Who is this body? Anabella Lenzu at La MaMa Moves!

Anabella Lenzu
(photos: Anabella Lenzu Dance)
"This is my body. The dance is coming from my body,
not the body of a 25-year-old."
--Lenzu in her post-show conversation with director Daniel Pettrow

What I most appreciate about Anabella Lenzu (Anabella Lenzu/Dance Drama), whom I have known since she took my dance writing course at New York Live Arts, is how fully she inhabits the moment. She's all there, a force of self-determination, and that serves her well in her vivid new solo, No more beautiful dances, a world premiere for La MaMa Moves!

It's a generous presence in which Lenzu--plunging headfirst into performance after a long time focused on making work for others--ramps up what it means to be a dancer. It means your body speaks for you; it is your art, one vulnerable to the judgment of others as well as your own, offered up for display and assessment. Lenzu aims to stay honest about all that. With the audience as witness, she desires to serve, too, as her own outside eye.

She marks thick lines in menstrual red around her feet and thighs, outlines she will then fill with the same color and with furious energy. She allows two live-streaming cameras--one from above, one from below--to snoop around every surface and crevice of her 42-year-old body. This reads a bit like feminism of the My Body, My Self kind, an effort to take look at herself, journal what she observes, understand and come to grips with the changes undergone with the years and after giving birth to her two kids.

With the help of director Daniel Pettrow and the mentors she will cite after the show, this "journal" has been distilled down to about 40 minutes. But it encompasses so much--all that can be seen and all that needs to be imagined upon reflection of the viewer's own history. It stretches across the walls of The Downstairs theater's waiting area where blown-up, drawing-enhanced selfies of the dancer have been hung. It includes Lenzu's sturdy, expressive movement, of course, and her husband Todd Carroll's video projections but also Lenzu's speaking and songs recalled from her Argentinian youth--all to recapture a grounding sense of a self almost lost here in a new land.

In her post-show chat with Pettrow and the audience, Lenzu answered the inevitable question about her title, No more beautiful dances, by calling it a warning: "This dog will bite you."

Oh, yeah, I get that. When I first read the title, I thought of it as: "No more beautiful dances...for YOU, MISSY!" I also could not help but hear a poignant question: "Am I no longer able to make beauty?"

But I think an audience member figured out something better, something true of Lenzu when he offered this:

"No more pretty dances. Ah, but beauty...!"

Costumes: Jennifer Johanos
Lighting design: Hao Bai

No more beautiful dances has a final performance tonight at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan

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Steppin' out with Rick Owens in Paris

Rick Owens Paris Fashion Week Show Took Runway Diversity To A Whole New Level

by The Huffington Post, September 26, 2013

What's next for The Black Swan?

No, not that one!

Click below to read about Black ballerina Aesha Ash's Swan Dreams Project.

The Black Swan Diaries: The Next Step
by Aesha Ash, The Black Swan Diaries, October 29. 2011

A pretty big "IF"

Heidi Latsky (of Heidi Latsky Dance) took a frisky turn in her career several years ago when she started exploring the interesting movement possibilities and specific virtuosities of performers who have disabilities. Originally, her GIMP PROJECT spotlit the skills and charisma of these performers--most memorably, Lisa Bufano and Lawrence Carter-Long--partly because of its episodic nature, the result of rehearsal scheduling complexities. Her new hour-long work, The GIMP Project: IF, moves into more ambitious--and, in a way, ambiguous--territory. It largely pulls away from what, even though not consciously intended, became star-making machinery to attempt a larger, more communal point of view with nearly two dozen performers of varying races, ages, body sizes, physical abilities and disabilities, and experience with dance. You can see it this afternoon and evening in its last showings at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival (details below).

IF answers the question I had in my head when I set out to see this show: Where can Latsky go next? Answers it truly, if not with complete satisfaction. Although much of IF derives from improvisation--something new for Latsky--it still feels tightly restrictive, mysterious, too, since it's hard to get a clear sense of what's being held in.

