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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One more to see: Rennie Harris gets funky at New Victory

Performers from
Rennie Harris: Funkedified,
a world premiere at New Victory Theater
(photo: Brian Mengini)

Two acclaimed Philadelphia dance crews--Rennie Harris Puremovement and The Hood Lockers--are tearing up the stage at New Victory Theater, now through June 10. If you love popping, locking, breaking and all things street dance, go see Rennie Harris: Funkedified.

The premise of this expert world premiere production is a remembrance of the funk music and dancing of the 1970s--think James Brown and Soul Train--that set Harris on his path to becoming one of the world's best-loved masters of hip-hop artistry. A marvelous five-piece band, led by guitarist Matt Dickey and drummer Doron Lev, brings the funk in a big, joyous way. Several cloth panels, hanging above the band like a quilt, capture projected imagery--some hazy, some abstract, some psychedelic--as well as Bob Steineck's luscious, saturated lighting as we hear Harris's musings on his cultural past. His voice--echoey and phantasmal--seems to emerge from out of a cloud or the depths of a dream--but the ingenious, passionate dancing and music speak for themselves.

The New Vic is a family-oriented theater and, at this Saturday matinee, most folks in the audience were small kids in booster seats sitting quiet and polite throughout the show. I kind of longed for an audience of Black teens who'd know just what to do with what we were seeing and hearing! It took a while for any heads to start bopping to the fantastic music--and they were adult heads. I just hope there were youngsters in the audience checking out, in particular, Puremovement soloist Leigh “Breeze-Lee” Foaad whose fluidity, range and poignancy should prove a powerful inspiration.

Rennie Harris Puremovement: Shafeek Westbrook, Katie Cruz, Joshua Culbreath, Phil Cuttino Jr., Tatiana Desardouin, Leigh “Breeze-Lee” Foaad, Mai Lê Hô-Johnson and Yuko “Uko Snowbunny” Tanaka

The Hood Lockers: Ricky “Glytch” Evans, Joshua “J Peazy” Polk, Andrew “Riot” Ramsey and Marcus “Epic” Tucker

Musicians: Shareef Clayton (trumpet), Matt Dickey (Music Director; guitar), Doron Lev (Music Director; drums), Nicholas Marks (keys), Osei Kweku (bass) and FKAjazz (saxophone)

Sound design/composition/production: Darrin Ross
Visual design: Jorge Cousineau
Lighting design: Bob Steineck

Rennie Harris: Funkedified runs through Sunday, June 10. For information and tickets, click here.

New Victory Theater
209 West 42nd Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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These Full Circle Souljahs refuse to be “Boxed in”

Kwikstep (left) and Rokafella
of Full Circle Souljahs
(photo: Ian Douglas)

From start to finish--and even throughout its post-show Q&A--Full Circle Souljahs's Boxed In aims to smack down barriers between dance techniques and traditions as well as who can and should perform what. If you think you've got classical ballet over here in this corner and street dance way over there on that far end and maybe a few discrete modern and postmodern things floating between, this hour-long show will simply break up alla that.

Holding court at Danspace Project now through Saturday evening, the troupe is the winning handiwork of two famed Bronx street dance veterans--the married couple of Kwikstep and Rokafella. Diverse in race and ethnicity, Full Circle Souljahs collective is also remarkable for its performers' diverse training background. And that's the point of Boxed In. What all have in common is a passion to do their art, to perform, and most have eagerly soaked up experience from all sectors of their art. Watch stately Shaneekqua Woodham and gymnast-sleek Odylle "Mantis" Beder switch gears from ballet to b-girl moves, you realize that you're looking at the smart, multiple dimensions of today's youth and their can-do spirit.

The show includes sequences that suggest the two choreographers might have Broadway audiences in mind--for example, the cirque nouveau-style Cyr wheel hooping of Gabriel "Emphasis" Alvarez who eventually puts distance between himself and some vaguely menacing characters in commedia dell'arte masks. The piece deals with issues of ambition, the temptation to sell out and the wonder of freeing your creativity to work outside of set rules, categories and expectations.

It’s the sort of show that would be great for youngsters, and there were many in the smallish opening night audience with parents plus a contingent of college students. People I did not see: the typical “downtown” Danspace Project audience. The troupe has two more shows, and—who knows?—that might change. But maybe the message they’re bringing—step out of whatever box confines you—needs to reach more of us.

