can you can you: Jerron Herman and Molly Joyce at Danspace Project

Jerron Herman and Molly Joyce
in Breaking and Entering at Danspace Project
In deep background below: ASL Interpreter Kathleen D.Taylor
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Breaking and Entering
by Jerron Herman and Molly Joyce
at Danspace Project
November 12, 15-16

Breaking and Entering, a collaboration between two well-regarded disabled artists--Jerron Herman and Molly Joyce--creates an intriguing relationship among its players and with its audience. Early on, we're introduced to American Sign Language Interpreter Kathleen D. Taylor whose signing rings with a robust, dancer-ly flow.

Uh-oh, I thought at first sight of her hands in motion, knowing all too well my tendency to gaze long at ASL interpreters whose particular style draws me in. What if I look at Taylor and miss important things that Herman might be doing?

No chance of that, really, since Herman is not exactly someone you can miss. Moreover--and curiously--Taylor soon gets relegated to deep backdrop, removed to the upper reaches of St. Mark's Church's altar steps for the rest of the piece. Thinking back on that now, I realize that distancing, blurring any initial, vivid connection to Taylor, might be by complicating design.

The words accompanying the work's three movements--entitled "Compliance," "Defiance" and "Emergence"--suggest a negotiated relationship with others, perhaps with viewers, perhaps with parts of the performers' own bodies.

Herman, who bills himself as "an interdisciplinary artist, primarily working in dance," is a snazzy performer with hemiplegic cerebral palsy which has caused him to devise ways to work balance and propulsion differently. His energy in the space is wrenching, surprising and always thrilling. Composer/musician Joyce, disabled in an accident, often moves with Herman, sings high and sweet, and plays a vintage toy piano set up in the middle distance between far-off Taylor and the audience. Their textures are so different, they make me think of their performance space as a painting canvas generous enough to make room, at once, for the roughest impasto and a silky brush.

The evening ends in an invitation to the audience to join the artists on the floor and dance to a DJ's fifteen-minute set. Disability activist and scholar Kevin Gotkin dj'ed last evening; Michael Hammond and JIJI will do the honors on Friday and Saturday, respectively.

Text: Marco Grosse, Molly Joyce, Jerron Herman
Sound: Michael Hammon
Costumes: Gerald and Cynthia Herman

Breaking and Entering continues with performances this Friday, November 15, and Saturday, November 16, at 8pm. Besides ASL interpretation, audio description is also provide for each performance. Each concludes with a fifteen-minute dance party for the artists and audience. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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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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luciana achugar: the body in power and joy

Choreographer luciana achugar
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Brujx, a world premiere, ritualizes the labor of the dancers, exposing and transcending it to unearth the powerful and primal magic brujx within them. As in all of achugar’s [sic] work it proposes DANCE as the necessary transformational healing for our time. Brujx resists western assumptions of beauty and hierarchical order, freeing the dancers both of their role as worker in the power structure within the creative project and of the universal shame of being animal-sexual-powerful-instinctive creatures. -- from publicity for luciana achugar's Brujx

As part of senior director and curator Jay Wegman's two-week Karl Marx Festival: On Your Marx at NYU Skirball, luciana achugar's Brujx embeds her audience in the flow of the work, instantly transforming most of these "viewers" into performative, even scenic objects to be gazed upon far more than the official dancers. In her somewhat nervous pre-show welcome on Skirball's grand staircase, achugar offered each of us a choice: Either stand or sit onstage, or take a regular seat in the theater's rows.

As it turned out, if you sat facing the stage, as I chose to do for most of the 90+ minutes of Brujx--think bruja, Spanish for witch, but  gender-busting--you'd have to work to catch as much as could be seen from there. Sometimes you'd lean to one side or the other to glimpse dancers through a sliver of space in the crowd. Or, guided by the percussion of bodies slapping the floor or walls, use your imagination. Imagining the scene onstage behind a tightly-packed semicircle of people was not so hard, actually. A lot of Brujx happens through consistent, monotonous kinetic and sonic repetition with a blend of the organic, the industrial and the sexual. See enough, and you can make a good enough guess about the rest.

