Eva's on Substack!

 

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BODY AND SOUL: devynn emory: dancing in the liminal

devynn emory on set for Grandmother Cindy, 2022 (photo: Reilly Horan)

emory with bronzed skin, dark black faded hair stands in their grandmother's warm fuzzy coat covered in polar bears looking directly at the camera while clasping their hands in anticipation of the performance beginning soon. behind them is a silver sterile table with bowls of medicine placed in preparation, their performer/collaborator Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) and their cinematographer Jorge Cousineau. two figures draped in yellow fabric hold the space, representing devynn's ancestors.

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There's no reason to build a wall of labels around devynn emory and their work in this world and between worlds. They care for body, spirit, and community in a multitude of ways--from nursing to choreography, from mediumship to bodywork, from writing to work with death and grieving. This rich interweaving of skills and services sounds strange only in a society that deliberately separates body and soul and fails to respect the multiplicity of ways of knowing and healing. devynn, however, stays attuned to ancient ways and what the land teaches.

Listen to their segment on Body and Soul podcast here.

Subscribe to Body and Soul for more.

Read below to learn more about devynn.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

 

devynn emory filming Cindy Sessions: LAND on the lands of the Serrano peoples

 

BIO: devynn emory is a choreographer/dance artist, dual-licensed bodyworker, ritual guide, medium and registered nurse- practicing in the fields of acute/critical care, hospice, COVID and integrative health. emory's performance company devynnemory/beastproductions finds the intersection of these fields, walking the edges of thresholds–drawing from their multiple in-between states of being, holding space for liminal bodies bridging multiple planes of transition, finding reciprocity practice as a constant decolonial practice. they are currently working on a trilogy centering medical mannequins holding the wisdom of end-of-life experiences. (deadbird + can anybody help me hold this body, 2021, Cindy Sessions: Grandmother Cindy + Cindy Sessions LOVE, LOSS, LAND 2022, boiling-rain tbd). emory is a research group fellow at danspace 2020-2023, a recipient of the Onassis Eureka award, an FCA emergency grant recipient, and an Art Matters Artist2Artist fellow. born on Lenape Land, emory is a reconnecting descendant of mixed Lenape/Blackfoot/settler ancestry. www.devynnemory.com

"Spirituality of the Body" with Charmaine Warren and guests, December 1

As curator for Gibney’s upcoming Arts + Action Talk: Spirituality of the Body (Tuesday, December 1, 7pm on Zoom), I’m truly excited to hear from a panel of artists whose work illuminates spiritual ideas and values, where the body is the site of spiritual expression and practice. We will welcome Laurel Atwell, Shamar Wayne Watt, Ogemdi Ude, and iele paloumpis, along with moderator Charmaine Warren, for a conversation that I hope will be the first of many--in Gibney’s digital space and beyond--exploring this rich topic. I spoke with Warren--a beloved veteran dancer and creator/host of the popular YouTube series, Black Dance Stories--about her experiences with spirituality and her hopes for the evening’s get-together.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa: How have you experienced dance as a means of expressing or practicing spirituality?

Charmaine Warren:  Many years ago, I was introduced to Ashtanga yoga, and this young dancer would run to a full day of rehearsal after my early morning yoga class. Someone pointed out the difference in my dancing, and then I started to pay attention. The light of acknowledgement doesn't go off right away but, with time, as I grew old and began to "own" my practice, I knew that it was the inner reckoning; my opening to spirit that brought my two loves together. Later, too, learning more about my Jamaican tradition and spirit in the African way has further helped me wake each morning and give time to my own spirit before I share the day with anyone else.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa: As you see it, especially as a dancer, what is spiritual about the body? Or what is the role of embodiment in spiritual practice?

Charmaine Warren:  Again, I have to acknowledge growing older and experiencing life as the answer. I dance now because I feel ready inside, and being ready inside means that I am one with my spirit. I work to be one with those around me before we "move" together. I work to be one with the space that I will "move" in. That may mean holding hands, doing sun salutations or taking time to breath together--and, now, land acknowledgements!

Eva Yaa Asantewaa: What do you hope for this gathering of artists?

Charmaine Warren: Mostly that we have an audience that will be willing to listen, but that we will share tools that we all use to stay connected to spirit during these trying times.

