Drury and Rankine: award-winning writers challenge whiteness

MaYaa Boteng portrays Keisha,
the pivotal character in Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview
(photo: Julienta Cervantes)

Hosted by Brooklyn's Center for Fiction and presented with Theater Communications Group, playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury and poet Claudia Rankine sat in conversation about Drury's Pulitizer-winning play, Fairview (2018), and Rankine's first published play, The White Card (March 2019). Both stories have scenes centered around a dinner party and deal with race and white surveillance, ultimately training a floodlight on what whiteness is and what it does. The writers discussed Fairview, mostly, including Rankine's experience of seeing Drury's play in the company of a white woman, a close friend and colleague, who (literally) failed to rise to its challenge. So, The White Card, which I have neither seen nor read will remain more of a mystery to me for a bit longer.

Though highly anticipated, the event proved to be frustrating, beginning with its late start (a half-hour) and a curious mismatch of speakers--both thoughtful, distinguished artists--whose personas could not have been more different. Rankine more reserved and watchful, read not from The White Card but from her essay responding to Fairview and contributed careful, finely-wrought, even mournful analysis at select moments. Drury, more accessible and endearing, too often seemed like a nervous student in awe of a visiting star scholar who is, yes, a MacArthur-certified genius. Rakine's 2014 multiple award-winning volume of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, zoomed her into mainstream awareness as a critical witness to everyday racist microaggressions that, along with the fundamental nature and tenacity of white supremacy, make any mention of "post-racial America" an absurd lie. Would that The Center for Fiction could have magically blended these two writers into one fascinating being.

Rankine largely supported Drury in working through the creative process and the varying audience responses to Fairview, a play that first soothes and reassures white audience members with a familiar sit-com scenario and then asks them to participate in gradual, then increasingly unsettling, hard-to-escape exposure of their own white privilege. This conversation gave me a moment to revisit my own reaction to Fairview's final section where the teenager Keisha invites white people to rise from their seats and reassemble on the stage. As a Black woman, I immediately got the system-tilting shift Drury was going for in this theatrical exercise, and I must admit I felt a little smug. No, a lot smug. I also recall that the white people in the SoHo Rep audience I had sat with were all quite cooperative. From Drury's report, it seems that reaction was far from common.

As with reading Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, I'm struck, once again, by a sense of unacknowledged tragedy--what Rankine refers to as the loneliness an oppressed person feels, the sense of having been abandoned by all to injustice. On many levels, for many reasons, so many of us live with unhealed trauma. Gaslighting deepens and worsens the tenacious psychological/emotional effects of injustice. It messes with our overall health as individuals, communities and a society, and we're living in a time when gaslighting is pretty much the National Anthem.

Artists like Drury and Rankine bring heroic witness to this incendiary, potentially transitional time. The rest is up to us--to clean these uncovered wounds and allow them to heal.

Learn about The Center for Fiction and its upcoming events--such as evenings with authors like Edwidge Danticat, Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins--here.

The Center for Fiction
15 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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From sea to shining sea with Kayla Farrish

A still from The New Frontier
(photo: Alexander Diaz)

The New Frontier (my dear America) Pt. 1
Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts
Danspace Project

I admire the energy burst and largeness and hearty ambition of Kayla Farrish and her premiere at Danspace Project--The New Frontier (my dear America) Pt. 1. The title hints at what will come: "Here I am, a Black woman, a Black woman dance artist, and I'm going to wrap my mind around what it means to take over this venerable performance space for essentially two hours (even with a 15-minute intermission between two "acts," rare for a Danspace Project show), and I'm bringing in my talented folx to grab up and slice through this space like human buzzsaws. I'm going to show you that anything can happen here in this American space. And, by the way, this is only Pt. 1."

Even before the piece starts, it starts. I took my seat and saw dancers scattered and drifting around as a recording of Sinatra singing "My Way," his anthem to a lifetime of self-assertion. Some decidedly non-official US flags rested on the floor. The intermission is populated by an "intermission entertainment" (a fine solo performed by Dorchel Haqq to the Sammy Davis, Jr. recording of "Mr. Bojangles") and, later, dancers, with homey informality, going about the work of arranging props, set and lights for Act 2.

Resembling less the legendary American melting pot than a full washing machine on spin, The New Frontier includes a soundscape that, along with Frank and Sammy, might touch down now in dreamy Debussy realms or terrains of Nina Simone or hip hop. And a film--set to premiere as its own entity in 2020--fills in gaps between live dancers with looming images of other performers on a beach. That's a smart way to tame the intimidating volume of St. Mark's Church.

Containing multitudes, The New Frontier is, itself, a quilt stitched from two earlier Farrish projects--With grit From, Grace in Act 1; Black Bodies Sonata in Act 2--her film, and the writings of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and others.

