New documentary explores the art of Crutchmaster Bill Shannon

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COMING UP IN NOVEMBER!

CRUTCH, a documentary about the life and artistry of dancer Bill Shannon, will stream its world premiere through DOC NYC on November 11 and be accessible through November 19. A project of award-winning directors Sachi Cunningham and Chandler Evans (aka Vayabobo), the film follows the development of Shannon in his native Pittsburgh as an energetic youngster with a passion for skateboarding, hip hop and basking in the gaze of whatever audience he could find. His diagnosis with Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease--a degenerative condition of the hip--complicated but did not stop his trajectory as a performer. Instead, with crutches that alleviate the pain of walking and dancing, he built a unique movement technique and began experimenting with ways in which performers and audiences interact and how disabled and non-disabled people relate to one another.

CRUTCH is an introduction to Shannon's origin story and family life, his personality and creative process. I recall being immediately smitten with this dancer so sparked by the pulse, intensity and joy of the streets. That might have been in the early 2000s. I have not seen his work since his 2010 excursion through Lower Manhattan, Traffic: A Transit-Specific Performance, with his audience following and viewing him from inside a bus. In the intervening years, New York City's dance presenters and critics have grown more familiar with the spectrum of disability artistry, and this makes me hope that the worth of Shannon's skill and ideas will be better understood today than they were nearly twenty years ago.

CRUTCH (USA, 2020) 

SEE CRUTCH at DOC NYC, November 11-19

Instagram: @crutchdoc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/crutchdoc
IMDb: https://pro.imdb.com/title/tt4441460

 

Ellice Patterson of Abilities Dance Boston (photo:

 AND THIS THURSDAY NIGHT!

Dancer-choreographer Ellice Patterson's troupe, Abilities Dance Boston, which includes performers with and without disabilities, uses dance as a tool to tell stories, process emotions and promote intersectional disability rights with an emphasis on artists of color and queer artists.

Celebrity Series of Boston will stream Abilities Dance Boston's concert (with audio descriptions) this Thursday, October 29 at 8pm EST. 

Tickets for the digital concert are free with your RSVP 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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Disabled Arts on Camera, Part 2: "Vision Portraits" by Rodney Evans

Dancer Kayla Hamilton,
one of four artists featured in Vision Portraits
(photo: Kjerstin Rossi)

Writer Ryan Knighton telling his story at The Moth
(photo courtesy of Vision Portraits)

Vision Portraits

(2019, USA/Canada/Germany; 78 min.)

written and directed by Rodney Evans

The documentary Vision Portraits introduces us to four dedicated artists whose lives, careers and creative approaches have been profoundly impacted by diminished or lost sight. They include art photographer John Dugdale, our beloved dance colleague Kayla Hamilton, Canadian writer Ryan Knighton and the award-winning filmmaker himself, Rodney Evans, best known for his 2004 narrative feature, Brother To Brother.

filmmaker Rodney Evans
(photo: Kjerstin Rossi)

We visit with these appealing and thoughtful people, the stories and glimpses of the work of the first three interspersed with the story of Evans's attempts to reverse the degeneration of his vision from Retinitis pigmentosa. Evans also wants to share with us how impairment affects vision through occasional images simulating fuzzy or dim sight, narrowed visual range or--as in the case of Dugdale--a nonstop internal light show of spectacular colors and effects.

Self-portrait of photographer John Dugdale

Dugdale's photography, achieved with assistants who adjust lens focus, is deeply poetic, melancholic and moving. When a stroke befell him at the age of 30, taking all but a crescent-like sliver of his sight, he told his mother "What makes you think I'm not going to be taking pictures anymore? I'm going to be taking pictures like crazy now!" I am grateful for that indomitable spirit; the work is so beautiful.

