Sounding off with Miguel Gutierrez at The Chocolate Factory

Center: Dance artist Miguel Gutierrez
brings his new work,This Bridge Called My Ass,
to The Chocolate Factory Theater
(photo: Paula Lobo)

Miguel Gutierrez
This Bridge Called My Ass
American Realness at The Chocolate Factory Theater
January 9-19

Before the messy mound of fabric scraps, chairs, step stools, electric cords and other discards at center space gets picked through for eccentric props; before festively-colored lights blink on and draw attentions to unexpected places; before dancers, without a shred of self-consciousness. display more and more bare flesh and sexual inclinations, there is sound.

In the beginning of This Bridge Called My Ass, there is the word--or many, really--some written by Miguel Gutierrez. A Spanish call-and-response--all the performers are of Latin American heritage--and a kind of chant that seems derived from an elementary school classroom or a language lesson for the non-Spanish speaker. The pacing and forceful energy of the choral readings of this text sound like a choir filled with conviction. But not a choir without the capacity to be flippant; if you were placed just right, you would have noticed a sly gaze-and-grin passing between Gutierrez and Oakland burlesque dancer Xandra Ibarra.

As things spread out--and lordy, how they do spread out--so does resonant sound of voice, music, props making bizarre impact against the floor and each other. As things spread out, they sometimes come in precarious contact with other things or nearly so. I worried much over the safety of so much unprotected flesh in the presence of hard metal wielded with abandon and also fretted over the safety of a MacBook with a rather large step stool weirdly balanced on the edge of its opened cover. Who takes this kind of risk?

Sprawling over the mess, toying with it, the dancers get tangled apparently without any of the fear I, from the relative safety of my front row seat, was feeling. Nor do they inhibit themselves or others. Soft and hard things are just things. Things are just things, and you might find yourself hallucinating that the inanimate is animate, and very much vice versa. These juxtapositions are truly audacious, monstrous connections. You have to give yourself over to the in-the-moment pointlessness and futility of it all, because the dancers definitely do.

Presented without intermission, the piece is about 90 minutes and feels really endless. Towards the end, though, there's an interesting shift that I resist interpreting. In fact, I resist interpreting anything here. All I will say is that the execution of it has--again, the best words I can find for this show--energy, resonance, to an impressive degree. There's something here that lives beyond the initial mess.

Created by Miguel Gutierrez and performed by Gutierrez with Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, nibia pastrana santiago and Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez

Dramaturg and assistant director: Stephanie Acosta
Lighting design: Tuçe Yasak

This Bridge Called My Ass runs through January 19. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 48th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(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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We all scream for "Screamers."

Molly Lieber in Screamers,

a film by Brian Rogers, screening now at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Brian Rogers)

More squirmer than screamer, Screamers--a feature film written and directed by Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory Theater--situates a vulnerable woman (Molly Lieber) inside a deconsecrated Catholic church that will now be her home in a small town where, we're told, "there's little to see and even less to do." You might as well ignore the dreary man moving into it with her (Andrew Dinwiddie) because this is Lieber's film. She is the dark matter at the center, the magnetic force, and she is magnificent in her role--visually, symbolically, emotionally. Everyone else seems like hallucinatory debris in orbit--from the smirky, smarmy priest (Jay Wegman) who used to celebrate mass there to the annoyingly inaudible handyman (Jon Kinzel) who leaves an oily black smear on Lieber's lips. And what's with the scenes of a hulking Jim Finlay punching out a hooded captive?

I appreciated the framing of Lieber by her haunted visual environment, but the sonic environment most captured my attention and imagination. Aside from Lieber, the stars of this show are the crisp sounds--everything from a creaking stained glass window to couch cushions that complain when compressed and released--amplified to an unnatural degree. Sounds with heft, with personality. It is as if we all had taken drugs, and the noises ordinary things make--usually in the background of awareness--are now sharing stories and opinions.

