"THE DAY" arrives

Cellist Maya Beiser with Wendy Whelan
performing The Day
(photos: Hayim Heron, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow)

THE DAY

by Maya Beiser, Lucinda Childs, David Lang and Wendy Whelan

October 22-27

at The Joyce Theater

In all honesty, when I hear that the events of September 11, 2001 inspired a piece of art, I note and then turn away from that detail, hoping for an alternative reason to connect. The excellence of THE DAY's principal collaborators--cellist Maya Beiser, dancer Wendy Whelan, choreographer Lucinda Childs and composer David Lang--drew me to The Joyce this week for this work's New York premiere. (I went, in particular, for Beiser, and please hurry to her site's video page and share my new obsession.) Thinking back now, I find myself drifting between certainty that THE DAY reflects a moment in our history and, at the very same time, wavering certainty about what my eyes and ears testified as I gazed from my seat in the audience. Thus, for me, it might be the perfect evocation of the experience of witnessing 9/11.

Performed without intermission, the interdisciplinary work consists of two parts--The Day and World To Come, named for music previously composed by Lang for Beiser--and contemplates the aftermath of a soul's separation from its body. The width and height of the Joyce stage, backed by Joshua Higgason's video projection, contribute to THE DAY's monumentality and hallucinatory depth of field and dreamy elusiveness.

In the opening part, Beiser and Whelan occupy separate, opposing territories--cellist and cello crowning a translucent incline; white-draped ballerina starting off artfully perched on a stool as if posing for a fashion shoot. Sara Brown's minimalist, abstract set--angled lines suggest subtle demarcation--works in tandem with the strength, and severity, that Childs' ideas bring out in Whelan's deft improvisations which, at times, evoke an iconic rendering of the architectural proportions of the human body. She creates, and exists within, pristine, divine abstractions.

Lang crafted the voiceover text for Part 1, Beiser writes in her program notes, out of numerous statements crowd-sourced from the Internet, each phrase completing his own phrase "I remember the day I...." Each statement is separated from the next by six seconds, giving the text a hypnotic rhythm, like a prayerful litany, and I found it fascinating to find that he had carefully alphabetized the statements.

I stopped speaking. I stumbled. I switched. I talked. I talked to myself sternly.

Each statement, taken out of context, could sound as if it captured a mundane moment in time. But, in fact, Lang intends each to mark a significant turning point in a person's life. Carefully strung on a silver thread of breath, each statement takes its moment to shimmer in light before giving way to the next. So, in a way, each is extraordinary but no one surpasses any other. Each stands in as a symbol of human consciousness, symbol of human experience--and, it is painful to remember, a single loss out of many.

Some of the sonic and visual atmospherics of THE DAY tease the audience while also being unsubtle--a long, muffled, engine-like roar; two white lengths of fabric suspended from the stage's fly space suddenly rippling to the floor; the video speeding bodies into spectral visitations blurred across an interior space; Whelan increasingly wrapped by shroud-like fabric as her body rolls down the incline.

But the music. Beiser's strong, exacting control of her instrument; the energies generated and invoked in her playing. This mastery at the core of THE DAY anchors everything, gives everything else here a reason for being.

Sound design: Dave Cook

Lighting design: Natasha Katz 

Costume design: Karen Young

The Day concludes today with a performance at 2pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(directions)

******

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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Movement Research presents "Body Disrupt" at Abrons

Mat Fraser as The Beast
(with Jonny Dixon and Jess Mabel Jones)
in the 2014 production of
Beauty and the Beast at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Sheila Burnett)

Below: Julie Atlas Muz as Beauty
(photo: Sin Bozkurt)

Artists with disabilities and artists whose work disrupts normative notions of what constitutes a dancing body will come together in conversation.

 --about Body Disrupt, a Movement Research Studies Project panel

Body Disrupt
--a panel convened and moderated by dance artist Kathy Westwater at Abrons Arts Center for Movement Research--left my head buzzing, not so much with a bunch of questions or final answers but rich points of departure. In that way, I found it satisfying--again, not in the sense of finality or feeling sated but in the sense of deliciousness. Each panelist--Wendy Whelan, Petra Kuppers, Julie Atlas Muz (representing her husband and creative collaborator, Mat Fraser), Marissa Perel, Cathy Weis, and Westwater herself--offered a different history, pathway, insight and flavor. I consider them all guides who lead you to a good place and leave you there with confidence that you're smart enough to push on forward in your own way.

