DANCE NOW's final bow

Today, DANCE NOW’s Founders and Board announced in a letter to artists, audiences and supporters that they had made the difficult decision to shutter operations as of December 31, 2021. The full text of the letter is shared below.

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Dear Beloved DANCE NOW Community,

DANCE NOW started in 1995 as a wild experiment to bring artists and audiences together through unconventional and accessible programs as a catalyst for creativity and exploration. From a small program in the Soho Arts Festival to a widening network of performance, creative development, and educational opportunities, DANCE NOW (DN) has been steadfast in our love for dancemakers and their ability to tell stories, to connect and provoke, to move and inspire. It is with a heavy heart, but also tremendous pride and gratitude, that DN shares that this is our final bow. The combined challenges of the COVID epidemic, the uncertainties around live performance, and loss of some foundational income has led the Board to this necessary decision. While the leadership announced the close of programming
by December 31st, DANCE NOW is honoring all existing commitments to artists through 2022, including the commissioning fees of 22 digital works and a creative commission for Kyle Marshall. The Fall On Demand program, featuring short dance works by The Davis Sisters, Davalois Fearon, Paul Singh, Rourou Ye, Audrey MacLean, and The Bang Group, will premiere at a virtual Watch Party on November 4, 2021 and will serve as the final performance event for DN.

Over the years, DN presented dance in more than 25 traditional and unconventional venues throughout NYC, and became the fall kick-off to the dance season. In 2003, DN created the Dance-mopolitan series, using the intimate setting of Joe’s Pub at The Public to inspire creativity and to give audiences an up-close and personal cultural experience. In the past decade, DN has diversified its programming to help start, expand, and  advance the careers of artists through residencies, teaching and performance opportunities, including more than 25 evening-length works for Joe’s Pub. DN constantly grew our community of artists, seeking out new voices, while continuing to support and promote existing artist
relationships across many generations. In response to the challenges of COVID, DN celebrated our 25th Anniversary through a new digital platform and interactive artist-to-audience celebrations. DN has presented the work of 1,000+ choreographers and more than 10,000 performers have graced our
stages and screens.

To our partners, funders, and audiences, thank you for your faith, investment and support on this exciting adventure. To our staff, Board and advisors, thank you for helping to steer the ship over the years. To Lauren, thank you for going above and beyond in every role you’ve taken on to realize the DN vision for 13 years. And to our beautiful, brilliant and passionate community of artists, thank you for 25 years of extraordinary dance and magic.

It has been our honor and privilege to have been an ally, accomplice, advocate, and ringleader. We look forward to seeing how we can all continue to dance outside the box!

With much love,

Robin Staff, Founder & Artistic Director
Tamara Greenfield, Founder & Board Chair

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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LA's BlakTinx choreographers featured in video series

The June 2020 BlakTinx Dance Festival: Dancing on the Edge
was presented online by Bootleg Theater.

At some early (now forgotten) point during the confusion of the past few months of our troubled planet, a thought surfaced. Unbidden and, from that moment on, completely unexplored, it was composed of three simple words:

I miss choreography.

I thought it and...yeah...left it right there.

I think I realized how unpopular it might be in the "new normal" of EXCITEMENT!!! over EVERYTHING THAT DANCE CAN BE!!! now that it can't be what it once was, which--as we all know--was terrible. Absolutely terrible.

I'm not even going to try to argue what about dance might not have been so terrible. Because now that the fact of its terribleness is up in our faces, we can finally do something about it, right? No more procrastination.

All I can tell you is that, of the tons of content emerging online since the pandemic first divided us from one another, I have consumed a lot of virtual theater and music, many thoughtful conversations and informative panels and...a smattering of dance. Of that dance, what I've most enjoyed--although not completely--happened to be recordings of full productions of works from prior months and years. I am still waiting for up-to-the-minute made-for-Zooms to knock me out of my desk chair.

I still love you all, but these virtual solos-in-place; these housebound duets danced safely with your significant other, these whimsical improvs, these trippings of the light fantastic around your backyard are giving me an ache for something I'm apparently not supposed to continue to yearn for because there were, I'm hearing, all these problems with it.

So, come on, Eva. Get happy.

I thought about this I miss choreography thought again when I was watching the YouTube video series Dancing on the Edge, the 2020 edition of Bootleg Theater's BlakTinx Dance Festival that presents work by Los Angeles-based Black and Latinx choreographers, all alumni of the festival from years past. I had accepted Bootleg's request to view and review the four-part series out of curiosity about a dance community largely unfamiliar to me, a New Yorker, and because the brief new and archival works were all by Black and Latinx artists, twenty-five strong, responding to this double-whammy of social distancing and social uprising.

These compilations--a resilient adaptation to the extreme realities of our times--turned out not to be the best way to get to know these artists, the legacies that shaped them, their histories in the field, the contexts in which they regularly work and the meaning they may hold within their respective communities. I'm also wondering if enough time has passed for any artist to deeply process all that has happened since coronavirus began its deadly spread and since George Floyd's death awakened a passionate movement. Have they had time to dive and return with something not obvious but truly incisive and unique to them?

With all that in mind, and after having watched Dancing on the Edge  without sufficient background, I'm not going to review these works--which is to say, I'm not going to white-supremacist this thing.

Catch my drift?

I'll give you the BlakTinx Theater Festivals channel links for your own exploration:

Program 1: https://youtu.be/Le-9yWLPz2o

Program 2: https://youtu.be/CkRS_eIDSzw

Program 3: https://youtu.be/lSJfVjtJWcA

Program 4: https://youtu.be/fdNjj_3BnQE

And let me just point out some items that most captured my imagination. Someday, I might make it out west to learn more--that is, if we're ever safely back to seeing dance in the flesh.

