the CURRENT SESSIONS: Currently at wild project

Choreographer Fana Fraser presents work this weekend
along with other artists for the CURRENT SESSIONS at wild project.
(photo: Quyn Duong)

Movement Currency will focus on how bodies produce, exchange, and perform within systems of value, drawing on figurative and ethnographic practices to consider the lineage of choreographies which qualify our social identity.

--from promo for the CURRENT SESSIONS's new season Volume VI, Issue II: Movement Currency

With New York's fall dance season looming up ahead--and, believe me, it's looming--we can enjoy a breather for a few more weeks. But if you're still craving dance with some bite to it, Alexis Convento's team, the CURRENT SESSIONS, might have just the thing for you.

Last evening's presentation was organized around the concept of Risk--"from fragility to preservation, harm to survival...risk as a performative dimension which trades personal safety for choreographic opportunity." Tonight's show will tackle Debt, and tomorrow's 3pm matinee and 7pm performances, respectively, spin off from Savings and Credit. Each feature a concise mix of emerging artists guest curated by Ali Rosa-Salas, Justin Cabrillos and Sasha Okshteyn.

Risk--well-paced and clocking in at 45 minutes without break--offered work by dance artists Katrina Reid, Jessica Pretty and Amanda Hunt and filmmaker Ben Hagari. Of these four, all intriguing, I found Pretty and Hagari the most compelling.

Hagari's tour de force, Potter's Will (2015), is a sensuous and yet nightmarish ballet for wet clay, hellish fire glow, a man's clay-smeared body and the madly swirling camera of cinematographer Boaz Freund. Set, quite appropriately, to Ravel's La valse, it draws the viewer ever closer to danger--immolation, extinction and perhaps, at this great cost, unimaginable transformation.

Pretty's solo, the third., images a powerful wanting and not having. The dancer is a Black woman with hands often splayed in front of her gentle face, shielding her squinting eyes from the fierce glare of an imagined light source. She moves and folds and shapes her body like a tangle of brambles in big expenditures of energy and motion. She's a powerful, satisfying dancer--all the more reason that the empty platform stage seems confining, as does that invisible light source. Sudden, insistent bursts of song--Kanye West's "Nobody to Love," with its weird exhortation to just "grab somebody" from the party--both kind of name her situation and fragment it into any number of problematic realities.

Movement Currency's series resets the lineup for each show, with some repeats. So, your experience may be different but always an opportunity to discover, engage and be challenged.

Volume VI, Issue II: Movement Currency continues through Sunday, August 21. For programming information and ticketing details, click here.

wild project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Wild "Seas" at Wild Project

The annual Between the Seas Festival, directed by Aktina Stathaki, creates opportunities for performing artists from the Mediterranean region to show work as well as connect and collaborate with their counterparts in New York. Now in its third season, the festival runs through Sunday, July 28. On last evening's shared program at a little Lower East Side gallery and performance venue called Wild Project, two dark, intense dance productions made use of the tiny stage space to varying degrees of effectiveness.

D R T or possible other titles!--a world premiere by the Turkish artist Korhan Basarn for Brooklyn's Mari Meade Dance Collective-overcomes its awkward title as well as its copious program notes/manifesto/open letter through fervent performance. One sentence--set off from the rest and rendered in boldface--contains what might be a flash of specific intention: "#brokenangel will be there as an elegy to the ones we recently lost as a victim of violence." This likely alludes to Taksim Square, but audiences must still grapple with the enigma of the dance itself.

D R T opens in silence, with a ritualistic vision: four long-skirted women cupping votive candles close to their hearts, aligned in a row in front of four strapping men in bikini briefs, crouched low with the tops of their heads planted onto the floor. The women advance, carefully stepping off the stage's edge, coming to nestle between the viewers and the stage as they quietly watch the men shamble forward.