Westwater introduced the event by talking about how her engagement with somatic practices left her at variance with their emphasis on organizing the body. In her dance practice, she said, she was "pursuing a disorganized body, trying to understand what that was."

"Why am I trying to organize my body?" she asked. "I'm an artist. I want to express the body I have." Indeed, she turned to physical "disorganization" as a stimulus for a choreography of exaggerated dis-alignment that, she says, "never stops being interesting to me."

As the panel wrapped up, Westwater revisited this language and reworked it--referencing, instead, "different organizations of bodies."

As a dance writer, I found that revision at once enjoyable and useful. It made me remember a question someone recently posed to me: "What do you look for when you go to see a dance?" My response was perhaps different from what another writer might offer: I go to engage with what's there, whatever it might be, not to look for something predeterminied. In other words, if I expect anything, it's the possibility of something different, and I've signed up for engagement with it. While that's no guarantee that I will get it or like it, it's a protective against simply failing to respect its right to exist.

Westwater and Whelan, it turns out, are old friends from youth. Even so, Whelan's presence on this panel was surprising and proved refreshing. After all, her stellar career, though evolving, has been rooted in classical ballet technique, far from Movement Research's approach to dance. But here's the thing: At age 12, Whelan was diagnosed with scoliosis (curvature and rotation of the spine) and spent months in a chin-to-hip body cast while bravely resuming her rigorous ballet training. Treatment helped, but it did not wipe away her innate sense of difference. At times, the ballerina had to endure fault-finding by members of my profession for the look of her body and her dancing.

Today, Whelan considers her condition a gateway to the truth of herself, beyond picture-perfect ballet conventions, and to the pursuit of more adventurous means of self-expression through the works of contemporary choreographers.

"I strive to be fearless," she says. "I'm never afraid to embarrass myself."

Kuppers--a German-born community performance artist and disability culture activist, now based in Michigan--impressed me with her playful approach to the world as a model of easygoing engagement based in perception and compassion. From Muz--performance and burlesque artist married to an actor with thalidomide-induced Phocomelia--I simply inhaled a renewed affirmation of my femme self and a voracious pleasure in the age-old, radical power of the Outsider. Perel spoke of disabilities and pain hidden from view--"I've been able to look like a dancer"--and, in particular, what dance critics fail to take into account when they encounter her work. A poet, installation artist, choreographer and critic, Perel says she works with forms of art that will give her agency. "I don't really care what they are." Weis, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in decades ago and facing the loss of her marriage, regained her own agency through turning not only to dance but to stained glass and, especially, to video as an extension of herself, made on equipment that she could handle by herself.

Body Disrupt offered notions of disruption that can instigate not only the work of movement artists but also the work those of us who view, process, document and critique their art. These artists encourage each of us to define and relish in our freedom.

*****

Movement Research Studies Project presents a series of artist-instigated panel discussions, roundtables, performances and/or other formats that engage issues of aesthetics, philosophy and social politics relevant to the dance and performance community.

All Studies Project events are free and open to the public.

UPCOMING:

June 7, 6:30pm
Festival Spring 2016 Studies Project
Curated by Aretha Aoki, Elliott Jenetopulos, Eleanor Smith and Tara Aisha Willis

Gibney Dance Choreographic Center
890 Broadway, 5th Floor, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Wendy Whelan to give final NYCB performance October 18

Wendy Whelan
(photo by David Michalek)

Whelan Plans to Depart City Ballet After 30 Years
by Michael Cooper, The New York Times, March 31, 2014

No safety net for retiring US dancers

'A Dancer Dies Twice': The Unique, Sad Challenge of Retiring From Ballet

Acclaimed ballerina Wendy Whelan is just one of many professional dancers who find themselves struggling to transition into new careers as they hit middle age.

 by Maroosha Muzaffar, The Atlantic, March 7, 2014

Cheering at The Joyce

What's the deal with that reported Google-sponsored free WiFi in Chelsea? I hoped to post my FOCUS DANCE observations and thoughts to Facebook and Twitter at intermission, but all I could find was a "Joyce Public" connection that hung for hours every time I typed just a few characters. Crazy.

