"TROPICO": between what is solid and what is not there

Director-choreographer Raja Feather Kelly performs in TROPICO.
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Above and below: Dancers of The Feath3r Theory
perform TROPICO in the sanctuary of St. Mark's Church.
(photos: Ian Douglas)

I remember some years back, a few people started talking about how we'd simply have to get used to a new reality--that, in order to survive in our brave new world, dance would have to move out of live performance and into cyberspace and new media. That got my back up, and I'm glad to see that live performance in real time and real space seems not only alive but livelier and feistier than ever.

Case in point, a new production from director/choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and his troupe, The Feath3r Theory, running (amok) this week at Danspace Project.

Let's start by invoking its full name. Are you ready? Here we go!

the feath3r theory presents: Andy Warhol's TROPICO or Zeitgeist - the fall of man, the age of desire, Adam and Steve in the Rite of Spring, Lana Del Rey's 'It's Always Everything' staring Allen Ginsberg as William Shakespeare or the greatest story (of survival) ever told.

Now, normally, I'd italicize and boldface that entire name-dropping title (with a hyperlink), but I'm giving it to you the way Kelly gave it to us in order to minimize confusion. You're welcome.

But I understand it's okay, between friends, to refer to Kelly's opus as TROPICO, which also appears to be the name of a nation, or a people, with its own anthem. Although it makes a pretty good name for a queer, campy pop-opera with multiple musical references to everything from a Christmas carol to The Rolling Stones to The Wiz.

I like that Kelly's work not only demands its life but does so while living large. Generally speaking, I can appreciate dance ("multidisciplinary, boundary-breaking dance theatre," as Kelly's promo material would have it) envisioned on the plus size, specifically where it amplifies the creative voices of typically marginalized people. Katy Pyle's Sleeping Beauty & The Beast and Kelly's TROPICO are recent prime examples, both involving prodigious ambition and sprawl.

TROPICO, though, might have Pyle's piece beat for sprawl. (Did I mention it's also a graphic novel? And a downloadable musical collaboration between Kelly and Bryan Strimpel?) I entered TROPICO's befogged atmosphere shortly before 8pm and left it close to 10:30 having spent all that time in an unholy mixture of fascination (genuine) and impatience (equally genuine). Let's deal with that last part first.

Lord, is this piece long! Most maddening are those numerous times when it seems to be building to a possible end only to sprout something new. Honestly, it got to a point where every time an earnest player showed up with mic in hand--to recite, to exhort or to sing a little tune--I wanted to snatch that mic and throw it as far as possible.

For TROPICO, the audience sits on the bare (okay, thinly-carpeted) risers flanking the space. No cushioning, no back support, no intermission. And, as we all know, the humidity inside St. Mark's on a warmish spring or broiling summer evening needs a name as long as this dance's official one. Near-continuous fog-making only contributes to the airlessness.

I'm not whining here, just being real. This is a real experience--and, likely, deliberate. It's legitimate to talk about it.

But, at the same time, let me admit I loved the near-continuous fog-making--if not that humidity. The fog--and the dancing and dramatics within it--took over that familiar space like nothing I've seen before, and I digged that. Tuce Yasak's nimble lighting design played off that fog and the flesh, costumes and neon-colorful wigs of the dancers with maximum witchery, directing our eyes and carving out areas of dramatic interest. Yasak matches Kelly in the painterly ability to take a basic bunch of space and make us feel dimensions and possibilities within it.

Kelly's work proceeds with dream-like pacing, scrambled sequencing, mystifying vagueness and excess. Warhol meets the Symbolists for a drink at the Dada Bar. It's as if a dream has exploded within the sanctuary of St. Mark's Church. Sometimes that ongoing explosion happens in drifting slo-mo; sometimes it bursts out into a crescendo of noise and aggression--dancers gyrating, bouncing, bounding, squatting, strutting, humping the floor or roughhousing for no discernible reason. And sometimes Kelly forces some of us to look at things from weird angles (or through a barrier of tightly-spaced bodies) that makes them fairly impossible to see. Our imaginations take over from our eyes as the initial frustration gives way to wonder--except, of course, in the case of the handful of people who simply got up and walked out.

Kelly has quoted Warhol: “It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.”

I don't know if Warhol had a point, but I think Kelly is fighting back with a barrage of live art that's about not telling you any of these things but maybe pushing you to figure out how to be with it and with yourself inside it.