Rogers spent time alone in artistic residency at puppeteer Dan Hurlin's upstate house, a deconsecrated church, an experience that, he says, worked some strange changes. So Screamers and probably Lieber's character, to a degree I won't speculate about, contains a fair amount of Rogers. But, for me always, any American ghost story raises useful parallels to those ghastly ghosts of American history we try to avoid and which now are popping up all over the place.

Starring: Andrew Dinwiddie, Jim Findlay, Daniel Fish, Vallejo Gantner, Keely Garfield, Jon Kinzel, Quinn Larson, Molly Lieber, Jay Wegman

Writer/Director/Editor: Brian Rogers
Producer: Madeline Best
Director of Photography: Jeff Larson
Production design: Sara C. Walsh
Lighting: Jon Harper
Location Sound: Stephen Bruckert
Dramaturgy and Directorial Consultation: Madeline Best
Music by Brian Roger
Sound Design, Mix and Mastering: Jim Dawson
2nd Unit Director of Photography: Stephen Bruckert
Assistant Production Design: Jessie Bonaventura
Production Assistants: Youree Choi, Ben Demarest, Jonathan Ginter, Kenneth Olguin, Nicole Simonson

Catch the last screening of Screamers tonight at 7pm at The Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center (466 Grand Street, near Pitt Street, Manhattan). Click here for details, ticket information and directions.

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American Realness: "We Wait In The Darkness" by Rosy Simas

Rosy Simas in her solo We Wait In The Darkness
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Rosy Simas Danse
We Wait In The Darkness (New York premiere)
co-presented by Abrons Arts Center and Gibney Dance for
American Realness 2018 at Abrons Arts Center

Recent scientific study verifies what many Native people have always known, that traumatic events in our ancestors lives are in our bodies, blood and bones. These events leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA. Our grandmother’s tragic childhood can trigger depression or anxiety in us, but we have the ability to heal these DNA encodings and change that trait for future generations.

--Rosy Simas 

For people of the Black African diaspora, too, these words from Minneapolis-based dance artist Rosy Simas (Seneca, Heron Clan) ring true, and I must begin with gratitude to Simas for work that illustrates the body as truth-teller and healer. We, too, are a people nurtured by connection to ancestors with tragic histories in this hemisphere, and many of us express reverence for ancestral heritage through powerful spiritual and artistic practices that are, in their way, forms of anti-colonial resistance and justice-making.

Simas's 50-minute solo, We Wait In The Darkness--with its soundscape by composer François Richomme--uses visual, textual, kinetic and sonic mediums to affirm and reclaim the strength of ancestry and environment. By employing this sensory overlapping and overload, viewers grasp what it must be like to uncover the memories one's body holds--some sweet, some painful, some subtle or slow to emerge, some earthshaking--and to tap its wisdom.

Over one end of the stage hangs Simas's long, white paper model of a DNA strand. Towards the center back a white, puff-sleeved dress with a long, old-fashioned dirndl skirt dangles. Along stage left, Simas has suspended a series of white paper panels textured like fine quilts. Panels also capture film imagery, often hazy, glimmering and ethereal, that allude to place--and sometimes people--without specific identification for the benefit of those outside Seneca culture. This poetically elusive quality renders the work as ritual rather than documentary, gives it a spaciousness rather than containing it as the story of a particular individual--although we do hear a voiceover of actual letters of Simas's grandmother, as read by her mother, and we also hear words in the Seneca language gruffly whispered as Simas dances. So, precious, protected mystery exists but also a certain porosity and generosity to help all of us begin to understand the possibility and path of healing.

Theater of both the vivid and the indistinct, then. As Simas sits with her naked back to the audience--spine and arms deeply flexing, stretching and reaching, snaking and twisting--I recall my first realization, when I practiced energy healing, that the back shares more information, without a person's conscious intervention and manipulation, than the front of the body. Throughout the dance, even when she finally dons that white dress, Simas shows us a body of focused, determined will, sure of itself, sure of its mission, sure of the ultimate fulfillment of that mission. We come to understand the evocative sound and visual imagery--drawn from earth and waterways of Seneca land--as its sacred source. And we also contemplate what it meant, for indigenous people, to be literally torn from that grounding, nourishing source. Her body speaks as it moves, and it is saying: I will this. I call this back. The spirits of the land respond in Richomme's mesmerizing, commanding weave of sound.

