"What Remains": Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls collaborate

from What Remains,
a new work by Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls,
premiered this week at Danspace Project
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

“One thing about being black in America—you have to curtail your movements, to live in such a way that what the white gaze projects upon blackness will not end your life,” says Rankine to The New York Times. “So you’re always thinking, can I walk at night?…Can I have my cell phone out? If it glitters, will someone think it’s a gun? At what point can I just be?”

Adds Rawls, “One never just happens to be black, even in the most abstract dance…Whiteness in our society — and this is something Claudia talks about, too — is the space that produces the conditions and terms against which all other lives are measured and enabled or disabled. Dance doesn’t escape those power dynamics.”

-- Danspace Project publicity for What Remains

At what point can I just be?

A few years ago, I read poet Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and felt immediate, grateful identification in her detailing of both the overt and the deceptively subtle aggressions Black people endure, every day, in our society. Racism--within white, patriarchal supremacy--is the American condition, something that does not go away because a Black president gets elected. In fact, as we certainly recognize now, such an unexpected shock to the system only wakes and further enrages the persistent many-headed Hydra.

Upon hearing that Rankine, as writer, would team up with dance artist Will Rawls, I knew, at once, that we should not expect anything as straightforward as Citizen. Rawls--winner of the 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer--comes from that sector of dance that embraces the oblique, the abstract, the elusive, that leaves pin pricks and cracks and often big gaping holes in the fabric of a work for the light--and, ultimately, the viewer's mind--to get in.

What Remains--co-presented by Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française for FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival--would not be Citizen. And I'm going to be danged honest and tell you that part of me rolled my eyes when I thought about that. The other part of me, though, was chill and is now glad all of me got there.

Rawls has a dream team of collaborating performers for this work--Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (also his sound designer and composer), Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty and Tara Aisha Willis. Draped by designer Eleanor O'Connell in funereal black and haunting St. Mark's sanctuary with its stained glass windows also shrouded in black, they have been described as "a resonant, ghostly chorus."

What they most appear to be are embodiments of the undead spirit of resistance. Nimble, resourceful and unruly, they rise from unshapely, ungainly lurching and stumbling and gentle, quiet harmonizing to steadily refine and define themselves, both physically and vocally, over a solid 70 minutes of un-curtailing their movements. There are musical surprises in this séance that delighted the hell out of me and an ingenious synergy of space, darkness and scattered lighting that transforms the church into mutating dreamscape. I won't spoil any of this for anyone lucky enough to get in to see the final show tonight.

Yes, if you were to have a house haunted by not one but a whole batch of brilliant Black artists--pent-up spirits reclaiming their time at the mic or piano bench--I imagine you might have something like Rawls and Rankine's What Remains. Something more tickling than scary...at least to a Black woman like me. I can imagine some people might find all of this deeply frightening.

Creative Consultant: John Lucas
Production design: David Szlasa

What Remains concludes tonight with a show at 8pm, with no late seating. Tickets are sold out, but a wait list starts at the door beginning at 7:15. For information, click here.

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

Subscribe in a reader

Your list of the 2017 Bessie recipients...and thanks!

RECIPIENTS OF 

THE 2017 NY DANCE AND PERFORMANCE (BESSIE) AWARDS

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Artistic Director, Urban Bush Women
(photo: Crush Boone)

A Lifetime Achievement in Dance Bessie Award
was given to Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
last evening at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts,
presented by dancer-choreographer Dianne McIntyre.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN DANCE

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

For forming Urban Bush Women in 1984 and bringing to the stage a complex, bold, and affirming vision of the African Diaspora. For transforming and diversifying the field by developing new ways of training, curating, connecting, and lifting up generations of choreographers of color. For a visionary life both on the stage and in the world.

OUTSTANDING SERVICE TO THE FIELD OF DANCE

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

For her capacity to reflect, contextualize, and discern dance work, providing an urgent and necessary voice for dance artists and their varied practices. For her work as writer, educator, mentor, and activist over many decades in print, radio, and online. For strengthening the city’s arts community as an important witness, an intentional healer, and a mindful presence.

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer Bridgman|Packer Dance for Voyeur at the Sheen Center

For groundbreaking use of video in live performance, creating a space where virtual and actual movement merged. For inhabiting Edward Hopper’s imagery and taking the audience on an inventive journey of private spaces and ever-shifting viewpoints.

