Body and Soul: Vicky Shick: The refuge we take in trust

Vicky Shick (photo: Alan Mandell)

 

Describing this photo, Vicky Shick writes:

I am sitting on a gray bench with a bunch of green leaves behind me. My hair is loosely piled.on top of my head. I am wearing a dark gray sweater - a light green collar is sticking out and around my neck is a colorful gray, red and pink scarf.

In this episode of Body and Soul podcast, the respected, award-winning artist and educator Vicky Shick discusses the challenge and "universal necessity" of trust in a time of widespread distrust and anxiety. As an artist, she sources trust in "the innate intelligence in our bodies" and "in the vulnerable practice of creation."

Listen to Vicky's episode here. And scroll down to learn more about her work!

Vicky Shick has been involved in the New York dance community for four decades--teaching, performing, and making pieces. She feels grateful to all the incredible people with whom she has worked. She was a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company and staged several of Brown’s dances, including in her hometown, Budapest. Previously, she was a member of the Sara Rudner Performance Ensemble. Vicky has developed student pieces at Barnard, The New School and Yale, among other institutions. Her last two works were at Arts on Site, and a collaborative performance at Roulette with choreographer/artist Jon Kinzel. In New York City, she teaches at Movement Research, for the Trisha Brown Dance Company and has taught for 15 years at Hunter College. She was a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence (twice), a Bessie recipient (twice), a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Gibney DiP grantee, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Artists Reach Out: Vicky Shick

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Vicky Shick

Vicky Shick
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Vicky Shick has been involved in the New York City dance community for four decades. During her years (’80 - ‘86) with the Trisha Brown Company, she received a Bessie Award for performance. She has been making dances since the mid '80’s and was honored with a second Bessie Award for her collaborations with artist Barbara Kilpatrick and sound designer Elise Kermani. Shick has taught, shown work and created student dances, most recently at Yale (2020) and restaged Brown’s pieces in festivals and at universities, including in her hometown, Budapest. She has collaborated and worked with many cherished others, including Seline Baumgartner, Jodi Bender, Yoshiko Chuma, Donna Costello, Meg Harper, Irene Hultman, Eva Karczag, Jon Kinzel, Jennifer Lafferty, Ralph Lemon, Diane Madden, Juliette Mapp, Marilyn Maywald Yahel, Jodi Melnick, Mina Nishimura, Omagbitse Omegbemi, Jimena Paz, Stephen Petronio, Susan Rethorst, Sara Rudner and Cathy Weis. In 2015, she was a second-time Movement Research Artist-in–Residence, a 2008-2009 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and a 2006 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

This pandemic has, of course, affected my upcoming scheduled work. This past winter, I had the privilege of creating a piece with ten Yale students for a performance to be done in late April. Amazingly, we were able to complete all our scheduled rehearsals. Social distancing had not yet been recommended, and so, I can now spend time relishing the many image memories of their intimacies in the work we created together. In mid-May, Jon Kinzel and I were to share a now-cancelled show at Roulette. I had been rehearsing with Jennifer Lafferty, Athena Malloy and Marilyn Maywald Yahel. It feels sad to temporarily end our process, to end studio time. Jon Kinzel just completed a residency at MacDowell where he was also developing work for this no-longer performance. We hope it will be re-scheduled. I also have some teaching starting in May through the summer. It seems that none of it will happen.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I started dancing a couple of years after my family came to the States. I didn’t speak English and was unusually shy, but somehow I managed to find comfort inside dance classes. Becoming a dancer was my dream. I was not nearly as sophisticated nor savvy as young dancers now are. At 27, I began working with Sara Rudner and, at 29, I joined the Trisha Brown Company. Early on, we were laid off for ten months.  Now what??? I decided to try to make my first dance--a solo. I had no idea that dance-making would have such a life-long grip on me.

My practice is time in the studio. In my late twenties, it was warming up alone in my apartment. I loved the process of readying myself and then, religiously going over movement material. That’s what I did. Thirty-eight years later, it’s not so different. Finances were easier then, I had a part-time job proofreading.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

In some way, I am practicing what I have always been practicing--dancing. How I get to that dancing and the type of dancing I do, hopefully, has changed. My readying process has certainly shifted toward a more somatic-informed preparation. Perhaps, at its heart is serendipitously landing on a certain quality or a particular articulation and staying with it--even trying to make it more concrete. However, that pinning-down effort can stalemate the exploration.

