Eliza Bent gets personal on race and cultural appropriation

Eliza Bent
(photo: Knud Adams)

It's far worse than you might think.

No, that's not my review of Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen, the new monologue written and performed by Eliza Bent, now at Abrons Arts Center. But that's what I believe Bent wants viewers to grasp.

The piece jumps off from the playwright's memories of a film on the 19th Century queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch--a school project Bent cooked up at age 13 with a friend and classmate. The young auteur cast her white affluent self as the indigenous queen and now looks back on it--as we get to do; the film is both cringe-worthy and just ridiculously audacious enough to kind of work, ya know?--with no small amount of shame. I can't gauge how completely woke today's Bent is but, as things unfold, you will definitely see she's got her eyes propped open.

She might have forgiven her teenaged self (and begged our forgiveness) for youthful indiscretion. But she does not stop there.

Surrounded, inexplicably but beautifully, by Elizabeth Chabot's rich, thick textile art and a row of fetching portraits--Bent resembles some combination of high-class talk show host and star monologist. Wearing a buttoned-up little black dress with A-line cut, she talks nonstop with well-practiced intensity that pegs her as facile, artificial, privileged, ready for PBS or an NPR podcast.

Frankly, even when self-revealing, she's off-putting. You take note when she utters something amusing. You note that amusement and yet stand clear of enjoying it. You definitely stand away from Bent, and maybe she means you to do so, because her delivery of text is noticeably, oddly driven, airless, leaving no room for her breathing or your own.

At some point, you get used to that. Which might mean an unseen internal change within her or--and this is really what it felt like--something shifting inside you, like when a climber gets more and more acclimated to lower levels of oxygen.

Maybe, though, Bent's the sort best positioned to lead us where we need to go and show us what we need to see--what she's done and what she's witnessed, particularly in the world of media and the arts. (In addition to her stage work, she served, for several years, as a senior editor at American Theatre magazine.) Deep into the play, she circles back to her own relationships and disconnections--refusing to absolve herself for what remains unresolved, tasking herself and the rest of us with acknowledging the pervasive breadth and durability of privilege and the damage wrought. Not a curious fossil from the ancestral past. Not a specimen of a problem that has not a thing on Earth to do with us now.

Direction: Knud Adams
Textile panel art: Elizabeth Chabot
Sound design/original composition: Jerome Ellis
Lighting: Kate McGee
Make up and styling: Naomi Miyoko Raddatz

Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen continues through April 21. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)

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Must see, last chance: Hadar Ahuvia at 14th Street Y

Above and below,
Mor Mendel (at left) and Hadar Ahuvia
(photos: Jakub Wittchen)

Maybe this has happened to you. You're watching a show and, before long, you're saying to yourself, Damn! Everybody needs to see this! That might occur after the show ends, but when it comes not too far into the hour or so, and that feeling just keeps building and building and building, well....

So, here we have "Everything you have is yours?" It's a fascinating, powerful evening by Hadar Ahuvia and her collaborators and co-performers Mor Mendel and lily bo shapiro, ending its too-short run tonight at 14th Street Y. The question in the title, Ahuvia says, was posed to her by an Israeli security official when she had her passport renewed. In her mind, the question takes a provocative twist.

It inspired Ahuvia to examine her Jewish and Israeli identity in a way particular to her role as a dance artist. She looked at how Israeli settlers of European Ashkenazi heritage (her background) appropriated native North African and Middle Eastern folk dances to solidify their sense of a strong, unified culture in a new homeland, and how, in turn, these numerous "Israeli" dances have been appropriated, watered down and YouTubed by conservative Christian Zionists of the US for their own purposes. If all of that sounds way complicated, didactic, and potentially inflammatory for concert dance, hang on a minute. Ahuvia and her friends do want you to think about all that, but they've got quite a few theatrical tricks to woo you.

The dances--which the three live performers and various on-video instructors demonstrate--have magnetic vivacity and charm. (Some of you, like me, might remember learning a few of these in grade school, back in the day.) But the entire production--created and attended to with meticulous care by Ahuvia's team--appeals not only to the mind but to every sense. Personal histories, cultural history; music; speaking and singing voices; projected photo and video imagery; dance movement, of course; little proffered treats of mint tea and fragrant tangerines; plus the invitation, at the close, to learn some steps and chat with the artists. Everything warmly invites us in--as living bodies-- and helps us stay present with Ahuvia's ideas.