These aspects--organic, industrial, sexual--never separate in our minds as we observe. Instead of fixating on one notion of what we're seeing and hearing, we fluctuate even as the dancers stay steady in many of their actions. Their evoked nature ranges from insect-like to human, from animal to machine. One of the most indelible, brilliantly conceived and executed images is of a languid, cattle-like walk with each of the dancers on all fours, their haunches exposed and the luminous focus of everyone's attention.

achugar, curiously, is the only performer identified in NYU Skirball publicity, and no program notes, that might identify the others, were issued. Perhaps this anonymity has something to do with the significant partial nudity and behavior of the dancers throughout the piece. I was unnerved to see one man approach the stage with a cellphone and train his videocam on one dancer's upended, pumping backside.

It was not until late in the game that the most of those of us in the seats had mounted the stage to watch the three half-naked witches gyrate to electronic polyrhythms produced by an ingenious sound sculpture. I often think achugar aims to bring back the Sixties, which part of me, remembering the Sixties, finds a bit hokey. Also hokey, having dancers climb to the top of the audience seating and then, row by row, clamber down over the backs of seats. This makes both parts of the audience have to shift their gaze for a while, but to little purpose, and perhaps tells us what we already know about these witches. Yes, they are wild, unruly things. And hasn't the fourth wall been breached already--and more creatively?

Still, looking around as I stood with other on the stage, I noticed the audience's bodies were noticeably relaxed, their faces softened, as the dancers' liberated spirit seeped out into everyone. One woman, absorbed in herself and not even gazing towards the performers, kept up a serpentine undulation in response. As I took my leave, the dancing and gawking continued, the audience now almost completely merged and submerged.

Brujx concludes this evening with a performance at 7:30pm. For information and reservations*, click here.

NYU Skirball's Karl Marx Festival: On Your Marx--*all free with an RSVP and a donation, if you desire--continues through October 28. For information, click here.

NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Place (between West 4th and West 3rd Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Meet your doom--maybe--with Split Britches at La MaMa

Above: Lois Weaver
Below: Peggy Shaw
Split Britches brings Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)
to La MaMa for its US premiere.
(photo: Matt Delbridge)

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), a US premiere from famed lesbian theater duo Split Britches (Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw), takes inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's political satire Dr. Strangelove (1964). It works from a similar wackadoodle take on the threat of nuclear disaster within reach of itchy Twitter--I mean, trigger--fingers. A top-flight general (Shaw) is stationed by a desk and computer monitor where he keeps track of time and apparently takes calls from gal pals. Weaver, referred to by Shaw as "Madame Mr. President Sir," initially slumbers at a far curve of circled "Situation Room" tables. They communicate via landline phones, although sometimes the phone rings, it's not Weaver, and Shaw breaks into randy old pop songs.

The situation at La MaMa, then, is less tense than Shaw's tracking of the countdown clock might suggest. Yes, the show itself must finish by the end of sixty minutes, but Billy Ward and the Dominoes's "60 Minute Man" is one of those randy songs, and there seems to be plenty of time for studly Shaw to bop out to that. Yes, something must be done about the impending doom we're trying to track on confusing overhead monitors, but there's lots of time to field a council of elders from among the oldest of us in attendance. And, no, although lined up with other greyheads, I failed to make the cut.

Directed by Weaver and written by the pair with Hannah Maxwell, the show contains clever text aligned like precision-cut puzzle pieces (best delivered by saucy Shaw) and room for whatever unpredictables the elders might bring to the table. (One woman seemed obsessed with the mysterious whereabouts of one Tiffany Ariana Trump, offspring of Marla Maples and POS...oops, I mean, POTUS. Now that I think about it, Tiff does seem to have been out of the public eye for a suspiciously long time...hmmm.)

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) is more chuckle-provoking and captivating than Kubrick--well, of course! it's lesbian!--with the additional benefit of encouraging the audience to determine not only how the play will go but also, you gotta hope, how the rest of our lives will go. Folks came up with some really good stuff!

Part of The Public Theater's now-closed Under the Radar Festival, and originally scheduled to end last weekend, Unexplode Ordnances (UXO) fortunately continues tonight, Saturday, at 8pm and Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa -- Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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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)

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Next on the BAM Next Wave: Faye Driscoll says thanks

Brandon Washington (left) and Alicia Ohs
dance in Faye Driscoll's Thank You For Coming: Play
Below: Sean Donovan
(photos: Maria Baranova)

It's not every day I get a last-minute email that says don't reveal this or that about the show you're about to see and review; we want this to be a surprise. But I got one the afternoon before Faye Driscoll's New York premiere of Thank You for Coming: Play at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space), and I'm completely up for being in on the fun.

