Artists Reach Out: Yanira Castro

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Yanira Castro

Yanira Castro at center; devynn emory at right
(photo: Anna Maynard)

Bio

I am a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist living in NYC for 26 years. Since 2009, I have made performances, videos, and installations with a team of collaborators under the moniker, a canary torsi. a canary torsi’s practice has involved creating systems, scores, and software programs that ensure that elements of performance (choreography, text, music, environment) unfold in real time in response to the presence/participation of the audience. This way of working complicates issues of authorship and asks questions about how we, the people in the space together, deal with image and meaning-making and the power structures inherent in performance. I am lucky to have made, shown, toured work consistently, to have received grants and awards, and to get to be in a working practice with amazing people, all of whom I am missing. acanarytorsi.org.

Court/Garden
with Luke Miller, Haley Fish, Simon Courchel,
Pamela Vail and audience
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

I had my first dance festival gig get postponed. It was a week at the Bates Festival, teaching and presenting work. Occasionally there comes a situation that feels like a marker; this gig felt like one of them. Last time I was at the Festival was over two decades ago. I was twenty and making that turn on the road towards a future.

Returning to Bates felt like the future meeting the past, the circle coming around, the young and older self meeting in the studios. That won’t be happening quite in the same way. Now, those classes I was going to teach might go online. I didn’t even have an email address when I was 20. The word “web” was…well, you know, it was woven by Charlotte.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

When I was 8 and I was asked what I wanted to do with my life by the school librarian, everyone before me had answered teacher or firefighter. I had no answer. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything I could name. At some point the word artist got attached to the idea of “I don’t know but not that.”

I went to Amherst College because Emily Dickinson had lived there. I thought I would write novels. I thought I had written a few. Instead I saw Sankai Juku’s performance Unetsu at UMass and decided I had to be wherever the people were who got to do that. I had no idea what I was looking at, but it looked like freedom to me. In my imagination I stopped writing after that. I took a Scripts & Scores class with Professor Wendy Woodson at Amherst, and I haven’t stopped since.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

I am practicing being in the unknown, which is something I should have already been practicing and thought I was, but I was kidding myself. Writing scores has always been about embracing what might happen and daring myself to not get in the way, but vision often gets in the way.

Practicing the unknown and envisioning are difficult bedfellows. Hence my addiction with performance. But now I am envisioning how we might re-enter gathering. What might be the things we will desire, need--what kind of assurances, what kind of understandings about space and proximity?

I envision us all at our first physical gatherings…unsure what to do with that 6’ between us. In my room alone, I practice with the few theater materials I had with me when we went into sheltering-in-place: light gels, Mylar. I am continuing that practice of shaping sight.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I care about the potential of seeing differently...creating spaces and circumstances for people, containers for potential experiences, with all the conflict inherent in that--the practice of embracing the unknown bumping right up with the vision of spectacle, which is to say control and authority. Gathering, for me, has always been about acknowledging a central conflict: “I want to be with you" rubbing up against “communing is hard work.”

I could argue my performance life is about discomfort with the power of the spotlight: on who and what does it shine and who decides? When I was 10, I was ill and paralyzed and was brought out with other kids in wheelchairs to shake hands with the Harlem Globetrotters. Who is the spectacle? For me, it was the audience.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

My practice has been taking the shape of a score-writing class for this new online platform, @freeskewl. It started only three weeks ago, and it has a full roster of Zoom and Insta Live classes. How quickly and uncomfortably that became a way.

The class is called #PromptsforPlayandLightness which is really unlike me. I am not a particularly light person. But keeping things simple seems necessary (wasn’t it always?), and I am equating lightness with unburdening, which could be a release of the darkest bile in you.

In this class, I have allowed myself to create an environment from a score for the people taking the class as they work on their scores. This has kept me in the intentional process of scoring with the unknown, of playing with perception and attending to the liveness of the moment. It was always an important survival skill, but there is a way in which this virus has revealed the essential.

Briefly, share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now. 

Spending time in the dirt trying to make things grow has been healing. I bought some wildflower seeds, and seeing the first signs of growth has given me something to attend to that moves me forward and yes, envisioning. I am imagining bright, red poppies.

