His A.I.M. is true: Kyle Abraham's Joyce season

Claude CJ Johnson, Connie Shiau and Catherine Ellis Kirk
of A.I.M. perform Kyle Abraham's Drive.
(photo: Ian Douglas)

No half-measures. No uncertainty. Kyle Abraham is at The Joyce Theater this week with his newly-renamed troupe, A.I.M., doing things to the max.

This season--which makes room for dances by Doug Varone and Bebe Miller, world premieres by Andrea Miller and Abraham as well as the Joyce commission of his first solo performance in nearly a decade--feels like a bold announcement of a new phase in the life and career of this award-winning artist. In an opening-night audience packed with New York's dance notables and media, it also felt like the place to be.

Program A opens with the Miller trio, state, where a knife-sharp trio of Black women--Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk and Marcella Lewis, with whom Miller collaborated--splash their stark images, live or via looming shadows, against the pale glow of a backdrop. They resemble stylish fashion models distorting their bodies out of mundane functionality into nifty abstractions for the eye of photographers and magazine readers; a fascination grows with the hypnotic observation of their physical capabilities and precision design, their aggressive flair. Reggie Wilkins's music underscores a certain sci-fi otherworldliness in this picture as does Nicole Pearce's lighting design--but she's got even more astonishing ideas for Abraham's solo, INDY.

Created with composer-pianist Jerome Begin, INDY is a work of emergence, search and breakthrough, as moving as it is beautiful to behold. It reveals itself slowly, literally coming out of mist. In its early moments, I see aspects of the dancer I remember from way back: part b-boy/part voguer, the latter's effortlessly slinky moves a form of catnip for this audience. (Let me pause, a minute, to throw a few !!!s behind the name of designer Karen Young whose black slacks/top costume, with its thick bands of fringe, throws more than a few !!!s around Abraham's gyrations: Karen Young!!!). But with the spreading of his arms and the parting of the black curtain behind him, Abraham moves on from this image of himself.

We find him shuddering, his arms locked behind his back as if his wrists are handcuffed. Pearce's lighting, here and throughout, arrives from the oddest places and in the strangest ways. She is a fount of surprises, stepping up to the challenge of choreographer ready to surprise himself and all who follow him. Begin's sound chamber suddenly erupts in an audio clip of a voice announcing Abraham's BFA graduation. The dancer strips down to briefs to move around like an awkward, broken marionnette.

The work's fully-revealed, eye-popping visual design suggests a well-ordered cosmos--external and containing the dancer or internal and generative of his evolution, perhaps both. The Abraham we see now has unshackled himself from our and, likely, his own expectations.

With Meditation: A Silent Prayer, another Abraham world premiere, made in collaboration with his performers, the choreographer returns to a concern that has informed his works in previous years--the precarious existence of Black lives in white supremacist society; specifically, the unrelenting roll call of deaths of Blacks at the hands of police. The ensemble gently performs moments of human connection before Titus Kaphar's backdrop-spanning mural of what, at first, might seem to be looming images of three distinct Black faces. Instead, you come to realize, the three are blurs made to look like multiple, overlapped and moving faces. We hear a litany of ages, family roles and names, written and read in voiceover by artist Carrie Mae Weems. In addition to Kaphar and Weems, the notable creative team for Meditation includes Craig Harris (music), Dan Scully (lighting) and Young (costumes).

This program--as well as Program B--ends with Drive, an Abraham collaboration with A.I.M. which was a hit of the 2017 Fall for Dance Festival at City Center. More tight work by the ensemble, more stunning lighting by Scully, and the asserted conviction that--when ready--you can just pick up and go wherever you choose to go. A.I.M. is ready.

Performers:

Kyle Abraham, Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk, Marcella Lewis, Tamisha Guy, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, Jeremy "Jae" Neal, Matthew Baker and Claude "CJ" Johnson

****

A.I.M.'s Joyce season runs through Sunday, May 6 with two programs and varying start times as follows:

Program A (approx. 1hr 40 min)

Tuesday (7:30pm), Friday (8pm) and Saturday (2pm)

state (World Premiere) by Andrea Miller
INDY (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Meditation: A Silent Prayer (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Drive by Kyle Abraham

Program B (approx. 1 hr 20 min)

Wednesday (7:30pm), Thursday and Saturday (8pm) and Sunday (2pm)

Strict Love by Doug Varone
Habits of Attraction by Bebe Miller
Meditation: A Silent Prayer (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Drive by Kyle Abraham

For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Jennifer Monson's iLAND premieres "bend the even"

bend the even
danced by Mauriah Kraker (left) and Jennifer Monson
Below: Monson (left) and Kraker
(photos: Ryutaro Ishikane)

This work allows for the possibility that movement disappears and leaves only sensation, an emanation that is experienced through the skin and ears, not so much through the eyes. In bend the even this asks the viewer to release what might be tangible about the experience in preparation for what is newly emerging.
--from publicity for bend the even

Most of New York's dancemakers struggle to secure space to develop their work. But, for Jennifer Monson's latest piece, nature has provided...provided a place for research and exploration...provided motivation, inspiration, even, in its way, partnership.

bend the even--now in its premiere run at The Chocolate Factory Theater--is an experience of an Illinois prairie that we cannot (or maybe can) see. It is darkness and dawn at a beach we cannot (or maybe can) feel beneath our feet. It comes to life in a small loft studio in Long Island City but is intended to take us somewhere to wait for the unexpected and unforeseeable to become apparent to us.

