Marital burnout is no laughing matter...and yet: Sara Juli

Sara Juli in her show, Burnt-Out Wife, at Dixon Place
(photo: Nick Pierce)

Burnt-Out Wife
Sara Juli
Dixon Place
February 21-28

What a set! Designer Pamela Moulton's vision for Burnt-Out Wife, a solo performance by multi-talented Sara Juli, is lying in wait for the Dixon Place audience. And I say that advisedly, for this set is a monster, an eyesore. A cotton-candy-pink bathroom complete with polka dot toilet seat cover, a filmy pin-up girl robe with hot pink feather boa trim; and a wall splotched with wound-like flowers crafted, with childlike imperfection, out of who knows what. You gaze and wonder what Juli has in store for her unsuspecting visitors.

Burnt-Out Wife is everything that set suggests--and more. "I wanna get married...that's why I was born," sings Nellie McKay in the wry, melancholic song that ushers in this brilliant performance. Juli appears, giving the left-up toilet seat a certain look that immediately invokes the mate at fault and aiming another look at two baby dolls strewn about the floor. But if you think that tells you everything you'll need to know about Juli's project, think again.

Written by Juli, the performance draws clarity and vitality from her background in dance and stand-up comedy, and she shows ease and confidence in both genres. Marital burnout might not be first on your list of the funniest things in life, but Juli is really funny without straining and really fresh. She looks like a woman waking up to realize she's an Amazon and one with a future in performance art. She's physically strong--as you'll discover if she shakes your hand in a firm grip or strikes poses to represent the misalignment between her desires and her husband's--stronger than you might suspect from the weary look she gives the world most of the time. And she's smart as a whip, more than holding her own with the unseen spouse and her wackadoodle surroundings as she slyly, steadily lays waste to heteronormative conventions. In fact--through the magic touch of Moulton, costume designer Carol Farrell, sound designer Ryan McDonald and lighting designer David Ferri--she turns her hideous bathroom into a throne room worthy of pissed-as-hell royalty.

The surprises, joys and rewards of this show are many, and I will not spoil them for you as I hope you'll make your way to Dixon Place tonight for the final performance. But hurry! Last night's show was packed with happy people laughing their heads off.

Burnt-Out Wife concludes this evening with a show at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie 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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La Mama hosts the great Germaine Acogny

Germaine Acogny, "Mother of Contemporary African Dance,"
performs SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
(photo: Thomas Dorn)

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING
by Germaine Acogny and Mikäel Serre
FIAF's Crossing The Line Festival
La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre
September 26-28

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING--a US premiere for Crossing The Line Festival by renowned Senegalese/French contemporary dance artist Germaine Acogny and director Mikäel Serre--unfolds as if it were dreamt, a full-sensory haunting both sustained in time and elusively fluid in nature. A rich soundscape makes the viewer feel surrounded, engulfed. Visual design tucks things far out of reach or behind layers of other images, or suddenly zooms them large or slips them back into darkness, seriously messing with rational sense of space.

Its fascinating and troubling text, adapted for the stage by Serre, is often spoken in French by Acogny while also running in English as supertitles. If you do not comprehend French, this regularly pulls your gaze up and away from the stately moving sculpture that is Acogny.

You make your choices here; they're difficult, disruptive, regretful and the only ones you're allowed. At almost every turn, she and her creative team suspend us in a phenomena from which we cannot turn away. Even the smell of baby powder and the tickle of tiny, airborne feathers will eventually reach our unguarded selves.

A stage-spanning string curtain serves as a scrim onto which ghostly images may be projected and into which solid objects (and our beloved dancer) can be swallowed out of sight as if dragged below waves.

Like the simple props that will gather dramatic meaning--an open notebook, its white pages reflecting light; a pillow the dancer hugs to her chest, a heavy rock--Acogny contains the brooding power of history, of secrets, a complicated narrative with webs of connection to the Greek Medea and the tragedy of today's refugees seeking safety in Europe.

One surprise discovery, among many, in a diary--the words "Power is passed down from woman to woman." How to access that inheritance? Does it come from things--a set of formidable butcher knives passed along to the wrong person? Or is it knowledge, the force of truth about oneself that can purge the evil wrought by colonialism, patriarchal religion, racism, male supremacy?

