Koma Otake honors his ghosts at Danspace Project

Master dancer Koma Otake performs
the final section of his solo, The Ghost Festival,
outside St. Mark's Church, May 11.
All photos ©2017, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

all photos ©2017, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Using a mobile trailer, Koma creates an interactive visual art installment, as well as a performance space. The design, paintings, and choreography, have all been created or set by Koma himself. Only through performance and the presence of his body in relation to the set does The Ghost Festival truly come to form. Koma envisions The Ghost Festival as a meditative and communal space to honor the connection between past and present, and provide a home for lost spirits.

--from publicity for The Ghost Festival by Koma Otake 

The legends surrounding St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery--home of legendary Danspace Project--include hauntings by its 17th Century builder, Peter Stuyvesant, Secretary-General of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, who is entombed in the church's east wall. But now dance artist Koma Otake has raised other shades at St. Mark's with The Ghost Festival, his first multidisciplinary project without Eiko Otake, his wife and long time creative partner. Although not entirely without Eiko!

If you showed up at St. Mark's at 7pm to catch a five-minute preview in the little park outside the church, you'd catch a glimpse of Eiko ladling cool water onto Koma's naked but bandaged back as he crouched and bent into a trailer painted with his art and bearing a shallow pool of water in which a stand of candles float and glisten.

This mysterious preview is almost unbearably poignant, especially when Eiko carefully closes the trailer's doors around Koma's still-crouching body. One thinks of the foot injury that kept this master dancer from performing for nearly a decade and set the stage for Eiko's well-honored solo projects. It is wonderful to see Koma again. The image he presents carries dimensions of sacredness and of sadness. Of course, isn't that almost a definition of what Eiko and Koma have always done--together or apart?

Inside the church, shortly after 8pm, the performance proceeds like an offering to the spirit of Pina Bausch, an early influence on Eiko and Koma, especially heard in the Francisco Canaro milongas and tangos that fill most of the soundtrack, music that brings to mind Bausch's signature dance-theater. Butoh's genius, Kazuo Ohno, is also here, for sure, from Koma's legacy, but I do not think I am wrong to see Charlie Chaplin peeking impishly from behind an invisible curtain.

How is it possible that I have never truly focused on Koma before The Ghost Festival? How is it that I find myself now smitten by this dancer when, before, I was merely impressed? He is heartbreaking. He is sexy. He is coy and elfin and sly. His unkempt cascade of hair and soft, pliable form are illuminations. He is rumpled, dusty, disheveled, musty, imprecise as a branch in the wind that carries a current of feeling. He is one with the props that surround him, folding his entire slim and yielding body over a chair stacked with black pillows, his legs splayed behind him. He is an irresistible performer. All of this must come from the love he offers these predecessors in dance. Koma is radiant with this love for performance and performers; as the piece opens with Jacques Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas, he seems to plead for even the shadow of their presence to stay and never leave him.

In the spirit of "every goodbye ain't gone," Koma's "festival" does not end despite an assistant parading around the space with a sign that reads "Finale." We're given a fifteen-minute break, mainly to pick up our belongings and move outside the church. (People lagged a bit; it was a chilly evening.) Once assembled, we heard the strains of a Japanese folk song--one perhaps related to traditional celebrations of the departed--and Koma emerged in flowing white to engage with his intriguing trailer/temple, at one point mounting it and generally behaving like the sort of looney you rarely see anymore around this East Village neighborhood. It was fun to watch unsuspecting folks walk by and check out our crowd and Koma's commotion.

With lighting by the legendary Kathy Kaufmann

The Ghost Festival continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm as well as free 5-minute public previews, open to all, at 7pm outside St. Mark's Church. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
2nd Avenue and 10th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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California dreaming: Roya Carreras at the wild project

This weekend, Roya Carreras shows The Big Balloon at the wild project.
(photo: Jason Knade)

Choreographer Roya Carreras welcomes us into dreamy interiorized exteriors and minimized, constrained interiors in her childhood-memory piece The Big Balloon. Curated by Alexis Convento for her performance series, The CURRENT SESSIONS, Carreras multidisciplinary work will have its final show today at the wild project where aspects of it take over even the surface of a floor (film projection) and the surround of the lobby gallery and restrooms (soundscape).

Our complete immersion, executed by Carreras' team, is greatly enhanced by the close quarters of the space, the numbers of enthusiastic first-night fans and, ultimately, the convenience of a bar right there at the box office. Arrive for the roughly half-hour dance installation prelude--performed by the impeccable Fana Fraser--grab a drink, and you feel as if you have wondered into tiny East Village gallery opening.

Fraser's solo--performed just inside the lobby entrance, in the confines of a plywood enclosure filled with wonderfully-fragrant planting soil and decorated with a patch of artificial grass--interested me the most. Her relationship to the rich earth ranged from delicate and meditative to searching to aggressive. A few times, she ventured out onto the sidewalk to pick up a pot of geraniums to replant in the soil, but she herself seemed more the planted than the planter. Carreras' imageful work takes inspiration from her childhood in California where, I would imagine, the Iranian-Hispanic artist must have found solace in her family's garden.