To label it as a dance, and specifically a duet between Monson and Mauriah Kraker, is to lop off two of its essential limbs--the live soundwork of Jeff Kolar (electronics) and Zeena Parkins (acoustic harp); the lightwork of Elliott Jenetopulos, performed in the breath of the moment. (Costumes are by Susan Becker; scenic design by Regina Garcia.) It seems important to this team that their contributions be noted then removed from that hook and released. Something else, we've read, will come to "emanate at the edge of kinesthetic perception."

The research for this project was started in February 2017 with weekly rehearsals at dawn. These rehearsals have generated material connections between light, music, and movement – not as a representation of the liminal states of dawn but as a way of accessing new frameworks for emanating presence and animacy through the three mediums. This work allows for the possibility that movement disappears and leaves only sensation, an emanation that is experienced through the skin and ears, not so much through the eyes. Through the choreographic process, the collaborators will research the physics of sound, light, and movement on multiple scales – both scientific and experiential – drawing on atmospheric science as well as particle physics to inform the dawn practice.

Monson proposes something new, not so much relinquishing the choreographer's role--for the movement in this piece is fascinating and appealing as it is willful and wayward--as redirecting us to an unacknowledged result of choreography, a different purpose for it and for its fusion with other stimulants. I feel that I'm quite stuck on the edge of this desire, instinctually sympathetic with it while what's aimed for remains elusive. As audience members, we're habituated to focus on looking and listening for things and to appreciate (and, yes, interpret and judge) what we see and hear. bend the even intends disruption, or some form of liberation, but I'm caught up in its sensations.

What did we do with the sudden, absolute stillness that broke out on occasion? Did we check for external or internal vibes, or did we tick the seconds, wondering what we were supposed to be feeling and when the dancers might finally move again? Did that time feel more awkward than destabilizing? What about Jenetopulos's precipitous jolts in the lighting or other changes in sound and the dynamics of motion? Did we just "even" the bends right out and get back to our usual way of taking things in?

All that's to say, I'm not sure the bends in any even did more than point to a barrier we should know about. It did not lower that barrier--at least, not for me, not last evening. But maybe that pointing is, in itself, a useful beginning.

bend the even, running through Saturday with performances at 8pm, is sold out, but there is a waiting list. For information, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
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Darkness into light: Kota Yamazaki at Baryshnikov Arts Center

Julian Barnett in Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination,
Raja Feather Kelly and Mina Nishimura in background
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

Philosophy, dance, and folklore merge in Bessie Award-winning choreographer Kota Yamazaki’s latest work inspired by French writers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata’s notion of a “dance of darkness,” and Japan’s Goze music tradition. Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination explores the fragile body, the vaporizing body, and the body as an absorbing force.

--from promotional material for Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination

Mina Nishimura (foreground) with Raja Feather Kelly
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

I started watching Kota Yamazaki/Fluid hug-hug's new dance, Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination, by drawing a diagram of each dancer's position along the floor of Baryshnikov Arts Center's Gilman space. So one corner of my notebook page now resembles a star map. It also includes an arrow representing Kota's delayed entrance and indicating the direction in which, for most of the dance, his prone body will rest, alongside the outer edge of the special floor mat. And I drew a little, three-lined flap hanging just above the stars. That's for the sheer, opalescent fabric dipping low over the space (like the costumes and, indeed, the choreography, the inexplicably whimsical handiwork of Kota Yamazaki). It seems arbitrarily placed and more decorative than functional--say, as a space divider. But then, to be decorative is a function, and the fabric catches, liquifies and softly reflects a portion of Thomas Dunn's lighting. Even silence seems to have a function destabilized by the patter of dancers' feet on the surface. Later, Kenta Nagai's music will emerge--at first, a distance whistling seemingly from two sources and then a muffled chiming. 

Yamazaki's dancers--Julian Barnett, Raja Feather Kelly, Joanna Kotze and Mina Nishimura, all seasoned dancemakers in their own right--spend much of the time in relative proximity to but isolation of one another, each suspended in a specific portion of space, maybe slowly...slowly...shifting weight and gaze and, eventually, location. Limbs jutting or retracted, taking a few steps here or there on the balls of their feet, go their own way and mind their own business in that way aquarium fish have. And we watch them in a similar fashion. I quickly realized Yamazaki was splitting up the imagery so I'd have to make a choice. Most often I chose Barnett, a dancer who turned into a volatile madman as the piece went along, his nearly-comical agitation so propulsive that he stormed the audience...twice!