With performances by Raja Feather Kelly, Shaina Branfman, Amy Gernux, Beth Graczyk, Sara Gurevich, John Gutierrez, Lindsay Head, Rebecca Hite Teicheira, Nik Owens, Rachel Pritzlaff, Collin Ranf and Aaron Moses Robin. Video by Aitor Mendilibar +  Laura Snow. Costumes by Melody Eggen

Andy Warhol's Tropico continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 8pm. Tickets are sold out, but you can join the waiting list at the door at 7:15 each evening. For information, go here.

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery

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

(map/directions)

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Thinking with/talking back to Lemon's "Scaffold Room"

Above: April Matthis
Below: Okwui Okpokwasili
performers in Ralph Lemon's Scaffold Room at The Kitchen

musings...about how B/black artists choose quilting/sampling where materials--visual, verbal, aural; humble or dear--are many and close to hand. moms mabley and kathy acker; ben webster and david bowie (totally pimped out on soul train and wasn't even embarrassed). when you unroll and stretch this fabric out its seams run thick as scars. does cold, unforgiving space crush art? or does it set it off like jewels on velvet in vitrine? what's up with footwear for women here: white nursing clogs? patent leather red spike heels? or none at all, just barefoot? admitting guests to nearly-barren space where most must stand for two hours...or so they think. actually starting the performance first and then interrupting to pass out folding chairs? what...hostility? inhospitality? chaos? how is performance like a scaffold--for exhibition, for execution? what is B/black womanhood? janis sang baby i know just how you feel in little girl blue? did she? know just how you feel, i mean? did amy know? what if beyoncé--whose teeny screen image one must bow to see--is actually not the vortex of every last person's universe? which universe are we talking? subtle pauses and tilts of the head, matter-of-fact voice...is okpokwasili artificial, a simulacrum, an impersonation of an impersonation folded in upon herself like nested alternate universes? april matthis singing and mumbling to herself in a distracted, helium-ated voice or screaming in different registers for what seems like ten minutes or six centuries...has she found freedom in the body, meeting it on its own terms...freedom shockingly beautiful and also dreadful?

*****

Conceptual artist Ralph Lemon opened Scaffold Room (multimedia installation, readings and performances) at The Kitchen on October 30 in collaboration with Kevin Beasley, Jim Findlay, Paul Hamilton, Malcolm Low, April Matthis, Roderick Murray, Naoko Nagata, Okwui Okpokwasili, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Katherine Profeta, Marina Rosenfeld, Mike Taylor and Philip White. Performances and readings concluded yesterday, November 10, but the installation remains open through Saturday, December 5  in the 2nd floor gallery. Hours are Tuesday-Friday 12-6pm, Saturday 11am-6pm. Admission is free.

For information, click here.

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

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)

In the name of freedom: Charlotte Brathwaite's "Prophetika: An Oratorio"

Prophetika: An Oratorio
Below, Jadele McPherson in the focal acting/singing role
(photos: Hao Bai)

So, it looks bad for the world. The only things left are shabby-glamorous or just shabby. The whole thing's hanging by a thread, and that thread is fraying fast.

If you're of the African diaspora, you might have a better grasp on what to do with what's left, making your way out of no way, in time-honored fashion, while making sure there's still some shine and style. Something that speaks of who you are, who you remain. Here and there, you scavenge the discards. Half-shredded tarp. Broken electronics. Dead branches pile outside a nest you will inhabit alone. You make a Buckminsterfullerene shelter. You cover yourself in shards of mirrors and face paint. You've still got that harp, miraculously intact, wondrously carved from warm-colored wood. At times, in the midst of your gasps and clicks and wordless cries, your body remembers old songs. And you remember charging rhythms and how it feels to be on the march. You remember ancestors. Malcolm X. Sun Ra. Harriet Tubman. Fanny Lou Hamer. You consider: How to get from here to there? You make of yourself a spaceship in violent vibration, aiming to clear the atmosphere.

Charlotte Brathwaite describes her new multidisciplinary piece, Prophetika: An Oratorio, as "part theatrical event, part visual art installation, part ritual ceremony," all of which says that it reawakens primal human urges and strategies. The Club at La MaMa serves as sacred ground for this conjuring of spirits by singer Jadele McPherson with musical support by composer-pianist Courtney Bryan, harpist Brandee Younger and sound designer Justin Hicks. The visual environment shaped by Abigail DeVille (installation, costumes), Kent Barrett (lighting) and Cauleen Smith (video art) suggests the obsessively repetitive, vaguely menacing dreamscape of what's left of the American dream--I question America. I question America. Who will play with Jane?--where, if you take a minute to focus more closely on things, you might see that they are both more ordinary than you imagined and more impossible than you'd feared. Or you might just rev up, break the seal and fly outta there.