It was also fun to get to know a little about Knighton (author of the memoir Cockeyed), who considers his blindness to be a door onto "a different way of living, a different point of view." His blindness opened a portal to deeper honesty and a wicked sense of humor. If you watch this documentary for no other reason, you will value it for the concise yet uproarious story of the trip he took with his brother to a snake rodeo in Texas. It's a safe bet you'll never set foot at a snake rodeo in Texas or any other state but also a safe bet you'd enjoy hanging out with these guys.

Vision Portraits opens in New York City at Metrograph on August 9 and in Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal on August 23.

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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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Ballroom with a difference: Freedman's "Hot to Trot"

Ernesto Palma and Nikolai Shpakov,
ballroom competition dancers,
appear in Gail Freedman's Hot to Trot.
(photo: Curt Worden)

Emily Coles and Kieren Jameson
(photo: Robert Cortlandt)

The international ballroom dance competition scene was largely unfamiliar to me when I sat down to watch Gail Freedman's documentary Hot to Trot. If you asked what I thought of same-sex competitive ballroom dancing, I would have cheered because hooray, I'm a lesbian! There was no way to anticipate that, by the end of nearly 90 minutes, I'd find tears pooling in my eyes and realize I cared deeply about the people Freedman had so gently, carefully introduced to me. A lesson in a niche of a niche of the dance world offers a space to think about what it means to be human.

The film follows the twists, turns, dips and changing partnerships in the lives of same-sex ballroom dancers--like the charismatic, creatively ambitious Ernesto Palma, raised in poverty in Costa Rica, a former meth addict for whom dancing is emotional self-care; the Russian Nikolais Shpakov who blossoms as a performer as he grows more confident in his gay identity; and Emily Coles, battling diabetes as she strives to create beauty. "It's Fred and Fred and Ginger and Ginger," quips a judge at California's annual April Follies competition. But it's more than that: It's people you might know. The personal is political, as we used to say, and the intimacy--enhanced by Freedman's team of cinematographers and her editor--makes for compelling viewing.

Cinematography: Joel Shapiro, Diana Wilmar, John Cummings, Vanessa Carr
Editing: Dina Potocki

Opens Friday, August 24 at Quad Cinema (New York) and Friday, September 14 at Laemmle Music Hall Theater (Los Angeles)

Quad Cinema
34 West 13th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Debra Chasnoff, 60

Debra Chasnoff, Whose Films Redefined Gay Families, Dies at 60
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, November 14, 2017

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Those rebellious Trocks, now on film!

REBELS ON POINTE

(2017, 90 minutes)

A film by Bobbi Jo Hart

An Icarus Films Release

This month, Icarus Films and director Bobbi Jo Hart will celebrate the US theatrical release of Hart's Rebels on Pointe, the first documentary devoted to the all-male Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. For more than four decades, the New York-based Trocks have strapped on pointe shoes, delighting world-wide audiences with irreverent, accessible interpretations of ballet's classics. While the gender-bending is all in fun, their dancing also demonstrates serious technical capability and attention to detail.Artistic director Tory Dobrin sees no reason, he says, to choose between joke or no joke. The Trocks, says ABT's James Whiteside, an ardent admirer, strike "an incredible balance between high art and clever camp."

Generous with samples of the troupe on stage, Hart's film is also lavish with clips of interviews with and about the dancers. We come to appreciate their work ethic, their drive to perform and the joys and challenges of day-to-day life within and outside of dance.

I only wish Hart had delved a little deeper, seizing an opportunity to contextualize the Trocks's achievements. Dance fans can now explore an exciting landscape in which openly queer, trans and gender non-conforming artists expand how we see, read and respond to dance, both classical and contemporary. It would have been interesting to hear from out-lesbian dance artist and educator Katy Pyle whose Ballez--a philosophy, practice and company--is designed to re-write "the narratives of Story Ballets to tell the history of our lineage, as dancers, and as queers" and re-imagine "Archetypal characters to reflect multiplicity: of identity, desire and expression." And Pyle is only one of many artists upending conventional roles and affirming more gender fluidity in dance today.