Now in her 70s, Acogny--choreographer, performer and educator--has been called "Mother of Contemporary African Dance." Watch as she makes startling use of Johnny Cash's recording of "Hurt" with its evocation of self-inflicted pain and "empire of dirt," and you will grasp why this artist can claim worldwide reverence. Do not miss her historic performance at La MaMa.

Concept and direction: Mikäel Serre
Choreography: Germaine Acogny
Set design: Maciej Fiszer
Costumes: Johanna Diakhate-Rittmeyer
Music: Fabrice Bouillon "LaForest"
Video: Sebastien Dupouey
Lighting design: Sebastien Michaud

Talkback moderation: Okwui Okpokwasili
Translation: Courtney Geraghty

SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING runs through tomorrow evening at La MaMa with performance at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For information on other events in Crossing The Line, an annual presentation of French Institute Alliance Française, click here.

La Mama (Ellen Stewart Theatre)
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery 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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Nicky Paraiso: ready at La MaMa

Nicky Paraiso (right) with dancer Paz Tanjuaquio
in now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories

Nicky Paraiso
now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories
Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
March 22-April 7

Nicky Paraiso's performance memoir, now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories, directed by John Jesurun, runs about 80 minutes. A densely-packed, non-stop monologue, it is augmented, surrounded--and, more or less, supported--by scenic design, music, movement and the occasional verbal exchange with his dancing collaborators. It traces Paraiso's Queens boyhood in a Filipino immigrant family through an illustrious, four-decade career in theater, music and curation to the present day. These "intimate histories" of the verbal kind take the lion's share of space and oxygen--although the projections on the scrim dividing one half of the audience from the other can be as enchanting as Paraiso's piano playing and singing.

I question the choice of engaging four star dancers of downtown renown--Irene Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Vicky Shick an Paz Tanjuaquio--if, while relating nearly every life and career detail of your own with a biographer's specificity, you keep these fine artists largely marginalized until nearly the end. I enjoy seeing these performers wherever they land, but why here for what adds up to so little?

Their movement patterns never achieve the impact of Paraiso's heartfelt reenactment of singing "Into The Mystic"--one of my own soul songs--at a lover's memorial. They can't match his remembrance of how the late La MaMa, Ellen Stewart, loved to proudly flash her melon-like breasts and how she admonished him that "you like those talky, talky plays. That's not La MaMa, baby!" And how she added, "You do whatever you want, but I don't gotta like it!"

Talky, talky, indeed.

now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories requires some patience, but the rewards are real. Go, if you want to learn what made Paraiso Paraiso. He is beloved by our downtown arts community and one of the most knowledgeable, diligent and gracious advocates for artists everywhere.

Written by Nicky Paraiso
Direction by John Jesurun
Created in collaboration with performers Irene Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Vicky Shick and Paz Tanjuaquio
Dramaturgy/Script Development: Irene Hultman, George Emilio Sanchez and John Jesurun
Production Management by Caleb Hammond
Costume Design: Gabriel Berry
Lighting Design: Joe Levasseur

now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories continues through Sunday, April 7. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues), 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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His A.I.M. is true: Kyle Abraham's Joyce season

Claude CJ Johnson, Connie Shiau and Catherine Ellis Kirk
of A.I.M. perform Kyle Abraham's Drive.
(photo: Ian Douglas)

No half-measures. No uncertainty. Kyle Abraham is at The Joyce Theater this week with his newly-renamed troupe, A.I.M., doing things to the max.

This season--which makes room for dances by Doug Varone and Bebe Miller, world premieres by Andrea Miller and Abraham as well as the Joyce commission of his first solo performance in nearly a decade--feels like a bold announcement of a new phase in the life and career of this award-winning artist. In an opening-night audience packed with New York's dance notables and media, it also felt like the place to be.

Program A opens with the Miller trio, state, where a knife-sharp trio of Black women--Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk and Marcella Lewis, with whom Miller collaborated--splash their stark images, live or via looming shadows, against the pale glow of a backdrop. They resemble stylish fashion models distorting their bodies out of mundane functionality into nifty abstractions for the eye of photographers and magazine readers; a fascination grows with the hypnotic observation of their physical capabilities and precision design, their aggressive flair. Reggie Wilkins's music underscores a certain sci-fi otherworldliness in this picture as does Nicole Pearce's lighting design--but she's got even more astonishing ideas for Abraham's solo, INDY.