At one point, facing the black back curtain, Kotze muttered something we all could hear but, I'm sure, not make out. That was fine with me, because I doubt Yamazaki wanted us to try to understand it any more than he needed any other pop-up scrap of speech to make contextual sense.

The hour-or-so "hallucination" is part of a planned trilogy, and I missed Part 1, which is probably okay in the overall scheme of things. It has a fishy relationship to clock time and a (suspected) protagonist who, intriguingly, stays out of sight at first and then stays out of action for almost the entirety of it. And the piece winds down with wondrous Dunn lighting that bathes increasingly serene dancers in the cool gold of morning.

Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination continues tonight and Friday, December 15 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Billy Name, 76

Billy Name, Who Glazed Warhol’s Factory in Silver, Dies at 76
by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, July 21, 2016

Aakash Odedra Company brings "Rising" to Skirball Center

I want to keep my memories of dancer Aakash Odedra killing some James Brown funk three years ago in his joyous, Bessie-winning performance at the Apollo. And I want to forget Rising--his program of solos made by Akram Khan, Russell Maliphant, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and himself, brought to New York this week at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

Back in 2011, Rising marked a turning point for this British performer trained in classical Indian dance--his debut as a choreographer and commissioner of works in a contemporary vein. It draws heavily on the lush, picturesque qualities of his dancing and onstage design. It draws and draws, in fact, until both those wells run dry which, in the absence of anything more sustaining, takes just moments.

There appears to be a formula for Rising: a haze-filled stage; murky lighting; a vaguely mystical aura; and fluidity of movement that turns, time and again, to twirling and sinuous undulation. Odedra's own Nritta is the bland template for this pattern. Khan at least attempts a somewhat different direction for his handsome comrade in the next piece, In The Shadow of Man, invoking a screaming, yipping animal self that heaves and arcs and rotates off its axis. Maliphant's Cut locates Odedra in the triangular gap between two dark, framing curtains, yet again engulfed in billowing haze, bright light catching only splashes of his busy hands or forearms in a visual flamboyance that Alwin Nikolais surely would have admired. I thought, too, of David Parsons's Caught, the signature piece and perennial crowd-pleaser where flashing strobes make a leaping soloist appear to fly and fly and fly.

For Cherkaoui's Constellation, numerous globe-like light bulbs, sort of pomegranate-sized, hang on cords suspended from the flies. Individual lights can be moved from above like marionettes. That's lovely, but the design execution and the dancer's engagement with one or another dangling star only add up to pretty display. But I could not resist this thought: How many dancers does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. But that bulb has to want to change.

Rising is closed.

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Colleen Thomas Dance: Looking beyond the blueprint

Samantha Allen of Colleen Thomas Dance
in Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint
Photo: Alex Escalante

"We see what we think we know, not what stands before us," Colleen Thomas writes, introducing Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint, presented by 92Y Harkness Dance Center's new Dig Dance weekend series.

An artist's handiwork gets complicated, re-imagined and completed by what the individual observer brings to it. In the shifting gloom of 92Y's Buttenwieser Hall, we encounter Thomas's sensibilities, ideas and decisions, bringing "the stories we keep telling ourselves" about ourselves and about everything else. As she writes further, "Life is here, this moment. Now....and now...and now."

With the exception of composer John McGrew, who performs his score live, every single one of the men in Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint--Ehizoje Azeke, Marc Mann, Nathan Trice and the striking Orlando Hunter--are Black. Startled to notice this, I returned to Thomas's words and wondered if anyone else had experienced a similar jolt.  (Tamara Joy Clarke, also Black and also a dancer, passes through and around the space. But in this work, she's primarily serving as vocalist.) Thomas and the other women dancers--Samantha Allen, Jenna Riegel and Jessica Stroh--are white, and we had just watched them, stationed across the space, scaring us with images of obsessive self-grooming, as if they wanted to rub every bit of clothing, hair and flesh away from their inflamed bodies. And then, BLACKOUT. And now, these four men--each one grand and vulnerable.

Knowing of Thomas's concern with how we get ensnared in "the web of perceived social, gender and racial narratives," I felt she'd just dropped a grenade in our midst. We have seen multicultural dance ensembles; Thomas, herself, has danced with some of them. But the demographic makeup of Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint--and the balance of prominence and power within it--are rare in contemporary dance.

Tricia Toliver's preternatural lighting turns this hall--a dimly-lit space with a heavy, heavy feel--into a camera obscura or chamber of hallucinations, the perfect setting for the stark and fiery choreography. We're made aware of an outside--a black drape gets pulled aside; an opened door emits a blast of white light--to this tense and murky inside. Toliver takes the simple facts of folks--Have you seen dancers when they are off-duty?--and splashes harsh light across bodies, turning them spooky or monumental.

We can't trust our eyes. Or maybe sometimes we can. But it's important, first of all, to make the effort to look. For "life is here, this moment. Now....and now...and now."

Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint continues tonight at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm.

92nd St Y (Buttenwieser Hall)
Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Like, "WOW": Keely Garfield at Danspace Project

photo: Keely Garfield

In beginning to make WOW, I started thinking about what it would be like to make something that was entirely sincere without a hint of irony or trying to be clever.



