Playing games with Karma Mayet at JACK

Karma Mayet
(photo: Karl Ferguson, Jr.)

Multi-talented Karma Mayet--actor, vocalist, composer--is busy crafting something both fun and painful in Race Card at JACK, now through December 16. As the title suggests, this project gets all up into America's favorite non-favorite topic. You might remember Congresswoman Maxine Waters responding to the accusation that she's playing the race card. Words to the effect of "Good, because I've got a whole deck to play!"

Mayet, a Chicago native with roots in Mississippi, has a whole deck, too--literally--with playing cards liberally distributed around the audience seating at JACK. A fan of Bid Whist--her granny is her Bid Whist guru--she has worked out a way for an audience, even card game novices like me, to play a version of the usually intricate, fast-paced game with her as she sits at a little table with a pencil, paper and a phone full of music. The winner of each round triggers her telling of a personal story of racism in a society where macro-aggressions are fundamental and micro-aggressions are thick on the ground.

In between Mayet's true-life stories that both amuse and sting, viewers are shuffled like cards while grooving to what Mayet enjoys calling her "white jams"--the tastiest, most irresistible music made by white appropriators of Black style. ("Twenty years after you create something," she quipped, "they'll get a passable imitation.") Here and there, things might get a bit raggedy--part of the fun, actually. The overall concept rocks. The chance process and continuous audience involvement as co-creators--no two evenings will be alike--are refreshing.

And you've gotta love Mayet. Even rooted in her chair as she tells her stories, she's the Queen of movement and dynamic charm. Go play Bid Whist with her at JACK.

Race Card continues through December 16 with performances at 7:30pm, except where noted:

Saturday, December 2
Sunday, December 3
Friday, December 8
Saturday, December 9
​Sunday, December 10 at 3pm
Thursday, December 14
Friday, December 15
Saturday, December 16

For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Global Rhythms's Yesenia Fernandez Selier on presenting Afro-Cuban dance in public space

Dance artist, educator and MFA student Beatrice Capote
(photo: Russell Hayden)

For my Montclair State University course, Performance Perspectives, Dance MFA student Beatrice Capote interviewed Yesenia Fernandez Selier, Executive Director of the performing arts troupe Global Rhythms.

Global Rhythms is a cultural enterprise devoted to enriching society and empowering individuals and communities through Cuban dance, music, and cultural education. Founded in 2012 by Cuban scholar, activist, and folkloric dancer Yesenia Selier and Hunter Houde, US born Latin dancer and entertainer, Global Rhythms uses these elements to create bonds between people and cultures and to promote a more diverse and tolerant society. With exciting dance performances, live Latin music shows, and interactive academic conferences on the history of popular and religious music and dance from Cuba, our experienced staff blends the talents of traditional artists, scholars, and award winning entertainers to provide an unforgettable cultural experience. Global Rhythms has worked with and alongside world renowned artists such Pedrito Martinez, Roman Diaz, Maykel Fonts, Septeto Nacional de Cuba, Ivan Acosta, Jose Conde, Jane Bunnett, Cita Rodriguez, Grupo Irek, Miguelo Valdes, Mauricio Herrera Tamayo, Gerardo Contino, Venissa Santi, among others. 

Cuban born performer and researcher, Yesenia Fernandez Selier is currently a media, culture and communication PhD candidate at New York University-Steinhart. Yesenia is the recipient of fellowships from CLACSO and the CUNY Caribbean Exchange Program of Hunter College and recognized for her work preserving Latino heritage by the “Save Latin America Organization.” Her work on Afro-Cuban culture, encompassing dance, music and race identity has been published in Cuba, United States and Brazil. Yesenia has developed several projects, like Tambo! and Ibiono Project for the preservation of Afro- Cuban legacy in NYC. She produced, the theater play Women Orishas for Miami Cuban Museum (2013) and the show Cuba en Clave for the Cuban Cultural Center in Miami (2014). She is currently Executive Director of Global Rhythms.

To listen to this audio clip from today's guest contributor, Beatrice Capote, click here (20:51).