From Program 1:

Add Water & Stir (excerpt from a 2017 performance)
Brigette Dunn-Korpela
B.Dunn Movement/Dance & Theatre Company
www.bdunnmovement.com

Ghostly 1950s white housewives swan around ghostly domiciles and stir bowls of mysterious ingredients, literally sidelined by Dunn-Korpela's bustling troupe. While the white-folks imagery quickly gets relegated to a small oval in one corner of the screen, dancers of color churn through and own the space in a physically-demanding piece that references the deaths of Emmett Till, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner.

Como los Pájaros
Andrea Ordaz
A.Ordaz Dance
http://www.andreaordaz.com/

Super-short, lyrical video featuring the body of a dancer in a flowery blouse and wind-blown hair sliding over a dark grey sky with bright, scattered clouds. In program notes, Ordaz sites Puerto Rican poet Willie Perdomo's The Crazy Bunch:

How to describe that sound when the birds flutter like a deck
         of cards being shuffled? Where to find your uplift &
         hallelujah, hosanna & hero, campana & chorus?

Although severely restricted by narrowed space and limited time, Ordaz manages to convey a flight of freedom.

From Program 2:

Baile de Cuarentena
Briseyda Zárate
https://briseydazarateflamenco.wordpress.com
https://instagram.com/briseydazarate

One of a few festival entries centered in the art of flamenco, Baile de Cuarentena (quarantine dance) approaches pandemic apocalypse with a mask but no filters. Also, no costuming and no heavy footwork that might disturb Zárate's downstairs neighbors. You can feel the energy of frustration along with determination to keep flamenco--and hope--alive.

Time up the River
Alan Pérez
film: Christopher Lopez
@alan.lperez

Shelter-in-place can be unsafe for LGBTQ+ folx forced to share space with homophobic/transphobic families. Choreographer Pérez took that reality as the premise for this duet with Robert Gomez dancing in a tight spot of liminal domestic space with some mirrors for self-reflection and a bit of light from the outside world.

From Program 4:

What the Hell is Going On
Rubí Danielle Morales 
Videography: Crystal Morales 
IG: rubi_so_oh
FB: https://m.facebook.com/rubi.morales.37?ref=bookmarks

Hemmed in by the stark angles of a kitchen space, Morales responds with similar starkness and angularity of movement in this disturbing solo before a restless, intrusive camera.


Dancing on the Edge choreographers:

Anthony Aceves
Bernard Brown
Sofia Carreras
Joshua Estrada-Romero
Regina Ferguson
Kassy Francis
Michelle Funderburk
Primera Generación
Nancy Rivera Gomez
Vannia Ibargüen
Irishia Hubbard
Brigette Dunn-Korpela
Keilah Glover-Lomotey
Amber Morales
Rubi Morales
Andrea Ordaz
Yarrow Perea
Alan Perez
Dorcas Román
Eluza Santos
Stacey Strickland
Maura Townsend
Shantel Ureña
Sadie Yarrington
Briseyda Zárate

For more information about LA's Bootleg Theater, click here.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Oona Doherty: the stories she's carried

Belfast's Oona Doherty is a thrilling soloist
in Hope Hunt and The Ascension into Lazarus.
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Hope Hunt and The Ascension into Lazarus
by Oona Doherty
92Y Harkness Dance Festival
March 6-7

Such a percussive and narrative, if mystifying, title: Hope Hunt and The Ascension into Lazarus. It makes the heart beat a bit harder and the breath come a bit faster just to read it out loud. And that's an appropriate reaction. It really is a bracing kind of story, an epic one with what seems to be hundreds of characters--working-class men you might find on the byways of dancer-choreographer Oona Doherty's Belfast, Northern Island.

The multiple award-winning artist brought her electrifying tour de force to 92Y Harkness Dance Festival for a short run of three performances over two days. I hear tell it's the last time she'll ever perform it. So, head there this afternoon or tonight because she's worth a look.

The piece begins directly in front of 92Y at the Lexington Avenue curb and sidewalk with some crunchy pelting and hip-hop tumbling about in hoodies. This launch introduces Doherty and a couple of her compatriots, two young men who soon speed away from the scene. A first impression, it deftly encapsulates how reckless she's willing to be as a mover but, in retrospect, I don't know how much of this you actually need once you've seen what she does upstairs in 92Y's Buttenweiser Hall.

For, once there, you're captive to a short solo that moves past you at the speed of light--or as if someone took a very long novel and flipped the pages so you'd get flashes of characters in action, flashes of speech, all of it thrown your way with tremendous force and unexpected fluidity, with transitions from one situation to another that would seem to be impossible but, no, there they are unfolding right in your face.

Once there in your seat, the first thing you notice are flashes of Doherty's flesh caught in light, the parts not covered by a dark, shapeless, nondescript costume, as she whips back and forth from one side of the darkened space to the other. Then she comes forward in the space, building an impression of harsh environments and harsh life with her repetitive, explosive vocalizations, physical and vocal tics and eruptive movements. You hear a fan chanting at his favorite football team, a man trying (and failing) to make time with someone named Stephanie, and any number of people you give up trying to hold onto in the avalanche of scenes and players.

Life is raw, vivid, fleeting. Doherty's putty-like tomboy's body, expressive face and vocal dexterity make her a thrilling performer in full mastery of this roaring stream of consciousness.

It takes little over a half-hour to complete but, really, how much more could Doherty's body have sustained? She has given so much.

She accepts our grateful applause and goes away only to come right back and draw aside a curtain, revealing her DJ, Joss Carter. She invites the audience to get up and dance and--if I heard this right--find some cans of beer among the garbage (her set) tucked away in a far corner of the space. The music played, and a small handful of folks rose from their seats, but this ending seemed oddly awkward, lifeless and superfluous.

