Robert M. Pirsig, 88

Robert M. Pirsig, Author of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,’ Dies at 88
by Paul Vitello, The New York Times, April 24, 2017

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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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Premiere by Marjani Forté & Works at Gibney Dance

Tendayi Kuumba in being Here.../this time
below, l-r: Kuumba, Jasmine Hearn and Ni'Ja Whitson
(photos: Alex Escalante)

Here's hoping you're one of the few people who will get to attend being Here…/this time, a new piece by Marjani Forté & Works. One of the few, because the space--Gibney Dance's Agnes Varis Performance Lab, the mixed-use studio right off the downtown center's lobby--seats so few. With a music and media station tucked into one corner and audience squeezed into two others, there's barely room for dancers to gallop through the middle. Yet they do. And how.

being Here.../this time concludes Marjani Forté-Saunders's unusual three-year project, a consideration of racial oppression, its resulting trauma and its consequences of poverty, mental illness and addiction. The work questions how we view these conditions and how our social policy has always, and quite deliberately, failed to confront them. A hefty load for dance, certainly, but Forté-Saunders does not bear it alone. Her accomplished team includes husband Everett Saunders (sound), Monstah Black (costumes), Wendell Cooper (media) and Howard Curry, who performs a pivotal voiceover as a good Christian advocate of slavery. Powerful dancers (Ni'Ja Whitson, Tendayi Kuumba and Jasmine Hearn) embody Forté-Saunders's Afrofuturistic aesthetic.

Tendayi Kuumba
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Forté-Saunders gulped when she first saw the space Gibney assigned to her, but limitation turned out to be her best friend. By compressing every element--us included--the tiny lab creates inescapable sensory immersion, as if the entire production takes place within one stressed body, one hallucinating mind. If you can walk out of this show feeling calm and unchanged, see your doctor.

After viewing a prelude out on Chambers Street and in the tiny lobby, audience members enter the studio, take seats and slip on headphones to hear Saunders's vivid 3-D soundscape. His choice splicing of voices, music and sound samples delivers information--sometimes disturbing or satirical, often loud--direct to one's ears and nervous system. There's no buffer, no mediation. Like Cooper's projections, and like the choreography, the sound shifts, and jerks us, from states of crystalline clarity to disorientation, from unnatural excitation to exhaustion. Black's costume design, too, fuses trash and beauty, the right partner for a dance channeling personae who flicker between states of mysterious and mystical nobility, belligerence, frantic struggle, and tenderness.

Kuumba (l) with Hearn
(photo: Alex Escalante)

The choreography--layered in complex, suggestive imagery--can buffet and distort the human body so that you wonder who's in charge. Maybe more than one driver, maybe not of this time or space but all being Here.../this time in this lab, in this pressure cooker, on this sacred and sacrificial altar.

Hearn (l) and Whitson
(photo: Alex Escalante)

being Here.../this time continues nightly through Saturday at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (entrance at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Leaning in too far: TV's view of strong women goes bonkers

TV’s New Wave of Women: Smart, Strong, Borderline Insane
by Heather Havrilesky, The New York Times, March 12, 2013

Being necessarily here...with Marjani Forté

Dancer-choreographer Marjani Forté (left) and members of her company LOVE|FORTÉ A COLLECTIVE

(photos: left, Ian Douglas; top, Wah Ming Chang, Open City Magazine)

This up-and-coming troupe will present a world premiere in March at Danspace Project.

In recent months, the American media and people, responding to a series of well-publicized tragedies, have opened up a new--although not always entirely helpful--conversation around trauma, mental illness, and public safety. For dance artist Marjani Forté, who has been considering these issues for some time, these discussions don't always lead us back to a significant source of mental distress and imbalance--the daily collision with injustice faced by millions of people marginalized by the mainstream culture. 

"We need to have a deeper conversation around who we are as a country in regards to our history around race and our systems that have been constructed around that history," the choreographer says.

During curator Ishmael Houston-Jones's historic Parallels platform at Danspace Project (February-March 2012), Forté showed a work-in-progress called Here... which she describes as an "observation of mental health in the face of systematic oppression," the impact of racism and economic inequity. Feedback on that 20-minute preview, she says, provided insight into the value of making space for "the full picture of resilience, survival, and healing." The resulting evening-length work--retitled being Here...--opens at Danspace Project on March 21 for a two-night run.

Marjani Forté (photo by Ian Douglas)

Last winter a friend and I encountered a young woman on the Q train in New York City. She was young, slender, beautifully dark skin and curly hair, bright colors and denim pants. She was ranting. She spoke about a time she should never have known about. At no older than 25, this woman spoke like an 80 year old man, about the American Flag. “..You don’t know about the blood on that flag,” she said, as she described her trauma. She carried on in this way across the Brooklyn Bridge to Midtown Manhattan. Then her voice began to change. She developed an accent, deep, thick, and broken. Finally captivated by her, my friend made eye contact with her and winked. The young woman winked back! I sobbed, my friend and I sobbed together.

I felt time pause, and in that moment, she reflected my own journey, my fight for balance, equality, and health. She inspired me to make this work, a story of connection and healing.

--Marjani Forté 

We rarely expect concert dance to tackle an issue as weighty and complex as the roots and consequences of mental illness in American society. But Forté, best known for her performances with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Urban Bush Women, is no stranger to social engagement or art that addresses difficult social concerns. Inspired by her interviews with women from the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, Forté aims, in being Here..., to "tell one story."

"The most powerful art pieces that I've seen have caused me to ask and generate my own questions about myself and how I'm implicated from telling one story," she says and notes the Benh Zeitlin film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, written by Zeitlin and playwright Lucy Alibar. 

"That movie tells one story about this one community through the eyes of this one child and her journey into adulthood. In that one story, they address the isolation of this community, the power and assets that this community has  without being defined by mainstream culture or government. They address this community's own set of values. They address how mainstream culture comes in and can completely dismantle this community by placing its values on a community that had been self-defined. They address poverty. And they also address how one person takes all of this in and owns her own self-worth and power inside of it.

"So, the way that I'm avoiding getting too complicated in my own thoughts around these issues is, I'm focused on telling one human story, hoping to affirm recovery and regeneration.

"I want people to step into one mind and the facets of that mind."

See being Here... at Danspace Project, Thursday-Friday, March 21-22 at 8pm. For complete details and ticketing, click here.

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery

East 10th Street at Second Avenue, Manhattan

(directions)

D'Ambrosi's Pathological Theater

Pathological Theater, a Salve to Soothe Minds

by Gaia Pianigiani, The New York Times, June 2, 2010