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Come join us!

RSVP now for Arts + Action Talk: Spirituality of the Body here. It’s FREE!

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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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Before we begin tonight's program...

Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group
in Wilson's ...they stood shaking while others began to shout
Danspace Project in St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Before we begin tonight’s program...

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Hello. My name is Eva Yaa Asantewaa (she/her/hers), and I am a non-disabled, medium-dark-skinned Black cis queer woman writer and editor and curator and counselor and mentor and atheist spiritualist mage of African-Caribbean immigrant heritage and of a certain age. I am certain that age, at this time of reckoning, is nearly 68--now just over fifteen days away. I have almost no hair, having clipped it off, nearly to the scalp, several times during this barber-less pandemic shelter-in-place, and I’m wearing a light layer of drugstore lotion and matte black eyeliner and mascara and a little bit of eyebrow pencil in a dark, greyish brown. I miss wearing dangly earrings and glossy red-brown lipstick; neither pair well with surgical masks. I am coming to you, remotely, from the light clutter of my snug and cave-like home office and also wearing an olive-green t-shirt with an image of Snoopy from Peanuts on it. The shirt is really old, a hand-me-down—maybe I should say “hand-me-over”—from my wife who had cut off the sleeves and neckband and overlapped and sewn the shoulders to make the armholes more fitted and the shirt a bit smaller across the chest, and her stitches are tiny and even. Hello. My name. Snoopy is seated in front of a bulky old computer monitor and surrounded by bits of text from the early days of the Internet (like "alt.schulz" and "FTP sites"), and the two of us--Snoopy and I--are greeting you from unceded and, in fact, stolen Lenni Lenape land just a stone’s throw away from St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery which, like a lot of things on stolen indigenous land, was built and maintained by the labor of African ancestors and where, during services held by the biblical god’s own goodly Christians, these ancestors were relegated to the balcony. I’ve sat up there. In the balcony. No, not back in the day. Though, maybe yes, if you believe in reincarnation. Which I actually think I don’t. But, no. More recently. I’ve watched Ni’Ja Whitson and their dancers from up there, through the posts of the balcony’s railing, as they performed Oba Qween Baba King Baba below for a preview audience of LGBTQIA+ folx like me. I looked down, watching a universe erupt across the warmth of a broad wooden floor. I’ve sat below and looked up, past the railing to watch Reggie Wilson’s troupe dance a passage of ...they stood shaking while others began to shout near stained-glass windows. Woman of African-Caribbean immigrant heritage. Hello. St. Mark’s Church. Among other things. Is a danspace. A constellation of spaces for the arts flickers around here in lower Mannahatta island, with star-spaces in any direction you look--walkable, if you are walking, flyable if you are a crow or a jay, though pigeons and mourning doves seem to rule the territory now. I miss the crows. I miss the jeering jays. I no longer see them or hear their corvid harshness near the trees of St. Mark’s. I am certain of my age and that, someday, I will miss the pigeons and the mourning doves, too. I am certain. This local, time-limited self I have been given pleases me. Like Audre Lorde, I treasure each identity even as I know I am a vast, capacious, timeless spiritual being having a human experience. The specificity of that human experience is the craft. That specificity is the key for the lock. The unique key for any lock, so many locks. What then, hello, if we all think of our bodies as conjurations of the Mighty Dead? So different, then...Hello. My name is...from that idea of reincarnation. Hello...I am...here, in this time, a unique key, turning in so many locks in this time of locks. Before we begin tonight’s program, I want to give an acknowledgement, acknowledging the jays I used to hear and their parental vigilance, and the red-tailed hawks who now hunt Tompkins Square Park and their august strength. I want to acknowledge the grief we humans cause and the grief we carry. I want to acknowledge that pain lives quietly, or not so quietly, inside nearly everything we make and do and, for some of us, it is the lightning bolt and jolt and juice carrying us through to the end of days. I want to acknowledge that breath is work. Hard and worthy work. At this time of reckoning.

(c)2020, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

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

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

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

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa

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

Reflections on Maria Bauman-Morales’ (re)Source

by Melanie George

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

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

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

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

“Resources are tools. I want to make transparent that 

‘I am because we are’. 

I have resources because people have gone through worse.”