Performers: Raymond “Spex” Abbiw, Jennifer “Beasty” Acosta, Gabriel “Emphasis” Alvarez, Odylle “Mantis” Beder, Michael Bond (pianist), Gabriel "Kwikstep" Dionisio (aka DJ KS 360), Deana Richline,  Sharmaine Sheppard, Gene Shinozaki(beatbox), Janice Tomlinson, John “Flonetik” Vinuya, Shaneekqua Woodham

Lighting: Carol Mullins

Boxed In continues through Saturday, May 19 with 8pm performances at Danspace Project. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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We always win: Marguerite Hemmings and friends at JACK

Marguerite Hemmings
(photo: Delwin Kamara)

Look and see. Black women make and hold space within dance for everything to come through.

The latest example of this is To Make Ready Again, an evening of performance and discussion offered by Jamaica-born dance artist Marguerite Hemmings, four dance colleagues, singer/musician Solo Woods and drummer Themba Mkhatshwa. It opened at JACK, the small Brooklyn venue famously decorated with crinkly aluminum foil; its run concludes tonight at 8pm.

Inspired by the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, JACK plans a year-long focus on exploring and expansively defining concepts of reparations in a program entitled Reparations365: From Memory to Movement (February 2017-January 2018). One primary insight already surfaced in community discussions is that monetary value cannot be placed on historic trauma, true justice and healing. It's hard to imagine and calculate in any realistic, satisfying way. Repair and restoration come not from the outside but from within vulnerable yet profoundly resourceful individuals and their communities.

Hemmings's we free multimedia series, of which To Make Ready Again is a part, draws from her knowledge of African diasporan street dance styles, social dancing, hip hop and dancehall, and her work, she says, centers around liberation. In TMRA, she's joined by powerhouse dancers--Courtney J. Cook, Jaimé Dzandu, Katrina Reid and Italy Welton--who whisper and conspire, laugh and vocalize, activating the space in ways both protectively intimate and boldly assertive. A loving circle, a sinuous warrior force, a reservoir of care and uncomplicated joy, they channel and filter even the male vocal energy of hip hop through grounded bodies. Their frequent broad stance roots them into the floor and earth below, freeing up torsos, shoulders and arms for hair-trigger action whenever, wherever necessary. They dance the ancestors through and make their mark on a world they wish to manifest.

Black women like Hemmings--a founding member of the emerging Black women and gender non-conforming collective The Skeleton Architecture--are dancing liberation and reparation. "Bring it down, and spread it all around." And remember, "We always win."

Lighting design: Nikita Maturine
Set design: Zunnania Anderson

To Make Ready Again concludes with a performance this evening at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Meet Mix’d Ingrdnts, Oakland's all-women street dance troupe

‪Women Dancers Redefine Oakland’s Street Dancing Scene
by Emma Silvers, KQED Arts, November 12, 2015

What's happening on Second Avenue at 2:22pm on 8/22?

Darcy Naganuma (of Naganuma Dance, Naganuma 2 and The ZGroove Project) promises "a heart revolution" and "a phenomenal cast of house/street dance pioneers, prominent contemporary dancers, DJs, MCs, and visual artists," plus a New York City Ballet surprise, this Saturday, August 22, at 2:22pm. Where? The East Village at St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.

For more information, check here.

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

Here to set it off: "FLEXN" comes to Park Avenue

Klassic (Joseph Carella) with the cast of FLEXN at Park Avenue Armory
Now, try re-creating his pose.
Klassic counsels, "If you have the imagination,
[you] can do anything you want because the body is able to do it."
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

FLEXN co-directors Peter Sellars (l) and Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

Flex is Brooklyn street, not Park Avenue street. Yet, thanks to FLEXN, you'll find the Brooklyn street dance form known as flex at the Park Avenue Armory behind a set of thick wooden doors that, when closed in front of you, don't exactly say, "Welcome!"

Pull those heavy doors, though, and you'll find a huge, dark space re-imagined for sensation and spectacle--STREB's action heroes "kissing the air" comes to mind--now given over to some of Brooklyn's most extraordinary young street dance performers. This ninety-minute production, a collaboration between choreographer Reggie (Regg Croc) Gray and director Peter Sellars, is a magnet intended to engage New Yorkers with issues like racism, policing and youth incarceration. The co-directors began work on FLEXN against the backdrop of #BlackLivesMatter, aware that the Armory commission could offer a platform not only to introduce flex to a broader audience but to raise awareness of the realities that drive the art.