If expanse and dynamic variety are a large part of what makes America (more properly called the United States) America, they are also what makes this interdisciplinary piece off-balance, hard to figure out and, ultimately, less effective as a work of dance theater than it might have been. As a viewer, I sought meaning and coherence and had to settle for individual bits and pieces that drew me in--like a fantastic second-act duet, by turns wheeling, churning, swooning and sensitive, between Farrish and Kar'mel Small performed near a fan-blown stretch of fabric that evokes everything from a silky bed to a rushing stream. Compelling narratives suggest themselves here--nothing terribly obvious, just enough to make us take notice and care. While I enjoyed the skills and gusto of the dancers throughout the evening, I would have liked to care as much about all of The New Frontier as I did about this duet.

Farrish's vocal projection in her spoken parts would benefit from coaching, especially to overcome the challenges of St. Mark's Church and occasional competition from other sound. It was discouraging to miss so much of the delivery of her opening monologue (written by Nik Owens) and other texts throughout the evening. Even so, the implied correlation, here, between the seductions of the American Dream and the seductions of social media feels undercooked and awkward. It felt both necessary and unnecessary to try to tune it in, both sad and a relief to let go and tune it out.

Live performers: Kayla Farrish, Dorchel Haqq, Emilee Harney, Kar’mel Small, Mikaila Ware

Film collaborators and crew: Alexander Diaz, Kayla Farrish, Dominica Greene, Kerime Konur, Rebecca Margolick

Lighting: Carol Mullins
Costume collaboration and design: Athena Kokoronis

The New Frontier (my dear America) Pt. 1 concludes its run this evening, Saturday, with an 8pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Melanie George reflects on (re)Source, new performance from Maria Bauman-Morales

Maria Bauman-Morales performs (re)Source.
(photo: Kearra Amaya Gopee)

I celebrate the abundance of this essay by guest writer Melanie George on (re)Source, a new immersive dance work by Maria Bauman-Morales co-commissioned by BAAD! and The Chocolate Factory. The solo premieres at BAAD! in its BLAKTINX 2019 series on September 25 and runs nightly through September 28. For more information, click here.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Getting By, Getting Through, Getting Over, and Making it:

Reflections on Maria Bauman-Morales’ (re)Source

by Melanie George

(re)Source is a work of blood and bone, of muscle and memory. It only lives in Maria Bauman-Morales, and will likely only ever be performed by her. In part, because it is an improvisational work, but also because the specificity within the thematic content – America, race, family, identity – can only be assembled by way of her understanding of her origin story and place in the world. She is tethered, literally and figuratively, as she navigates and negotiates her relationship to space, memory, and family lore. Her body is an interpreter of stories, individual and collective, detailed through the supple facility of her movement, and open curiosity of her gaze. I hesitate to use words like earnest and confrontational, as, too often, we associate them with the absence of complexity and nuance, but to deal with race in America is be smothered in complex nuances. The willingness to do so openly (but not fearlessly because our history with race is overflowing with the consequences of fear) is to be vulnerable and critical, for performer and audience. I find the work to be one of meaning-making, not statement-making. In her multi-hyphenate identity – as a queer, woman of color, artist, educator, anti-racism facilitator, womanist, wife, daughter, citizen – her sociopolitical values are realized and transparent so as to not to be proclamations. Lived truth and embodied identity speak volumes.   

As I attempted to locate (re)Source in contemporary art making practices, Maria pointed me toward the work of Amara Tabor-Smith, and her theory of Conjure Art. In Conjure Art, there are no boundaries between the spiritual and artistic practice. In fact, they serve as reciprocal conduits within the process of art-making. In defining the practice, Tabor-Smith explains, “Conjure artists believe in the forces of nature such as ancestor spirits, gods and/or deities found in indigenous cultures and recognize these energies as the guiding forces in their art practice.” Through the improvisational score that comprises much of (re)Source, we experience conjuring in real time. On multiple occasions in rehearsal, Maria noted that her deceased father had joined her during runs of the piece. This is not metaphor or allusion. In crafting (re)Source Maria makes room for her elders and ancestors to dance with her and through her, to receive impulses that guide choice-making during the performance. I was particularly struck by adaptation of Doug Varone’s “room reading” exercise to prepare to rehearse. As her line of inquiry is steeped in exploring non-proscenium spaces, she is negotiating her relationship to the stage and inquiring about the role of agency on uneven terrain. Her practice is guided by relationships to people, to environment, to identity. So, of course, there is a need to engage with all of these things before diving into the dance. 

For those inclined to over-academise the art-making process (I, too, can be guilty of this), the identification of Conjure Art is fundamental to receiving (re)Source as it is intended, rather than applying erroneous models to interpret it. Please note my identification of the academy. This is purposeful because of its predisposition to valuing Western-normative art-making models, and its function as a gatekeeper in our field. What does it mean to accept this work on its own terms? What is our role and responsibility in engaging with this dance? First, we must allow the artist to define the landscape of the work. In (re)Source, Africanist elements are centered, as is the importance of storytelling. This must be the terra firma from which we start our journey with the piece.  Maria is highly conversant in several dance languages. Chiefly, she values the weight, rhythm, dynamism, and spirituality that we recognize as essential to an Africanist movement lexicon. Her training in capoeira informs her movement vocabulary and is instrumental in her strength and use of space.  Additionally, she employs elements of movement abstraction that we associate with the choreographic tools of post-modernism. In her work, I see the intersection of multiples ways of knowing and claiming contemporary dance. Within one movement there may be a composite of physical textures, alternately competing and co-existing. In centering the names and stories of her ancestors - purposely keeping black folks present and visible in the work -  she is also centering her art-making practice. All are resources toward the making of the work. All are valid and do not require defense.