Nevermind. If Doherty is saying goodbye to all the men she brought through in Hope Hunt and lived with since 2016, I'm quite eager to see where she's moved to since then and where she's moving next.

Music by Oona Doherty and Luca Truffarelli
Set and costumes by Oona Doherty

Hope Hunt and The Ascension into Lazarus continues and concludes today with performances at 4pm and 9pm. For information and tickets, click here.

92Y Harkness Dance Center
92nd Street Y
1395 Lexington Avenue, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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"Surveys the Prairie of Your Room" opens at La MaMa

Ae Andreas (front) with Dan Safer
in the premiere of Surveys the Prairie of Your Room at La MaMa
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Surveys the Prairie of Your Room
Witness Relocation/Dan Safer
La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre
May 18-19, 2019

Not a person shifted place during last night's performance of Surveys the Prairie of Your Room, though Dan Safer--who collaborated on this bold duet with his Witness Relocation colleague Ae Andreas--invited us to move anywhere around three sides of the perimeter of their crisply delineated rectangle of performance space. Standing in a single, constrained line curved around that space--I had one of several folding chairs--viewers were encouraged to look at the performers' duet from any number of angles.

And we did not. We stayed where we were planted. Which is kind of okay. The piece--Safer's first full-length duet--looks just fine from a stationery viewing point. Certainly, it moves enough, itself, for dozens of people. And there's enough excitement when a dancer's arm, sneaker sole or backside gets within a foot of your face. The intimacy of the setting--wide but shallow liminal space betwixt the theater's entrance and the back of its seating rows--heightens a sense of drama, urgency and potential. This "prairie" in a box has got a lot going on.

David Bowie's "prairie of your room" (from "Eight Line Poem") had its "tactful cactus." Andreas has a chair--a hard, unsparing one--and they are mighty restless not only sitting on that metal chair but sitting within their body in its man's suit.

At the top of the 45-minute piece, Andreas darts past the rectangle's white tape that keeps the audience sidelined, and they sit on the chair, their left foot instantly jittery. Turbulence ensues. Their hands shove their jaw this way and that. From the chair to the floor, their body wriggles, writhes, twists and stumbles, a mess of angles. And when Safer--shadow, partner, instigator, supporter, challenger--melts into the scene, also suited-and-sneakered-and-contradictory, all of this trouble is doubled and magnified.

Andreas and Safer
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Longtime Witness Relocation collaborator Heather Christian contributed an intriguing music-scape evoking diverse moods, and writer Kate Scelsa worked found text into a voiceover rendered by actress Grace McLean into soothing seduction in sharp contrast to the dancers' agitation. In a soft, moist tone, McLean touts the amenities of a luxury hotel and, if you're like me, you'll fixate on the apparently hundreds of pillow variations on offer--from anti-allergy to duck down.

There are two people here, but this appears to be a journal of one life, a long stretch of unpaved road with some exhilarating views along the way. It's handsome and danced with all-out exuberance, and you have only one more chance to line up around the rectangle--this afternoon!

Directed, choreographed and performed by Dan Safer
Co-preated and performed by Ae Andreas
Original music by Heather Christian
Original text by Kate Scelsa
Voiceover by Grace McLean
Suits by Ministry of Supply
Lights by Juan Merchan

Surveys the Prairie of Your Room, presented by La MaMa Moves! dance festival, concludes today with a 5pm performance. Tickets are limited. Hurry and click here.

And La MaMa continues to move! Now through May 26, in fact. For schedule and ticketing information for this annual dance festival, click here.

La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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A meditation on Ni'Ja Whitson at La MaMa Moves

Ni'Ja Whitson (above) and Stacey Karen Robinson (below)
perform The Unarrival Experiments #4', described as
"a ritual digging into the 'vaporous body'
via relationships between astronomy, cosmology, time,
Blackness, and premature death." 
(photos: Theo Cote)

Opacity is in the very nature of what award-winning dance artist Ni'Ja Whitson created in The Unarrival Experiments #4, a presentation of La MaMa Moves at The Downstairs.

A ritual to which you have been invited and for which you have not prepared.

A space in which you are kept in the literal (mostly) and metaphoric (almost always) dark and in which you learn, deep into 90-or-so uninterrupted minutes, that it's all about darkness.

A dark in which much happens to which you are not privy, like the engulfing dark of the ocean at night or at its greatest depths. Or the dark of the vastness of space between stars.

With their audience scattered in clusters, Whitson, dressed in white, begins the evening by beating large fronds against one of the theater's risers. The rhythms of these strikes are clear but keep changing so much that you begin to listen for a language-like pattern, a message. Straining for this might be your first mistake. If this effort wears you out a bit, good. Just stop it.

Stacey Karen Robinson is also in the space with her supple, musical voice. She takes Whitson's dense text on a long, long stream of a flight. (Whitson will also perform a few soliloquies.) She molds it like clay. But, like the rhythms Whitson beat out at the start, her words slip right by you as you reach to grasp them.

I tried. In the middle of jotting down a sentence, I'd lose the rest of it. I'd labor over the start, and the remainder would evaporate, and Robinson would be way past floundering me, on to something else and something after that and more after that. And even what I thought I had managed to capture in my darkened-theater scrawl turns out to be no good to me today. A senseless, hopeless tangle. Or gone. Mostly gone.

Not all, though:

It is not every day I die, not every day I find me a new body....

These walking glories, these transmigrators....holding the North in themselves....the only direction was free!

He broke her. He broke her.

It seems like a contest. Who is the more distracting?

Robinson--distracting us from the largely fugitive Whitson in their dim environment or in darkness or scurrying out of audience view, so that when we catch sight of Whitson again, faint white clothing peeking out from a different part of the space, we're momentarily startled? Maybe momentarily reassured?