Beatrice Capote is a soloist dancer, choreographer and teacher. She started her pre-professional training at PPAS/The Ailey School, and then graduated from University of North Carolina School of the Arts as a dance major. In addition, she continued her college journey at Montclair State University where she received her BA in Dance Education. Professionally, she has worked with INSPIRIT, a dance company, Mavericks dance company, The Wells Performance Project, Areytos Performance Works, Earl Mosley, Matthew Rushing, Darrell Moultrie, Antonio Brown and Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In. Motion. Ms. Capote choreographed and performed her solo work as a guest artist for ASHA Dance Company, the Eric Dolphy Jazz Festival, and recently performed her Newest Solo at the Martha Graham Studios for WestFest Dance, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD), Pepatian Dance Concert at Pregones Theater, and Battery Dance Festival. She received a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to choreograph and show new works at the Pier 17 South Street Seaport. She has, also, set work at the Earl Mosley Institute of the Arts Summer Intensive Program, Fort Wayne Ballet Summer Intensive Program, and Steffi Nossen School of Dance. In her work, she gravitates towards the individual artistry/ experience. She asks questions like what, when, where, and who…. Within those questions, she uses gestures to tell her story/ experience. The gestures evolve to expansive movements within the body that reflect to deeper meaning. The movement quality is known to be very energetic and vibrant contemporary modern aesthetic infused with African, ballet, modern, and jazz. Her goal in the work is for the audience to experience and relate to the work. In addition, She is currently faculty at the Ailey School, Joffrey Ballet, Montclair State University and a dancer with Camille A. Brown and Dancers. Website: beatricecapote.com

Free email subscription

to InfiniteBody
Click here! 

New work by Molly Poerstel at Gibney Dance

Scenes from Are we a Fossil, and Of Facings by Molly Poerstel
Above: Jennifer Kjos, Eleanor Smith, and Alice MacDonald
Below: Kjos and MacDonald
(photos: Scott Shaw)

Energy.

It's one of the things I love most about dance, whether doing it or being there to see it. Molly Poerstel's Are we a Fossil, and Of Facings would have great, great gusts of energy even if it were not for the unusual audience seating arrangements which expose the viewer to it. These arrangements expose the viewer, too, creating a heightening and unnerving effect.

The hour-long dance takes place in the theater at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center and tames that space by ignoring the customary rules of engagement. There's no front. Folding chairs for audience members are arranged around the floor of the performance area in a few single strands with small circles or clumps of chairs here and there, especially surrounding columns. You and your closet neighbor might find yourselves in chairs pointing away from a column at radically different angles, wondering how that's going to work later when, reportedly, there will be dancers and dancing to be seen.

Though dark and still somewhat heavy in feeling, the theater seems, if not airy, at least more encouraging of a flow of energy. You can well imagine a river of energy--or a real river--coursing through it.  It's a little bit nice but, as noted before, also exposing. You're forced to look around at everyone else sitting in their lines of chairs or their groupings, and you feel on display.

One of the secret little psychological perks about performance-going is that you're usually not on display. You sit back, and it's somebody else's show, somebody else's responsibility to make it all work.

Situating the audience inside the belly of the work, Molly Poerstel offers complex rhythmic structures and movement patterns in which forms calcify and disintegrate. Here, Poerstel gives agency to her performers as they unveil courageous bodies in transformation.

--from promotional material for Are we a Fossil, and Of Facings 

Being in that belly means you make decisions. You make mistakes. You make discoveries. Being in that belly means the likelihood of missing some courageous bodies in transformation--Jennifer Kjos, Alice McDonald, Eleanor Smith and, at times, Tara Sheena--because you're looking one way and don't see one or another of them over there doing her thing; or turning your head to catch someone way off to the side and wondering if you're supposed to be doing that; or tucking your feet out of the way of a surging dancer or two or three.

And, boy, do they ever surge. Yes, these bodies are courageous, sculpted by Poerstel--statuesque, monumental, Winged Victories sweeping through in rhythmic, repetitive flight or charge or leaping trot. At a certain point, the movement to Dana Wachs's music recalls Laura Dean's work with Philip Glass--driven, repetitive with striking variations and developments. Some of Mandy Ringger's lighting schemes remind me of dramatic museum lighting on a precious object, darkening everything that surrounds and could distract from the object of focus.

Poerstel's prelude melds creativity with basic carpentry--an apt way to set the tone for this impressive performance.

Are we a Fossil, and Of Facings runs through Saturday, March 12 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

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

(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

"Atlantic Terminus": Jon Kinzel's residency at Invisible Dog

Jon Kinzel
(photo: Erica Freudenstein)

Out of the blustery night, I arrived at The Invisible Dog Art Center around 7:15 only to find the space behind its streetfront windows pitch-dark. Puzzled, I reached for the doorknob anyway. It yielded to me.

For some reason, I'd had the start time for Atlantic Terminus, Jon Kinzel's performance, as 7:30, not 7pm. Even so, as I peered around the ground-floor space, it looked as it nothing was shaking. A faint glow emanated from something on the floor, but where was the audience? Had I made the trip from Manhattan in vain?

