Artists Reach Out: Greg Purnell and Tendayi Kuumba

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Greg Purnell and Tendayi Kuumba

Greg Purnell
(photo: AngieMLV Photography)

Tendayi Kuumba
(photo: Hayim Heron Photography)

Greg Purnell is a Brooklyn-born and -bred barber, visual artist, writer and all around creative. He has cultivated and refined his multi-medium artistry and sense of vision through barbering, which has provided a beautiful reservoir of inspiration and people from vastly different walks of life and cultural backgrounds. Greg has been featured in the 2015 BRIC Stoop Series Barbershop Stories: it's all about hair and BRIC TV's Brooklyn Made series. Other features include Afropunk, BAM, OkayAfrica and Nike collaborations, and webseries feature in I Don't Camouflage by Aiko Tanaka. He embodies various practices such as sound designer, lighting designer, director and music creator for various solo and collaborative works. Past choreographic/creative works include collaborations with Tendayi Kuumba, Courtney Cook, Urban Bush Women, The Illustrious Blacks, and MVMNT PHLSPY.

Currently, Greg is the Founder and primary visionary of artistic lab/creation space The Golden Ratio Project, where he has developed his own brand of barbering utilizing aesthetics, art, music and storytelling to create a personable therapeutic experience. He recently self-produced the art exhibition 33, commemorating his 33 years of barbering in collaboration with his visual artistry. Greg Purnell believes all forms of art and expression are united by our dreams, and it is through technique and passion that our dreams become realities.

International singer, songwriter, and choreographer Tendayi Kuumba is a Spelman College graduate with a BA in Drama with a Dance Concentration. Her training as a youth ranges from Buffalo Inner City Ballet, Ballethnic, Callanwolde Fine Arts, and Moving in the Spirit. As a Brooklyn transplant, her choreographic roots embody a long throughline of musical exploration, vocal portals, response of the body and storytelling. Her past choreographic works have been on multiple platforms including Danspace, HiArts, Harlem Stage and BRICLab.

Frequent collaborators include Greg Purnell and Courtney Cook. She has worked with choreographers Marjani Forté-Saunders, ASÉ Dance Theater Collective, Nathan Trice/ Rituals Performance Project, Jim Findlay's "Electric Lucifer" workshop and Philadelphia Operas’ We Shall Not be Moved, directed by Bill T. Jones. In 2018, she toured as one of two backup singer/dancers on the American Utopia World Tour of the Talking Heads leading man and Grammy Nominated singer/songwriter/recording artist David Byrne and has gone on to make her debut in David Byrne's America Utopia on Broadway.

In other spaces, she's generating and co-creating artistic collaborations and spaces such as The Golden Ratio Project, in Brooklyn, NY alongside Greg Purnell. Recent projects include U.F.O (Unidentified Fly Objects): Stardust Melanin under the Gibney New Voices: Spotlight residency Spring 2020 and Danspace Project's Platform 2020: Utterances from the Chorus in collaboration with Greg Purnell. As well as being a mindful member of the Voice/Body Danspace platform, a creator within 100 Years/100 Women with Urban Bush Women, and a practitioner in Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Borns’ Sitting on a Man’s Head.  She  gives thanks and blessings for life, love, breath, and the pursuit of happiness through creativity.

Kuumba and Purnell in collaboration
(photo: AngieMLV Photography)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Yes, we were a part of other productions at Danspace that were canceled. We ended up turning our production that was set to premiere at Gibney into a digital sharing instead. Also Greg's scheduled art exhibition in Soho was canceled.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

Greg's beginning as a barber from age 12 opened many other artistic outlets. His particular practices include as visual art, writing, and music.

Tendayi has performed as a dancer from age 3 and vocalist from age 7.  Various dance schools, performing art schools, and mentorships have informed her practices.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

Collectively, we are diving into different art forms and practices to create a multimedia experience--specifically looking at how dance, music, storytelling, visual art, mixed media, and technology intersect. We're envisioning a more full-bodied experience that can translate across multiple platforms. Also, how we can create these experiences and stories with the social and technological changes occurring in today's world?

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

We most care about the healing of our people and community. Our practices consist of questioning the what and whys of the world we live in. They represent ways of addressing voids that exist and broadening perspectives and connections.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

We are remaining open to different forms of artistic expression. Our practices give us ways to adapt in the ever so changing climate we're in. We are immersing ourselves in learning and understating our connecting to technology and how we can use it to push deeper into our art making.

