An audience with Angie Pittman

Dancer-choreographer Angie Pittman (photo: Scott Shaw)

Sequined Kisses and Vazlean is a diptych that grapples with ways to give love, receive love, be cool, be resilient, achieve survival, and daydream. Sequined Kisses... is an exploration of interiority, and its relationship to compression, love and joy within the context of historical trauma against Black folk. ...VazLean centers “cool” as an African Diasporic concept through greasiness, lubrication, and James Brown cape choreography. Together, these two pieces are a journey towards what Donnell Alexander calls “finding the essential soul while being essentially lost.”

Presented as part of The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness at The Kitchen, Angie Pittman's performance of conjoined solos--Sequined Kisses and Vazlean--seemed like a half-hallucinated audience with Black shamanic or ancestral royalty. The James Brown/Prince lineage, in particular. One night only--and for your eyes only, lucky ones.

We saw her partly in dim light and, even when bathed in spotlight, in a form that seemed indirect and indistinct, often twirling or oriented sideways, never giving us a good look in the eye. Moving and gesturing as if through a fishbowl filled with gel. Here and not here.

The radiant white-and-gold satin cape (designed by Athena Kokoronis), which Pittman wore at the top of the hour, was lifted away by a tender supplicant and only returned late in the action. Musical voices accompanying her were often unpleasantly muddled and distorted, discordant and abrasive as if they, too, represented someones not of this time. Many pasts accumulated into the present.

Our evening with Pittman unfolded in a much-transformed performance space that turned what is normally inclined rows of audience seating into dark, bleak mountain for the holy descent and re-ascent of a spiritual being. The audience--and we were many--sat in semicircular rows opposite this "mountain," watching Pittman gradually forge her path down its central steps, her movements suggesting an effort to turn a three-dimensional body into bold, iconic marks against a black surface. Ancient, enigmatic, beautiful, powerful.

Powerful, especially, when reaching the black floor and whirling nearly--but never--out of balance on the dips and surge of the music, her surefootedness a thrill and an instruction. Vulnerable to the risk of stumbling and yet taking care of herself in the midst of the ecstasy she claimed.

Angie Pittman: Sequined Kisses and Vazlean is closed.

The Kitchen's visual art exhibition of The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness continues through August 3. Artists include Josh Begley, Paul Chan, Mel Chin, Ja’Tovia Gary, Ken Gonzales-Day, Kate Greenstreet, Titus Kaphar, Baseera Khan, Charlotte Lagarde, Seung-Min Lee, Glenn Ligon, Mores McWreath, Sandeep Mukherjee, Native Art Department International, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Cindy Sherman, Rodrigo Valenzuela and Anicka Yi. For information, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (west of 10th Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Sidra Bell's worlds of imagination and friction

Sidra Bell who presents two works this week
at New York Live Arts
(photo: David Flores)

I'm on the fence about Sidra Bell's new work F R I C T I O N (prequel)--on the bill now at New York Live Arts along with 2014's garment (Director's Choice) about which I am unreservedly enthusiastic. And so it goes. Like super-clever sci fi writers and filmmakers, Sidra Bell Dance New York creates new worlds, exactingly-designed ones and hellish, to which we are invited. We don't have to go, and maybe we don't always.

F R I C T I O N opens this season's lengthy program--two hours with an intermission. You don't get dancers more weirdly excellent--and let me underscore, here, both *weird* and *excellent*--than Bell's troupe. But I really found it difficult to stay with 56 minutes of them behaving like soulless, mechanistic blips in a manic video game. It was just not for me. That's not to say that the audacity and stylishness of Bell's entire interdisciplinary aesthetic isn't brilliant and impressive and even hypnotically seductive. It is.

But then there's garment (Director's Choice), which has already won praise, and rightly so. This 47-minute work has been promoted as:

a playful, slightly offensive jaunt that attempts to rescue the individual by constructing a world that navigates popular zeitgeists, cultural rituals and social containers. Conceived through materials the work exercises small performance ceremonies and allows the performers to speak and mask through filters to observe identity, appropriation, political incorrectness, subliminal language, transfiguration, nonsense, influence, authorship, and reformation. you’ll be remembered…###

So...okay.