(re) Source is not a sentimental work. Maria may be conjuring her ancestors, but she is doing so in the age of Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and the rising tally of Black trans women’s deaths this year. There is little time for sentiment when you’re gathering your tools for survival. She sees (re)Source and her family history as “a microcosm for race relations” in this country. Within that history are black and white relatives, and white relatives that owned enslaved black people. Maria reckons with the weight of that knowledge through movement and text, and aligns it with the jarring shift in our political climate since the ascent of Donald Trump as a political figure. There is great responsibility in telling personal truths about one’s family. Maria endeavors to make the labor visible, but in doing so she does not wallow in the impact of that labor. Instead, her role, part oracle and part griot, is to synthesize the contrasting content into a locking archive. The set, which functions as installation, immersive theatrical design, and interactive playground for the performer, is both obstacle and portal. A series of interwoven strings and chairs resembling a human sized cat’s cradle, the bonds can be tenuous, supportive, pliable, or binding. Alternately highlighting positive and negative space, they function as a metaphor for taking up space, holding space, and moving through it. The seating arrangement interlocks so that perspectives are varied, but no one sits alone. Interdependence is also a theme of the work. Though it is a solo performance, through conjuring and the seating arrangement, Maria is never, truly dancing alone. (re)Source invests in telling truths about race. By design, the audience is implicated in her navigation of this content.

“Resources are tools. I want to make transparent that 

‘I am because we are’. 

I have resources because people have gone through worse.”

• Maria Bauman-Morales

Though I am writing about (re)Source, I feel it is important to note Maria is developing this new piece concurrently with another evening-length work, Desire: A Sankofa Dream. The processes for the productions are not related. Solo vs. Group. Fantastical vs. Non-linear Improvisation. Personal history vs. imagined biography. Though they are wholly individual works, the continuum between the two productions encapsulates a core underpinning in Maria’s artistic identity: Interconnectedness and the continuum between the intrapersonal and interpersonal. It feels significant that she is working on these dances concurrently. The duality of honoring the individual and the group is an Africanist element that is a resource for how she makes meaning in the world. This speaks to a larger, overarching theme in her work: Life as practice, and an embodied investment in the survival and thriving of black and brown folks. The processes used in the making of her art are enacted in comparable ways in all areas of her life, notably through her work with Urban Bush Women’s BOLD program (Builders, Organizers and Leaders through Dance) and as a facilitator of Anti-Racism training with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. The various roles Maria plays an artist-activist are not discreet from each other, they are in dialogue, as she is openly and actively in dialogue with us.

Melanie George is an educator, choreographer, and scholar. She is the founder of Jazz Is… Dance Project, and the Audience Educator and Dramaturg at Lumberyard Center for Film and Performing Arts. She is honored to be the Dramaturg for (re)Source.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Zahava Griss: the sacred work of transforming white culture

A list of the skills Zahava Griss has amassed and roles they have played might fill this entire blog post--gender-transcendent dance artist, erotic ritualist, bodyworker, educator, coach, anti-racist activist and so much more. Recently, Griss contributed a chapter of perceptive writing to a new anthology of essays, Sacred Body Wisdom: Igniting the Flame of Our Divine Humanity, out soon from Flower of Life Press.

Their chapter, “Transforming the Culture of Whiteness in Dance and Sexuality Communities,” outlines ways in which white artists and activists like themselves can approach creative and social justice work--as well as the relationship with their own and others' bodies--with greater openness, awareness, respect and joy.

Sections of the essay deal with issues of white culture within ballet (where authoritarian traditions predispose dancers to follow rules and not speak up for themselves), within sexuality and within the complex challenges of community building across differences. Griss notes, "so many of the body-centered events and communities I have explored are mostly white people, white leadership and white culture." And, by that, Griss means “certain ways of communicating, an aesthetic of what is valued and acceptable, an unspoken way of framing what being a body is, what ‘safety’ is, what spirit is, what having a body means, what success or beauty means that is familiar to a dominant white culture...an often unconscious culture that has been created by those who came before us that does not acknowledge or reflect awareness and respect for people of color, who make up the majority of people on this beautiful earth.”

Griss continues, “I wrote this so we could better observe white culture, vision what we want to replace it with, clarify what diversity means to us personally, and take action to create the society we want to live in.”

