David Thomson opens world premiere at Performance Space New York

Scenes from he his own mythical beast by David Thomson
Above and below: Thomson, at left, with Paul Hamilton
(photos: Maria Baranova)

he his own mythical beast interrogates the complexities of American culture and draws from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, James Baldwin, the confession booth, Claudia Rankine, high school fights, Judith Butler, baptism, Roland Barthes, and Trisha Brown. Venus, a character that flirts with black face, gender ambiguity and sexuality, becomes a guide on this journey. Part beast and part myth, Venus is named after the Hottentot Venus, aka Sarah Baartman – an enslaved black woman who was exhibited as an exotic in the early 19th Century London and Paris. This code-shifting chimaera is Thomson’s response to the post-modern performance aesthetic that historically privileged neutrality as a means of subverting the personal narrative.

--promotional material for he his own mythical beast, a world premiere at Performance Space New York 

At center, Jodi Bender (left) with Katrina Reid
(photo: Maria Baranova)

This week, David Thomson wraps up Performance Space New York' 2018 COIL festival with the world premiere of he his own mythical beast, a work he has developed and shown, in various iterations from Danspace Project to BRIC, since 2012. A quartet with video and projected text installation, it feels like something massive punching its way out of a confining container.

I hated, but also sort-of understood, the space it inhabits--a black coffin of a room with audience rows set up along one long and two short sides, and woe to you if you happened to be positioned on one of those short ends trying to figure out what's going on at a spot that seems many cold miles away, the dancers like austere, awesome planets and moons. From the distancing and darkness rose stark ring lights washing across dark faces and torsoes--Thomson's and Paul Hamilton's dark Black skin. The men turned their limbs into layered sculpture, feverishly churning within a square on the floor, its space and boundaries sealed by tape. Compressed, trained to be small and of controlled beauty, the dynamism, fluidity and complexity of these two men only grew more apparent.

Above and below: Thomson
(photos: Maria Baranova)

The solid core of Thomson's project, with its numerous sources of inspiration and extraordinary creative contributors over the years, is the situation of the Black body--his body and Hamilton's and Reid's, too, though this Black woman's role here seems perhaps deliberately secondary--within aesthetics and systems upheld by white postmodernism. In a straightforward sequence, Bender--the sole white dancer-- gets to humiliate and brutalize Hamilton over and over and over and over again and then some more. The viewer, appalled, might flash back to some of the hallway's projected text--a brief exchange, between two speakers, about slavery reenactments--that runs alongside the loop of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Does it help, here, to remember that the dastardly, Road Runner-chasing Wile E. Coyote always brought about his own undoing? Maybe. I can't help but think that a good part of that punching out I felt from the whole work was about punching the hell out of one's own mindset.

Fierce performances make this work special and memorable, but I also credit the striking visual and lighting concepts realized, respectively, by Peter Born and Roderick Murray.

he his own mythical beast continues with performances tonight and Friday at 7:30pm and Sunday, February 4 at 3pm. These performances include an installation, and you are invited to arrive early to view it. For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets, 4th Floor), Manhattan
(directions)

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Shared Evening: Jasmine Hearn and Mariana Valencia

This weekend, Danspace Project presents shared evenings of work
by dance artists Jasmine Hearn (above) and Mariana Valencia (below).
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Maybe this Earth is a bed where each of us rests on the threshold of a dream or all of us can dream collectively. Sitting down to take in this spell by Jasmine Hearn (shook at Danspace Project) means drawing near a fire to hear old, passed-down stories, but the fire is invisible, the stories and songs muffled, the images shadowy, blurry. It might not matter if you can't pick up distinct words, follow sentences; if a song is made up of one word that trails off in the air or is simple sounds intoned in a flutey voice. It calls you to take part in the making.

The costumes are equally indistinct, cobbled together as if by a child who had leafed through pages of history, falling asleep atop them, dreaming and dreaming. The fabric--how unruly, voluminous, billowing, ennobling...or thrown together with function if not sense. The movements--how softly fluid, swirly, simple, repetitive, shifting, un-insistent, graceful, agile (Hearn, Angie Pittman, Dominica Greene...these three and also the traces of all who made this, continue to make this, one spectre floating into the other....) You see what you will see. You dream what you will dream, unfolding a chiffon dream engulfing altar steps like sea foam slipping over a shoreline.

