Ainesh Madan returns with "Phantasies"

Phantasies
Ainesh Madan
Speyer Hall, University Settlement
May 24-25, 2019

The play of children is determined by their wishes, really by the child's ONE wish, which is to be grown-up.... He always plays at being grown-up; in play he imitates what is known to him of the lives of adults. -- Sigmund Freud, "The Poet and Daydreaming"

Superbly skillful dance artist Ainesh Madan has worked with noted choreographers such as Bill T. Jones, Pramila Vasudevan, RoseAnne Spradlin and Heidi Latsky. He won a 2018 Gibney Work Up residency and intrigued audiences with his developing solo, Phantasies, on a strong program shared with performers Evelyn Lilian Sánchez Narvaez and Marion Spencer. He now lives and works in his native India but is back in New York this weekend with a handsome production of Phantasies.

This solo, now roughly 40 minutes, is episodic, stark sections tightly spliced together by changes in Emma Matters's lighting and distinguished by unexpected imaginings of ways in which props (coins, umbrellas) can be used. Apparently tireless, Madan seems suspended between adulthood and childhood--his rendering of a Sigmund Freud quote, above, about child's play inspired the piece--drawing a palpable vitality from being in that liminal state.

His choreography for the piece, though informed by contemporary aesthetics, invokes qualities of classical Indian dance--percussive force and sweep and a breathtaking precision and speed of arm and hand gestures conveying a narrative. Only, with Madan, that narrative often remains elusive. Why Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee?" That music drops into the atmosphere like a memory, and might well be one, the significance of which we're left to imagine.

The piece, which opens with the sharp-pitched sounds of song birds, reads like a long series of random journal entries--or short-short stories, or a cycle of songs--each entry its own shiny facet in the diamond.

Here, by the way, is the original text of the quote from Freud's 1907 talk, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming."

A child’s play is determined by wishes: in point of fact by a single wish–one that helps in his upbringing–the wish to be big and grown up. He is always playing at being “grown up,” and in his games he imitates what he knows about the lives of his elders. He has no reason to conceal this wish. With the adult, the case is different. On the one hand, he knows that he is expected not to go on playing or fantasying any longer, but to act in the real world; on the other hand, some of the wishes which give rise to his fantasies are of a kind which it is essential to conceal. Thus he is ashamed of his fantasies as being childish and as being unpermissible. 

In that talk, Freud also spoke of the way artists learn to draw a veil across personal elements in their work, sparing us what we might perceive to be TMI. I think it's possible to enjoy Phantasies without gaining entrance to all that's going on within it--which is surely a lot--and to leave that to the dazzling performer at work.

Phantasies concludes this evening with an 8pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

Speyer Hall, University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street (between Rivington and Delancey), 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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Jillian Sweeney's (un)reality show at University Settlement

Top: Jillian Sweeney dances in her Arrows & Errors
Bottom: from left,
Lindsay Reuter, Tara O'Con, Laurie Berg and Jodi Bender
(photos: Maria Baranova)

Who is "Myrna?" I'm certainly not going to tell, but if you go to see dancer-choreographer Jillian Sweeney's Arrows & Errors at University Settlement, you will not forget her--Myrna, that is. Or, at least, that's what Sweeney tells us, with insistence: You will never forget Myrna. I've got my own idea of who/what Myrna is, and I'm going to hold onto it. Yes, I guess Sweeney's right. Unforgettable.

What are the arts for if not to make something necessary where there was nothing. Even if that something is an illusion. That illusion points to something we could have and gives it a shape we can be energized by, a shape we can use. Why not Myrna, then? It seems artists know that however we manage this, it's okay. They give themselves permission to do it imperfectly, because imperfection works, too. There seems to be human energy in imperfection that just works--especially when people get together.

So, Jodi Bender starts off sitting in a chair on the top edge of an oval of light, an odd kind of spotlight. Her casual aspect is hardly star-like, and it's like the light is aware of her but half-heartedly includes her in its own space. In any case, she's just sitting, serenely gazing out at us. Then she's easily replaced by one or another of Sweeney's other dancers--Laurie Berg, Tara O'Con or Lindsay Reuter. Easy substitutes.

