Bebe Miller Company and Susan Rethorst make room for process

Gabrielle Revlock and Gregory Holt
in Susan Rethorst's Stealing from Myself
(photo: Robert Altman)

Go here now.

It's "The Making Room," the cleverly-named online home (in development) dedicated to a meeting of the minds between dancemakers Bebe Miller and Susan Rethorst in embodied conversation about creative process "from start to premiere." This week, these two also share evenings at New York Live Arts where, if lucky enough to snare a ticket, you can sit among downtown's savviest artists and watch stellar performers of contemporary dance charge and activate space.

The Making Room is a much longer evening than one might expect at NYLA or most downtown spaces. Rethorst's duet, Stealing from Myself, runs 35 minutes, and Miller's ensemble, In a Rhythm, clocks in at 70. Between them: a 15-minute intermission. So: a commitment. Sort of like your trip to see Ailey, including Revelations...and maybe including revelations. Somehow, though, it never feels excessively long.

Both artists, admirably, draw from a seemingly bottomless, self-refreshing well of movement ideas; in the case of Rethorst, that also includes recycled material (hence, the "stealing from myself"). With Rethorst, the fascination is in watching how she deploys the bodies of Gabrielle Revlock and Gregory Holt along with simple props (two wood chairs, two small stacks of books) without being precious about how we usually see things--the bodies being people and the props being inanimate. Everything presented to us has shape and parts that, like 3-D puzzle pieces, can be set in motion, as if by Mickey's magic wand, and placed in proximity to each other in quirky ways, often at high speed. The pace of the pair's opening section makes things especially amusing if not laugh-out-loud funny. Seeing the familiar put to unfamiliar uses begins to make the viewer call everything into question. When something emerges that kinda looks like a ballet run through a Rethorstian blender, you just chuckle to yourself. Well, of course she would.

With Miller, I found myself not paying attention so much to individual movement ideas as to how she surveyed and, with her ensemble, claimed the landscape of the space, even extending it by leaving houselights up at times and addressing us directly to share artists and incidents that influence her making. The dancers are Michelle Boulé, Christal Brown, Sarah Gamblin, Angie Hauser, Bronwen MacArthur, Trebien Pollard and sometimes, and wonderfully, Miller herself. There's that initial, clean, floaty flow; agitation and scattering; sweep around and across the floor; a wash of movement, a splattering, a peeling away, a deft shifting of arrangements; a droopy hanging out together. Here and there, a centerpiece, like Boulé sailing over this song by Donny Hathaway which one YouTube commentor has rightly described as "grown folks music." Boulé gives us full-out grown-folks dancing, as she always does. The juxtaposition of that song--a man giving his all even when he has very little--and her performance is heart-stopping. It might be my imagination, but it sure looked like Boulé made everyone else after her work harder--even Miller.

I also enjoyed noticing individual minds at work--no two alike--and, in particular, watched for Christal Brown's decisions. I assuming they were decisions, not directives, because they looked that way, like they arose from her in the moment, had her signature and were fully hers to make. They made me think back to Miller's citing of Toni Morrison--and the frustrating silliness of an interview Charlie Rose conducted with the valiant Black author (questioning why she always has to write about Black people). In the face of so much failure to "get it," the corrective is just to persist in being Toni Morrison, being Christal Brown, being Michelle Boulé and Bebe Miller. Do what you do and press on.

The Making Room continues nightly through Saturday, February 24 with performances at 7:30pm. After tonight's program, there will be a Stay Late conversation. Saturday, from 2-4PM: Shared Practice. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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"Her Fishtrap": a reflection from Ni'Ja Whitson

Choreographer Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

In Her Fishtrap, dance artist and guest writer Ni’Ja Whitson reflects on Building a Better Fishtrap, a work presented at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange this month by choreographer Paloma McGregor in collaboration with visual artist Sara Jimenez, installation designer Vassi Spanos and sound designer Everett Saunders.

Photos by Whitney Browne

***

Her Fishtrap

Cold jar swings
from the ceiling.
Coating
its translucence
interior
thick
off white spill.
A residue
memory, and time.

Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

It is another of McGregor’s portals.

Building a Better Fishtrap commands its audience receive and witness with the same stamina the soloist McGregor rigorously expels. The performance takes place between three floors of Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a spatial expanse that mirrors the vast locations of physical, object, and media vocabularies embodied. She is wielder/welder/poet/cyclone/octopus/child/magician/dreamer.

Fishtrap’s audience becomes her ocean-bound garden, being toiled and rooted as the piece unfolds. One of the work’s most striking and successful elements is the manipulation of object and/in space. Among all three floors, her unique world is made by the ways in which the calculated manipulation of objects installed in the performance space are activated. On the first floor, mason jars are rolled and spun, opened and emptied, carried with care and abandoned. McGregor, at one point, makes a clever emptying roll of a jar, releasing a swell of aromatic ground mint, then proceeds to further make her/self a conjurer, shifting the air through the sense of smell. She then wafts the jar to the witnesses, puts mint grounds in hand, over body, head and floor. She cleanses and reopens. The doing in this work is its magic. And McGregor does both the subtle and grand with such intention, the magic hypnotizes.

Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

She breaks
through time. Strung
as a clothesline
the years hang.
With back wing
spread the ocean
sorceress stops
let light wonder over
body.
She sings her birth.
Dances a life
from the deep.

It was born to her.

McGregor is a masterful constructionist; her choreographic structure is tightly considered, thus where she “plays” she, too, devises. Strategically and uniquely working within a grounded knowledge of African diasporic vocabularies (and beyond), Fishtrap makes meaning in the employment of improvisation as a virtuostic practice. And the lines where presumably “set” or improvisationally set material live, exist here as wonderfully blurred. The dance of this performance is as much in the spaces of (brief) stillness as it is in McGregor’s turns, arm curves, undulations, and foot pounds. This is critical to the work; there are no disposable gestures.

Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

Black mama joy

spin her.
Wave skirt and dive
into.
She wet.
We dry. But we all swim.
Black mama child girl
cross a net sea
to the other side.
We wait
at the shore
she our people
bones in the dark.

Paloma McGregor’s Building a Better Fishtrap is an embodied poem and slicing exposition of memory. It, at times lullabies in quiet movement or task, then within an instant destabilizes through near-cinematographic staging and striking movement. Fishtrap gifts what it inquiries: play and recall.

Her Fishtrap
©2016 Ni’Ja Whitson

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Limits of the S K Y: Gill, Anderson, Hay at New York Live Arts

New York Live Arts is what now? Some combination of 92Y and TED Talks? A place, beyond dance, for avant garde marquee names and hip intellectuals to hold forth?

Not that those are necessarily bad things. Let us, indeed, engage with the most stimulating and crucial issues of our day. But the home for a wide range of contemporary dance and performance art--a place I've cherished since the 1970s, where ideas were already quite alive without being forced--seems far from recognizable today.

Again, this is not to suggest that, as a work of intersection, New York Live Arts's annual Live Ideas Festival--launched in 2013 with programs inspired by Oliver Sacks and, last year, James Baldwin--lacks potential meaning and usefulness. By all means, let's intersect. Let's get real intersecty in ways that even the new boss, Bill T. Jones, might not be ready to imagine.

But let's make it work.

This year's Live Ideas Festival, curated by the famously intersecty Laurie Anderson, bears the title, "S K Y - Force and Wisdom in America Today," and New York sophisticates will please themselves to be in one another's presence enjoying contributions from marquee names like Anderson's, Anne Carson, Julian Schnabel, John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros and dance's own Deborah Hay in a slate of 25 events, including performances, screenings, readings and talks.

The desired audience for New York Live Arts will be able to shell out a minimum of $50 to witness a "conversation" between Anderson and Hay, her collaborator on Figure a Sea, a upcoming premiere for Sweden's Cullbert Ballet. And, yes, this less than enlightening encounter followed the premiere of an hour-long dance by Bessie-winner Beth Gill, commissioned for the festival, something that certainly might have run all by itself at New York Live Arts (or even Dance Theater Workshop) but at less than that S K Y-high price point.

From Beth Gill's Portrait Study
at New York Live Arts
(photos: Yi-Chun Wu)

No shame to Gill in describing her presentation, Portrait Study, as a rush job. Gill admits as much. She got Live Arts' invite at the end of January.

January 2015.

So, with her bang-up cast of downtown dance artists, here's how she handled things:

I am building a structural overlay that will both incorporate and highlight the improvised movement of a cast of brilliant dancers. I am using a complex and layered movement score, which will act as both a map and a set of directives for the performers. The show as a whole will be an improvised installation in which the event's timing and structural arrangement is determined by the performers. The movement material for each dancer will be a combination of self-directed individualized choreography and past experiences they have from working within the score during our rehearsals.

--Artist's Statement 

Portrait Study--accompanied live with Eliot Krimsky and Ryan Seaton's electronic score and a song by Eliot Krimsky/Glass Ghost--presents "short autobiographical solos that collect in the space over the course of the hour." One or another of a total of thirteen dancers emerges or bursts into the space, executes a short or sustained passage of abstract, eccentric improvisation and finally sinks into a dead pose on the floor. The floor, littered with bodies of the fallen--at one point, I thought of Jonestown--becomes a more and more crowded platform for each dancer, each self-portrait drawn.

A one-time-only event, remember. Here, Gill used the ephemeral nature of dance--and of her specific challenge from New York Live Arts--to strip her usually meticulous process of its training wheels. In this, she reminds me of Katie Workum with her Authentic Movement-inspired Black Lakes shown, just last week, at Danspace Project. Like Workum, Gill now entertains a "broad goal of finding less controlled ways of working—while still producing beautiful and meaningful work...without the pressure of becoming bound over time to the product." She asks of each dancer that they find and make the dance largely from their own inner materials.  Since we're talking about recognized adepts such as David Thomson, Neal Beasley, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Stuart Singer, Jodi Melnick and Emily Wexler, there can be interesting moments to take in and appreciate.

And there can be puzzlement.