This is a smart, witty, political and ultimately moving work filled with unexpected delights like shapiro's pitch-perfect segment of BBC-style voiceover narration and an alluring passage in which jeans-clad Ahuvia and Mendel overlap an impressionistically-blurred archival film clip of a women's ensemble--begowned, synchronized--performing the same dreamy sequence. The visual design by Gil Sperling (projections) and Kryssy Wright (lighting) obscures, breaks down and transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, arguing for the undeniable power of the body in motion and our human, irresistible pull to celebratory dance that might or might not have originated with our own people.

Sound design: Avi Amon
Dramaturgy: lily bo shapiro
Dramaturgical support: Stacy Grossfield and Rowen Magee

"Everything you have is yours?"--a presentation of LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture--concludes its run with a performance tonight at 8pm followed by a post-show conversation with Franny Silverman of Kolot Chayeinu. For information and tickets, click here.

To read Hadar Ahuvia's guest essay about this work, "The Dances Are For Us" (InfiniteBody, January 10, 2017), click here.

14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE moves to value and protect culture

Left to right: Sita Frederic, Michael Manswell, Candace Thompson,
Jessica Phoenix and Valierie McLeod-Katz
(photo: Adanna Jones)

As you can imagine, there are so many exciting and important events in New York, and beyond, that I cannot get to, and--as a woman of Caribbean heritage--I'm grateful to Candace Thompson for putting me in touch with Adanna Kai Jones, today's guest contributor, who offers following report on Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE's May 4th gathering at Brooklyn College.

Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE 

Takes a Stance Against Cultural Appropriation

by guest contributor Adanna Kai Jones


On Thursday, May 4, a relatively quiet evening, some fyah-starters gathered in the Woody Tanger Auditorium of the Brooklyn College Library to hold the first ever Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE (DCC) town hall meeting on cultural appropriation. Walking into the auditorium, people quickly noticed “graffiti” on the walls, to use the lingo of DCC’s town hall moderator Sita Frederick. Large sheets of white paper, taped to the walls, bore questions that all participants were invited to contemplate and to respond to in writing:

1. Do you think about the creators of your favourite Caribbean music? What ways have you tried to support them (financially and otherwise)?

2. Who do you think should be able to teach Caribbean dance styles? What should the requirements be?

3. What does mastery look like? What qualities or skills make one a Master teacher?

4. Do you enjoy seeing Caribbean dance/music on the mainstream?  Why? Why not?

5. What do you think is the responsibility of mainstream artists when using our culture?

Given this already-rich food for thought, participants were next offered a taste of Caribbean creativity--a mini-class on Jamaican dancehall taught by the dynamic duo of Kendell “History” Hinds and Korie Genius (a.k.a. Genius), two members of the Black Gold Dance Crew. We learned old school dancehall dances such as the Willie Bounce, the Wacky Dip, the Gas and the Mad Run. After we practiced these steps for a bit, the teachers changed to a follow-along method, the way dances were taught and learned in the dancehalls of Jamaica. Similar to a call-and-response format, first History and Genius would execute a four-count movement, then we would be expected to repeat their steps. Although these steps were tricky, we caught the flows, styles and energies of our instructors. In effect, “responding” to their “call” got easier and easier as the class continued.

Kendell "History" Hinds and Korie Genius (a.k.a Genius)
teaching the Willie Bounce
(photo: Adanna Jones)

Following the class, five people took to the stage and the main discussion began. The panel featured dance masters Michael Manswell (Creative Director of the Something Positive dance troupe) and Valerie McLeod-Katz (Artistic Director and Coordinator of the Visual and Performing Arts Programs at Medgar Evers College Preparatory School) plus the up-and-coming game-changers Candace Thompson (Artistic Director of ContempoCaribe and Founding Executive Director of DCC) and Jessica Phoenix (founder of FIYAH Dancehall Theater). And, as aforementioned, Sita Frederick (Director of Community Engagement Programs for Lincoln Center Education) moderated the panel discussion.

