Meet Gabri Christa's "Magdalena" at Theaterlab

Gabri Christa in her new multimedia solo, Magdalena
(photo: Kevin Yatarola)

Having spent the early afternoon at 92Y Harkness visiting Pino-Latino's intersection of Asian and Latinx cultures, I headed to Midtown West for Gabri Christa's multimedia solo, Magdalena. I found the Curaçao-born dance artist/filmmaker greeting people arriving at Orietta Crispino's tiny studio at Theaterlab, carefully guarding a square of white performance space surrounded on three sides by a string of light bulbs from heedless, bull-in-china-shop audience members.

Towards the rear of the demarcated space, a baby doll of fragile, chocolate-brown porcelain sat atop an ancient valise. At the start of her hour-long performance, Christa, a woman of mixed races and cultures, began her storytelling by pointing to the Black doll and relaying its history. (How did this toy, so rare in the Europe of her Dutch mother Magdalena's youth, come into her family? From an auntie who'd gotten it as a present from her Black, and married, lover.) As in the best stories, that single point and gaze would steadily open up many vibrant channels of memory, history, questions, feelings. We would be introduced to a family, to a war, to Catholic schooling, to interracial love, to the Black Caribbean, to adventurous vitality and, finally, to aging and dementia. For this is a story moving towards her mother's state of forgetting, and it is an act of loving discovery, recall and reclamation.

A gifted storyteller, Christa employs many supportive tools--among them, a treasure trove of archival visual imagery, some of it from personal family materials. But none of that would matter if the interconnected tales themselves--as in Bennyroyce Royon's new piece for Ballet Hispánico--did not rest on a foundation of humanity.

Conception, writing and performance: Gabri Christa
Direction: Erwin Maas
Design and Dramaturgy: Guy de Lancey
Radio play performed by Wayne Miller and the Spotlight Theater
Music: Izaline Callister and Vernon Reid

Magdalena continues through Saturday, September 22, but hurry. Seating is extremely limited. For information and tickets, click here.

Theaterlab
Third Floor
357 West 36th Street (west of 8th Avenue)
(map/directions)

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Elaine Summers, 89

Elaine Summers, Who Meshed Dance and Film, Dies at 89
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, January 15, 2015

Bokaer installation honors women's acts of resistance

Have you read this New York Times article about dance artist Jonah Bokaer's tribute to four little-known women of courage?

Commissioned by the American Jewish Historical Society and curated by Rachel Lithgow (AJHS's executive director and Bokaer's co-researcher), October 7, 1944 is a multimedia installation inspired by the resistance activities of a network of Polish Jewish women, laborers at a munitions factory near Auschwitz and Birkenau. Róża Robota, Estera Wajcblum, Regina Szafirsztajn and Ala Gertner were among the women recruited by the underground to smuggle out small quantities of gunpowder to be used to create grenades and, on the date of Bokaer's title, destroy a crematorium. Just a few weeks before the advancing Soviet army could reach and liberate the camps, the Nazis arrested, tortured and hanged these four women while their fellow workers were forced to watch.

"These women were not remarkable in any way that is known to us," writes Lithgow in her essay for the exhibition's brochure. "They were young women who believed what they were doing was right."

Bokaer's structurally elegant, haunted arrangement of archival documents, fragmented music instruments, blow-ups of sheet music and projected imagery includes two dance films--one made for this project (Four Women), another from 2012 (Study for Occupant) with eerie echoes of his current theme. Both films feature the dancing of Laura Gutierrez, Catherine Miller, Irena Misirlić and Sara Procopio.

The exhibition is small in size, but its inner density invites commitment of time to lengthy videos and documents in plexiglass display cases. These cases stretch along a white table, oddly protected and recessed just far enough from its edge to make a reader bend in an awkward way to read the typed or printed words. To read each document, you end up leaning over a concrete block in front of each case. Each block has a piece of a musical instrument resting on it. A strange experience, as I saw it: You must decide to skim a selection of a document's words, get a general sense of what's there and move on or to tilt yourself just so, hold that pose and read word for word until you're done. With his dancer's sensibility, Bokaer seems to be trying to create discomfort and effort in our bodies as well as our minds. He introduces a sense that learning all there is to know about the gruesome reality of the Holocaust is both important and impossible.

