Live Ideas: Trajal Harrell in the house of the spirits

Trajal Harrell performs his solo, The Return of La Argentina.
(photo: Maria Baranova)

In The Return of La Argentina, performer Trajal Harrell--best known for postmodernist vogueing--"walked" Participant, Inc., a Lower East Side gallery stripped of artworks and stuffed with audience members in post-snow drab. The long, white-walled venue had a downbeat, pedestrian air--too few chairs for the crowd, wood floor glistening with tracked-in slush, random doodads tucked around a row of three piano benches clearly reserved for Harrell and his props.

Or perhaps I should say, reserved for the shade Harrell would come to channel--Butoh artist Kazuo Ohno in turn channeling his idol, Antonia ("La Argentina") Mercé, the Argentine, early 20th Century star of Spanish dance. Somewhere in there, also, was Ohno's Butoh co-creator and director, Tatsumi Hijikata, who died of cancer in 1986. It was not only a crowded gallery but a rather crowded seance, too.

The engrossing solo was originally presented in 2015, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art. Last evening, Harrell performed it for Mx’d Messages, the current Live Ideas Festival, curated by Mx Justin Vivian Bond for New York Live Arts. V, trans-genre artist, designed the 2017 edition of the festival as a presciently timely exploration of "non-binary strategies to approach some of the most vexing and wide-ranging problems our planet is now facing."

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, Mr. Trump,
That wants it down.

What Bond intends to offer with this festival is a free flow of energy and ideas across literal and metaphoric boundaries that no longer do us much good. For Harrell, lately, one such boundary is the veil between worlds. He conceived of The Return of La Argentina as an archiving of Ohno's 1977 solo, Admiring La Argentina. While the audience looked on, he snacked on orange juice, potato chips and, finally, some magical concoction of Greek yogurt and jam to see what would happen next.

Would Ohno make himself present?

He did, Harrell told us later, the proof always being the mistakes that crop up--and a few things did go wrong last night. Which means, in Harrell's way of thinking, things went right.

"If there are mistakes, it means that Kazuo Ohno's spirit is in the room." He tells us this in the middle of performing, and the room suddenly got even more crowded with African, Afro-Atlantic and Native American ancestors who totally get what he's talking about.

Although Harrell takes up this performance hoping to slip behind it, The Return of La Argentina helped me see him better than anything I'd ever watched him do. In the beginning, sensing something about to happen, I turned my head and caught him quietly and shyly entering the space, initially out of view of most of us, barefoot and clutching the ruffled top of a floral Spanish dress against his breast, eventually attempting undulations and haughty attitude, that body otherwise dressed in rumpled black jeans (much like my own) and a blue t-shirt over a long-sleeved black shirt. This guy could not look less like the elegant, charismatic Mercé, and he knows we know it, and that's part of it.

I'm more in touch now with Harrell's transparency. I realize that I've frequently seen him change clothing in front of us, and that that process of costume changing always looks the same--kind of ragged, a little harried, down to earth, another sign of the pedestrian aesthetic of postmodernism, its take on "realness," unified in the Black body of this particular contemporary dance artist. (How "real" is any of this? And why do I always want to use quote marks and assign question marks to things when I'm thinking about and writing about Harrell and the things that interest him?) His straightforward, often unprepared or awkward way with props--like tapping the wrong passcode into a smartphone and having to ask someone for the correct one--is a madness method. Try and fail, and do it right in front of everybody. No cover-up. The body tremors I'd noticed in him years ago and wondered about appear to be constant and, here, add visible texture to the vulnerability of the spooks who pass through The Return of La Argentina.

The performance was followed by a conversation between Harrell, Bond and New York Live Arts director Bill T. Jones. It was useful to hear Harrell articulate his sense of his work here as an act of archiving in which our presence is essential.

"It's a keeper, a space, a record, a context, a conservation," he says. And it's a way of thinking about, overall, my experience of live dance. I am honored to be invited into this house of spirits.

The Return of La Argentina is closed, but Mx’d Messages continues through this Sunday, March 19. Get schedule, venue and ticket information here.

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

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The Pen Thief

Well, actually, from all accounts, there are two of them--Trajal Harrell and Eiko Otake.