• Maria Bauman-Morales

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

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

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

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Forever hunger: Kimberly Bartosik at BAM Fisher

Joanna Kotze in Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you
(photo: Jim Coleman)

Lighting designer Roderick Murray's fluorescent tubes hang from the ceiling inside BAM Fisher's Fishman Space, colder and more severe than stalactites. Two dancers--Christian Allen and Lindsey Jones--step into the bare space of Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you. You can almost hear raptor wings, so forceful is the way they will lunge and beat and spin against the air. Arms lifting and rotated. Heavy breath audible. Heads and chins tilted upward. Torsos arching as they drop to a knee.

Burr Johnson, Dylan Crossman and Joanna Kotze--raptors, too, or perhaps angels, if angels have feet to strike mountainous earth--come in and churn and lash against the empty space as well. Back and forth, they cross it, overlapping in time and close pathways, until their labors clearly take a toll. Watching them, too, provides an initial sensation of exhilaration followed by exertion. When they stop--just stop and stand and shift inside and gasp--you feel the same internal wooziness, everything inside one's own body saying, "Hold up. Can we just settle back into order?"

I hunger for you plays with the risk of release--the kind of dropping of form and letting go that we experience in extremes of sensual and spiritual ecstasy--without guarantee of connection. Or guarantee that connection achieved will stay or will satisfy. A partner backs off or quietly quits the space entirely. The one remaining might freeze in a pose of hopelessness--arms wrenched forward from a torso bent as if in abject submission.

Much of the inspiration for the piece comes from the choreographer's religious upbringing, and it's interesting that she has cast her own child, Dahlia Bartosik-Murray, as a silent witness to some moments of Kotze's dancing as well as, later, a figure of release, coursing around the space like a wild filly.

Choreography: Kimberly Bartosik in collaboration with the dancers
Music: Sivan Jacobovitz, with arrangement by Kimberly Bartosik
Costume design: Harriet Jung
Sound Engineering: James Bigbee Garver
Dramaturgy: Melanie George

I hunger for you continues a sold-out run through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information, click here.

Also, Friday's audience is welcome to an informal post-show discussion, facilitated by Melanie George with Bartosik and company in BAM Fisher's Lower Lobby.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(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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Shamar Wayne Watt and family revisit "Gully spring" at JACK

Shamar Wayne Watt
(photo: Scott Shaw)

This week, Brooklyn's JACK performance space is presenting a new version of Gully spring: Di exhortation, a dance piece by Jamaica-born Shamar Wayne Watt, originally shown on a Gibney program curated by Nora Chipaumire. (See my review of that late 2017 engagement here.) Just short of an hour, the piece centers Afro-Atlantic spirituality as a landscape of resistance to colonial power and the constraints of Eurocentric Christianity. The work embodies and elevates family with the presence of Watt's mother, Valerie Davis, who contributes her choir-singing joy and, now at JACK, brother Lamar Jerome Watt, a Florida-based student athlete and krump dancer.

The center of Gully spring, though, remains the prophet Watt, mounting a platform and revolving and testifying beneath the ongoing baptismal drip of a gallon jug of water suspended above his head. I recall, from Gibney's promotion, that he declared a new religion of his own making, drawn from African-Jamaican traditions and Pentecostal worship as well as the political awareness and urgency of the moment. Is it not fitting and right that he administer his own benediction?

You have one last chance to witness this performance I called "exhortative, magnetic, formidable" this evening at JACK (8pm). For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 ½ Waverly Ave, Brooklyn
C or G train to Clinton-Washington

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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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Wilson's Fist & Heel troupe concludes Platform 2018

Choreographer Reggie Wilson
of Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group
(photo: Antoine Tempé)

My old friend Reggie Wilson put a "post-African/Neo-Hoodoo"* curse on me last night at Danspace Project.

Let me explain.

I'd been taking notes during his opening, hour-or-so Powerpoint talk--the initially-rambling preamble to his troupe's performance of …they stood shaking while others began to shout. Friday's talk, amusingly illustrated and delivered, touched on Wilson's perennial sore point--what he perceives as the chasm between the World of the Written Word and the Land of the Body Moving in Space and Time; the way colonized thinking devalues the power of bodies to communicate knowledge to other bodies. Only a man as accomplished and lovable as Wilson could get away with lecturing his audience on how to look at and analyze his (or anybody's) dances right before rolling out his newest one.

