishimura in background
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

Philosophy, dance, and folklore merge in Bessie Award-winning choreographer Kota Yamazaki’s latest work inspired by French writers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata’s notion of a “dance of darkness,” and Japan’s Goze music tradition. Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination explores the fragile body, the vaporizing body, and the body as an absorbing force.

--from promotional material for Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination

Mina Nishimura (foreground) with Raja Feather Kelly
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

I started watching Kota Yamazaki/Fluid hug-hug's new dance, Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination, by drawing a diagram of each dancer's position along the floor of Baryshnikov Arts Center's Gilman space. So one corner of my notebook page now resembles a star map. It also includes an arrow representing Kota's delayed entrance and indicating the direction in which, for most of the dance, his prone body will rest, alongside the outer edge of the special floor mat. And I drew a little, three-lined flap hanging just above the stars. That's for the sheer, opalescent fabric dipping low over the space (like the costumes and, indeed, the choreography, the inexplicably whimsical handiwork of Kota Yamazaki). It seems arbitrarily placed and more decorative than functional--say, as a space divider. But then, to be decorative is a function, and the fabric catches, liquifies and softly reflects a portion of Thomas Dunn's lighting. Even silence seems to have a function destabilized by the patter of dancers' feet on the surface. Later, Kenta Nagai's music will emerge--at first, a distance whistling seemingly from two sources and then a muffled chiming. 

Yamazaki's dancers--Julian Barnett, Raja Feather Kelly, Joanna Kotze and Mina Nishimura, all seasoned dancemakers in their own right--spend much of the time in relative proximity to but isolation of one another, each suspended in a specific portion of space, maybe slowly...slowly...shifting weight and gaze and, eventually, location. Limbs jutting or retracted, taking a few steps here or there on the balls of their feet, go their own way and mind their own business in that way aquarium fish have. And we watch them in a similar fashion. I quickly realized Yamazaki was splitting up the imagery so I'd have to make a choice. Most often I chose Barnett, a dancer who turned into a volatile madman as the piece went along, his nearly-comical agitation so propulsive that he stormed the audience...twice!

At one point, facing the black back curtain, Kotze muttered something we all could hear but, I'm sure, not make out. That was fine with me, because I doubt Yamazaki wanted us to try to understand it any more than he needed any other pop-up scrap of speech to make contextual sense.

The hour-or-so "hallucination" is part of a planned trilogy, and I missed Part 1, which is probably okay in the overall scheme of things. It has a fishy relationship to clock time and a (suspected) protagonist who, intriguingly, stays out of sight at first and then stays out of action for almost the entirety of it. And the piece winds down with wondrous Dunn lighting that bathes increasingly serene dancers in the cool gold of morning.

Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination continues tonight and Friday, December 15 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Limits of the S K Y: Gill, Anderson, Hay at New York Live Arts

New York Live Arts is what now? Some combination of 92Y and TED Talks? A place, beyond dance, for avant garde marquee names and hip intellectuals to hold forth?

Not that those are necessarily bad things. Let us, indeed, engage with the most stimulating and crucial issues of our day. But the home for a wide range of contemporary dance and performance art--a place I've cherished since the 1970s, where ideas were already quite alive without being forced--seems far from recognizable today.

Again, this is not to suggest that, as a work of intersection, New York Live Arts's annual Live Ideas Festival--launched in 2013 with programs inspired by Oliver Sacks and, last year, James Baldwin--lacks potential meaning and usefulness. By all means, let's intersect. Let's get real intersecty in ways that even the new boss, Bill T. Jones, might not be ready to imagine.

But let's make it work.

This year's Live Ideas Festival, curated by the famously intersecty Laurie Anderson, bears the title, "S K Y - Force and Wisdom in America Today," and New York sophisticates will please themselves to be in one another's presence enjoying contributions from marquee names like Anderson's, Anne Carson, Julian Schnabel, John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros and dance's own Deborah Hay in a slate of 25 events, including performances, screenings, readings and talks.

The desired audience for New York Live Arts will be able to shell out a minimum of $50 to witness a "conversation" between Anderson and Hay, her collaborator on Figure a Sea, a upcoming premiere for Sweden's Cullbert Ballet. And, yes, this less than enlightening encounter followed the premiere of an hour-long dance by Bessie-winner Beth Gill, commissioned for the festival, something that certainly might have run all by itself at New York Live Arts (or even Dance Theater Workshop) but at less than that S K Y-high price point.