Or do Whitson's movements, weighty while enigmatic, distract from Robinson's speech?

To which artist do we owe our attention, our witness, our loyalty?

Body? Or Voice?

And what of that moment when a shredding blast--sounding random, meaningless--obscures both artists?

We, audience, may cup the used space--be space-holders in a way--but we appear to matter only in the way cosmic bodies matter to one another. It doesn't feel personal. It feels functional. Even arbitrary.

A strange feeling. One I'm on the fence about. It's a provocative ask of an audience. But I found myself wondering about (and resisting) all the literal and metaphoric darkness. I felt we had been abandoned. Stranded in space.

And something more. At one point, Whitson drew a ball of twine from beneath an audience member's chair. Whitson unraveled it, spider-like, stringing it between the legs of some of our chairs.

I noticed immediately. I was right next to this action and felt the twine as it touched my ankles. I reached down and ran my fingers over it. I noticed where it connected. I wondered what it meant.

When the piece concluded, I happened to remain in my seat for a few moments and watched as two women--hastening to leave, an impulse I must admit I shared but resisted--nearly stumbled because they did not notice (or perhaps remember) the twine at their feet. Oddly, it took a few moments more before a staffer finally warned the audience to be careful of the twine.

Hard to know if this was deliberate--yeah, in a way, I could see that fitting this piece--or an oversight.

What we don't know could fill a multiverse. Whitson's text offered a brief crack of light for me in a few places--the most dramatic being their mention of how infinitesimally huge is the place of black darkness in the cosmos.

How little there is, really, that we can say with certainty we know, define and control.

Sound design and performance: Jeremy Touissant-Baptiste
Lighting design: Tuce Yasak
Lighting and Sound Supervisor: Hao Bai

The Unarrival Experiments #4 concludes tonight with a 7pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Costumes: Jennifer Johanos
Lighting design: Hao Bai

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

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

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Performance Space New York opens with Heather Kravas

New logo
for the rebooted, rebranded PS 122

The new lobby for Performance Space New York (renovated Second Coming of historic PS 122) might be the East Side equivalent of the entranceway to The Kitchen. There's almost identical warmth and appeal--which is to say, absolutely none. At least, the lobby at Chelsea's New York Live Arts often offers something creative to gaze at and the chance to take a load off while you wait.

On opening night for PSNY's COIL Festival--on now through February 4--I could not wait to get out of that lobby and up to the 4th-floor studio for the New York premiere of visions of beauty by Heather Kravas. Now that space has possibilities--generously broad with an impressively high ceiling and row of tall windows. It will be interesting to see how a variety of artists re-imagine, re-shape and activate it, just as it will be welcome to have this influential venue back online in my neighborhood.

visions of beauty
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Kravas's vision felt like an apropos place to begin again. Its minimalism and quirky, glacial pacing and moments of matter-of-fact nudity seemed like flashbacks to the sort of thing I remember experiencing here in decades past when it was still cramped-and-funky PS 122. Its quietude, its stillness, seemed intentionally therapeutic. The re-arrangements of wedges of nine dancers in various, alternating, far-flung pockets of space seemed intent on messing with our ability to claim them--the way an audience can "herd" a bunch of performers, as entertainers, in our minds. Instead, they evaded us. They slowed us down and made us wait and gave us an uncompromising atmosphere in which to wait. The last show I'd seen--at The Joyce--did the polar opposite of that, expertly, and it was an ongoing struggle for me to keep my eyes open for Kravas, something else I remember from certain moments and certain artists at the old PS 122.

Though described as "anti-spectacle," the hour does contain one fantastic passage in which dancers create one long, highly-active braid of interlocked bodies along the floor, supporting and shifting under one another. Something oddly meditative and a tad creepy and all the more fascinating for the understated way it brings those qualities together.

visions of beauty was created in collaboration with performers Andrew Champlin, Tarek Halaby, Michael Helland, John Hoobyar, Michael Ingle, Joseph Kipp, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Kayvon Pourazar and Saúl Ulerio.

Original music: Dana Wachs aka Vorhees
Song: Peter Schilling
Piano: Hank Mason
Lighting design: Madeline Best

visions of beauty continues on the following schedule:

Thursday, January 11, 8:30pm
Friday, January 12, 9:30pm
Saturday, January 13, 6:30pm

For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(directions)

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Who's falling for dance?

I attended two dance shows yesterday: Fridays@Noon at 92nd Street Y and New York City Center's Fall for Dance. I haven't been to Fridays@Noon in a long while, largely due to time and energy factors, but I'm glad I found my way to this one. Over the years, I have never taken in too many of the extremely popular Fall for Dance shows either, and that's because I've already fallen and I can't get up.

Who's falling for dance? And who's spending lunch break catching some dance on the Upper East Side?

It was a small, mainly "insider" dance audience at 92Y yesterday afternoon for Words and Images: Trebien Pollard, A Future Vision. Pretty much everyone voiced some version of these words: "I wish more people could have seen this program." Well, actually more people can, since 92Y has a recorded livestream, thanks to Paul Galando and his dance and new media fellows from NYU Tisch. So you don't have to take it from me, but curator Pollard and his colleagues Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Aimee Rials and Brother(hood) Dance! (Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine) killed it.

Pollard's dance artists step up and acknowledge that dance, while maintaining rigorous craft, can make powerful contributions to the current discourse on race, gender, sexuality and justice. I greatly admire Hunter and Valentine's work. In the video and dance excerpt they showed from Black Jones, they continue to set a high bar for exploring facets of Black gay identity and threats to Black life and well-being. They get me with accomplished performance technique as well as with humor and tenderness. Pollard, draped in a long, black gown, approaches his solo, Never Not Broken, like a ritual priest. Inspired by Martin Buber's I and Thou and Claudia Rankine's Citizen, the work makes use of Rankine's text and stark, solemn imagery to establish a space where hard questions can be asked about the cost of living as one's true self in oppressive society.