But the team really worked the hell out of this one, in both sight and sound. There's Bell, the auteur who bills herself as "Director," not choreographer. And there's Amith Chandrashaker (Creative Director, Lighting Design, Décor), an adept of space and atmosphere, and costume designer Caitlin Taylor. Costuming, as might be guessed, looms large in Bell's universe but so much more here where it suggests a kind of kinky-glamorous masking of the self; an angry, frustrating search for a less-fraught, more ordinary self; and--with Sebastian Abarbanell's expansive, ritualistic solo--finally a taste of freedom.

Bell's worlds are singular--even when colliding with the worlds of Pina Bausch, fashion and Harlem's ballrooms, as they do here. They fold and contort as much as Abarbanell's uncanny body. They are as ridiculously opulent as an extravagant hotel. It's hard not to cheer Bell on when you see all these things laid out just right and danced to perfection by this crew: Abarbanell, Tushrik Fredericks, Drew Lewis, Misa Kinno Lucyshyn, Madison Wada and Leal Zielińska, her self-described "boutique brand of prolific movement illustrators...."

Sidra Bell Dance New York continues through July 1. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

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

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Willa Kim, 99

Willa Kim, Designer of Fanciful Costumes, Dies at 99
by Anita Gates, The New York Times, December 28, 2016

In the "ARENA" with Walter Dundervill

Walter Dundervill (photo by Ian Douglas)

Drop into Walter Dundervill's ARENA, a performance installation at the small arts space JACK tonight, anytime between 6pm and 9pm, and you'll feel close enough to nearly everything to feel the inexorable pull of gravity dragging everyone and everything down. If tonight is anything like the last, and there's no guarantee of that, maybe this showplace of the deep interior will feel a lot like the external world itself, and Dundervill--going about his business of dressing his seven dancer/models in a workmanly manner--will seem like the crafter of that world in his messy workshop full of mylar, aluminum foil, dropcloths, drapery, ribbons, cardboard and plexiglass, piling idea onto idea of costuming and decor details with more industry than clear sense. It might pull at your spirit to watch Omagbitse Omagbemi submit to having Dundervill tie padding to her hips and a length of ribbon around her gray, matted wig and eyes--a tiny flicker of apprehension and reluctance crosses her face each time he approaches--and to watch Rebecca Brooks, with her customary princess-like bearing, peaceably acquiesce to similar treatment. But then it's all going south, all of it, into a mess of forms mashing into one another, Brooks and Omagbemi collapsing into surrounding fabric like half-melted icing; Omagbemi encasing herself in a plastic box listlessly pushed by Brooks; their fellow performers forming a sprawl of bodies along a kind of horizontal, earthbound and joyless maypole. When I left last evening (you can come and go as you please), the intensified and briefly exciting dynamics had started devolving into clutter. Nowhere to go. But, then again, who knows what happened next? Or what will happen tonight?

Installation, costumes and sound by Walter Dundervill

Performed by Dundervill, Omagbemi, Brooks, Benjamin Asriel, Nicole Daunic, Jessie Gold, Jennifer Kjos and Kevin Lovelady

Curated by Stacy Grossfield

ARENA concludes tonight, open to viewing between 6pm and 9pm. Ticketing is by cash at the door. For further information, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Historic loss for Graham company in hurricane crisis

Martha Graham Sets and Costumes Damaged by Hurricane Sandy
by Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, November 2, 2012

Strange characters invade Danspace Project

Michelle Ellsworth: The Pythagodress

At first, I wanted to bat Ellsworth away with a flyswatter. She talked a mile a minute and looked like she was about to jump out of her skin or fry herself from the nerves out. For god's sake, she wouldn't shut up! But how can you resist a crazy who's this brilliantly crazy--and entertaining to boot? Her solo is named for Pythagoras--yes, that Pythagoras--and for the voluminous Elizabethan dress that is far more than a dress, more like a prop, installation, fortress, way of life and numerological and metaphysical concept, designed by the equally brilliant Priscilla Cohan, Janice Lacek and Bruce Miller. I began to feel strongly protective of Ellsworth as her spindly, vulnerable fingers nervously wrangled with aluminum pipes and plastic buckles, snapping this piece to that piece, adjusting the extended dress into various functional configurations. But it became clear that she knew exactly what she was doing, had done this many times before. I detected in her a survivalist's terror beneath the wispy veneer of good cheer as the self-described problem-solver unpacked more and more of her hoarded supplies--everything from the expected (a roll of duct tape) to the bizarre ("a toilet paper roll that talks to me"--and, yes, my friends, it does--and a folding shrine to Martha Graham, complete with two white votive tapers). Her condensed, ineffectual recounting of The Odyssey, by means of a flannel board and cut-out characters, finally endeared her to me forever.