I keep returning to Lithgow's words about this exhibition's heroes. Are they not, in fact, remarkable? In a sense, they most certainly are. But in another sense--her meaning, surely--they were ordinary women and ones whose small but essential contributions have remained largely obscure except to scholars of the Holocaust. Bokaer does not overdramatize this heroism but his work reminds us that anyone of us, at any time, can choose to do the one thing that will make a difference.

October 7, 1944 will be on view in the Popper Gallery at the Jewish Historical Center (home of the American Jewish Historical Society) through December 30. For visitor information, click here.

Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Artists needed for International Human Rights Day

Dancing While Black

in partnership with

the Human Rights Project 

at the Urban Justice Center

announces

OPEN SEASON

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Open Season is an event that combines art and creative conversation with nationally recognized experts about race and the culture of policing in America. The inaugural session will be held on December 10, 2014—International Human Rights Day. The Human Rights Project at the Urban Justice Center, in partnership with Dancing While Black, is pleased to offer an opportunity for performance and visual artists to become a part of this immersive experience.

WANTED: Imaginative, provocative visual and performance art on the topics of community, confinement, race and gender. We encourage submissions that address these themes in a creative and expansive way.

ELIGIBILITY: Artists of color who are working in dance, performance, photography, multimedia installation, animation, illustration, painting or drawing. Performance work should be performance ready in a small or unconventional space, no longer than five minutes, require minimal setup and technical support. For visual art submissions, please send up to ten images saved as a pdf portfolio labeled with your lastname_firstname.

We encourage submissions from artists who have personal experience with the criminal justice system, including people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated and their family members.

SUBMISSION: Please prepare a PDF portfolio of no more than 10 images and/or a link to a 5 minute performance you would like us to consider. Include:

    a 150 word description of the work and why it should be included in Open Season;

    a resume and 150 word bio;

    Performance Artists: A list of technical requirements;

    Visual Artists: List of images by number that includes artist name, name of work, medium, dimensions, and date.

DEADLINE 

November 12, 11:59pm

Complete submissions should be sent to:

OpenSeasonSubmission@gmail.com

"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)

"Trade Practices" on Governors Island: "Dude, money is crazy!"

Scenes from HERE's Trade Practices
Above, l-r: Daphne Gaines, Mary Rasmussen, Peter McCabe
Below, l-r: Mike Iveson, Jr., Peter McCabe, Dax Valdes
(photos by Carl Skutsch)

A theme as weighty as the financial collapse of 2008, the hand basket we found ourselves in, and what money means in American society might take a project as big, as intricately textured and as labored upon--by a list of collaborators as long as my two arms and two legs spliced end to end--as Trade Practices, created by HERE artistic director Kristin Marting and David Evans Morris. A two-hour event directed by Marting and set in Governors Island's Pershing Hall, the site-specific, multimedia, physical theater performance is audience-immersive and interactive to the max, a game of "high-stakes" investor role-playing on our part as we move among rooms and storylines. It also has song-and-dance numbers, undercurrents of soap opera and even a bloodcurdling touch of the supernatural.

Clearly the entire creative team had a blast growing the witty, rousing Trade Practices and making the ten actors work their sweaty butts off--most notably, Daniel Kublick who, with all his physical might, gamely throws himself into his role as a roguish factory foreman. Tip: If you go, you'll sweat, too. This year for sure, Labor Day doesn't really mean the end of summer, and few of these Pershing Hall rooms have A/C.

Above and below: details from Works Progress Administration military history murals
inside Pershing Hall, Governors Island's former Administration building
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Trade Practices--written by Erin Courtney, Eisa Davis, Robert Lyons, Qui Nguyen, KJ Sanchez and Chris Wells--introduces us to the fictional Tender family and employees of Tender, Inc., proud paper manufacturers who go back centuries in New England and US history. Tender's CEO, played by the versatile Peter McCabe, would like to keep some of that New England history (and all of the corporation's current troubles) under wraps. Audience members get to trade shares in Tender, Inc. and witness the secret damage and debris from extremely close vantage points. Cast members' performances, and your own, can be fun even if this sort of thing--high finance, corporate intrigue--is so not your thing. Each viewer's experience will differ according to the storylines followed; if you find yourself disengaged, as I did at one point, you'll have a few opportunities to trade your shares for something potentially more promising.