Mercer and Rials were discoveries for me. The only white and only female artist on the program, Rials is a New York-based Tisch grad raised in Alabama. Her solo, Modif(her), draws from her sense of crossing strict borders whenever she goes home, adjusting her appearance to conform, not out of shame but out of genuine concern for her and her family's safety. Modif(her) crackles with tension, obsessiveness and watchfulness, all sharply contained and restrained in space. Mercer's performance (with "drifter and assistant" Johnny Chatman II) impressed me for the opposite reason: Despite also alluding to societal strictures and dangers, Mercer seemed voracious in his imaginative reach and energy.

For a schedule of upcoming Fridays@Noon events, click here.

The Friday night Fall for Dance show featured France's CCN de la Rochelle/Cie Accrorap (acrobatic hip hop), Australia's Bangarra Dance Theatre and Hong Kong Ballet, all bringing big, crowd-pleasing US premieres. Oh...and among those unfurling ensembles, one more act, a solo: New York's Ayodele Casel, holding down the City Center stage with her assertive and nimble tap style. ("I feel like Ray Barreto on the timbales!") But maybe I should look at this a different way, because no tap dancer ever dances alone. Casel may have appeared to be up there by herself, but she showed up with her tribe--the ancestral women tap dancers, like Jeni Le Gon and Marion Coles, who she honors in While I Have the Floor. Every other act on Friday's program sprawled out in time, maybe too much so. (Dance sampler programs aimed at new audiences should give us samples, not productions almost lengthy enough to serve as their own evening.) But, if I had my wish, it would be for more Casel and a broader sample of her musical powers. It has been a long time since I've seen her dance, and While I Have the Floor, with its outward focus on others and heritage, though admirable, was not satisfying.

Fall for Dance's affordability is a great deal for dance artists and dance fans on a budget. Its omnibus programming enables established dance fans to easily try out companies or genres of dance they've never before considered or to catch up with a production they might have missed. I hope it really does inspire folks to explore and support other shows. For the hardcore dance-goer, though--okay, for me, I will own it--the evening can seem long while devoid of meaningful context for each company's presentation. It feels like both too much and not enough. But here's one sure thing: The folks in the seats throw a lot of love back at that stage.

This Fall for Dance program continues tonight at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here. For information and tickets for programs running October 5-8, click here.

New York City Center
131 W 55th St (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Moving past "the feast" with dance artist Tiffany Mills

Mei Yamanaka and Tiffany Mills
in After the Feast
(photo: Julie Lemberger ©2016)

Kyle Marshall and Emily Pope
in After the Feast
(photo: Julie Lemberger @2016)

Hot on the dazzling tail of Ballez, the Tiffany Mills Company lights up this year's bustling La MaMa Moves festival with another must-see production--the world premiere of After the Feast. Marking Mills's fifteenth anniversary season, the hour-long sextet propels the artist and her fellow dancers through a harsh, ruined environment. The past is shattered. Now survival demands guts, transparency, cooperation and--most of all--the will to keep moving.

Mills is joined by Kyle Marshall, Jordan Morley, Kenneth Olguin, Emily Pope and Mei Yamanaka, giving all-in performances, deeply committed to the striking physical volatility and human intimacy of the work. Other collaborators include Jonathan Melville Pratt (music), Dennis O'Leary (visual design), Mary Kokie McNaugher (costumes), Chris Hudacs
 (lighting) and Kay Cummings (dramaturgy).

After the Feast runs Thursday, May 12 through Sunday, May 15. Thursday-Saturday performances are at 7pm with a 4pm performance on Sunday. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa
at Ellen Stewart Theatre and The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Ballez: La MaMa Moves presents ballet on the wild side

Khadija Griffith (left) and Deborah Lohse in
Sleeping Beauty & The Beast,
a Ballez world premiere
(photo: Theo Coté)

Ballez is performance, company, class and community, that invites everyone to witness and celebrate the history and performances of lesbian, queer, and transgender people.

Ballez dancers claim our inherent nobility and belonging within, around, and on top of a form that has historically excluded us. 

Ballez celebrates the virtuosity of complexly gendered embodiment, energetic eloquence, queer coding, and the magical adaptability of expression that Ballez dancers have cultivated through their lives as a way to survive and thrive.

--some statements from www.ballez.org

Sleeping Beauty & the Beast--the latest project of Katy Pyle (with Jules Skloot and members of Pyle's Ballez troupe) is big.

How big, you ask?

So big, it requires more than two hours and two--not one--theater at La MaMa to tell its story.

So big, it's really telling multiple stories, mashing up classical ballets and fairy tale archetypes with Lower East Side labor organizing history and with L.E.S. queer culture--resulting in a hot mess that is and isn't.

So big, Pyle needs two dozen versatile, well-trained and coached dancers (most playing multiple roles) and eighteen classical musicians (New York's Queer Urban Orchestra playing straight-up Tchaikovsky for Act 1) plus a DJ JD Samson's house music (Act 2) and even that's not enough.

So big, it Occupies the Ballet Canon; big enough for a look-in from Graham and Loie Fuller; too big for the gender binary; too big to behave.

So big, it can embrace sweetness, humor, revolutionary fervor, sexual heat of diverse and ever-shifting varieties, and the pain of loss.