Last night's presentation of Camille A. Brown & Dancers and Brian Brooks Moving Company at the APAP-targeted FOCUS DANCE at The Joyce got the audience cheering so vociferously I began to wonder if I hadn't slipped into a wormhole and ended up at City Center's Fall For Dance festival instead. The cheering sounded a little pre-planned, shall we say?

I will cheer, though--and loudly--for a couple of solos from this program.

Brian Brooks presented I'm Going to Explode, a signature piece from 2007 where the choreographer steps out (and flips out) of his character's mundane, buttoned-down existence and splinters into rapid-fire, thrashing, punishing movement. It's an amazing performance of physical control and endurance, one I never tire of seeing, just as I never tire of its accompanying music--"Losing My Edge" by LCD Soundsystem. (Yeah, I'm losing my edge...The kids are coming up from behind...the kids from France and from London, but I was there...I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band. I told him, "Don't do it that way. You'll never make a dime."...But have you seen my records?...Gil! Scott! Heron!)

Brown's half of the show also featured a distinguished solo--The Real Cool, an excerpt from her ensemble piece, Mr. TOL E. RAncE (2012). The solo works as a standalone item. Like Brooks, Brown has superb control of timing, weight, every last movement in this meditation on Black performing artists and stereotypical representations. A dancer with legendary skill and presence, Brown turns her character into a full-body mask. Its intelligent, fiery and sorrowful human spirit seems to float a few feet back from this animated shell. Eerie.

Other highlights on the bill: Brown's fun and feisty Been There, Done That (2010) duet with lovable Jule D. Lane (a Jacob's Pillow crowd-pleaser that, yes, this talented duo should work the hell out of as long as they can) and Brooks's duet, Fall Falls, some attractive, if inconsequential, slippery-do and swirling around with Wendy Whelan which exploits her malleable qualities without giving her much of a point for being there except to be Wendy Whelan, surely wonderful to indulge in (as dancemaker and as audience) but which, in the end, does not satisfy.

For information on the remaining FOCUS DANCE programs through January 13 at the Joyce--Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, Doug Varone and Dancers, Eiko & Koma and John Jasperse--click here and here.

The Joyce Theater
Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Coming to the Guggenheim in 2013

Daniel Beaty and Moisés Kaufman
Tallest Tree in the Forest
Sunday, January 13, 7:30pm; Monday, January 14, 3 and 7:30pm

Advance tickets are available for the Works & Process presentation of The Tallest Tree in the Forest. The play, by Obie-Award winning performer and writer Daniel Beaty and Tony- and Emmy-nominated director and playwright Moisés Kaufman, explores the evolution of Paul Robeson as an actor and activist.

Wendy Whelan
Restless Creature
Sunday and Monday, Apr 14 and 15, 7:30pm

Hailed by the New York Times as “America’s greatest contemporary ballerina,” Wendy Whelan performs a Shen Wei solo; a duet with New York City Ballet’s Robbie Fairchild choreographed by Joshua Beamish; and excerpts from Restless Creature, featuring four new duets by Beamish, Kyle Abraham, Brian Brooks, and Alejandro Cerrudo, prior to its premiere at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Jacob’s Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Ella Baff moderates a discussion with Whelan and the four choreographers.

For a schedule of the entire Works & Process series, click here.

Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue ( at 89th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Falling for dance again....

For many of us, it takes very little to fall for concert dance. In fact, we've been goners for some time now. For everyone else--and, in America, that's a sizable number--the kind of rah-rah action on hand at New York City Center's annual Fall for Dance festival might be just the ticket. And a relatively cheap ticket at that ($15), if they can manage to get their hands on one, even with the newly-expanded--12 nights now!--Fall for Dance evenings. Really, all you sharpies who already love dance should step aside, at least for one year, and let some newbies get in the door.

Once in the door, they will discover a tossed salad of troupes and styles--everything from ballet to hula to contemporary dance out of Indonesia--designed to open their eyes to dance's fabulous diversity, its connection to their values, and the rock-star appeal of skilled, hard-working performers from celebrated troupes. They will thrill to an environment where they're free to applaud between sections of a dance and raise the roof with lusty, arena-ready cheering when it's all over. A fun night out, maybe even an enlightening one. That can be good for business at City Center and, ideally, elsewhere.