L-r: Daniel Kublick, Dax Valdes and Mariana Newhard
(photo by Carl Skutsch)

Trade Practices runs through September 21 with performances by Jenniffer Diaz, Daphne Gaines, Megan Hill, Brooke Ishibashi, Mike Iveson, Jr., Daniel Kublick, Peter McCabe, Mariana Newhard, Mary Rasmussen and Dax Valdes. Click here for full details, including performance schedules, ticketing and Governors Island ferry departures from Manhattan and Brooklyn. Enjoy Governors Island.

Recommended: Cynthia Hopkins in "A Living Documentary"

Cynthia Hopkins
as her sassiest character in A Living Documentary
(photo by Jeff Sugg)

Whatever enrages, disturbs, and/or frightens me most becomes the subject of my work.

-- Cynthia Hopkins, from her Artist Statement

More intimately enraging, disturbing and frightening than global climate change--a topic Cynthia Hopkins treats in This Clement World--is the abject condition of the serious theater artist attempting to live a healthy life and make meaningful work in New York City. The multiple award-winning Hopkins takes on this issue in her new performance, A Living Documentary, this week at New York Live Arts.

In this quasi-fictional, quasi-autobiographical "documentary," Hopkins transforms herself into a series of comedic characters--veterans of the performing arts scene, for better or for bitter--whose behavior and words maintain a sizzling tension between what's off-putting and what's wise, what's over the top and what's completely down to earth. Their varying points of view on the possibility of a sustainable arts career shape up into a pretty interesting seminar. It's a more bracing kind of career seminar than you might ever imagine attending, with generous helpings of profanity and poignant musical interventions from this irresistible singer/composer.

For her ninety-minute show, Hopkins has adopted the sustainable strategy of simplicity. First, it's a solo. That saves a lot of cash right there. There's recorded music--played on an ancient cassette recorder to boot--and a set and props that look as if they were pulled from her apartment and/or some thrift shop. That's enough when the mission is to call bullshit on the external arts gatekeepers and overseers as well as the internal sabotage agents that conspire to keep artists fearful, passive and broke.

My favorite character, her hilarious motivational speaker-type--rocking rhinestones and a jet black halo of feathers--exhorts us to "act like you're worthy of a prosperous life...act like you're a woman of dignity...even if you're not a woman!" Hopkins knows that while one part of us is smirking, the other part is likely absorbing, that the clown's job has always been to slip around the guards and Make. That. Delivery.

A Living Documentary runs through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

March 6, 6:30pm -- Come Early Conversation: The Truth Behind A Living Documentary. Moderated by Paul Lazar

March 7 -- Stay Late Discussion: No-nonsense - Discussing the Economy of Art-Making. Annie-B Parson in conversation with Cynthia Hopkins

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)

Start the Car: DUMBO series for multimedia storytelling

Start the Car

Multimedia Storytelling Series

presents

Getting Lost

October 10, 2013

 Galapagos Art Space

Getting Lost features storytelling from Zefrey Throwell (Whitney, MoMa), Hollis Witherspoon (Comedy Central, The PIT, WBAI), Elena Megalos (The Moth), Jenny Zhang (LMCC, Rookie Mag), Chris Stackhouse (Poet, Art in America), Benaifer Bhadha (Narativ), and Nathaniel Sullivan (Flux Factory, This Red Door).

Start The Car is a multimedia storytelling series featuring a diverse panel of writer/artist/performers at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The event brings together artists, writers, and performers that may utilize various creative multimedia to support an "alternative presentation" of a narrative structure. A rotating line-up of storytellers offer up diverse essays, non-fiction and fictionalized stories based around a loose theme and are encouraged to use sound, pictures, written and spoken word, video, music, images, collaboration and any other modes to creatively enhance the narrative.

Tickets are $8 in advance ($12 at the door) and can be purchased at ticketweb.com. Doors open at 7pm, and stories will begin at 8pm. This event is 21 and over; seasonal drink specials will be available for purchase.

Galapagos Art Space

16 Main Street, Brooklyn

(map/directions) 

"Singing Sexuality" brings multimedia diversity education to Palestinian youth

Sexuality and gender taboos challenged by Haifa project
by Jillian Kestler-D'Amours, The Electronic Intifada, May 24, 2013

Shhhh! You're trying to read!

If you're following the renovation-displaced Performance Space 122 around in its various peregrinations these days, you know there's no telling where it or you will end up next. And that's a good thing. Breaking free of the legendary East Village nest, this resilient presenting organization now feels free to drop art down just about anywhere--a good model for the rest of us.