Prophetika finds strength when music takes the foreground--strongest when McPherson stakes claim to the recently contested Take My Hand, Precious Lord and the familiar, maybe too familiar Four Women, lucid moments lucidly willed into a heavy, airless dream. One of Brathwaite's guiding "divine spirits," composer Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, described sacred music as a transcendent healer. Brathwaite and her collaborators clearly want to make that kind of offering with Prophetika but, sitting among last night's audience at La MaMa, I was uncertain about how it was being received, and I'm still unsure. Can this work, as a whole, move audiences to not merely sit back and gaze at the phenomena?

Prophetika: An Oratorio continues through Sunday, April 5 with Friday and Saturday performances at 10pm, Sundays at 6pm. For tickets, click here.

Post-performance conversations on Sundays:

The collaborators of Prophetika invite experts in the humanities and the arts, to participate in one of two informal conversations on core themes in this work including: Afro-futurism, spirituality, politics, activism, science, representation and the arts. The duration of all conversations will be 50 minutes.

March 22: “Transcendence” Discussion topics: Spirituality, Politics, and the Arts speakers: Kara Lynch, Dr. Matthew Morrison, Dr. Imani Perry, Imani Uzuri. Moderator:  Dr. Courtney Bryan

March 29: “Dark Matter” Discussion topics: Science, Technology, and the Arts speakers: Greg Tate, Didier Sylvain, Abigail DeVille. Moderator:  Charlotte Brathwaite

La MaMa The Club
74A East 4th Street, (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

"johnbrown," a work by Dean Moss, premieres at The Kitchen

Scenes from johnbrown by Dean Moss, seen above
(photos by Mark Simpson)

johnbrown.

The title of this interesting new work is rendered, in a teasingly familiar way, as one word in lowercase letters. All it would need, to be completely up to the minute, would be a Twitter hashtag. Not slapping that hashtag on looks a bit like something has been held back, and I think johnbrown's creator, Dean Moss, does hold something in reserve for the group of teenagers he employs here as "production assistants" to rearrange the set and work the media equipment.

johnbrown, presented this weekend and the next at The Kitchen, is a work made by a 60-year-old Black man and includes a (marvelous and often funny) recording of that man's 85-year-old dad, a civil rights activist and former mayor (first Black mayor) of Tacoma, WA. It's also haunted by the shade of white militant abolitionist John Brown--memorably embodied by dancer Asher Woodworth as a man given to stupefaction and sputtering impulses--as well as by sounds of combat and sounds of sentimental hope. That's a lot of time, a lot of history, a lot of feeling pressing around and complicating the present moment.

Moss establishes johnbrown as nonlinear complication from the first, sending dancer Cassie Mey out in silence to the foreground of a display of oblique, tightly interlocked black and white bands. There she appears to hover and float with extravagant effort. When that stark, abstract backdrop shifts to a distant expanse of generic bucolic landscape--and, later, a soundscape erupts with the turbulence of battle--it is as if a resolute, unchanging angel has spiraled down to Earth to pull back the veil on something we'd rather not witness. We're not really all that close to it--Moss avoids being direct in that way--but close enough to recognize it for the mess it is and that it is ours.

The imagery throughout johnbrown seems to reference disorienting illusion of all kinds--the almost-comic fake hair on Okwui Okpokwasili, a woman dancer who, here, speaks the role of Frederick Douglass in the work's video; deflated balls that fail to bounce and people who flail and fail to connect; the extended play of reflective panels held aloft, flipped, tilted and twirled by Kacie Chang and Moss with the manner of desultory, if still spellbinding, stage magicians. Projections of stereotypical cartoon images make me think back to Kyle Abraham's recent season at New York Live Arts. Abraham, too, worked with stereotypes in a nonlinear, multi-layered approach to the narrative of race relations and social activism in America.

Moss brings it all around to quiet conversation, a perfect, inescapably moving ending...and a perfect beginning.

Live performances: Kacie Chang, Julia Cumming, Cassie Mey, Sari Nordman, Asher Woodworth and Dean Moss

Video performances (original script commissioned from Thomas Bradshaw): Tymberly Canale, Aaron Hodges, Okwui Okpokwasili and Pete Simpson

Sound/music: Stephen Vitiello

Original song: Julia Cumming

Lighting: Vincent Vigilante

johnbrown continues through Saturday and again October 23-25 with performances at 8pm. For details and tickets, click here.