Frederick started things off by posing a question to everyone in the room: “What does cultural appropriation look like?” After calling attention to Drake’s obsession with Jamaican dancehall and to Beyoncé’s invocation of Oshun, she then shifted the conversation to a discussion of how we should take on such forms of appropriations, which have become rather commonplace in today’s society.

Over the next hour, panelists discussed their training, mentors and inspirations, calling the legacies of Eugene Joseph, Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham into the space. These are the great shoulders upon which today’s Caribbean dance makers stand.

Talking about how and why each panelist began teaching and promoting Caribbean dance and culture, everyone recalled recognizing the need–really, a demand--for their teaching as well as the need to build community. They have all created a space where cultural history is kept alive, valued and passed on for many generations that will follow.

Thereafter, Frederick opened the floor for questions and open discussion. The first audience member to speak called attention to the nuances of the term “natural,” specifically citing the exploitation of Caribbean cultural labor by people who claim a “natural” affinity for all things Caribbean. (Her line of questioning further brought to mind Rachel Dolezal’s infamous appropriation of Black identity.) In response, panelists and members of the audience prescribed the following remedies:

1. As a Caribbean community, we need to put money and value back into our own arts, culture and heritage.

2. We must institutionalize our cultural practices so that the state has no choice but to support us, especially through large grants.

3. We must make sure that our team is filled with people knowledgeable about all aspects of society--especially experts in law and policy, accounting and finance, marketing and social media, in addition to cultural masters, writers and creators.

4. We must be honest, be of integrity and hold everyone, especially ourselves, accountable.

As the first DCC town hall meeting ended, it was very clear that everyone still had much more to say. Most of the audience members and panelists lingered, getting into deeper discussions of many of the points raised.

In general, we need this type of gathering in New York City, period. In today’s fast-paced world of Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat, there is too much at stake for us to not take more control over how Caribbean dance cultural practices are transmitted and used.

As a Trinidad-born, US-raised, winer woman, I look forward to the next town hall meeting where we can clarify our agenda, further our vision and expand our audience. In conclusion, with DCC taking the lead in creating space for Caribbean dancemakers to take a stance against cultural (mis-)appropriation, I expect that the Caribbean dance community will continue to work together and forge a path for profound social change, not only throughout New York but also throughout the world.

Adanna Kai Jones
(photo courtesy of Adanna Kai Jones)

Adanna Kai Jones received her Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and her BFA in Dance from Mason Gross School of the Arts—Rutgers University. She has performed in professional dance companies based in NYC, including the Julia Ritter Performance Group and Souloworks with Andrea E. Woods. And in general, her research remains focused on Caribbean dance and identity politics within the Diaspora, paying particular focus to the rolling hip dance known as winin’. With regards to her own creative pursuits, she has choreographed dance-theater pieces that were not only based on her research, but were also used as tools for generating more research questions. In July 2015, she choreographed Wine & Tales in Port of Spain, Trinidad, which was presented by New Waves! 2015 and the Dancing While Black Performance Lab. And in May 2016, she performed Rum & Coke in New York City at Field Studies 2016. Both performances were rooted in her ethnographic fieldwork on the wine and Caribbean Carnivals within the US. As a visiting lecturer at Stanford University in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, she taught a survey class on folkloric and popular Afro-Caribbean dances, as well as a composition dance class that used Caribbean aesthetics along side that of US contemporary dance practices. Currently, she is an adjunct at both Marymount Manhattan College and Temple University, teaching two lecture courses on dance and culture.


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"Native American Realness": Address/redress cultural appropriation

Rosy Simas and Christopher K. Morgan
(photos: Tim Rummelhoff and Brianne Bland)

On Saturday, January 7, American Realness 2017 presented a conversation featuring Native American choreographers Rosy Simas (Seneca) and Christopher K. Morgan (Native Hawaiian) with Sara Nash, Program Director, New England Foundation for the Arts at Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room.

The afternoon session was organized by American Realness in response to concerns first raised in mid-December by Simas about the APAP-related festival's planned programming of a solo performance by Latifa Laâbissi, a French national of Moroccan lineage. (See Rosy Simas Reads Laâbissi’s "Self Portrait Camouflage", InfiniteBody, December 13, 2016.)  Sima's complaint and subsequent conversations with American Realness founder, curator and producer Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor led to an apology statement from Pryor, who had programmed the Laâbissi show in collaboration with MoMA PS1 associate curator--now Executive Artistic Director of Performance Space 122--Jenny Schlenka. Although Pryor quickly withdrew his organization's co-sponsorship of the Laâbissi event, MoMA PS1 kept the show on its APAP schedule. In the meantime, Simas and Laâbissi had an extensive conversation about the issue. 

