Osserman troupe presents "Quick Time" program at TNC

Ancient Egypt's symbol of the sacred eye gave Wendy Osserman a powerful focus and impetus for her 1985 trio Udjat. The piece--now danced by Lauren Ferguson, Cori Kresge and Emily Vetsch--stands at mid-range in a dance career stretching back to the 1960s. It reflects Osserman's ongoing interest in the plasticity of the body as sculptural medium and her facility at turning connected, interactive bodies into dynamic mobiles.

Performing this week at Theater for the New City, the Wendy Osserman Dance Company celebrates its 40th anniversary with Udjat and two premieres in an hour+ program entitled Quick Time. If Udjat intimates healing and eternity, Timed, the choreographer's new solo, suggests preoccupation with time running out.

"If time was a good mother," Osserman says in the piece, "she'd wait for me," a dilemma that even Einstein cannot help her resolve. Well, I will not guess at Osserman's age, but she has remained a lithe, mercurial mover. When she muses, "My body can surprise me with movement," the viewer's response can only be, Why, yes.

Timed and Quick Time--a quartet including the troupe's only male dancer, Joshua Tuason--sup from and thrive on that surprise as well as what appears to be, for better and for worse, a loosening of the choreographic grip. These works are not Udjat. They play across space and time like doodles--lines and impulses free to go where they will, twisty and slippery and clever and sometimes remarkable in the moment. Awkwardness of form and interactions--sometimes profoundly so and, yes, surprising--is permitted. The abstract physical relationships among performers flare without building towards resolution or meaning, the very things one might hope for from the passage of time.

Music direction: Skip La Plante
Musicians: Skip La Plante and Harry Mann
Set: Sanya Kantarovsky
Lighting: Alex Bartenieff
Costumes: Cori Kresge

Quick Time continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Johnson Theater at
Theater for the New City
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Cori Kresge's poetry in motion

Cori Kresge and Hiroki Ichinose's duet in Do You Like This Title?
(photo: Ryan Reich)

In Wendy Ossserman's Do You Like This Title?, presented in March at Theater for The New City, four dancers struggle to be three-dimensional in a 2D world and two-dimensional in 3D space. Additional movement sources include Hokusai’s manga, Matisse’s cut-outs, 3D printing and the anatomy of the mouth.

Kresge

(photo: Liz Magic Laser)

Wendy Osserman writes of her dancer Cori Kresge,

Cori Kresge first started dancing with me eleven years ago when she was still an undergrad at SUNY Purchase. After a long movement session one day, I suggested she sit and write for awhile. Ever since, Cori has been astounding us all with her dancing as well as her writing.

Enjoy samples of both below!

DO YOU LIKE THIS GARDEN?

by Cori Kresge

In the beginning
there were two howls in the barren black velvet.

There was dust, lots of it,
and an old screen door flapping on its hinge in the white wind.

Turn around and see spring,
budding It's pink tongue.

In fact, spring makes tongues of us all.
A wrist also wants to eat the amber light.

A breast bone wants to lick the hyacinth from the dewy air.
And here is where it gets interesting:

when the pair of mantises quibbles about who said what,
whose turn it is to be fig leafed,

which limbs to keep or discard,
they go for an evening walk as one.

A walk on the air perhaps.

This spring, stem cells in bloom
are sold in tidy bundles.

Kinkos makes kidneys in a gyrating cube,
ready-to-wear in translucent pinks and grays.

Soon nature will pulse with new mechanical precision;
Swatch brand bromeliads that promise to be better than real.

New guns full of hope for making the world a better place,
new knives for carving the air into roses.

At the drawing board of obsessive doodling
where ideas are piling up in crisp new shapes,

squeezed from the minds of Apple and Google,
we wait to pour through into the next dimension.

Like the goo in a 3D printer
in a silicon dream, waiting to join the pulse of life

without beginning/without end. Amen.

CORI  KRESGE is a NYC based dancer and writer. She was a member of the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group and part of the Cunningham teaching faculty. Cori graduated from SUNY Purchase with a BFA in dance and the Dean’s Award for "breaking the mould." She was a recipient of the Darmasiswa International Scholarship to travel to Indonesia and study traditional Balinese dance. Cori is thrilled to be dancing with Wendy Osserman for over 10 years. She also currently works with Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Reiner, Ellen Cornfield, Rebecca Lazier, and film maker Zuzka Kurtz. In recent years she has worked with Jose Navas/Compagnie Flak, Sarah Skaggs, and performance artist Liz Magic Laser.

Left, right...and dance

Wendy Osserman Dance Company in Compromised
LIZ MAGIC LASER © 2012

Wendy Osserman, whose recent commissions include works for the Baryshnikov Arts Center, La MaMa and 92Y, plans a new quartet for her Spring season. Compromised is inspired by the inflamed political discourse of the moment, seen through the eyes of this keen and often humorous artist.

Compromised reflects the polarization we are witnessing on the political stage, the extremism of the conflicting truths voiced by Left and Right.  Can they both be right? Are they both wrong? The movement is fueled by the contradictions we find between and within us. 

Dancers Lauren Ferguson, Cori Kresge, Cara Heerdt and Milan Misko collaborate with Osserman in this evening length piece.

The Company’s last New York season, presented in association with Joyce SoHo, featured more is more is more or less inspired by Gertrude Stein’s novel, Ida: “more engages and flows from the beginning. It’s light, humorous and eccentric, with moments of mild cacophony, delighting and providing, as Stein did in her own day, unexpected pleasure.” (David St.-Lascaux, Voice of Dance).

See Compromised, Wednesday-Saturday, April 11-14, 8pm at the Hudson Guild Theatre. Tickets are available at BrownPaperTickets.com or 1-800-838-3006.

Hudson Guild Theatre
441 West 26th Street (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(directions)

Volunteer with Wendy Osserman Dance Company

Wendy Osserman Dance Company requests a volunteer to assist with promotion and all aspects of the production of her new Gertrude Stein piece, more is more is more is less, May 21-24, presented in association with the Joyce SoHo. The volunteer would be needed one or two half-days per week.

Osserman's project includes four dancers and Czech singer/violinist/composer, Iva Bittová. Songs are composed and played live by Bittová, inspired by Gertrude Stein whose writing continues to sound avant garde. Osserman, the dancers and Bittová explore how that can be: they trade identities, avoid narrative and recall paintings by Stein's friends Picasso and Matisse.

Osserman's choreography for last year's collaboration with Bittová was described as "provocative precisely because it feels like a new amalgam of some indefinible kind." NEW YORK TIMES, 3/29/08.

Contact Wendy Osserman at wodanceco@aol.com.

*****
For instructions on how to submit your own request for arts volunteers, please click here.

Choreographer Osserman featured in Lennon Tribute

An Annual John Lennon Tribute Concert Soldiers On at the Ailey Theater
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, November 30, 2008

It's a jungle in there!

You've probably missed the Wendy Osserman Dance Company--amiable and talented performers--exploring and responding to conceptual artist Federico Uribe's HUMAN NATURE exhibition at Chelsea Art Museum (August 2). But you can still see this exhibition now through August 18 and perhaps visualize some jungle-y dancing of your own amid the gallery of sculptures of wild flora, fauna, landscape and weather conditions, all imaginatively constructed from pieces of PUMA footwear. The show is irresistible and fun but tense and cautionary, too. That prowling panther has a stuffed toy monkey dangling from its jaws dripping blood made of red laces, but Uribe fully implicates humans--with our devastating effect on the environment--in that red-in-tooth-and-claw business.