Again, as with Workum's presentation, each witness will decide whether all these parts--fascinating or not so much--add up to a substantial sum or if they even need to do so. Perhaps, as observers of dance, we're also being trained to take satisfaction where and when we can.

After a 20-minute intermission, the Anderson-Hay "conversation" kicked on with a rocky, baffling start. Collaborators? The two women did not seem to occupy the same psychic space.

If you're wondering why the quote marks: Is it a conversation when, over the course of an hour, one person is doing almost all of the talking, nearly nonstop? After a long time, though, Hay slipped from her folding chair and started moving around it, around the space, to the edge of the audience and back home to her original perch--while Anderson rambled on or played music, some of which was delicious, at her electronic setup.

I don't know if Hay's sojourn was planned, but it was reasonable strategy--meeting verbal torrent with the language of the body in space.

The evening had started at 7:30. Around 9:40, Anderson looked out and acknowledged that the audience might have questions. I took my leave.

For information on other events from Live Ideas 2015: S K Y - Force and Wisdom in America Today, click here.

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

A. Nia Austin-Edwards explores the world of dance artist Nia Love

I'd like to welcome guest writer A. Nia Austin-Edwards who has contributed a fascinating profile of New York-based dance artist Nia Love. Both women demonstrate profound commitment to art in the context of culture and community. Their inspiring professionalism, generosity and creativity make it a pleasure and honor to share my space at InfiniteBody with them. Please enjoy.

Nia Love in Memory Withholdings at BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange)
(photo: Iquo Essien)

A. Nia Austin-Edwards
(photo: Gerry Eastman)

No Lines & No Coloring Books:

Nia Love’s Polyrhythmic Existence

by A. Nia Austin-Edwards

Polyrhythm, simultaneous sounds that create an elaborate musical composition, is commonplace in music of the African diaspora—spirituals, jazz, salsa, blues, hip hop, and beyond. As my sister-friend, mentor, and artistic inspiration, Adia Tamar Whitaker says, “Cooking dinner, watching babies, planning the weekend, and talking on the phone, that’s polyrhythm too.” Indeed, many of us negotiate a plethora of rhythms—art, life, parenting, race, gender, sexuality, nation building—all at the same cadence. Nia Love is one of those phenomenal beings, and she continues to be an inspiration to us all.

As the Skype call begins, I enter a room full of shadows. Nia Love is framed by plants, and her afternoon soundtrack is her husband’s jazz band in rehearsal. The internationally-renowned band also features her 10-year-old son, Kojo, on drums. This is her world–epitomizing life as art in a way I see so infrequently that I often wonder if it’s even real.

When Nia Love was young, she always wanted a coloring book. As she and her father waited in line at the grocery store, she would ask and ask and always be told no. She remembers being four- or five-years-old and complaining to her mother that her father kept refusing to buy her a coloring book. Her father overheard her and responded:

"I'm not going to get you coloring books because it's the first oppressor. It's the first thing you have as a child that makes you conform to a line that's not yours. It's not what you make. What you make is important. So you make the line and color it in if you want. And if you want to go out the line, go out the line. But I will not give you someone else's mark and consciously oppress you."

This message has informed her life, her art, her world, and anyone who has met Love would agree that she makes her own lines and colors where she pleases. I wholeheartedly admire this commitment to identity, ideas, and self—a steadfastness that is not often easy to maintain.

Nia Love is a choreographer, mother, performer, wife, educator, grandmother, artist, doula, scholar, jazz lover, collaborator. Her story is not linear. It is one that places family and humanity at the forefront, one that challenges perceptions of art and hierarchy, one that exists outside any frame I have ever known.

Beginning at the Beginning

Nia Love has performed across the world. She has lived in Ghana, Cuba, Sweden, Harlem, and beyond. She has raised children, helped these children birth grandchildren, held hands with grandparents as they transitioned, and when I ask her where her dance begins she offers her absolute beginning. She observes:

“As dancers, when we start talking about our physical careers we start talking about training. I think you come with everything, and then we start peeling that everything away. We start with infinite numbers of things, and as soon as you take that first breath you're that many breaths closer to death. Training becomes something that can confine us based on how we manifest it.”

She remembers a letter her mother sent her from her childhood home in California to where she was working in Japan. In the letter, her mother shares a memory of a New Year’s Eve party that she attended days before Love was born. At the party, her mother couldn’t stop dancing. Her friends told her “You better sit down! You’re about to have that baby right here on this floor.” The morning after the party, her mother woke up feeling the “most freedom she had felt in her life.” Love was not born that day, but in fact four days later. Still, she was dancing well before she entered the physical world.

Portraits of Nia Love
(photo below by Antoine Roney)

With this we begin to understand the integrated life Nia Love leads. Her father was a sculptor who taught at Florida State University, New World School of the Arts, and Howard University. In his Washington, D.C. backyard, he had a welding studio with images of Malcolm X, Sojourner Truth, and Toni Morrison on the walls and John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Thelonius Monk as his creative soundtrack. The blending of art, identity, and academia is not a conscious choice for Nia Love. Rather, it is the foundation of her experience.

