Koma Otake honors his ghosts at Danspace Project

Master dancer Koma Otake performs
the final section of his solo, The Ghost Festival,
outside St. Mark's Church, May 11.
All photos ©2017, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

all photos ©2017, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Using a mobile trailer, Koma creates an interactive visual art installment, as well as a performance space. The design, paintings, and choreography, have all been created or set by Koma himself. Only through performance and the presence of his body in relation to the set does The Ghost Festival truly come to form. Koma envisions The Ghost Festival as a meditative and communal space to honor the connection between past and present, and provide a home for lost spirits.

--from publicity for The Ghost Festival by Koma Otake 

The legends surrounding St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery--home of legendary Danspace Project--include hauntings by its 17th Century builder, Peter Stuyvesant, Secretary-General of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, who is entombed in the church's east wall. But now dance artist Koma Otake has raised other shades at St. Mark's with The Ghost Festival, his first multidisciplinary project without Eiko Otake, his wife and long time creative partner. Although not entirely without Eiko!

If you showed up at St. Mark's at 7pm to catch a five-minute preview in the little park outside the church, you'd catch a glimpse of Eiko ladling cool water onto Koma's naked but bandaged back as he crouched and bent into a trailer painted with his art and bearing a shallow pool of water in which a stand of candles float and glisten.

This mysterious preview is almost unbearably poignant, especially when Eiko carefully closes the trailer's doors around Koma's still-crouching body. One thinks of the foot injury that kept this master dancer from performing for nearly a decade and set the stage for Eiko's well-honored solo projects. It is wonderful to see Koma again. The image he presents carries dimensions of sacredness and of sadness. Of course, isn't that almost a definition of what Eiko and Koma have always done--together or apart?

Inside the church, shortly after 8pm, the performance proceeds like an offering to the spirit of Pina Bausch, an early influence on Eiko and Koma, especially heard in the Francisco Canaro milongas and tangos that fill most of the soundtrack, music that brings to mind Bausch's signature dance-theater. Butoh's genius, Kazuo Ohno, is also here, for sure, from Koma's legacy, but I do not think I am wrong to see Charlie Chaplin peeking impishly from behind an invisible curtain.

How is it possible that I have never truly focused on Koma before The Ghost Festival? How is it that I find myself now smitten by this dancer when, before, I was merely impressed? He is heartbreaking. He is sexy. He is coy and elfin and sly. His unkempt cascade of hair and soft, pliable form are illuminations. He is rumpled, dusty, disheveled, musty, imprecise as a branch in the wind that carries a current of feeling. He is one with the props that surround him, folding his entire slim and yielding body over a chair stacked with black pillows, his legs splayed behind him. He is an irresistible performer. All of this must come from the love he offers these predecessors in dance. Koma is radiant with this love for performance and performers; as the piece opens with Jacques Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas, he seems to plead for even the shadow of their presence to stay and never leave him.

In the spirit of "every goodbye ain't gone," Koma's "festival" does not end despite an assistant parading around the space with a sign that reads "Finale." We're given a fifteen-minute break, mainly to pick up our belongings and move outside the church. (People lagged a bit; it was a chilly evening.) Once assembled, we heard the strains of a Japanese folk song--one perhaps related to traditional celebrations of the departed--and Koma emerged in flowing white to engage with his intriguing trailer/temple, at one point mounting it and generally behaving like the sort of looney you rarely see anymore around this East Village neighborhood. It was fun to watch unsuspecting folks walk by and check out our crowd and Koma's commotion.

With lighting by the legendary Kathy Kaufmann

The Ghost Festival continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm as well as free 5-minute public previews, open to all, at 7pm outside St. Mark's Church. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
2nd Avenue and 10th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Take a walk through Colleen Thomas's childhood.

Dance artist Colleen Thomas grew up on Governors Island in the 1970s, long before it became today's popular playground for the creative arts and healthy outdoor fun. Her new interdisciplinary site work, Welcome Home, offers an impressions of an apartment--and life--much like the one she knew. She fills it with generations of relatives, artifacts, visual arts, music and social dancing. It's nostalgia for sure, but nostalgia with a potent kick--that energy provided by the many surprises that Building 10A's rooms hold and the edgy effect of stuffing twenty audience members and a corps of agile, fearlessly turbulent dancers into the same cramped spaces.

For the most part, Welcome Home is an enjoyable forty minutes. But not everything that happens in Building 10A, in the island's quiet Nolan Park area, is upbeat. Thomas evokes the racial divisions of the times, and there's at least one tiny room--darkened, hurried through--that looks like a nightmare in progress. We're hustled away, perhaps for the best.