Created with composer-pianist Jerome Begin, INDY is a work of emergence, search and breakthrough, as moving as it is beautiful to behold. It reveals itself slowly, literally coming out of mist. In its early moments, I see aspects of the dancer I remember from way back: part b-boy/part voguer, the latter's effortlessly slinky moves a form of catnip for this audience. (Let me pause, a minute, to throw a few !!!s behind the name of designer Karen Young whose black slacks/top costume, with its thick bands of fringe, throws more than a few !!!s around Abraham's gyrations: Karen Young!!!). But with the spreading of his arms and the parting of the black curtain behind him, Abraham moves on from this image of himself.

We find him shuddering, his arms locked behind his back as if his wrists are handcuffed. Pearce's lighting, here and throughout, arrives from the oddest places and in the strangest ways. She is a fount of surprises, stepping up to the challenge of choreographer ready to surprise himself and all who follow him. Begin's sound chamber suddenly erupts in an audio clip of a voice announcing Abraham's BFA graduation. The dancer strips down to briefs to move around like an awkward, broken marionnette.

The work's fully-revealed, eye-popping visual design suggests a well-ordered cosmos--external and containing the dancer or internal and generative of his evolution, perhaps both. The Abraham we see now has unshackled himself from our and, likely, his own expectations.

With Meditation: A Silent Prayer, another Abraham world premiere, made in collaboration with his performers, the choreographer returns to a concern that has informed his works in previous years--the precarious existence of Black lives in white supremacist society; specifically, the unrelenting roll call of deaths of Blacks at the hands of police. The ensemble gently performs moments of human connection before Titus Kaphar's backdrop-spanning mural of what, at first, might seem to be looming images of three distinct Black faces. Instead, you come to realize, the three are blurs made to look like multiple, overlapped and moving faces. We hear a litany of ages, family roles and names, written and read in voiceover by artist Carrie Mae Weems. In addition to Kaphar and Weems, the notable creative team for Meditation includes Craig Harris (music), Dan Scully (lighting) and Young (costumes).

This program--as well as Program B--ends with Drive, an Abraham collaboration with A.I.M. which was a hit of the 2017 Fall for Dance Festival at City Center. More tight work by the ensemble, more stunning lighting by Scully, and the asserted conviction that--when ready--you can just pick up and go wherever you choose to go. A.I.M. is ready.

Performers:

Kyle Abraham, Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk, Marcella Lewis, Tamisha Guy, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, Jeremy "Jae" Neal, Matthew Baker and Claude "CJ" Johnson

****

A.I.M.'s Joyce season runs through Sunday, May 6 with two programs and varying start times as follows:

Program A (approx. 1hr 40 min)

Tuesday (7:30pm), Friday (8pm) and Saturday (2pm)

state (World Premiere) by Andrea Miller
INDY (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Meditation: A Silent Prayer (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Drive by Kyle Abraham

Program B (approx. 1 hr 20 min)

Wednesday (7:30pm), Thursday and Saturday (8pm) and Sunday (2pm)

Strict Love by Doug Varone
Habits of Attraction by Bebe Miller
Meditation: A Silent Prayer (World Premiere) by Kyle Abraham
Drive by Kyle Abraham

For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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World premiere: Ivy Baldwin Dance presents "Keen [No. 2]"

Choreographer Ivy Baldwin performs in Keen [No. 2],
a new work for her ensemble, Ivy Baldwin Dance, at Abrons Arts Center.
Set design is by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen.
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Eleanor Smith (left) and Katie Workum
perform a duet in Keen [No. 2].

Below, an ensemble scene
(photos: Maria Baranova)

Grief is a force that seizes the body from within and works its way--by covert pathways and on its own timetable--throughout and through. Although humans have devised various rites for directing and honoring its expression, there's no controlling its urges and its dimensions. As such, grief has much to teach the conscious mind that humbly attends to it.

In Keen [No. 2]--in world premiere at the Abrons Arts Center, co-commissioned with The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Joyce Theater as part of Joyce Unleashed--Ivy Baldwin and her dancers dwell within a space of grief. They boldly ask us to pay attention to so much--in Katie Workum's opening solo, in front of that gorgeous, wow-inducing set by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen, a surprising, sometimes halting, even awkward exploration with no interest in pleasing our eyes; in the ensemble's lengthy passages of repetition, often numbingly even in tone; or the same ensemble indulging itself in excesses of release and of obvious uses of imagery and theatrical space, all of it given unconditional permission.