******

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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Artists Reach Out: Grace Osborne

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Grace Osborne

Grace Osborne
(selfie courtesy of the artist)

Grace Osborne is a healing arts practitioner from Pasadena, California currently based in New York City. Her practice includes sound baths, soundwalks, and body work informed by Usui Reiki and the practice Romiromi as taught by the teachings of Hohepa Delamere.

www.verdantvibration.com
Instagram: @verdantvibration

Grace Osborne in performance
(photo: Malcolm-x Betts)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

This is truly a season of stop, cancel, and reflect, because a lot of my projects have been postponed. In February, I was going to do a workshop at Movement Research, and then 48 hours before the event, my grandfather passed away, and I just wasn’t able to do it. In March, I had plans to collaborate with the company Archestratus to facilitate a monthly Sound Bath healing salon with in-house brewed chai. In April, I was going to lead a workshop on DIY audio recording. For the month of May, I had plans to be in a writing residency at NYU’s satellite campus in Prague. Everything this season has been cancelled! I’m hoping that I can resume activities in the fall.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I come from a family of musicians and artists, so I grew up listening to the Jazz my great uncles would compose, listening to my cousins sing, admiring the clothes my aunt made, watching my grandmother paint, and reading the poems my mother wrote. Making art and being creative in my family is just who we are. I never saw it as something for an audience—just for ourselves and each other.

I started to seriously study Flute when I was 9 and went on to major in Music Theory and History at Mills College. From that experience, I started to take classes and make music with people like Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, and Roscoe Mitchell. I really pushed myself to participate in as much improvised and experimental music as I could.

I also worked as a stage hand. So, for years, I got to hear so many different types of music. It really blew my mind. When I graduated, I started to begin my own practice of improvisation. When I moved to New York to start my graduate studies, I took a break from my practice, but 2016 I started using sound bowls. I met [dancer, producer and curator] Marýa Wethers and everything changed. I felt inspired around her, and she saw something in me. She started to recommend me to other movement-based artists and, since then, I’ve become a part of this amazing community of dancers and movement artists.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

Especially now more than usual, I am practicing becoming a better listener. My practice is about listening and healing through vibration. Even though this is a creative arts practice, it’s not about creating a work. This practice is about creating environments and experiences that guide others to pause and look inward, rest, and heal. I’m working towards and envisioning doing more collaborative work especially with recorded sound. I’m also excited to start curating more Sound Walks!

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I’m really excited right now, because I feel like most of us in quarantine are already participating in the activities that I consider to be a part of my practice! So many people are taking the time to intentionally rest, listen, walk and connect with others. After all this is over, I look forward to hearing about how people engaged these practices and what it meant for them during this time.

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

Just stop and listen. Tune into the experience life is offering you at any present moment.

******

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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Imprinting (Dan)space: Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha

Left: Tendayi Kuumba (photo: Angie Vasquez)
Right: Samita Sinha (photo: Aram Jibilian)

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha
Danspace Project
April 25 and April 27, 2019

collective terrain/s is a collective research process into sounding in the body. How does the body open up possibilities for voice and resistance? What resonances in the voice and body exist beyond language?

 --from Danspace Project

As part of an evening organized by collective terrain/s, composer and vocalist Samita Sinha--with numerous collaborating vocalists of cultural diversity--creates a force field of sonic energy to surround an audience informally positioned at the center, not the perimeter, of the performance space. Infinity Folds is vocal music in motion, a lovely, luscious gift that makes you the focus of a meditative sonic bath and massage, your aura tingling. It's marvelously coordinated as the circle of vocalists shape and move breath--moans and drones, trills and low roars--into the outer air, using softly-adjusted bodies as tuning devices. You absorb the circling and circling soundscape that builds, pulses, overlaps, presses towards listeners and then ebbs, flares in spots, sometimes drops away entirely. Set in the sacred and justice-conscious space of St. Mark's Church, this loving ritual feels and sounds so right. You might never want it to end. [Performed by Regina Bain, Rina Espiritu, Fana Fraser, Yingjia Lemon Guo, Chaesong Kim, Risha Lee, Okwui Okpokwasili, lily bo shapiro, Samita Sinha, Sheena Sood and Helen Yung]