--Keely Garfield 

Keely Garfield's WOW is a luminous mess that makes me smile, and I mean that sincerely. WOW encircles the music of Kate Bush, whose song "Wow," ironically, seems to lash at the insincerity of the entertainment biz.

The hour-long production, running now at Danspace Project, is an act of disruption, an unmasking with occasional masks, a mouthful of Pop Rocks, a baptismal immersion in feelings that continuously build, ebb and build again. Theatricalized for performances that, after all, will happen over three evenings, these feelings nevertheless appear to originate in and take their sustenance from someplace real.

WOW's a trip down the sub(terranean)way where public announcements end up not being what they seem at first. The edge comes off. These are not quite the expected MTA alerts any typical New Yorker could repeat out of a deep sleep, but dreams could produce the disarming little things Garfield turns them into.

A dancer (Leslie Kraus) pulls up a chair and locks with you, eye to eye, allowing all the sun to come through her face, and she cracks up, unable to hold anything back. A duet happens but with Garfield and Paul Hamilton endlessly writhing, wriggling their backs against the floor, and you might wonder where you, the baffled viewer, are located. Physically, you've retained your seat, surely, but has your vantage point somehow shifted to the air above this pair? No, that doesn't quite feel right either. Let's ask again: Where are you?

Big gestures and energies come unleashed; hills are run and conquered by desire. You're in the presence of a playful, exuberant mind, like that Facebook poster, "a browser with 2,857 tabs open. All. The. Time." Garfield's thousands of tabs include her collaborators, among them Brandin Steffensen, Jordan Morley, Hamilton and Kraus, each dancer a resource so wonderfully distinct and fascinating; singer/pianist Matthew Brookshire; and Kathy Kaufmann, whose lighting wizardry transforms the gaping openness of St. Mark's into the intensified dramatics of a proscenium.

WOW closes with tonight's performance at 8pm. Get information and tickets here.

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

Joe Levasseur: Take a workshop with dance's wizard of lighting

Movement Research presents a workshop with Bessie Award winner Joe Levasseur, lighting designer for dance, at Abrons Arts Center, July 7-11.

Lighting Design for Dance

This classroom and practical workshop will be a technical tutorial and discussion about the process of creating lighting designs for dance. All efforts will be made to demystify lighting in order to promote informative decision making and more easeful discussion in future collaborative processes. This class is designed for anyone interested in dance lighting including dancers, choreographers, and stage technicians. Participants must be present for all workshop dates.

Monday-Wednesday, 6:30-10pm, Thursday-Friday, 5:30-9:30pm
Optional: Tuesday and Wednesday 10am-5pm

Fee: $165

Abrons Art Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Kimberly Bartosik's intriguing duets at New York Live Arts

Roderick Murray (left) and Kimberly Bartosik
in You are my heat and glare
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Singers Dave Ruder (left) and Gelsey Bell
in You are my heat and glare
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Last night, I joined the second wave of audience members led up to the studio space at New York Live Arts to see You are my heat and glare, a U.S. premiere by Kimberly Bartosik/daela. After the first group took the elevator up, my group followed vocalists Gelsey Bell and Dave Ruder by the stairs and found seats as our guides, dressed in casual white clothing, continuously sang and circled the performance area. I tried to capture the lyrics, many slipping away even as they repeated and repeated. But, as Bell and Ruder moved in their gentle gait, I felt their voices--especially, Bell's softly soulful one--sowing themselves into another part of my awareness, and I caught one strong line: "Love is the mystery inside this walking."

You are my heat and glare, inspired by Anne Carson's writing, presents a landscape of love, mystery and risk. Moving, often in darkness, a lover might encounter danger or grace. Bartosik and her husband and lighting designer Roderick Murray carve out a space charged with intense lighting and physical energy and suggestions of erotic and volatile emotional states. Sharing that space at close quarters feels raw, almost too much to bear.

They made the right decision to present this evening-length piece in the studio, not the ground-level theater, and I can see this strategy working well for other dance groups with finished pieces best appreciated in a less formal setting, not just studio works-in-progress. It would be interesting to see more of these types of presentations at New York Live Arts.

The couples interacting here may be facing the end of the world--referenced in Bell and Ruder's haunting song--or the end of the world as they know it. At times, to this New Yorker's ear, the soundscape--roar of aircraft engines?--seems "extremely loud and incredibly close." But instead of distracting specifics, Bartosik's creative team dwells in the poetic--pitch-black darkness disturbed by shards of light or warmed by human breath and song; a planet in its long, lonely orbit of a star; a heron striding through the twilight stillness of a marsh; a spider climbing an orange web of electrical cording; a prisoner under interrogation; a most precious jewel set apart in a container of startling light, protected and constricted. In one stunning, slow-motion duet, Joanna Kotze and Marc Mann, with muscles trembling in furious tension, unleash a silent and truly terrifying argument.

You are my heat and glare is both intimate and harshly revealing, tender and aggressive, minimalist and monumental--a work of intriguing beauty.