Both award-winning, internationally-renowned dance artists. Both of Japanese descent--Harrell by way of one distant ancestor. Both of whom have presented work at the Museum of Modern Art where, last night, they met for the first time for Harrell's much-desired "blind date," introduced and ably chaperoned by LMCC prez Sam Miller.

So, about the pens. Harrell admitted that if he's handed a pen to sign papers, he's liable to just tuck that pen away for safekeeping. Otake, quickly raising her pen in the air, confessed to the same larcenous trait. As a huge fountain pen aficionado, I can tell you, I plan to keep both of these people at arm's length. You do not steal pens from me and live to make art another day. Fair warning.

The most exciting thing about the Harrell-Otake conversation, part of American Realness 2015, was the chance to hear Otake speak at length about her relationship to Japan--apparently, a challenging one. In 1972, with her husband, Koma Otake, she left behind Japan's master-disciple system to craft an independent practice. When she returns to her homeland now, she finds herself getting angry.

"Being angry is very important to me," she said. "It pushes me."

Along with that anger comes feelings of grief and remorse. "And I don't want to be released from that," she added.

Anger can be fuel. I was amazed to hear Otake's statement as I shared the same insight, just hours before, with another choreographer. When we shame and seek to scrub ourselves of these troubling energies--which the viewer can readily see in Eiko and Koma's demanding, uncompromising work--what creativity do we end up washing away?

American Realness: Discourse, now through Sunday, January18

Trajal Harrell: Serving looks at The Kitchen

Dancer Trajal Harrell and his audience,
prepare for Monday night performance at The Kitchen.
(all photos: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Trajal Harrell is, by now, legendary for his "looks"--specifically, the array of interconnected dance projects, created since 2008, that wear the title Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church. In each of these pieces, Harrell plays with the fantasy of crossing two influential performance movements that arose in New York in the 1960s--a neutral minimalism favored by "downtown" dance artists, questioning what dance is, and Harlem's competitive and fabulous ball culture. Harrell's works, like articles of clothing, come in a variety of sizes--(XS), (S), (jr.), and so on, leading up to what he says will be a publication (XL). On Monday night, Harrell performed his solo, (S), at The Kitchen as part of FIAF's 2014 Crossing the Line Festival.

In the stripped-down, democratic Judson aesthetic, external appearance was nothing; in the world of the balls, it was everything, all about displaying the look of something you're not and, in most cases, will never be. That surface look transcends its illusion and elusiveness, cleverly employing yet moving beyond costume and even physicality to something trickier to glimpse, the spirit of the performer. That spirit becomes more clearly visible the longer we watch Harrell perform (S).

For (S), Harrell spends an hour on and around his catwalk, shifting through twenty personae of apparel and movement, starting from "West Coast Preppy School Boy" (in yellow slicker and white flipflops) and nerdy "East Coast Preppy School Boy" (complete with Obama backpack). In a Judsonian touch, the frequent costume changes take place right in front of us at a stand of ordinary folding chairs draped in pants, jackets and other gear, shoes and boots stored beneath. Harrell dons each "look" with zero fuss and with utmost transparency, hurriedly discarding one outfit for the next. Harrell's strides back and forth and around the rim of watchers, though inspired by the atmosphere and dramatics of a high fashion runway, are based in matter-of-fact human walking.

In the early phases at least, he takes on a modest, restrained demeanor that looks like the imaginary Harlemite showing up for postmodern dance class: "I'm here, but I'm not here." But there's way too much drama, way too much Josephine Baker, Graham, Basquiat, Meryl Streep in this guy to be sealed up in pure Judson, and what Harrell allows to shimmer through and seep out of any and all formal containers can be weirdly beautiful.

More "looks" coming up: (M)imosa, tonight at 8pm; (jr) Antigone Jr. and, at 9:30pm (Plus) Antigone Jr. ++ on Wednesday; (L) Antigone Sr. on Friday; and (M2M) Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem on Saturday. Clicking here will get you complete schedule, casting and ticket information.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map)

For more information on FIAF's 2014 Crossing the Line Festival, running through October 20, click here.

Who won Bessies?

