Sidra Bell's worlds of imagination and friction

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

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

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

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

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

So...okay.

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

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

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

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

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Marjani Forté-Saunders: The story we've always known

Marjani Forté-Saunders
dancing Memoirs of a... Unicorn
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Marjani Forté-Saunders
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Memoirs of a... Unicorn--a breathtaking work by dance soloist Marjani Forté-Saunders--fills the Westbeth underground now known as The Collapsable Hole. The space is rough, roomy, multi-leveled, multi-surfaced and multifaceted. You enter and look around, dreaming of all the talented artists who might dare to try it. But for now, presented by New York Live Arts, Forté-Saunders owns every corner and staircase, every recessed area and side room with intricate, unexpected treasures, every inch of concrete floor and brick wall. With her design team--including dad, Richard Forté--she has turned this basement into mythic space and immersed her audience in Black-centered story.

You reach it, appropriately, through labyrinthine corridors. But instead of confronting a minotaur, you eventually spot the Black unicorn concealed in her lair. Maybe not right away.

The installation opens to the public a half-hour before performance time, and you might wander the space unguided or get distracted by a noisy conversation with your buddies or just sit, stare at your phone and wait for something to happen not realizing that something already is.

At some point, you become aware of the unicorn, her fearsome vulnerability, her defining feature with its awkward, unreasonable length, its prickly yet delicate construction. A structure that will both confine and exalt this strange captive has been built (by Forté-Saunders's father) to endure. By the end, that reassuring durability, coupled with a long-remembered song by Gil Scott-Heron, might move you to tears.

The space, filled with a light haze, balances precariously between dark and light, looks a little dangerous for any number of reasons--among them, the painted spikes of wood affixed to a wall like metal studs. Forté-Saunders is similar--a mix of audacious power and trembling sensitivity, an archive of damage and of ingenuity, a warrior and a mother. She's a woman capable of channeling exacting, telling details of masculine personality, energy and movement, neither afraid for her body nor afraid of it. Her speech patterns emerge sly or wrecked and disrupted, her singing voice imperfect yet Sending Its Message. A fedora-clad figure, she can be a little scary and quite a bit seductive. Direct, elusive. Controlled as she loses control. She dredges up memories--some personal, some collective--that sometimes wound or sometimes soothe. She makes you chuckle with her determined yanking of a man's jacket over costume wings, those stiff yet flimsy things jutting out from collar and hem.

In a generous, informative chat with Okwui Okpokwasili, post-show, Forté-Saunders expressed gratitude for having unpolished space in which to tell her complex, miles-deep, centuries-deep story. To my eyes, not one element of the many, many here seemed out of place, and even excess felt like the right move in The Collapsable Hole. Forté-Saunders is a confident, important, extraordinary performer hitting a new high mark in Memoirs of a... Unicorn.

Medi design: Meena Murugesan
Original composition and sound design: Everett Saunders featuring violinist Juliette Jones
Set design: Mimi Lien
Set built by Richard Forté/Build with Forté and August Hunt
Lighting design: Tuce Yasak

Memoirs of a... Unicorn continues tonight through Sunday the 19th with performances at 7:45pm. Doors open at 7:15 for a gallery pre-show. For information and tickets, click here.

The Collapsable Hole
55 Bethune St (enter at Bethune and Washington), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Jen Rosenblit presents "Clap Hands" at The Invisible Dog

Jen Rosenblit in Clap Hands
(photo: Maria Baranova)

In Jen Rosenblit's Clap Hands, I first notice color. A choreography of color. Color dancing across a wide space. Yellow. Red. Black. White. A fractured medicine wheel of color of sorts pulling attention every which way. Because that's what's dancing. Piles of tomato red felt neatly folded and stacked or unfolded and scattered or placed just so here and there. My eyes go to this and the spotless white of Effie Bowen's fencing uniform, the sunny, satiny yellow of Admanda Kobilka's wrestler unitard, the black that wraps Rosenblit, which she eventually sheds.

Clap Hands--hosted by The Invisible Dog Art Center , co-presented with New York Live Arts--was conceived as a complicated solo (add or remove quote marks as you will) performed by three people. And, actually, there's a fourth--the "supportive" alexia welch, whose role seems to be to hold a boom mic for Rosenblit and look impressively butch dykey with her laden toolbelt.

Clap Hands diffuses "center" and focus, allowing us to hold fast to nothing, especially our need to hold fast to something. So much there, so little there. At the same time, it feeds us, immerses us in color, texture (that fabric, the rabbity fur of the mic's windsock), shape (all that scarlet felt in folds, rolls, drapery, mounds, trains of a makeshift gown), sound (even the almost volumeless flow of air from Kobilka's yellow-red-black melodica), voice (Rosenblit's clear, resonant speaking). When Bowen dresses Kobilka in a bright pink turtleneck sweater, she adds a new, irrational splash of color. It first looks like an assault--the fabric restraining his throat, a sleeve bunched up tight around his arm. Then she unwinds it, draws it over his body in the normal way before, for good measure, slipping a red felt vest over his already burdened torso. You sense an uncomfortable heat, reminding you of his body...and yours.

But disappearance, I think, is the one through line and ironic touchstone--references to a disappearing ship, disappearing hair, escape routes, departures. Generally speaking, bodies, and their grounding force, aren't key here...until they are. Rosenblit, matter-of-factly nude, going about her workmanlike business, uninflected. Bowen, in her fencing gear, introducing skilled physical alignment, precision. Rosenblit folded up on a table before audience members whose metal bleacher row has been reoriented to place them just a few feet away from naked skin. Rosenblit, again, with a half-chewed strip of yellow plastic dangling from her mouth, dancing like...I can only call it the rustling of seaweed...with her gaze wild.

