The New Yorker names Susan Rethorst book one of 2012's best

Alec Wilkinson writes, "Rethorst so clearly described the immensely receptive manner in which she apprehends the world that I felt I had a privileged view of the mechanics and procedures of an ardent life."

And I agree.

Read more about dancer-choreographer Rethorst's wonderful book of "autobodygraphical" essays, A Choreographic Mind, as well as other 2012 book selections here: 

Best Books of 2012
The New Yorker, December 13, 2012

Happy 70th, Meredith Monk!

I'm wishing a grand, happy birthday to Meredith Monk who got the surprise of a charming little cake last evening at Danspace Project but really gave us all the most beautiful gift.

The special program, Pioneer Days, part of Danspace's PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now programming, included a screening of filmmaker Robert Withers' reconstruction of Monk's breakthrough 16 Millimeter Earrings Judson Memorial Church performance of 1966, filmed excerpts from the transcendent site-specific Songs of Ascension (2008), and reworked selections from pieces from the early '70s, constructing mosaics out of choice, unearthed shards from the past. The early Monk prepared the way for artists who now readily cross boundaries of genre and modalities and for audiences hungry for immersion in total experience and stimulation of all modes of perception.


Her art is more than voice, but even just her voice--or, rather, voices swooping, stretching, ululating, mewing, fluttering in rapid succession--can entice listeners to journey. Monk reminded us that her project is to heal the unnatural rifts between the arts unique to the modern Western approach and to counter our tendency to rely upon secondary experiences through cyberspace. Instead, she would have us engage with the "blood, guts and nerves" of live art where "we're all in the same space at the same time."

"Nothing can substitute for that," says this sage and shaman.

Sensewalking with Miguel Gutierrez

I'm wishing Miguel Gutierrez great weather at The High Line tomorrow evening for Sensewalk #4: GIVE ME SOMEBODY TO SHOW!

Presented by Elastic City, dancer-choreographer Gutierrez has been leading small groups (16 people, max.) in intriguing and fun explorations of external and internal space, heightening awareness of our expanded palette of senses. Last Saturday, I took his Elastic City walk at the New York Public Library's 5th Avenue flagship building--a place I knew fairly well and loved in my young adult years--and was thrilled to see, hear and feel a whole lot more than I might have imagined. Previous locations included the Staten Island Ferry and Prospect Park.

If space is still available for tomorrow's High Line walk (6:30pm), give it a go!

Get complete information and RSVP (required) here.

Elastic City intends to make its audience active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit.

Artists are commissioned by Elastic City to create their own walks. These walks tend to focus less on providing factual information and more on heightening our awareness, exploring our senses and making new group rituals in dialogue with public space. (Read more here.)

Seeing with Cunningham

"What is there to add?"

A writer colleague voiced this concern last night as we waited for the third program of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's Legacy Tour at BAM.

Indeed. What to add about a durable dance institution only a year younger than I am, whose influence recharged dance-making in the modern age, whose generations of artists and students form a large part of the nervous system of contemporary and future dance, a company that, in a few weeks, will be no more?

What to add when so many words have been said and written over the years and, even more so, since the death in 2009 of its beloved founder?

I stayed for two of last nights three dances, for Pond Way (1998) and RainForest (1968), paying my respects and saying goodbye.

Dance does not leave us alone; it reshapes us. I believe that and spent an entire semester trying various wily ways to persuade college students of its truth. I could have done no better than to bring them all with me to witness the last Cunningham ensemble at work.

I know Cunningham's theater can train us to regard the solid earth with trust, to sturdily and cleverly connect with it for the physical and psychic strength to be a human being in space--more flexible, more capable, more creative. In this way, it reminds me of what I learned from women's and neopagan ritual back in the 1980s but demonstrated--stripped of mythic interpretation, of course--solely through the abstract actions of bodies on a stage.

On my way home last night, I found myself more than ever annoyed by the streaming Friday night traffic--vehicular and pedestrian--and wondering why. Then I realized that I'd just spent more than an hour under the influence.

After I got over being annoyed, I felt grateful for the time out of time that dance can provide. We have so few places of refuge, particularly in the urban environment, but sometimes dance can offer this chance to slow the breath, switch channels, detect subtle, often fleeting things that we usually miss out of habit and distraction.

Give yourself a steady diet of that, and there's no telling who you might become.

And so, thank you to Merce Cunningham, and his dancers, down through the years, for giving us all new ways to see, to imagine and to create.

BAM Next Wave Festival's presentation of The Legacy Tour concludes this evening with a 7:30pm performance of Program C: Pond Way, RainForest and Split Sides. Information here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(directions)

For information on the final performances of Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Park Avenue Armory (December 29-31), click here.

Do the (misaligned) eyes have it?

...if you have normal stereo vision...you can appreciate the monocular cues used by artists if you sit perfectly still in front of a painting, close one eye and wait.

-- Bevil R. Conway, Ph.D., artist and neuroscientist, Wellesley College

Stereo Blindness Allows Some to See a Masterpiece
by Sandra Blakeslee, The New York Times, June 14, 2011

What if the dance dances us?

Lake Lowell, Idaho (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

"...perhaps the most vital task of the sleight-of-hand magician is precisely to startle the senses from their slumber, to shake our eyes and our ears free from the static, habitual ways of seeing and hearing into which these senses have fallen and the deadening influence of abstract and overly-objectified ways of speaking and thinking.

"Yet perhaps such magic is also, now, the province of all the arts..."

--David Abram, Ph.D., Alliance for Wild Ethics

A wonder: Do we find ourselves caught up within and experienced by the dancing that we see?

Does the dance we see also see us?

And, if so, how might that make awareness and transformation available to us?

I welcome you to read an essay by David Abram--"Animism, Perception, and Earthly Craft of the Magician"--and to consider his thoughts as well as my questions and how they might relate to our experience with dance.

Please feel free to post your responses as comments here and/or on this post as it appears on my Facebook wall.

Thank you!