"This is the answer to my 7 year old self who casted spells in her bathtub...spells that dripped honey, affirmation, and the belief that magic lives in the marrow of our bones."

"I am looking to evoke a realm, a place, a time, a memory when/where black women are not doubted." -- Jasmine Hearn

Concept and direction: Jasmine Hearn
Choreography and performance: Maria Bauman, Kayla Farrish, Dominica Greene, Jasmine Hearn, Catherine Kirk and Angie Pittman
Costumes made in collaboration with Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency
Sound: Jasmine Hearn (includes a rework of Sylvan Esso's Die Young)
Video: Alisha B. Wormsley
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Scene from shook
Angie Pittman (at left) and Dominica Greene (center)
with Hearn
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Mariana Valencia performs Yugoslavia
(photo: Ian Douglas)

"What are we if we are together but not related?"

In her solo, Yugoslavia, Mariana Valencia asks this question, specifically referring to her relationship to her Polish stepfather (and, I guess, in a way, her Polish stepfather's relationship to her Guatemalan mom).

One word that recurs in the work is blend. Spoken with Valencia's characteristic clarity and evenness, the word blend has its own physical pose. She hits it, and you watch it...for a few seconds. You might not understand it, but you can see it and recognize it when it comes around again. You learn a piece of movement language by immersive process.

Yugoslavia finds Valencia blending a lengthy monologue into movement in a way that seals any divide between verbal language and dance. That seems to work, although at least one person I spoke with afterwards found the piece to be not very dance-y. To me, it was a poetic marathon, a work of impressive endurance and grace under the pressure to tell a story with a lot of unexpected and seemingly unrelated moving parts and somehow make them hold together. Or not. I think, mostly, not.

At least, not for me. For me, they stayed demarcated, and that seemed okay. Or more than okay. That seemed the right thing.

In Yugoslavia, I intersect the First World, the Second World, the countryside, the imaginary plane and vampires. Factual, humorous, and grave observations depict my herstorical frame,” writes Valencia. With Yugoslavia, “I’m in search of the spiritual, in observation of the physical, and in awe of the artificial.” 

See, those commas and "ands" work well, and the way Valencia speaks shows you one thing after another. And that seems the right thing. More juxtaposition than blend. Blend might be an aspiration. Or not.

Writing about her inspiration for the piece, Valencia says, "visiting the Balkans (Serbia and Macedonia) has awakened my lineage through Slavic languages. I'll be tuning into identities that are landless, homeless, nameless, wandering, and exiled." In other words, not so blended.

Mention of the Balkans also brings me to that word derived from their situation--Balkanization, fragmentation often with tense and hostile juxtaposition of the separate entities. And then there's the discomfort of a young girl, Valencia, trying to sing Leonard Cohen lyrics with her dad without revealing her pleasure in the racy verses. Blending by omission? There's a single painting--just one--by her dad on a tripod in all of St. Mark's roomy space. And something about vampires because, we're told, the word vampire originates in the Serbian language. A lot of thingy things.

I watched Valencia take sheets of raspberry red construction paper and cut them into letters that she then arranged on the floor. I'm not particularly good with cutting paper with any degree of accuracy. But, apparently, she is. She went right to it, and the letters turned out well-shaped. They looked like themselves and like nothing else.

Choreography, script, costume, set and performance: Mariana Valencia
Original score: Mariana Valencia
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann

Shared Evening: Jasmine Hearn & Mariana Valencia continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 8pm. No late seating. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: Dana Michel

Dana Michel performs Mercurial George
in this year's American Realness festival.

The Black Canadian dance artist Dana Michel--who made a big splash at home and here in New York in 2014 with her solo Yellow Towel--is back with a new solo, Mercurial George, at Abrons Arts Center for American Realness.

She has described the hour-long piece as an act of “wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig” asking “What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body?” A seeming extension of Yellow Towel, with its genesis in racial stereotypes, Mercurial George implies the release of an authentic identity not imposed by others.