From California to Cuba

An avid young reader, Nia Love spent days sitting on the floor covered by books in the now-forgotten space known as the library. After seeing a movie that featured fairies whose costumes she liked, Love decided she wanted to study ballet. It was the only dance she saw that had similar costumes. Through her reading she came to understand that the Russians were the gatekeepers of ballet technique, so she searched California’s phone book for a Russian ballet teacher. Yes, the good old Yellow Pages directed her to her first ballet teacher, Olga Fricker. No YouTube videos or Facebook pages, just a name and a phone number.

After six years of study in California, Love asked to join her father in D.C. so she could be as close to New York as possible to further her dance career. She received a scholarship to train at the Washington School of Ballet (WSB) where she experienced struggles that I found all too familiar. No matter how good she felt about her technique, she was constantly challenged by a body type that was not “ideal” and racism that would always define her as “second best.”

Nia Love was about twelve years old when Ballet Nacional de Cuba was rehearsing in WSB’s studios. While watching a rehearsal, Love found herself enthralled by artists who looked like her, “from my skin to my hair to my body and my hips and they were KILLING IT!” Seeing herself reflected in these artists was life changing. They were not only technically sound, but “completely driven spiritually, completely present in their emotion and love and passion.”

Alicia Alonso, the company’s co-founder and one of the dancers she had studied in those library books, came to watch Love’s class one afternoon. As the other students left class, Nia Love sat with Alonso and her translator discussing her dance training and the experience of being the only Black body in the room. Alonso invited her to study with the company. The ecstatic teenager spent almost two years in Cuba before her mother made her return. She learned Spanish, developed global friendships, and was introduced to the world of Afro-Cuban rhythms that have become integral to her movement vocabulary. Danza Nacional de Cuba, the contemporary wing of the company at the time, taught Love about “being present, powerful, loving, caring, about putting it all on the line.” They understood that dance was her spiritual commitment, her “priesthood.”

Love returned to the States and continued her dance training at Duke Ellington School of the Arts with new tools in her toolbox. She broadened her international lifestyle as an exchange student, and went on to attend Howard University and Florida State University, beginning her family along the way. She then became a second generation Fulbright Scholar, following in the footsteps of her father who had spent two years in Sweden and took her all over Europe between the tender ages of four and six.

A Polyrhythmic Existence

In 2001, Nia Love’s Fulbright brought her and her family to Ghana. She was supposed to arrive on September 11 but instead departed two weeks later on her late father’s birthday. As Love says, “My daddy was with me that whole trip!”

She went to Ghana as a research lecturer, but did not get much written research done. Bringing her family shifted her focus. She spent her days teaching and her evenings mothering--cooking dinner, cleaning clothes, fighting malaria, and everything in between. “That trip was more an experience for my children than for me,” Love reflects.

This role of mother is one that Love cherishes and respects, not only as a doula who has helped birth at least 40 children, but also as a mother-artist herself. When pregnant women, mothers, or single parents come to take her class, she offers them the flexibility of paying what they can because she understands the priorities of parenting. Love observes, “As mother artists, we live in the world differently. We can’t follow the prescribed way of doing things.” And her journey to Ghana shifted her own lines of priorities and risk-taking.

Traveling with family, particularly with children, there is no space to indulge selfish desires or fears. “I had to exercise my ability to show them my liberating mind so they don't have inhibitions built up by seeing me have an inhibition,” she says. When the children asked where to go to the bathroom, Love had to show them how to squat and relieve themselves in the dirt. “I had to be really open and really careful at the same time.”

With her children’s lives in her hands, she had to make immediate decisions about what risks she would take based on whatever information was in front of her. This is what choreographer Adia Whitaker calls a polyrhythmic lifestyle, balancing the risk-taking with the openness. And this polyrhythmic existence has colored Nia Love’s art-making as well.

Each Process is A Process

As her son Kojo gets livelier on his drums in the background, Nia Love shares painful tales of her early struggles as a choreographer. However, Love’s lessons have allowed her to integrate her upbringing among “Garvey-ites” (followers of the teachings and philosophies of Marcus Garvey), who examined race at every intersection, into art that exists in a so-called “post-racial America.” She developed an artistic practice that mines movement through a constantly evolving choreographic voice, informed by whatever is in front of her. Her polyrhythmic existence manifests in her polyrhythmic creations. She acknowledges:

“I never stopped talking about race, but I started being really smart about how to look at the paradigm and intersections of race. And because I started looking deeper into those intersections I was also able to look deeper into the intersection of composition, the way in which I mine material. How I get in it, open it, shift the lens of it. It made me rethink my own intersections, about the way I deal with a pervasive, very oppressive system–mentally, physically, spiritually. How I deal with it with my children and how I prepare them for a system that targets them, particularly my Black boy, how it targets him and his life. It's not dance for me. It's life.”

Love visits Kara Walker's A Subtlety
(photo: Onye Ozuzu)

Love continues to investigate these intersections through a worldview in her newest work, a five-lens project called “The Agricultural Body for the Post-colonized Body.” She began by traveling Tanzania where she worked with farmers and dancers in the rural and urban areas of Dar es Salaam, the country’s largest and richest city. That exploration equipped her with gestures and movements based on the swinging, throwing, and shoveling of agricultural tools.