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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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New Yanira Castro trilogy spans three spaces and boroughs

Left to right, Luke Miller, Darrin Wright and Kyle Bukhari,
three dancers among a revolving cast for Yanira Castro's new CAST,
running now at The Chocolate Factory Theater
(photo: Brian Rogers)

This month, choreographer Yanira Castro and her a canary torsi (name anagram) operation are making their mark, simultaneously, on three New York City boroughs--Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Claiming lots of physical and conceptual space and institutional support is, in my eyes, a terrific thing for a woman to do, a woman of color in particular and, even more so, a woman of dance. Go. Get. It.

The three institutions hosting the world premiere of Castro's ambitious trilogy, CAST, STAGE, AUTHOR, are:

• The Invisible Dog Art Center--where, each afternoon, AUTHOR invites visitors, one at a time, to wind their way inside an installation to a little room, remove their shoes, close the door, sit down at a laptop and...that's as far as it makes sense for me to go, because your experience of what Castro has set up and what it means will be unique to you. On view through Sunday, September 17, weekdays and Saturday, 1pm to 7pm; Sunday, 1pm to 5pm. Free admission. For information and directions, click here.
• The Chocolate Factory Theater--home to CAST, now through Saturday, September 23, which I attended last evening and will discuss in a little bit. Information and tickets here.
• Abrons Arts Center--hosting STAGE in the Playhouse, tonight through Saturday, September 23. Information and tickets here.

Now, to my experience of CAST at The Chocolate Factory Theater. From publicity materials about the performance:

CAST brings together a rotating cast of four performers, different each night, who negotiate a new script at each performance in front of a live audience. A computer generates a unique script culling from transcripts of over 100 hours of conversation with CAST’s 15 performers regarding casting, performing and the complexities of representation. It is a concentrated study of what constitutes a cast. 

Last evening's opening night performance set the audience up in a couple of rows of folding chairs on risers arranged in a kind of horseshoe shape around a constricted performance space. The fourth end of the theater was reserved for seating for the evening's quartet of dancers--devynn emory, Luke Miller, Sai Somboon and Darrin Wright, out of an available roster of fifteen performers--and a printer and a table laden with props.

As audience members gradually filled all available seats, Miller sat at another table within the performance area, his hand clasping a stubby pencil poised over a sheet of paper. His steady gaze implied a thinking process and, from time to time, he circled the pencil point just above the paper, all of this provoking a curious frustration in the viewer (well, this viewer).  To the left of him, a laptop screen greeted us with a stark HELLO in white letters and a fast-disappearing list of the evening's performers. The other cast members sat quietly reading scripts with randomly-assigned material they were seeing for the first time. At 7pm on the nose, the noisy audience members suddenly hushed as it became clear that something was starting to happen.

A computer-generated voice identified the script as #67, 404 (I believe, unless it was #67, 040--a number I think I heard later) and proceeded to cyber-stutter its way through the cast's names. It told us the source of the material (conversations at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) and the length of the performance (45 minutes, which would be accurately and usefully announced at its completion).

Wright rose, pulled Miller's table and chair out of the way, re-positioned two speakers and stretched out on the carpeted floor with a microphone. Not quite comfy, though. The script tasked him with a long monologue and the apparent pressure to read it quickly, forcefully and as if, by the time he reached the end of sentences, his throat was squeezed, struggling for the breath to continue. Among other things, allusions to race would surface, float off and disappear in the flood of verbiage and, after a while, a listener (well, this listener) surrendered to the possibility, the likelihood, that none of these words mattered. Whether they do or not, whether dance is about transcending or resisting words, addressing or skating around specific issues and should be or shouldn't be, it was just too much to deal with. The voice was strangulated. The man was gasping to speak and, finally, crumpling the script pages and tossing them aside.

Words on race slipped through later verbal material and complicated activity--the dancers taping paper, cardboard, Mylar and cloth around Miller's head and torso. "this white racist thing gender history seventies noise sorry like Athena body fascist line that identifieds you phallic queer body brain labor...." A misshapen monster, a captive, he struggled to rise and move around the space with all that had been stuck onto him, eventually ripping it off him--an action that looked satisfying to observers (well, this observer). The printer whirred to life and birthed new sheets.

devynn held up the first page, and the others followed suit, posing together and beginning to musically chant a series of scripts for solo or interwoven choral voices ("Ailey, when I was at the Ailey," "I considered Trisha feminine," "When we auditioned, I had really brown eyes" and the rapturous, amusing, repeated intonation of a single seductive name--"Bausch").