What happens soon after the stroke of the hour, when we've wandered into the theater proper, is another matter--suggestive and fleeting, and I will not say more. Before the lights go down, Carreras allows us a hint in the stage decor that she shows and which, as the dance proceeds and ends, will perhaps become more meaningful to viewers. The dance itself--well performed by Caitlin Taylor, Elise Ritzel, Eloise DeLuca, Gregory Dolbashian and Maleek Washington--disturbed me in the way it depicted relationships between men and women. I found myself quite often checking out. But it's possible that Carreras' intent was to show us exactly what it was that turned me off.

That's a wild stab. I cannot say for sure. And I ended up not staying for the post-show Q&A. Having gotten tangled in the mob of people getting more drinks and lining up for the restroom, on second thought, I opted to just make my way home.

The Big Balloon concludes this afternoon and evening: lobby installation at 5:30pm, performance at 6pm followed by a wrap party at 7. Proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the National Iranian American Council. For information and tickets, click here.

the wild project
195 East 3rd Street (between Avenues A and B), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Gather here: Walking Minetta Creek trail with Emily Johnson

Gathering at the basketball court of Chelsea's PS 11
for the opening passages of
Emily Johnson's SHORE in Lenapehoking (NYC)
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Dance artist Emily Johnson with audience member
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

I view our bodies as EVERYTHING: our bodies are culture, history, present and future, all at once. Out of respect for and trust in our bodies and collective memories, I give equal weight to story and image, to movement and stillness, to what I imagine and to what I do not know.

-- Emily Johnson, Artist Statement

Emily Johnson (Emily Johnson/Catalyst), a Minneapolis-based dance artist born in South Central Alaska of Yup'ik descent, seeks to use her art and knowledge to reawaken people to their environment and to one another, to realize connections that offer meaning and dignity. Her mission springs from her own deep longing for the landscape of her native state and for its indigenous traditions.

She has taken up this healing work in a celebrated trilogy, including The Thank-You Bar, which won a 2012 Bessie, and Niicugni (2013). The trilogy concludes now with SHORE, originally presented in Minneapolis and now manifesting in our city as SHORE in Lenapehoking (NYC), a multifaceted ceremony spanning several days and venues, with multiple artistic and community partners. The project involves volunteer activities in the Rockaways and on Governors Island, storytelling and readings, bike rides and potluck feasts, and a silent procession to dance installation performances at New York Live Arts.*

All parts of SHORE engage with the larger world beyond theater space. According to Johnson, each bears equal importance. Certainly, total immersion in SHORE should offer not only the most complete understanding of the project but likely provide its intended benefits. Regrettably, I could only take part in last evening's event--a dance/vocal prelude and silent walk from the basketball court of Chelsea's PS 11 along a serpentine path, once the large Minetta Creek, to the New York Live Arts's theater for the rest of the performance. I'm glad I did at least this much.

A sliver of moon hung above the city, and a crow winged across 21st Street, quickly disappearing. Audience and performers gathered, greeting friends and colleagues in the sudden dramatic chill of this late April evening. Johnson provided heavy red blankets as wraps for several folks, and the rest of us made do with winter gear we thought we would have stored away by now.

Performers at PS 11 basketball court
(c)2015, Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

A cluster of performers began an unhurried dispersal. Meanwhile, beyond the court's gate, other dancers took slow, intermittent strides along the sidewalk. Eventually, members of the inside group picked up their pace, even sprinting around us in a wide orbit. Through their movements, the ground seemed to come a little more alive, indeed provoking curiosity about who and what once coursed through this region.

Above and below: Emily Johnson at PS 11
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Johnson, her face sporting a band of red makeup across her eyes set with thick, jet-black false eyelashes, mounted a wooden stand to relate her dream of an eagle, a hawk and a baby. A dream that, in her impassioned telling, felt numinous and ecstatic and right for this stark weather. She then asked us to make our way to the theater, walking the creek trail together without talking.

We walked, guided by soothing, pulsing sounds from little portable speakers and human voices. We moved forward, united in purpose, as if part of an invisible watercourse, an invisible ceremony feeding through the busy, darkening Chelsea streets. We held no signs, wore no identifiable costumes. We could have been any stream of pedestrians making our way through traffic and street noise. In fact, outsiders unwittingly strode in and out of our procession. I'd like to think the sonic and kinetic energy reached them on a level just beneath everyday consciousness.

At New York Live Arts, SHORE performers
L-r: Krista Langberg, Emily Johnson and Aretha Aoki
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Johnson's stagecraft at New York Live Arts works boldly with the visual and kinetic energy. SHORE straddles a line between stark abstraction and subtle representation. Performers mass in large groups or lines that recall swaying, rustling trees or pound footfalls like earth tremors or recede like a damaged, vanishing habitat. Dancer Aretha Aoki makes no obvious bird-like moves, but the lash of her arms, jutting turns and impetuous attacks on air seem avian to me. Gasps, electronically amplified, connect human breath to the life force within all living beings. Pairs of dancers sometimes move right into each other's space, nose to nose, so close that they might breathe as one. Kettledrums blare out another potent voice of nature.