Somewhere in the midst of U.F.O.:(Unidentified Fly Objects), made and performed by Tendayi Kuumba in creative collaboration with Greg Purnell, an intermittent projection flashes against an upper corner of the church's wall. It images a patch of cloudy sky lit up by the glow of lightning. Kuumba's formidably quirky self-presentation gives way to something simply majestic, and you realize: this unpredictable, kinda scary woman is lightning. Folding, writhing, recoiling, she lights up the night with pure energy coursing through every stretch of her without impediment. The piece--accompanied by Purnell, seated at a desk, working a soundboard and providing a strong, rumbling ostinato--also features Kuumba's vocals. In body and voice--and soul--she is jazz.

We already whole, she sings. Even through the rain/somehow we always maintain.

We already home.

Purnell sings with her.

Can't break my soul.

Now hear that!

Choreography: Tendayi Kuumba
Creative concepts, lighting, dramaturgy, set design and songwriting/musical composition created with collaborator Greg Purnell

collective terrain/s is organized by Lydia Bell, Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum. To learn more about collective terrain/s's activities and the series' publication--designed by collective please--click here.

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha concludes tomorrow (Saturday) with a performance at 8pm. For the best effects, come a bit early to get a prime seat in the center, though you can also sit along the church's risers. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

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

(map/directions)

******

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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Lime Rickey International presents "Future Faith" at Abrons

Lime Rickey International (aka Leyya Mona Tawil)
(photo: Vesa Loikas Photography)

Future Faith
Lime Rickey International
Abrons Arts Center
March 7-9

"Lime Rickey International is the superconsciousness of Leyya Mona Tawil, an artist working with dance, sound and performance practices. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Lime Rickey International emerged as a container for the world of lost homelands. The works of Lime reference Tawil’s training in Arabic dabke as well as decades of work in the realm of contemporary dance, improvisation and experimental performance." -- from publicity for Future Faith 

*****

Syrian-Palestinian-American transdisciplinary artist Leyya Mona Tawil first appears to us drenched in red light, hunched in a corner just to the side of the Underground Theater's staircase. We're finding our seats, and she's taking a private moment, crouched on the floor with the front of her body turned towards a wall. The audience seating has been shifted around from its usual orientation to now afford a view of the theater's door and staircase and part of the balcony. The theater space is not big but, gazing across at Tawil, an onlooker might feel, at once, both distant and invasive.

The deep red serves as the performer's shield, though; at the start, we can't detect, for instance, the glossy electric-blue/green cyan of her wig or shiny chartreuse of her costume. Later, these items become shields, too, for the human beneath.

There's a persistent drone that--even more than the visual elements--serves notice that we've stepped into altered, potentially hazardous space. Although it comes from equipment near Tawil, it might just as easily stream from her pores. Just who and what are we looking at, anyway, and what is about to happen?

*****

"The choreographers that I know and respect who are pushing dance forward right now are trying to create a model of relationships - not just between dancer and dancer, but dancer and audience, and also dancer and society, and stage and society. So what we're doing onstage is actually a suggestion for how we can treat one another in the world. Contemporary dance is a suggestion about how we wish the world would be. It is less about art reflecting society and more about art going through the wall and creating something more. This is a search for future forms." -- "Leyya Tawil in Conversation with Linda Weintraub" (Critical Correspondence, 2014)

*****

The visual and sonic mood eventually lifts, and we see Tawil more clearly despite the fake hair flopping over her skin. Dancing, she looks robust in her futuristic, kind of goofy costume, a strapping woman freely inventing and reinventing herself and not hesitating to assert herself in space. Her angular moves sprawl every which way, gesticulate as if she were a stick figure engaged in full-body sign language. She flaps and stomps, and I'm reminded that dabke--the name of an exuberant Arabic dance tradition she cites as an influence in her work--literally means the dance of stomping.

I do not know what it means when, late in the 45-minute piece, Tawil's sound swerves back into the threat zone, but it's like the room becomes a paper shredder, and I'm thinking that--what does she call it? superconsciousness?--is something formidable with which we should never presume to get too cozy.

Composition/Choreography/Performance: Leyya Mona Tawil
Live Lighting: Emese Csornai
Costume: Scott Tallenger
Set Design:Tim Clifford
Audio Tech: Ian Douglas-Moore

*****

Future Faith concludes with a 7pm performance this evening. For information and tickets, click here.