Rebels on Pointe leans more personal than political, though, of course, these things glide along a spectrum. It's more of a glance behind the scenes and the dressing room door but, if you love people, love dancers, love the Trocks, that might be enough.

See Rebels on Pointe 

in the following theaters:

New York City: opening November 15 at Quad Cinema

Los Angeles: opening November 24 at Laemmle Music Hall

Chicago: opening November 24 at Gene Siskel Film Center

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Murray Lerner, 90

Murray Lerner, Who Filmed Music’s Biggest Stars, Dies at 90
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, September 5, 2017

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Invisible made visible: Okpokwasili, Rossi present "Bronx Gothic"

"Bronx Gothic is about inhabiting the body of a brown girl
in a world that privileges whiteness."

"I am asking you to see the brown body."

"Maybe Bronx Gothic creates visibility for the invisible."

--Okwui Okpokwasili,
from the film Bronx Gothic, directed by Andrew Rossi

Photos courtesy of Grasshopper Film

Now ask yourself: Are you awake?

--Okwui Okpokwasili, Bronx Gothic

Christians have a gospel story about Jesus, aware of his fate, praying in the garden of Gethsemane on the night before his crucifixion. All around him, his disciples--whom he had asked to merely keep watch with him--sleep deeply, leaving him alone with his agony.

I thought of this scene as I watched Okwui Okpokwasili in the documentary Bronx Gothic (2017, 91 min.), a film with superb direction by Andrew Rossi and killer editing by Andrew Coffman of Bryan Sarkinen and Rossi's daring cinematography. Launching its world premiere theatrical engagement on July 12 at Film Forum, the film provides deep insight into the motivation and process that guided Okpokwasili's magnificent solo performance piece of the same name. It delves into her experiences, thoughts and feelings as she takes the show on its final tour and holds discussions with members of her audience.

As the film opens, Okpokwasili is in mid-performance, dressed in the color of congealed blood, tears pooling and dripping from her luminous eyes as the persona she inhabits recalls life-changing incidents from a Bronx childhood. I was reminded of the frequent, insistent sobbing in Kyle Abraham's ensemble dance, Dearest Home, and also how, like disciples at Gethsemane, not every viewer will necessarily have the will to stay awake--available, vulnerable, connected, "woke"--when Black artists ask for empathetic witness.

Both Dearest Home and Bronx Gothic--denying any demand for performance to stay within narrow, acceptable confines--make messy vulnerability and intense pain visible, in particular Black pain. Both works reach into as well as beyond their makers' personal history of being Black in America to suggest characters and narrative that should move anyone of heart and conscience.

Okpokwasili was raised within a large, middle-class Nigerian-immigrant family in the comfortable Parkchester section of the Bronx in the 1980s. (Her charming parents, whom we meet late in the film, make an indelible impression.) Describing her solo as "semi-autobiographical" allows it to partake of her extraordinary imagination and her empathy for the pre-teen girls she observed in her youth. She remembers them, remembers their pleasures and their struggles, channels them and serves them with intensely committed soul and physicality. The film's audience is spared little of how violently this haunted performance has wrenched its performer's psyche and body.

Having seen two iterations of Bronx Gothic live (Danspace Project, 2012 and 2014), I can tell you that the film, generously sampling the live performance, only slightly misses the electrifying force of Okpokwasili live. There's nothing quite like being in a close, tent-like enclosure with her as she quakes head to toe, shares sexual secrets, scrapes her bare feet and smacks her bones against a punishing floor.

"Black flesh has deep meaning in this culture," Okpokwasili remarks at one point as she discusses her intentions for Bronx Gothic. All the vivid imagery--the dark and the light, the glistening sweat, the luxurious undulations and seizure-like trembling--serves to underscore this uncomfortable, complicated truth.

As she thinks about how her performance confronts and nearly overwhelms her audience, the artist is also both overwhelmed and intrigued. Recalling her experiences in the role, she asks an imaginary watcher, "Is my Blackness getting on you? Am I getting on you? Can you take on the pain?"