Antony Hamilton for Meeting at La MaMa with Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

For obsessive, precise choreography that synthesized two men’s movements with a circle of robots’ percussive tapping into a mesmerizing whole. For a work both abstract and profoundly human.

Ligia Lewis for minor matter at American Realness with Lumberyard Contemporary Performing Arts at Abrons Arts Center

For interrogating the social inscriptions on the black body within the frame of the black box. Moving with the logic of interdependence, three dancers push against the theater’s physical space transforming it into a visceral world pulsing with love and rage.

Taylor Mac for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse with Pomegranate Arts

For an epic, tireless, and bold 24-hour performance that generated thought and action through the deep investigation of music's role in our common humanity. A carefully curated concert featuring 246 songs, extravagant visual transformations, and a community-creating ritual of hope.

Abdel Salaam for Healing Sevens with Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theatre, Illstyle & Peace Productions, and Dyane Harvey Salaam at DanceAfrica, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

For the combined efforts of three stellar companies using West African, hip-hop, and modern dance forms to find new ways of storytelling, new ways to deliver healing truths. For exploring how multiple generations of a community can look within to resolve conflict and violence

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL

Ishmael Houston-Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, Nick Hallett, and Jennifer Monson for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes From a Life and Other Works by John Bernd at Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found

For channeling the artistic vision of John Bernd, whose narrative, along with those so many others, was cut short by AIDS. For shepherding a young cast into communion with the spirit of the work. For responding to, reimagining, and restoring a missing chapter of our creative history.

OUTSTANDING PERFORMER

PeiJu Chien-Pott in Martha Graham’s Ekstasis, reimagined by Virginie Mécéne, Martha Graham Dance Company at The Joyce Theater

For bringing to life a lost Martha Graham solo from 1933, masterfully inhabiting the earthy, percussive, and fluid movements of pelvis and torso, and embodying the very essence of Graham’s ecstatic vision.

Anna Schön for Sustained Achievement in the work of Reggie Wilson’s Fist & Heel Performance Group

A bold presence and generous performer who moves with raw emotion and lightning speed while remaining sensitive to and connected with her fellow dancers. A deeply spiritual dancer who brings utter conviction to every performance.

Ensemble of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds: Maria Bauman, Sidra Bell, Davalois Fearon, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Melanie Greene, Kayla Hamilton, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Nia Love, Paloma McGregor, Sydnie L. Mosley, Rakiya Orange, Grace Osborne, Leslie Parker, Angie Pittman, Samantha Speis, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Ni’Ja Whitson, and others*

Curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa for Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found

For a history-in-the-making performance that dismantled improvisational dance norms to create a robust, disruptive, and dynamic world. For a cast of individuals who used a full range of movement styles to take the audience from Dakar to Kingston, the Bronx to Bushwick, in a fluid dance of connection.

*Edisa Weeks and Tara Aisha Willis were also in the cast but are ineligible as they serve on the Bessie Selection Committee.

Daaimah Taalib-Din for Sustained Achievement with Forces of Nature Dance Theatre

A chameleon of dance styles from traditional African to contemporary African Diasporic forms. A dynamic presence in every work in which she dances, moving from highly stylized to smoothly nuanced with impeccable grace and technique.

OUTSTANDING MUSICAL COMPOSITION/SOUND DESIGN

Alisdair Macindoe for Meeting by Antony Hamilton at La MaMa with Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

For creating a complex percussive score using 64 tiny robots armed with tapping pencils. For adding the virtuosic rhythms of two dancers slapping hands and reciting numbers to create a unique soundscape that was both relentless and strangely satisfying.

OUTSTANDING VISUAL DESIGN

Taylor Mac (creator), Niegel Smith (director), Machine Dazzle (costume), Mimi Lien (set), John Torres (lights), Eric Avery (puppetry), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (choreography) for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse with Pomegranate Arts

For a thoroughly considered and painstakingly crafted visual experience revealed over 24-hours and 24-decades of American history. For a complex, complementary, and immersive mix of scenography, costumes, lighting, puppets, and crowd control which transformed a concert into a sublime engagement of all the senses.

Two awards were presented in July at the 2017 Bessie Awards press conference:

The 2017 Emerging Choreographer Award went to Will Rawls for creating astute, genre-eluding work that explores the relationship between movement and language and delves deeply into ideas of transmission, translation, and authorship; and for his multifaceted artistry as choreographer, writer, editor, and curator, expanding the presence of dance and performance.