Wendy Whelan and Tyler Angle (Photo © 2011 Erin Baiano)

Jared Grimes (Photo by Ernest Gregory)

For the most part, I had a good time with Program A, which featured choreography by Jared Grimes (Transformation in Tap); Christopher Wheeldon (Fang-Yi Sheu & Artists in Five Movements, Three Repeats); Sol León and Paul Lightfoot (Nederlands Dans Theater in Shutters Shut); and Jarek Cemerek (BalletBoyz in Void).

In Grimes' voice-over, he remembered himself, newly arrived in New York, as "a mad scientist" in the lab of the tap world. His world-premiered ensemble piece, Transformation in Tap, isn't nearly as "mad" as it might be--especially since one of the most delectable parts of it, a Grimes solo to "The Lady is A Tramp," reaches way back to pay homage to world-class, charismatic Sammy Davis, Jr. But younger viewers will find in Grimes' intense, muscular style some of the clean snap and acrobatic flourish of hip hop, keeping tap in the moment and ready for whatever's ahead.

To my eye, Wheeldon gave modern dancer Fang-Yi Sheu an elegant, lyrical backdrop--New York City Ballet dancers Tyler Angle, Craig Hall and Wendy Whelan. She is, to quote a superstar of baseball, "the straw that stirs the drink" in Five Movements, Three Repeats (2012), a being of almost inhuman ability to mold and re-mold her body, shape-shifting into new forms. Whelan and Angle--faithful, if less dazzling, in a somber, increasingly ethereal pas de deux--have the good fortune to have been paired not only with each other but with composer Max Richter's affecting remix of Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth." (Listen to it here). What good is love.... What good am I.... But while a voice within me cries/I'm sure someone may answer my call...." It was hard to not feel a pang, even a foreboding chill, whenever Angle lifted Whelan just high enough for her toes to clear and skim the floor, just high enough to free her of the earth for a brief respite.

Shutters Shut (2003) is a sparkling duet performed by NDT's Astrid Boons and Quentin Roger with Gertrude Stein's "If I told him: A completed portrait of Picasso" as score. Clad in costumes that seem to flash a succession of now white, now black signals--a secret language--these two jutting, wind-up dolls rapidly work through Stein's ear-tickling repetitions and variations.

In Void (2011), Britain's hunky BalletBoyz kick butt and will smack down anyone who hears "Dance is..." and thinks "...for sissies." I was reminded less of West Side Story (see the Macaulay review) than Fight Club, right down to the suggestion of a secluded, urban warehouse setting where bare-chested guys get into it, but a Fight Club choreographed to be sleek, slick and picturesque, where no blow lands with impact and people fly at one another but all you get is the idea of men fighting, over and over and over and over.... Cemerek carefully crafted every detail of this idea but quickly exhausts it, even if he never exhausts those ten amazing dancers.

Fall for Dance continues through October 13. If any tickets remain, you can find out here or by calling the City Center box office at 212-581-1212 (Monday-Saturday, Noon-8pm; Sunday, Noon-7:30pm).

New York City Center
55th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Stephen Petronio Company at The Joyce [UPDATE]

Barrington Hinds in The Architecture of Loss
Stephen Petronio Company
(Photo: Steven Schreiber)

My guest and I spent entirely too much time scheming how one or the other of us would take possession of Stephen Petronio's shiny copper shoes by any means necessary. Then again, we had lots of time to dwell on this because Petronio was doing this queer-New Yorker-in-London spin on Steve Paxton's Intravenous Lecture (1970). Petronio turned Paxton's tale of censorship of nudity into an epic of wearing the wrong shirt at the wrong time in front of the wrong bobby and winding up in jail. Petronio talked to us while a male nurse hooked up to an IV drip and later drifted around the stage, dancing and gesticulating, as an assistant wheeled the IV pole just so and quietly gazed at him. Dancing Petronio--the Rubberband Man--was as amazing as his story's pacing and tone. And it turned out to be possible to stop coveting those shoes long enough to think how great it would be to force Rick Santorum to watch this man work.