2012 New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies)

presented at The Apollo Theater

and hosted by Elizabeth Streb

October 15, 2012

Outstanding Production ("in large capacity venues--over 400 seats")

Event by Merce Cunningham
Park Avenue Armory

Outstanding Performer ("in large capacity venues--over 400 seats")

Silas Riener in Split Sides by Merce Cunningham
Brooklyn Academy of Music

Outstanding Production ("stretching the boundaries of a culturally specific form")

La Edad de Oro by Israel Galván
The Joyce Theater

Outstanding Performer ("stretching the boundaries of a culturally specific form")

Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards "for sustained achievement in performance and her work with Jason Samuels Smith at The Joyce Theater"

Outstanding Production ("performed in a small capacity theater--under 400 seats")

Antigone Sr./Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church by Trajal Harrell
New York Live Arts

Outstanding Performer ("performed in a small capacity theater--under 400 seats")

Omagbitse Omagbemi "for sustained achievement in the woks of Keely Garfield, Ralph Lemon, David Gordon, Urban Bush Women, and many others"

Outstanding Production ("in the context of the expanding field of contemporary arts, dance, and performance practice")

The Thank-you Bar by Emily Johnson
New York Live Arts

Outstanding Performer ("in the context of the expanding field of contemporary arts, dance, and performance practice")

Nicolle Mannarino in Devotion Study #1 by Sarah Michelson
The Whitney Museum

Outstanding Revived Work

The Shining by Yvonne Meier, presented by New York Live Arts
The Invisible Dog Art Center

Outstanding Visual Design

Doris Dziersk, set design for Blessed by Meg Stuart
New York Live Arts

Outstanding Sound Design or Composition

Flamme Kapaya and band for more more more...future by Faustin Linkyekula, The French Institute's Crossing the Line Festival
The Kitchen

Outstanding Emerging Choreographer

Rashaun Mitchell for NOX
Danspace Project

2012 Juried Bessie Award recipient

Souleymane Badolo
Awarded by 2012 Jury: Lar Lubovitch, Yvonne Rainer and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

2012 Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance

Paul Taylor

2012 Bessie Award for Service to the Field of Dance

Alice Tierstein

***

Become a member of the New York Dance and Performance League. Email the bessies@gmail.com to find out how.

Judson When?: Trajal Harrell at Danspace Project

Yeah, I love Bryan, too.

Yes. 

If I have to come home with an earworm, 

I want it to be this song. 

Every day and all days. 

So, thank you, Trajal Harrell.

So...on to Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now:

Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (M2M)

This mouthful of a title--crafted by dancer-choreographer Trajal Harrell--tells me a few things: Harrell is a man with much on his mind, much of it overlapping, much that does not get thrown away. The Judson Church pioneers are in there, somewhere, and the theater of ancient Greece and the voguing balls and all of the variously-sized (XS, S, M, jr., L, XL) manifestations of his preoccupation with the concept of a collision between queer Harlem and the glory days of downtown postmodern dance. There's also an inclination to play with our heads: I'm going to tell you something or show you something "in all sincerity" and then I'm going to pull it out from under you. You know that thing that just happened? It wasn't what you thought it was. You know that thing I just said? Forget it.

This last trait is slightly annoying but has its place. Harrell seems, simultaneously, to want to seduce and to ward off intimacy. In hallowed St. Mark's Church, which already bears its own extensive arts history, he has overlapped ancient theater, Judson Memorial Church--home of early postmodern dance titans, and the ballrooms of Harlem. With this unlikely theatrical mélange for a moody setting, he performs the (forced) marriage of ironic distancing to emoting, virtuosity, passion and potential catharsis. 

He will just sit there, looking pained, along with dancer Thibault Lac, looking blank, while we simply listen to the entirety--the entirety!--of Adele's "Set Fire to the Rain." When was the last time that happened in a dance show? Audacious spliced with irritating (and I like Adele; I like Harrell, too).

It makes me think of my own youthful musical obsessions, not too far from this (and some of them I still claim) and how they fired creativity. And then I think I get a little more about Harrell.

It's all a bit much. Interjections of words--impassioned, yet kind of silly. Some dancing--ecstatic, yet trailing into the ordinary. The blues sitting there like the smug papa of all of the other music Harrell has gathered around it. Lengthy, lulling passages of things like Ondrej Vidlar intoning this command--"Don't stop"--stretching those words and playing with the inflection and tone (muttered, gentle, insistent, menacing) while a pained-looking Harrell sits and squirms. Harrell's unexpected, confident singing is too much--luscious and indulgent in equal measure. At times, he reminds me of Antony; at others, a holy-roller getting that (really, really) old-time religion.