This year’s Juried Bessie Award went to Abby Zbikowski for her rigorous and utterly unique development of an authentic movement vocabulary, employed in complex and demanding structures to create dances of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger. The 2017 Bessies Jury was comprised of Kyle Abraham, Brenda Bufalino, and Beth Gill.

To view the livestream video, click here.

For more information on the Bessies, click here.

****** 

Congratulations to all the Bessie recipients and nominees. I am grateful for your commitment, your work, all you create and share to build and sustain this field.

My deepest thanks to Lucy Sexton and the Bessies Committee for the profound honor of receiving the 2017 Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. I could not be more moved by this recognition of my work and by the amazing, loving introduction byThomas F. DeFrantz. I suppose I will have to carry y'all a little bit longer, but the work is as joyful as it is necessary.

My deepest respect and love to the members of the new collective, Skeleton Architecture. Congratulations on the award we all knew you were destined to receive. As individual artists, each of you have already given so much to the art of dance. Your exceptional performance together at Danspace Project in 2016 wrote an exciting new chapter in all of these individual stories, now part of Bessies history. As a collective now, you will write your future...and ours. We cannot wait to see what you have to teach us!

Much love,Eva

Subscribe in a reader

News from the Bessies for 2017!

Dance artist Lela Aisha Jones is among four nominees
for this year's Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer.
(photo: Alex Shaw)

The NY Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies) organization has announced four nominees for the 2017 Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award:

Lela Aisha Jones
Niall Jones
Will Rawls
Katarzyna Skarpetowska

In addition, Abby Zbikowski will receive the 2017 Juried Bessie Award.

These two awards will be presented on July 12 (6-7pm) at a press conference at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, preceded by a ticketed cocktail party (5-6pm).  The organization will also announce nominees for Outstanding Production, Outstanding Revival, Outstanding Performer, Outstanding Music Composition or Sound Design and Outstanding Visual Design.

Information on the July 12 cocktail party and press conference: click

And hold the date for the 33rd Annual Bessie Awards: Monday, October 9, at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts!

About the Bessies
 The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 33 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize outstanding work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League, as members participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. www.bessies.org

Subscribe in a reader

New York Live Arts presents Buffard's "Baron Samedi"

David Thomson leads the international cast of
Alain Buffard's "choreographed opera," Baron Samedi,
at New York Live Arts, now through Saturday evening
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Danse: a French-American Festival of Performance & Ideas will run through May 18 at fourteen New York City venues (see information here) to examine "the ways in which dance engages with and informs our understanding of the world." The festival got off to a provocative start last night at New York Live Arts with Baron Samedi (2012), the final work of the late multi-genre artist Alain Buffard.

This "choreographed opera" is not easy to embrace. It took me a while before I found my way into it, and its continues to unfold today in my mind--which argues for the gravity and value of Buffard's offering.

Drawing from Haitian voodoo symbolism--in which the corpse-like Baron Samedi rules both healing and death--and the music of Kurt Weill, this work emerges from a very dark morass. At it opens, we are given only a woman's strong, melancholy singing voice and the soft, vulnerable patches of light on her face, something for us to hold onto. An hour later, everything brought to light slowly seeps back into darkness.

When we are first granted full sight of the stage, we see motley figures moving over and away from a clean white platform. Designed by Nadia Lauro, this platform resembles a large, undulating sheet of blank paper. It nearly engulfs the performance space, and it complicates it, creating discrete areas for encounters and interactions or for individual behavior separate from the whole. There's a slippery slide effect, too, that plays a part in the physical theater of the piece.

You will notice that the typical racial balance of "downtown dance" has been upended; most of the performers are Black, born either in African nations or in the US. They include Nadia Beugré (Ivory Coast/France), Dorotheé Munyaneza (Rwanda/France), Hiengiwe Lushaba (South Africa) and venerable New York dance artists Will Rawls and David Thomson. Three others--dancer Olivier Normand and the two musicians, double bass player Sarah Murcia and guitarist Sébastien Martel--are, like Buffard, white and French. This shift in balance, and the pulse and propulsion of the dancers' movement across the sloping white surface, works brilliantly with the platform's undulation, keeping everyone, including observers, in a continuous, unsettling state of flux. Although the villain of the piece--the amoral, lascivious and hideously vain Baron, played by Thomson--is Black, he serves as a lens on the nasty workings of European colonialism. Buffard underscores his preoccupation with this theme by having performers sing Weill's "Pirate Jenny" and "Ballad of the Soldier's Wife."