Gia Kourlas writes an interesting assessment of Petronio's season in "Explorations of Loss, the Personal and the Public" (The New York Times, March 7), although I certainly don't agree with her preference for practice clothes over wearable art. It just wouldn't be Petronio without the sartorial drama. What's more, the new piece--The Architecture of Loss, scored by Valgeir Sigurdsson--presents the perfect integration of movement, scenic design and costuming. Even more than City of Twist (2002), The Architecture of Loss speaks to me of the atmosphere of 9/11. By that, I don't mean just the images of smoke smudging, and later billowing, across the three background panels, but also the strained, shredding and torn costumes (by Gudrun & Gudrun), as fragile as cobwebs, tinted in ash and charcoal, and the movement that seems to be all incessant, risky transition, even when one or another dancer does not move. This dance embodies insecurity. Nothing looks safe. Everything looks violated. And every action exacts more and more of a price.

In the Ethersketch I solo from Underland (2003), guest artist Wendy Whelan--in gleaming gold fringe and necklace and a crotch-high black skirt--seems to be colliding centuries in her costuming. As for her dancing, the sound equivalent of it would be a trumpet's blast--alarming, exciting and over way before you can ever settle down and get used to it.

UPDATE: Petronio has added three more performances of Ethersketch I--one tomorrow and two on Sunday.


Stephen Petronio and Company continues at The Joyce Theater through Sunday, March 11. Click here for schedule and ticket information.

The Joyce Theater
Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

BAC FLicks screens Lidberg's "Labyrinth Within"

Trailer for Pontus Lidberg's Labyrinth Within (2010, Sweden, 28.5 min.)

Jury Prize for Best Picture, Dance on Camera Festival 2012, New York

Labyrinth Within--screened this week at Baryshnikov Arts Center--opens with a horizontally compressed view of a dizzying swirl of bare torsos belonging, provocatively, to the film's male performers. They are director/choreographer Pontus Lidberg, a remarkably lithe dancer, and the brooding Giovanni Bucchieri, who also played a similarly sensual role in Lidberg's award-winning film, The Rain (2006).

After your half-hour with Labyrinth Within, you might walk away uncertain of what you just saw. (Who's who? What's what? What's with that mask you see for a split second?) But asking this film to deliver straight answers is like asking a dream to get out of bed and make you bacon and eggs. That's not its job. Lidberg's project, co-written with dramaturg Niklas Holmgren, deals with mystery--change itself--as a permanent reality.

Labyrinth Within's layers slip through your awareness through multiple pathways--dramatic lighting and suspenseful camerawork; Bucchieri's brooding melancholy; rapturous, expressionistic duets between Lidberg and his female muse, the versatile NYCB principal Wendy Whelan, and the tension-building power of David Lang's original and arranged music. Place matters, too. The work--developed in residencies at BAC and Joyce SoHo but mostly filmed within the muted, under-furnished interior of a Stockholm apartment--turns upon evocative architectural as well as psychological space. In the discussion that followed BAC's screening, Lidberg, quite rightly, volunteered few revelations about his beautiful film but did dangle this tidbit: "I had a very eccentric father and grew up in an apartment with things like secret doors."

Upcoming at BAC Flicks: Carmen & Geoffrey (2005), a documentary on the lives and careers of Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder by filmmakers Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob. The screening will be followed by a discussion with de Lavallade. Tuesday, April 24, 7pm. For further information and ticketing, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan
(map and directions)

"Pointe and Pirouettes" master classes

Pointe and Pirouettes
Master Ballet Classes with Wendy Whelan and Francois Perron

Monday, February 21

Manhattan Movement & Arts Center 
248 West 60th Street (between Amsterdam and West End Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Pointe and Pirouettes is a day of master ballet classes and pointe shoe fittings. Dancers will have the opportunity to have pointe shoe fittings by master fitters as well as master ballet classes with Francois Perron, Manhattan Youth Ballet's Managing Artistic Director and Official Ballet Coach of the Billy Elliotts on Broadway beginning at 10:30am, and New York City Ballet Principal Dancer, Wendy Whelan, beginning at 1:30pm. Master Pointe Shoe Fitters from the companies Freed, Capezio, Grishko, Sansha, Bloch and Gaynor Minden will be in attendance. 

The master ballet classes are from 10:30am to noon and 1:30pm to 3pm.  Pointe shoe fittings will be held from noon to 4:30pm.

The master classes are $25.  To register, click here.