No, I wouldn't spoil it. But I'll go Driscoll one better. There's very little I'll reveal about this Next Wave show, short of showing you some photos here that will give you just the slightest hint of the delirious and endearing thrift-shop aesthetics of the thing. Think a bunch of untamed k(ids) with access to costumes like these, uncanny exposure to Kabuki and a passion for storytelling who somehow have sprung from Driscoll's head. Driscoll, herself, is on hand to kind of show us how the springing-from-head thing happens. Dancers Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Paul Singh, Laurel Snyder and Brandon Washington work their butts off while also working their way into our hearts. Dancing, vocalizing and making complete asses of themselves, they are an ensemble to be treasured and long remembered.

Play is the second part of Driscoll's Thank You For Coming trilogy and my first experience of it. I enjoyed watching a structure that made the most of physical space, visual variety, theatrical artifice and excess, and extremes of polarities (even within an individual performer) before tamping down and tapering all of those things like a decorative fan displayed, madly flapped and then finally folded.

Go see it. Driscoll made it with you in mind. And that's all I'm sayin'.

Choreography/text: Driscoll in collaboration with the performers
Sound: Bobby McElver
Musical direction: Bobby McElver and Sean Donovan
Original compositions: Sean Donovan, Bobby McElver and Faye Driscoll
Vocal arrangement: Sean Donovan
Lyrics: Faye Driscoll
Additional lyrics: Sean Donovan

Thank You for Coming: Play runs one hour/15 minutes without intermission and continues through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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FRINGE BENEFITS: Emily Carding--and you!--in "Richard III"

Emily Carding as Richard III
in Brite Theater's Richard III (a one-woman show)
at FringeNYC
(photos: Dixie Sheridan)

Instead of paying actors to play Shakespearean roles, Emily Carding gets them to work for free. By that, I mean most of the people in her small audience, each one sporting a lanyard ID--her "Duke of Buckingham," her "Lady Anne"--and occasional looks of uncertainty as Carding's masterful Richard III shares cynical confidences with one or gruffly orders around another. As the tale of bloody power grabs unfolds, condensed to under an hour, no one in attendance--even those without named roles--can fully relax. We know that Carding's Richard might suddenly lock eyes with us, requiring something of us, find us wanting.

We are not safe, Clarence. We are not safe.

What's more, Clarence, we can easily be offed by little more than an arsenal of office supplies.

An anticipated highlight of this summer's FringeNYC, Brite Theater's Richard III (a one-woman show) comes to New York bearing awards from the Fringes of Prague and Edinburgh. And, by Richard's will and Carding's skill, it will conquer in its US premiere. The set-up of the new-ish Alpha Omega studio on East 4th Street provides just enough space for Carding to pace or impatiently push off on the wheels of her office chair while maintaining intimacy and a tyrant's grip on her audience.

This Richard's world of scheming and endless violence is our own, where battleground reports come via text message and leaders can instantly document their narcissism with selfies.

The narrow runner of space between two rows of seating--accommodating perhaps 25-30 people--is charged with the energy of Richard's malevolence and excess. Directed by Brite's founder Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir, Carding interprets Shakespeare's Richard--a man of visible disability--with bearing and even speech that I'm greatly tempted to call dance. Dark business suit and skinny red tie askew, her body seems, at once, frozen and propelled in multiple directions even when still. And her speech, if failing in rhythm, moves with varying, unpredictable angles of attack. Deep into the performance, Carding seems to drop into a flow state from which she yields improvised snark--snapping at an unexpectedly stubborn "Lord Grey," Well now I know what you are getting killed for!--or minute, quite convincing facial expressions of fear and disintegration.

Make Richard III (a one-woman show) one of your priority stops along the Fringe. See it today at 4:30pm or tomorrow, Saturday, at 5pm. For information and tickets, click here.

And here's a special note to Fringe veterans and newbies alike: Happily, there's ample AC at Alpha Omega. In fact, you might want to bring a little wrap to throw over your shoulders.

Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company
70 East 4th Street (Lower Level), between Bowery and 2nd Avenue, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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I'm your puppet: Ronnie Burkett's marionettes at BAC

The actor Lovey Lunkhead (above)
and his creator, Ronnie Burkett (below)
in The Daisy Theatre
(photos: Hiroyuki Ito)

From the look and, especially, the sound of things at Baryshnikov Arts Center last evening, Canadian puppeteer extraordinaire Ronnie Burkett has a legion of south-of-the-border fans. And now he has one more, because I love him.