This is pertinent for exploration. Identity and marginal otherness--from immigration status to religion to gender--are battlegrounds with renewed real life-or-death stakes in the current moment. And Michel is a curious, fearless explorer, eccentric and mercurial indeed in her body language, fascination with the odd prop oddly used, and tendency to randomly mumble or declaim. She opens dimensions of mind and body that we usually declare unseemly and diseased and seems to say, "Look what else is here."

It's an interesting task and an interesting approach, requiring a performer who can submerge her calm, charming persona and grab hold of a viewer, no matter how resistant, for the space of an hour. Not easy. Go take a look and see what else is there.

Mercurial George
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Here's a mini-interview with Dana Michel

on the occasion of her January 2014 presentation of Yellow Towel

for American Realness.

(And here is my review of that show.)

Mercurial George will be presented again on Monday, January 9 at 4pm and Tuesday, January 10 at 7pm. Run Time: 55 minutes. For information on this and other American Realness events, now through January 12, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
(Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Out on the Fringe: Shamamian shakes the earth she loves

Louisine Shamamian
(photo: Kyle MaKrauer)

Courage can take many different forms. Comic Louisine Shamamian binds together distinct forms of true courage in her new monologue, Shake the Earth (FringeNYC), directed by Misti B. Wills. But don't expect one of her standup routines or her offbeat "lesbian matchmaker to the straights" videos.

While Shake the Earth has sweetly amusing moments, its Armenia-born writer-performer earnestly imparts two stories--her immigrant youth and coming out in Brooklyn and the Turkish oppression and slaughter of its Armenian population, including members of her family. This year marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide, a crime still denied by the Turkish government. In fact, in today's Turkey, it's criminal to even breathe the words "Armenian genocide." Shamamian breaks all silence--personal and political.

First, she charms us with family portraits and vignettes. As a kid, her red shock of hair and her size made her stand out; her kin called her "a red round tomato." There were enormous, festive gatherings with "women cooking for days." She recites a litany of food and its flavorful ingredients, the music, the dancing. You know how it goes--familial and, even to this Bajan-American, instantly familiar, the same sort of memories for many in an audience hailing from around the American melting pot.

Curious about the odd eating habits of one relative, the young Shamamian began asking questions and eventually researching the genocide with a "passion for a mythical place," her Armenia. At the same time, another life-altering passion stirred--a crush on a beautiful Black butch who returned her interest. Her sweetheart "didn't entertain shame." They became the first openly queer couple in their high school.

Shamamian took a big step in coming out to her mother. I don't know if the comic is aware of this, but her mom's initial reaction ("There are no gay people in Armenia!") syncs up perfectly with the words of comedian Margaret Cho's mom ("There are no gays in Korea!") in Cho's I'm The One That I Want performance. Some day, these two mothers--both of whom came around because they love their daughters--should really get together.

On occasion, Shamamian falls into a didactic tone that feels arid and artificial. There must be more efficient ways to impart facts than these flat, inserted teachings. (Expand the brief notes on genocide in your program? Project some text on the curtain behind you?) But she hits her high point with a recounting of one man's amazing escape from a Turkish work camp near Aleppo, Syria. We learn the source of her dedication to accurate history and honesty about the continued threat to Armenians and Kurds.

"Hold this information with me today," she says. "It is all I ask."

In accordance, each audience member receives a forget-me-not pin--the centennial symbol not only of past suffering but also the hoped-for unity, futurity and eternity of the Armenian people.

Remaining performances of Shake the Earth:

Saturday, August 22 (7pm)

Monday, August 24 (2pm)

Saturday, August 29 (8:45 pm)

For information and tickets, click here or here.

Read an interview with Shamamian here.

For information on all programming of the 2015 New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC), continuing through August 30, click here.

Spectrum

121 Ludlow Street (between Delancey and Rivington Streets), 2nd floor,  Manhattan

(map/directions)

Marissa Perel dreams it out

Marissa Perel in More Than Just a Piece of Sky
at The Chocolate Factory
(photo: Madeline Best)

Marissa Perel seems so very far away.