Sacred Body Wisdom: Igniting the Flame of Our Divine Humanity will become available on Amazon.com on January 21. Learn more about it here. For more on Zahava Griss and their projects, visit www.EmbodyMoreLove.com.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Inside the mask: Narcissister releases documentary self-portrait

Performer Narcissister opens the world theatrical premiere and two-week run of her documentary, Narcissister Organ Player, at Film Forum next Wednesday, November 7. A former dancer, she's best known in the performance art world for the contradiction of concealing her identity with doll-like masks while revealing her flesh and wildly creative preoccupation with body organs, orifices and functions. Narcissister regularly propels audiences into forbidden dimensions of the familiar. With this new self-portrait, though, she guides us to the hidden source of that extreme courage--the familial.

Just over 90 minutes, this stunning, poignant film--expansive and mythic in imagery--centers the influence of the artist's relationship with her Morocco-born Jewish mother (and, to a far lesser extent, her Black American father) on the ideas that drive her work. Q&As with Narcissister will follow the 7pm screenings on these dates:

Wednesday, November 7, moderated by Jeffrey Deitch, Gallerist, Deitch Projects

Thursday, November 8, moderated by Lia Gangitano, Director, Participant Inc.

Saturday, November 10, moderated by writer Ren Weschler

Narcissister Organ Player will also be screened at Northwest Film Forum (Seattle, Washington), November 15-18.

Film Forum

209 West Houston Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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"What Remains": Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls collaborate

from What Remains,
a new work by Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls,
premiered this week at Danspace Project
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

“One thing about being black in America—you have to curtail your movements, to live in such a way that what the white gaze projects upon blackness will not end your life,” says Rankine to The New York Times. “So you’re always thinking, can I walk at night?…Can I have my cell phone out? If it glitters, will someone think it’s a gun? At what point can I just be?”

Adds Rawls, “One never just happens to be black, even in the most abstract dance…Whiteness in our society — and this is something Claudia talks about, too — is the space that produces the conditions and terms against which all other lives are measured and enabled or disabled. Dance doesn’t escape those power dynamics.”

-- Danspace Project publicity for What Remains

At what point can I just be?

A few years ago, I read poet Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and felt immediate, grateful identification in her detailing of both the overt and the deceptively subtle aggressions Black people endure, every day, in our society. Racism--within white, patriarchal supremacy--is the American condition, something that does not go away because a Black president gets elected. In fact, as we certainly recognize now, such an unexpected shock to the system only wakes and further enrages the persistent many-headed Hydra.

Upon hearing that Rankine, as writer, would team up with dance artist Will Rawls, I knew, at once, that we should not expect anything as straightforward as Citizen. Rawls--winner of the 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer--comes from that sector of dance that embraces the oblique, the abstract, the elusive, that leaves pin pricks and cracks and often big gaping holes in the fabric of a work for the light--and, ultimately, the viewer's mind--to get in.

What Remains--co-presented by Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française for FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival--would not be Citizen. And I'm going to be danged honest and tell you that part of me rolled my eyes when I thought about that. The other part of me, though, was chill and is now glad all of me got there.

Rawls has a dream team of collaborating performers for this work--Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (also his sound designer and composer), Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty and Tara Aisha Willis. Draped by designer Eleanor O'Connell in funereal black and haunting St. Mark's sanctuary with its stained glass windows also shrouded in black, they have been described as "a resonant, ghostly chorus."

What they most appear to be are embodiments of the undead spirit of resistance. Nimble, resourceful and unruly, they rise from unshapely, ungainly lurching and stumbling and gentle, quiet harmonizing to steadily refine and define themselves, both physically and vocally, over a solid 70 minutes of un-curtailing their movements. There are musical surprises in this séance that delighted the hell out of me and an ingenious synergy of space, darkness and scattered lighting that transforms the church into mutating dreamscape. I won't spoil any of this for anyone lucky enough to get in to see the final show tonight.

Yes, if you were to have a house haunted by not one but a whole batch of brilliant Black artists--pent-up spirits reclaiming their time at the mic or piano bench--I imagine you might have something like Rawls and Rankine's What Remains. Something more tickling than scary...at least to a Black woman like me. I can imagine some people might find all of this deeply frightening.

Creative Consultant: John Lucas
Production design: David Szlasa

What Remains concludes tonight with a show at 8pm, with no late seating. Tickets are sold out, but a wait list starts at the door beginning at 7:15. For information, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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By Association: New performance from Pallavi Sen, Elena Rose Light and Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez

Above: Elena Rose Light (left)
and Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez
(photo: Malcolm-x Betts)

By Association is a platform for artists to collectively experiment with the practice of associative thinking. An artist is invited to be the “instigatory link” in a chain of thought, who then invites another artist whose practice informs and/or challenges their line of inquiry. This artist then invites another artist, and so the pattern continues. For three nights, the chain fuses and breaks in the form of shared evening presentations that put artists in creative discourse with one another across artistic disciplines. -- from publicity for Abrons Arts Center's By Association: Elena Rose Light, Pallavi Sen, Bully Fae Collins

The Underground Theater at Abrons Arts Center bugs me. It is so infernally ugly with its brutal, oppressive design. There isn't anything I like about this space, though I've seen some cool things there. I sometimes think it's designed to eat whatever enters.