Not for nothing is the genre-spanning Okpokwasili one of our most respected artists, a Bessie-winner to boot. I hope Rossi's portrait of her will be seen widely. I rank Bronx Gothic up there with Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro as another urgent, earthshaking documentary that must be seen and must be discussed.

Showings at 12:30, 2:30, 4:40, 7:00 and 9:10
Wednesday, July 12 through Tuesday, July 25

Q&As with Okpokwasili and Rossi at the 7pm shows
Wednesday, July 12, Friday, July 14 and Saturday, July 15

For information and tickets, click here.

Film Forum
209 West Houston Street (west of Sixth Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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It's a milestone: Nierenberg films on tap at Quad Cinema

The late tap dance great Chuck Green in Harlem
At right, Harold "Sandman" Sims and Bunny Briggs
(still from No Maps on My Taps, 1979,
by George T. Nierenberg, courtesy of Milestone Films)

Two more giants of the art:
Gregory Hines embraces his mentor Jimmy Slyde.
(photo: George T. Nierenberg, courtesy of Milestone Films)

Time has taken from us all of the beloved master innovators and mentors shown in the photos above. But contemporary tap lives and shines in exemplars like Savion Glover, Michelle Dorrance, Jason Samuels-Smith, Chloe Arnold, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, Derick Grant, Ayodele Casel, Max Pollak, Roxane Butterfly, Caleb Teicher and a slew of eager youngsters coming up behind them. That torch keeps getting passed and won't go out as long as there are places where people can see and appreciate the riches tap has to offer.

Filmmaker George T. Nierenberg was an early hero in tap's recovery from the rise of television and rock 'n' roll, changes in the nature of choreography for Broadway musicals, and the subsequent loss of tap venues and gigs. His two intimate and beautiful films, No Maps on My Taps (1979) and About Tap (1984), featuring chats and performances by Chuck Green, Bunny Briggs, Harold "Sandman" Sims, Steve Condos and Jimmy Slyde, helped revive interest in the art and turned on new generations of dancers and dance educators. In 2014, American Tap Dance Foundation presented Nierenberg with its American Tap Dance Preservation Award.

Film producer/director George T. Nierenberg
(photo: George T. Nierenberg, courtesy of Milestone Films)

At Manhattan's Quad Cinema, Milestone Films will now present the first theatrical release of No Maps on My Taps (58 min) and About Tap (28 min), digitally restored from the original camera negatives, for a week-long run coinciding with ATDF's popular Tap City: The New York City Tap Festival.

I can only say, GO! You cannot fail to enjoy these films and be moved by these artists. If you can, please take some young folks who might think tap has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with musicality, mad skills, collaboration, imagination, feeling and excellence. So, yes, it has everything to do with them.

No Maps on My Taps and About Tap open at Quad Cinema on Friday, July 7 and run through Thursday, July 13. Schedule information and ticketing will be available onsite tomorrow, Monday, July 3.

For Tap City 2017--which, once again, includes everything from shows and screenings to a ride on the Circle Line--click here to see some of what's up with tap today and what's coming tomorrow.

Quad Cinema
34 West 13th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Jonathan Demme, 73

Oscar-Winning Director Jonathan Demme Dies at 73
by Yohana Desta, Vanity Fair, April 26, 2017

Jonathan Demme, Oscar-Winning Director, Is Dead at 73
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, April 26, 2017

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92Y presents Overturning Expectations: Dance and Disability

Alice Sheppard
(photo: Britten Traughber)

Edisa Weeks's Overturning Expectations: Dance and Disability, curated for 92Y Harkness Dance Center's Fridays At Noon series this past week, drew upon the ability of dance artists with disabilities to take up the charge of Artist in the full sense of the word--to question, make with rigor, challenge self and audience, and nurture awareness of possibilities.