As it turned out, people were standing in random spots around the space, but it was a while before Kinzel lit a small light revealing himself, guest artist Jodi Melnick and a smattering of watchers.  I felt much relieved to see them but dismayed that I'd clearly arrived late.

Some context:

Atlantic Terminus rests on the pretext of using Kinzel’s own belongings as a set. Evolving over two weeks, he will sustain an onsite multi-faceted studio practice in the gallery creating new work daily. He aims to disclose his particular history of making connections between visual art and performance since 1988. Invited guests, collaborations, and set and improvised performances will contribute to the process and over all installation. Integral to the show will be the task of cataloguing and exhibiting some of his 25+ years of works on paper: drawings that informed his shows at The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, PS 122, Danspace Project, and Dixon Place among others. This will also serve to provide an unprecedented opportunity to share — a retrospective gesture — his ongoing interest in how kinesthetic and visceral sensibilities can be brought into engagement with visual thinking.

Kinzel is open-mined [sic] about ways in which a consensual relationship between audience and performer can allow both parties to engage in an atmosphere in which a very special “social” equilibrium is possible. He sees his work as collaboration between performer and audience, and as such there will always be unknown and uncontrollable elements, which provide a desirable tension to the experience on both sides.

That "open-mined" might be accurate. He's open to mining his journey and--with appropriate lighting--we could see evidence of an extensive engagement with paper and marking, including a table of supplies and tools in strict, neat arrangement. It was also nearly impossible, as an audience member, to wander about without coming into contact with drawings collaged on the floors or posted or stacked elsewhere. Much delicateness and vulnerability here in this open-mining.

Of course, for me, the performance was truncated. I only got to see both dancers vigorously swiping at taped-up drawings with wooden sticks as if whacking piñatas; Kinzel wriggling a long Mylar streamer in a kind of ribbon dance; Kinzel raising a charming paper cutout "sail" and moving a light around it; and Kinzel repairing to another part of the space to dance a bit of movement which, interestingly, made him look a bit like a charming paper cutout "sail." And, with perhaps no more than ten minutes of that, the performance was over.

Atlantic Terminus's remaining performances are tonight at 7pm and Saturday, February 13, at 7pm. Remember: 7pm, not 7:30! For information and tickets, click here.

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(directions/map link)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

Paloma McGregor builds her net...for us

Yesterday, I started thinking about how dance artists should market their genius for adaptability, for doing more with less. I've also been watching dance in fairly small spaces lately--not always a bad thing. Then Paloma McGregor brought Building A Better Fishtrap/Part 1 to BAAD!, premiering an evening-length version of work explored, over the last four years, in various venues. At BAAD!, this beautiful and moving ensemble piece is danced across a shallow strip of floor. It's a big burst of heart, and the dancers dance the hell out of it. If you sit in the front row, as I did, watch that your feet don't get trapped like fish.

McGregor, a native of St. Croix, draws spirit and imagery from, as she writes, "the vanishing fishing tradition of [her] 89-year old father." The work feels like a danced bedtime tale with dreamy happenings and archetypal, beloved characters who shapeshift form with ease. Indeed, like a cozy bedtime tale, it works best by leaving ample room for your own imaginings and feelings.

Empty chairs speak of separated or departed loved ones, the ever-present past. A "road" materializes when a young lady--bearing a modest, old-fashioned suitcase and a vision--strides forth while others hustle to pave the air with a row of chair seats continuously arranged below her advancing feet. As our loving storyteller, McGregor proffers not too much information, just enough--articles and spare gestures that suggest spearing, sorting, stirring; a wheel gently held aloft like a mystical symbol or used in the clever pantomiming of a family excursion; long spliced and braided cords that, when swept across the breadth of the space, evoke both the act of fishing and the foamy rush of Caribbean tide.

Now and again, a voice floats into the space, words suggesting identity and deep nourishment from which one can never be entirely separated. (I have been here before, maybe as a tree...The water is the Grand Queen of us all.) Still, dancers like Christine King and Audrey Hailes don't need words to connect when playful, girlish body language spins clear, universal "conversation" and inclusion.

That inclusion includes us, too, in a literal, ingenious and necessary way that I will not reveal here. Building A Better Fishtrap prepares and invites its audience, casting a spell that inspires trust. Last night, we fell into McGregor's welcome with gratitude.