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

New York Live Arts: RoseAnne Spradlin opens world premiere

RoseAnne Spradlin presents g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title) 
at New York Live Arts (photo: Ian Douglas)

It became quite clear, during parts of g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title), a world premiere by RoseAnne Spradlin at New York Live Arts, that the choreographer fully intended to keep on keepin' on. In her space-time groove. Doing it. Over and over. For whole audacious blocks of time.

And, of course, that meant that her dancers--Natalie Green, Rebecca Warner, devynn emory, Athena Malloy, Saúl Ulerio and, to a lesser extent, Asli Bulbul--would live within that groove, too, body and soul, until crawling bands of white light revealed the slick sweat of their staring faces.

And that set a challenge on the rest of us as well. Even to simply watch this hour of dance is to invest in it as Spradlin requires: in for a penny, in for a pound.

Here is a structure that, in theory, should produce tedium and the fidgeties but instead produces sparks of electricity and even wonder.

Spradlin, in her opening-night post-performance conversation with Tere O'Connor, had few theoretical/philosophical things to say about her process in making g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title), which, for my taste, was more than okay. She seems intuitive and practical about her practice rather than analytical. In trying things out, she finds and makes sense; she finds and makes the dance. What she has whipped up here is such a witchy spell, that when, at the end of things, it just sort of evaporates, lifts away from the stage without concluding punctuation--O'Connor called the end "profoundly uneventful"--you know things really haven't ended as far as you're concerned.

Time keeps on slipping into the future, dangerously alive because Spradlin and dancers have transmitted something into the viewer's nervous system.

It starts, in all innocence, with Green and Warner, dressed in shiny, transparent dresses, bounding and spinning about, arms flaring, like delicate but restless sprites--visions out of some ballet with a little Duncan or Loie Fuller touches mixed in. These creatures look pretty and inconsequential and familiar. (We are not yet afraid.) And, of course, they rewind and retract their steps at times, as you would imagine flitting sprites might do. Jeffrey Young's music--performed live by the composer and musicians tucked nearly out of sight at the side of the space--brings to mind the drone of flying insects or perhaps the sound that vibrating wings might make, undetected by our ears, as a hummingbird bird sups at a flower.

The blank white wall would create a sense of untouched space if it were not for the hovering presence of an enigmatic structure--Glen Fogel's kinetic sculpture Something (black)--that dominates one portion of the space throughout the piece and casts a shadow like a huge onion sliced in half. This sculpture will eventually rotate, pulse little streams of amber light and tease one's peripheral vision as dancers dance or film scenes run along the rest of the wall.

The sprites flit on, past the point at which you might logically expect a shift, and this is the first indication that Spradlin means to mess with time--and with us. The next comes when the dancers exit, and a projected film has ample time and space almost all to itself; there still is that sculpture over there, after all.

The film, a 1931 melodrama from China re-edited by Spradlin, races by in silence, its original ninety minutes of dramatic action and florid emotion compressed into a mere nine. Still, there is a lot of time in that nine. A lot. And we pick up its information, though, just not consciously. We might find ourselves peeking at Fogel's sculpture, now and again, or peeking at the film in order to keep an eye on that sculpture and understand it better. But, whatever our choice, we're absorbing data and rhythms from two distinct channels simultaneously.

Spradlin moves in for the kill with what she has called the "kicking section." (I love that while O'Connor calls it the "battement section," she persists in saying "kicking.") An enhanced corps of sprite-like beings--Green and Warner now joined by emory, Malloy and Ulerio--move about in synchronized step-kick-step-turn patterns that advance and swirl along the floor. Their basic steps, with percussive footfalls, gradually give way to directional and interweaving variations that, over long duration, allow occasional individual accents, such as a dancer raising a hand to her temple or to his throat or loosening her hair. These simple, momentary human touches remind us that industrial, even military, repetition is performed here by actual people. In each dancer, in different ways, the inner life of the body shows up, reveals something about itself and what it feels and wants in the moment.

By the time Spradlin is finished with this section of the dance--an 18-minute stretch--it is impossible to escape the entrainment of that sound of feet striking the floor. She's got us.