The event opened with two film screenings--choreographer Heidi Latsky's heady, striking Soliloquy (2015), featuring dancers of varying ages and abilities, and Karina Epperlein's short documentary, Phoenix Dance (2006), a profile of the late Homer Avila. If Latsky's film underscores the awesome force and sensuous beauty of dancers, Epperlein--through Avila, who lost a leg and hip to a rare form of cancer--shows us what goes into making a dancer, any dancer. Love, determination and discipline. Watching the one-legged Avila take daily class, watching his nimble work with duet partner Andrea Flores and choreographer Alonzo King, you revise your expectations of both the human body and the mind. Avila--whose spreading cancer took him from us at age 48--educated his audiences and colleagues well.

Dance artists Jerron Herman (Phys. Ed) and Alice Sheppard (So, I will wait and Trusting If/Believing When) might be polar opposites, at least by evidence of their respective solos. Herman's piece leans towards the athletic side of things. He is a dancer with Cerebral palsy's spastic condition, dystonia, noticeable in one arm and hand. Phys. Ed's repetitive nature--maybe a tad too lengthy and repetitive--has a down-to-earth, pedestrian feel despite his forceful jerking and jackknifing. Sheppard's solos here were infused with meditative, classical lyricism, her arms and torso arching and flexing into space above and around her wheelchair. Rather than an impediment to graceful movement, her wheelchair was both partner and a source of ability. Like Avila, she redirected our thoughts to the potent bodily and psychic strengths that make dance possible.

For information on upcoming Fridays at Noon programs at 92Y--including Moving Forward: Women Choreographers East and West, April 28--click here.

92nd Street Y
1395 Lexington Avenue (between 92nd and 93rd Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)


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Don Hunstein, 88

Don Hunstein, Who Photographed Great Musicians, Dies at 88
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, March 24, 2017

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See "Enter the Faun" on WORLD's America ReFramed

"I grew up totally mixed up between art and medicine."
-- choreographer Tamar Rogoff

"To be able to feel the floor with my whole foot is an amazing sensation.
That's so new to me."
--performer Gregg Mozgala

Above and below:
Gregg Mozgala and Tamar Rogoff
appear in the documentary film, Enter the Faun
(photos: Andrew Baker).

Enter the Faun, directed by choreographer Tamar Rogoff and Daisy Wright, will receive its US television premiere next week on America ReFramed, WORLD's independent documentary series. The film explores the rigorous and intimate process between Rogoff, an artist deeply engaged with the body's intelligence and diverse neuro-capacities, and Gregg Mozgala, an actor and playwright with cerebral palsy as the collaborators prepared his first foray into dance--her 2009 work, Diagnosis of a Faun. It is a persistent questing beyond fear and panic to a memorably sensuous performance.

Challenging the boundaries of medicine and art, as well as the limitations associated with disability, Tamar and Gregg opened the door to new and endless possibilities. His transformation was so radical that even before Tamar could understand its ramifications, she knew she needed to document it and share it.

Mozgala partners dancer Emily Pope-Blackman.
(photo: Harvey Wang)

Postcard
Photo: Harvey Wang
Drawing: Robert Eggers
Design: Olivia Klaus, Orange Static

Check local listings for the March 28 US premiere screening on WORLD (8pm EST).

Starting Wednesday, March 29, Enter the Faun will be available for free streaming for audiences across the US on WORLD. It is also available for purchase here.

Read about Mozgala's work with Rogoff in "Learning His Body, Learning to Dance" by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, November 24, 2009.

And follow this link to my Dance Magazine review of Tamar Rogoff Performance Projects' 2009 La MaMa premiere of Diagnosis of A Faun. I wrote that Rogoff "shows us people testing and achieving balance through moving away from what’s safely familiar—physically, intellectually, emotionally—into something new."