Performances by Christine King, Audrey Hailes, Stephanie Mas, Erica Saucedo, Ricarrdo Valentine
Scenic Design: Paloma McGregor
Costumes: Kym Chambers

Lighting: Susan Hamburger
Soundscore: Everett Saunders
Text: Ebony Noelle Golden

Building A Better Fishtrap/Part 1 continues tonight at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information, click here, and for tickets, click here.

McGregor continues to build her fishtrap. Over the next two years, her Building A Better Fishtrap project moves on to BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and to sites in Red Hook and along the Bronx River. "With each iteration," McGregor writes, "the hope is to deepen the connections collaborators and audiences have with one another's legacies and the future of our embattled water spaces." Keep up with McGregor's progress at Angela's Pulse.

BAAD!
2474 Westchester Avenue, Bronx
(map/directions)

Be the show: Ivana Müller (and you) at New York Live Arts

Croatian-born Ivana Müller,
choreographer, artist and author of texts,
concludes her unique presentation, We Are Still Watching,
at New York Live Arts tomorrow night.

About We Are Still Watching at New York Live Arts (part of FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival 2014)

Made by Ivana Müller in collaboration with Amsterdam-based choreographer Andrea Bozic, Brussels-based artist and theater director David Weber-Krebs and Brussel-bsed dramaturg Jonas Rutgeerts

                                                                                                                                                                                

I was part of the Legendary Reading Group of October 1, 2014.

Sort of. Which means I ended up with all of one line.

Except for the choral part.

Here's what I learned from Ivana Müller's We Are Still Watching.

1. Arranging a small audience along the sides of a square can foster close observation and intimacy among strangers. If you're lucky.
2. Selling tickets to people who come to see a show and end up being the show--they take turns reading your script about a group of people coming to see a show who end up being the show--is kind of cheeky. And kind of cool.
3. Doing this and then later revealing that you "hate participatory theater" is outrageous. Until you explain that the things you hate about audience participation are totally not what your piece is doing.
4. Not knowing who's going to show up and how they'll behave with your guidelines and your script is risky. And thrilling.
5. Every audience is its own show, and every show is different.
6. It works if all sorts of people reading your words have all sorts of accents, some of them a little hard to hear if you're not sitting right next to them. You're an accented foreigner, too. Constantly. Moving yourself and your work from place to place while making a home in two different European cities. And here you are now, showing this piece in New York City. Where every other person, it seems, hails from someplace else.
7. The words are simple. Got to be. But sometimes, a beautiful surprise: Your "Romeo" and your "Juliet" may end up being the same sex. Or not. Maybe simply two people with foreign accents giggling over the words they mispronounce. Musically, impossibly sweet in the middle of all of this.
8. Sometimes your audience/listeners/readers will chuckle through the entire thing. It's good for their bodies.
9. A touch of subversion will flare for mere seconds along with a smidgen of confusion.
10. Some people may try to "act" their lines, and that will sound funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. Because it's beside the point.
11. Your Q&A moderator will script the follow-up Q&A and have it read by people who are neither you nor him. Happily, this cutesiness will not last long.
12. The script is not as important to you as how people appropriate it.
13. This work is "very choreographic." The voice, traveling.
14. Sometimes people who do not know each other go for drinks afterwards.
15. "Clearly marked with what is about to happen," the script "creates a frame in which everyone is exactly the same."
16. This has some source, you suggest, in social change happening in the Netherlands, one of two places you call home.
17. The New York Times will declare it all "disappointingly banal." Because. And of course. And...Next!!!

Be a part of the Legendary Reading Group of October 3, 2014. Tickets for the final evening of We Are Still Watching--this Friday at 8pm--are here.

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

For details on FIAF's 2014 Crossing the Line Festival, which runs through October 20, click here.

New Brooklyn Theater partners with its diverse audience

New Brooklyn Theater Casts Audience in Crucial Role
Four Plays by African-American Playwrights
by Richard Morgan, The New York Times, July 4, 2014

New Victory Theater to offer summer dance program for kids

A Summer Dance Program for Children in New York City
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, May 15, 2014

You, too, can create a universe: Sarah A.O. Rosner's ETLE

Sarah A.O. Rosner: Creating a New Queer Universe
by Marcie Bianco, Lambda Literary, January 19, 2014

"Our Planet": a new Japan Society commission

Jenny Seastone Stern ("Luna") in Our Planet
(photo by Julie Lemberger)

You get dizzy, you get dazzled, you get giddy.