Love and students of Fordham-Ailey's New Directions Choreography Lab
prepare for their January showing (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
See InfiniteBody post.

Those movements informed her development of the second lens with Fordham-Ailey BFA students in the New Directions Choreographic Lab. She wanted to see how this agricultural movement filtered in a “technicalized body.” For five weeks she investigated who could color outside the lines and just how far they would go. She interviewed them about the communities they grew up in and looked at how their experiences aligned with their exploration and mining of the movement. And sometimes, she had return to “contemporary mode” to then break the lines:

“I would come into a phrase of African cultural movement, then I would swing it into another contemporary motif so they could edge it off. And then they could understand the intersection. Then they would bring to their mouth the question of how does that start, ‘because I got the swing out part, but what is that in between’?”

Then Love deepened the exploration by bringing soil into the studio. As they rolled around, ran their fingers through, and literally got down and dirty, she was able to further delve the lines and frames of every student in the studio.

As she approaches the third lens, she will return to Tanzania to learn to craft tools with farmers. And after that, well, she doesn’t know. Every process is a new experience. Love lets each process inform the next but also seeks to fully explore what’s in front of her. She describes:

“If I were to work with you, then you're bringing something else to my process. So now I have to meld my process into your process, because if I deny the process that's in front of me then I deny the information. So I can't think that it’s MY process, I have to think it’s A process, and each process is different.” 

And with that, Kojo offers a high-hitting, intricate drum solo. CRASH!

BIOS

Nia Love is an established choreographer who has taught at educational institutions, universities and festivals throughout the USA, Africa and Asia. An American Fulbright fellow, Nia has worked in England, West Africa, Japan, France, Colombia, Cuba, USA, and most recently Tanzania. Nia is the Artistic Advisor for Tanzania's prominent dance institution, MuDa Africa, and has recently created work for the nationally acclaimed Ailey|Fordham BFA program along with creating and presenting numerous dance works throughout the world. She was also awarded two consecutive Suitcase Fund grants, an initiative if New York Live Arts. Nia has been creating work over the past 2-½ decades with at least 20 works under her belt and continues to conducts annual research in Tanzania, East Africa on Agriculture and Dance. Nia Love has joined forces with Marjani Forté to form Love|Forté a collective. They have received their 2nd year AIR at BAX and are proud recipients of the Mertz Gilmore Grant 2014. Love|Forté will be presenting their premiere evening-length performance/installation, Memory Withholdings, at the Pillsbury House Theater in Minneapolis, MN, this fall. Most recently, Nia is the proud recipient of the CUNY-Hunter College Dance Initiative 2014-15, a selected adjunct position at Queens College Dance Department, and Texas Women's University’s 2014-15 winter Guest Choreographer.

A. Nia Austin-Edwards (ANAE) began her dance training in Atlanta, GA, at Total Dance / Dancical Productions, Inc. She went on to major in dance at Tri-Cities Visual and Performing Arts Magnet High School and received a B.F.A. in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Nia currently performs with Brooklyn-based ASE Dance Theatre Collective and remains an associate member of Atlanta's Total Dance Company and Axam Dance Theatre Experience. In 2013, she started PURPOSE Productions--a company that supports artists and activists in the manifestation of PURPOSE-full work that seeks to unify and develop our world community. She serves as an editor and correspondent to The Dance Enthusiast, and shares more personal thoughts on her blog, nocurtains.wordpress.com. Nia is enthusiastic about opportunities for movement to be a lens for viewing, redefining, questioning, challenging, living, loving, and anything else.

Movement Research Studies Project studies curation, inclusion, community

Studies Project: Let Me In Let Me In Or I'll Blow This House DownCurators on Process and the Matter of Inclusion

Moderated by Juliette Mapp and Jen Rosenblit

Josie's
520 East 6th Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan

FREE

To feel a part of something. Communal, to have community. To be asked, invited in, to ask to be invited in. Access, entry. While the role of curator and the process of curation holds as much artistry as the making of dance and performance, we hone in on an equally important need for a touch of transparency surrounding the presentation of dance and the body. What issues and concerns arise inside of a shifting community where representation is crucial for belonging and sustainable support? What are we doing to reach out to more artists? Where are those artists? Who are those artists? What are the complexities that arise while supporting the sustainability of an artist? What responsibility do we have to an idea of cultivating and supporting "newness"? Where is the body inside all of this? How do we digest being on the inside or outside of something spiritually, aesthetically, emotionally and academically?

Participants include:

Ben Pryor (American Realness) 

Laurie Berg and Liliana Dirks-Goodman (AUNTS)

Rebecca Brooks

Barbara Bryan

Matthew Lyons (The Kitchen)

O, Hay! Dancers talk about working with Deborah Hay

Watch three dancers--Luke George, Michelle Boulé and Miguel Gutierrez--talk about working with choreographer Deborah Hay in this video from Walker Art Center. Click here.