Andrew Dinwiddie: Farewell Tour

With neither the ancient KISS nor its Starchild frontman Paul Stanley on my radar, I had to do some Wikipedaling to remember exactly who Stanley was/is. If you don't know or don't remember, Dinwiddie's part-lipsynced, part-unplugged solo--another virtuosic impersonation from the man who gave us the supercharged Get Mad at Sin! in 2010--will remind you. Dinwiddie's character--a prancing id decked out in a thick, black, shoulder-length wig and facial hair and mask--utilizes and acts out the 2005 bootleg CD, People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest: The Very Best of Paul Stanley's On Stage Banter. Wielding his skull-topped wireless mic like a jester's baton and surrogate phallus, Dinwiddie manages to suggest both unbridled, expansive physicality and, because of the distant and distancing effect of the rock star's recorded voice and crowd noise, a certain ghostliness. (Stanley, like KISS itself, is still around, mind you, and even preparing to tour with Motley Crue, though the Wikipedia page notes hip replacement and vocal cord surgeries.) In the second, and rambling, half of this piece, set to a Chopin sonata, Stanley appears to go on mental walkabout. While I'm not sure what we're meant to make of this delicate passage, it's an interesting development, perhaps a spiritual one, and danced with care.

Andrew Dinwiddie and Michelle Ellsworth continue their shared evening at Danspace Project tonight and Saturday night, 8pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Stephen Petronio Company at The Joyce [UPDATE]

Barrington Hinds in The Architecture of Loss
Stephen Petronio Company
(Photo: Steven Schreiber)

My guest and I spent entirely too much time scheming how one or the other of us would take possession of Stephen Petronio's shiny copper shoes by any means necessary. Then again, we had lots of time to dwell on this because Petronio was doing this queer-New Yorker-in-London spin on Steve Paxton's Intravenous Lecture (1970). Petronio turned Paxton's tale of censorship of nudity into an epic of wearing the wrong shirt at the wrong time in front of the wrong bobby and winding up in jail. Petronio talked to us while a male nurse hooked up to an IV drip and later drifted around the stage, dancing and gesticulating, as an assistant wheeled the IV pole just so and quietly gazed at him. Dancing Petronio--the Rubberband Man--was as amazing as his story's pacing and tone. And it turned out to be possible to stop coveting those shoes long enough to think how great it would be to force Rick Santorum to watch this man work.

Gia Kourlas writes an interesting assessment of Petronio's season in "Explorations of Loss, the Personal and the Public" (The New York Times, March 7), although I certainly don't agree with her preference for practice clothes over wearable art. It just wouldn't be Petronio without the sartorial drama. What's more, the new piece--The Architecture of Loss, scored by Valgeir Sigurdsson--presents the perfect integration of movement, scenic design and costuming. Even more than City of Twist (2002), The Architecture of Loss speaks to me of the atmosphere of 9/11. By that, I don't mean just the images of smoke smudging, and later billowing, across the three background panels, but also the strained, shredding and torn costumes (by Gudrun & Gudrun), as fragile as cobwebs, tinted in ash and charcoal, and the movement that seems to be all incessant, risky transition, even when one or another dancer does not move. This dance embodies insecurity. Nothing looks safe. Everything looks violated. And every action exacts more and more of a price.

In the Ethersketch I solo from Underland (2003), guest artist Wendy Whelan--in gleaming gold fringe and necklace and a crotch-high black skirt--seems to be colliding centuries in her costuming. As for her dancing, the sound equivalent of it would be a trumpet's blast--alarming, exciting and over way before you can ever settle down and get used to it.

UPDATE: Petronio has added three more performances of Ethersketch I--one tomorrow and two on Sunday.


Stephen Petronio and Company continues at The Joyce Theater through Sunday, March 11. Click here for schedule and ticket information.

The Joyce Theater
Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Sperling's weather witchery at BAC

Loie Fuller (1862-1928)

Portrait of the modern dance and lighting pioneer

c. 1900

I adore the mischievous look 
and the hairdo resembling the lush swirls 
of her famous costumes.

