Singing with spirits

On Saturday, February 22, 2020, I was joined by Okwui Okpokwasili and David Thomson in leading an opening ritual for Danspace Project's platform, Utterances from the Chorus, conceived and curated by Okwui and Judy Hussie-Taylor.

As the audience settled into seats in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery's parish hall, David and Okwui began to hum and vocalize as I read an invitation. It opened with a question derived from Okwui's exploration for the new platform which, regrettably, was interrupted and scrapped as the coronavirus pandemic shut our city down.

Here, I offer a new version of this invitation. As we now struggle with multiple traumas--the pandemic, the economic crisis, the murder of our Black kin--and dedicate our lives to justice, may you find this ritual healing, strengthening and motivating.

I invite you to perform it privately or in groups, as you find it useful.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: D. Feller)

Okwui asked:

What does it mean to weave a collective song?


And so, let us ask:


What does it mean to weave a spirit song on Lenape land? 

What does it mean to sing with the African souls?


What does it mean to be guided?

What does it mean to be activated?


Today, charge this space with the energy of sound.


Seek and find your name inside your cells,

inside your veins,

inside your bones.


Sit or stand with the energy of your name circling inside you until you hear its song.


Bring that energy out into this space on the flow of breath and flow of melody.


What is your name?

Sing your name.

Sing your true name.


Find a melody that transports your name into this space.


Keep singing your name into the space.

You can get loud with it.

You can get soft.


You may pause if you’d like to rest,

and you may resume at any time.


You may raise your votive candle above your head at any time, and that gesture will mean whatever it wants to mean.


You may extend your votive candle in front of you at any time, and that gesture will mean whatever it wants to mean.


Feel and sing or chant the name of ancestors of your family blood or ancestors of your mind.


Find the melodies that transmit their names into this space--loud or soft.


Keep singing their names into this space.

Keep singing their names into this space.

Keep singing their names into this space.


Return at any time to the song of your own name.


Sing. Sing out.

Sing. Sing it out.

Keep singing.

******

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

******

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Making space sing: Anna Sperber at The Chocolate Factory

Anna Sperber in Wealth From The Salt Seas
(photo: Brian Rogers)

The costumes for Anna Sperber's Wealth From The Salt Seas--a duet with vocalist/musician Gelsey Bell--display at least two variations on a theme of chocolate brown. (Sperber's pants, hard to make out in the lighting, might be of a hue between dull dark brown and charcoal.)  More than a possible sly reference to the work's venue, The Chocolate Factory Theater, the color has immediate effect--low-key and calming, earthy without being overly sensuous or overbearing, not stark like black. This, as it turns out, is a deep-brown dance.

It's appropriate for the choreographer who might easily go unnoticed when making her quiet, unremarkable first entrance with dark-brown hair pulled back from a scrubbed, serene face. She's just suddenly there, settled in place for a moment.

Sperber eventually drifts from one corner to another, positioning herself at one or another end of a row of viewers, slowly tracing hands over her face and neck and around her waist and hips. Her awareness is internal; you can feel that as easily as you feel the weight and slight friction of hands on skin and fabric.

Sperber's enigmatic, repetitive actions bring attention to the margins of the space and gather stillness and silence there like a gift. You might notice the difference this makes and think: Have I ever looked at performance space--or a performance--in quite this way?

Bell's entrance introduces sound--a voice that momentarily heightens in volume and shrillness. The sound score for the hour-long dance is produced by recorded and live voicings; the impact of feet on the floor; the strange effect of crouching and howling into the corner between two walls; the haunting bells played by the women as they bend their faces to them; and the reverberation of metallic sheets rattled and filling the air between Sperber and Bell as if, like whales, they signaled each other across an expanse of sea.

Curious props appear--a long, thick cable that Sperber manipulates; the odd-looking bells cast in blackish metal; a tarp of golden plastic; small, wooden scaffolds at either diagonal end of the space where the women climb and store their equipment. Curious, too, those moments when you swear you just saw one or the other dancer but she's suddenly out of sight, then she reappears as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Wealth From The Salt Seas continues through Saturday, March 31 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City
(map/directions)

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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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SPAC's "Mugen Noh Othello" at Japan Society in sold-out run

Japan Society, celebrating its 110th anniversary,
and The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival
present Satoshi Miyagi's Mugen Noh Othello.
(photo: Takuma Uchida)

Front left, Micari (Desdemona)
Front right, Maki Honda (Pilgrim from Venice)
with chanters (l-r): Kotoko Kiuchi, Yoneji Ouchi, Asuka Fuse,
Kazunori Abe, Fuyuko Moriyama and Haruyo Suzuki
(photo: Richard Termine)