You are My Heat and Glare runs now through Saturday, March 1 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and ticketing, click here.

Thursday, February 27, 6:30pm: Come Early Conversation: Comprised of Duets: Considering the Performance of Intimacy, moderated by Nicole Birmann Bloom (Program Officer, Dance and Theater, French Cultural Services)

Friday, February 28, post-performance: Stay Late Discussion: Creating You are my heat and glare moderated by Dean Moss in conversation with Kimberly Bartosik

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
212-924-0077
(map/directions)

Maria Hassabi premieres "PREMIERE" at The Kitchen

Choreographer Maria Hassabi (far left) with members of her troupe--
l-r, Robert Steijn, Andros Zins-Browne, Biba Bell and Hristoula Harakas
(photo by Marialena Marouda)

From Hassabi's PREMIERE
(photo by Paula Court)

The publicist wasn't kidding when he wrote, "The artist and The Kitchen would like for me to remind you that there is absolutely no late seating for this show, so please plan accordingly to be here before 8:00."

As soon as you pass through the set of doors into the performance space for Maria Hassabi's PREMIERE (co-presented by The Kitchen and Performa for Performa 13), you're trapped. With the action--yes, I will use that word--unfolding in front of you, the five performers arrayed between you and those doors, there's no unobtrusive way to get up and walk out. And, any number of times, you might think about walking out, think about fleeing the tedium and the cumulative heat of countless stage lights massed on either side of the performance space. The dancers' movements are incredibly slow and slight; the temperature in the airless room, elevated; and you are uncomfortably aware of everything going on within your own body.

Over ninety straight minutes that feel like ninety minutes indeed, you tilt forward, backward into your seat, list to one side or the other. Your eyes droop. You fan yourself with your program. You hear your neighbors similarly shifting, rustling, coughing. You catch one checking her watch. You check your own watch.

And yet you stay put. Not because you are a Performa type, because maybe you're not. Not because you're self-conscious and/or polite. But because the work--an endurance trial for performers and audience alike--is a knockout.

From Hassabi's PREMIERE
(photo by Paula Court)

You first experience PREMIERE as you enter the space, noticing the dancers rooted in place--Biba Bell and Hristoula Harakas standing, Hassabi, Robert Steijn and Andros Zins-Browne lounging on the floor--all motionless as they face the theater's doors. They maintain that tableau, inside the blaze of hot lights, with their backs to the audience as it settles in. When the last stragglers enter, Kitchen staff close the doors--the only indicator that the time has come to pay serious attention.

You watch for something--anything--to break loose. You feel relief and triumph to notice even just the flow of breath ruffling through a dancer's back, and you search for more of the same. Your outer and inner senses reach out. Despite yourself, you have already begun to live in this dance.

This persists over a long stretch until Harakas breaks the spell with a teeny, tiny twist of one foot. Bell also makes a minute slide or twist that slightly re-positions her body. In time, Zin-Browne's arm, which has been supporting him on the floor, slips backward an inch or so, and so does both of Hassabi's supporting arms. Glacial pace and subtlety in movement get the job done, though. You can look away for a while and look back to find the grouping changed in significant ways. It not only breathes; it evolves.

"Sound, here," I wrote in my notebook, "is color." I cannot say what I meant in that moment, but, so be it. The sole of Bell's ankle boot makes little crackles as it inches along the floor. In the otherwise silent atmosphere, that reaches us like amplified music. This approach to sounds, created by the friction between surfaces, recurs throughout the piece as dancers adjust their grounding. In one part of the dance, a crinkly sound initially seems to issue from one or more of the lights, like a sudden electrical problem. That distracts you until the volume of the noise strengthens and you get the joke. It's part of a recording as is a soft, high voice that appears somewhere and swiftly disappears.

Late in the piece, the blast of light reduces and then gets restored. Maybe you notice, for the first time, the oval pattern of dusty shoe marks--presumably from the audience, but it looks so perfect--that decorates the floor. Maybe you think, "Who's to stop me from napping for the remaining time? Really, who?" Instead, you continue to watch the dancers work their way 'round to their original tableau in which they face the doors through which you now may exit. In their end is their beginning.

Sound design by Alex Waterman
Lighting design by Zack Tinkelman and Maria Hassabi
Styling by threeASFOUR
Dramaturgy by Scott Lyall

PREMIERE continues at The Kitchen through Saturday evening with performances at 8pm. For schedule and ticketing information, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

******

More on The Kitchen

More on Performa 13

On lighting Black skin in film

‘12 Years a Slave,’ ‘Mother of George,’ and the aesthetic politics of filming black skin

by Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post, October 17, 2013

Jennifer Monson premieres "Live Dancing Archive" at The Kitchen

At the outset of Jennifer Monson/iLAND's Live Dancing Archive, the audience sits without benefit of light for a very long time. We hear tiny, ambient sounds of one another breathing, shifting, rustling, settling into an alive, soft darkness. Recalling that Monson recently told me that she had come to think of her audience as the ocean, I'm also remembering a time when I sat and watched the open sea at night, its awesomeness shading into something even more mysterious and compelling than usual and more than a little scary. What's in there? What's down there? 