Though, I rely on the ritual and rigor of finding a nuanced physicality, I am simultaneously quite interested in the inherent drama in movement alone, in the underlying genuine behavior of the body, in intimacy with the self and with others and, in the immediacy of straightforward action. I’m drawn to the human-ness of the performer, the architecture of the body inside the architecture of the space--so simple! I try to navigate through all of that.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

My great desire in choreographic practice is to locate an authenticity of action and behavior. I want to believe the performer, to trust the real-ness of the physicality, to see the thought process and decision-making in choreographed or structured movement. I’m interested in trying to pare down to an essence while also channeling some subtle, idiosyncratic flamboyance and passion. I struggle with all of this. And so, the hours and days and hours and days inside the studio investigating, doing, watching and trying are my world. What eventually matters is the intersection of that studio time with what bubbles forth and erupts.

These days, I spend a tremendous amount of time with others in the studio. For a decade, it has been mostly with Marilyn Maywald Yahel. The gift of working with her and with several others has exploded the possibilities.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

Well, now, in this harrowing pandemic world everything is upside down and different. There is no studio time. For me, there is no pleasure of treasured in-person work with others. As a senior, who did not grow up with computers, I am a foreigner to technology. Most people my age and older are wonderfully digitally-proficient. I am not. I feel this lack more than ever now. Though, I have participated in some Zoom meetings, I have found it less than satisfying. There is always some glitch, some gap, some disturbance, some problem. However, I do recognize the extreme, indispensable importance of technology now. It is the answer to our isolation. I am back to the beginning, trying to move alone in my apartment.

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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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Nicky Paraiso: ready at La MaMa

Nicky Paraiso (right) with dancer Paz Tanjuaquio
in now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories

Nicky Paraiso
now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories
Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
March 22-April 7

Nicky Paraiso's performance memoir, now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories, directed by John Jesurun, runs about 80 minutes. A densely-packed, non-stop monologue, it is augmented, surrounded--and, more or less, supported--by scenic design, music, movement and the occasional verbal exchange with his dancing collaborators. It traces Paraiso's Queens boyhood in a Filipino immigrant family through an illustrious, four-decade career in theater, music and curation to the present day. These "intimate histories" of the verbal kind take the lion's share of space and oxygen--although the projections on the scrim dividing one half of the audience from the other can be as enchanting as Paraiso's piano playing and singing.

I question the choice of engaging four star dancers of downtown renown--Irene Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Vicky Shick an Paz Tanjuaquio--if, while relating nearly every life and career detail of your own with a biographer's specificity, you keep these fine artists largely marginalized until nearly the end. I enjoy seeing these performers wherever they land, but why here for what adds up to so little?

Their movement patterns never achieve the impact of Paraiso's heartfelt reenactment of singing "Into The Mystic"--one of my own soul songs--at a lover's memorial. They can't match his remembrance of how the late La MaMa, Ellen Stewart, loved to proudly flash her melon-like breasts and how she admonished him that "you like those talky, talky plays. That's not La MaMa, baby!" And how she added, "You do whatever you want, but I don't gotta like it!"

Talky, talky, indeed.

now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories requires some patience, but the rewards are real. Go, if you want to learn what made Paraiso Paraiso. He is beloved by our downtown arts community and one of the most knowledgeable, diligent and gracious advocates for artists everywhere.

Written by Nicky Paraiso
Direction by John Jesurun
Created in collaboration with performers Irene Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Vicky Shick and Paz Tanjuaquio
Dramaturgy/Script Development: Irene Hultman, George Emilio Sanchez and John Jesurun
Production Management by Caleb Hammond
Costume Design: Gabriel Berry
Lighting Design: Joe Levasseur

now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories continues through Sunday, April 7. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues), Manhattan

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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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Vicky Shick brings "Another Spell" to Danspace Project

Heather Olson (above)
Below, l-r: Donna Costello, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Lily Gold
and Heather Olson dancing Another Spell at Danspace Project
(photos: Ian Douglas)

New York provides so many ways to spend your precious weekend. But--oh, you lucky ones--you can spend an hour at Danspace Project with Vicky Shick, Jodi Bender, Donna Costello, Lily Gold, Marilyn Maywald-Yahel, Heather Olson and Omagbitse Omagbemi. Shick and all of her collaborators have brought us Another Spell, one of the most beguiling events of the dance season.

Another Spell's modular look, we're told, came together by picking through earlier work for elements of Barbara Kilpatrick's costume and set design. Even the movement bears that popular aesthetic--easygoing, sustainable--plus all the charm of an afternoon of thrift store shopping with a friend blessed with taste and ingenuity.

I imagine Another Spell drawn across white boards and then described--in juicy 3D--by circling hips, flapping thighs and knees, tensile ideas projected into receptive space. The scrapbook tape, filmic splices and stitched seams never show, and Kathy Kaufmann's lighting makes it all look mutable and luxurious.

Glitches prevented the opening night audience from hearing the proper soundscape (performed live by Elise Kermani with additional tracks composed by Todd Lent), but you might get to hear it if you go tonight or tomorrow. I hope you can!

Another Spell runs through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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What's moving downtown, moving the Bronx

Look sharp!

There's dance moving all over town... 

La MaMa Moves Dance Festival

Chamber Works 1--featuring Dark Matter by Juliette Mapp; present.tense (progressive) by Maura Donohue; and So be it--not a piece--miniatures for five by Vicky Shick. May 11-13. La MaMa’s The Club, 74A East 4th Street, 2nd Floor.[information and tickets]

Beauty--Jane Comfort and Company. "...a gimlet-eyed look at the extremes women go to achieve impossible beauty." May 17-20, 7:30pm La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor. [information and tickets]

La MaMa
[map/directions]

Dancing While Black: Voices from the Bush
a presentation of BAAD!'s 2012 Boogie Down Dance Series

Thursday, May 17, 8pm

Featuring current and former dancers from Urban Bush Women--Maria Bauman, LoveForte (Marjani Forte and Nia Love), Paloma McGregor and Samantha Speis--who present their own brazen dance works as part of Dancing While Black, "an artist-led project/initiative that explores many questions including what does it mean to be a Black artist today in order to shift the power of contextualizing work and articulating aesthetic values into the hands, and bodies, of black dancers themselves."

For more information on this and all Boogie Down festival events and to purchase tickets, click here or call 718-842-5223.

BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance
841 Barretto Street, 2nd Floor, Bronx
(map/directions)

Rethorst: Make yourself at home

Here's the link to my Dance Magazine review of "Susan Rethorst: Retro(intro)spective," a series of events curated by Melinda Ring at Danspace Project, May 9-June 18.

Wishing upon stars: Rethorst's "Beau Regard"

An apparition out of the past--to be specific, an apparition out of 1989, a year I hold in high regard for my own reasons--Susan Rethorst's Beau Regard drifts in and out of one's conscious awareness. Sculpted partly by the choreographer's episodic whimsy, partly by Carol Mullins' confident, sublime lighting touch, partly by the dashes and splashes of music and a ground of silence, it comes and goes. Mainly its gestures, relationships and narratives inhabit subterranean, subcutaneous and distinctly subconscious space. A delicate and timeless thing, it fits the very notion of Retro(intro)spective, the Rethorst-focused series christened by PLATFORM 2011 curator Melinda Ring.

Its gentle charm softens you up, its clarity of execution makes you trust it even as the language escapes you or, at least, your conscious mind.  The main performances by Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick, Iréne Hultman Monti, Rebecca Brooks and Noami Fall make of Danspace Project's home, St. Mark's Church sanctuary, a sanctuary indeed, a house of worship of goddesses ancient, classical, Romantic and everyday. I must say I found it a tad unnerving, almost too hushed in its most quiet moments, but I could sense my neighbors listening not just looking, as if forbidden to giggle in church or afraid to miss any exquisite, if esoteric, detail.

When you wish upon a star, you're graced by the women, a spectrum of generations, who perform in this piece. Men eventually appear, too, late in the course of things: Benjamin Ford Asriel, Neil Greenberg and Jon Kinzel, good sports who drew the audience's only chuckles last night and made me wonder what story Rethorst might be telling about the male of the species. Their costumes--tomato-red shirts and slacks with dark blue slacks awkwardly, comically belted and strapped to the front of their lower bodies--suggests an underlying, blunt vitality masked by superficial nobility and authority. The dawning of patriarchy is a goof. Not necessarily Rethorst's idea, though; just a thought from a watcher of symbols and colors.

Beau Regard continues tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm. For more information and ticketing--as well as additional information on the remaining Susan Rethorst: Retro(intro)spective events, click here. 

Danspace Project
Second Avenue at 10th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Kinzel's responsible

Jon Kinzel's Responsible Ballet And What We Need is a Bench to Put Books On--curated by Sarah Michelson for The Kitchen--is a tasty bit for lovers of contemporary dance and its star performers. Vicky Shick, recovering from a fall, did not appear last night, but Kinzel, Hilary Clark, Jodi Melnick, Christopher Williams and promising newcomer Jeremy Pheiffer held everything together--not one of these folks duplicate any of the others or, for that matter, can anyone else in the dance-iverse duplicate them.

There aren't wings at the sides of The Kitchen's performance space, just one, smallish and dark partition--part of Kinzel's visual design--hanging in space. The piece begins when dancers scatter from behind this screen; when dancer return during the course of the piece, it amusingly hides everything but their legs. The bare, WYSIWYG space contains one other clever design element--a few long strips of masking tape. Yep. That's basically it. But really, it's fun when Williams rips the strips from the black wall and turns them three-dimensional. A little effort, a little act of down-to-earth alchemy. 

Responsible Ballet--free of overwhelming multimedia distractions--exposes its dancers and the arbitrary-seeming quirks of its movement. Kinzel favors spongey, stretchy, sometimes bizarrely distorted moves that shift and slither through positions that are unusually, continuously alive. This dancing writes across open space in an unknown or forgotten language--postmodern hieroglyphics.

In Kinzel's solos and duets, each dancer carries an elusive story of sorts. Melnick (with the big, intact valentine on her holey shirt) and especially Pheiffer carry the most distinct, resonant ones. Pheiffer's springy gyrations have a viscerally disturbing quality--like the first stirrings of seasickness--but I think something about him brings out the squirmy, sloshy-iness running through Responsible Ballet as a whole.

Clark, who has been more interestingly deployed, makes out less well than any of her colleagues here where it seems she serves merely as a blunt, undefined physical contrast. To be fair, that might not have been Kinzel's intention, but that is the effect. If Pheiffer writes with a fine Rapidograf, Clark wields a luxurious sable brush, but her hieroglyphics look all slash, splash and babble. And Kinzel has not added anything fresh to Williams' excellent track record.

Even so, these highly responsible and responsive dancers are well worth our venturing out to The Kitchen on some of this winter's coldest nights. But there's only one show left--tonight. Click here for ticketing.

Go see Vicky Shick!

Vicky Shick is one of those artists whose name alone is worth enough to make people run from all points, eager to see her perform in her own or others' work. So, here we go again: If you had all sorts of other plans for this weekend, drop one of them and go see Vicky Shick in her new work, Glimpse, running at Danspace Project through Saturday night (8:30pm).

Shick is a major lyric poet of dance--one whose gently moody, quietly breathtaking effects reveal a rigorous eye and craft. Her sometimes non sequitur poetry-in-motion looks just right on fellow dancers Tamás Bakó, Christine Elmo, Hedvig Fekete, Eva Karczag, Dianne Madden. With Barbara Kilpatrick (set and costumes), Elise Kermani (sound score) and Carol Mullins (lighting), this exquisite team pulls off one of the loveliest and most rewarding productions of the season.

Tickets at Danspace Project or 866-811-4111
St. Mark's Church
131 East 10th Street, Manhattan

Jaroslow's "Sixty"

[Note: Correction of closing date.]

For the life of me, I cannot understand how most Americans--even some smart ones--miss the exceptional value of dance and dancers. One could not ask for more from art and performance than we are receiving from Risa Jaroslow & Dancers in Sixty, this week, at Danspace Project.

In 2007, prior to her sixtieth birthday, Jaroslow solicited dance ideas from a range of people she'd known. From their varied ideas, she selected nine, worked them over and came up with a surprisingly seamless, if frequently nutty, blend of fifteen sections in sixty minutes. Sixty is a work of ferocity, wit and charm. It's a symphony of relationships rendered with full-tilt intensity and sensitivity by Jaroslow and her delicious, gustsy company--Gabriel Forestieri, Luke Gutgsell, Elise Knudson, Rachel Lehrer and Paul Singh--plus a large corps of guests, including Vicky Shick.

Do your heart a favor and go. There's just one more show--tonight at 8:30pm.

Tickets (or 866-811-4111)

Risa Jaroslow & Dancers Web site
Jaroslow's journal: notes on the creation of Sixty

Catching up with New York

Back from the powerful earth of Arizona, I managed to haul my jetlagged self to Hoofers' House at The Kitchen (curated by Rashida Bumbray and MC-ed by Jason Samuels Smith) on Friday night and to La MaMa Moves Festival's "Dancing Divas" evening on Saturday evening (curated by Nicky Paraiso and Mia Yoo and featuring works by Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick, Pam Tanowitz, Barbara Mahler, Sally Silvers and Sara Rudner). Lovely, sensitive and interesting moments were in good supply at La MaMa Annex, but the mamadiva who moved us most had to be Rudner, one of my dance-crushes from way back, whose Positions--The All Star Variation was a true, openhearted gigglefest. I loved its extravagant size, its combination of the serene and the silly, its total lack of taking itself seriously. My kind of extravaganza with amusing performances from John Scott and Chris Yon among a bevy of downtown dance beauties, Rudner among them. Look for my Hoofers' House review on DanceMagazine.com sometime down the line.