Original score for live performance: Jeffrey Young (composer, violin, live electronics), Hannah Levinson (viola), Mara Mayer (bass clarinet) and Lisa Dowling (bass)

Sculpture and projected visuals: Glen Fogel

Film re-editing: RoseAnne Spradlin

Lighting: Stan Pressner / Ben Hagen

Costumes: Walter Dundervill

g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title) runs through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Related programming:

Thursday, October 9: Come Early Conversation: Carla Peterson--Director of Florida State University's Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, MANCC--in conversation with RoseAnne Spradlin

Saturday, October 11, 1-4pm: Shared Practice: Process-focused workshop with RoseAnne Spradlin. $20, advance purchase recommended.

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

"Tyson vs. Ali" knocks out 2014 COIL opening

Scene from Reid Farrington's Tyson vs. Ali
(photo by John Hurley)

Reid Farrington and his extensive creative and technical team deliver, yes, a decisive knockout punch with the world premiere of Tyson vs. Ali. And since Farrington's COIL Festival run at 3LD Art & Technology Center has been extended to January 26, you'll have more chances to get your ringside seat.

 

Tyson vs. Ali is a PS 122 commission, produced by
3-Legged Dog and co-presented by PS 122 and 3-Legged Dog.

Less a conventional play about two titans of boxing, Tyson vs. Ali deftly squeezes into one hour, through extraordinary live action, video imagery, text and sound, a visceral encounter with The Boxer as looming archetype and intriguingly complex individual.

At the heart of the work's sensory dazzle are four gifted performers--Dennis A. Allen II, Roger Casey, Femi Olagoke, Jonathan Swain--through which the personalities, words, speech patterns, body language and fighting styles of Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali and others endlessly shift. In other words, no one "fighter" portrays and embodies a stable identity, and you are along for the ride.

The surrounding boxing ring (set by Simon Harding, who also created the video) is similarly fluid with continuously projected imagery, some of it massive, close-up and disturbing. It plunges us into history--through clips from famous matches or from television interviews with the champs--and yanks us back into the present as we gaze upon video images of the actor/dancers' beat-up faces, swollen eyes and bloody gashes. (Shenna Vaughn's special effects makeup is frightfully convincing.)

The various "rounds" and transitions offer, for our contemplation, considerations of boxing style and strategy, the genesis of each boxer's attraction to the sport and, the psychology of champions and, of course, issues of power, sexuality and race.

Although I've seen a few televised matches and have the typical American's awareness of boxing and its celebrities, I do not follow the sport. But you need not be a boxing fan to appreciate Tyson vs. Ali. Farrington's team has achieved a coherent and powerful beauty.

With choreography by Laura K. Nicoll, script by Frank Boudreaux, performances by Dennis A. Allen II, Roger Casey, Femi Olagoke, Jonathan Swain and Dave Shelley; sound design by Juan Aboites

Tyson vs. Ali has been extended through January 26. For complete information, including schedule details, click here. To purchase tickets, click here.

3LD Art & Technology Center
80 Greenwich Street (near Rector Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Cirque Éloize's "Cirkopolis" rises at Skirball

Members of Cirque Éloize
perform a banquine act in Cirkopolis
photo (c)2012 Productions Neuvart/Valérie Remise

Right before the curtain rises on Montreal's Cirque Éloize--now at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts through January 5--discordant music starts grinding and growling. Houselights flash; the curtain swirls with blobs of light, and whatever lies behind that veil could be radioactive. A startled audience gives up its first flurry of applause. And when that curtain lifts, watch out!

Cirkopolis, featuring a gifted, versatile troupe from Montreal, is what Fritz Lang (of Metropolis fame) might whip up from a big heap of contemporary circus acts, a dollop of music-theater choreography and a dash of Magritte. Instead of Lang, though, we have Cirque Éloize's Jeannot Painchaud and co-director/ choreographer Dave St-Pierre mischief-making with Robert Massicotte (sets/video), Alexis Laurence (video), Nicolas Descoteaux (lighting) and Stefan Boucher (music), just to name a few of the numerous co-conspirators responsible for this spectacle. Together, they have constructed an impressive, if also menacing, vision of urban life with views of towering, zooming architecture, a mass of mechanical gears that endlessly churn, and business men and women as soulless in their workaday existence as their yard-high stacks of paperwork. But that's not all.

Somewhere beneath this city of driving energy lies a more magical, more seductive one, no less driven. A city of expressive freedom, of romance, where men and women of cultivated power and skill display not only physical daring but also sensitivity and whimsy. In other words, a city of circus.