Jennifer Monson (photo by Valerie Oliveiro)

Live Dancing Archive, presented at The Kitchen, serves as a way for Monson to embody a decade of her history of research and making, her sensitive and searching relationship with ecological systems of environments and communities, and her understanding of herself within all of this as a queer woman, activist and artist. It includes not only her hour-long performance--a collaboration with two brilliant artists, lighting designer Joe Levasseur and composer Jeff Kolar--but also a video installation by Robin Vachal and a digital archive designed by Youngjae Josephine Bae.  Levasseur and Kolar accompany her live for the journey, shaping and toning her austere surroundings: Levasseur striding here and there, adjusting the position and varying intensity of portable lights; Kolar sitting at his table of wonders, manipulating "external weather phenomena, wireless technology systems and human activity" through an array of handmade radio transmitters and receivers. If all of this seems like a pretty packed package, it is indeed, necessarily, packed and yet rendered with elegance.

Having seen a preview of part of the video last year, I limited myself to Monson's live show last evening. Even so, I came away feeling full and privileged to witness the skill and authority of this performance.

Jennifer Monson (photo by Ian Douglas)

In Live Dancing Archive, Monson presents herself as a hybrid creature of fur (fake pelt strapped to her torso, concealing her breasts) and human, womanly flesh (the wide mesh of her translucently pale, footless tights enclosing while revealing the nudity of her lower body). She initiates her dancing by pawing and pushing through the air, unfurling into and swimming into it. She endlessly channels organic forms, many presences coming and going in her movement and aspect. An inner wildness becomes external, and vice versa, all with precise control and calibration of pace, effort and coordination. A brief femme-drag sequence/lipsync to singer Antony's "Bird Gerhl" (with Monson ritually adorned by her costume designer, Susan Becker, in a completely uncharacteristic platinum wig, scarlet lipstick and saffron chiffon sleeves) serves as a solemn moment of vulnerability shortly before we experience, along with her, violent disturbance in the surrounding field of energy and sound.

There's so much more that transpires, in this ferocious, profoundly beautiful presentation, than I can say here. I hope you will jump at your chance to take it all in before Live Dancing Archive ends its run at The Kitchen tomorrow night.

Remaining performances: tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

Vachal's video installation will be on view in the theater today (noon-6pm) and tomorrow (11am-6pm) for free viewing.

Browse, enjoy and subscribe to the Live Dancing Archive site: Click here.

The Kitchen
519 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

heat, glare, Bartosik

Let me take a moment, between APAP shows, to remind you to keep posted on a work-in-development from dancer-choreographer Kimberly Bartosik, You are my heat and glare, set to premiere in the fall of this year. The choreographer and artistic director of Kimberly Bartosik/daela offered 55 minutes from her evening-length ensemble piece today at Gibney Dance Center for APAP. The work has greatly intensified and darkened, intriguingly, since I saw early versions of a couple of its segments last year.

Like a book of strange, compelling short tales, You are my heat and glare presents enigmatic duos--Bartosik and Roderick Murray; Joanna Kotze and Marc Mann, who are exceptional and terrifying; and the engaging vocalists Gelsey Bell and Dave Ruder--whose relationships are contained, shaped, revealed or rendered inscrutable by Murray's in-the-moment lighting manipulations. And that's quite a bag of tricks Murray has, too.

Kimberly Bartosik/daela

Rashaun Mitchell brings "NOX" to Danspace Project

Anne Carson

Rashaun Mitchell

When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get. -- Anne Carson

Rashaun Mitchell, by and large, is a quiet presence in NOX, his lovely, site-adjustable collaboration with poet Anne Carson, running now at Danspace Project, based on a book Carson wrote about the elusive brother she lost twice--the second time to death. My strongest memories of Mitchell find him striding the perimeter of the performance space, his entire body an icon of clarity and cool, or resting on the floor with his legs tucked around like a cat's tail or standing at a distance with a calm gaze fixed on Silas Riener.

Reiner carries the oddness, the frenzy, the passion of NOX--hurtling from one doorway to another, writhing and melting around columns, crawling down steps on his elbows and creating arresting sculpture out of his human body.

This night veers from cool to electric, from absence to presence, from safety to emergency, always with the possibility that these things will intermingle. Everything is painted in light and shadows (breathtaking painterly effects by Davison Scandrett), especially the doors and stained-glass windows of St. Mark's Church's balcony. Scandrett's lighting can imitate time's subtle passage, build anticipation of an arrive, make the immaterial visible and exalted. It is an extraordinary gift to these beautiful master dancers and exquisite poet.

With live performances by Carson (text), Benjamin Miller (music) and Robert Currie.

Rashaun Mitchell's Nox at Danspace Project now through Saturday, 8pm. Seating is limited, specially arranged for this production and, as you might expect, tickets are pfffttt! gone! Try the waiting list, though. For information, click here.

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

So...I won exactly what?