There was--for practical reasons as well, I think, symbolic ones--a break between talk and dance. During that brief turnover, I quickly and roughly jammed my notebook and a fairly new ballpoint pen into my crowded shoulderbag and turned to chat with friends and colleagues. When the houselights lowered for the dance, I reached to retrieve notebook and pen only to find the pen entirely dismantling in my hand, one small piece of plastic flying off onto the darkened floor.

I thought of many things at once:

God, I hope nobody's seeing this and laughing at me.

Oh, boy! Reggie and Tere O'Connor (who once admonished critics to stop writing notes and just look) would get a kick out of this!

I can only ever make out 5% of what I wrote in the dark anyway. So, fuck it.

Then, and only then, was I able to let go.

Reggie's curse.

His rich and complex platform--Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance--concludes, this weekend, with the beautiful Fist & Heel Performance Group ranging all over St. Mark's space including, quite vividly, the balcony to which enslaved African people were once relegated. His talk inspired a laser focus on that claiming of space and the variety of ways Wilson takes the measure of it, populates it, creates drama with it, brings warmth to it and affects those of us who watch.

If you get a chance to see …they stood shaking while others began to shout--inspired by rhythmic Black Shaker, Yoruba, Black Baptist and Spiritual Baptist worship traditions and a luscious collage of Black music--I think you will appreciate how all of this craft creates a sturdy container for deep, enormous feeling. (That feeling is the neo-hoodoo secret sauce, quietly simmering away underneath it all, unmistakably permitted and, to me, unmistakably Black.) I think you will find space for emerging feelings of your own, and I would imagine--I would hope--that you would not necessarily need to be Black to find and feel them. Certainly, Wilson's multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational dancers and vocalists--Hadar Ahuvia, Rhetta Aleong, Yeman Brown, Paul Hamilton, Lawrence Harding, Raja Feather Kelly, Clement Mensah, Gabriella Silva, Annie Wang and Michelle Yard--suggest this. Each performer brings palpable individuality--a generously-welcomed selfness--to Wilson's movements, arrangements and scenarios.

This seems a most significant retention from all of Wilson's many years traveling the African diaspora to witness how Black people evoke and fill ourselves with Spirit: the idea that one might come to that work through the door of one's own struggle and dignity and pleasure, in a way that has one's own signature, and that there is room for you just as you are. The strong traditions--of song, of movement--hold space for us to do what we need to do as we find family.

[*Wilson has long referred to his choreographic aesthetic as "post-African/ Neo-Hood Modern Dance."]

Tonight's 8pm show--already sold out--ends the Wilson platform. A wait list will be taken at the door beginning at 7:15pm. No late seating. For information, click here.

For full information on Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance, 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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Gibney's DoublePlus: Wesley Chavis and Cori Olinghouse

Wesley Chavis in his solo, Ku In Tuo Muah,
a DoublePlus presentation of Gibney Dance,
curated by Dean Moss
(photos: Scott Shaw)

In Ku In Tuo Muah, soloist Wesley Chavis's "physicalizing [of] his worship"--to use Gibney DoublePlus curator Dean Moss's words--adopts a widespread human practice with ancient origins, still active, for example, in the Black churches of Chavis's own Southern upbringing. Worship of higher, disembodied powers is often a practice of the body, and extreme, transcendent states of mind have always been powerfully accessed through the body, say in ritual dancing or ingestion of sacred hallucinogens. 

Ku In Tuo Muah, like most dance works I get to see, might have many behind-the-scenes influencers and supporters. But the few program credits--for "concept, audio/visual design and, of course, performance--go to Chavis solely, no stated collaborators. For the audience, this solo offers a privileged, if complicated, view of a path engaged upon decidedly alone. It's an internal, private, abstract exploration with challenges only one man can know.

Even the sounds that arise from this exploration are sounds of the breathing and gasping (and maybe unseen crying) of a human body. The emphasis on peeling off and shedding articles of clothing suggests continuous self-transformation and digging down to the person beneath persona beyond the grip and labeling of an outside world.