Among other things, I thought of valkyries and angels in flight. I thought of Isadora Duncan, that passionate force of nature, and her grief at the sudden death of her two young children. And I thought of furious tantrums in response to the unexplained, the unfair, the unbearable. It's significant that the dancing sometimes evokes the animal world in shapes, moves, rhythms, sounds, herd-like and unguarded behaviors. Grief connects us to our bodies in ways that can make us remember our basic animal selves and force us to let go of constructed, functional personas. Who better to demonstrate this for us than a chorus of dancers, artists who study the many intricate, wild truths their bodies hold?

Lawrence P. Cassella--who, in 2015, succumbed to a rare immune system disorder after brief illness--was a member of Ivy Baldwin Dance from 2003 to the end of his life. Keen [No. 2] is dedicated to this beloved member of our dance community and informed by Baldwin's experience of losing and grieving him. I watched it with a flow of questions: Is Workum, the work's initial soloist, testing the remaining abilities of a body she no longer trusts? Or could she be testing the powers of a new "body" beyond physical form--rotating her wrists to see if she can lift a leg, twining her hands to generate a new set of fingers? When dancers duet, their bodies coming into sync, can we know who is lost and who is mourning? Or is that interconnection, that blurring of distinction, that temporary inability to let go, regain and shelter in one's own, separate energy and identity, at the very heart of grief? Might it be, for dancers, even harder than for the rest of us to let the physical bodies of their loved ones and colleagues go?

Like the process of grief itself, Keen [No. 2] makes no appeal to what a viewer might want or accept. It is unreasonable and unruly in nature, but it is true to its own purpose and logic, presented with admirable conviction by Baldwin, Eleanor Smith and Katie Workum with Katie Dean, Dia Dearstyne, Heather Olson, Kay Ottinger, Marýa Wethers (June 1-4), Tara Willis (June 8-11), Tara Sheena and Anna Adams Stark.

Sound design: Justin Jones
Lighting design: Chloe Z. Brown
Costumes: Mindy Nelson

Keen [No. 2] continues through June 11 with performances Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm. For information, click here. For ticketing, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (near Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Aakash Odedra Company brings "Rising" to Skirball Center

I want to keep my memories of dancer Aakash Odedra killing some James Brown funk three years ago in his joyous, Bessie-winning performance at the Apollo. And I want to forget Rising--his program of solos made by Akram Khan, Russell Maliphant, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and himself, brought to New York this week at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

Back in 2011, Rising marked a turning point for this British performer trained in classical Indian dance--his debut as a choreographer and commissioner of works in a contemporary vein. It draws heavily on the lush, picturesque qualities of his dancing and onstage design. It draws and draws, in fact, until both those wells run dry which, in the absence of anything more sustaining, takes just moments.

There appears to be a formula for Rising: a haze-filled stage; murky lighting; a vaguely mystical aura; and fluidity of movement that turns, time and again, to twirling and sinuous undulation. Odedra's own Nritta is the bland template for this pattern. Khan at least attempts a somewhat different direction for his handsome comrade in the next piece, In The Shadow of Man, invoking a screaming, yipping animal self that heaves and arcs and rotates off its axis. Maliphant's Cut locates Odedra in the triangular gap between two dark, framing curtains, yet again engulfed in billowing haze, bright light catching only splashes of his busy hands or forearms in a visual flamboyance that Alwin Nikolais surely would have admired. I thought, too, of David Parsons's Caught, the signature piece and perennial crowd-pleaser where flashing strobes make a leaping soloist appear to fly and fly and fly.

For Cherkaoui's Constellation, numerous globe-like light bulbs, sort of pomegranate-sized, hang on cords suspended from the flies. Individual lights can be moved from above like marionettes. That's lovely, but the design execution and the dancer's engagement with one or another dangling star only add up to pretty display. But I could not resist this thought: How many dancers does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. But that bulb has to want to change.

Rising is closed.