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

*****

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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What we have in Commons: The Commons Choir at BRIC

Daria Faïn
in her mayday heyday parfait at BRIC House
Below: members of The Commons Choir
(photo: Ryan Muir) 

You find yourself surrounded by resonant sneezes, explosive farts, otherwise unidentifiable big or more subtle expulsions of air from a multitude of gesticulating bodies.

No. Not the subway system.

It's the sonic opening of mayday heyday parfait, a new 90-minute work presented by The Commons Choir at BRIC House. This large, multifaceted, multicultural ensemble, co-directed by choreographer Daria Faïn and poet Robert Kocik, represents artists spanning disciplines from dance to poetry to song.

For the first several minutes, the audience stands in the middle of the performance space with performers darting or weaving through them. Every sound has a clear launchpad within a moving body. You watch--and feel--it being produced. To experience this at maximum intensity, keep your eyes on Faïn's clenched movements. But every dancer contributes to a variable soundscape that pulls the standing, slightly shifting audience together into one organism--like a forest with sounds whistling through its canopy and rustling through its understory.

After a time, the watchers can take seats on the space's perimeter, and the story continues with words spoken by a man, a woman and a young girl. In his opening remarks, the man mentions Brooklyn--BRIC's home, of course, and a symbol of historic, if threatened, class and cultural diversity. I forget now what the woman said--and my scrawled notes are of minor help--but the youngster wrapped up by thrice intoning three words, like a mantra and admonition: Change what happens.

Those words combine a sense of inevitability (shit happens and will happen) with a directive: Do your magick. The ensuing performance continues the interdependency of physical movement and vocalization testifying for the body as a site of individuality, intelligence, will, communication and meaningful interaction. The vocalizing is varied. Dancer Saúl Ulerio, for instance, gradually rolls onto his side and front while quietly emitting a kind of musical moan--un-ing. At other moments, strings of words like "uninhabitable worst-case scenario invaluable" float by in an enigmatic stream.

As the movers move, the arrangements look like drifting patchworks of individual bodies doing individual things and putting sound into a site, and that seems okay because no one is impinging on the space of another. I wrote--and think I actually heard someone say--"You can only be who you are." Co-existence and working together do not render us all exactly the same. Cannot. Should not. How could it? Why would it?

Sometime later, Ulerio says something else that sticks with me: "That which I can't know about myself is you."

Writing my notes, I was one of a handful of people who did not opt to reassemble in the middle of the space for the work's resolution and, once again, become bathed in sound. This time, people sat in a large, round bunch like herded cows, and they were ringed by the performers, vocal music rising, falling, burbling, reverberating. At the end, the performers announced their names: Martita Abril, Massimiliano Balduzzi, Ilona Bito, Yoon Sun Choi, Lydia Chrisman, Ichi Go, Alvaro Gonzales Dupuy, Antígona González, Michael Ingle, Aram Jibilian, Anaïs Maviel, Jean Carla Rodea, Saúl Ulerio, Drew Devero, Cecilia Woolfolk and Fay Victor.


Daria Faïn: Co-director and choreographer
Robert Kocik: Co-director and librettist
Darius Jones: Composer
Anaïs Maviel: Composer & Musical Director
Tuce Yasak: Light Designer
AshakaGivens: Costume Design
Eternal Polk: Video Design
Dov Tiefenback: Sound Design
Saúl Ulerio: Assistant choreographer

mayday heyday parfait continues through Sunday, November 12 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BRIC Arts Media
647 Fulton Street (entrance on Rockwell Place), Brooklyn
(directions)

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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)

luciana achugar and the uses of the erotic

A day or two before the opening of luciana achugar's OTRO TEATRO at New York Live Arts, I received an email from the theater's publicist, requesting that critics not divulge sensitive information about the "surprises" in the production. Not only will I abide by that request, I'm not going to tell you much at all.

I think it fair, though, that you know the work lasts around three hours without a break, just in case you have, say, a babysitter issue, like a dance artist in last night's audience. But don't worry; you can come and go for pit stops as you please. You can even get up for a drink in the lobby and bring it back to your seat.

Why you'd actually need a drink to sit with something as sense-filling, dizzying and sometimes impactful as OTRO TEATRO, something meant to get you high, is a serious question.