That's not too extreme a position to take, given how Burkett seeks to wring every bit of love and laughter out of audiences for his Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, putting a positive spin on the word manipulation.

The New York premiere of The Daisy Theatre stars a handful of Burkett's forty finely-designed creations--a motley crew who are impossible to resist--in acts ranging from burlesque to opera. Improvised around each marionette's personality and John Alcorn's loopy songs, the show has elastic tendencies. Performed without intermission, it can stretch from ninety minutes to two hours, depending upon how much fun Burkett is having with his marionettes, with volunteers from his audience and with the serendipity of any given moment.

Burkett indulges himself, and us, because he is a child. He is a happy child, standing up there on the bridge, deftly working the control bars and wires that give his marionettes uncanny, supple life. With his own marionette-like jaw, resplendent smile and maniacal, motormouth voice, he resembles someone from his nomadic tribe of performers. Or the Second Coming of Robin Williams. In fact, if you find yourself gazing up at Burkett about as much as you watch the marionettes acting out below, you would not be wrong--or alone. He's a huge, huge part of the show.

Burkett and his rotating cast of characters
(photo: Hiroyuki Ito)

Steeped in fearless queer attitude, profane language and racy innuendo, The Daisy Theatre ain't puppetry for tots, and anyone under 16 will not be admitted. But anyone over 16 will enjoy the likes of sweet, yearning "fairy child" Schnitzel (a stand-in for Burkett's inner child, I suspect) and Las Vegas belter Rosemary Focaccia, a-shimmy in fringe dress and knee-high boots, hair-trigger rage and foul mouth out of all proportion ("I know people, Baryshnikov! Don't cross me!!"). An eerie segment featuring marionette Meyer Lemon--an ancient master ventriloquist--and his dummy stood out for near-literary, surreal quality and Burkett's exacting skill.

Acclaimed ventriloquist Meyer Lemon takes the spotlight.
(photo: Hiroyuki Ito)

I have no idea who--among all forty of the possible players--will perform when you see The Daisy Theatre and what they'll be up to. You'll be, in Burkett's words, one of the "poor bastards sitting in the dark not knowing what happens next."

How exhilarating!

Remaining performances:

Tonight, October 1, 7:30pm
Friday-Saturday, October 2-3, 8pm
Wednesday-Saturday, October 7-10, 8pm

Ronnie Burkett in Conversation:

A conversation with Ronnie Burkett and Kristy Edmunds of Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA will be held in BAC's Jerome Robbins Theater on Monday, October 5 at 6:30pm. Reservations are not required.

Jerome Robbins Theater
Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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)

Niegel and Todd and ten willing participants

THIS IS IT!

InfiniteBody,

launched on March 29, 2007,

has just reached its 5,000th post!

Thank you so much for your support along the way.

Now, back to our regularly-scheduled review!

*****

Niegel Smith and Todd Shalom

Oh. One more thing to celebrate...

Happy 10th anniversary of "artnership" to Niegel Smith and Todd Shalom who opened their latest collaborative gig, Dream State of Affairs, with sly toasts over sparkling cider and an invitation to their watchers to become doers. Presented by The Invisible Dog Art Center in partnership with Shalom's Elastic City, this dream state has a whimsical premise and a spine of steel.

We’ve scored a performance: a where-we-are but in your shoes. There are written prompts that overlap–a set of tasks that form a fairy tale weee invite you to complete.

We’ll play with race, lust, consent, underpaid labor and childhood shit; the cat and the meow. You’ve a choice: consent to be on stage or around it, as you will. We will take care of you.

Not to be overly paranoid, but "we will take care of you" is a promise that can be read different ways, and I ended up relieved that I did not volunteer to be one of ten participants. Sure, I would have gladly held the orange tabby (see photo above) but last night, the second of the two-night run, there was no cat in sight and no meow to be heard.

Instead, there was an orchestral structure involving a score with instructions set up on a semicircle of music stands, precision timing regulated by digital clocks set up around the space. Participants had to read and then leave their timed instructions on the stands and enter the performance space just at the right moment to not strand one or another of their fellow players working off their own set of directions and schedules.

In one of a few efforts to ease any pre-performance jitters, though, Shalom told his willing participants, "There's absolutely nothing you can do wrong tonight. Whatever you do is the right thing to do."

Well, that's not exactly the case. In one instance, action had to be stopped and clocks reset for another go with a guy, stretched across a broken-legged sofa, saying "What if nothing is too serious to be joked about?" And there remained the possibility that someone from the audience-audience (unwilling non-participants) might stop the proceedings and the clock (by calling "Hold" into a dangling mic) to critique what had gone before.