And it might have eaten Pallavi Sen's section of last evening's By Association: Elena Rose Light, Pallavi Sen, Bully Fae Collins, except that Sen's multifaceted visual display--a bustling, long/tall thing spanning most of the space while Sen sat all-too-gently reading its text at one side--seemed too monumental to be easily consumed by the theater...or by its audience. I must admit when I wasn't checking out the imagery in front of me, Sen's voice almost lulled me to sleep. I made an effort to shift focus to her, now and again, but I suspect she wanted to stay out of sight, her body folded close to the darkened floor and tucked away with her words (about her South Asian family and about loss) and her little reading light, while her projections unfolded a manifest of what her mind is really like. I can probably call to my own mind what her lost relatives looked like and everything dancing around their cameo portraits but, for the life of me, I will not be able to tell you much of what she told us about them or what Sen looked like last evening.

After a ten-minute break, though, collaborators Elena Rose Light and Mexico-born Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez ate the theater.

Their opening momentarily fooled us into thinking the intermission was just continuing. Lights did not go down. Eventually, at both extreme ends of peripheral vision, I became aware of presences at the tops of the long staircases leading down into the performance space from both sides of the theater. Presences barely visible. Presences beginning to vibrate. Presences that, when finally fully seen, presented as comic. Comic in their ridiculous suits painstakingly constructed of clear, crinkly bubble wrap. Comic in the way they endlessly bounced on their feet and pumped their arms and scampered all around and up and down the theater and its balcony like schoolkids chasing each other at recess.

I know a bit more about Sánchez Narvaez's work and have watched her start other performances with a similar scattered, extroverted approach and gradually unpeel, winding her way down to a deeper, quieter, more sensitive and emotionally brave place. What she and Light accomplish in this demanding, durational piece, as they strip away the plastic, becomes similarly revelatory and wrenching.

You won't catch much of what's said between the two; they have no mics. But you'll catch enough to recognize the triggering of issues of racial and class difference. Sánchez Narvaez first interjects this by calling out Light for having once complained, "I'm paying you more than I'm paying myself." It goes downhill from there with the performers appearing to be athletes in training...or an athlete (Light) with a particularly hardass trainer (Sánchez Narvaez)...or two collaborators who have hit a brick wall that only physical aggression and honesty might begin--only just begin--to demolish.

This is a very hard dance to do...and see...and think about.

The remaining By Association schedule pairs Pallavi Sen's solo with work by Bully Fae Collins (tonight at 7:30pm) and Bully Fae Collins with Elena Rose Light and Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez (tomorrow at 7:30pm). Get information and tickets here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)

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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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World premiere of Geraldine Inoa's "Scraps" at The Flea

Roland Lane (left), Alana Raquel Bowers (bottom center),
Michael Oloyede (top center) and Tanyamaria (right).
the main cast members of Scraps at The Flea
(photo: Hunter Canning)

What we always hear: “Black Male Shot by White Police Officer.” What we never see: how loved ones struggle to cope amidst their anger and grief.

-- from program notes for Scraps

In its new Tribeca home and its fresh new season devoted to "Color Brave" programming, The Flea Theater comes out swinging with Scraps, a psychological drama by LA-based playwright and television writer Geraldine Inoa, directed by Niegel Smith. With a strategy similar to Jackie Sibblies Drury's recent Fairview (Soho Rep), another theater piece examining race in America, Inoa carefully grounds her audience in the familiar before hauling us into bizarre territory. Hard to tell, though, which one hauls with the rougher hand: Fairview's second and third acts seem more cleverly conceptual while Scraps goes full-out surreal nightmare with a menacing Greek tragedy-style chorus.

The 85-minute piece takes place in The Flea's tiny Siggy Theater on a shallow stage not even a leg-stretch away from the audience's first row, a set-up that will only become more engulfing and threatening as this tale of Black urban life and racist police violence proceeds. Inoa introduces us to four main characters--connected by race, culture, neighborhood and personal history--whose interactions become complicated by grief, resentment and fear.

All roles are played by members of the Flea's resident acting troupe, The Bats. We first meet unemployed Jean-Baptiste (Roland Lane) who deftly raps up a bleak, nearly Shakespearean take on the prospects for a Black man under white supremacy. Like his namesake, he's a voice of one crying in the wilderness, and a stern warning.

Inoa quickly--maybe too much so, too stereotypically--gives him a nemesis in the form of Calvin (Michael Oloyede), a London-based college student now home in Bed-Stuy for only a brief visit. Calvin, looking casually-sharp in a way that immediately ticks off Jean-Baptiste, has been able to avoid dealing with the police killing of an unarmed Black man they both knew. Calvin longs to get back in the good graces of Aisha (Alana Raquel Bowers), single mother and young widow of the slain man. Though none too pleased with Calvin either, the alternately sunny, bone-tired and volatile Aisha is susceptible. But her sister Adriana (Tanyamaria) carries the heaviest burden of all, a trauma she tries to conceal with good humor and toughness. Tries and repeatedly fails.