Stopping to remove his shoes and shirt is the first thing Chavis does as he walks through the door into the theater called Studio H at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. It's like watching a weary man come home.

At first, he does not enter the portion of the space directly in front of the audience seats and will not for a long time. Instead, he occupies that stage-left area near the mirrors. So we must look over, slightly sideways, to watch him. It's a brilliant distancing device. You see me, but you have to work a little for it. I'm still over here in my somewhat private space, and I'm going to make you feel like the voyeurs you are.

So we watch as he proceeds to disturb and distort the functional harmony of his body, and we watch the wrenching and shedding and listen to the ragged gasps. His entrance to the main section of the space, which is covered in shiny, black plastic introduces more sound--the noise of him scrunching that floor covering as he continues to contort and scrunch up his body.

At the end, Chavis simply gathers up his clothing and exits the theater, remaining someone seen with the physical eyes but not really known--an impressive, even beautiful, but remote performer. His dance, his ritual, remained--for me, at least--a journey monitored but not truly shared, and I note that with acceptance and respect.

Cori Olinghouse (above and below)
in GRANDMA
(photos: Scott Shaw)

What Cori Olinghouse calls Clown Therapy draws from The Fool's power to look at things sideways upside down and dismantle the everyday mundane and how we habitually see it. Her GRANDMA--an interdisciplinary piece for herself, Martita Abril and Kate Watson Wallace--is wacky without (for the most part) being funny. It really isn't clowning in the conventional manner. Its pace is most often glacial with stiff, stooped, dazed dancers shambling about a space littered with cheap snack food. Their overpowering, face-obscuring wigs and lipstick pink costumes, the recognizable snack food product placement, though--that's where the funny would normally be situated. The clown proffering little plastic-wrapped cupcakes could not be more pathetic as she apparently cannot bring herself to approach more than two people in the audience, her feet repeatedly colliding with the plastic cups that earlier exploded onto the floor right in front of us.

My sympathetic attention cleaves to one performer momentarily and sadly stuck facing a corner, as if in shame, confusion or both. The old-fashioned tv screen at the center of it all gives back nothing but static. Attempts to mop up the mess--or stuff slices of Wonderbread under one's wig--are futile, half-hearted and soon abandoned. The overall ineptitude and visual disarray speak to a growing upheaval at the core of something, and that must be the therapy Olinghouse chooses to agitate.

Olinghouse's inclusion of two pop hits--George Michael's "Father Figure" and Wham!'s "Everything She Wants"--will launch an army of earworms, I can attest. The songs underscore a displeasure with warped values, excess consumption and the detritus it generates.

Wesley Chavis + Cori Olinghouse concludes tonight with a performance at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (entrance: 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Global Rhythms's Yesenia Fernandez Selier on presenting Afro-Cuban dance in public space

Dance artist, educator and MFA student Beatrice Capote
(photo: Russell Hayden)

For my Montclair State University course, Performance Perspectives, Dance MFA student Beatrice Capote interviewed Yesenia Fernandez Selier, Executive Director of the performing arts troupe Global Rhythms.

Global Rhythms is a cultural enterprise devoted to enriching society and empowering individuals and communities through Cuban dance, music, and cultural education. Founded in 2012 by Cuban scholar, activist, and folkloric dancer Yesenia Selier and Hunter Houde, US born Latin dancer and entertainer, Global Rhythms uses these elements to create bonds between people and cultures and to promote a more diverse and tolerant society. With exciting dance performances, live Latin music shows, and interactive academic conferences on the history of popular and religious music and dance from Cuba, our experienced staff blends the talents of traditional artists, scholars, and award winning entertainers to provide an unforgettable cultural experience. Global Rhythms has worked with and alongside world renowned artists such Pedrito Martinez, Roman Diaz, Maykel Fonts, Septeto Nacional de Cuba, Ivan Acosta, Jose Conde, Jane Bunnett, Cita Rodriguez, Grupo Irek, Miguelo Valdes, Mauricio Herrera Tamayo, Gerardo Contino, Venissa Santi, among others. 