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Yolanda Sonnabend,80

Yolanda Sonnabend, Designer Who Influenced Choreographer, Dies at 80
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, November 29, 2015

"this is an Irish dance": Jean Butler at Danspace Project

Neil Martin and Jean Butler
perform this is an Irish dance at Danspace Project.
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Jean Butler might still be best known for Riverdance--the global Irish dance phenomenon she starred in with Michael Flatley--but she has moved on to a new level of inquiry in contemporary dance. this is an Irish dance, her thoughtful and poetic performance with cellist/composer Neil Martin at Danspace Project, helps us hear music not only in the duet of instrument and movement but also in the sensitive aliveness within silence, stillness and near darkness.

To make this work, the two artists collaborated through simultaneous improvisation. We read the living record of those explorations as they perform or even just regard each other across space, or as Butler quietly holds the cello for Martin as he busies himself with pushing a white cube a short distance. The warmth of his cello's voice contrasts with her sculpted serenity. Its heartful earthiness creates a trusty base for her still-very-Irish lightfootedness.

In an essay for this production, Butler writes of the supremely controlled form of Irish dancing as "a gesture of defiance," meant to elevate the Irish stereotyped by the English as "uncivilized, unruly, and of questionable character." I tried to understand this notion of physical self-restraint as a form of defiance. As a Black woman, I know how, under similar racist conditions, self-restraint can be a strategy for survival, if a self-erasing one. But an act of defiance? Nevertheless, Butler's birdlike physicality does reveal the powerful presence and strength within cool control, a self-awareness and a witty, mercurial facility that could as readily be turned to battle as to fanciful play.

Frank Conway's set further complicates things, evoking the aftermath of some unidentified disaster the two performers have survived. Upon first entering the church sanctuary and seeing his arrangement, I flashed back to the time I passed through my wife's art studio and closed its door behind me just as its ceiling collapsed.

Aside from a narrow, plain white table and a few white cubes, Conway has spilled jagged chunks of white foamcore down two sides of the floor--heavy piles near the altar steps tapering down into lighter remains and finally single pieces close to the audience. Although Butler and Martin rarely interact with this wreckage, it's hard to not be aware of its presence as they interact with each other.

Are we not all living with the wreckage of past injury and, quite likely in these times, foreboding? And do we not all, despite our first misgivings, hope to move beyond these things and find ways to connect and to heal?

this is an Irish dance continues through November 21 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

Liz Gerring brings "glacier" to the Joyce

Scenes from glacier
Liz Gerring Dance Company
(photos, above and below: Johanna Austin)

Presented without intermission, Liz Gerring's dance octet, glacier, gives the impression of being longer than its 65 minutes--alternately, a welcomed thing and, at times, a burden. But that strange elasticity reflects how the piece mirrors the fullness, diversity and adaptability of the natural world while remaining--like a watercolor painted in strokes of varying saturation--just abstract enough to tantalize.

What is going on here? Gerring's meticulous craft seduces with faint suggestion (ah! that looks somewhat familiar, but...), continuous metamorphosis and elusion. And the members of Liz Gerring Dance Company are exquisite in their performance for this Joyce Theater season.

Scene from glacier
Liz Gerring Dance Company
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Given its world premiere in 2013 at Peak Performances @ Montclair State, glacier has been slightly readjusted for the Joyce's stage. It looks fine, as if it had been made for the Joyce.

Robert Wierzel (set and lighting) suspends three cool white rectangular panels, like empty canvases, across the black expanse at the back of the stage. The floor also transmits a muted white. Both set off the sculpted gestures of Gerring's eight dancers whose movements alternately evoke vast space and intimacy, whose limbs suggest the odd stem here, the bent twig there, the fiddlehead of a fern. Michael Schumacher's electronic score, Glacier, captures, alters and layers sound from the woods and town around Colorado’s Glacier Lake with more conventional musical instrumentation. The sounds' origins remain nonspecific, delightful puzzles for the ear. A frog? A whistling duck? Fissuring ice? The stately procession of a ghost?

The soundscape can turn thrillingly harsh and agitated, with dancers rebounding and riding that energy while never looking forced, never violent. Most often, they let go and surrender--to gravity, to momentum. They inscribe curving, arching shapes where the eye does not expect to find them in everyday human posture or locomotion. This is a constant pleasure.