So big that--well, you know those old timers who regale you with stories about being there when so-and-so made her stunning debut or first danced with Nureyev and knocked their socks off in that difficult role? One day, if you're lucky, you will be that old timer, unable to shut up about how you saw Ballez premiere Sleeping Beauty & The Beast at La MaMa Moves.

That big. Historic. Meaningful. Moving.

Pyle and company get so much joyfully right, starting with the complex precision work of Act 1's opening yarn weaving dance. But I'm going to let you discover the best of Sleeping Beauty & The Beast for yourself, because you're going, right?  You're going.

Sleeping Beauty & the Beast continues tonight and through May 8--Wednesday to Saturday at 7pm; Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa
at Ellen Stewart Theatre and The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor (between Bowery and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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American Dance Festival takes a stand on North Carolina's HB2...sort of

American Dance Festival--launched in 1934 as Vermont's Bennington Festival and, since 1977, based at Duke University--is arguably one of the world's most historic, most influential arts institutions. Its renown--and its location in Durham, North Carolina--recently raised questions for many of us in the dance community when the state's legislature passed HB2, touted as a way to protect women and girls from transgender women in school and public bathrooms and changing rooms. HB2, in actuality, broadly denies anti-discrimination protection to LGBTQ people and strips employees of the right to file claims under state law for discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, color and age. It also restricts local governments from raising the minimum wage beyond the federal level.

HB2's passage drew swift condemnation--most notably from rock star Bruce Springsteen, who cancelled shows scheduled for the state, and PayPal, quashing plans to open a center with hundreds of jobs in Charlotte. But what about ADF whose programs include and serve many people who identify across the queer/gender non-conforming spectrum?

On March 30, ADF's Facebook friends found this posting on its page:

In light NC's legislature passing ‪#‎HB2‬, we want our friends in NC and beyond to know that our bathrooms are still safe for trans and gender non-conforming folks. ‪#‎WeAreNotThis‬ ‪#‎NoHateInMyState‬

followed by Google's handy map of North Carolina businesses "who have stated publicly that their bathrooms are safe for trans* and gender non-conforming folks under HB2." And that--to the immediate and continued anger of many friends from the dance field--is as far as things went.

Yesterday, finally, a dance artist I know discovered a new statement now linked through ADF's website:

The American Dance Festival (ADF) is disappointed by the North Carolina legislature's recent passage of HB2, a bill that cruelly reduces the scope of anti-discrimination protections in the state. Discrimination is wrong, period. As an organization, ADF has long promoted diversity and is deeply troubled by North Carolina's embarrassing step backward. HB2 does not reflect the values of ADF nor do we believe it reflects the values of the overwhelming majority of the state of North Carolina. ADF has been a proud resident of the North Carolina arts community since 1977, a community that believes in inclusion and fairness and believes that every individual is important. 

ADF strongly urges the North Carolina General Assembly to repeal HB2 at the earliest opportunity. ‪#‎WeAreNotThis‬

This is the rough equivalent of "Hey, you guys, cut it out. We're over here trying to do the right thing, and you're making us look bad." No one expects dance folks to make economy-shaking gestures on the level of a Springsteen, an Apple or a PayPal, but we really need to pull out better words than these prim ones about disappointment and embarrassment.

ADF has no shortage of smart, creative people. Surely, good heads can work up a statement or action that, in no uncertain terms, reflects ADF's cultural and economic value to the state of North Carolina and the weight of its rejection of hate. Direct, uncompromising condemnation of HB2 from ADF--an institution associated with the best North Carolina, and our nation, has to offer--would have high visibility and moral impact, giving needed support to anti-discrimination activists in the state and beyond.

This fight isn't only about who gets to use which bathroom. It's about concerted efforts to drag our country back to times when discrimination and abuse could be widely, openly practiced without restriction or consequences. An ignorant, hate-filled demagogue now commands an army of supporters who--even if he goes down to defeat--have been encouraged and activated. With or without a Trump--or a Cruz--we're staring at damage we'll likely still be confronting well into the future. Sitting there in the belly of the beast, ADF needs to toughen up, speak truth to power and represent our dance community the right way.

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Live Ideas presents Radouan Mriziga's "~55"

Radouan Mriziga
(photo: Benjamin Boar)

Fascinated by an artisan’s gestures in which movement is organized to serve production, Mriziga uses his body like a tool to play with perspective and audience expectations. What emerges is an ancient symbol bearing new meaning, questioning our fundamental attachment to symbols and their ability to transgress meanings over time. In the artist’s own words: “The starting point of 55 is: how can I be as functional as possible on stage? As a dancer you constantly ask yourself questions: Is it sufficient? Is this what I want to convey? Is this the right form? What exactly am I doing? What am I making? What do I express? I set out in search of functionality and the form functionality may adopt. It is an almost architectural approach. I question myself as a performer and as a creator.”

--from promotion for Radouan Mriziga's ~55 

Someone recently asked me what I look for when I look at a dance. It's an impossible question. Isn't every dance different? And, anyway, I'm not supposed to be looking for anything. I'm supposed to be looking at something. I'm supposed to be present with whatever's there and, with luck, connect and communicate with it in some way. At least, that's the way I see how I'm seeing. Just to be clear, that doesn't mean that I'm always going to connect or, if I do not, no one else can.

Radouan Mriziga's ~55 solo--a US premiere at New York Live Arts--kept hitting me in the intellectual chakra, you know, the one that detects checklist items like counting, repetition, geometrics, workmanlike gesture. Stuff I get. Performing in NYLA's upstairs studio, Mriziga, dressed simply--black jeans, casual black shirt--made his way within a perimeter of onlookers. Hailing from Belgium, born in Morocco, he looked and moved like he would have been right at home at a showcase at Judson Church.