Cuban born performer and researcher, Yesenia Fernandez Selier is currently a media, culture and communication PhD candidate at New York University-Steinhart. Yesenia is the recipient of fellowships from CLACSO and the CUNY Caribbean Exchange Program of Hunter College and recognized for her work preserving Latino heritage by the “Save Latin America Organization.” Her work on Afro-Cuban culture, encompassing dance, music and race identity has been published in Cuba, United States and Brazil. Yesenia has developed several projects, like Tambo! and Ibiono Project for the preservation of Afro- Cuban legacy in NYC. She produced, the theater play Women Orishas for Miami Cuban Museum (2013) and the show Cuba en Clave for the Cuban Cultural Center in Miami (2014). She is currently Executive Director of Global Rhythms.

To listen to this audio clip from today's guest contributor, Beatrice Capote, click here (20:51).

Beatrice Capote is a soloist dancer, choreographer and teacher. She started her pre-professional training at PPAS/The Ailey School, and then graduated from University of North Carolina School of the Arts as a dance major. In addition, she continued her college journey at Montclair State University where she received her BA in Dance Education. Professionally, she has worked with INSPIRIT, a dance company, Mavericks dance company, The Wells Performance Project, Areytos Performance Works, Earl Mosley, Matthew Rushing, Darrell Moultrie, Antonio Brown and Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In. Motion. Ms. Capote choreographed and performed her solo work as a guest artist for ASHA Dance Company, the Eric Dolphy Jazz Festival, and recently performed her Newest Solo at the Martha Graham Studios for WestFest Dance, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD), Pepatian Dance Concert at Pregones Theater, and Battery Dance Festival. She received a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to choreograph and show new works at the Pier 17 South Street Seaport. She has, also, set work at the Earl Mosley Institute of the Arts Summer Intensive Program, Fort Wayne Ballet Summer Intensive Program, and Steffi Nossen School of Dance. In her work, she gravitates towards the individual artistry/ experience. She asks questions like what, when, where, and who…. Within those questions, she uses gestures to tell her story/ experience. The gestures evolve to expansive movements within the body that reflect to deeper meaning. The movement quality is known to be very energetic and vibrant contemporary modern aesthetic infused with African, ballet, modern, and jazz. Her goal in the work is for the audience to experience and relate to the work. In addition, She is currently faculty at the Ailey School, Joffrey Ballet, Montclair State University and a dancer with Camille A. Brown and Dancers. Website: beatricecapote.com

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Dance solos for Troy Ogilvie, Laura Careless at Alchemical

If you can manage to get a ticket, you'll likely enjoy PRISM: Facets of the Feminine, a suite of five solos for dancers Laura Careless and Troy Ogilvie at Alchemical Theatre Laboratory, a small West Village venue for the arts.

The two-hour program features works by choreographers Roy Assaf, Jonathan Watkins, Itzik Galili, Idan Sharabi and Careless that deliver surprise gifts of the season designed to keep you unfolding more and more aspects of the archetypal feminine. The British-born Careless brings consummate theatrical presence to her own piece informed by Neruda love sonnets, and Ogilvie is at her most vital--rubbery and restless, a wild woman--in Sharabi's Troy's Feet, Joni.

The final performance of PRISM: Facets of the Feminine runs this afternoon at 3pm. Seating is very limited and may be sold out, but it's worth checking. Click here for information.

Alchemical Theatre Laboratory
104 West 14th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Doubling up: Leslie Cuyjet and Lela Aisha Jones at Gibney

Patricia Peaches Jones
in Plight Release & the Diasporic Body: Jesus & Egun
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Choreographers create worlds for us to visit--visits sometimes good enough to make us to want to linger. But I don't recall ever wanting to just go live there. I mean permanently. Then came Lela Aisha Jones.

Jones--curated by Cynthia Oliver for a DoublePlus evening at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center--created a world so finely-crafted and nourishing that I could imagine not ever leaving. Really, this dance might be all I need for the rest of my life.

Her trio, Plight Release & the Diasporic Body: Jesus & Egun, takes off from the notion that Jesus, a figure dear to many people of African descent, is also way overworked. There are so many other ancestors and spiritual beings who could and should be asked to shoulder some of that burden. This is a concept Jones attributes to Nzinga Metzger, PhD, a scholar of African diasporic religious traditions.