Don't tell me magick does not work. Dance works witchery nearly every day. Among so many others, there may be no nicer witch than Jody Sperling whose Time Lapse Dance, accompanied by percussionist Tigger Benford, worked theatrical and meteorological magick, last evening, in an intimate studio presentation at Baryshnikov Arts Center.

As the radiantly pregnant (7 months!) Sperling danced her solo Not Here Yet, with fingers skittering around her belly and out into space, the studio's high, panoramic view revealed heavy weather hanging low over Manhattan. Next, Sperling's six women dancers premiered Turbulence, a Loie Fuller-esque fantasia of swirling, undulating robes of frothy white silk, depicting dynamic currents of air. Assisted by long wands sewn into the rippling fabric, the dancers conjured billows, gusts and whirlwinds, tightly timed and coordinated patterns of hypnotic complexity. Now and again, I peeked through the window as the storm gathered. As he longish piece neared its final moments--BOOM!--the sky opened. Torrential rain!

Like Sperling, I've always been fascinated by Loie Fuller, and I've no doubt her flamboyant spirit was in the house blessing this majestic ensemble. But if any doubt remained, it was wiped away when Sperling returned with a work from repertory--her Fuller-like solo, Claire de lune, from the 2005 Debussy Soirée. She twirled, the dark clouds swept off, the sky brightened.



See Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance tonight, 6:30pm; Friday, 6:30pm, followed by a talkback; or Saturday, June 25, 2pm, including a participatory workshop.

UPDATE: 3:30pm show added on Saturday

Tickets here or 1-800-838.3006 ext. 1
 
Baryshnikov Arts Center (Studio 6A)
450 West 37th Street (between
(directions)

Student designer wins Limón competition

Sheryl Liu (scenic design, UC Irvine) has been selected to create the new sets and costumes for the Limón Dance Company’s upcoming revival of Limón’s 1956 masterwork The Emperor Jones, scheduled to premiere April 29 in Culiacan, Mexico, birthplace of Limón, followed by a tour of Mexico and presentation during the Company’s June 7-12 New York season at the John Jay Theater.

The Competition was sponsored by the Limón Dance Company and the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces for the purpose of bringing a fresh point of view to this acknowledged dance classic, on the occasion of its first restaging by the Company in 25 years. An invitation was extended to a select group of visual arts institutions in Mexico, Canada, and across the US , who invited a small group of their most talented students to apply. The Company received applications from young designers around the country, including Tennessee, California, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and 10 finalists were chosen.

Sheryl Liu was selected by the panel of judges that consisted of Carla Maxwell, Artistic Director of the Limón Dance Company; Roxane D’Orleans Juste, Company Associate Artistic Director; lighting designer Carol Mullins, and Clay Taliaferro, who learned the work directly from José Limón, danced the leading role, and will reconstruct and direct the revival.

SHERYL LIU is a third year scenic design student at UCIrvine. Her assisting credits include working in Alexander Dodge’s studio during the summer of 2009 on projects at the Old Globe, the Lansburgh, and the Roundabout Theater Company. Last summer she assisted Christopher Acebo at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her designs for Salome and La bohème have been selected to be part of EMERGE: 2011 at the Prague Quadrennial, the world’s top international stage design exhibition. Design credits at UCIrvine include The Wild Party, The Laramie Project, Little Women, Cyrano de Bergerac, Into the Woods, and The Crucible.

THE EMPEROR JONES
Premiered July 12, 1956 at the Empire State Festival, Ellenville, New York
Choreography: José Limón
Commissioned Score: Heitor Villa-Lobos
Reconstructed and Directed by Clay Taliaferro

In the classic Eugene O’Neill play, Jones, a fugitive from a chain gang, sets himself up as emperor of an island domain. He becomes a tyrant, and his mistreatment of his subjects causes them to rebel, hunt him down, and bring him to an ignominious end. The dance makes no attempt to adhere to the play’s sequence, but rather seeks to give it another dimension. The various episodes which concern Jones’ encounter with visions and hallucinations encompassing his own personal, and later, his racial memories, are juxtaposed within the necessarily brief duration of a dance.

For further information on the Limón Dance Company and its upcoming programs, click here.