Gerring's odd-man-out, offbeat spatial flow and Schumacher's aural surprises don't tire the eye or mind--until moments when they do. That does happen, although I must admit any mental flagging and impatience on my part might have been due to the unusually chilly temperature in the Joyce on an unseasonably cool spring night. It made me wonder. Was that by design--you know, glacier and all?

glacier's closing, a disappearance by lighting effect, seems especially apt. A day of rich, sensory experience finally closes. Or more threatening: an entire landscape, a vital web of relationships, declines before our eyes.

Performers: Benjamin Asriel, Brandon Collwes, Tony Neidenbach, Adele Nickel, Brandin Steffensen, Jake Szczypek, Jessica Weiss and Claire Westby

glacier continues through April 2 with performances tomorrow (7:30pm) and Thursday (8pm). Following tomorrow's show, there will be a discussion with Gerring and dancers. For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

Danspace Project presents new work by Jillian Peña

From Jillian Peña's Polly Pocket: Expansion Pack
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Let's just say that with Jillian Peña you know where you stand--or sit, actually.

Outside.

Funny. I was just thinking--yesterday, before I went to see Peña's latest work, Polly Pocket: Expansion Pack--about the many ways that artists have arranged audience seating at Danspace Project. Last night, I walked through the inner doors of St. Mark's Church to find a thick barrier erected between the performance space and the seats. About 2-1/2 feet in height and 2 feet in depth, stretching from one margin of the performing area to the other and carefully covered in white fabric.

Two Peña dancers, Alexandra Albrecht and Andrew Champlin, were already at work in one corner of the space, visible but cut off from us by the barrier. (We're over here. You're over there. That's the way it's going to be.) Which led me to wonder if, in some unanticipated way, Peña would eventually breach that barrier. Or perhaps she really means to freeze us in place and role in a polite and tasteful but firm way.

White sheets hung between the columns that flank the space, obscuring the seating risers along those sides. Lighting was basic and gentle. This made the interior space look like what it is to the historic church that houses it--a sanctuary, sacred and protected space. Or perhaps a hospital room.

The audience gathered and gradually grew still. The chiming, droning undertone strengthened. The partners--different in sex but similar in height and physique--continued their calm, repetitive patterns. Facing each other, the dancers would touch their four palms together, moving them in slow, drifting extensions or curves or crosses as if engaging with a mirror image of themselves. Or they might turn away from each other, facing the open space and hooking an arm around the other's waist, each tracing a rond de jambe à terre. Two halves of a whole, it would seem. Sometimes, they would separate enough to be seen as distinct entities--but not so far as to lose one another--then move back in for more rounds of the repeated motions.

Not limited to pristine movement patterns in her intense focus here, Peña eventually--and, I think, inevitably--introduced audible counting. The first instance of this occured with a shift in the music and expansion in movement--legs lifting, arms stretching outward, directional changes, slow tumbles and more mirroring of the Other. Eventually, a third Other--dancer Kyli Kleven--joined the first two.

Although not deeply engaged by Polly Pocket: Expansion Pack, I enjoyed its overall look and the quality of its trio of performers, all evenhanded, airy and luminous. The movement and soundscape were a little too lulling for me, but I admit to being under-slept and in need of something more jolting. The "expansion" referenced in the title--charming, though even more lulling in its way--is meant as a surprise. So, I will refrain from revealing it here.

Set and Video: Jillian Peña and Chris Sellers
Music: Krzysztof Komeda, The Valerie Project, Fripp & Eno
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann (original lighting by Joe Levasseur)
Costume Design: Reid Bartelme (costumes created by Bartelme with Stephanie Yarger and Jillian Maslow)

Polly Pocket: Expansion Pack runs through Saturday, 8pm. No late seating. For tickets, click here.

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

Brantley on Branagh's "Macbeth"

Rushing Headlong Into the Hurly-Burly
A Fast and Furious ‘Macbeth’ at Park Avenue Armory
by Ben Brantley, The New York Times, June 5, 2014

H. R. Giger, 74

H. R. Giger, Swiss Artist, Dies at 74; His Vision Gave Life to ‘Alien’ Creature
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, May 13, 2014

Monstrous insect slimes the Joyce

The Royal Ballet's Edward Watson
as Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis

 

Certain types of dance events, certain companies and certain choreographers bring out critics I never or rarely run into anywhere else around New York's diverse dance environment, and you know exactly what I mean. They land in flocks and, yes, the fall migrants are landing--with good reason--for The Royal Ballet's export of The Metamorphosis, a major coup for the new Joyce Theater season.