I've grooved to Harrell's succulent dancing more in other works than here. In this piece, Thibault Lac, nearly walks off with everything. Though impossibly gawky in appearance, he transforms himself into a voguing superstar with slippery back, crazy legs, arms moving like whips, batons, propellers that blaze into near invisibility. (Don't think! WERK!!! WERK!!! Don't think!) Yes, please. More Lac.

The three men, draped in filmy, flowing black "vestments" (by Complexgeometries) could be ancient ritual celebrants or high-fashion models in little black frocks. These roles crash and clash. I'm waiting for these strutting priests/priestesses to "take us there"--to that place of catharsis--but it's not happening because the models, of course, are making us hold back and just look, sit back and just watch.

Oh...one more great earworm from Judson Church is Ringing. Love it.

Trajal Harrell at Danspace Project tonight and tomorrow, 8pm. Sold out, but there's a wait list. Click here for information.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Just come get this mess

Can you just clear it up? I need a little more clarity. -- Peter Richards in Para-dice (Stage 1)

When Patricia Hoffbauer auditioned for DTW's Fresh Tracks series, she says, David White argued that her dance was too messy and disorganized. But my guess is that mess is often the point. Because either you're going to have a tidy piece of work or you're going to have a real piece of work (meant in both senses of that term). Hoffbauer sees everything in terms of the mess.

And what she has going on now at Danspace Project--a phenomenon called Para-dice (Stage 1)--is messy to the max on purpose. Sprawling throughout space and time, it doesn't even have a discernible beginning or a definitive end. And oh, that middle!

Add the fact that Para-dice (Stage 1) is messily shoehorned into an evening with another phenomenon called The Adventure (instigator: Trajal Harrell), a nightly sample of choreographic research experiments-in-progress and, on the evening I attended, a thought-provoking party game for audience members followed by an invitation to stick around for wine. What's going on here?

If narrative is power, is there any coincidence whose narratives are visible? -- Patricia Hoffbauer in Para-dice (Stage 1) 

What seems to be going on is a kind of blasting open of assumptions about what it means to make and perform dance, what it means to try to give a lecture on dance and culture (with Hoffbauer and collaborators vividly referencing and mercilessly deconstructing Brazilian history, pop culture and stereotypes), what it means to consume art, what it means to critique it or to willingly live with it and participate in its meaning. It complicates everyone's safe story--and just what does it mean to have a crush on a smooth-singing, smooth-looking samba/funk star who turns out to have been an informer for the dictatorship devastating your country?--and it continuously interrupts "serious" art with entertainment and vice versa. And it does all these things with an almost unimaginable seamlessness and insouciance.

One of my favorite moments happens very early on: There's a smallish film screen set up on one side of the space, and some hazy imagery comes on for just a few seconds before the images inexplicably slide away onto the back wall of St. Mark's Church's sanctuary. Why in hell should the images stay on a little screen when they can more rambunctiously, even sacrilegiously, splash themselves, as in a movie theater, across far more impressive space? This filled me with cheer, and the oncoming dance--riddled with graceful humor among other good and smart and skillful things--kept me alert throughout.

The piece was created in collaboration with its performers--Peggy Gould (so deft and pleasurable to watch in her duet work and other interactions with Hoffbauer), Elisa Osborne, Peter Richards (whose visual contributions include samples from Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha) and George Emilio Sanchez (responsible for much of the text). Costumes are by Liz Prince, lighting by Kathy Kaufmann.

Every performance includes a different work from The Adventure. (Last night, for instance, dancer Anna Whaley "stole" Thibault Lac's solo, 2, Line, Science--simply constructing a sandpainting-like diagram of white powder on the church floor and dustbusting it up again, all to the strains of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine.") So go and see what adventure's in store for you this weekend. 

Patricia Hoffbauer's Para-dice (Stage 1) and The Adventure

continuing tonight through Saturday, 8pm

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church

Second Avenue and Tenth Street, Manhattan

Tickets

Conspire with Trajal Harrell

Trajal Harrell, dancer-choroegrapher and curator of Danspace Project's celebrated PLATFORM 2010: certain difficulties, certain joy will offer a 20-minute lecture on the current state of dance and performance.