Wow. Rather than rejecting Jesus as the ironically white icon of European colonizers, Jones both embraces and frees him. She doesn't so much lower him from his pedestal in Black church tradition as place him on a spectrum with others. And with her wonderful dancing mates--Zakiya L. Cornish and Patricia Peaches Jones--she demonstrates that Afro-Atlantic religious traditions, including those under the banner of Christianity, can exist to serve the nature and cultures and healing needs of the people who take part in them.

L-r: Patricia Peaches Jones, Zakiya L. Cornish and Lela Aisha Jones
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Everything in Plight Release is made or selected by Jones and her team with utmost care--set and props (which we encounter and interact with first), lighting and shadows, costuming, music and, finally, dancing of ritualistic rigor and beauty. There's nothing done by rote or imitation. Jones finds her own ways to employ symbols, gestures, dance steps. The effect is to be welcomed into a gracious home and sacred space, treated with respect and, at every moment, feel yourself to be in the presence of someone with clarity about what she's doing and why she's doing it. You simply relax.

So, it's decided. I need to look for more from Lela Aisha Jones | FlyGround, and you need to go see this piece tonight. Last chance!

Also curated by Oliver for this program: Alike, an intriguing duet by Leslie Cuyjet for herself and Darrin Wright. The big draw here is seeing two of New York's "dancers' dancers" explore magical, even mysterious approaches to space and their more obvious differences of gender, race, timing and expression.

Darren Wright and Leslie Cuyjet in Alike
(photo: Scott Shaw)

This DoublePlus program concludes with tonight's performance at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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Afro-Caribbean legacy: Visit "La Sirene" this weekend

The Afro-Cuban Lukumi Arts--founded in 2008 as "an open and growing collective of artists, orisha/palo priests and practitioners, singers, dancers, percussionists, MCs and producers"--presents La Sirene: Rutas de Azucar at Brooklyn's JACK performance space now through tomorrow evening. Dedicated to the Black mermaid water deity who protected Haitian sugarcane workers on their way to Cuba, the 90-minute program is an immersive experience created by a thriving network of multi-talented, accomplished artists dedicated to the continuing relevance of Afro-Atlantic history and spiritual culture especially in our time of renewed resistance to oppression.

For four days, singer/performer Jadele McPherson in collaboration with Director Charlotte Brathwaite, offers a cosmic sonic journey through black liberation figures, conjurers and spiritual leaders from Haiti and Cuba, surrounded by fellow performers Val Jeanty, Maxine Montilus, Yomaira Gonzalez, Caridad Paisan Garbey, Bembesito Akpon, Hansel Vaillant and Daniel Gil. La Sirene: Rutas de Azucar (“The Siren: Routes of Sugar”) probes Cuban revolutionary José Antonio Aponte's libro de pinturas, a book of paintings, of black heroes that served as a catalyst for an attempted rebellion against colonists, leading to the first conspiracy and abolition charge in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Through sound and movement, McPherson maps the connections between West Indian and Haitian migrations to Cuba to harvest sugarcane and repositions the Cuban ingenio (sugar mill) as a birthplace of freedom that extends beyond borders and waters.

Each performance is followed by a special event. Tonight's--on the eve of Santa Barbara/Shango's day--the cast will offer "Afro-Cuban Rumba for the Vispera de Santa Barbara-Chango." Sunday evening will conclude with "Healing Quisqueya and Beyond," a reference to the Taino name for the island including the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This panel features Dr. Nathalie Guillaume, Goussy Célestin, Jose Perez and Osvaldo Lora.

Dr. Nathalie Guillaume is an alumnus of the University of Miami where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry and Foreign Languages. She holds a Master of Science in Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine from the Atlantic Institute of Oriental Medicine, and a Clinical Doctorate in Pain Management & Oncology from Bastyr University. She specializes in lifestyle medicine with an emphasis on nutrition, meditation & Qi Gong, and is dedicated to promoting the benefits of holistic health to the community. She is currently adjunct faculty for the Graduate School of Oriental Medicine at the New York College of Health Professions and practices in New York City where she is the CEO and Medical Director of Healing Happy Hour.