Unless you're a New York University student or faculty member, you probably haven't set foot in the upper reaches of NYU's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. Up until yesterday afternoon, I certainly had not. But a PS 122 event, a new collaboration with the ongoing PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, drew me into an upstairs reading room lined with tables filled with students gazing at laptops.

I was issued a mini iPod and headphones along with a simple, essential sheet of preliminary instructions in the use of old technology--a stack of three novels topped by a thin, spiral-bound notebook. Another visitor, paired with me, sat beside me before an arrangement of the identical reading materials.

And, yes, we were there for a performance. With a twist.

The performance happens, largely, between your ears. Conceived and directed by multimedia/autoteatro artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells, The Quiet Volume makes collaborators of its "audience"--two people at a time, sitting at a table in an active library. Each listener follows the instructions, remarks and reading passages whispered through his or her headphones, taking any indicated actions (pick up the Kazuo Ishiguro book; turn to page number X; follow the text with your finger as you hear it; visualize something on this blank page in the notebook, and so forth).

But there's more. The written and spoken text also messes with your sense of time. It effortlessly lifts you right out of your immediate location into awareness of the space and your reading partner and the students around you. It stimulates mental imagery. Eventually, the collided and collaged text creates tension and disorientation. It grows nearly impossible to read or comprehend under the shifting directions and the occasional sound effects, which sound both intimate (in the headphones) and distant (coming from somewhere in the surrounding room).

The Quiet Volume runs at NYU's Bobst Library through May 5, in reserved slots between noon and 8pm daily (1pm to 8pm on May 5).

It is also hosted by The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture through May 4 between noon and 8pm daily (10am to 6pm, May 3 and May 4).

Hampton's Cue China (Elsewhere, Offshore) will also run at NYU's Bobst Library, May 1-5, noon to 8pm (1pm to 8pm, Sunday).

Tickets can be purchased indivually or in pairs. For further information or to reserve a slot for performances in either of these two locations, click here.

The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
New York University
70 Washington Square South, Manhattan
(map/directions)

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Boulevard, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Frances Alenikoff, 91

Frances Alenikoff Dies at 91 - Founder of 2 Dance Companies
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, July 8, 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.

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)

Yatkin's "Wallstories": dancing to freedom

There's a moment, late in the hour, when Wallstories--a Fringe Festival multimedia work presented by Nejla Y. Yatkin's NY2Dance--takes flight. Prior to this point, the production seems an earnest, generically energetic ensemble based in thoughts about the Berlin Wall and the eventual passing of the Cold War era.

Opening with a blaring voice-over and a very narrow horizontal strip of film imagery of workers laying bricks, the dance employs a multicultural cadre of performers in short, rumpled raincoats who repeatedly bunch together and collapse one moment and, at another, make big, jazzy gestures like a Broadway chorus line of mimes. Their dancing, set to music by Bach and Pink Floyd, runs from lunges, stretches, dashes and collisions that give an impression of restlessness and inevitable release to sharply-rendered solos that convey the essence of an individual's recollections and emotions. Occasionally--as in the sixth section, "Dorothea's ?uestions," set to Pink Floyd's "Blue Sky"--the movement achieves a rapturous flow.

Yatkin's fifth section--superfluously titled "The Government, Mother Russia, my Mother, your Mother"--feels like the first clear evidence that Wallstories aims to operate on a level of psychological and universal insight beyond its aesthetic and historical concerns. But it isn't until one of the final sections, when Yatkin suddenly rises from her front-row audience seat to move in sync with one of her dancers, that the work comes home. As a member of the audience, she stands on the cusp between us and the dancers, bridging temporal, physical, emotional and psychological divides. She visually identifies herself, finally, as the heart of this piece.

A Berlin native of Turkish-Egyptian descent, now living and working in the States, Yatkin is a tall, sinewy, strong-featured wonder, a gifted dancer's dancer whose every performance is living sculpture. Watching her move last evening offered the thrill and, simultaneously, the poignancy that Wallstories had previously withheld despite the admirable effort of its other hard-working performers. It located Wallstories squarely in Yatkin's body and in her experience as a descendant of immigrants, and that touched off connections to issues roiling Western Europe in the present day.

A joyous coda brings the evening to a close, but Yatkin's presence brought it to its height.