Every now and then, we would hear individual, ragged outbursts of unidentified music that sounded classic (as in really old), each lasting perhaps a few seconds. Everything about the movement construction seemed snapped together, like a Tinker Toy, and everything about this intermittent soundscape seemed rudely snapped apart, shredded, flying past the audience at unpredictable moments. I was more taken by the source--five ancient cassette decks--and the integration of layers of past-ness in this present-day event in a festival devoted to futurity (Live Ideas 2016: MENA/Future – Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region). I was reminded of how, here in the States, we like to bulldoze and obscure the past--whether it be old neighborhoods or old social traumas--as opposed to other places in the world where the past is either rightly treasured or still sadly inescapable.

Anyway, those were my thoughts. And here I was with Mriziga who has his own thoughts and questions and something that, we would learn, building in his head, in the air and, ultimately and most carefully, on the ground. As his moves and gestures became more familiar to me, either I received them better or--and this could be true--he seemed to relax more, enough for me to see and connect with the human artist at work. Maybe, maybe that was because he knew he was closing in on something he felt sure about and we had yet to see.

~55 concludes with a performance tonight at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Harkness Dance Festival: Keely Garfield Dance in "POW"

Molly Lieber and Keely Garfield
in Garfield's POW
(photo: Julie Lemberger)

The dancing body is exposed to the golden wind and shines through.

--Keely Garfield

Keely Garfield calls POW--presented this weekend at 92Y's Harkness Dance Festival--"a 'Frankenstein' of a dance made from scraps of fear and loathing that are boldly transformed, sutured, amplified and left to run amok, creating a brave new version of events."

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein character was the creator, not his creation, the monster. Maybe, in some sense, that's relevant, too.

POW does seem, like Frankenstein's poor monster, a fragile, vulnerable construction, one with a look of intense, obsessive labor about it. The hour-long ensemble work--a trio plus pianist/singer Matthew Brookshire--might inspire the viewer to zoom out to consider every contour and suture of the whole production, observing how beauty and disturbance lie a mere thin veil away from each other. On the other hand, particular imagery and energies, here and there, might ensnare you, a valid way to respond to the too-muchness of it all.

Garfield's opening solo
(photo: Julie Lemberger)

Garfield first presents herself as a woman precariously striding about and rocking her hips in a sheer mesh unitard--a cross of white tape covering one nipple--and firetruck-red, fringed stillettos. This reads, immediately, as extravagance crossed with eccentricity, and get used to the fact of much matter-of-fact crisscrossing in POW and little by way of explanation for it.

There might be a reason for dancers Paul Hamilton and Molly Lieber to show up in matching black leotards that read "I Only Got Ice For You." Or there might not be. But molding these two bodies into the space--frequently evoking un-theatrical but full-out movements of champion athletes, frequently testing power of statuesque balance against gravity--illustrates Garfield's interest in the commitment and heroism of dance/the body in the face of ultimate extinction, exposed to the golden wind. Much of POW alludes to extremity and the eternal in ways that seem squeezed between the cornball and the genuinely moving. Just try pulling them in one direction or the other. They won't budge.

Garfield and Hamilton
(photo: Julie Lemberger)

Some things, for me, did not resolve. I resisted Brookshire's intermittent role in the performance even as I got it. But one section of the work absolutely gripped me--Garfield and Hamilton crawling, rhythmically lumbering across the floor to (and with) Rihanna's stunning reggae-pop song "No Love Allowed."

Like a bullet your love me hit me to the coreI was flying 'til you knocked me to the floorAnd it's so foolish how you keep me wanting moreI'm screaming murderer, how could you murder usI call it murder, no love allowed

No coincidence, I take it, that Hamilton is a Black Jamaican and Garfield white and British-born and that she ultimately mounts his back and presses his body to the floor. We see that and cannot un-see it, cannot un-think its implication.

Without warning, Garfield drops her audience into the mess of race, societal and domestic violence, white privilege, all of that while producing the kind of movement that, against our will, rocks our insides. As if that's not enough, the two dancers also cram their heaving bodies against the legs of a couple of people in the front row as if to say, "You think you're not part of this, but you are. Take what is yours, too."

POW continues through Sunday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Buttenwieser Hall

92nd Street Y

Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan

(map/directions)

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COIL 2016 festival: It's "DISCOTROPIC" down below

Diahann Carroll as the holographic Mermeia
from Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)
(photo from Starwarsholidayspecial.com)

Somewhere, there must be an Official Contemporary Performance Checklist that itemizes terms like "Afrofuturism" and "queer politics" and "the black female body," all of which show up in promotion surrounding niv Acosta's DISCOTROPIC (part of PS 122's COIL festival). I'm always wondering where this spaceship is headed; the answer isn't always clear. But DISCOTROPIC turns out to be a quality ride, bracing and perhaps as illuminating as any potential destination.

Running for ninety minutes, DISCOTROPIC utilizes rough basement space at Westbeth, artist housing in the West Village, including a recessed room, straight and spiral staircases and an ample platform. As architecture, DISCOTROPIC revels in the aesthetics of hide and seek, hear and strain to hear, sincerity and exhibitionism. Instrumental and electronic sound sources are tucked around the space, and bold, color-saturated video abstractions and lighting play a hallucinogenic role. Audience members stand to watch and--carefully, please--step here and there, following the actions of Acosta, Monstah Black, Justin Allen, Ashley Brockington and Dion TygaPaw.

DISCOTROPIC, we've been told, exists "between the pragmatic and the fantastical while exploring the relationship between science fiction, disco, astrophysics and the black American experience." The unseen, but presiding, archetypal figure here is the elegant Diahann Carroll. Specifically, Acosta's literature references Carroll's acting role as a sea creature in a 1978 television movie. Added to the cast after pressure to bring in a Black performer, Carroll portrayed not a flesh-and-blood woman but a sexy sea creature--and a hologram at that. Acosta sees Carroll's role as "an illusion that distills the ways in which the black female body has been consumed in mass media: as alien, bodacious, and marginalized."