"THE CONSPIRACY OF (Performance)"
Friday, October 29, 2pm

Admission: Free

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (corner Second Avenue), Manhattan

The Larissa Show

Let me say it outright: I love Larissa Velez-Jackson. 

And you have one more night to see her troupe at Danspace Project--tonight, 8pm--where she's showing Holy Now! and Making Ends Meet as part of curator Trajal Harrell's PLATFORM 2010: certain difficulties, certain joy.

Harrell's concept of "difficulties" (Velez-Jackson's experiences with a broken toe or a broken heart) and "joy" (the choreographer's ebullient creativity and infectious sense of humor) is well illustrated here. Velez-Jackson is an injection of sunshine and courage.

I love how, in Holy Now!, she dares to create a lovely, honest-to-god altar (although a suspiciously pagan one) in the St. Mark's sanctuary and populate postmodern performance space with women having what appears to be ecstatic encounters with divinity. The work--performed by the choreographer and Sarah Holcman, Abigail Levine and Katy Pyle with soundman Jon Velez-Jackson--is poised on a fine line between seriousness and goof, a satire of bizarre, cultish behavior that locates (and enjoys) the cultish behavior in theatrical performers and their audiences.

Making Ends Meet seems spiritual, too--in the sense of the choreographer using every trick in her book to exorcise the demons that bedevil the process of making and presenting art--like self-doubt and bad reviews. How to do that? Well, start by advising your audience to loosen up: "Guideline #1: Enjoy!" Have a videographer (Ivo Serra) follow you around and turn his lens on the people in the seats. Those live close-ups of audience members' faces will knock 'em off guard. Package yourself in a format the audience has already embraced--the reality show--and maybe think about hiring a coach to bring some edginess out in your niceness.

"Don't hurt the artist," Velez-Jackson sings, over and over again.

Singing this, she parked herself right in front of me--me with my pen suddenly frozen over my notepad--and gazed into my eyes while the videocamera was trained, for painfully long minutes, on my face. 

(Oh, no worries, Larissa. You're barking up the wrong tree. The tree you really want, though, might be planted over on the other side of the room!)

Velez-Jackson's a charismatic, kickass artist who, with playfulness and protean skills as a physical comedian, establishes immediate rapport with her audience. Getting us right where she wants us, she's capable of delivering any kind of message or sting or bouquet of rare joy that she desires.

See Larissa Velez Performance Company tonight, 8pm. For information and reservations, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

Directions

Bouchra Ouizguen and "Madame Plaza"

A few thoughts on Madame Plaza (2009), curated by Trajal Harrell for Danspace Project's PLATFORM 2010, certain difficulties, certain joy and co-presented by FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival at Florence Gould Hall:

With her research into the cultural practices of the Aïta women singers and dancers of her native Morocco, dancer-choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen tells us that she intends to break free of conventional perspectives on the female body and its uses in dance. Madame Plaza, however, seems to me to be a sign of the sheer beginning, not the fruit, of experimentation. 

The strongest push of the envelope that this hour-long production offers--at least for an audience that, as usual, is almost completely white--is the sight of four brown-skinned women, three of whom are far heavier than conventional dancers Americans are used to and are, indeed, Aïta performers, moving in spare, often pedestrian gestures and patterns like old-school and, frankly, tedious "downtown" stuff. This made me wonder: If this work did not have the Moroccan context--or the short passages of ecstatic incantation, thrashing and a little bit of gender-bending that directly relate to the world of the Aïta--would we find it interesting, intellectually or sensually compelling enough to justify the time? I paid attention and sought engagement from Madama Plaza's first, langourous, dead-silent moments, when the women sit or recline on oblong cushions, occasionally rearranging themselves. It never sparked my interest.

There was a telling moment, at the conclusion of Harrell's post-show Q&A, when Ouizguen took a final question from the audience about a statement she'd made about breaking away from her training and all that dance was supposed to be. The questioner asked,"What did you think dance was?"  The choreographer thought for a second, then replied that she no longer knew the answer to that question, didn't know what she's originally meant--a quite apt answer from someone apparently still in a liminal state of search. Both ends of the search--past and possible future--seem fuzzy to me, but I'd love to see what she and the Aïta can do when it all comes into focus.