"Making Work" with Miguel Gutierrez

MAKING WORK
Workshop with Miguel Gutierrez

Miguel Gutierrez (Photo by Ves Pitts)

Monday-Friday, December 17-21

10am to 2pm

New York City Center

$200

In this workshop we will focus on the creative process in making body/movement based performance. Participants will spend the week making short pieces, mostly solos. I first offered this workshop in 2003, and have enjoyed its various permutations throughout the years. This is the first time I lead it in NYC in over three years.

Originally my reason for creating this workshop was that I wanted to find out if it was possible to create the conditions to teach something that can’t actually be learned – how to make work. I discovered that through unequal parts making, discussing, improvising and watching the work of other workshop participants, you can uncover and deepen your individual interests, your process and your work.

My interest is in creating a space where inherited notions of dance and performance are critiqued, absorbed or discarded in the service of creating performance that comes from a vital, necessary place and that speaks to a contemporary context. There is no one way to make work.

My teaching is influenced by: years of teaching this workshop, years of seeing shows and talking with various artists about them, my experiences working with many extraordinary performance makers, my experience in making my own work in various scales and in a host of places/conditions, my pseudo-Zen/Feldenkrais belief system that tells me you can’t force anyone to change but can create the conditions for spontaneous learning, and my belief that everyone is a creative artist of potential brilliance and that “genius is as common as dirt.” (John Taylor Gatto)

This workshop is useful for artists who are anywhere in their trajectories as performance makers.

Workshop participation is limited and by selection only. If you are interested please send an email/doc, one page max (500 words or so), with some information about yourself and why you interested in joining the workshop to Miguel@miguelgutierrez.org.

Please explain if you have any schedule conflicts. Priority will be given to those who can attend all of the days and times.

Sharing the process: Tere O'Connor and "BLEED"

Get inside the process of making dance with BLEED: A Process Blog from award-winning choreographer Tere O'Connor and writer/performance scholar Jenn Joy.

....BLEED, trespasses between dance and dialogue, process and idea and includes interviews between Tere and Jenn, “interrogations” or discussions at open rehearsals, video and text documentation. In addition, Tere provides ongoing reports from the studio in the PROCESS NOTES section. We invite you to read, to watch, to ask questions of our attempt to more transparently reveal the systems, values and thinking surrounding the making of these dances. 

Visit BLEED here.

"Writing the Living Matrix" with Deena Metzger

Deena Metzger's Writing the Living Matrix

The imagination is a real place. The real life and our future reside there. It is rich with stories, visions and dreams. When we enter this sphere, the writing experience calls self and other(s) into dynamic relationship on the page. This writing can be like a council that holds all the voices, including our ancestors and descendants as cohorts. It develops from the intrigue that we can each imagine and enter a new literature that looks to and helps create a future, vibrant, beautiful and alive....

To follow Story is to understand the path of healing.
Each of our stories is a universe.
Each one of us is living a story. 
To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making.

 --Deena Metzger (Author, Writing for Your Life)

Click here to learn more about and register for Metzger's Writing the Living Matrix workshop at Rowe Camp & Conference Center (Rowe, MA in the Berkshires), October 12-14.

Susan Rethorst: A Choreographic Mind

I've just finished reading essays by a dancemaker who, while pressing words to fine use, celebrates quiet, visceral intuition over verbal, intellectual modes of being that are usually more highly prized. Susan Rethorst's A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings (Teatterikorkeakoulu: Kinesis 2, 2012) takes her readers deep into the sensibilities of an artist who chooses to embrace "not knowing, not quite controlling," honoring what her body tells her and what the dances she makes tell her, too.

The book presents two strands for us to follow: Rethorst's life-altering experiences in youth and her application of personal transformation to creative process. In a custody dispute, her father kidnapped her and her brother Johnny when they were quite young. Two years later, he kidnapped the boy again and, this time, she would not see Johnny until he was 21. I get the impression that while Rethorst must relate this disturbing history--which left her, into adulthood, disinclined to speak but inclined to watch people intently and read the subtle currents and language of bodies--she does so only to set the stage for a calm exploration of how dances are made, how they reveal and present themselves and how they might best be perceived by maker and witness alike.

Rethorst's discussions could benefit fellow choreographers; clearly, she hopes to share her ideas with young artists who frequently stumble over treacherous piles of shoulds and shouldn'ts--what this favored artist does, what that prominent critic appears to reject or champion, what Teacher says is the right thing to do, what's trendy among peers or presenters this season. To these artists, she offers her trust in the unconscious, the body, the ongoing conversation with the dance itself.

The mainstream dance critic, picking up this book, will feel his/her ears burn:

Basically, they tell you what they want to see, and how the piece before them does, or does not, answer to that. It is rare to hear people try to cut through their own taste to try to examine what the dance maker is doing with the form.

Elsewhere, she writes,

What it, the dance, is doing is a door to see what it is valuing, what its goals are, how it functions. Talk about dance is too often, in my opinion, full of implied lack, and the lacks reveal what the particular talker desires to get out of dance.