There is gracefulness and power, a sense of empty distances, quiet and loneliness as well as a certain homeyness and intimacy--the presence of houseplants at the edge of the space, sounds of a televised basketball game, the flicker of false eyelashes in the otherwise stillness of a hunched over body. Late in the performance, you might become aware that the theater's houselights have gotten a little brighter because, really, you're not just watching from over there, are you? You're part of the story and the song, too.

*****

The SHORE Choir: Margot Bassett, Pareena Lim, Jules Skloot, Erika Banks, K.J. Holmes, Emma Brown, Lisa Loew, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Peter Sciscioli, Michael Becker, Carime Santa-Coloma, Jack Gray

The Physical Choir: Marýa Wethers, Ben Weaver, Madeline Sayet, Koliane Rochon, Tara Willis, Erica Ricketts, Pavel Machuca, Mary Kate Sickle, Monica Gonzalez, Steph Lee, Maré Hieronimus, Erica Chen, Brooke Wheeler, Greer Dworman, Tyler Rai, Lariza Reyes, Gavino Limon

Concept, choreography and writing: Emily Johnson
Direction: Ain Gordon
Soundscore: James Everest and Nona Marie Invie with Fletcher Barnhill
Lighting: Heidi Eckwall
Costumes: Angie Vo
Scenic design: Johnson, Gordon, Everest, Ecwall

*****

REMINDER

It's going to be another cold night. If you're planning to see SHORE tonight, wear sufficiently warm clothing for standing around at the school and walking to the theater.

Do not arrive at New York Live Arts. Performances--tonight and tomorrow at 7:30pm--begin in the basketball court of PS 11: The William T. Harris School at 320 West 21st Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Manhattan.

GET TICKETS HERE

*Additional SHORE events this Sunday

SHORE: FEAST Group Bike Ride*

Sunday, April 26 at 12:30pm
Red Lantern Bicycles, 345 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn

Bicycling songwriter, poet, and SHORE cast member Ben Weaver, will lead a group bike ride starting at Red Lantern Bicycles in Brooklyn and ending 6 miles later at the North Brooklyn Boat Club where SHORE: FEAST will take place.

*Riders are responsible for getting themselves home from the feast.

Pre-register (FREE)

SHORE: FEAST (potluck celebration) at North Brooklyn Boat Club

Sunday, April 26, 2pm-6pm
North Brooklyn Boat Club, 49 Ash Street, Brooklyn
Under Pulaski Bridge, on Newtown Creek

Outdoor event: Please dress for the weather.

Pre-register (FREE)

For all information and tickets or RSVPs, click here.

Yanira Castro makes a spectacle of ourselves

Costume detail from Court/Garden
Photo: Miodrag Gubernic and Jose Espaillat

I won't reveal too much about Court/Garden, the dance installation given its world premiere last night at Danspace Project by Yanira Castro's a canary torsi. If you go, you should come upon it fresh. I will advise, though, wearing a pair of shoes you don't mind standing in for a while, and when coat check attendants ask you to give up your bag and jacket, do comply. It will just make things easier.

Castro and her teeming band of collaborators--a mile-long list of them, including a dramaturg, a crown-builder and a perfumer--have gone all out here in an elaborate mash-up of Sun King spectacle with modern technology in which audience members are not only part of the mix but the whole point of it. We go from being treated like catered-to spectators in Louis XIV’s court--like 17th Century celebrity figures attending the hot event of the day--to a condition that feels far more democratic if borderline chaotic. Throughout, Castro maintains an interesting tension between high expectations and low-level means of delivery, between firm control of things and awkward execution, between glittering artifice and banal transparency, between seductive beauty and those things that make you seriously question what you find beautiful, why you do and who the hell you think you are to judge.

Costuming ranges from fabulous, if disturbing, to shabby-fabulous. And there's a fantastic segment in which the especially well-cast Luke Miller gazes out on all he surveys, his privileged and waspish tongue enhanced by electronic distortions.

True to its time-traveling nature, Court/Garden also has an online presence, created by Web designer Helen Gaffigan, but I will allow you to discover that in your own time.

Castro gives her primary performers collaborative credit as choreographers: Simon Courchel, Tess Dworman, Luke Miller, Pamela Vail, Darrin Wright, Kimberly Young. Music is by Stephan Moore, costume design by Miodrag Guberinic, lighting/installation by Kathy Couch, and video by Peter Richards. See the program notes for full details about Castro's entire production team.

Court/Garden continues through Saturday evening with performances at 8pm. Arrive early to check your belongings. Seating is limited, and there will be no late admission. For tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

An hour or so of the 12-hour "Little Dot"

Impressions of Suzanne Bocanegra's Little Dot,

a 12-hour dance installation 

presented by Danspace Project

Saturday, September 27, 2014

11am-11pm

featuring 14 members of

New York Theatre Ballet

all photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

***

Little Dot is more an object than a dance.
It is a sculpture that lasts only 12 hours and then is gone.
--Suzanne Bocanegra

all photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa