InfiniteBody: surrealism

Showing posts with label surrealism. Show all posts

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Isao Takahata, 82

Isao Takahata, Leader in Japanese Animation, Dies at 82
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, April 6, 2018

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Friday, December 13, 2013

This weekend: Cori Olinghouse's "Ghost lines"

Cori Olinghouse in Ghost lines
(photo by Andy Jordan)

Film is a ghostly art--the old silents, perhaps, the ghostliest of all, though all movies preserve traces of long-departed starlight. Cori Olinghouse's Ghost lines, a film/dance production running now at Danspace Project, raises the ectoplasm of entertainers like Buster Keaton, Snake Hips Tucker, the British eccentric comic Max Wall, all known for matchless physical signatures. It also draws from the extravagance of more contemporary clowns, specialty dancers and anime characters.

The hour-long piece is a phantasmagoric shadow play in two parts. The first fifteen minutes present a luminous, masterful film collaboration by Shona Masarin and Olinghouse where the choreographer performs a silent film-style act. Layers of cracks, blurs and sparkles make the images of her surreal and ever-receding. After a pause, the work continues with live dancing, including the performance, by Bessie Award-winning tap artist Michelle Dorrance, of a flashy Hal Le Roy solo from 1931 that she reconstructed. You can enjoy the sensational original here.

There's magical illusion in the way Olinghouse stacks and fans out her dancing characters like cards from a deck of poignant oddballs, how designer Andrew Jordan conceals their faces or costumes them in distracting fabrics and shapes (which makes me think of the pants legs excitingly whipping away from Le Roy's thin limbs in that movie clip), how Kathy Kaufmann's lighting moves snatch away from us, for moments, the power of sight and then restore it. Now you see it. Now you don't. And what you see has been carefully constructed for your transitory delight. Beneath one white-smeared face is someone we will never know. And like the veiled, black-clad Eva Schmidt on her hiked-up feet, the work picks up its heels and trips away.

With dancing by Cori Olinghouse, Eva Schmidt, Michelle Dorrance, Elizabeth Keen and Mina Nishimura

Ghost lines continues through Saturday evening with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

(directions)

Saturday, April 20, 2013

"Dining" with Rosie Herrera...and Bausch

Making up my mind about Rosie Herrera--who offered the New York premiere of Dining Alone this week at Baryshnikov Arts Center--turns out to be a work in progress. This morning, I'm still at it. Welcome to my process.

Herrera is shrewd enough to color a corner of her ensemble piece with a jazz instrumental of the Jimi Hendrix's slow-simmering "Hey Joe"--sounds like Robert Glasper at the piano, but I'm not sure--so that it slips a hook into you, warmly percolating, just a sliver above subliminal. There's a moment of "Oh, wait...I know that song." Then you remember the disturbing lyrics of the original tune ("...where you goin' with that gun in your hand? I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady, you know I caught her messin' 'round with another man...."). Well played. There are other smart, fresh moves in Dining Alone--for one, its opening gambit places the suave Octavio Campos, steadily if inaudibly holding forth, at the head of a long dining table lined by cardboard-cutouts guests--but I'm not sure it's all quite enough.

Herrera hails from what she calls the "Cuban ghetto" of Hialeah in Miami. For her vivid dance theater in Dining Alone, she chooses to mine that world and popular culture for its passionate preoccupations and cheesy excesses. Love seems a delicious danger, a delirious indulgence and a fundamental necessity all at once. No narrow, post-modern bed, this: It's roomy. Straight-up Rachmaninoff and Eric Carmen's power-ballad changes on Rachmaninoff are both welcome, because Herrera's got to keep slipping you that one something more. Of course. White dinner plates, when not creating transitory pathways for moonstruck sonamubulists, spin on edge and clatter, clatter, clatter to novel visual and aural effect. The episodic Dining Alone "reads" like magical realism, like a fever dream amid bouts of red-eyed tossing and turning.

And I like this about it. I just wish the ghost of Pina Bausch would lift away and leave Herrera to devise her own ways of doing things. I'm looking at Dining Alone and thinking way too much about Bausch: Would or wouldn't Pina do this or that? And, if so, would she do it in this way? So, after watching Dining Alone, I was startled to pick up a Dance Magazine profile in which Herrera described herself as follows: "If Pina Bausch and Michael Jackson had had a baby...."

Okay, one thing I know: I'm eager to see Herrera step out and test the strengths of her own vision, push the choreographic and visual design elements much further.

With performances by Campos, Ivonne Batanero, Leah Verier-Dunn, Liony Garcia, Katie Stirman, Raymond Storms, Melissa Toogood and Fernando Landeros. Lighting by David Ferri.

Closed April 19.

Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre

Baryshnikov Arts Center

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Graham's surrealism on display at the Morgan

Along with its major exhibition of Surrealist works on paper--Drawing Surrealism (January 25-April 21)--The Morgan Library and Museum will present a performance of works by Martha Graham.

Inner Landscape: Martha Graham and the Surreal
Thursday, February 7, 7pm

The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform three of Graham’s masterworks that touch on surrealism and demonstrate how the choreographer made the workings of the mind visible in dance. Every Soul is a Circus (with Katherine Crockett performing the lead), Satyric Festival Song, and “Moon” from Canticle for Innocent Comedians will be featured with commentary by the Company’s Artistic Director, Janet Eilber. Drawing Surrealism will be open at 6pm especially for program attendees.