This quartet of skilled actors has energy to burn, particularly Bowers and Tanyamaria who, when they get going with their lines, leave us in the dust, hyperventilating, unable to catch up. Of all, even Jean-Baptiste, Inoa gives the women the best language. But all actors turn on extraordinary ferocity in the final, disturbing developments of the story, which I will not reveal here.

Where Sibblies Drury concluded Fairview with a panoramic view of white privilege, boldly implicating her audience, Inoa maintains focus on the tragedy of unhealed racial trauma passed from generation to generation.

Other cast members: Andrew Baldwin, Bryn Carter

Sets: Ao Li
Costumes: Andy Jean
Lighting: Kate McGee
Sound: Megan Deets Culley
Violence choreography: Michael G. Chin

Scraps continues at The Flea through September 24. For information and tickets, click here.

The Flea Theater
20 Thomas Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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An audience with Angie Pittman

Dancer-choreographer Angie Pittman (photo: Scott Shaw)

Sequined Kisses and Vazlean is a diptych that grapples with ways to give love, receive love, be cool, be resilient, achieve survival, and daydream. Sequined Kisses... is an exploration of interiority, and its relationship to compression, love and joy within the context of historical trauma against Black folk. ...VazLean centers “cool” as an African Diasporic concept through greasiness, lubrication, and James Brown cape choreography. Together, these two pieces are a journey towards what Donnell Alexander calls “finding the essential soul while being essentially lost.”

Presented as part of The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness at The Kitchen, Angie Pittman's performance of conjoined solos--Sequined Kisses and Vazlean--seemed like a half-hallucinated audience with Black shamanic or ancestral royalty. The James Brown/Prince lineage, in particular. One night only--and for your eyes only, lucky ones.

We saw her partly in dim light and, even when bathed in spotlight, in a form that seemed indirect and indistinct, often twirling or oriented sideways, never giving us a good look in the eye. Moving and gesturing as if through a fishbowl filled with gel. Here and not here.

The radiant white-and-gold satin cape (designed by Athena Kokoronis), which Pittman wore at the top of the hour, was lifted away by a tender supplicant and only returned late in the action. Musical voices accompanying her were often unpleasantly muddled and distorted, discordant and abrasive as if they, too, represented someones not of this time. Many pasts accumulated into the present.

Our evening with Pittman unfolded in a much-transformed performance space that turned what is normally inclined rows of audience seating into dark, bleak mountain for the holy descent and re-ascent of a spiritual being. The audience--and we were many--sat in semicircular rows opposite this "mountain," watching Pittman gradually forge her path down its central steps, her movements suggesting an effort to turn a three-dimensional body into bold, iconic marks against a black surface. Ancient, enigmatic, beautiful, powerful.

Powerful, especially, when reaching the black floor and whirling nearly--but never--out of balance on the dips and surge of the music, her surefootedness a thrill and an instruction. Vulnerable to the risk of stumbling and yet taking care of herself in the midst of the ecstasy she claimed.

Angie Pittman: Sequined Kisses and Vazlean is closed.

The Kitchen's visual art exhibition of The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness continues through August 3. Artists include Josh Begley, Paul Chan, Mel Chin, Ja’Tovia Gary, Ken Gonzales-Day, Kate Greenstreet, Titus Kaphar, Baseera Khan, Charlotte Lagarde, Seung-Min Lee, Glenn Ligon, Mores McWreath, Sandeep Mukherjee, Native Art Department International, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Cindy Sherman, Rodrigo Valenzuela and Anicka Yi. For information, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (west of 10th Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Eliza Bent gets personal on race and cultural appropriation

Eliza Bent
(photo: Knud Adams)

It's far worse than you might think.

No, that's not my review of Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen, the new monologue written and performed by Eliza Bent, now at Abrons Arts Center. But that's what I believe Bent wants viewers to grasp.

The piece jumps off from the playwright's memories of a film on the 19th Century queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch--a school project Bent cooked up at age 13 with a friend and classmate. The young auteur cast her white affluent self as the indigenous queen and now looks back on it--as we get to do; the film is both cringe-worthy and just ridiculously audacious enough to kind of work, ya know?--with no small amount of shame. I can't gauge how completely woke today's Bent is but, as things unfold, you will definitely see she's got her eyes propped open.

She might have forgiven her teenaged self (and begged our forgiveness) for youthful indiscretion. But she does not stop there.

Surrounded, inexplicably but beautifully, by Elizabeth Chabot's rich, thick textile art and a row of fetching portraits--Bent resembles some combination of high-class talk show host and star monologist. Wearing a buttoned-up little black dress with A-line cut, she talks nonstop with well-practiced intensity that pegs her as facile, artificial, privileged, ready for PBS or an NPR podcast.

Frankly, even when self-revealing, she's off-putting. You take note when she utters something amusing. You note that amusement and yet stand clear of enjoying it. You definitely stand away from Bent, and maybe she means you to do so, because her delivery of text is noticeably, oddly driven, airless, leaving no room for her breathing or your own.