Goussy Célestin currently performs throughout the NYC-Tri state area as a musician and dancer. She is an alum of ASE Dance Theater Collective, a neo-folklore ensemble dedicated to the traditional/contemporary arts of the African Diaspora filtered through Haitian music and dance. She is also a member of ¡Retumba!, an all-female multi-ethnic music-dance ensemble dedicated to the traditions of the Caribbean and Latin-America, in addition to serving as lead vocalist for Charanga Soleil. Ms. Célestin's wide range of interests and versatility, has led her to study classical piano, Jazz and Latin music. While in Cuba, she had the honor of performing with members of the Buena Vista Social Club, as well as performing/mentoring with members of Grupo AfroCuba de Matanzas, Yoruba Andabo and Clave Y Guaguanco. She has performed at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, Del Terzo Studio at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, SOB's, the Knitting Factory, NJPAC, Tilles Center, Newark Symphony Space, Joe's Pub, as well as various jazz clubs in NYC.

Osvaldo "Bembesito" Lora. Bembesito is one of the most renowned and versatile "akpons" in the U.S. and maybe even internationally speaking. With over 10 years of experience performing religious ceremonies and as an olo Obatala he brings a level of professionalism that is hard to find in most ceremonies. Bembesito's crew does it all, from cajon to guiro to Aña and even the music of the 21 divisions from the Dominican Republic also called los palos. Over all the experience you will receive at a ceremony where Bembesito performs will be clean, authentic, professional and like no other...

Jose Perez is a writer and editor, an investigative reporter, a West Indian Nationalist, and a public school history teacher at North Miami Middle School where over 80% of his students are Haitian.  He infuses social justice into  his underground curriculum, which has led to him to become a leader in professional development trainings to teachers in the Miami-Dade County Public School System, the 4th largest in the United States. Pérez also was a  Research Assistant for Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando during the production of her moving documentary about Haitians in Cuba, Reembarque.  Collaborating with AfroCubaWeb.com and Dr. Andrea Queely of Florida International University, he brought Ms. Rolando to North Miami Middle for her only Florida screening of Reembarque.  Pérez has been recognized by the Haitian American Cultural Society as well as the Mayor and Board of County Commissioners of Miami-Dade County for journalistic coverage of Haitian heritage. Perez's interest in the bridges between Ayiti & Kiba is as deep as the joy found in a plate of homemade legume.

La Sirene: Rutas de Azucar continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 8pm. Seating is limited. For more information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Avenue (between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Gloria Naylor, 66

Gloria Naylor, Author Of ‘Women Of Brewster Place,’ Dead At 66
by Claire Fallon, The Huffington Post, October 3, 2016

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone!

Here comes the sun, and I say 

It's all right...

Abundant blessings to you and yours in
this season of returning light.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Closing tomorrow: "Hildegard (vision)" at La MaMa

Multi-talented Marina Celander is the elegance central to Hildegard (vision), a curious interdisciplinary work running now through Sunday at La MaMa. Directed by Gian Marco Lo Forte with writing by Abby Felder and music by John Sully (Pioneers Go East Collective), the hour-long piece aims to offer insight into the physiological and emotional experiences of medieval German composer, scientist and mystic Hildegard von Bingen whose migraines triggered futuristic visions.

The immediacy of setting--a row of audience seats surround performers on three sides of the narrow, rectangular, brick-lined theater--provides the sensation of a dream externalized. Colors and textures feel intimate to viewers; the attractive, live green of the abbess's plants, the gleaming clear or dark amber glass of science beakers and bottles, are particularly striking visual elements. The space contains, all at once, everything it needs, collapsing the separation between one point in history and another era. We watch Hildegard, with assistant and same-sex lover Richardis von Stade, potting and tending the plants as they converse just as we clearly see centuries ahead to the commonplace of men and women side by side in their labs.

"We are vessels. We are women. How can we transcend so many barriers?" Celander asks shortly before von Stade (Nehprii Amenii) pulls out a videocam from out of somewhere and trains it on her abbess's face. The subtle interactions between these two--the dynamics of Celander's faint but detectable withdrawal, her self-containment, and Amenii's confused, quiet discomfort--drew me into the work. Regrettably, the text--in it plainness and in telling us what we likely already know--lacks the poetic vision to soar with Hildegard's celestial artistry.

Hildegard (vision) has two more performances: tonight at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. Seating is limited. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa: First Floor Theatre
74a East 4th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)