Cirque Éloize in the juggling pins scene of Cirkopolis
photos (c)2012 Productions Neuvart/Valérie Remise

Over the course of 80 minutes, Painchaud and St-Pierre offer no straightforward narrative but utilize "big number" stagings--like a wildy imaginative ensemble dance with juggling pins--as context and lightbox for circus acts like trapeze work, banquine, contortion and clowning. The pace is variable but mostly lively, with only Lauren Herley's scarily-good but overextended corde lisse (aerial rope act) dragging out longer than necessary. From the sheer poetry of Angelica Bongiovonni's intricate twirling with and within a life-like Cyr wheel--I believe she can fly!--to the more macho posturing of a male sextet slipping around inside the German wheel, Cirkopolis is a nearly overwhelming thrill. Make time for Cirque Éloize this season!

Performed by Maude Arseneault, Angelica Bongiovonni, Dominique Bouchard, Mikael Bruyere-L’Abbe, Ashley Carr, Samuel Charlton, Myriam Deraiche, Lauren Herley, Reuben Hosler, Ugo Laffolay, Yann LeBlanc, Frederic Lemieux-Cormier and Francois Saussus (alternating with Carr in the clown act)

Through January 5. For complete schedule details and tickets, click here.

Skirball Center for the Performing Arts

Kimmel Center for University Life

New York University (at Washington Square)

566 LaGuardia Place, Manhattan

(map/directions)

BRIC House multidisciplinary arts center opens tomorrow

Brooklyn Arts Group to Reopen in Former Strand Theater

by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, October 1, 2013

New arts residencies announced by Park Avenue Armory

Park Avenue Armory Names Artists in Residence
by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, April 19, 2013

Art made for a participating audience of one

A Waking Dream Made Just for You
by Chris Colin, The New York Times, October 4, 2012

Yoshiko Chuma's "Love Story, Palestine"

To read my Dance Magazine review of Yoshiko Chuma's Love Story, Palestine--running now at the La MaMa Moves! festival--click here.

BRIC House residency proposals sought

BRIC House Fireworks Residency Program open call for proposals
by Maxwell Cramer, Culturebot, March 15, 2012

Keep an eye on CULTUREMARTists

HERE's CULTUREMART festival concludes this evening with a shared program featuring samples of two promising works-in-progress:

Shaun Irons, Lauren Petty and Mei-Yin Ng consider their multimedia performance work--Keep Your Electric Eye On Me--to be at a very early, very sketchy stage of development. I'll have to take them at their word, although KYEEOM already brings enough ominous razzle dazzle to make me wonder what radical changes, as the creative team calls them, we'll be blown away by when the final product debuts. Irons and Petty contribute the lysergic video and sound, and Ng, the enigmatic choreography and performance, in an already well thought out, well structured display that nevertheless seems to emanate from inside one damaged or very disturbed head. While I can't wait to see what this one becomes when it grows up, I'm a little scared, too.

I saw an early rehearsal of part of Alexandra Beller's other stories at the Gibney Dance Center, and that experience drew me to this CULTUREMART showcase where Beller is showing an excerpt. This interesting ensemble piece, set to premiere at Joyce SoHo in April, comes with three unique features.

The first is a video view into the window of a building in Manhattan's Flatiron District, a voyeuristic monitoring of a couple's unheard, but clearly troubled, conversation.

The second is a big white portable structure designed by Brian Ireland--a clever abstraction of a house with a simple rectangular cutout for a door and an external, embedded ladder. "Stories"--in the form of mystifying allegiances, provocations and conflicts--smoothly drift in and out of this house. (If you go, for a view into the house, where there's always something going on, avoid sitting at the extreme left end of the audience.)

The third, and most exciting, is the guest drop-in collaborator from among the royalty of New York's contemporary dance scene. Here's how Beller describes the collaborator's role:

Every show features a different guest artist...[who] works with us for 1 hour to one day, depending on the event. Their role is structured improvisation, which is then set and developed live during the course of the performance.

So, of course, for that to work, your company must be perceptive and game and, in that, Beller can thank her lucky stars. (Performers for the HERE showing, besides Beller and the guest artist, include Lea Fulton, Toni Melaas, Kendra Portier, Edward Rice, and Simon Thomas Train.)

At GDC, I saw the troupe stirred by the guesting Paul Matteson who moved clean and elegant as an angel on a mission. Last evening, the springy, lusciously flexible Luke Gutgsell gave this vanguard role a far scruffier, feral edge and seemed to rouse an uncommon animal intensity in the company at the conclusion. Alex Springer will perform tonight.