The men bear patches of white feathers on their shoulder blades. Streaks of fake blood crust at the base of these vestiges of wings. The men's propulsive movements are heavy, wrenching and torturous. They grapple, sometimes alone, with one another or with a wall. Meade's dancers seize this rough material with eagerness and competence. We might not fully comprehend what's going on here--something about the confinement of embodiment and imperfection, perhaps-- but we understand the dancers' commitment.

The notion of endless struggle gets upended, though, by a reversal of roles and a radical change in tone. The men watch from the edge, and the women regain the stage, the women's interactions leading to frequent catfights and audience amusement. Stranger still is the conclusion--the appearance of an additional wounded man--a dancer not listed in the program but, apparently, the choreographer. His long, spastic thrashings extend an already protracted piece.

Portugal's Pedro Goucha Gomes
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Amongst Millions
Photo by Flavia Zaganelli

By contrast, Pedro Goucha Gomes offers no lengthy manifesto, no compatriots to share the burden. And, in fact, he stands naked before his audience. At the beginning of his solo, he barely moves.

His US premiere work, Amongst Millions, does have strong social justice intent, clearly stated. A few lines of notes refer to Europe's crisis and "feelings of frustration, alienation and fear" among the people of his homeland, Portugal. The notes continue, "The stylized, polite, urban and civilized body is replaced by ...crude expressiveness." True enough, yet that description does not sufficiently convey the extraordinary achievement of this singular and challenging performance.

In everyday life, Gomes has the form, visage and bearing of a knight. He has danced with some of Europe's most notable ballet troupes. Yet the extreme physical tensions in this solo give him the appearance of a man writhing with starvation or suffering torture. His stretchy face grows gaunt. His head morphs into a skeleton's skull with an alternately desperate, manic or lewd grimace of gleaming, terrifying teeth. The soundtrack, starting in a barely perceptible rumble, might issue from inside this frightening head. At times, it blares in volume, complexity and force.

The work, though profoundly disturbing, exerts a hypnotic pull and must be experienced. Gomes performs again on the festival's Thursday performance at 9:30pm, in a program shared with Meade's troupe and Vanessa Tamburi/FLUSSO Dance Project.

For complete program, schedule and ticketing information for Between the Seas, click here.

Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map)

This week, journey "Between the Seas"

Between the Seas Festival, produced and directed by Aktina Stathaki, offers New Yorkers a diverse menu of performers and arts disciplines from all around the Mediterranean region. This year--the festival's second--Italy, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey and Albania, among other nations, are represented. It's a smashing idea, even though New York's glut of arts festivals--let alone individual arts and entertainment programs--makes it tough for a relative newcomer to establish a toehold.

Ido Tadmor in the Rachel Erdos solo, And Mr. (Photo by Gadi Dagon)

Tonight, it's worth the trip "between the seas"--or almost to Avenue C--for the chance to watch Ido Tadmor, a magnificent Israeli performer, dance in And Mr. (the choreographer's cut) by the British-born, Tel Aviv-based choreographer Rachel Erdos. Having seen this piece last evening, I'm not convinced that the original solo, And Mr., really needed to be expanded into a duet with Stefan Ferry. Stretching that initial half-hour of oddity into an externalized interaction brings out an unwanted preciousness, and it is simply too long. There seems enough Jekyll-and-Hyde duality and gnarliness within the tousled Tadmor alone as he interprets Erdos' stark, lacerating tangles of movement. It's a brilliant performance and, to my mind, Tadmor should be the end of the matter.

Vanessa Tamburi (Italy) and her FLUSSO Dance Project will open the evening again with Lost Rights, an ensemble piece inspired by the work of the late Italian journalist, Maria G. Cutuli, who was killed in Afghanistan. A well-intentioned piece, it nevertheless displays a disconnect between Tamburi's choreography and her stated theme of African women and children suffering poverty, disease, exploitation and abuse. Although the quartet of performers, who learned the piece in just two weeks, give it their all, the projected text and larger-than-life photo portraits--which carry the only connection to the serious theme--distract the eye and overwhelm the dancing.

Between the Seas Festival continues through Sunday, August 26, at Wild Project. Get complete programming and schedule information here.

Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)