So, at this point, I want to stop describing all that went on from there--especially since a lot of it involved rapid, relentless and arbitrary introduction and rearrangement of props, movement and dancers' proximity to a vulnerable audience, a flow of thingy things, none of which we could or would be intended to worry over or hold onto.  Instead, I want to share a thought that popped into my mind as first I gazed at Miller and then at Wright.

Over the years, I'd seen each of these two guys dance in so many works by some of our most accomplished choreographers. Their bodies contain so much and such diverse information, so much imprinting and history, from disparate sources. And--I began to realize--so much wisdom. I began to see these two men as our knights and sages, and I know I don't live in a society that thinks of dancers as sages. But these guys are, and we have a wealth of more like them in our dance community, knights and sages of all genders and gender non-conforming.

I was also aware, towards the end of the 45 minutes, of a feeling of sacredness. I pulled back from this, a little bit, because it began to seem, even to me, a bit hokey. But I really started to think of the space as church. And I am not a church-goer.

Am I going too far with this? I don't know. I don't even know if Castro would care. But when the 45 minutes was dutifully (and cybernetically) announced, it truly felt as if the Mass was ended, and we could go in peace.

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Gibney's new Center Line season presents Long Table convos

I'm looking forward to a new season in the arts in New York!

Please join me on September 27 and November 8 

for two special Long Table conversations 

at Gibney Dance, 

free and open to all!

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Center Line Conversation Series

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

Curated and facilitated by dance writer and independent curator Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Center Line is a conversation series highlighting issues concerning the dance community. Center Line conversations will adopt performance artist Lois Weaver’s non-hierarchical Long Table format to encourage “informal conversation on serious topics.”


Casting About: About Casting
Wednesday, September 27 at 6:30pm

Initiated by Yanira Castro, Casting About: About Casting will explore present day dynamics of cast, audience and choreographer. What does a cast represent? How does access to resource affect the composition of a cast, and does this change the relationships between performers, the work and the choreographer? Does the mutability of the contemporary performer challenge or stimulate creativity? Invited participants include Yanira Castro, Aaron Mattocks, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Kyle Bukhari and Leslie Cuyjet.


Moving into Writing
Wednesday November 8 at 6:30pm

Moving into Writing considers approaches to the written word as response to, collaboration with and documentation of dance and performance. What can writers and dancers learn from each other? What role do writers play within local, national and international dance ecosystems? How can dance artists best interact with critics, scholars and creative writers in their field? Participants may bring one sample written about or for dance, to share if time permits (350 words, maximum). Invited participants include Maura Donohue, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Paloma McGregor, Tara Sheena and Marissa Perel.

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For information on this and all Gibney Dance programming for Fall 2017, visit Gibney Dance Center here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (entrance at 53A Chambers), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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A nearly-winter Wonderland of art at Invisible Dog

You're in Wonderland
in Boerum Hill's The Invisible Dog Art Center.
(photos: Maria Baranova)

Dance artist Yanira Castro of a canary torsi has made her first venture into video installation with PERFORMANCE | PORTRAIT, part of Wonderland, a new exhibition at The Invisible Dog, the Boerum Hill art center directed by Lucien Zayan. I found Castro's work here--which I won't spoil for you--to be an experience to be seduced by, to breathe with. I don't know if this video actually recalibrates one's seeing, but if you then look around the rest of Wonderland, you might notice similar invitations to take your time, lean in close and savor what's tiny and intricate and often interestingly elusive.