Madame Plaza--with performances by Fatima El Hanna, Naïma Sahmoud, Kabboura Aït Ben Hmad and Bouchra Ouizguen--completes its run tonight at 8pm.

FIAF's Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street (between Park and Madison Avenues), Manhattan

Ticketing

Now, about that elephant...

As part of its PLATFORM 2010: certain difficulties, certain joy--curated by Trajal Harrell--the innovative Danspace Project will offer a series of Saturday afternoon public forums addressing "topics in contemporary dance that often get superficial treatment or go undiscussed." Hence the title--The Elephant in the Room!

Free. Donations accepted at the door.

Location: Douglas Dunn Studio, 541 Broadway, 5th Floor, Manhattan

For complete program and schedule information, click here.

What does "choreography" mean today?

Time to Put Choreography Back on Its Feet

by Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, September 2, 2010

Meg Stuart lays it out on the table

I hope Meg Stuart and Performa 09 will not mind my quoting a bit of the promotion for Auf den Tisch! (At the Table!) which I attended, last night, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. It's really the best way to get the concept right:

Picture this: you enter a room and can take a seat at an enormous table, with four microphones at the ready, as if in a conference situation. From your chair you can see how the table becomes a platform for action and reflection. Or something of the kind. You see performers sing, play, dance, and talk about performance issues, fragility, and territories. Or not. Meeting and improvising at an oversized table such as this one, it is no wonder that things get out of proportion. “Auf den Tisch!” (At the Table!) is a curatorial improvisation-project by Meg Stuart. Upon her invitation and initiation, a changing cast of performers, thinkers, writers, musicians, actors, and dancers confer about their pressing issues while presenting a performance of negotiations.

If you manage to get a reservation for tonight's final performance (7:30pm), you too can witness--or, as you wish, more directly participate in--this conference of sorts.

The table--a huge, blond wood beauty with a couple of unimaginatively used trap doors--is a total performer magnet. Who wouldn't look at this spacious, brightly lit thing and want to clamber on and act out?  Combining the likes of Stuart, David Thomson, Yvonne Meier, George Emilio Sanchez, Trajal Harrell, Keith Hennessy and others, you certainly have the makings of a major act of acting out. Audience folk sit to table with the performers or occupy a few rows of chairs that ring it. As Stuart settles down in front of her microphone and gazes around the room, there's a sense of something momentous about to happen.

She starts by reading text. It sounds sensitive, fragile and quiet, a kind of table-like base for what will follow, and might represent Stuart's essential nature as the dreamer and generator of the entire project. The performance I saw contained a repeating motif of a heavy body or bodies piling on top of or rolling over a body underneath. Stuart's opening words are followed by other voices around the table that accumulate and spill over one another, swelling, eventually subsiding.

Stuff happens. Lots of it. Anything can happen, since improvisation is in the room. Thomson, dressed in a comic-strip hoodie and jeans, prowled the

space between table and outer chairs. Later, he was the first to bust out dancing, top and center, in loose-limbed, splayed-out movements.

Meier--challenged by Stuart at one point-- retorted, "I'm sorry. I'm not sitting on my mouth." Someone, to clunky effect, alluded to the Fort Hood shooting: "I'm still stuck on the psychiatrist with a machine gun. Was he improvising?"

A parlor game broke out, and the possible fucking of pineapples and righteous politics of pineapples were contemplated. Thomson and Harrell engaged in a cross-table Q&A about forgiveness. A belligerent Janez Jansa somewhat reluctantly performed the history of Richard Schechner's "putting off of clothes." This "getting close to history" made Meier at last "sit on her mouth."

The spectacular "Floral Cat"--the spectacular Hennessy in costume--touched off a segment of leftover Halloween shenanigans. Sanchez--in a kind of Soupy Sales act flipped upside down and turned psychological--encouraged all of us to take a piece of paper money from our own wallets and simply rip it up. Amid more scampering, a few words were carefully added to a flipchart and just left there, meaninglessly, until someone gave the equally meaningless order for the flipchart to be flattened to the floor.

There were dashes of chemistry, untethered patches of the jazz of delicious movement (Thomson, Harrell) and wide-awake humor (Sanchez), and not a little mystification and diminishing returns. The performers seemed unwilling to acknowledge signs that energy and interest had dropped. What I had been told would last "maybe a little over an hour," stretched towards two hours before, having had more than enough, I rose to leave.

You have to know when to push back from the table.

At that point, Stuart, having just asked the audience if it had any questions, was answered by a heavy silence. For an interesting moment, we were left with her standing rather defenselessly before us in all her original sensitivity, fragility and quiet. Okay. Matters could have ended there, and quite reasonably.

But then, Performa founder and director RoseLee Goldberg took the mic and asked something on the order of "Do you think improvisation is still alive?"

I'm not really sure what she was going for with that question but, in light of the overall lack of surprise, challenge or revelation in the performance, I'd rephrase the question, maybe split it into two parts:

"Do you think there's still life in your improvisation?" and "Can improvisation still matter?"

Performa 09 information and resources

Baryshnikov Art Center

450 West 37th Street, Manhattan

House of Harrell

How nice to get let into a performance space well before a show begins and be able to enjoy the quietly cheerful presence of its star-to-be as he greets friends. Last night at the New Museum, the stellar soloist in question--Trajal Harrell—started the show by handing out impeccably-printed cards with the lineup of twenty voguing “looks” to be performed over fifty minutes in the museum’s intimate theater space, surrounded on three sides by audience.


The piece is called Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (S)—the S representing “small”; reportedly, there are XS, M, L and XL versions. Besides the museum, Harrell’s savvy co-presenters include Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line festival. You have one more chance to see the exquisitely-performed (S): Go tonight!

Using a sextet of metal folding chairs—draped in pieces of clothing--as his dressing room, Harrell dons a changing, mix-match array. From Preppy Schoolboy (West and East Coast versions) to Legendary Face and Basquiat Realness, Harrell walks, embodying his long-imagined collision of Judsonian postmodernism (the party of NO!) and the aesthetics of the Harlem ball scene (YES! to glamour, YES! to theatricality, YES! to seduction). In fact, it is a big YES! to the importance of surface impressions and a hearty embrace of making magic (and magick) theatricality in postmodern dance.

For the most part, Harrell avoids the gleaming runway, created by artist Franklin Evans, taped over the theater’s floor. It’s there, but he’s elsewhere, breaking up not only the way we can look at him but the way he looks at everything with a gaze that sometimes draws the watcher in and sometimes evades or wards off the watcher, but is always pulled together and deployed like a serious and irreversible hoodoo spell.

This performance—a pleasure to witness--combines wit, patience, subtlety, awesome fluidity and grace and even some room for amusingly tacky effects (kitchen apron turned superhero’s cape with the help of an electric fan, for instance). The man’s keen taste in music and sure application of it for color and atmosphere are simply delectable. Harrell has always been an interesting thinker and creator. This piece, though, should make him legendary.

Tonight, 7pm, at New Museum, 235 Bowery, at Prince Street between Stanton & Rivington. 212-219-1222. Information also at Danspace Project.

Générique, an open source performance

Générique
Monday, December 8 at 8pm
Judson Memorial Church Meeting Hall
55 Washington Square South, Manhattan
Free -- no reservations required

Générique: presentation of everybodys toolbox. Come play and discover Générique, an open source performance.

The presentation will be supported by DD Dorvillier, Milka Djordjevich, Trajal Harrell, Sarah Percival plus YOU! Followed by Mårten Spångberg performing Powered by Emotion, a reconstruction of the Goldberg variations by J. S. Bach, interpreted by Glenn Gould, improvised by Steve Paxton, filmed by Valter Werdin.

Information at everybodys toolbox

Information at Movement Research

Conversation for "The End of Time": Greco and Harrell

Coffee and Conversation with Stephen Greco and choreographer Trajal Harrell about "Quartet for The End of Time"
Dance Theater Workshop blog, November 19, 2008

Are you sincere? Harrell's "Quartet"

There are good-enough dances that stay on their side of the audience-performer divide, slide in front of your eyes, take a quick bow, and go. Nod fondly at them or turn away, unaffected and cold; it might not matter, one way or the other.