Mugen Noh Othello

North American premiere

presented by Japan Society (NOH-NOW SERIES, PART IV)

part of The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival

Satoshi Miyagi and his acclaimed Shizuoka Performing Arts Center center and elevate the role of Shakespeare's Desdemona in Othello in Mugen Noh Othello. Seen through the tradition of mugen noh theater, the warrior Othello's wife and victim becomes the potentially disruptive shade trapped between life and definitive death until she can work through her story in front of the living. This crucial process for moving on and finding ultimate rest is, in a real sense, a form of theater as ritual to release her soul. Unlike most otherworldly beings in mugen noh, though, Miyagi's Desdemona is a more humble than formidable figure, appealing to the audience's sympathy.

As the tragic ghost, Micari, silkily, eerily skims the stage on feet we never see, voluminous robes concealing what surely must be casters bearing a body that admits no articulation, drawn forward as if by magnetic force. In her thin, delicate crown, she's a doll, the very model of perfection, but our final sight of her--oh, that parting gesture!--might reveal how much her devastating fate will always define her.

The full-bodied percussive music has power. As kneeling members of the superb chorus, arranged at stage left, chant the story, you will have to scan and stare hard at each mouth to determine the source of each utterance. Supertitles provide English translations, but I bet you'll find it tough to tear your eyes from the stately beauty on stage.

Script: Sukehiro Hirakawa
Original music: Hiroko Tanakawa (arranged by the actors)
Costume design: Kayo Takahashi
Lighting design: Koji Osako

Remaining shows of Mugen No Othello (tonight and Sunday) are sold out. Wait list lineup starts one hour prior to curtain. For information, click here.

Japan Society
333 East 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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My Eiko journal: Part 6

Eiko's A Body in Places

Saturday, March 12 -- 3pm

Meredith Monk
marked the hour at 3pm
at St. Mark's Church
for Eiko's A Body in Places.
photos (c)2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Eiko (left) with Meredith Monk
who taught us all a Japanese lullaby, The Red Dragon Fly
(c)2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Come by today and this evening for the continuation of Danspace Project's commemoration of the Fukushima tragedy with an installation of William Johnston's powerful photographs and a performance offering by artists every hour on the hour through 9pm. For more information, click here.

******

Read My Eiko journal: 

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

*****

Eiko's A Body in Places platform continues at Danspace Project and other venues through March 23. There's so much going on in this platform's programming, that Danspace Project is actually offering consultation with a docent to help you get your bearings. Really. For detailed information, click here.

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

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Michelle Sui presents "Body of Song" at Dixon Place

Multidisciplinary artist Michelle Sui
composed and wrote lyrics for Body of Song.
(photo: Len Irish)

Performing for a small audience mainly consisting of your buddies offers a chance for a bit of insider fun. So I'm not sure if composer-vocalist Michelle Sui was speaking in earnest or having a little joke, last night at Dixon Place, when she made reference to doing "site-specific theater."

The site in question, for Songs of Body, was the Dixon Place lounge, squeezed between the famous bar--This pays the bills, folks! Drink up!--and the waiting area and box office for the theater downstairs. Dixon Place uses its lounge space for compact performances of all kinds, but they might as well erect subway poles for a couple of street dancers. That's about as much room as you get, and anyone heading from the front door to the restrooms or theater below distracts audience and performers alike.

I'm still trying to figure out if Songs of Body would just work better in a more suitable, less awkward venue. Or if Sui's singers should perform it while holding cocktails. Or if she needs to cook this work more thoroughly. Maybe all are true.

The work grew of out the artist's interest in polyphonic folk vocals of Georgia and the Balkans--"laughing songs, drinking songs, eating songs, traveling, wedding, healing, dancing--song as function." In these vocal traditions, "music becomes the medicine," Sui told her audience. "It has a life of its own."

Songs of Body is described as an exploration of  "sound as touch, voice as body and language in all its senseless disintegration and relocation." A quintet of white-clad women, including Sui, sing her lyrics--"You have dismembered all melody in my eyes...I will not remember," for example--re-configuring their orientation in space for each song and, on rare occasions, making fleeting, puzzling gestures. In the work's most body-centric moment, a singer cocks back in her chair, allowing her arms and legs to paw the air as if climbing invisible clouds. Otherwise, the women remain as stationary as dolls encased in their factory boxes.

Sui erased expression of the flesh, leaving only traces to discover, contradicting the "body" part of this equation. (Sort of. I do see singing, itself, as an art of the body.) However, it does set off the voices really well because you cling to them for information. Sui's voice sounds like power constricted, reining in a mature fullness that she will let you notice and admire...from a distance. Meghan Hourigan is surprisingly jazzy in timing but like an abstract painting of a horn playing itself. A brief duet between Sui and Tayi Sanusi carries--solely because of Sanusi--an inviting lushness that makes up for the spare and shrill tone of much of the composition.