That's a familiar concern in contemporary performance, and the bodies in Acosta's work, with booties frequently a'twerking at any and all angles, can be viewed in these ways, both boldly playing to and subverting exploitation.

"I exist for you. As you create me, yes, I control your reaction. I'm getting your message. Are you getting mine?" 

--Ashley Brockington in DISCOTROPIC

But I sensed something deeper going on in DISCOTROPIC that proved unique and exciting. I sensed the engineering of a durable spaceship.

My first inkling came as Monstah Black, back turned towards us, flailed his arms and slipped his sneakered feet over what appeared to be a layer of black sand in a recessed storage room. His "sand dancing," his more distinct stomp-and-drag rhythm, and a minute burst of shimmying had me thinking about vaudevillian dance acts. In a later segment, I watched the dancers form a tight, disciplined squadron in which various dancerly routines emerged, the sort of thing we used to see Black singing groups do to enhance the appeal of their acts. I thought of how some marginalized, underemployed tap dancers survived by teaching dance skills to these emerging pop and R&B artists.

Invoking We Travel the Spaceways, by future-perfect jazz priest Sun Ra, the cast's circling, metronomic, escalating vocal patterns suggest an evolution of something post-human, proto-robotic.  But not post-Black. Black survives in the rocking, the swinging and, eventually, in the excess--Acosta's beaming as joy leaps out of his vocal performance.

There's always something passed along, voice to voice, body to body. Something Black survives any alteration of form and any displacement of form, from Africa to the Americas, from the Americas to worlds beyond. Black always was and always will be.

DISCOTROPIC's remaining performances run today at 3pm and 8pm, and Sunday at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Westbeth Artist Community
55 Bethune Street (corner of Washington Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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In their skin: BAAD! presents works by men of color

Jonathan González
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Benjamin Lundberg
(photo: Jeca Rodríguez-Colón)

In Our Skin--a one-evening show presented at BAAD! with Pepatián for the 2015 BlakTinX Performance Series--offered a rare and important opportunity. The event focused on works by young male choreographers and performance artists of color--Benjamin Lundberg, Gentry George (who showed several short pieces), Alvaro González Dupuy, Eduardo Fajardo and Jonathan González. The run-on format--two hours with no intermission--should be rethought as it became tedious, poorly serving works presented late in the program. Why not distribute the lineup of artists over at least two evenings of reasonable length--say, no more than 90 minutes--allowing breathing room for both these artists and their audiences?

In a program ranging from Lundberg drawing vials of his own blood to mix with dishwashing liquid as a painting medium (Limpieza de Sangre) to queer chatterbox Fajardo charmingly singing and dancing along to a cumbia hit he later questions for its misogyny (CABARET), George's solos and duets stood out for conventional polish--the look of Ailey crossed with contemporary ballet--and the remarkable facility of their performers. In Our Skin certainly could not be faulted for lack of variety in approach to performance.

Chilean, New York-based Alvaro González Dupuy was, for me, the strongest discovery and pleasure of the evening. In Dame la Mano and i give you my elbow--his duet with equally vivid Emily Smith--stream-of-contact, genial roughhousing and audience involvement yielded unexpected freshness. I would welcome the chance to see more from this mind.

Jonathan González's curious deep divine shows him to be a clean, feline mover with an interest in engaging the possibilities of his environment and messing with the way we understand sound, lighting and the body in theater space. Sorry to say, by this point, the lengthy evening found me feeling captive, low in energy and unprepared to give my best attention. But González--recently seen in Patricia Hoffbauer's Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People at Gibney--has some new projects coming up in 2016. Worth getting on your radar.

Closed. For information on remaining BlakTinX Performance Series programs (closing November 21), click here.

BAAD!
2474 Westchester Avenue, Bronx (map/directions)

Is it too soon to be thinking about The Nutcracker?

Photos from Dance The World Nutcracker Festival
courtesy of JP Dance Group

Maybe, even though Rockefeller Center's Christmas tree is already in place!

But JP Dance Group wants you to start thinking about its Dance The World Nutcracker Festival, devoted to New York's exciting diversity.  Three programs (December 15-20) will present dance forms from a wide variety of cultures represented in our city--Chinese, Bulgarian, Middle Eastern, African, Caribbean, Mexican and Indian.

For a complete schedule of festival programs, click here. For tickets, click here.

The Secret Theatre
44-02 23rd Street, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Caleb Teicher: Watch those feet!

Bessie Award-winning tap performer Caleb Teicher
introduces a showing of excerpts from his work, Variations,
at American Tap Dance Center
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Perhaps you've found yourself cursing the fact that you had to watch a tap show in a theater with bad sightlines, unable to see the dancers' feet. When that has happened to me, I've consoled myself with the thought that tap is music. At least, I can listen. However, I prefer to be able to see how each dancer works those musical instruments.

Left-to-right: Elizabeth Burke, Gabe Winns and Teicher
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Watching the crisp, incisive choreography of Caleb Teicher, you will want to see entire bodies, from head to toe. Lots going on there. But the feet, in particular...the feet! You must observe how the feet--scrupulous, sensitive, clear--reveal every impulse and inflection and variation of the music--in this case, the singularity of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations.’

Winns at work
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Burke at work
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

So, I wish you excellent seating this weekend for Tap 'N Time, the Saturday night program at Jersey Tap Fest (Bloomfield College's Westminster Arts Center), featuring excerpts from Teicher's Variations as well as works by Heather Cornell and Jason Samuels Smith.

For complete Jersey Tap Fest information and tickets, click here.