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Choreographer Hansen critiques misogyny in "Mr. Gaga" film

Anneke Hansen
(photo: Baille Younkman)

Yesterday, I received a letter dance artist Anneke Hansen sent to film producer Barak Heymann about Tomer Heymann's documentary, Mr. Gaga. After seeing the film, which deals with the life and work of acclaimed Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, Hansen spoke with the producer to voice her concerns as outlined here.

*****

Dear Mr. Heymann,

I am writing, as promised, to reiterate my dismay at the misogynistic filmmaking displayed in Mr. Gaga.

As I mentioned, I was appalled by the section of the film that covers Ohad Naharin's early years in NYC. The film shows archival footage of the women whose bodies helped realize and establish his aesthetic. It uses the voices of these women. For several minutes they occupy the screen without ever being credited by name. In contrast, a male dancer, Daniel Tishman, I believe, is identified by a caption. This is a great and offensive mistake.

The disrespect is deepened by the fact that, at the same point in the film, Mari Kajiwara is introduced as "the most beautiful woman" Ohad has ever seen. We watch Ms. Kajiwara dance for many minutes, learning of her unique artistry, her acclaimed work with Alvin Ailey, and - rather smugly - of Ohad's conquest, without ever learning her name. Again, this is shameful. It is only after several minutes that Ms. Kajiwara's first name is introduced, leaving the audience to wonder, for quite some time, what her full name might be.

This treatment of Ms. Kajiwara, and other women who danced with Mr. Naharin, is shameful. Your film treats them as lesser beings, as objects for Ohad Naharin's male brilliance, rather than the great artists who allow for the work's existence. The misogyny of your filmmaking accidentally highlights an old and ugly tradition in the field by replication: women have often been the clay from which men mold their names.

As a choreographer, I'm usually grateful to see a film about dance - especially when it receives some critical acclaim and support. In this case, however, I was left with a foul taste in my mouth.

I sincerely hope you will re-edit the film to name these women and give them respectful recognition for their work and contributions to Mr. Naharin's success. I intend to share this letter with the NYC dance press and community. I look forward to your response.

Best regards,
Anneke Hansen 

*****

Anneke Hansen is a choreographer, performer, and teacher based in new york city who primarily presents dance works through her company, Anneke Hansen Dance. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence college, her work has been presented in NYC by the Chocolate Factory Theater and as part of the La Mama moves! Festival, Draftworks at Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, Dance Conversations @ The Flea, and at University Settlement. Hansen has been international guest artist-in-residence at Dance House in Dublin, Ireland, Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico, and her company has enjoyed creative residencies at Rockbridge Arts Exchange in Virginia, and Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, VT. The company's work has been featured at the Big Range Dance Festival in Houston, TX, among other venues, and her site-specific work has been performed in NYC parks and abroad in Washington D.C. and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her most recent project, a collaboration with Lori Yuill, was selected as Best of Fringe at the Houston Fringe Festival, 2016. Anneke Hansen Dance has received funding from LMCC’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund, NYFA’s BUILD grant, and the Puffin Foundation. As a performer, Hansen has had the pleasure of dancing for New York choreographers Sara Rudner and Susan Rethorst, and for Australian choreographer Russell Dumas, among others. A student of anatomy, she served as assistant to master anatomist and neuromuscular educator Irene Dowd. In addition to teaching dance in both the US and abroad, Hansen maintains a practice as a private movement instructor in NYC, specializing in rehabilitative movement and performance training, and has taught anatomy at several area colleges. www.annekehansendance.com

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February US opening for film on Gaga's Naharin

Choreographer Ohad Naharin
(photo: Gadi Dagon)

Mr. Gaga, Tomer Heymann's 2015 documentary film, delves into the life and maverick work of Ohad Naharin, artistic director of Tel Aviv's Batsheva Dance Company. It will open in US theaters in February of next year.

Clips from an early film of young Naharin flipping and tumbling in the grass around his childhood home suggest the roots of his genius creation, Gaga dance. Son of a dancer, the youngster took obvious pleasure in physicality without fear or rules. The mature artist would come to offer students and dancers a pathway to the freedom he had always sought.