The Native American Realness forum was convened on Saturday:

"to discuss the state of Native American performance work across the US and the epidemic of institutional negligence, insensitivity and attempted erasure of and towards Native American / Indigenous / First Nations’ values, histories and contributions to contemporary artistic practice. This conversation seeks to investigate how our dominant culture’s historical insensitivity aids in forms of cultural appropriation, Redface, and racism in artistic practice, spectatorship and presenting. Does Redface sell? Is curating Native artists seen as risky, unsellable, or uninteresting, or does this speak to institutional and societal ignorance?"

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.--co-founder, with Ricarrdo Valentine, of Brotherhood Dance!--attended this session and contributes a report.

Native American Realness

by guest contributor

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

Native American Realness was nothing short of a resistance that's been happening for over 500 hundred years. Artist Rosy Simas from Minneapolis initially sparked what's part of a larger fire as it relates to indigenous performance, life and well-being. Simas challenged the annual American Realness festival to reexamine why it would present Latifa Laâbissi's Self Portrait Camouflage, a Red Face performance, an appropriation by an artist who may or may not have done the research on indigenous performance.

Laâbissi was not there to defend her work and dialogue with Simas. Should she have been?

The conversation opened with each person stating their names and if they belonged to any indigenous nation--a traditional way of opening the space and filling it with ourselves and our ancestors. The first questions posed for the room were loaded yet poignant: What is "Red Face" and why is it problematic? Why is it programmed? We further questioned: Why does Red Face programming get funded in the United States while Native American artists do not? Boundaries were set so that Indigenous people in the room would speak first.

It should be noted that not every cultural institution would have the integrity to share their failure so publicly and be willing to host the provocateur and many others who stand in solidarity. And they did this only a month after the controversy arose. Response plus action.

Red Face is a racialized representation of Native American people similar to Black Face in America. Red Face is the impersonation of Native American people by white people of European descent, though not exclusively. People of color can also objectify their own cultures as well as others. Educational structures and cultural production sectors use this and other similar mechanisms to control the image of Native Americans. These efforts continue to write Native Americans out of their own stories, never affording space or access to funding for Native Americans to write their truths.

As the conversation progressed, further challenges emerged around intention and the research process. Who is authentic? For bodies of color, entering European performance spaces is a radical act in and of itself.

Participants questioned how context can be provided for the audience. Should it even be provided? When it comes to esthetics, what is disruptive? If the standard is European esthetics, then we must question who is radical. Someone mentioned a recent performance by Will Rawls that was sourced in Balkan dance traditions. What does "radical" mean for different cultures? In the words of Rosy Simas, "If an artist says it's radical, shouldn't we believe them?" Contextualizing performance is left up to the artist who must negotiate how much they want to let the audience in on their intended communication.

As the ninety-minute conversation ended, everyone realized that this was only a beginning to the work of excavating the dissociative culture we live in and its reluctance to process the trauma suffered by indigenous cultures. How do we heal?

Native American Realness was an opportunity for cultural workers and community members to have open dialogue about the misrepresentation and appropriation of Native culture and performance. This conversation was an example of how cultural production platforms and artists can work together to incite change, offering healing resistance with rigorous dialogue and harmonious creative space.

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Orlando Zane Hunter Jr. is a choreographer and dancer who researches, illustrates and creates from an African-American male perspective. In his work, he tackles issues resulting from a capitalistic imperialist patriarchal white supremacist system. Hunter grew up dancing hip-hop and graduated with a BFA in Dance from University of Minnesota, where he performed works by Donald Byrd, Bill T. Jones, Carl Flink, Louis Falco, Colleen Thomas, Uri Sands, Stephen Petronio and Nora Chipaumire. His solo Mutiny was selected to represent the University of Minnesota at the 2011 ACDFA gala in Madison, Wisconsin. Orlando studied LGBT activism and history in Amsterdam and Berlin. He has performed with Christal Brown/INspirit Dance Company, Contempo Physical Dance, Forces of Nature, Makeda Thomas, Threads Dance Project, TU Dance and Ananya Dance Theater, an all-women’s company where he was the first male member and toured with them to Trinidad & Tobago and Zimbabwe. Hunter is a co-founder of the collective Brother(hood) Dance!