From Beth Gill's Portrait Study
at New York Live Arts
(photos: Yi-Chun Wu)

No shame to Gill in describing her presentation, Portrait Study, as a rush job. Gill admits as much. She got Live Arts' invite at the end of January.

January 2015.

So, with her bang-up cast of downtown dance artists, here's how she handled things:

I am building a structural overlay that will both incorporate and highlight the improvised movement of a cast of brilliant dancers. I am using a complex and layered movement score, which will act as both a map and a set of directives for the performers. The show as a whole will be an improvised installation in which the event's timing and structural arrangement is determined by the performers. The movement material for each dancer will be a combination of self-directed individualized choreography and past experiences they have from working within the score during our rehearsals.

--Artist's Statement 

Portrait Study--accompanied live with Eliot Krimsky and Ryan Seaton's electronic score and a song by Eliot Krimsky/Glass Ghost--presents "short autobiographical solos that collect in the space over the course of the hour." One or another of a total of thirteen dancers emerges or bursts into the space, executes a short or sustained passage of abstract, eccentric improvisation and finally sinks into a dead pose on the floor. The floor, littered with bodies of the fallen--at one point, I thought of Jonestown--becomes a more and more crowded platform for each dancer, each self-portrait drawn.

A one-time-only event, remember. Here, Gill used the ephemeral nature of dance--and of her specific challenge from New York Live Arts--to strip her usually meticulous process of its training wheels. In this, she reminds me of Katie Workum with her Authentic Movement-inspired Black Lakes shown, just last week, at Danspace Project. Like Workum, Gill now entertains a "broad goal of finding less controlled ways of working—while still producing beautiful and meaningful work...without the pressure of becoming bound over time to the product." She asks of each dancer that they find and make the dance largely from their own inner materials.  Since we're talking about recognized adepts such as David Thomson, Neal Beasley, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Stuart Singer, Jodi Melnick and Emily Wexler, there can be interesting moments to take in and appreciate.

And there can be puzzlement.

Again, as with Workum's presentation, each witness will decide whether all these parts--fascinating or not so much--add up to a substantial sum or if they even need to do so. Perhaps, as observers of dance, we're also being trained to take satisfaction where and when we can.

After a 20-minute intermission, the Anderson-Hay "conversation" kicked on with a rocky, baffling start. Collaborators? The two women did not seem to occupy the same psychic space.

If you're wondering why the quote marks: Is it a conversation when, over the course of an hour, one person is doing almost all of the talking, nearly nonstop? After a long time, though, Hay slipped from her folding chair and started moving around it, around the space, to the edge of the audience and back home to her original perch--while Anderson rambled on or played music, some of which was delicious, at her electronic setup.

I don't know if Hay's sojourn was planned, but it was reasonable strategy--meeting verbal torrent with the language of the body in space.

The evening had started at 7:30. Around 9:40, Anderson looked out and acknowledged that the audience might have questions. I took my leave.

For information on other events from Live Ideas 2015: S K Y - Force and Wisdom in America Today, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues)
(map/directions)

Desert immersion: Beth Gill at New York Live Arts

L-r: Heather Lang, Jennifer Lafferty,
Marilyn Maywald and Christiana Axelsen
in Thomas Dunn's hazy sunlight in
New Work for the Desert
(photo by Cherylynn Tsushima)

In New Work for the Desert, dancemaker Beth Gill and her collaborators--composer Jon Moniaci and lighting and set designer, Thomas Dunn--translate the desert regions of the American Southwest to the spare, artificial confines of New York Live Arts's stage.

(photo by Cherylynn Tsushima)

Live imagery and motion (or lack of same) and sound (or lack of same) and gradiations of light mimic a psychic and somatic experience of being there. Pre-dawn silhouettes. Clean, empty space and time stretching out in austere silence. Sound just below conscious awareness and then arriving in hums, reverberations, chimes. Sun-baked noon. Bodies introducing slender lines, linear shapes, constructing balance, holding stillness, drifting in and out of sight, twisting as if to seek out signals from afar.

Kayvon Pourazar and Christiana Axelsen
(photos by Cherylynn Tsushima)

with dancing by Christiana Axelsen, Jennifer Lafferty, Heather Lang, Marilyn Maywald, Kayvon Pourazar, Stuart Singer

Now through Saturday, each evening at 7:30pm. For ticket information, click here.

Tonight's show will be followed by a conversation, "Under the Influence of Light," with Beth Gill and John Jasperse.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)