Here is something she would like us to consider:

How do we continually locate ourselves and what is it to deal with the haunting nature of remaining alone? Clapping hands is a phenomenon we do together, to celebrate, mark or culminate. Clap Hands is something we have to sit alone with, to recall being together.

--from publicity for Clap Hands

Clap Hands concludes tonight with a performance at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(directions/map link)

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Geoffrey Holder, 84

Geoffrey Holder, Dancer, Actor, Artist and Much More, Dies at 84
by Jennifer Dunning and William McDonald, The New York Times, October 6, 2014

Of margins and sticky fingers

Let’s talk about margins
We’re making a book. The margins are important. Do you know how important?
by Craig Mod, Medium.com, August 18, 2014

In the "ARENA" with Walter Dundervill

Walter Dundervill (photo by Ian Douglas)

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

Installation, costumes and sound by Walter Dundervill

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

Curated by Stacy Grossfield

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

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

Fujiko Nakaya: Artist of fog

Q. and A. | Fujiko Nakaya on Making Sculptures Out of Fog

by Ken Miller, The New York Times, May 27, 2014

Have you seen the latest Google doodle?

Don't miss today's Google doodle in honor of the 93rd birthday of the late graphic designer and filmmaker, Saul Bass (1920-1996). Click here and enjoy!

Beauty on the brain

Why We Love Beautiful Things
by Lance Hosey, The New York Times, February 15, 2013

"If I can make it here...": Spanish Consulate offers help

Want to make it in New York?

Spanish cultural professionals interested in presenting arts projects or making a career in New York City can download a new series of pdf guides--covering everything from funding resources to media outlets--directed to professionals in architecture and design, film, gastronomy, literature, humanities and science, music, performing arts and visual arts.

These How to Make It in New York guides should be useful for any newcomer--Spanish or not. So, click here for more information on this project and to download links for each of the covered arts and culture disciplines.

Theater group Organic Magnetics recruiting interns, volunteers

Organic Magnetics seeks interns for its upcoming programs.

Organic Magnetics (OM) is an emerging theater arts organization that creates live installations and educational programming connecting dance, music, drama and design sustainably.

Organic Magnetics premieres a live installation at Fort Tryon Park, August 3-5 and 7-12, 2012. Ghosts of Manhattan traces New York City's cultural evolution over five hundred years, from native land in 1512 to global metropolis in 2012. This is an interactive walk-through theater experience of New York City in 5 centuries.

We need a few dedicated interns and volunteers!

Interns will assist theater professionals in technical rehearsals, load in and strike and the theatrical run of Ghosts of Manhattan. This internship will be a quick and intense experience. Interns are needed daily from July 30 to August 14 for the run of the installation. Interns will be paired with mentors, having the opportunity to learn about all areas of the production including directing, lighting, sound, video and administration. Interns will receive brief training and are expected to be quick on their feet and respond to needs as they arise. This is an excellent opportunity for anyone exploring a career in theater arts that wants to help an arts organization pull off a spectacular community based production. This is an unpaid position and can lead to future opportunities with OM.

To apply for an internship, click here.

Many volunteer opportunities are available. Volunteers are needed the for every performance of the live installation to assist with crowd control, technical needs and supporting the performers. You can volunteer one time or repeatedly depending on your desires and availability. This is an unpaid position.

Falcon women and the falconer McQueen

Recommended
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty

Now, it's a sure bet that the Metropolitan Museum of Art does not need my endorsement of its blockbuster exhibition of Alexander McQueen's art. If you've already gone and spent too long trying to see past clumps of people who have stopped dead cold in front of one or another of the late fashion designer's creations, you probably would laugh at the idea of my encouraging more people to get in there by July 31. But there it is. I'm encouraging.

In fact, I'm so into encouraging that when I left the exhibit this morning, I could barely restrain myself from running up to people on the lines stretching down the Met's corridors to tell them that, yes, it's worth the wait, worth any sacrifice you might make, and even worth that little snarl you might have to emit to get a few folks to move their bodies away from a certain plaque so that you can, for god's sake, finally read it.

Just go. Be snarly, if you need to be. And that snarl might even work quite well if you're a woman. McQueen wanted women to be powerfully scary. He would approve.

Photographs and illustrations and videos (see here and here) won't do the job. You must stand in the presence. You must face these clothes-as-icons and observe the lush materials, the searing severity, the impeccable details, the daring theatricality, the overarching boldness of conception and execution. And the Met has set it all up with accompaniment that makes the whole work like an elaborate musical jewel box--a rather frightening musical jewel box but, nonetheless, an exceptionally thrilling one.

It's profoundly poignant that this genius is gone--and by his own hand. A troubled and brief life, but what an accomplished one!

Note: If you are a Met member, you don't have to stand on line. Show your card at the exhibit entrance, and sally forth. However, you'll most likely find that your sallying will not take you very far before you hit a wall of people. That's what happened to me, even though I arrived, card in hand, first thing in the morning on a weekday!

Don't fret. Eventually, the clump of your fellow gawkers will loosen up as you press further into the exhibit.

Enjoy!

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
5th Avenue at 82nd Street, Manhattan
(directions, admission and other visitor information)

NYPL celebrates designing women

Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance through May 2 at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center

Click here for directions, hours and further information.