Reuter, seated, introduces a rippling through the body, from tailbone to head, that the others copy, each in her own way. Some get up and carry this sloshing into short walks across the stage from one set of chairs to another. And, by the way, those lines of chairs along either side of the performance space? A few members of the audience sit there, too. So dancers periodically melt into the lineup, becoming almost invisible, or at least unremarkable, and only rise into visibility when it's time for the next task.

I noticed O'Con's and Bender's tiny smirks, completely absent from the other dancers' faces--the blank Reuter, the sullen or quietly skeptical Berg. The differences opened a few dimensions in the work, alternate places where it could live and be received. It seemed to ask me to notice these present but unforced expressions and to watch and see if they might change over time.

Beyond those micro-features, though, were the macro ones--like the way aggressive Sweeney imagined folding chairs--a game of musical chairs under new rules that might find two dancers crowding and pressing into each other and using chairs as supports, props or even costumes. The adaptive play parallels the choreographic process and life itself.

Sweeney goes old school with a collection of old tape recorders and cassette tapes that serve multiple imaginative functions--sonic and visual--throughout the piece. These also evoke the past, our memories of the past, which may or may not still be on Memorex, and they are beat up and outmoded, just like our very human memories. They have energy, though. Just the sight of them can take us places. Like to an old, classic tap dance routine that lights up in some of our heads (the more senior heads, surely) while she's showing us something entirely different.

I'm not sure what it is that makes Sweeney herself so fascinating to watch dance, both borderline amusing and borderline formidable. I'm not sure why, when she carries or drags out a bizarre mix-match of kitschy props (credit Michael DiPietro) they start off somewhat irritating to look at and end up making sense because, you understand, she's got an inner vision of them making sense and they must and they just sort of do or your resistance has been worn down and now you're seeing in them what she's seeing. In any case, as with Myrna, you're suddenly able to see them. Choreography!

Sound consultation: Robert Ramirez
Lighting:Vincent Vigilante
Dramaturgical support: Jeffrey Crano

Arrows & Errors continues with a performances tonight at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Our bodies, our business: SLMDances at University Settlement

Candace Thompson of SLMDances
at University Settlement for BodyBusiness
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

BodyBusiness--the exuberant, inspired new venture from Sydnie L. Mosley's SLMDances--asks "How can dancers be paid a living wage for meaningful work? How can we transform places of lack in our lives into places of abundance?"

While the first question will require something like revolution, the second gets answered and put into practice this very week by BodyBusiness itself, a dance concert hosted by The Performance Project at University Settlement where Mosley has been in residence. But not just a dance concert. BodyBusiness is a dance physically--and spiritually--nested inside a social, marketing and community networking event ("Marketplace").*  The simple fact that I might have something you need and vice versa is its operating principle and a model for how to survive, thrive and get your work done as an artist in New York or really anywhere.

Katherine Bergstrom of SLMDances
at play with audience members
at University Settlement for BodyBusiness
photo ©2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Opening night found US's Speyer Hall performance space encircled by reps from from several community service organizations--The Field, Pentacle, OurGoods, PURPOSE Productions, among others--the sound system pumping soul and R&B as an audience gathered. Eventually, dancers from Mosley's troupe appeared, casually engaging a few audience members in movement play in the central space as tabling continued on the sidelines. These interactions provided a transition into the formal performance. With tables cleared away, Damel Dieng's video introduced and, with the help of Mosley's entertaining dancers, cleverly illustrated the complex economic issues faced by freelance dance artists.

Unpaid or underpaid. Up to their eyeballs in debt. Working several jobs to support themselves while pursuing an art they love. Statistics stacked against any hope for healthy balance in life, let alone success in their chosen career.

In the following live performance, we learned more about Mosley and her dancers as individuals, their backstories, struggles and dreams. "My folks wanted me off the couch," said Kayla Hamilton. "My mother, she worked too damned hard for me to be just dancing around," said Kimberly Mhoon. "My mother likens my dance career to an abusive relationship," said Candace Thompson.

Most of the dancers are Black women, and Mosley's choreography for this initial segment shows a wry relationship with classical ballet (as skill, as playacting) that is full of charm and mischief.

There is joy and determination and something I can only call being-one's-selfness in every move, and I love how Mosley keeps things continuously on the move. There are bodies in a range of sizes, and so we bid fond adieu to that "mold" that one dancer, Rachel Russell, said she did not fit. Fuck that mold.

The audience participation that follows--which I will not divulge here--gets to the heart of Mosley's whole project. She has a need to see dancers stand in their power (probably more than just dancers, too...but let's start there), and she offers some tools and bids us all use them well and carry on.

*Tonight's Marketplace--open at 6pm and followed, roughly at 7 or 7:30 by the performance--will feature tabling by health and social services organizations, and tomorrow's will be devoted to small businesses.

For BodyBusiness information and tickets, click here. Note: No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Also, with advance notice, childcare is available--which is very cool.

University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street (near Rivington Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Hamilton and Zachery at University Settlement's Performance Project

André M. Zachery (left) and LaMont Hamilton
(photo: Layla Zami)

The dance series Five on the Black Hand Side/Dapline! draws its title from the practice of the dap ("dap" meaning "dignity and pride"), a spectrum of elaborate gestural greetings and supportive hugs between Black men. Visual artist/photographer LaMont Hamilton and André M. Zachery of Brooklyn's Renegade Performance Group have curated three programs that can be seen as commentary on, as Hamilton has written about one of the works, "Not 'Black Lives Matter' but blackness as matter moving throughout the space; real and present."

Last evening, the series opened with three works that approached this embodied Black presence in different ways, each with a flavor of dreamlike timelessness.

Oxana Chi
(photo: Layla Zami)

Oxana Chi (Oxana Chi & Ensemble Xinren) comes to us from Germany, a dancer of Nigerian and Eastern European origin. A chart of her dance background would look like a spinning globe--from ballet and Cunningham and jazz to Javanese and Egyptian dance. Her solo Neferet iti, performed to live music by Layla Zami and a recorded score by Gilbert Trefzger and Abdoul Aziz Sinka, dares to draw visual and kinetic elements from different cultures, too, in a quilt-like, multi-textured performance. Her Central American plumed headdress, her yellow-gold harem pants, her hip thrusts and shimmies, her archer's bow draws, Masai jumps, capoeira maneuvers, vogue hands and dervish spins add up to a heady mixture. She believes it all works--you can see that--and makes it work. A somewhat delicate presence, she is, nevertheless, a woman writ large, claiming concert dance space for a diverse and teeming world, blessing that space. I don't claim to understand the two theatrical sneezes--clearly not real afflictions--that punctuated sections of Chi's performance. Perhaps the audience was meant to respond by offering its own blessing.

Hamilton collaborates with sound artist Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste on Evil Nigger (pt 1), a hallucinatory performance in which he sits behind a small table covered in a drop cloth and smears his dark chocolate face and white dress shirt and tie with a succession of gloopy paints--white, red and black. He is flesh-and-blood canvas, wrecking convention, striking out for something unknown in what starts off, it might appear, as a sendup of blackface and veers out of control. Like the droning, distorted music, the streaks and splotches and ungainly blends of stark, gleaming wet color eventually turn him into a still object of art fading from our view as the lighting slowly drains away.

The dap originated in the Vietnam War/Black Power era with Black GIs and spread throughout African American communities as a way for Black men to express cultural identity and support. In Zachery and Hamilton's ensemble piece, Dapline!, six men of color perform a fugue-like imagining of military discipline and, at the same time, reveal a tight community responsive to the pain, frustration and momentary failures of its members. The idea of the dap is addressed both in spirit and, later in the piece, in technical execution. The viewer marvels at the unity and elegance of this corps of men, the clean architecture of their shifting arrangements and movements in space, the softness and tranquility that can emerge when masculinity is unshackled, given more than one narrow definition. We watch some of the daps performed in slow motion, skin sliding over skin, our eyes absorbing the beauty and meaning of these silent interactions. These are duets; one quite fanciful interpretation unfolds like a stretchy, twisting tango. If I could have anything reconsidered about Dapline!, it would be its duration. Portions of it seem unnecessarily repetitious and drawn out. Rounding out the program, it makes for a long evening. But this important work is given magnificent and affecting performances by its dancers--Brian Henry, Andre Cole, Johnnie Mercer, Malcolm McMichael, TJ Jamez and Stephen Galberth.

Five on the Black Hand Side/Dapline! continues this evening with guest artists Candace Thompson/Nehemoyia Young and University Settlement's New Youth Movement Collective (NYMC). On Saturday evening, the series concludes with Laurie M. Taylor/SOULMOVEMENT and Hamilton and Baptiste's Evil Nigger (Part 2). Both programs include performances of Dapline!, not to be missed.

For information and tickets for tonight and tomorrow's performances, both at 8pm, click here.

Speyer Hall
University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Westerby troupe at University Settlement

Last night, Matthew Westerby's company and five-work program at University Settlement's Speyer Hall appeared well-bred if fundamentally conventional in aesthetics and reach. Unfortunately, the warm, stuffy space--filled to capacity with audience and one crying babe--did not help matters.

Westerby goes for casual elegance and buoyant musicality, but A Watershed Moment, a 2009 ensemble piece, looked merely cluttered in the shallow confines. In Stricken (2008), set to a slurpy, gargling soundscape, the most striking images were of several dancers unhappily scraping something off their skin--the fog billowing from the fog machine? Hell Hath No Fury sounds like a perfectly fine title, except that the genial dancing in this piece, clearly made to entertain, renders it inexplicable. And the newest work, Court, shows that Westerby values order and pattern and the hint of drama, but you go away humming the costumes--velvet vests on the men, eggplant-colored bustiers on the women, Elizabethan collars (the stiff ruffly historical kind, not the pet protectors).

If you do go tonight to the second and final performance of this season, look for the quietly, classically beautiful Alessandra Larson (in anything) and in a brief Stricken duet with Dylan Baker. These two sharp dancers seem to be on the verge of taking Westerby's movement out of the realm of something-to-do and into the realm of something-to-live. There's a difference. These performers show a certain capability for more. You watch them and wait for them to go there.

Matthew Westerby Company, tonight at 8pm

Ticket information

Speyer Hall at University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street (near Rivington Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Handa and the culture chameleons

Perhaps the list of cities and countries in which you've lived since childhood is as long as your arm. Cultures other than your own have touched your life, shaping your view of the world--and of yourself. You're a TCK. That's a Third (or Trans-) Culture Kid--a sociological term from the 1960s--with far more in common with other global nomads than with folks from your own native culture.

That's the premise of an interesting program curated and produced by Alaine Handa, running this week at University Settlement on Eldridge Street. The multi-talented Handa--dancer, choreographer, make-up artist, photographer, videographer and director of A. H. Dance Company--drew together numerous collaborators and guest performers to artistically explore what it means to be rooted in rootlessness, a mobile citizen of a larger, more complex world than most people experience. The two-hour evening--Chameleon--employs a collage of dramatic monologue, spoken word, video, dance and music. The music selections are lovely, and the performers are all technically secure, vivacious and handsome--even when serving up dance that looks a bit generic rather than capable of sharply articulating the program's unique theme. But Handa's video, I am a TCK, successfully conveys the core and heart of her story.


With its segments interspersed throughout Handa's ensemble dance, 4. Chameleon--a world premiere--the video is a fairly standard talking heads interview clip compilation and, on occasion, the sound quality is wanting. However, it does introduce us to a wonderful, diverse group of young people who share what it's like to adjust to and benefit from a succession of foreign homes.

Handa's project--which she describes as "living, breathing, evolving and growing"--strikes me as the kind of work intended more to generate cross-cultural engagement, discussion and support than for the kind of cutting edge aesthetic innovation critics tend to expect. I enjoyed the video, in particular, because it gently drew me close to the lives of these interesting young people--a valuable experience in empathy.

Chameleon continues tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30 at University Settlement (184 Eldridge St, corner of Rivington Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side; map). Click here for information and ticketing.