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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The Public Theater's PUBLIC FORUM

presents

JOSEPH STIGLITZ ON THE RICH AND POOR

Monday, December 9 at 7pm

Joe's Pub at The Public

Featuring Nobel Prize-winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz on income inequality and what the artistic community can do about it

Followed by a conversation between Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC, Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, and Public Works Director Lear deBessonet

The new Public Forum Solo series is designed to bring great artists and theater audiences into contact with America’s most vital thinkers. In this event, Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University gives a talk about the most pressing issue of our time, and some of New York’s most socially engaged artists respond to his ideas about what the creative community can do to help.

Tickets for this event go on sale on October 31. For tickets and information about other current Public Forum events, click here.

Joe's Pub at The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street (just below Astor Place), Manhattan
(map/directions)

********

PUBLIC FORUM presents the theater of ideas. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, this series of conversations and performances features leading voices in politics, media, and the arts. Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway, Cynthia Nixon, Sam Waterston, and former NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman have hosted its programs, which have featured the insights of Kurt Andersen, David Brooks, David Byrne, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Tony Kushner, Rachel Maddow, Wynton Marsalis, Francine Prose, Salman Rushdie, David Simon, Anna Deavere Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the culture writers of New York Magazine, and young veterans of the war in Afghanistan - plus performances by Christine Baranski, Matt Damon, Holly Hunter, Wendell Pierce, and Vanessa Redgrave, among others. Current Forum programs include Public Forum Drama Club, Public Forum Duets, Public Forum Solos, and the Public Forum Podcast.

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Being necessarily here...with Marjani Forté

Dancer-choreographer Marjani Forté (left) and members of her company LOVE|FORTÉ A COLLECTIVE

(photos: left, Ian Douglas; top, Wah Ming Chang, Open City Magazine)

This up-and-coming troupe will present a world premiere in March at Danspace Project.

In recent months, the American media and people, responding to a series of well-publicized tragedies, have opened up a new--although not always entirely helpful--conversation around trauma, mental illness, and public safety. For dance artist Marjani Forté, who has been considering these issues for some time, these discussions don't always lead us back to a significant source of mental distress and imbalance--the daily collision with injustice faced by millions of people marginalized by the mainstream culture. 

"We need to have a deeper conversation around who we are as a country in regards to our history around race and our systems that have been constructed around that history," the choreographer says.

During curator Ishmael Houston-Jones's historic Parallels platform at Danspace Project (February-March 2012), Forté showed a work-in-progress called Here... which she describes as an "observation of mental health in the face of systematic oppression," the impact of racism and economic inequity. Feedback on that 20-minute preview, she says, provided insight into the value of making space for "the full picture of resilience, survival, and healing." The resulting evening-length work--retitled being Here...--opens at Danspace Project on March 21 for a two-night run.

Marjani Forté (photo by Ian Douglas)

Last winter a friend and I encountered a young woman on the Q train in New York City. She was young, slender, beautifully dark skin and curly hair, bright colors and denim pants. She was ranting. She spoke about a time she should never have known about. At no older than 25, this woman spoke like an 80 year old man, about the American Flag. “..You don’t know about the blood on that flag,” she said, as she described her trauma. She carried on in this way across the Brooklyn Bridge to Midtown Manhattan. Then her voice began to change. She developed an accent, deep, thick, and broken. Finally captivated by her, my friend made eye contact with her and winked. The young woman winked back! I sobbed, my friend and I sobbed together.

I felt time pause, and in that moment, she reflected my own journey, my fight for balance, equality, and health. She inspired me to make this work, a story of connection and healing.

--Marjani Forté 

We rarely expect concert dance to tackle an issue as weighty and complex as the roots and consequences of mental illness in American society. But Forté, best known for her performances with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Urban Bush Women, is no stranger to social engagement or art that addresses difficult social concerns. Inspired by her interviews with women from the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, Forté aims, in being Here..., to "tell one story."

"The most powerful art pieces that I've seen have caused me to ask and generate my own questions about myself and how I'm implicated from telling one story," she says and notes the Benh Zeitlin film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, written by Zeitlin and playwright Lucy Alibar. 

"That movie tells one story about this one community through the eyes of this one child and her journey into adulthood. In that one story, they address the isolation of this community, the power and assets that this community has  without being defined by mainstream culture or government. They address this community's own set of values. They address how mainstream culture comes in and can completely dismantle this community by placing its values on a community that had been self-defined. They address poverty. And they also address how one person takes all of this in and owns her own self-worth and power inside of it.

"So, the way that I'm avoiding getting too complicated in my own thoughts around these issues is, I'm focused on telling one human story, hoping to affirm recovery and regeneration.

"I want people to step into one mind and the facets of that mind."

See being Here... at Danspace Project, Thursday-Friday, March 21-22 at 8pm. For complete details and ticketing, click here.

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery

East 10th Street at Second Avenue, Manhattan

(directions)

Legal issues in choreography and dance

Dance Magazine and Dance Films Association present

Legal Issues in Choreography and Dance

Thursday, October 20, 4pm

This class will provide an overview of the legal issues that affect non-profit and for-profit dance companies, individual creators, choreographers, and performers, such as dancers. Topics discussed include: business entity formation, intellectual property protection, rights of publicity, licensing, and labor and employment. This class will be taught by Elena M. Paul, Esq., VLA’s Executive Director. All registration fees are non-refundable.

Registration fees, form and other details here

Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts
1 East 53rd Street (between 5th and Madison Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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