--from Yukio Shiba's Our Planet

For each performance of Our Planet, audiences--each thirty people only--hike all over Japan Society's midtown East landmark building for ninety minutes. They stand and perch in public and private spaces amid music and startling animated projections as they follow the long (really, really long), developing relationship between two playful neighbor kids. Okay, what if I were to tell you that those kids are Earth (Terri) and the moon (Luna); that neighborhood, the cosmos; and that relationship a matter of life (all life) and death (of stars and pretty much everything)? Intrigued yet? You should be.

The powerful actor Julian Rozzell, Jr., who eventually plays the female Terri in a skirt wrapped around his pants, first greets the audience in the darkened lobby, dramatically backlit by the light of an open elevator. On his lips, Yukio Shiba's text zips past you in bursts of forceful and mercurial dazzle--catch and hold what you can--setting up your understanding of the birth of a universe that will teem with the massive and the microscopic, and of a planet that will host all human experience, thought, speech and feelings.

Like a Pied Piper, Terri takes her charges on a journey, integrating them into each new environment, also placing little tea light "stars" here and there, even in the little pools of the lovely indoor water gardens. Eventually, Terri leads her followers upstairs to encounter Luna, embodied by Jenny Seastone Stern, where begins an initially shy and then fervent friendship, one faithful even through distance, time and time's inevitable changes. Our relationship with the convincingly girlish Luna--and with the innards of Japan Society's home--also grows. You might even find yourself seated to tea at a family table where Luna speaks the entire communal dialogue. Stern brings vulnerability and lightheartedness to her role, drawing something of the same from Rozzell, Jr. Well matched, they are.

All in all, you can't help but get a little dizzy, a little dazzled, a little giddy. Happily, there are guides all around to help you watch your step.

Direction: Alec Duffy (Hoi Polloi)
Scenic design: Mimi Lien
Costumes: Becky Lasky
Lighting design: Jiyoun Chang
Music composition and sound design: Tei Blow
Motion graphics: Nobuyuki Hanabusa

No late entry. Be prepared to stand, walk up and down stairs and, at times, sit on little cushions or benches. You're encouraged to leave your coats and belongings at the coat check. I'd recommend keeping a light sweater with you: The building is fairly cool.

Running time: 90 minutes

Through December 8 (various dates/times). Due to audience-size limitations, a number of performances are already sold out. Click here for complete schedule details and ticketing.

Japan Society

333 East 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan

(map/direction)

Allison Orr: from trash to treasure

Trash Dance, a luminous and fun film by Andrew Garrison, follows choreographer Allison Orr's progress as she befriends Black and Latino sanitation workers in Austin, Texas, and--in her gutsy, hands-on way--learns about the diversity and intricate details of their labor. Her project? To guide these men and women as they turn equipment and everyday actions into the stuff of art. How can you take a garbage truck, something that we commonly see--and, yet, don't really see--and make it expressive? Orr--who, as Artistic Director of Forklift Danceworks, has crafted projects with Austin firefighters and the gondoliers of Venice--steps up to this fresh challenge with surprising and moving results.

Meet Orr and Garrison this Wednesday, May 1 (7:30) for a special screening of the multiple award-winning Trash Dance, with moderator Aviva Davidson (Executive and Artistic Director, Dancing in the Streets), or catch the last New York screening on May 2.

1FP reRun GastropubTheater
147 Front Street, Brooklyn (DUMBO)
(map/directions)

For tickets, click here.

For information on other screenings of Trash Dance, click here

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

Free for all: Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas Museum of Art will offer free membership and a return to free general admission starting January 2013.

Click here for more information.

SHOW/SHARE: They showed. We shared.

Congratulations to the six independent choreographers (and their performers) who showed work at last night's SHOW/SHARE event at Gibney Dance Center:

Melissa Riker (Kinesis Project Dance Theatre)

Kathleen Dyer (KDNY Dance Company)

Carmella Ollero

Cori Olinghouse (Ghost Lines Project*)

Ashley A. Friend (The Contemporary Dance Core)

Amanda Hunt

It was a pleasure to sample your projects and to hear about your ideas, values and process. I wish you all the very best!

Thanks, too, to our audience for sharing what you saw, felt and imagined. Your feedback will give these artists encouragement for the future.

SHOW/SHARE is a comfortable, informal, two-hour "open mic" for choreography. For more information about future SHOW/SHARE evenings, click here (and scroll down). For information on other programs and services of Gibney Dance Center, click here.



*UPDATE:

And do check out this Kickstarter campaign for Ghost line--an intriguing film/dance collaboration between Cori Olinghouse and Shona Masarin.

The urgent A.O. herself!

The resourceful Sarah A.O. Rosner gets profiled by New York Live Arts blog here.