Even in a smallish space where the white bed and bedding that cloak her hidden body are not only visible to all eyes but glowing in pristine, ghostly light.

When her audience enters the space, there might be a tiny sliver of skin to see. That's all.

Later, after Perel sits up in the bed, which she never leaves, we strain to hear her singing or speaking voice. But her alter egos--the dancers Lindsay Reuter and Jumatatu Poe, with whom Perel created More Than Just a Piece of Sky--extend her range into our world.

Choreographed and written by Perel, the performance fractures and refashions characters, text and--in one smart moment--vocal music from Barbra Striesand's 1983 movie, Yentl, itself sourced in "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy," a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yentl, you might recall from the film, is really a young Orthodox Jewish woman with a thirst for Talmudic knowledge in a culture that relegates women to home and family. Yentl's defiant self-disguise--her cross-dressing, name-changing strategy--works fine until... Well, just download Streisand singing "The Way He Makes Me Feel."

Presented at The Chocolate Factory as part of Queer New York International Arts Festival, the piece applies artfully arranged text, movement, video, music and lighting to invoke a dream state in which gender identity and roles shift like the moon through its cycles. I'm thinking especially of the delicate verbal and gestural exchanges between Reuter and Poe around a dangling microphone, but each instant of More Than Just a Piece of Sky is meant to show the many facets of difference as forms of sensual magic power.

A passage where Poe presses and slides his naked skin against a wall seems to slip into the ether, to evaporate, perhaps intentionally transient in its effect. Another sequence in which the dancers languidly roll across the floor in each other's embrace feels different, substantial, and is just gorgeous. But I suspect it is not a big deal to Perel to make an impact by making an impact. She might be more intent on charting an ephemeris of all that cannot be pinned in place.

More Than Just a Piece of Sky continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For more information, click here. For tickets, click here.

For a schedule of other events in the 2014 Queer New York International Arts Festival, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Antonio Ramos and the Gang Bangers present "Neverland"

Of all the places to present a dance work that, from start to finish, features performers cavorting naked: A little theater in El Museo del Barrio, its walls sweetly decorated with scenes out of fairy tales!

Neverland--the result of Antonio Ramos's year-long residency at the museum--also seems, as a title, packed with provocation. Peter Pan and Michael Jackson zip through the mind.

Ramos's dancers--sometimes wearing wigs of glistening, fluttering Mylar or other minor trinkets and accessories--repeatedly, and repetitively, spill through the aisles or over the equally-bare stage, pumping and prancing around to lengthy dance tunes. Neverland has that certain in-your-face quality--literally: eventually, you do find yourself mooned by a quartet of dancers for what seems like hours--and a feeling of an outrageous and inescapable drug-trip version of a Broadway show. And unlike some nudity in contemporary dance, there's absolutely no attempt to tamp down the sexiness of the human body. Here, sexiness is often the point (and to that I would add, just sheer beauty and style and, sometimes in Ramos himself, a kind of ancient classical heroism). 

This work is clever as hell. Inspired by a magazine story about a homeless lesbian finding hardship and community in New York City--and, by extension, Ramos's own story of moving to this city without a job or a friend--Neverland's tawdriness easily and irreversibly slides into glamour, ritual elevation and radical badass-itude. It reminds us that dancers are the artists who profoundly unnerve and rock the system by putting their bodies front and center all the time, even when fully clothed. So, when they're unclothed (and foregrounding sexuality) in a society with serious issues about the body and embodiment, they're making revolution. 

"Let your whole body talk," sings RuPaul in a song on Neverland's soundtrack.
These dancers demonstrate that, no matter the context or circumstances, we can express ourselves with creative energy and pride.

So, hats off--if nothing else, for the moment--to Ramos and Joey Kipp, Adele Loux-Turner, Saúl Ulerio and Rebecca Wender--for braving this hour+ work and to Amanda K. Ringger for gloriously lighting it. And, while I'm at it, a tip of the hat to Charles Rice-Gonzalez for giving us, for once, the clearest, most helpful answer to that perennial question: "Okay, so, what the heck does a dancemaker's dramaturge do?" This one has done a very good job.

For more information on El Museo del Barrio's exhibitions and programs, click here.