Look for this work when it comes to Joyce SoHo, April 4-21.

The final presentation of this shared program runs tonight at 8:30pm. For program information, click here for Irons/Petty/Ng and here for Beller. For general ticket and box office information, click here.

HERE
145 6th Avenue, Manhattan
(Enter on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street.)
(map/directions)

Ghosts in the machine

And All the Question Marks Started to Sing might be the most extravagant experience Dance Theater Workshop has ever hosted. The hour-long, enigmatic fantasia of theater, music and visual and sound art, created by Norway’s Bessie-winning Verdensteatret collective, commandeers nearly every surface of DTW’s performance space and explodes throughout its air.

DTW’s theater has been transformed into a complex machine that generates and splatters not only sounds but muted light, intense shadows and the roving, wall-high animations of ghostly imagery. In this highly functional display, the most prominent features are revolving wheels (bare or decorated in what appears to be dried flowers, leaves and/or feathers) that emit amplified bleats, thrums and other sounds as if hooked up to the shattered remains of a jazz band. Handlers--Hai Nguyen Dinh, Ali Djabbary, Gjertrud Jynge and Øyvind B. Lyse--manually spin some of these wheels and carefully attend to other matters. Sometimes they contribute vocalizations to the sonic layers.

While this is not officially a dance-oriented piece, movement looms large, quite literally, although I’m not talking about anything typically associated with the performing body. Rather, these human bodies serve the machine, and the machine and its effects dance without cease.

I found, nevertheless, an unmistakable dancerliness at moments when Jynge grasped one of the wheel stands and rose on her toes to vocalize into its crackling microphone. It seemed obvious that that stand could have been made short enough so that she wouldn’t have to strain to reach the mic. However, the clutching and the straining and the plastering of her torso against the stand and particular arch of her feet in her little boots seemed to be an essential part of the design. In other words, dance.

A co-presentation of Dance Theater Workshop, FuturePerfect and Performance Space 122, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing, with its multitude of recycled mechanical parts and contraptions, has a charming old-fashioned feel. And just look at those those angelic pigeons, that crazy little breeding gull, that accordion squeezing all by itself, the prayer beads clicking away in Djabbary’s hands. This baby is a machine, all right, but not from our slick, digital age. It’s made by artists. The beauty, the wit, the ingenuity go on forever.

And All the Question Marks Started to Sing continues tonight (7:30pm) and tomorrow (5pm) at DTW, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Hurry for your tickets! (information and ticketing)

Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

And All the Question Marks Started to Sing is the inaugural event of FuturePerfect 2011, a new performance, art & technology initiative in New York City. Produced in partnership with leading national and international cultural institutions, FuturePerfect highlights new hybrid performance practices, media forms, and artistic ideas that emerge as digital technologies evolve and become ubiquitous in contemporary culture. And All the Question Marks Started to Sing is also presented as part of PS122’s 30th Anniversary Season.

Genesis Project residency welcomes applications

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
Genesis Project, New York
Artist Residency Program

Genesis Project is a unique, month-long, artists' residency program catering to body-based artists who identify as working between disciplines and/or seek to integrate other disciplines into their performance practice through individual experimentation and open-source collaboration. We seek to diversify the range of skills present in the residency; therefore, the committee will also consider artists working in non-performance disciplines and professionals from art-related fields who want to incorporate performance into their practice. To enhance the residency experience and to promote ideological exchange and discourse, local artists from various fields will conduct workshops with the program participants and take part in a lecture series throughout the month.

Genesis Project is a program of Culture Push, a New York-based non-profit arts organization that focuses on collaboration and group learning through active, participatory experiences. The residency will be hosted by 319 Scholes; a studio and exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn that supports the minds and needs of contemporary artists of various disciplines. Genesis Project is directed by Culture Push co-director, Arturo Vidich.

Application Deadline: Friday, January 14, 2011
Notification: Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Residency Timeframe: Monday, August 1, 2011 to Monday, August 29, 2011

For more information, please send a brief letter of inquiry to genesisproject@culturepush.org

Genesis Project
Culture Push

Topiary's "Landscape"

I wasn't sure where the evening was headed when C. Ryder Cooley sat high atop a platform, strumming a ukulele and singing, in a twee folkie's voice, an elegy to the spirit of a slain goat. (The head of a Pyrenean ibex lay under her platform.) And I wasn't totally sure when writer/video artist/performer Samuael Topiary, dressed to suggest the Renaissance Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel, climbed down a ladder situated at the rear of the audience rows and started picking out potential models. Something about that seemed a little ordinary, a little...done. But trust quickly kicked in because, with Topiary, it soon became clear that we were in the hands of a multi-talented artist who knows what she's doing and why she's doing it.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, presented at Abrons Arts Center, is named for the Bruegel painting in which the mythic flyboy's disastrous splashdown is totally marginalized by the luminous environment dwarfing it. A consideration of this famous painting becomes Topiary's starting point for a deep, flowing meditation on the state of an America pitching towards 9/11 and economic turmoil.