On Friday, Thomas's dad was on hand in another room, one open to the light of day, to briefly guide us through old family photos.  The father/daughter resemblance is remarkable. Someone asked him how it felt to be back on the island.

"Weird," he said.

Performers: Samantha Allen, Keith Johnson, Saradiane Mosko, Jessica Stroh, Pedro Osorio, Kathy Stephens, Jim Stephens, Colleen Thomas, Darrin Wright, Olivia Young, Dylan Young, Bill Young

Visual Design: Rebecca Makus
Video Installation: Jason Akira Somma
Music: John McGrew
Costume Design: Rachel Jones Bellas
Dramaturgy: Adrian Silver

Welcome Home's remaining shows run today and tomorrow at 3pm, 4pm and 5pm.

(If you go, I strongly recommend that you also take advantage of some of the last chances to see the profoundly moving Michael Richards: Winged  exhibition in The Arts Center in Building 110, right off the Soissons ferry landing. Click here for information and gallery schedule.)

Click here for complete ferry information for Governors Island and here for Welcome Home tickets. Advance purchase is required as each performance accommodates only 20 audience members. You're advised to take a ferry leaving your departure point at least one hour before the start of the show you plan to attend.

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jill sigman/thinkdance presents "Weed Heart" at Gibney

Jill Sigman in her performance of Weed Heart
and below with Katrina De Wees
(photos: Scott Shaw)

Unruly.

That word often crops up when we talk about weeds.

And about certain people.

I'll use it here to describe both the artist Jill Sigman (jill sigman/thinkdance) and what she has wrought at Gibney Dance Center: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center as choreographer and as Gibney's first Community Action Artist in Residence.

Her project, Weed Heart, is an unruly yet sociable thing of sculptured plantings, tea servings, soup servings, community conversations, free-ranging ideas, music and movement in intimate space. It willfully sprawls from Gibney's gallery lounge area to its tiny ground-level Studio A and, ultimately, beyond the center's front door.

Weed Heart is both a cozy, rather retro (think: hippie era) installation, a commons where anyone can drop by and hang out (the gallery lounge), and a performance where only a little over thirty onlookers can fit (Studio A). At the evening performance, those thirty or so get soothed by a weedy brew of tea, light and delicious red lentil soup made by Katrina De Wees and luminously textured electronic and vocal energy from composer Kristin Norderval. Seated in a single ring around the space, those thirty or so observe an abstract representation of the path that Sigman took--from earnest seeking and bewilderment to soul-felt awareness--as she sought to learn what common weeds can teach her.

How they communicate with themselves and, potentially, with us. How they survive. How they foster healing. How cultures have regarded and interacted with them over time. How our disdain for weeds parallels our similar ignorance about humans we consider to be unlike ourselves and less worthy.

Working with living creatures whose existence depends upon deep connection below the surface--or, at least, attachment to dug-up portions of earth--she has tapped into sediments of her family legacy and of New York history. Weed Heart is haunted by the displacement of indigenous people, the brutality of slavery, the appropriation of what was once land available for common access.

As Sigman reminds us, during a video in her performance, when we buy our sports bras next door at Modell's or park our cars in the lot east of Gibney, we do so over the remains of enslaved Africans. Yes, Weed Heart is packed with all of this--and more. Sigman works tend to be threaded with everything and every interconnection engaging her mind--from environmental sustainability to The Movement for Black Lives. It's a fertile mind, and you just plug into something that resonates with you and hang on as best you can.

Weed Heart, the dance and the dancing, seems born of age-old ritual. Here Sigman takes on the trappings of the plant kingdom. She has tied a large, heart-shaped Paulownia leaf around her face (and, much later, reveals its remarkable source). Brighter green leaves--and a little rose-pink rhinestone heart--decorate her dark-blue hoodie. One cannot look at that hoodie, somehow, and not think of Trayvon Martin's and--when her head and face are completely swathed--the Muslim hijab and niqab.

Sigman's movements--often angular, jutting and jarring--have an alien feel, and Norderval's soundscore draws us through metallic or insect-like dimensions that elude easy identification. It's the role of the ritualist, after all, to take us far from Kansas. Sigman does this, yet--with assists from Norderval and De Wees--she shows that "strange new worlds"--removed and hidden and strange and new to us, at least--can be places of graciousness and mercy.

Jill Sigman on Chambers Street
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Weed Heart performances continue through Saturday, September 10 and Wednesday-Saturday, September 14-17, all at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Related event: Weed Heart: People, Plants, and Social Justice panel discussion on Sunday, September 25, 4-5pm. Click here for information.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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In the swing of things: Ann Hamilton's active audience

The Audience as Art Movement: Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory
by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, December 6, 2012