At some point, you get used to that. Which might mean an unseen internal change within her or--and this is really what it felt like--something shifting inside you, like when a climber gets more and more acclimated to lower levels of oxygen.

Maybe, though, Bent's the sort best positioned to lead us where we need to go and show us what we need to see--what she's done and what she's witnessed, particularly in the world of media and the arts. (In addition to her stage work, she served, for several years, as a senior editor at American Theatre magazine.) Deep into the play, she circles back to her own relationships and disconnections--refusing to absolve herself for what remains unresolved, tasking herself and the rest of us with acknowledging the pervasive breadth and durability of privilege and the damage wrought. Not a curious fossil from the ancestral past. Not a specimen of a problem that has not a thing on Earth to do with us now.

Direction: Knud Adams
Textile panel art: Elizabeth Chabot
Sound design/original composition: Jerome Ellis
Lighting: Kate McGee
Make up and styling: Naomi Miyoko Raddatz

Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen continues through April 21. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)

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Davalois Fearon and the politics of race in dance

Davalois Fearon in Time to Talk
(photo: ANDREW IMAGING)

Sometimes, there's the story you intend to tell, and then there's the unintended story you wind up telling.

Davalois Fearon--a powerful dancer acclaimed for her many years with Stephen Petronio--has struck out on her own. In recent years, she has developed earnest multimedia pieces like Consider Water (2017) and the new Time to Talk, running this week at Mabou Mines. The background of Time to Talk--Fearon's literature cites research in "American history, dance history, racial identity formation and systemic racism"--has yielded a work that slightly gestures at the toxicity of these massive, interlocking entities. It hovers around what it means to train, professionally perform and be seen and critiqued performing dance in a Black body. And we know that's what the Jamaica-born Fearon has done exceptionally well--the irony of the piece being that you readily see she's a woman who excels at whatever she sets her mind to doing. Her supple, sculptural, forceful body is equipped to ace every form of movement--from ballet barre to twerking--even when built-in, exaggerated imperfections show she's unhappy and unfulfilled by the expectations that others put on her.

There's the distraction of her mastery, a mastery undercut by only partially-disguised misery and resentment. I get it. But the main story it's actually telling me--and underscoring any number of times--is the familiar one about how Black people take whatever's available to us and make it shine like the sun. We've been doing that from way back and do it still. And then other people copy what we've done, often profiting from it.

With prompting and accompaniment from her husband, jazz musician Mike McGinnis, Fearon makes various attempts to find the right genre of dance that's "appropriate" for her to do. As an interracial couple, they seem to have mined their own situation and conversations for material. Unfortunately, this creates some imbalance: He's an accomplished artist in his own right but not an actor; his awkwardness, when not working a sax or clarinet, weakens their interactions and gives Time to Talk an amateurish feel. I believe their good intentions, though, and I believe they need still more time to nurture depth, breadth and incisiveness in the work.

Fearon cites her Jamaican upbringing as a shield from racism. She experienced colorism in the Caribbean, for sure, but admits it was only when she entered grad school at a Midwestern university, a few years ago. that she discovered what Blacks face in the US on the regular. Her experiences in Milwaukee shocked her.

Fearon's aims to spark audience dialogue and follows each performance with a talkback with McGinnis and guests. Last evening, she included representatives from the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League. I counted just a few Black people in the room--including myself and Fearon's own understudy. It was disheartening to hear no one actually acknowledge the systemic nature of American racism (not just how people getting to know one another better will cure things). It also made me tired to hear most of the talking--at great length and intensity--issuing from white men.

But, again, the story you didn't intend to tell is sometimes the one that rolls out even so.

Time to Talk continues through Thursday, March 29 with performances at 9pm. For information and tickets, click here. For tickets by phone call 212-352-0255 or 1-866-811-4111.

Mabou Mines Theater
150 1st Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Wilson Harris, 96

Wilson Harris, Guyanese Writer of Intricate Novels, Dies at 96
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, March 16, 2018

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Peggy Cooper Cafritz, 70

Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Patron of Black Artists, Dies at 70
by Penelope Green, The New York Times, February 23, 2018

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Tatyana Tenenbaum's "Untitled Work for Voice"

Cast of Tatyana Tenenbaum's
Untitled Work for Voice
(photo: Liz Charky)

Choreographer/composer Tatyana Tenenbaum
performs in her work.
(photo: Simon Courchel)

I'm fairly sure I saw Shirley Temple's ghost at St. Mark's Church last night. Long, diaphanous curtains descended from the sanctuary's balcony and draped along the side risers. The faint, spectral image of Hollywood's tapdancing white child star shimmered over the sheer fabric and against the wall near the entrance. At least, I think it was Shirley, her spirit briefly hovering--a blessing? a warning?--before Tatyana Tenenbaum premiered a new, hour-long ensemble piece, Untitled Work for Voice, for Danspace Project.