Baron Samedi, himself, is on hand to stir movement and provoke uncertainty (of one's identity, one's station in life, one's autonomy, one's physical and psychological safety). Thomson, sounding like a bit like the great Geoffrey Holder, reaches his high point in dancing when the Baron is at his lowest. Confronted by his victims, he is revealed to be nothing more than a hollow man, a skeleton tottering on the verge of collapse, a sack of graveyard dust.

Baron Samedi runs through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. You're also invited to come early this evening at 6:30pm for a conversation on Baron Samedi--Symbolism and Practice in Haitian Voodoo moderated by Whitney V. Hunter, PhD Candidate and Director of Whitney Hunter [MEDIUM]. For complete information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Will Rawls: Shuttling between "downtown" and Serbia

Dance artist Will Rawls

In 2008, I went to the Balkans for the first time and, in some ways, never came back. It was also the summer that Obama was running for president.

The Planet-Eaters is a choreographic investigation of folklore to encounter ourselves as different kinds of performers who are neither here nor there, neither expert nor amateur, both singular and plural, both ancient and new.

--Will Rawls, excerpts from program notes for The Planet-Eaters

In the exceptionally elegant body of American dancer Will Rawls, the folkloric dance rhythms and rituals of the Balkans reveal a lush complexity. Rawls and his musical collaborator, Chris Kuklis, duet in The Planet-Eaters: the dancer entering the realm of music via a twisty, vocalized system of counting beats and his pulled-up posture and lighter-than-air trotting, prancing, pivoting; the musician sharing physical space and elaborate movement and even aggressively manipulating props. Both men go where they "don't belong," and they do so heartfully and beautifully.

With the few audience rows forming a broad crescent curved around one long side of The Chocolate Factory's performance space, and the dancers getting particularly rambunctious in the latter part of the work, you might say there's even community involvement in all this. Come expecting a solo dance turn by a star of the "downtown" arts scene--a strange expectation here, since folk dancing is a communal kind of thang--and you actually become part of a highly textured fabric of witness and support. And then there's the matter of your own feet and the way an eventually sweaty, panting, slip-sliding Rawls might ram right into them. And Kuklis? At one point, he flaps and thrashes a huge patch of Astroturf in your general direction. It gets to be a hot mess up in there--especially when everything takes a turn into a cross between house culture and Old Europe shamanism--assisted by Saša Kovacevic's fanciful costuming--in a suddenly darkened space. About the only weak link is Rawl's lengthy spoken word passage in the middle of the show; the narrative is intriguing, but his voice could use more oomph.

with lighting by Bessie Award winner, Madeline Best

The Planet-Eaters continues through Saturday evening: SOLD OUT. For complete information on this program, click here.

For information on future presentations at The Chocolate Factory, including Jon Kinzel's Someone Once Called Me A Sound Man (December 4-7), click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

A chat with photographer Ian Douglas

Will Rawls in Collected Fictions, Frontispieces (c)Ian Douglas

Photographer Ian Douglas

Click here for audio interview with Ian Douglas [14:54]

Since 2006, Ian Douglas has been actively photographing New York City's amazing contemporary dance and performance art scene, regularly working with artists like Ishmael Houston-Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, Yvonne Meyer and others. He is the photographer-in-residence for Danspace Project and Movement Research, and has photographed for the New York Times, New York Live Arts/Dance Theater Workshop and more. Douglas's work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Dance Magazine and various publications throughout New York City and the world.

Click here for Ian Douglas's Web site.

Scroll down for more samples of his work for Parallels.

Ishmael Houston-Jones, Parallels curator (c)Ian Douglas

Dancer-choreographer Nora Chipaumire (c)Ian Douglas

Click here for information on purchasing the Parallels catalogue and other Danspace Project catalogues.

Of related interest

Movement Research Studies Project presents Photography and the Performance Journal, a discussion with photographers Dona Ann McAdams, Anja Hitzenberger and Miana Jun, moderated by Ursula Eagly.

Tuesday, March 20 at 6:15pm -- Free admission

More information at Movement Research

Gibney Dance Center
5th Floor, Studio 1

890 Broadway, Manhattan

(map/directions)