Choreographed by Arthur Pita and premiered in 2012, the award-winning production stars Royal principal Edward Watson as Franz Kafka's tormented Gregor Samsa. The regal Watson bends--I should say, contorts like crazy--to the task of transforming himself from a rigid, driven traveling salesman, stuck in a life of sterile routine, into a bug of indeterminate species drooling viscous brown liquid from its mouthparts and sliming the super-clean bedroom where his horrified family has confined him. (Simon Daw's massive and pristine white set design, lit by Guy Hoare, is already a nightmare just waiting to become something even worse.) Watson's grotesque physical performance as man-trapped-in-exoskeleton truly astonishes as much as it repels, and it is with no small relief that, for long stretches of the 90 minutes, we're given leave to gaze aside at a host of characters who make up Samsa's world.

Watson's duet with Nina Goldman (Samsa's mom)

Of these, Bettina Carpi (wonderful as the family's hearty, amusingly unflappable maid) and Corey Annand (Gregor's kid sister, Grete) have the most interesting roles. And it is the aspiring ballerina Grete's own monstrous transformation--from loving, if giddy, child to angry, rock-hearted adult, largely shown through the development of her ballet technique--that helps Pita suggest a long passage of time.

I read somewhere that Watson thinks composer Frank Moon's live performance tops his own, and--at great risk of being unfair to the amazing Watson--I must admit that thought did cross my mind at least once. Moon, stationed below one corner of the stage, serves as another good landing place for one's troubled gaze. At times, I'd watch him leaning into the mic to deliver atmospheric vocals over his recorded and live playing. His brilliant score--featuring guitar, oud, violin, tam-tam and voice--combines precision and madness, a monstrous beauty.

The Metamorphosis runs through September 29 at The Joyce Theater. Click here for a complete schedule of shows and ticketing information.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan

(directions)

Historic loss for Graham company in hurricane crisis

Martha Graham Sets and Costumes Damaged by Hurricane Sandy
by Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, November 2, 2012

Jasperse's "Canyon"

Click here to read my Dance Magazine review of John Jasperse's Canyon at BAM's Next Wave Festival, November 16-19.

A "SPLICE" of life

In an intense, jam-packed season like this--and that's just what's happening on New York's dance scene--it's easy to overlook smaller events and developing artists who might not yet have the bucks and big p.r. power to push them. Keeping an eye on how dance is shaping up takes a lot of running around, but DNA certainly wants you to make it one of your go-to places.

Its latest SPLICE program--which brings together pairs of choreographers with a common thread--concludes today at 3pm with a work apiece by choreographers Joanna Kotze and Benn Rasmussen.

Francis Stansky and Joanna Kotze in "Between You and Me" (Photo: Erika Latta)

Benn Rasmussen and Arletta Anderson in "Black Ground" (Photo: Erika Latta)

Kotze's duet, Between You and Me, sports one of the most elegant and dazzling--and fragile! watch your step!--sets I've seen at DNA, and one that's quite nicely adaptable to DNA's columns. (The design is by Jonathan Allen and Kotze.) She has won some fans for her aggressive, space-grabbing style, but my favorite takeaway was actually something far more subtle--the horizontal ripple that, every now and then, runs through Francis Stansky's shoulders like some mischievous and sensuous contradiction as he trots forward. The demarcated performance spaces--his and hers--eventually give way to theirs, and there are the peripheries in which the energetic dancers veer close to audience, kind of a jolt.

I'm not at all sure I've got the key to Rasmussen's quartet, Black Ground--with its over-sized black books that cushion heads, connect hands and get slammed to the floor--but I do like the pristine visual style with which Rasmussen crafts that mystery, and his ambitious fledgling troupe, Ardent August, has very promising performers in Arletta Anderson, Julia Kelly and Edward Rice.

Final performance today at 3pm. Click here for information and tickets.

And while you're there, you can view photo portraits by multidisciplinary artist Ryutaro Mishima--Before and After the Performance--in DNA's Gallery, now through October 30. Click here for information.

DNA (Dance New Amsterdam)
280 Broadway, 2nd Floor (entrance on Chambers), Manhattan
(map and directions)

So...I won exactly what?