So I went to Fitzgerald & Stapleton's Smell of Want performance at Abrons Arts Center, reviewed here by Claudia La Rocco of The New York Times and worth reading. It's fairly clear from La Rocco's writing that she had no more of a clue about the import of what she experienced than I did. I have nothing to add, and I can only assume that the description you will find on the Abrons site is deliberately intended to subvert thought and deflect understanding rather to support those things.

Oh--sorry, Steve--there actually is one more thing: Despite being assigned to the infamously glittery Winner's Circle, I walked away totally glitter-free--a small disappointment, as it turned out. In fact, it's kind of funny about the apparent formal significance of when you enter the space, where you sit, what that seating section is called and how it's decorated or not decorated. If any of that has any connection to what's going on in F&S's performance in Abrons' wonderful little Experimental Theater, someone please kindly tell me what I missed.

I did like Kryssy Wright's sometimes wavery lighting on the stone walls in this intimate space that suggests a cozy, dimly-lit sauna--Smell of Want's performers do wear, as La Rocco notes, costumes designed by Mother Nature--as well as lightly evoking something more ancient and ritualistic.

With performances by the Irish choreographers Emma Fitzgerald and Aine Stapleton and dancers Deborah Black, Maryanne Chaney, Anastasia Cohen, Carl Harrison, Linda Sue Stein. Although listed in the program, Arturo Vidich has been performing--and quite spectacularly so--this week in Dancer Crush at New York Live Arts.

Sound by Nicholas Santiago

Smell of Want concludes this evening with an 8pm performance. Click here for information and ticketing. Seating is extremely limited. If tickets are still available, you might be able to select your seating area--ticket price adjusted accordingly.

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

Miller and Bell: new work at DTW

Andrea Miller's Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell Dance New York are bringing something that feels like high glamour to Dance Theater Workshop this week. With their juxtaposed world premieres, these two confident artists and their creative teams take dance theater and punch up the theatricality to an aggressive level. 

Miller's half-hour For Glenn Gould--inspired by a kind of before/after consideration of the pianist's two contrasting approaches to Bach's Goldberg Variations--evokes Gould's eccentricity. Metal folding chairs suggest the specially-designed piano chair that Gould insisted on using; stacks of books and other items prop up dancers' prone bodies just as Gould used blocks to raise his piano to an unusual, preferred height. The stage is littered--colorfully, artistically--with found objects, the detritus of internal disorder spilling outward from a brilliant artist to his environment. Safe to say, dances containing metal folding chairs are going to be irritating--sonically and, perhaps, otherwise. On that score, For Glenn Gould does not disappoint. But Gould seems to exist here as a screen upon which to project and pick through issues around irrationality and creativity in a way that proves more sensational than satisfying. The oddball Gould proves to be a very specific and specifically distracting screen. On the other hand, the Gallim ensemble--Caroline Fermin, Troy Ogilvie, Francesca Romo, Dan Walczak, Jonathan Royse Windham and Arika Yamada--drive the choreography and their bodies at a serious pitch that always amazes.

Bell's Pool ups the theatrical ante with disco-like decadence and sensational performance by Jonathan Campbell, Austin Diaz, Alexandra Johnson, Caroline Kirkpatrick, Zach McNally, Maud de la Purification and Kendra Samson. Miller and Bell share the same lighting designer, but, here, Vincent Vigilante has stepped up his own theatrical attack with stark lighting that carves out sharply-delineated zones and ovular pockets of space with radically different temperatures. Oh, baby, you feel the lighting--a truly impressive thing--while you wonder if you shouldn't be feeling the choreography, too, and getting a better grasp on meaning. Pool keeps spooling out more and more wild cleverness, seeming about to end and always finding more play (if not more sense) in that spool--a stretch of 41 minutes that seems to go on forever.

Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell Dance New York continue at Dance Theater Workshop through this Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For more information, click here.

Dance Theater Workshop

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)

Dance theater as dark art: "PURO DESEO"

Back in April, my colleague Andy Horwitz (of Culturebot) reviewed luciana achugar’s PURO DESEO when it premiered at The Kitchen and called it “several kinds of awesome.” I usually try my damnedest to avoid that word, but--damn it--Andy got it right. Achugar has delivered a work that should define the experience of awesomeness in dance theater. She and her creative team went on to win a 2010 Bessie for it, much deserved.

Having missed the Kitchen season, I grabbed the chance to catch up with PURO DESEO during Ben Pryor’s innovative American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center.

The first thing that got me was the gutsiness of starting it off in darkness and keeping the audience visually locked down for a very long time, with just achugar’s sing-song voice rising from the far side of the audience, repetitively singing a Spanish lyric, her faint tone slowly intensifying from folksiness to a slightly more strident pitch, and then the sound of something heavy passing me in the aisle, pounding its way towards the stage. Lighting designer Madeline Best is several kinds of gutsy, too. When we’re finally permitted to see, she lights the playhouse’s raw stage to suggest some dank, fire-lit cave of the mind, one you’d do well to avoid.