A ritual of shamanic transformation, OTRO TEATRO unfolds as...

solo/network/field

whirling dervish crossed with Sheela na gig

sights and sounds of varying amplitudes

darkness and light

being and performing

Body standing in for body and body standing in for Body

breaking and building

vagina punk and hippie apocalypse

OTRO TEATRO continues nightly through Saturday at 7:30pm. For ticket information, click here.

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

Abe Abraham's "Wind and Tree" screened tonight and Wednesday

Someone please come right now and rescue me from JT Bullitt's Web site! I am lost in falling glass, the sound of a wild snail eating, and oceanic ambience.

None of this would have happened had I not attended a screening of Wind and Tree--a powerful, disturbing dance video installation by Abe Abraham, which features Bullitt's seismographic recordings of Earth vibrations. These good vibrations, much amplified, create a sonic background for Abraham's choreography overlaid with uneven, ragged, violent breath of Earth--grinding and clanging, wheezing and gasping--often synchronized with the thrashing images of dancers.

Inspired by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon (see below), Wind and Tree's images appear, at first, fleeting and ghostly as they come and go across a trio of video screens. (Abraham's first iteration of this work, premiered in 2011, involved only one screen.) The photography, directed by Peter Masterson, and editing by Abraham and François Bernadi are superb. 

We make out tangled limbs interspersed with the domes of heads. Eyes glint from out of the haphazard, angular frames of arms. Light streams across flesh that takes on the texture of marble or mahogany or pumpernickel bread or rugged landscape or...strangely enough...bare human skin.

Dancers seem desperate to wrest free of arms clamped over their heads--arms that are their own. Self-protection? Or self-imprisonment?

Punishing sounds and images suggest bodies recoiling from the blows of invisible opponents but, really, the dancers appear to box with themselves. This becomes particularly frenetic--as well as beautiful, as well as frightening--in a segment featuring Abraham and Megumi Eda, a 2004 Bessie Award winner. 

By the time Wind and Tree delivers us to the gorgeous "Wa Habibi" ("O Beloved") sung by Lebanon's great Fairuz, our hearts have already been pummeled open.

See Wind and Tree tonight and tomorrow, Wednesday, at 8pm at Theatre 80 St. Marks. 212-388-0388. Admission: $15 cash only.

A Q&A with Abe Abraham follows each screening.

Theatre 80 St. Marks

80 St. Marks Place (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan

(map/directions)

For more information on Abe Abraham's work, visit the Abanar Web site here.

*****

WIND AND TREE

In the way that most of the wind
Happens where there are trees,
Most of the world is centred
About ourselves.
Often where the wind has gathered
The trees together and together,
One tree will take
Another in her arms and hold.
Their branches that are grinding
Madly together and together,
It is no real fire.
They are breaking each other.
Often I think I should be like
The single tree, going nowhere,
Since my own arm cannot and will not
Break the other. Yet by my broken bones
I tell new weather.

Paul Muldoon (from New Weather, 1973)

A little songbird told me

Finding the brain's common language
by Erin Wayman, Science News, July 22, 2013

The powerful art of sound

Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller and the Power of Sound
by John Wray, The New York Times, July 26, 2012

Go into the light!

TAGR.TV Interviews Ernesto Klar

July 30, 2010


ERNESTO KLAR: RELATIONAL LIGHTS

December 15-21

3LD Art and Technology Center

80 Greenwich Street (near Rector Street), Manhattan

Luzes relacionais (Relational Lights) is an interactive audio-visual installation that explores our relationship with the expressional-organic character of space. The installation uses light, sound, haze, and a custom-software system to create a morphing, three-dimensional light-space in which spectators actively participate, manipulating it with their presence and movements. The work functions as a living organism with or without the presence and interactions of spectators. When viewers step outside the projected light-space, the system begins its own dialogue with space by means of extruding and morphing sequences of geometric light forms. And when viewers penetrate and interact with the projected light-space, a collective and participatory expression of space unfolds. Luzes relacionais amplifies the three-dimensional fabric of space by making it visible, audible, and tangible to participants. The resulting aesthetic experience encourages an unending relational process of shaping space among participants. Luzes relacionais is a hommáge to the work and aesthetic inquiry of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark.