The first section opens with a brief guest performance by La MaMa honoree Joan Finkelstein, stretchy and half-lit atop a recessed, elevated section of the stage. It also employs the theater's side balconies--although not particularly effectively--with Latsky slowly revolving, dipping and lifting her upper body while, across the room, Jeffrey Freeze first holds a pose in near darkness then moves behind his railing. Suleiman Rifai--dancer, psychotherapist and marathon runner who is blind--introduces the first real visual design interest as his long, lean body casts stark, precise shapes against a wooden barrier that marks the rear of the performance space. Latsky will eventually join him there, both of them splaying across the wall and sometimes overlapping, and Freeze will also descend from his balcony.

Music: moody sonic wallpaper, repetitive and mournful or chime-y and looping--think Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells," but less aggressive and, well, demonic--and later the raspy amplification of someone breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and.... Movements: frequently sinking low to the ground and hanging out there or turning away towards that high wall under tamped-down lighting. Overall feeling: depressive, perhaps intentionally. Watching something simply feeding upon itself is enervating, and Latsky's movement ideas are not yet resonant enough in themselves.

The second phase of IF starts as Julia Hahn-Gallego, expressionless in face and body, rollerblades around the space while other dancers carry chairs to their places, the legs scraping out a hive-like buzz. Her husband, George Gallego--survivor of a spinal cord injury and founder of Wheels of Progress--will later weave, swirl and do wheelies amid the more regulated rows of seated dancers. The patterns of those rows, and the movements, may open out as the section continues, but the choreography here seems not only dry and restrained but severely dialed down to make individuality--including the specificity of  disabilities, where they exist--something that you will have to catch by really looking for it. Not a bad thing in itself, but just saying. This flag might have stars, but they're as regular as the ones on Old Glory.

Jennifer Bricker, who was born without legs, and her aerial partner Nate Crawford are well known to fans of GIMP PROJECT for their romantic work aloft, suspended by crimson ribbons of silk. They contribute the longish but affecting third phase that concludes IF, its only underscored spectacle. The technical and physical control they need to do what they do injects something less than carefree about this performance, making the inevitable kiss just that--inevitable and suspected, not a lovely surprise.

Friday's audience received this duet, and the overall evening, with big cheers. The Q&A session also showed, once again, that audiences have taken Latsky and her dancers to their hearts. The work already reaches them directly. For that reason, Latsky's investigation has scored a success. But, more important for its aspirations as art, she continues to ask questions, learn from it and grow it. There's really no telling where it can take her next.

Other performers: Idil Bray, Stephanie Busia, Meredith Fages, Kevin Fay, Ambar Gonzalez, David Harrell, Terrence Hewitt, Jillian Leigh Hollis, Elfie Knecht, Claude Louissaint, Eve Packer, Jenny Rocha, Robert Simpson and Thomas Vallette

The GIMP Project: IF at La MaMa today, 2:30pm and 7:30pm

Tickets

La MaMa (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Movements: Politics, Performance, and Disability

Movements: Politics, Performance, and Disability

The Scholar & Feminist Conference XXXVI

Barnard College

Saturday, 2/26 (9-5pm)

This year's Scholar & Feminist conference brings together feminism and disability studies, two fields that have contributed to the interrogation of the public/private divide, and when brought together, radically contest and amplify the ways in which this split has produced extremely thin understandings and practices of accessibility, participation, livelihood, visibility and integration. Movements: Politics, Performance, and Disability will look closely at the ways in which political action and cultural production contribute to new ways of imagining what an inclusive society might look like for all. Through dance, film, political engagement and dialogue, we will make our way from Barnard College to New York City to the larger world and back again, exploring the ways in which artistic endeavors, scholarship, and politics have all led to mobilizations for feminist and disability activism. The conference features a series of workshops on topics including parenting and disability, alternatives to creating community in the face of privitization and state budget cuts, films on disability, and a new project on oral histories with Barnard and Columbia alumnae who identify as disabled. The day concludes with a special performance by the Heidi Latsky Dance Company, a fully integrated dance group.

Panelists include Nirmala Erevelles, Carrie Sandahl, Susan Schweik, Alice Sheppard, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rachel Adams, Pam Cobrin, Faye Ginsburg, Ansel Lurio, Kate Schaub, Penny Wolfson, Mary Marshall Clark, Ynestra King, Julie Maury, Stacey Milbern, and Akemi Nishida. ReelAbilities Film Festival will present a series of groundbreaking short films made by and about different deaf communities from around the world.

A conference website and online registration will be available online in late January. Please join our email list or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.