For someone who grew up not caring to talk much--and, in this and in Rethorst's talent for intuitive perception of people, spaces and things, I strongly identify with her--she certainly enlivens these pages with an impressive, persuasive voice. But, she advises, "don't take my word for it." (Word. There's that word, again....) Yes, your mileage may vary at times, but the journey will take you places you could never anticipate.

Order this book online.

What's in Susan Marshall's big tent?

Susan Marshall & Company in Sawdust Palace (Photo: Rosalie O'Connor)

Since forming in 1985, Susan Marshall & Company has garnered a whopping ten Bessie Awards. Marshall herself, a much sought-after dance maker on the US and international scene, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. So, fair to say, if you're given a chance to gain insight into this artist's creative process, that's a pretty good deal, right? 92Y's Harkness Dance Festival has a pretty good deal for you, coming up next weekend.

Invited by 2012 curator Doug Varone, Marshall immediately took to the festival's theme, "Stripped/Dressed," which refers to a two-part program. The first part gives the audience an interesting peek behind the choreographic curtain; the second presents fully-produced work.

"I'm approaching this as an opportunity to bring the process out into the open," says Marshall. "We'll dissect a couple of the sections that we'll present later."

She also hopes to show a work-in-progress--"fresh off the presses," she says, although conceptualized several years ago. "Since I'm in the middle of making it, I can remember what I was thinking!"

And it's quite something to remember, as the choreographer explains. "It involves an apparatus, a structure, that would allow the performer to--and this is the strange part--make her breasts move up and down."

She continues, chuckling, "I've become interested in the way the object takes a passive part of the body and gives it agency, and how it's very disorienting to actually see this part of the body dancing of its own volition!"

"I intend the work to be subversive," Marshall says, "And yet it's very hard to approach this sexual, female body in any way that hasn't already been exploited, in a way that doesn't fall into a trope of what's already out there--victim or seductress. It's like walking in a mine field.

"The sexuality is undermined by the humor and even by the ugly bizarreness of it--which I think might be a way forward. I'm very much looking forward to the audience response. I may not succeed, and I think feels like a very comfortable and safe place to have that discussion, to hear what the audience's response is to the work at this stage."

Susan Marshall and Dancers in Sawdust Palace (Photos: Rosalie O'Connor)

In 2007, she premiered Sawdust Palace, a Bard College commission in celebration of British composer Edward Elgar. The piece was created for a Spiegeltent, a portable dance hall. Marshall will revive Sawdust Palace for 92Y's Buttenweiser Hall.

"Elgar crossed the line between low and high art and created music for the dance hall. This caused problems for him in his own lifetime in terms of respectability, being taken seriously. In its time, the 19th Century, a Spiegeltent was used as a dance hall. Now, it's used for intimate circuses or Party Central for festivals or club space. So it has all these connotations, and we just went for it and decided to embrace them all.

"In the Spiegeltent, you have a bar, you have cabaret tables, and that sort of thing. The piece would not work as a stage work; that would be the wrong frame. So, we are transforming Buttenweiser Hall into a very informal theater-in-the- round."

"We have scarf dances. We have burlesque. We have specialty acts that I will leave to the imagination," Marshall says with another chuckle.

Not left to the imagination is anything having to do with creative collaboration. Marshall enjoys sharing what she has learned in years of working closely with her dancers. She's currently preparing for her annual SUMAC program--a play on the company's name and the anagram for Systems for Understanding Movement and Choreography--which will be held at Barnard College, June 11-16.

"It's built off a lot of the systems that we use as a company, but we incorporate
other approaches that we've learned from other choreographers. Many dance artists now work collaboratively and expect that kind of creative exchange with their dancers. We wanted to make sure that dancers have a place to practice that and have the tools and feel empowered to face the demands they may encounter. We wanted to help choreographers use the minds and bodies in the room more fully, and to help them to break out of their stuck places.

"We don't make it open to the public. It's a vulnerable space, and it's a very safe space."

Click here for application information for Marshall's Summer 2012 SUMAC program. (deadline: April 1)

See Susan Marshall & Company at 92Y's Harkness Dance Festival--Friday and Saturday, March 16-17 at 8pm and Sunday, March 18 at 3pm. For ticket information and purchase, click here or call 212-415-5500.

92Y
1395 Lexington Avenue (92nd Street), Manhattan
(directions)

What a dancer can teach a business leader

Dancer-choreographer Darrell Jones--whose Hoo-ha (twister pump breakdown) is currently featured in the From the Streets, From the Clubs, From the Houses on the Parallels platform at Danspace Project--inspired some creative innovation at Tom Tresser's MBA class at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Read more:

What’s Dance Got To Do With Business?
by Tom Tresser, Entrepreneur The Arts, February 12, 2012

Hear it straight from the artists

Here are two audience development series that should be on your radar in 2012:

SORRY I MISSED YOUR SHOW

presented by Gibney Dance Center, developed in partnership with Dance/NYC

video screenings of works by both emerging and established choreographers followed by thoughtful discussions and reflections led by some of the great minds of the contemporary dance world

Jill Sigman in her hut at the Oslo Opera House (photo: Elisabeth Færøy Lund)

One recent SIMYS session--part of a marathon afternoon featuring other dance artists--detailed how choreographer/multimedia artist Jill Sigman created and performed in a hut made of trash in the light-filled lobby of Norway's Oslo Opera House. ("I do not find [discarded] skis when I build huts in New York City!") Concerned about the alarming amount of waste produced in the US and developed nations worldwide, Sigman seeks to raise awareness of this environmental issue while also engaging ancient means of forging community around place, work, food and movement. In her Hut Project series, she employs a music system run on renewable energy and elevates her diverse found objects "back into the realm of value."