Audiences are encouraged to come at least an hour early for pre-show panels on topics such as "Profiling Stop & Frisk" and "Judging the Juvenile Justice System," moderated by Sellars and Gray. As you wait for the panel, you can view photography by Richard Ross documenting the lives of teenagers in solitary confinement and a range of visual art by Akira Somma creatively tracing several years in the development of flex. The show's segments have been arranged to underscore the multiple challenges of city life for young people of color while highlighting these critical values--self-awareness, dedication and community.

FLEXN, from evidence of last night's show, mainly attracts a New York mix of the hip and the affluent only slightly more diverse in race than your typical concert dance crowd--in other words, largely a white audience--but spanning a wider range in age. Many appeared to have arrived only for the performance, although they are probably most in need of what FLEXN's Race and the City panels have to offer.

The dancers, I read somewhere, hoped audiences would feel free to voice their pleasure and support all through the show, the way it's done in flex culture. But, aside from a smattering of applause after segments or particular solos, the armory crowd watched in complete silence and stillness. I saw only a few people, at least in my immediate vicinity, acting on the show's invitation to take photos and videos for upload to Facebook and Twitter. But the evening ended with many standing in ovation, and friends turned to their companions with happy murmurs and exclamations of awe. As we all filed out past the massive, hall-spanning platform stage, the dancers sat along its edge, waiting to receive our individual greetings. That was a nice touch--and smart--giving us a chance to finally share whatever feelings we held back during the show itself.

At 14, Germany-born Android (Martina Heimann) almost abandoned
her training in conventional movement techniques, but her mother challenged her:
"Are you sure you want to live with the thought of not being a dancer?"
Today, she is a star of flex and FLEXN.
"I want flexn to be accepted as a full-blown art."
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

At center, Sam I Am (Sam Estavien)
One of FLEXN's most talented performers, Sam I Am writes,
"I feel like dance is my connection to the divine....
One of my goals is to raise the status quo of how dancers are respected."
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

Lookin at my watch its about that time
I done patiently waited
And I hate
That I'm so underrated
I hope you hear this song and know I'm singing from the heart
And I'm kinda faded
I wasn't created to be so underrated

-- Tank ("Underrated")

FLEXN uses solos, duets, ensemble pieces and a creative range of music (reggae, hip hop, R&B) to tell archetypal stories of complicated relationships, temptations and their consequences, violence and loss, the meaning of friendship and mentorship. Flex offers its young dancers not only a way to show clever and robust virtuosity--the flashy contortions called bone-breaking, the smooth knee glides, the minute, jerky isolations--but to define and speak for themselves.

I will no longer be defined by
What someone else believes that I am
Now that I have dropped the weight
I am light as a feather
It's time to elevate

-- India.Arie ("SoulBird Rise")

Performers to watch for include: Dayntee (Deidra Braz), marrying willowy, undulating flow to flex's more angular distortions of the body line. The masterful Banks (James Davis) who, as a teenager, took two bullets to the knee--which only made him more fervent about dancing. Sam I Am (Sam Estavien), deeply gifted, totally connected and coherent from head to toe. The theatrically expressive Android (Martina Lauture). And Karnage (Quamaine Daniels) with the abrasive solo he calls "Fuck the World."

But through all the bullshit I throw up a sign of hope…

-- Ace Hood ("Fuck Da World") 

FLEXN speaks of chaos, confusion and pain but also demonstrates two beautiful things: art as the key and community as absolute necessity.

Lighting sculpture/design: Ben Zamora
Sound design: Garth MacAleavey
Costume design: Gabriel Berry
Music: Epic B

Performers: Ace (Franklin Dawes), Android (Martina Lauture), Banks (James Davis), Brixx (Sean Douglas), Cal (Calvin Hunt), Deidra (Deidra Braz), Dre Don (Andre Redman), Droid (Rafael Burgos), Droopz (Jerrod Ulysse), Karnage (Quamaine Daniels), Klassic (Joseph Carella), Nicc Fatal (Nicholas Barbot), Nyte (Ayinde Hart), Pumpkin (Sabrina Rivera), Regg Roc (Reggie Gray), Sam I Am (Sam Estavien), Scorp (Dwight Waugh), Shellz (Shelby Felton), Slicc (Derick Murreld), Tyme (Glendon Charles), Vypa (Khio Duncan) and YG (Richard Hudson)

FLEXN continues through April 4 with Thursday-Saturday performances at 8pm and a Sunday matinee at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Watch FLEXN-related YouTube videos here.