In the course of guiding this Big Myth journey, Topiary assumes not only the role of Bruegel but also doomed high-flyers including explorer Henry Hudson, a bull she calls the Wall Street Minotaur, Amelia Earhart, David Rockefeller (who envisioned the World Trade Center) and, of course, Icarus, weaving connections among them that are both informed and intuitive. "It's pretty fucking meaty," as Miguel Gutierrez, Topiary's director, said during the post-performance Q&A, adding, "It's a show where you can really learn something." Indeed, and yet the learning comes through a fair amount of seduction. Most powerful in this regard are Jocelyn Davis's graceful, minimalist costumes, the eerie atmosphere created by Cooley's musicianship and Peter Kerlin's electronic soundscore and the gifted Topiary's vocal talents and physical authority.

Nothing's forced. It's as if Topiary is not only instructing us but excavating our memories and feelings with all the great care of a seasoned archeologist. No sudden moves. No aggressive jabs. Not right away, at least. Just steady work until, finally, something valuable emerges. Okay, now let's calmly, rationally examine it.

It's interesting to hear that she first conceived this work not terribly long after 9/11, when she was still in grad school and bore a skeptical attitude towards the imperial American overreaching that those two rather graceless buildings stood for. In the Breugel painting, she said, disaster is rendered as a fairly tiny detail in a larger context, whereas after 9/11, America had become obsessed with disaster and could not, would not, look at context.

"People got mad at me and thought I was blaming the victims." Not hard to imagine the flak she got. People were scared and pissed and having these human, understandable feelings worked up and manipulated to the max. Some of the "sacredness" associated with the site of the fallen towers--now complicating the building of an Islamic community center two blocks away--is as much about the supposed "sacredness" of the preeminent icon of corporate America as about reverence for a place where thousands of innocent people perished. With those two things--American power and American vulnerability--so firmly interlocked, will we ever be able to see clearly?

It's still not popular to bring this up, although Topiary's beautiful and intelligent Landscape probably reads differently to an audience of "downtown" artists and arts junkies like most of us and will (and should) be received well in its run at Abrons.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now through November 20, Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm 

Information and ticketing

Abrons Arts Center

Henry Street Settlement

466 Grand Street, Manhattan

(directions)

Maybe not HERE

Soul Leaves Her Body, running now at HERE Arts Center, would benefit from relocation. No disrespect to HERE, but this piece--co-directed by Peter Flaherty and the dance artist Jennie MaryTai Liu, who also choreographed it--seems ready to bust its sheath. 

At 75 minutes, it's a biggish kind of multidisciplinary work which, unfortunately, often moves at a ponderous, earnest pace. But there are some very good big things about it, too--like set designer Peter Ksander's tall, adjoined glass panels that cleverly serve as video screens and create dramatic entranceways. Of the four live performers, including Liu, the work is best served by dancer Leslie Cuyjet's vivid, delicately-detailed performing and actress Wai Ching Ho's beautiful warmth. These two possess an assured subtlety and conviction that tug at one's attention.

The piece, inspired by a story from China's 13th Century Yuan Dynasty, overlaps and merges ancient and contemporary narratives in a way that is sometimes intriguing, sometimes drawn out and not quite fresh. The point of it all--which, according to press materials, is something about love and family and distance and digital communication--wanders about and gets lost at times. But its visual elements--especially the larger-than-life imagery of characters in period theatrical garb and makeup--are knockouts.

Soul Leaves Her Body feels not only stuffed into its space but, with the maneuvering of the glass panels or the deployment of the video, shoved into our laps and faces. I imagine it, instead, in a more generous setting where its virtues can perhaps be reconsidered and better appreciated.

Soul Leaves Her Body continues through November 23. Ticketing information and directions

HERE Arts Center

145 6th Avenue, Manhattan 

(entrance on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring)

Into the unknown with Ralph Lemon

How can you support a work without knowing where it’s going?
by Alyssa Alpine, Culturebot, October 6, 2010