Quartet for the End of Time--created by Trajal Harrell and a disciplined team of performers and other collaborators, including dramaturg Julie Perrin--is not one of these.

Strangely, though, part of what drives this 90-minute work is just that kind of sliding by and going: the stylized yet casually cool demeanor of runway models and the apparent out-of-bodiness of erotic dancers. Yet, Harrell employs these same methods of presentation to question whether we've unknowingly slipped past an age of irony into one in which a renewed sincerity--an embodied sincerity--has regained a legitimate place within contemporary dance. The acknowledged sincerity of Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time--a work of celestial beauty created inside the hell of Nazi imprisonment--provides the sticky base for Harrell's imaginative, multimedia exploration.

Dancers Sirah Foighel, Will Gordon, Liz Santoro and Christina Vasileiou provide exceptional performances (with the additional challenge of frequent nudity).

In his program notes, Harrell writes:

This dance is nothing more and nothing less than Maybe to spectacle. Maybe to virtuosity. Maybe to transformations and magic and make believe. Maybe to glamour and transcendancy of the star image. Maybe to the heroic.....Maybe to style....Maybe to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer....Maybe to moving or being moved.

Are you ready for that? Virtuosity, magic, glamour, heroism, style...it's all there in Quartet, if you want it. The production issues from the murky, gloomy underground, haunted by the dead, and yet it dazzles. The visual elements--Erik Flatmo's set, Thomas Dunn's lighting and imagery by David Bergé and Harrell--conjure a space of shifting dimensionality, one that flattens, one moment, and fattens, the next.

Projected images face us straight on or, seductively, fold away sideways, as if someone is manipulating a giant pair of those skinny iPods. Messiaen's music has somehow magnetized samples from the likes of Imani Uzuri, Nina Simone, DJ Assault and Antony & The Johnsons. The energy of the imagery, sounds, and performance is richly layered but never hectic. The stylistic sophistication and the underlying sincerity contain each other, locked together like yin and yang.

This is a master work, one that will be remembered as a highlight of this dance season and of Harrell's provocative career.

Quartet for the End of Time continues tonight through Saturday at Dance Theater Workshop with performances at 7:30pm. Tonight, Thursday, meet Harrell for a pre-show "Coffee and Conversation" talk with Stephen Greco at 6:30pm in DTW's lobby.

In addition, Harrell will show Tickle the Sleeping Giant (stage number 8)--a "permanent work-in-progress"--on Saturday at 2pm (free to Quartet ticket holders).

Trajal Harrell: Body and Soul Podcast

The talented Trajal Harrell is one of dance's versatile, committed workers. He has learned to balance various roles including performer, choreographer, curator, journal editor and instructor. His innovative art, in concept and execution, investigates the links between postmodern and popular aesthetics.

Dance Theater Workshop will host the premiere of Harrell's "Quartet for the End of Time," October 15-18, 2008. This full-evening work for four dancers takes the story of Olivier Messiaen's famous music of
the same name (composed and first performed by Jewish and Christian musicians in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp) as a foundation for investigating the antagonism between sincerity and irony in our contemporary time.

BIO

Trajal Harrell was born in Douglas, Georgia. He graduated from Yale University, majoring in American Studies with a concentration in creative processes--researching theater, literary theory and art history. He has also studied dance and choreography at Brown University, The Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, The San Francisco Institute of Choreography, City College of San Francisco, Movement Research and the Trisha Brown School. His work has been performed in various venues in the US and Europe.

In 1998, he was selected as an artist-in-residence at Movement Research and has been active in the development of research projects and curation, including curating an initiative to diversify Movement Research's programming through selection of artists of color for performance opportunities. He has served in editorial capacities for the Movement Research Performance Journal and was appointed editor-in-chief in 2006.

LINKS

Movement Research:
http://www.movementresearch.org/

Dance Theater Workshop:
http://www.dtw.org

Body and Soul is the official podcast of InfiniteBody dance blog at
http://infinitebody.blogspot.com. Subscribe through iTunes or at
http://magickaleva.hipcast.com/rss/bodyandsoul.xml.

(c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

This material may not be reproduced in any way, either in part or in its entirety, without the expressed written permission of Eva Yaa Asantewaa.

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