Thoughout the hour-long piece, achugar and collaborator Michael Mahalchick roam that mysterious, unholy space like ritualists gone quite mad. Awkwardly swathed in heavy black drapery and elbow-length leather gloves, achugar shuffles, shuffles, shuffles, retracing her steps along a proscribed, diagonal path and turning her head to give us an impersonal, unseeing, chilling stare. Best’s lighting later picks out Mahalchick writhing on the floor like a beached walrus. The piece proceeds with solo segments and interactions between these two looming figures in a Gothic atmosphere where desire looks less than pure.

In one lacerating achugar solo, Best brutalizes our eyes (and nerves) by frantically switching light on and off. Eyes simply can’t adjust that rapidly, and it hurts, though achugar, repeatedly slamming herself onto the floor, is surely hurting more.

Another disturbing segment finds achugar flat on her back while Mahalchick, making wizard-like gestures with his arms, works her splayed legs as if by remote control. In another sequence, the two run through a long, striking series of strong, precise gestures of the arms and hands. As the pace of this gesticulation increased, I felt myself slipping into a trance I did not desire and twice had to yank myself back. Powerful stuff.

The sophistication of that ritualistic sequence--both as theater and as, well, a dark art--conflicts with apparently artless elements, such as when achugar, for no discernible purpose, rattles the metal gate at the rear of the stage. That noisemaking doesn’t add much...and yet it works...doesn’t work...works...doesn’t work. Oh, hell, I don’t know. It’s hard to settle one way or the other on this, and yet it seems very achugar, very much about simply throwing something at water to disrupt its surface.

PURO DESEO runs for just one more performance at Abrons--tomorrow, Sunday, at 5:30pm. Hurry for tickets!

Abrons Arts Center
Henry Street Settlemen
466 Grand Street (off Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)

Paintings by Joe Levasseur

Performance Space 122 invites you to a exhibition of paintings by award-winning lighting designer Joe Levasseur.

Opening: Tuesday, October 12 (7-9pm)
Performance Space 122
Downstairs Theater/Gallery/Lounge
150 First Avenue (enter on East 9th Street), Manhattan

Regular schedule:

Wednesday, October 13 (7-9pm)

Thursday, October 14 (7-11pm)

includes Thursday Night Social for I Am Saying Goodnight

Friday and Saturday, October 15–16 (7-9pm)

Sunday, October 17 (2-6pm)

Thursday, October 21 (7-11pm)

includes Thursday Night Social for Them

Saturday and Sunday October 23- 24 (2-6pm)

Monday, October 25 (7-9pm)

Click here for additional information on Levasseur and his visual art.

Japan's Umeda in black & white

Tokyo's celebrated Hiroaki Umeda opened his production--Hiroaki Umeda: Solo dance, light, sound & video--last evening at Japan Society. If that title sounds pedestrian and unwieldy--and it does--it is, nevertheless, completely accurate. The talented soloist has created all aspects of both works in the show and considers each of these aesthetic elements to be the equal of every other.

In the roughly 20-minute-long Adapting for Distortion (US premiere), Umeda turns himself into a human barcode, initially standing still while sharp, parallel lines are projected against his body and the darkened stage. Gradually, he introduces a twist here, a dip there, and there a tilt or a roll of the head. He builds these subtle movements into cool, minimalist, high-tech hip hop while piercing, grating electronic sounds accompany changes in the patterns of the lines of light, ending with a pulsating grid. It should be no surprise that Umeda was a photography student before succumbing to dance, late, at the age of 20.

Umeda's body and remarkably smooth dancing are easier to see and appreciate in Accumulated Layout (New York premiere), although, here, he once again plays unconventional games with light and darkness. At the opening, he's rooted in place, holding his shoulders stiffly as if they were a tilted hanger dangling his clothes at an angle. He lets his arms go crazy (or Krazy!, as Japan Society might have it).

Umeda has made of dance a total theater under the control of his photographer's eye. He certainly has new tricks to teach American hip hop dancers seeking fresh ways to translate their skills to the concert stage.

Hiroaki Umeda: Solo dance, light, sound & video concludes Japan Society's Beyond Boundaries: Genre-Bending Mavericks series tonight and tomorrow at 7:30. Click here for information and ticketing.

Baldwin's "Bear Crown" at DTW

Congratulations to Body and Soul interviewee Ivy Baldwin and her creative team upon the successful opening night of Bear Crown at Dance Theater Workshop. Running 55 minutes, the piece dreams up an environment of open, luminous structure with pockets of wit, mystery and danger. Derived from many experiences and serendipities, it all means--to you--whatever you glean from and project upon it. The cast includes Anna Carapetyan (a new member of the troupe) and longtime collaborative performers Lawrence Cassella, Mindy Nelson and Katie Workum. Lighting designer Chloë Z Brown and sound designer Justin Jones are each on top of their game, and their magical work for this piece will be long remembered.

Bear Crown runs through this Saturday at 7:30pm.

Schedule and ticketing at Dance Theater Workshop

Listen to Ivy Baldwin on Body and Soul podcast.