Lead Collaborators
Yanira Castro (Concept/Choreographer)
Kathy Couch (Installation Artist)
Stephan Moore (Interaction Designer)
Julie Wyman (Filmmaker)

Performer Collaborators
Anna Azrieli
Leslie Cuyjet
Peter Schmitz
David Thomson

Viewing schedule for PERFORMANCE | PORTRAIT:
In main space: December 3-30
In the glass house: January 5-15

WONDERLAND 

features over twenty artists:

Douglas Adesko, Matilde Alessandra, Vanessa Belli, Connie Bree, Guillaume Bresson, Tegan Brozyna, Jon Burgerman, Halsey Chait, Timothy Corbett, Andrea DeFelice, Digby and Iona, Lars van Dooren, Shannon Finnegan, Ryan Frank, Camille de Galbert, Crystal Gregory, Michael Hili, Oliver Jeffers, Caitlin Masley, Spencer Merolla, Anne Mourier, Dara Oshin, Mac Premo, Patrick Reynolds, Rachel Selekman, William Suran, Ian Trask, Peter Treiber, Nikita Vishnevskiy, Kevin Waldron and Alexa Williams

Viewing schedule for WONDERLAND:
Saturday, December 3 to Friday, December 30

Special Gallery Hours:
Monday to Saturday from 12pm to 7pm
Sunday from 12pm to 5pm

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn
(directions/map)

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Yanira Castro makes a spectacle of ourselves

Costume detail from Court/Garden
Photo: Miodrag Gubernic and Jose Espaillat

I won't reveal too much about Court/Garden, the dance installation given its world premiere last night at Danspace Project by Yanira Castro's a canary torsi. If you go, you should come upon it fresh. I will advise, though, wearing a pair of shoes you don't mind standing in for a while, and when coat check attendants ask you to give up your bag and jacket, do comply. It will just make things easier.

Castro and her teeming band of collaborators--a mile-long list of them, including a dramaturg, a crown-builder and a perfumer--have gone all out here in an elaborate mash-up of Sun King spectacle with modern technology in which audience members are not only part of the mix but the whole point of it. We go from being treated like catered-to spectators in Louis XIV’s court--like 17th Century celebrity figures attending the hot event of the day--to a condition that feels far more democratic if borderline chaotic. Throughout, Castro maintains an interesting tension between high expectations and low-level means of delivery, between firm control of things and awkward execution, between glittering artifice and banal transparency, between seductive beauty and those things that make you seriously question what you find beautiful, why you do and who the hell you think you are to judge.

Costuming ranges from fabulous, if disturbing, to shabby-fabulous. And there's a fantastic segment in which the especially well-cast Luke Miller gazes out on all he surveys, his privileged and waspish tongue enhanced by electronic distortions.

True to its time-traveling nature, Court/Garden also has an online presence, created by Web designer Helen Gaffigan, but I will allow you to discover that in your own time.

Castro gives her primary performers collaborative credit as choreographers: Simon Courchel, Tess Dworman, Luke Miller, Pamela Vail, Darrin Wright, Kimberly Young. Music is by Stephan Moore, costume design by Miodrag Guberinic, lighting/installation by Kathy Couch, and video by Peter Richards. See the program notes for full details about Castro's entire production team.

Court/Garden continues through Saturday evening with performances at 8pm. Arrive early to check your belongings. Seating is limited, and there will be no late admission. For tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Dancers go to the bathroom

Dark Horse/Black Forest, by Yanira Castro + Company, brings dance to a space really near you--your bathroom.

That's right. Get in touch with Castro through her new season's sponsoring organization, Performance Space 122, and you can arrange your own private performance of this work in your bathroom.

"There are no theatrical divisions and the experience is not one of distance but rather that of action beside and around you. By deciding to invite the dancers into your home you are granted the unique and exquisite experience of forever owning and being a part of a piece of live art."

To arrange for a performance, email darkhorse@ps122.org.

And click here for my Body and Soul podcast interview with Castro (February 4, 2008).

Funhouse: Yanira Castro transforms DTW

Yanira Castro + Company will give two more performances of Center of Sleep at Dance Theater Workshop (tonight and Saturday night) and, if you can, you must go.

I can't say I'm happy to see all of the details of the installation and action given away by Dance View Times's reviewer, Tom Phillips. In this work, the audience is best left unprepared, fresh for the experience and for the invitation to--as a neat non-instruction card instructs us--"Do as you please." (The rest of the card reads, "Assurances for an audience/No one will touch you./No one will ask anything of you./You are safe." The reverse advises--but does not demand--that we leave our bags and coats in the check room.) I think the work's delicately powerful, powerfully delicate conclusion, if nothing else, needs to be a surprise for the new audiences. I would have held back on spelling out what happens there.