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Rosy Simas reads Laâbissi’s "Self Portrait Camouflage"

Choreographer Rosy Simas
(photo courtesy of the artist)

On Sunday, January 8, MoMA PS1 and the American Realness festival will co-present Self Portrait Camouflage, an hour-long performance by France's Latifa Laâbissi, a dance artist raised in France by Moroccan immigrant parents. Curated by Jenny Schlenzka, the work is described on the festival's website as a use of

"tropes of caricature and the grotesque to conjure the silent aggressions and tensions at the heart of some immigrant experiences. Performing the piece naked, in bright spotlight against a sterile white backdrop, fully exposed to the world, Laâbissi becomes an object to be gazed at, studied, and scientifically dissected—evoking the imperialist custom of exhibiting indigenous people at World’s Fairs. Against the backdrop of recent anti-immigrant populism in the U.S. as well as the rest of the Western world, Laâbissi’s themes of 19th century representational politics and marginalization acquire new relevance."

Minneapolis-based choreographer Rosy Simas, who is Native American (Seneca, Heron Clan) addresses Laâbissi’s performance in the following statement posted last evening on Facebook. I have reached out to Ben Pryor, American Realness director and curator, for his response and will report back to you once I have heard from him.

*****

December 12, 2016

Dear MoMA PS1, American Realness, and Latifa Laâbissi:
I am writing to express my utter disbelief and outrage at the proposed production of Latifa Laâbissi’s Self Portrait Camouflage for the American Realness program. In the eyes of the Native American community, this production is an aggressive act of hate speech, cultural appropriation, and sacrilege.

My name is Rosy Simas. I am Seneca, Heron Clan. I am the fifth great-granddaughter of Cornplanter, the chief who negotiated with George Washington. My whole family line is of negotiators who have worked to create more understanding between our peoples.

I am a Minneapolis-based dance maker, a moving image maker, a performer, teacher, and an activist. I am a nationally known artist who has toured all over the U.S. and Canada. I am a Guggenheim fellow, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation fellow, a First People’s Fund fellow, and a McKnight fellow. My work is currently funded by NEFA National Dance Project and National Performance Network Creation Fund.

So I am speaking to you as an expert in the field of choreography and as a practicing cultural artist.
I want to explain as best I can why the production of Latifa Laâbissi’s Self Portrait Camouflage is traumatizing to Native women, disrespectful to Native peoples, and an act of white supremacy at MoMA PS1 and the American Realness Festival in NYC. 

I am also going to tell you what can be done on the part of the presenters and the artist to apologize for this atrocity and where you can begin to reconcile.

The description of this work says it is highly personal and that the performer is nude throughout the piece.

She is not Native American, yet the only thing she is wearing is something sacred to Native culture, a Native American headdress, the scared symbol of the Sioux Nations (the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples). Obviously the headdress is fake. Laâbissi would not be allowed to own sacred eagle feathers. Any artist of her stature SHOULD have taken the time to research the subject matter. The production has already been touring for some time now; in fact, this is the second presentation in New York City. The artist has had years to learn about Native people and sacred Sioux headdresses.

Second, the work cannot be highly personal when the weight of it is in the images. She wears the headdress through the whole piece. There is nothing highly personal in the appropriation of a sacred object of another people.

This is America. We are the First Americans. We are Native Americans. And there is nothing real in a non-Native choreographer pretending to be Native on stage. So this is not only offensive — but it is about as far from “American realness” as you can get.

Why would MoMA PS1 and American Realness want to add to the systematic genocide and erasure of Native people? Because that is what this production does.

Why doesn’t the artist draw from her own cultural experience if she is making a highly personal work?

European settlers, American culture and Hollywood has historically objectified, sexualized, and exotified Native women for hundreds of years. It is common to see the sexy mostly nude “squaw” sometimes with a headdress at Halloween, in pornography, in advertising and marketing. We have been and are still treated as if we are just a historic people of the past.