Unlike the songs that inspired Sui, Songs of Body's function is hard to discern. Its medicine remains elusive.

Closed. For information on Sui's multifaceted projects, visit her site here. For information on all events at Dixon Place, click here.

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

Jean Ritchie, 92

Jean Ritchie, Lyrical Voice of Appalachia, Dies at 92
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, June 2, 2015

Ben E. King, 76

Ben E. King, Soulful Singer, Dies at 76; ‘Stand by Me’ Was One of His Hits
by William Grimes, The New York Times, May 1, 2015

Percy Sledge, 74

Percy Sledge, Who Sang 'When A Man Loves a Woman,' Dies
The Associate Press, April 14, 2015

Julie Wilson, 90

Julie Wilson, Sultry Cabaret Legend and Actress, Dies at 90
by Stephen Holden, The New York Times, April 6, 2015

Adventurous voices: Odeya Nini and Gelsey Bell at Roulette

Odeya Nini
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Odeya Nini (l) and Gelsey Bell (r)
(photos courtesy of Odeya Nini)

When two barefoot wizards of vocal music sing you into sublimity, it's time to turn over for a nice, warm sleep. Unfortunately, last night, I had to leave Roulette, walk through the pre-spring chill and navigate the subway system. The charm of the final moments of A Solo Voice: Works by Odeya Nini and Gelsey Bell was, of necessity, followed by MTA charmlessness. But I will long remember singer-composers Nini (hailing from LA) and Bell (from around these parts) for their lovely efforts.

The collaborators presented a two-hour show with separate sets culminating in a jointly improvised piece, Spent Horizon, a kind of sonic woodland. Here their voices soared from opposite ends and levels of the theater, from balcony to stage, in birdlike call and response, overlapping and mingling, before the women slowly approached each other in an aisle, embraced and exchanged flyways as they drew apart.

This exploration of voice in trajectories of space is key to how Nini, in particular, wants us to understand vocal music. For her, as demonstrated in her 40-minute opening set, A Solo Voice, the moving body and the imaginative voice combine in a unified expression with elements of composition and improvisation. This carries the willing viewer and listener along through ethereal moments or ones that can pounce and grab and pierce. In other sections of this piece, Nini fills space with rich sampled sounds smoothly flowing into one another--some of this: bleating sheep, a creaking door, a whistler, gurgling water and what might have been eggs frying--and whirly tubes that simultaneously sing at varying pitches and make visible shapes in the air.

Bell's set, including four pieces before Spent Horizon, is cagey and fierce. Her combinations of vocal sounds can sound irrational with lines suddenly strangled or lyrics--briefly surfacing from her primal surround--that reveal disturbing histories. You come to suspect that even her melodic Now It Catches the Gleam of the might harbor something questionable underneath its honey-sweet and quiet, quiet, ever quieter repetitions. Those repetitions are a bit maddening. I'm thinking, Lullabye? Not so much. And, sure enough, there it is in Bell's program notes:

"Now It Catches the Gleam of the" was developed from my work with Gregory Whitehead on his radio piece Dimly Seen, which will air in May. Dimly Seen focuses on current American torture practices and uses the text of Francis Scott Key that was set in "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Click here to download Odeya Nini's debut CD, Vougheauxyice (Voice), released last April. Gelsey Bell's albums can be found here.

Lesley Gore, 68

Lesley Gore, ‘It’s My Party’ Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 68
The Associated Press, February 16, 2015

Carolina Chocolate Drops' Rhiannon Giddens prepares solo tour

A Solo Spotlight for a Powerful Voice
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, January 23, 2015

Irene Dalis, 89

Irene Dalis, Opera Singer and Company Founder, Dies at 89
by William Yardley, The New York Times, December 18, 2014

Sabah, 87

Sabah, Lebanese Singer and Actress, Dies at 87
by William Yardley, The New York Times, November 28, 2014

Tim Hauser, 72

Tim Hauser, the Founder of the Manhattan Transfer, Dies at 72
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, October 17, 2014

Love is crazy...or so says Justin Vivian Bond

CDs by singer/performance artist
Justin Vivian Bond

It's no small matter that two people--myself and an arts presenter I know--exclaimed the same words as we left Justin Vivian Bond's one-night concert, Love is Crazy, at FIAF: "So inspiring!"