And yes, that happened, although only once, the unwilling being particularly unwilling. But when it happened, it was a doozy.

One of the players, to the shock and amusement of the audience, had just finished pelting the wall and windows with half a dozen eggs. Smith showed up with a bucket of water and sponges, but one woman wasn't having it. She got up and took the mic.

"I want to see the white man clean up," she said, indicating Shalom and excavating what could have been buried deep in the minds of others. I chuckled and snapped because--you GO, girl!--that was top of mind for me. This directive from the audience-audience required a momentary negotiation between Smith and Shalom, but they managed it.

Now, mind you, that was a white woman. Most of the audience, unsurprisingly, was white. Most, I'm guessing, were artist types, performers even--which is why the willing participants seemed to look like they could well handle both the surreal theatrical activities of Dream State of Affairs and its controlled, highly-choreographed unfolding.

But one player, a white woman, seemed to balk at her next set of directions. She muttered something about not being sure she could do this before approaching one watcher and beckoning for him to come into the performance area. As she came up to me, I motioned towards my notebook, and she got the message.

She moved on, but it was a while before I figured out what was up. She had been instructed to pick out the Black people in the room. All five of us.

Without me, then, her meager haul was four. Once arranged in front of everyone, the Black people found out their fate. Again apologizing under her breath, she ordered them to turn around and stand with their arms against the wall and legs spread while the rest of the players, all of them white, whimpered in guilt. In short order, I swear to you, Smith turned all of this into the Hokey Pokey.

What if nothing is too serious to be joked about, indeed? The places your childhood memories take you? The rough debris of racial history and all the "crazy shit"--to quote Shalom's bio--that happens now? The sensuality and sexuality that only you can define? The struggle to survival and make your work in a tough market?

[Closed] For information on future events at The Invisible Dog, click here.

Covering up for Luke George

Dancer Luke George (above)
and a scene from Not About Face
(photos: Madeline Best)

Australian-born dance/performance artist Luke George has a pretty hearty notion of what audiences will tolerate. Never before have I been asked, as an audience member, to divest all of my belongings and don a bed sheet with eye holes that would make me look like a little ghostling who got terribly confused on her way back from Trick-or-Treating (with disconcerting, not so subtle visual echoes of chadors and KKK gear). George's current iteration of Not About Face, performed with collaborator Hilary Clark and, yes, every single person in attendance at The Chocolate Factory, has been described as:

An experiment in anonymous intimacy and fake belief, Not About Face questions the nature of the unspoken contracts between performer and audience, and accesses the supernatural and spiritual as a way to investigate how the yearning for belief can make people do many things. For this performance, audience members are robed in full-body shrouds and join a free-roaming and anonymous gathering in the performance space. We will come together. We will become anonymous. We will fake belief or believe in faking it.



Luke George
(photo: Madeline Best)

Funny thing about bed sheet ectoplasm: It underscores the earthly nature of the bodies underneath. Especially when you can easily recognize your friend or colleague or that downtown dance star by their height or their signature sneakers or snazzy boots. The quest for the intangible puts you smack up against the tangible when George directs you to huddle together ever closer, closer, closer to him and your neighbor runs into your toe.

The body also roars back into view with Clark's sudden crying jag, George's tantrums and, finally, George's lengthy, undeniably charismatic dance that concludes the performance. Transparency, here--used as a form of theatrics--is more spirited than spirit-ly.

I don't know about the "fake belief" thing or George's stated interest (see the program notes) in the behavior of crowds. Seems to me, it's pretty hard to see Not About Face, at least for its audience, as anything but an ordered experience that you consciously agree to participate in (with your paid ticket) to the extent of your comfort. Everyone covered up--that was the fun part--but not absolutely everyone followed every direction.

If you go, know that you will spend nearly ninety minutes mostly on your feet, milling around the space, wearing a heavy sheet that traps body heat. (Ah, yes, the body again....) Since it's cold out these nights, dress in layers and, before the show, leave most of them with that nice coat check person downstairs.

Sound/video/set/system programming: Nick Roux
Lighting: Benjamin Cisterne

Not About Face continues tonight and Saturday with performances at 8pm, and there's an additional show on Saturday at 5pm. Plan to arrive no later than 15 minutes before start time. For tickets, click here.

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

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)

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.