So I went to Fitzgerald & Stapleton's Smell of Want performance at Abrons Arts Center, reviewed here by Claudia La Rocco of The New York Times and worth reading. It's fairly clear from La Rocco's writing that she had no more of a clue about the import of what she experienced than I did. I have nothing to add, and I can only assume that the description you will find on the Abrons site is deliberately intended to subvert thought and deflect understanding rather to support those things.

Oh--sorry, Steve--there actually is one more thing: Despite being assigned to the infamously glittery Winner's Circle, I walked away totally glitter-free--a small disappointment, as it turned out. In fact, it's kind of funny about the apparent formal significance of when you enter the space, where you sit, what that seating section is called and how it's decorated or not decorated. If any of that has any connection to what's going on in F&S's performance in Abrons' wonderful little Experimental Theater, someone please kindly tell me what I missed.

I did like Kryssy Wright's sometimes wavery lighting on the stone walls in this intimate space that suggests a cozy, dimly-lit sauna--Smell of Want's performers do wear, as La Rocco notes, costumes designed by Mother Nature--as well as lightly evoking something more ancient and ritualistic.

With performances by the Irish choreographers Emma Fitzgerald and Aine Stapleton and dancers Deborah Black, Maryanne Chaney, Anastasia Cohen, Carl Harrison, Linda Sue Stein. Although listed in the program, Arturo Vidich has been performing--and quite spectacularly so--this week in Dancer Crush at New York Live Arts.

Sound by Nicholas Santiago

Smell of Want concludes this evening with an 8pm performance. Click here for information and ticketing. Seating is extremely limited. If tickets are still available, you might be able to select your seating area--ticket price adjusted accordingly.

Abrons Arts Center (Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map and directions)

Student designer wins Limón competition

Sheryl Liu (scenic design, UC Irvine) has been selected to create the new sets and costumes for the Limón Dance Company’s upcoming revival of Limón’s 1956 masterwork The Emperor Jones, scheduled to premiere April 29 in Culiacan, Mexico, birthplace of Limón, followed by a tour of Mexico and presentation during the Company’s June 7-12 New York season at the John Jay Theater.

The Competition was sponsored by the Limón Dance Company and the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces for the purpose of bringing a fresh point of view to this acknowledged dance classic, on the occasion of its first restaging by the Company in 25 years. An invitation was extended to a select group of visual arts institutions in Mexico, Canada, and across the US , who invited a small group of their most talented students to apply. The Company received applications from young designers around the country, including Tennessee, California, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and 10 finalists were chosen.

Sheryl Liu was selected by the panel of judges that consisted of Carla Maxwell, Artistic Director of the Limón Dance Company; Roxane D’Orleans Juste, Company Associate Artistic Director; lighting designer Carol Mullins, and Clay Taliaferro, who learned the work directly from José Limón, danced the leading role, and will reconstruct and direct the revival.

SHERYL LIU is a third year scenic design student at UCIrvine. Her assisting credits include working in Alexander Dodge’s studio during the summer of 2009 on projects at the Old Globe, the Lansburgh, and the Roundabout Theater Company. Last summer she assisted Christopher Acebo at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her designs for Salome and La bohème have been selected to be part of EMERGE: 2011 at the Prague Quadrennial, the world’s top international stage design exhibition. Design credits at UCIrvine include The Wild Party, The Laramie Project, Little Women, Cyrano de Bergerac, Into the Woods, and The Crucible.

THE EMPEROR JONES
Premiered July 12, 1956 at the Empire State Festival, Ellenville, New York
Choreography: José Limón
Commissioned Score: Heitor Villa-Lobos
Reconstructed and Directed by Clay Taliaferro

In the classic Eugene O’Neill play, Jones, a fugitive from a chain gang, sets himself up as emperor of an island domain. He becomes a tyrant, and his mistreatment of his subjects causes them to rebel, hunt him down, and bring him to an ignominious end. The dance makes no attempt to adhere to the play’s sequence, but rather seeks to give it another dimension. The various episodes which concern Jones’ encounter with visions and hallucinations encompassing his own personal, and later, his racial memories, are juxtaposed within the necessarily brief duration of a dance.

For further information on the Limón Dance Company and its upcoming programs, click here.