On the subway trip back downtown, we conferred and agreed: It's the kind of performance that makes you want to look for and bring out your own best. I remember watching Ben Kingsley act in Gandhi and quitting a soul-snuffing job the very next day. I'm not yet sure what Bond's example--or any other part of FIAF's Crossing the Line fest--might inspire me to do in coming days, but V, I'm all ears.

Loosely strung around a theme of love, Love is Crazy found Bond (aka V) in warmly relaxed and sincere, if glamorous, form. V opened with the '40s jazz standard "Angel Eyes," the singer allowing this boozy torch song an unadorned reading, quite right, that only faltered in its final moment. Without an ending note to tether it, "Excuse me while I disappear...." really did seem to dissipate into the ether. But inspiration need not require perfection, as V laughingly proved throughout the show.

Over the next 80 or so minutes, Bond pushed on, recovering voice, energy and wild mind. It's not every songwriter/chanteuse--transgender or otherwise--who would think to source Peggy Lee and Aleister Crowley simultaneously. Nor is it every singer who can build from a husky hush to a voice that makes you feel the scalding steam coming off Sinnerman's boiling seas and fear its devil.

Justin Vivian Bond sings a song by being alert and wholy alive within it. That's the teaching.

The set drew from V's Dendrophile (2011) and Silver Wells (2012) recordings, with selections like Mark Eitzel's furious "Patriot Heart" and Bambi Lake's "The Golden Age of Hustlers," fierce and picturesque dramas from the queer red light zone. We were also invited along quiet strolls through Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and The Cure's "Lovesong." In the latter, V's sensitive accompanists--Matt Ray (musical director/piano), guitarist Nathann Carrera and violinist Claudia Chopek--knew when to hold off and when to fill in and support the simple lyrics and wispy melody.

Bond clearly relished v's folkish duet with guest artist Miguel Gutierrez--better known as an award-winning choreographer--and even got a chance to display a few dance licks. The highlight of Gutierrez's segment was his version of "Smalltown Boy," an '80s hit by Bronski Beat; if you saw Marissa Perel's recent work, More Than Just a Piece of Sky, at The Chocolate Factory, you heard Gutierrez's recording of this song. Gutierrez, though no Jimmy Somerville, has a haunting shimmer to his voice and beautiful delivery.

Visit Justin Vivian Bond's site (photo, videos, the works) here.

For news of the Miguel Gutierrez universe, go here.

For details on FIAF's 2014 Crossing the Line Festival, which runs through October 20, click here.

Jean Redpath, 77

Jean Redpath, Prolific Scottish Folk Singer, Dies at 77
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, August 22, 2014

FringeNYC benefits: "La Donna Improvvisata"

Lisa Flanagan (photo: Michael Kroll)

La Donna Improvvisata

Improvised by Lisa Flanagan

Improvised Music by Frank Spitznagel

Directed by T.J. Mannix

"A witch!" cries a man to my rear, without hesitation, choosing one of fifteen possible operatic roles. "A condescending witch," another audience member quickly elaborates. Similarly, four specific musical notes are selected my fellow viewers. 

And so begins an hour of opera improvised, from start to triumphant finish, by soprano Lisa Flanagan and pianist Frank Spitznagel. It might sound like a gimmick--and one with no guarantee of success--but it turns out to be one of FringeNYC 2014's most innovative theatrical formats. 

When you see La Donna Improvvisata this Friday or Sunday, it will be completely different. Spitznagel's thunderous, threatening opening from this afternoon will be replaced by something new. Casually-dressed and ponytailed Flanagan will embody a different central archetype--perhaps Sorcerer or Maiden, Soldier or Temptress--crafting a plot that arcs from problem to resolution with a whole lot of song and physical action in between. She will move from character to character, mood to mood, cleverly rhyming lyrics on the fly. She will do this with nothing but her agile imagination and a trio of plain black boxes for a set.

This woman's opera auditions must be interesting. (Er...what's that she's singing?) If her voice gets a little tiring after about a half-hour or so, her chipper, sunny smile and undeniable gutsiness maintain their appeal. And that melodic, Broadway-ish number she whipped up late in today's show--call it "Quiet Little Street," perhaps--could be a viable thing. Lisa, I hope you remember what you made up there. It's good.

Remaining shows:

Friday, August 22, 7:30pm

Sunday, August 24, 3:30pm

Buy tickets for this and other FringeNYC shows.

The White Box

440 Lafayette St, 3rd Floor (Astor Place and East 4th Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

For all things FringeNYC, click below.

New York International Fringe Festival

What I learned: Cuba's Danay Suárez, "Yo Aprendí"

Danay Suárez Web site

Danay Suárez Facebook page

Latin Alternative Music Conference

(New York City, July 8-12)