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue (between 66th and 67th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Remembering house dance pioneer Marjory Smarth

Remembering House Dance Pioneer Marjory Smarth
by Czarina Mirani, 5 Magazine, February 13, 2015

Flex and Lite Feet dancers say there's "No Such Thing as Neutral"

BARNARD CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON WOMEN

presents

NO SUCH THING AS NEUTRAL

NYC STREET DANCE SYMPOSIUM

Leaders from the Flex and Lite Feet urban dance
communities gather for a lecture-demonstration and dance battle

Ali Rosa-Salas 
lectures on
No Such Thing as Neutral

Saturday, November 8, 3pm-8pm

Event Oval, The Diana Center
Barnard College

A day-long symposium about two distinctive New York City street dance forms (Lite Feet, founded in Harlem, and Flex, started in Brooklyn) will explore how these urban dance forms—known for improvisation, informal teaching methods, and the central role of marginalized communities of color in their production—are often figured in opposition to more traditional dance forms, but are making significant contributions to the contemporary dance world.

Countless forms of dance created and performed in public spaces are bundled under the umbrella of “vernacular” or “street,” which are recognized for their emphasis on improvisation, informal teaching methods, and the central role
 of communities of color in their production. Yet they are often figured primarily in opposition 
to traditionally valorized forms
 of dance such as ballet and modern dance. With this project, Ali Rosa-Salas highlights the contributions of women who participate in movement-based styles that engage notions of subjectivity and the body in their work while utilizing the technical formalities of abstraction. These New York City-founded dance forms speak directly to the centrality of gender, racial, and community identity in art-making and how such inquiries propel local art forms into international cultural movements.

Symposium schedule:

3pm-5pm: Join pioneers of the Flex and Lite Feet communities for a lecture-demonstration and discussion moderated by Ali Rosa-Salas. Panelists include Chrybaby Cozie, Tatianna "Tati B" Butler, Alora "Gaia" Martinez, Reggie "Regg Roc" Gray, Diedra Braz, Shelby "Shellz" Felton, and Andre "Dre" Redman.

6pm-8pm: Rep Your Style co-founder Melanie Aguirre will host the first-ever all-women Lite Feet and Flex exhibition showcase. Featured dancers include renowned female Flex and Lite Feet dancers Shellz, KitKat, Android, Betty Spaghetti, Lil Spank, Tootie, Cleo, and Gaia.

Information: bcrw.barnard.edu

Event Oval, The Diana Center

Barnard College

3009 Broadway (entrance at 117th Street), Manhattan
(directions)

HyperISH: Taking it from street to stage

Who's afraid?

These two words are the first uttered in HyperISH, an hour of power presented by the Amsterdam-based troupe ISH at The New Victory Theater, now through May 18. Dancers begin by creeping out under hazy light, wobbling atop a row of drab, ungainly platforms to woozy music--the first and last time you'll believe that any of these seven rambunctious men and women have ever suffered a moment of fear.

Founded in 1999 by Marco Gerris, ISH draws from diverse sources--hip hop, club dancing, acrobatics, ballet, Kathak, capoeira and other martial arts. A choreographic collision for sure, but you'll be happy to know that it works, thanks to Gerris's imagination and the outlandish talent and charisma of dancers like Micka Karlsson, Shailesh Bahoran and especially the unbelievable Martin Barnes. What does not work so well is Gerris's well-intentioned concept, a mess of dramaturgidity obviously aimed at young audiences.

When it is not just about fantastic dancing, HyperISH is sort of about alienation, about finding one's True Self despite the distractions and pressures of conformist, consumerist society, about our obsession with cyber-connectedness and being liked and...Liked. And so forth. The Catcher in the Rye has been cited as an inspiration. It tries way too hard.

But let the dancing help you forget all that. Don't overthink this show. Just go and watch what happens.

HyperISH runs through May 18. For program and ticket information, click here.

New Victory Theater
209 West 42nd Street (Times Square), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Brukup Brooklyn

Revival in Brooklyn of Brukup, Afro-Caribbean Dance
by Cathay Che, The New York Times, March 8, 2011

The Turning World (76)

U.S. Deportee Brings Street Dance to Street Boys of Cambodia
by Seth Mydans, The New York Times, November 29, 2008