Near the end of the piece, projections of schematic diagrams suggest maps with numbered sections, a landscape reduced to arbitrary parts for some entity's benefit. Again, nothing is identified, verbally or visually, yet the implications are clear. An environment we just experienced so powerfully in sight and sound, now lies butchered. Simas brings out a sheet of white paper marked with this diagram, solemnly ripping each section from its matrix and placing each strip in a carefully-chosen position along the edge of the floor. She also rips away more of these sections before descending into the audience and gifting them to several of us.

I received number 12. Although I have no idea what territory--real or metaphoric--that it might represent, I will preserve and treasure it.

Letter reader: Laura Waterman Wittstock (Simas’s mother)
Letters: Clarinda Waterman (Simas’s grandmother)
Lighting design: Karin Olson and Carolyn Wong
Set and film design: Rosy Simas

Closed. American Realness 2018 concludes this evening. For further information, click here.

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Egypt's Hafez and HaRaKa bring the future

Adham Hafez Dance Company in 2065 BC
at New York Live Arts
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Part political summit, part multi-media opera, part protest Hafez’s 2065 BC is a displaced and revisited re-enactment of the infamous ‘Berlin Conference’ of 1884 presenting a complex set of questions around the ethics of occupation in a manner that is dark, comic and politically ignited. In the year 2065, a conference of African scientists, politicians and diplomats gather in Berlin to announce the new world order. 2065 BC is the result of a two-year research process on politics and aesthetics, developed and directed by the Adham Hafez Company and the platform HaRaKa. The research took place in Cairo, Berlin and New York, and continues to unfold its many products in the form of a performance triptych and publications series.

--promotion for Adham Hafez's 2056 BC

In 1884, the colonial powers of Europe, invited by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, met in Berlin to organize and step up their occupation and pillaging of the African continent. With 2065 BC, Egyptian choreographer Adham Hafez flips this history, envisioning sprawling realms of victorious African queens--"Her Majesty the Queen of Liberia and the American West Coast" is heralded, for instance--in the wake of World War III. In what must have been one hell of a systemic global collapse, shoes are now firmly on the other foot.

This week, 2065 BC is making its U.S. debut at New York Live Arts as part of Live Ideas 2016: MENA/Future–Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region, an ambitious, multidisciplinary festival co-curated by NYLA's Tommy Kriegsmann and Hafez.

Four women actors portray the royalty, diplomats and scientists of this New World Order--Mona Gamil, Alaa Abdellateef, Salma Abdel Salam and Charlene Ibrahim, exacting in their roles. Inside their sterile-looking and echoey environment, whether sitting around a table strewn with thick legal documents, declaiming from a podium or performing frosty approximations of cabaret acts, they exude manipulative command. Assurances of safety and benevolence should not be taken seriously. Mockery comes easy and, everywhere, there's a current--calling it "undercurrent" would not be quite accurate--of sexuality firmly in women's control like weaponry. So who's the Venus Hottentot now? Listen and learn.

Hafez and 2065 BC's team have created an extraordinary look and sound; that sound--like rage compressed and parceled out with clinical accuracy-- can punish and takes its sweet time doing so. Despite a brief intermission, there's no let-up from this two-hour experience. It's difficult to receive and bear, yet brilliant in design and performance. Might as well pick up your "Arkisa passport" and enter.