We see the contemporary Naharin in the studio urging dancers to "find a way to let go...just let it happen. The more you let go everywhere in your body at once, the softness of your flesh will protect you." Later, Heymann introduces archival footage of a callow-looking Naharin, serving in an army entertainment unit during the Yom Kippur War. We consider how being surrounded by danger and death might have influenced the intense, liberating aesthetic of Naharin's future work.

He began dance training late, at 22, he tells us as we glimpse clips of a sturdy young guy with confident presence and a sense of what was right or, more to the point, not right for him. Martha Graham was not. Maurice Béjart decidedly was not. At Juilliard, he got by, smartly imitating the technique he observed in ballet class. You clearly see his efforts did not go deep.

An injury led him to explore new strategies to heal his body and allow it more authentic expression. And it was something more, a connection to "feminine forces," as he describes them in the film, "delicacy and aggressiveness at once." Dance teacher Gina Buntz later speaks of Naharin's "Mediterranean spine...very womanly," and Heymann shows the dancer indeed working that glorious spine.

In one teaching moment, Naharin instructs a young man to dance "like you're going to save somebody's life and, if you don't, it's gone." In another scene, we watch a gorgeous, vigorous male duet as Naharin tells us, "Dance is the opposite of macho. Movement, in its purest source, is about gender." Regrettably, we do not hear more about this idea or really learn what makes Gaga work from the inside out. The movement often looks grotesque and mind-blowing. Heymann's sampling of it--lots of it--can make your heart race.

Filmmaker Tomer Heymann
(photo: Mari Laukkanen)

The filmmaker weaves in the story of Naharin's passionate life and partnership with his first wife, Mari Kajiwara, a beloved Alvin Ailey star who quit that company and followed him to Israel. He emphasizes that Kajiwara's grasp of Naharin's often elusive ideas and demanding methods was crucial to their effective transmission to dancers. Sadly, Kajiwara succumbed to cancer in Tel Aviv on Christmas 2001. The choreographer is now remarried and a father.

Celebrated worldwide, Naharin has not escaped controversy in his homeland. Ultra-religious parties took issue with the notion that his dancers, invited to perform in a gala celebration of Israel's 50th anniversary, would tear off their clothes to dance to a Passover Seder song in undershirts and shorts. Under pressure, the choreographer agreed to more modest costuming and then immediately resigned. When his dancers backed him up, refusing to perform at all, Naharin quickly resumed directorship of his company.

In a stunning moment in the film, he chides his nation as "a country infected by racism, hooliganism, widespread ignorance, abuse of power and fanaticism." He continues, "This influences the government we elect. This government has put at risk not only my work, but the actual survival of us all in this country, which I love so much.”

That's tough love, as his dancers would surely recognize it. As Heymann reveals, the choreographer thinks nothing of barking disapproval from the wings--and that's after reportedly sending performers onstage with this tender blessing:

Don't fuck with me. My life depends upon you.

Mr. Gaga (100 min./English/Hebrew) opens in US theaters on February 1, 2017. For further information on international theatrical release and festival screenings, click here.

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Looking at Lucinda, then and now

Scenes from Dance (2009) by Lucinda Childs
(photos: Sally Cohn)

I regret missing Barnard College Dance Department's recent evening with Lucinda Childs and French filmmaker Patrick Bensard, director of the 2005 documentary, Lucinda Childs. Just short of an hour, the film traces notable influences and milestones in the dance artist's career--her exposure to the aesthetics of Cunningham and Cage, explorations with her fellow Judson iconoclasts such as Yvonne Rainer, magisterial flights through the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson universe.

It is Wilson, interviewed by Bensard, who best sums up the multitude within Childs, the mixed feelings she and her elegant, minimalist aesthetic can stir in a viewer. He describes a being at once soft and severe, hot and cold, and he appears to love her every polarized contradiction. The film includes wonderful excerpts of Childs, Mikhail Baryshnikov and other dancers performing her choreography--skimming the floor and slicing through air like figure skaters, earth and its gravity mere playthings to these mercurial figures.

