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.