One really must be out of touch to not know that thousands of Native women have been missing in Canada and the U.S. The rape and murder of Native women has been devastating to our people over the past few hundred years -- and it continues today.

So when I see these images of Laâbissi, that is what I see. I see a non-Native woman in a fake headdress performing naked. I see a mockery of who Native women are. And I see a stage reserved for whiteness excusing itself from responsibility because it is an international person of color performing this mockery. 

These images are traumatizing to Native people. Imagine what it triggers for Native women who have been raped and the families of those women who have been murdered and/or are still missing?

Images like this remind those women, remind all of us Native Americans, that we don’t matter and we do not even exist in your eyes.

What needs to happen next:

1) A public apology from the presenters and the artist needs to be issued immediately.

2) This performance should not go on as planned. Laâbissi needs to take off the headdress minimally. A cancellation of the production would be better, and in its place, a public forum led by Native artists on our work should be held, in which stereotypes and cultural appropriation can be dismantled.

3) A commitment from MoMA PS1 and American Realness to present and support contemporary Native American artists.

If this production proceeds as planned and advertised, MoMA PS1 and American Realness can expect a loud, sustained, and highly visible protest. As demonstrated by the Standing Rock Water Protectors in recent months, Native Americans will not quietly tolerate and accept the theft of our territories, the violent rape of our land, the appropriation and profaning of our religious beliefs, and colonization of our bodies.

Please contact me directly so we can begin to correct this injustice and work toward authentic reconciliation.

Nya:weh Sgeno,

Rosy Simas 

Choreographer

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Experimenting with Miss Ruth: Lionel Popkin at Abrons

(Left to right) Lionel Popkin, Emily Beattie and Carolyn Hall
in Popkin's Ruth Doesn't Live Here Anymore
(photo: Cristal Jones)

Ruth Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, says dancer-choreographer Lionel Popkin. And why not? Well, maybe that's because Ruth St. Denis--illustrious modern dance pioneer--was a white woman who got famous for pushing a vaudevillian Orientalist fantasy, and Popkin is a contemporary dancer of Jewish-Indian lineage who is more than ready to go toe-to-toe with her. His hour-long dance at Abrons Arts Center--a trio performed with enchanting Emily Beattie and Carolyn Hall--asserts a right to mess in and mess up her space in the greater interest of, perhaps, starting to clean up his own ambivalence.

Popkin takes a leaf blower to St. Denis's legacy, the way he takes a leaf blower to Beattie's abundant hair, stirring up swirls of theater dust in the process. When we first see them, both are dressed in a uniform of blue-collar workers--heavy, navy-colored coveralls--suggesting a certain no-nonsense approach to dance, the hallmark of more recent dance eras. By contrast, the glam St. Denis was all about sparkly artifice and nonsense and just plain making shit up.

Lionel Popkin
(photo: Brian Mengini)

Like a Ghostbusters crew, Popkin and his dancers venture deep into an ectoplasmic detritus of discarded saris and veils, the haul of St. Denis's far and frequent travel, strewn across the theater floor. Choreographic instructions (projected in white type on the backdrop) will be indifferently observed because, modeling St. Denis, Popkin says, they have given themselves leverage to excavate, appropriate and revise.

Watching a Hall solo, in particular--the one with the green skirt we're told "she found at a thrift store for seven dollars"--I have a sense of Popkin thinking through what he, as an American dancer, inherited from St. Denis and her age. He tips his hat to her ingenuity, her self-assurance and way of presenting herself, showing us something in her that transcended the wrongheaded aesthetics. Something useful in the way the mothers of modern dance clawed out a place for this art in the world's imagination and fought to keep it alive so folks could do and see it differently today. Like with more awareness. When we actually have awareness, that is.

Ruth Doesn't Live Here Anymore is well danced and fun. But who wins out here? Well, from Popkin's final words, it's clear that, as activists always say, the struggle continues.

Music composed and performed live by Guy Klucevsek (accordion) with Mary Rowell, violinist (ETHEL); costumes and set design by Marcus Kuiland-Nazario; lighting design by Christopher Kuhl; video design by Cari Ann Shim Sham

Ruth Doesn't Live Here Anymore, curated by Laurie Uprichard for her Travelogues series, continues through November 1 with performances tonight and Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center (Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)