Worth any price of admission are the brief glimpses of her solo Carnation, made in 1964 when I was 12 and a decade away from starting to write about dance. Maybe only a woman as frosty-looking as Childs could be this wickedly clever, surreal and funny in her ritualistic precision, crowning herself with a flexible strainer basket, carefully stuffing kitchen sponges into her mouth and fanning the stack open like a duck's bill.  How I wish I could see it performed live now.

* * *

See the fall season of The Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater, November 29-December 11. The first week's program includes the New York premiere of a Joyce commission, The Sun Roars Into View (2016), and the second week features Childs's signature work, Dance (1979) with a commissioned score by Philip Glass and the original film decor by Sol LeWitt.

For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Upcoming US premieres for Carlos Saura's "Argentina"

Fans of Spanish director Carlos Saura's series of flamenco-related films should also enjoy Argentina (2015), a soulful love note to the music and dance of that nation. Shot in Buenos Aires, the sensuous documentary bears family resemblance to Saura's Flamenco Flamenco (2010) in its minimalistic yet dramatic setting, chiarascuro lighting and sunset coloration, intriguingly voyeuristic camera work, close-ups of expressive, lived-in faces and diverse array of excellent performers.

The 85-minute film samples everything from indigenous folk music to extraordinary ballads with an existential or political edge. There are songs about friendship and generosity, songs about the pain we humans cause our earth. "The only thing more important than God," one lyric tells us, "is that no one should spit blood so that another can live better."

The dancing follows a similar mixture--regional social dances, carnival dancing, contemporary choreography. It's all Argentina.

I was moved by so much in this film but especially the photo montage honoring the late, great singer Mercedes Sosa--a progressive artist known as "the voice of the voiceless"--who Saura positions as inspiration to a classroom of youngsters charmingly attentive to her "Todo cambia" ("Everything Changes"). Everything, she tells us, will change--except for the love she holds for her land and its people.

Eighty-five minutes can only give us a taste but, in that short time, Saura does his best to help us understand what Sosa loved with all her heart.

See the trailer here, and the US premiere screenings at New York's Lincoln Plaza Cinema (June 17) and LA's Laemmle Royal (July 1), presented by First Run Features.

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Haskell Wexler, 93

Haskell Wexler, Oscar-Winning Cinematographer, Dies at 93
by John Anderson, The New York Times, December 27, 2015

Steve Gebhardt, 78

Steve Gebhardt, Who Made Films With Rock Stars, Dies at 78
by William Grimes, The New York Times, October 30, 2015

Clark Center NYC pays tribute to Thelma Hill

Dance artist and educator
Thelma Hill
(photo courtesy of Clark Center NYC)

On Tuesday, November 17, Clark Center NYC and 651Arts will join forces at MOCADA in a symposium to honor the life and legacy of acclaimed dance educator Thelma Hill.

CCNYC Steering Committee member Jill Williams writes, "Thelma was one of the architects of Clark Center and a major influence and mentor."

Hill in the studio
(photo courtesy of Clark Center NYC)

"Delores Brown who danced with Thelma in The New York Negro Ballet will moderate.  She'll be joined by Otis Sallid who began studying with Thelma as a teenager and continues to work as a choreographer, producer (recently with the James Brown project, Get on the Good Foot at the Apollo Theater), Mickey Davidson who was a student of Thelma's at Clark Center and works as a dancer, choreographer and director of her own company and Kathe Sandler who will share her short documentary gem, Remembering Thelma."

For further information on the symposium and to purchase tickets, click here.

MOCADA
80 Hanson Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Gary Keys, 81

Gary Keys, Filmmaker Who Documented Duke Ellington, Dies at 81
by William Grimes, The New York Times, August 30 , 2015