Gallery Hours: 12PM to 8pm and by appointment

Opening Reception: Wednesday, December 15 (6-8pm)

Directions to 3LD

Nearest subway stations are 1/R/W to Rector Street; 4/5 to Wall Street; J/M/Z to Broad Street; A/C to Broadway-Nassau; E to World Trade Center

Signify, Sanctify, Believe: The Library of Sacred Technologies

Every now and then, an announcement comes along that is way too good to not share. Here's the latest!

A Call for Contributions
Signify, Sanctify, Believe: The Library of Sacred Technologies

archivists: Tanya Rubbak and Adam Overton
at The Church of Public Fiction in Highland Park (Los Angeles)
in April 2011

dear friends,

do you ever feel like you see things that are invisible to others? 

do you ever intuit the presence of other possible realities?

do you ever sense a thickness of energies swirling within the materials around you?

do you ever look at plants and animals and think, “I know what you’re thinking.”

perhaps you’re interested in age-old traditions, but tired of age-old religions?

perhaps you hanker for sacred acts that history has forgotten,

or better yet, perhaps you’ve discovered NEW ways to gently channel the magic in your life?

sceptic or saint, believer or apostate, we’d like to talk to YOU …

about being a part of something very, very SPECIAL ...

The Library of Sacred Technologies

we would like to invite you to participate in our library/reading room in April as part of a residency at the Church of Public Fiction in Highland Park. the space will feature several artists and groups from February through April 2011 as it transforms itself into a church and spiritual center.

our library aims to intercept and illuminate a relationship between contemporary religious and artistic pursuit. we are interested in overlapping the sisterly processes of signification and sanctification, which we view as being innately creative and living in spirit.

with a mixture of found and invented ephemera in the form of pamphlets, newsletters, and articles of faith, the library will capture a communal voice as we celebrate a tradition of religious experimentation in the city of Los Angeles.

Do you hear the call? Will you heed it?

we invite you to temporarily become a best-selling self-published self-helper, a charismatic guru or spiritual leader, a religious anthropologist, or any other type of sincerely mystical dabbler from the past, present or future. we primarily desire text(s) and images to include in printed ephemera, but will consider video and sound documents as well. to whet your appetite, we’ve posted below a list of possible technologies we might be looking to collect. you’re welcome to contribute as much or as little as you’d like, and it can be as [in]comprehensive and [in]comprehensible as you please.

we plan to compile, design, and display these materials for visitors of our Library of Sacred Technologies opening in April 2011. meanwhile, artist-led sermons, services, and workshops based around the temporary observance of [semi-]fictional religious practices will be taking place throughout the month that, with your permission, may or may not incorporate some of these documents. (if you’re interested in leading one of these, please let us know and we’ll contact you as soon as we finish developing a separate call for that portion of the residency.)

here are some starting points for religious invention that we pray you’ll contemplate and contribute:

a religion of the hour

a religion of the day

a religion of the month

a religion of the year

alternative horoscope systems and charts

dance instructions that direct the kundalini or the schizophrenic flow

shaman seances to commune with animal spirit helpers

guided meditations for sudden reality shifts

cures for tardiness

recipes for honesty

maps, formulae and visualizations for time travel

guides to local vortex and portal areas

exorcisms of deep heteronormative conditioning

automatic writing to channel the language of light-beings

alternate creation myths

incantations for accessing the transverbal space of the semiotic chora

harmonic science scores of the ancients that modifies DNA

visualizations for clearing debt

scriptures on radical responsibility

ceremonies that deal with water, driving or synaesthesia

rituals for loss, or lost rituals

prayers and hymns for making new friends

resurrections, fortune-telling, channeling, oracles, predictions and sooth-sayings on the matter of anything you please

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ...

please send your submissions to: sacredtechnologies@plus1plus1plus.org

deadline for text and image submissions is January 15, 2011

deadline for audio and video submissions is February 1, 2011

also: stay tuned, as we hope to convene a couple sacred technology group writing sessions in late December and early January

Laurie Anderson sees the future

Laurie Anderson on the Sounds of the Future

by Jamie Katz, Smithsonian.com, August 2010

Sounds good to me

Sound Tunnel: Avant-Garde Park Portrait
by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, July 6, 2009

A Calming Presence Amid the Groans and Screeches
by Michael M. Grynbaum, The New York Times, July 6, 2009

How the Thunder Sounds
by Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times, July 6, 2009