2065 BC continues through Saturday, April 2 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Tere O'Connor opens "The Goodbye Studies" at The Kitchen

Tere O'Connor's The Goodbye Studies
(photos: Yi-Chun Wu) 

Although not created alongside Tere O'Connor's new dance, The Goodbye Studies, James Baker's original score might be considered its voice. If so, it is a voice containing multitudes strange, beguiling and fleeting. It emerges--bursts free--after a lengthy silence during which O'Connor has toyed with entrances and exits and placement coordinates for individuals and groupings within his 12-member corps. A rhythmic patchwork, the score reflects the texture of the ensemble that will dance this hour. Only dance insiders can fully appreciate the way the sight of each of these dancers--including "downtown" stalwarts like Simon Courchel and Michael Ingle--can make the heart beat a little faster in anticipation, but even newbies would surely read and get the seamless way they have learned to work together. It's visceral. And that coherence within diversity (and vice versa) is the charm of The Goodbye Studies, running at The Kitchen through December 12.

O'Connor creates an immersive ride for his audience. I don't mean the kind of immersive performance where we literally get all up in the performers' action. Here, that happens only in our heads, our shifting awareness--and, frankly, with O'Connor, that is quite enough. We zoom in and out, experience macro- and micro-awareness of the movement, the ensemble as a malleable, stretchable fabric that, at times, could even be rent apart and, in the next breath, flow back into wholeness. Within that fabric, sometimes wriggling hands claim our focus, or we might perceive tangles disentangling or wreathes of bodies unraveling themselves. Arms might issue firmly-shaped signals, graceful scoops and arcs or aimless pawing, requiring observation, discouraging interpretation. Smoothly morphing through its environment, the body of the ensemble becomes hypnotic and a satisfying force. You can be there with that.

Unwisely, I jotted notes but, the next day, wondered things like: "What exactly does 'orbital folk dancing' mean?"  I know I knew in that moment, but that moment is gone. And that seems to me to be where O'Connor lives.

The unshowy costuming--credited to performers Lily Gold, Eleanor Hullihan and Ingle--has a leveling effect, even though each garment is different, and lends a certain vulnerability. Michael O'Connor's lighting rests upon the ensemble without aggression.  The performers, well, they are everything: Courchel, Ingle, Gold, Hullihan, Tess Dworman, Natalie Green, Joey Loto, Oisín Monaghan, Angie Pittman, Mary Read, Laurel Snyder and Lauren Vermilion. They believe, and you believe. How lucky they and O'Connor are to have one another.

The Goodbye Studies continues through December 12 with performances at 8pm (no late seating). For schedule details and ticketing, click here.

Note: This is one of this season's hot tickets. Don't be late. Tickets are released to the wait list at 8pm sharp.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Katie Workum: "making a living dance" at Danspace Project

Dancers Weena Pauly (l) and Katie Workum
(photo: Ross Karre)

Here's Ross Karre's lovely photo of dancers Weena Pauly and Katie Workum engaged in a contemplative somatic practice called Authentic Movement. This practice forms the basis for Black Lakes, a trio Workum presents this weekend at Danspace Project with collaborators Pauly and Eleanor Smith.

Authentic movement is a profoundly simple form in which a mover moves with eyes closed in the presence of a witness. Rooted in Jungian depth psychology, it is a practice that stands alone with its own integrity.

--Zoë Avstreih, Founder/Director, Center for the Study of Authentic Movement

Each performance of Black Lakes is created by three deeply engaged dancers right before your eyes. Found movement. From the inside. And what I saw last night will not be what you might see tonight or tomorrow.

How does that alter how a concert audience looks at movement and relationships sparked in the moment versus how we look at set choreography? Authentic Movement requires not only a mover but a witness who receives perception of the movement without judgment.

It reduces the typical expectations--what makes sense? what is right? what is perfect? It heightens alertness to everything emerging as well as awareness of the witness's own inner stirrings. The hour-long Black Lakes reminded me of the trusting flight into open air that, for me, is my experience of giving a Tarot reading, a container for the arrival and expression of anything, the next thing and the next after that.

With Black Lakes, Workum, who has been making dance in more traditional ways since 1997, offers us a view into what she has begun exploring with Pauly over the past few years. Her program notes address the reason for this shift and invite the audience to be Witness as understood in Authentic Movement terms.

Black Lakes continues tonight and tomorrow night with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

"Say, do you happen to have the time?" See Marclay's "The Clock"

Christian Marclay. Detail of The Clock. 2010. Single-channel video with sound, 24 hours. © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, proudly declared Christian Marclay's The Clock to be "one of the most coveted works of art anywhere in the world." This unique, 24-hour video installation, winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, now belongs to MoMA's collection. The two men sat in conversation at MoMA's second-floor atrium to introduce a two-hour press preview of the installation.

A fast-paced montage of film clips--some obscure, others easily recognizable--The Clock draws from an international array of film, from the silent through contemporary eras, from Charlie Chaplin to Christopher Walken. This work of sly visual and sound editing unfolds real time before our eyes, each minute synced to our actual time and announced in exact order, each scene or image bearing literal and/or metaphoric connection to time and timepieces.

If you missed The Clock in its European presentations, in Boston or at last summer's Lincoln Center Festival, you've got another chance to catch it this winter from Decemer 21 through January 21, 2013. In addition to showings during public hours as well as some continuous screenings (see schedule here), MoMA will offer a special presentation of The Clock in its Contemporary Galleries on New Year's Eve beginning at 10:30am and running continuously through 5:30pm on New Year's Day. (Click here for information on after-hours admission.)

Marclay--an American-born multimedia artist, now based in London--edited film material, collected by assistants, over a three-year process he describes as "tedious but simple." He used sound to facilitate his enchanting transitions from clip to clip. For instance, for an illusion of continuity, he might overlap the native sound of one scene--say, the resonance of church bells--with the opening of the following scene.

How many discrete clips does The Clock contain? Marclay hasn't a clue and does not care.

"After I was done with the project, I didn't want to sit there and count them," he says. "All those statistics are less important than the actual experience."

That experience can be heady and surreal as well as richly entertaining. Images of clocks and watches, the ordinary and the ornate, alternate with motifs that suggest movement and speed (various types of vehicles) or the fluid possibilities of transition (entrances and exits; sleeping and waking; crossing a street; walking or playing on the sand at water's edge.)

Repeat viewers can tell you their favorite times of day. Moments of wit and humor or gripping suspense abound. Familiar actors and film scenes pop up, here and there, triggering memories that call up your personal experiences of time. Tension builds to a crescendo as the video approaches noon (as I witnessed today) and, reportedly, midnight. Around about the witching hours of three or four in the morning, Marclay says, "things get kind of weird."

Marclay suggests that The Clock is best approached and appreciated not as a marathon event but, rather, a work each viewer can tailor to the rhythm of his or her own life.

"You don't have to see it from beginning to end," he advises. "There is no beginning, and there is no end."

It took me a half-hour to figure out how The Clock was messing with my head--dazzling me while also making me feel antsy. Here's a video installation using bits of film to break amorphous time into its components, lining up each of those bits, one after the next, and insisting on giving each its visualized or spoken time-stamp. While cleverly celebrating the legacy and magic of cinema, The Clock resists acting like film--that is, it does not help us swoon and forget. It keeps us focused on the literal, linear passage of time. In that way it is, like Marclay's editing process, intermittently "tedious but simple," creating, even regimenting, a form of order out of chaos.

Arrive when you can, watch as much as you care to, and leave when it suits you. Each regular showing--free with museum admission--can accommodate 130 visitors and up to 170, if you include standing room.

A few important notes of caution, though. Prepare for a long wait to get in. MoMA promises live online reports on the state of the queue here and via Twitter @TheClockatMoMA.

Also, MoMA's sofas aren't particularly comfy--inadequate back support--but if you race in and grab a corner of a sofa, as I did, you might be able to angle your body in a way that will suffice for an hour or two. Sit on the floor, if you like. You can't bring drinks or snacks. Use the restroom before you enter the gallery; if you go out for a break, you forfeit your place. To re-enter, you'll have to stand on line again. Your youngsters might enjoy The Clock in intervals of reasonable length, but be aware that there is some profanity and nudity. 

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)