Performed by Ahmaud Culver, Shay Bates, Sevin Ceviker, Rachel Holmes, Fadi Khoury, Karina Lesko, Marissa Maislen, Derek Crescenti, Nejla Y. Yatkin and Ehizoje Azeke

Lighting: Caroyn Wong

Video Design: Michael K. Rogers and Nejla Y. Yatkin

Photography: Nejla Y. Yatkin

Text: Nejla Y. Yatkin, with original interviews with Germans from the East and West

Wallstories is a presentation of the New York International Fringe Festival and runs through Sunday, August 28 at Dixon Place. For specific schedule details and ticketing, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey), Manhattan
(directions)

Rethorst: Make yourself at home

Here's the link to my Dance Magazine review of "Susan Rethorst: Retro(intro)spective," a series of events curated by Melinda Ring at Danspace Project, May 9-June 18.

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)

Rogers and Best: select your memory

Selective Memory–presented by Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City–achieves a most eerie intimacy with its audience. To witness it feels, at times, as if one has fallen into what one is watching and weirdly exchanged places with or fused with performer and multi-faceted creative collaborator Madeline Best.

The roughly 50-minute performance takes place in flesh and blood–Best standing before us, nearly motionless or making slight, generally uninflected movements–as well as in projection of her image upon two screens (set design by Brad Kisicki). The first screen, hanging down like a shower curtain, traces a curving shape in the space, a little like the Greek letter omega lying on its back. The second screen is a narrow rectangle suspended several feet in front of the deepest inner curve of the omega.

Rogers sits to the left of the space behind a Mac, a panel of audio controls and a table-top keyboard. Best–wearing sensible shoes and a navy blue dress with fussy tiers of fabric–enters the space and stands just within the curtain’s curve. She’s holding something in her right hand that appears to be a remote control of some sort, but you’ll rarely catch her using it. Swirling sounds and faint voices are heard. Lights dim.

Best takes a few steps, centering herself deep in the curve. The sounds intensify–a shrill rumble, an indistinct voice. Her face appears on the front screen. A faintly-troubled hush embraces this quiet face with its blinking, sensitive blue eyes framed by straw-colored shoulder-length hair and bangs. Slight, almost imperceptible shifts of her head can be detected the more one looks and looks and looks for long stretches of time. And so, with this most minimalist of minimalist choreography, Rogers begins his campaign of snaring watchers. Did you catch that minuscule twitch? Will she suck up her lower lip one more time? As she makes this next shallow pivot, will she suddenly break out in something a little less subtle, more macro?

It’s amusing to imagine someone thinking, “When will the dancing happen?” This is the dancing.

The face on the screen creates an illusion of Best being closer to each one of us that she could possibly be. And, as you think about it, you realize that’s because she strongly resembles a viewer looking out at a performer–expressionless, curious and expectant, perhaps suspicious, perhaps not daring to make a move, suspending the next breath. Best looks like your neighbors in the row, and like yourself. What, then, is she doing there? But this passes once you think about it too much.

You can imagine all kinds of things that could be happening. You can populate this stripped-down place with a multitude of effects and beings and meanings. That would be your memory, selected. Or you can leave it alone.

Rogers brings up a warm buzz or hum and, later, a short, melodic loop as the screen zooms in on a detail of Best’s face from the lower reaches of her bangs to just below her nose. Her eyes–always watchful, though placid--search us out as she shifts in slow motion. The encounter is hypnotic and an endurance trial. A new development–she turns, and we see the back of her head on the screen–seems like a major advancement in a story we still cannot identify, a new chapter. A close-up of her left ear and cheek and chin feels like a punctuation mark. But what was that sentence?

The thought returns: We’ve been motionless, expressionless, silent, blinking as we stare out at Best--as into a mirror-covered object–for close to 45 minutes.

The screen shows us a close-up of the collar of her dress, her chin, her lips. A real-time projection of her appears on the curtain behind her, just to the left of its center seam. (A new dimension!) In short order, we see multiple shifting, drifting Bests populating the space, only one of them made of flesh and blood. The finale–green, serene and dreamy–seems like it should be a breakthrough but feels unreal, surreal and definitely elusive for the flesh-and-bloods sitting in the seats. Best slips away from us, vanished by the devices that brought her to us and, perhaps, brought us to ourselves.

Selective Memory

Wednesdays-Saturdays, through September 18 (8pm)

The Chocolate Factory

5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

#7 subway to Vernon/Jackson Avenue

Information and reservations