Let's just say that Yanira Castro and her collaborators--especially composer Stephan Moore and lighting and installation designer Roderick Murray--have brilliantly turned DTW's stage into a funhouse that is constantly changing and requiring you, the viewer, to also move and change as vivid dream visions and dream sounds reach you from everywhere. William Forsythe did something approaching this with his dance installation, You Made Me A Monster, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center nearly a year ago. Although Forsythe's theme was radically different, his piece was set in a dimly-lit studio and sent dancers out amid a standing, initially participatory audience. It too had a strange, striking sound score. But Center of Sleep is the far more searching, courageous and accomplished work.

Castro credits her performers as collaborators. They are marvelous, and they are Peggy Cheng, Luke Miller, Heather Olson, Joseph Poulson and Ashley Steele. Special honors to Stephan Moore, whose musical ingenuity knows no limit of means or delight.

Invitation to Yanira Castro's Open Showing

Yanira Castro--recently interviewed on Body and Soul podcast--has announced this free preview of her new work, Center of Sleep at Dance Theater Workshop:

As many of you know, we are getting ready for our season at DTW, and one of the big remaining questions about the piece is how the audience will interact with the aural, visual and movement environment that we have created. So, before the curtain rises (so to speak), we are having an open showing on Saturday, Feb 23 at 4PM at Dance Theater Workshop as a test run. We would love to get 60 people to come. All the elements of set and lights and sound may not be present but it will give us a good clue as to what expect come opening night.

We do have to limit the group to 60 so please RSVP to yaniracastroandco@yahoo.com as soon as you can so that we can keep a running tally. And please feel free to forward to anyone who might be interested in seeing the work in progress.

Dance Theater Workshop is at 219 W 19 Street between 7 & 8 Avenue. If you can arrive by 3:45, someone will be there to greet you in the lobby.

Thanks! Yanira

Y A N I R A C A S T R O + C O M P A N Y

Yanira Castro: Body and Soul Podcast

I admire Yanira Castro's darkly poetic and mysterious artistry. Her sense-laden works have the capacity to take watchers deep into experience and to change our habits of seeing, listening and thinking. I hope you will enjoy my interview with Yanira and find yourself similarly immersed in her newest work, "Center of Sleep."

GUEST BIO

Yanira Castro+Company is a New York City-based ensemble of dancers and designers that fuses experiments in movement with original music and visual elements such as video and installations to create vivid, contemporary scenarios for their audiences that transform and engage their experience of the work.

Award-winning choreographer Yanira Castro was born in Puerto Rico and received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature at Amherst College. She has been making work with a core group of performers and designers since 1997, presenting this work widely, including at Dance Theater Workshop, The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project and numerous other venues. Most recently, she has been working on site-based installations.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Yanira Castro+Dancers will present the world premiere of "Center of Sleep" at Dance Theater Workshop (February 27-March 1, 2008) with two shows per night at 7:30pm and 9:30pm. On opening night, DTW will host a free pre-show talk at 6:30 and post-show talk after the 7:30 show only. For further information and tickets, visit DTW at www.dancetheaterworkshop.org or call 212-924-0077.

LINK:

www.yaniracastrocompany.org

Body and Soul is the official podcast of InfiniteBody dance blog at
http://infinitebody.blogspot.com. Subscribe through iTunes or at
http://magickaleva.hipcast.com/rss/bodyandsoul.xml.

(c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File

Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography

Check out these brief video visits with dance artists--such as Miguel Gutierrez and Yanira Castro--who have participated in the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography fellowships and international exchange residency programs at Florida State University.

MANCC also has a couple of podcast interviews, downloadable through iTunes: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women, interviewed by UBW dancer and recent Bessie Award winner Nora Chipaumire, and Germaine Acogny, Artistic Director of JANT-BI, interviewed by UBW dancer Catherine Denecy on their companies' collaborative work, Scales of Memory, which will receive its premiere in 2008.

Dancer-choreographer/video artist Dean Moss will be the first artist to receive commissioning and presentational support in MANCC's new partnership initiative with Dance Theater Workshop. Read the full announcement here.