As the title indicates, the work involves not only movement but vocalization and, indeed, blends the two so much that it becomes clear that, for Tenenbaum, one's entire body, not just one's vocal chords, speaks and sings. I've read an interview where she talks about having lived from the neck up, a way of being she connects to her Jewish heritage (self-described, in her program notes, as white and assimilated). Untitled Work for Voice might offer a series of fitful attempts to break through, not by circumventing her situation but by mining it for any tool that might serve her purpose.

We sometimes hear a single word pronounced as if by dissection: courage rendered as kohr-raj-geh. We watch dancers dryly launch jazz dance (sort of) movement phrases and halt them before the payoff. There are moments of call-and-response that seem, at once, meaninglessly secular; because we are trained to expect beauty and sacredness in this format, we hear sacred beauty. Three of the dancers carry out and rattle thunder sheets--a theatrical device to simulate an awesome force of nature in a place where it is not.

An auburn-haired apparition in a white gown dotted with green pompoms softly mewls and sings and turns and twists in the air. Who or what is she?

Sentences might fragment, or start and get rethought and reset: "We had a fight...no, it wasn't a fight. We had an argument." Each element seems like a desperate grasp or stab at something. And dancers confidently intone made-up lyrics to Glenn Miller's, "A String of Pearls," a World War II swing hit best known as an instrumental. The actual lyrics--I Googled this morning to check--are something else again.

Untitled Work for Voice--perhaps "untitled" because how to settle on something that might keep shifting?--did not seem to be building towards anywhere or anything. But--to my surprise and, admittedly, my relief-- it really did with a swirling, gradually expansive solo for dancing, singing Jules Skloot.

Breakthrough.

Created and performed by Marisa Clementi, Pareena Lim, Emily Moore, Skloot and Tenenbaum
Costume design: Claire Fleury
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann

Untitled Work for Voice continues tonight and Saturday with performances at 8pm. There is no late seating. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (off Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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David Thomson opens world premiere at Performance Space New York

Scenes from he his own mythical beast by David Thomson
Above and below: Thomson, at left, with Paul Hamilton
(photos: Maria Baranova)

he his own mythical beast interrogates the complexities of American culture and draws from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, James Baldwin, the confession booth, Claudia Rankine, high school fights, Judith Butler, baptism, Roland Barthes, and Trisha Brown. Venus, a character that flirts with black face, gender ambiguity and sexuality, becomes a guide on this journey. Part beast and part myth, Venus is named after the Hottentot Venus, aka Sarah Baartman – an enslaved black woman who was exhibited as an exotic in the early 19th Century London and Paris. This code-shifting chimaera is Thomson’s response to the post-modern performance aesthetic that historically privileged neutrality as a means of subverting the personal narrative.

--promotional material for he his own mythical beast, a world premiere at Performance Space New York 

At center, Jodi Bender (left) with Katrina Reid
(photo: Maria Baranova)

This week, David Thomson wraps up Performance Space New York' 2018 COIL festival with the world premiere of he his own mythical beast, a work he has developed and shown, in various iterations from Danspace Project to BRIC, since 2012. A quartet with video and projected text installation, it feels like something massive punching its way out of a confining container.

I hated, but also sort-of understood, the space it inhabits--a black coffin of a room with audience rows set up along one long and two short sides, and woe to you if you happened to be positioned on one of those short ends trying to figure out what's going on at a spot that seems many cold miles away, the dancers like austere, awesome planets and moons. From the distancing and darkness rose stark ring lights washing across dark faces and torsoes--Thomson's and Paul Hamilton's dark Black skin. The men turned their limbs into layered sculpture, feverishly churning within a square on the floor, its space and boundaries sealed by tape. Compressed, trained to be small and of controlled beauty, the dynamism, fluidity and complexity of these two men only grew more apparent.

Above and below: Thomson
(photos: Maria Baranova)

The solid core of Thomson's project, with its numerous sources of inspiration and extraordinary creative contributors over the years, is the situation of the Black body--his body and Hamilton's and Reid's, too, though this Black woman's role here seems perhaps deliberately secondary--within aesthetics and systems upheld by white postmodernism. In a straightforward sequence, Bender--the sole white dancer-- gets to humiliate and brutalize Hamilton over and over and over and over again and then some more. The viewer, appalled, might flash back to some of the hallway's projected text--a brief exchange, between two speakers, about slavery reenactments--that runs alongside the loop of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Does it help, here, to remember that the dastardly, Road Runner-chasing Wile E. Coyote always brought about his own undoing? Maybe. I can't help but think that a good part of that punching out I felt from the whole work was about punching the hell out of one's own mindset.

Fierce performances make this work special and memorable, but I also credit the striking visual and lighting concepts realized, respectively, by Peter Born and Roderick Murray.

he his own mythical beast continues with performances tonight and Friday at 7:30pm and Sunday, February 4 at 3pm. These performances include an installation, and you are invited to arrive early to view it. For information and tickets for this and other COIL events, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets, 4th Floor), Manhattan
(directions)

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