For information on upcoming Sorry I Missed Your Show events, get on the GDC mailing list. Phone: 212-677-8560 or email here.

location: GDC, 890 Broadway, 5th Floor, Manhattan (map/directions)

Admission: Free (includes "popcorn and drinks")

Video archive coming soon

DANCE TALKS

presented by The Joyce Theater

If a more in-depth examination of issues shaping dance today interests you, join one of our Dance Talks, a series of conversations with artists and audiences illustrated with dance videos and movement demonstrations.

location: Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Street, Manhattan (map/directions)

Admission: Free. RSVP at 646-792-8377, although walk-ins are certainly welcome.

If you can't make it to Dance Talks, visit the Joyce's Ustream channel (sample below).

Video streaming by Ustream

November 21 Dance Talks at Joyce SoHo (65:33)

Gideon Lester (Director of Columbia University's Arts Collaboration Lab) chats with choreographer Martha Clarke and playwright Alfred Uhry ("Driving Miss Daisy") about their unusual collaboration on Angel Reapers, opening November 29 at The Joyce Theater.

Honest Bill

Finding out quite late in the game about the 2nd Annual DOC NYC film festival, I was only able to get to one screening, but I chose well!
 
A Good Man--directed by Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn is a ravishing and bracing documentary about two years in the making of Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray, the Bill T. Jones masterwork and meditation on the life of Abraham Lincoln, his complexity and his possible significance for American democracy in the current age. As Jones prepares this commissioned piece for premiere at the Ravinia Festival, we're taken behind the scenes. We become privy to his thought processes, his doubts and his often volatile working relationships with dancers and creative collaborators. This is an unflinching, warts-and-all portrait of one of dance's true superstars and geniuses but also an extraordinarily generous portrait of the talented individuals who support his visions, even under heavy fire, and bring them to powerful life.

After watching A Good Man, I tried to figure out why dance isn't the most popular and most rewarded art form in the United States. Okay, maybe it's just me, but who wouldn't want to spend quality time in a theater with these gods and goddesses who are also, as we see all too clearly, real live human beings? That duality--reflected in Jones, as in the Lincoln he was taught to admire--comes across through the sensitive and handsome work of Hercules and Quinn and their Director of Photography, Keith Walker.

A Good Man looks and sounds fantastic on the big screen, but you can catch it on American Masters (PBS) on Friday, November 11 at 9pm ET/PT (check local listings).

DOC NYC runs through next Thursday, November 10, at the IFC Center and New York University, with a fascinating range of programming. Get complete schedule and ticketing information here.

Jump back into that box!

Remember that wonderful advice about thinking outside the box? You do?

Well, forget it.

Creativity researcher Jacob Goldenberg, Ph.D. says creativity flows more freely, more effectively, within a "closed world."

"Getting outside of the box is not a useful idea," says Dr. Goldenberg, professor of marketing at the School of Business Administration at Hebrew University, Jerusalem and visiting lecturer at the Columbia Business School. "It could be used as a metaphor for a creative idea but not for the creative process itself. There is a box--the closed world--and the solution is inside it, not outside of it."

Solutions to practical and aesthetic problems can often be found within the problems themselves, he says. Constraints actually increase creativity because they restrict unnecessary distractions that can take us far off track or a myriad of choices that can confuse us. What's more, the popular practice of brainstorming with others actually generates fewer original ideas than do individuals working alone because of the likelihood that an individual's ideas will be ignored or discounted before they have had a chance to develop and show their potential.

While Dr. Goldenberg's interesting presentation at 92Y last Wednesday drew on examples of inside-the-box innovation within commercial product development and marketing--from Betty Crocker instant cake mix to the iPod Shuffle--a few writers in attendance questioned how his ideas could be applied to the creative arts.

This is clearly not Dr. Goldenberg's area of concern and expertise. But the questions made me think about poet friends and teachers who greatly enjoy working forms like sonnets or haiku or villanelles or the various game-like OULIPO structures. (Here's a fun OULIPO example.) The closed world of formal structure and technique obviously holds great significance in dance--from ballet to sacred hula and salsa dancing--and provides firm ground, to varying degrees, for the flow of creativity in movement style and performance.

So, here are a few questions for contemporary artists who work outside of traditional technical or cultural structures:

Have restrictions ever enhanced the creativity and effectiveness of your solutions? What constitutes your closed world? What structures do you like to have in place for creativity to flow?

Feel free to drop your comments below!

For information on upcoming events at 92YUptown click here. For 92YTribeca, click here.