"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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New York Live Arts presents Westwater's "Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part"

Choreographer Kathy Westwater
opened Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part
last evening at New York Live Arts
in a co-presentation with Lumberyard.

Kathy Westwater
Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part
New York Live Arts
(co-presented with Lumberyard Center for Film and Performing Arts)
February 14-16

It is our universal capacity for pain, and our histories of pain, that offer us hope of ever giving a damn about another being--or even just recognizing the value of doing so. Created by Kathy Westwater and her dancers, Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part, deliberately inflicts nearly unrelenting discomfort and disorder. For the ears, the driven discordance of the late composer Julius Eastman, filled perhaps with the pain of being Black and queer in this society but even more with Black, queer defiance and zest. For the eyes, seven bodies propelled out of everyday, conventional function--how we look, how we walk, when we are doing the things we are asked to do--into states of less rational, conventional control. 

When the audience wanders in to take seats, dancers are already in view, attending to one another in preparation for what their bodies will endure (and achieve). I watched this process during a showing of excerpted material Westwater held at Gibney (a showing, as it happens, that in no way prepared me for the ultimate weight of this production). This time, at the New York Live Arts premiere, I did not enter until very shortly before the dance proper began. So I missed almost all of this prelude. But I remembered its importance and kind of felt it in the air as the dancers rose and moved away from view.

With a dimming of the lights, they returned--a few taking seats in easy chairs tucked into downstage corners; the first explorer, Rakia Seaborn, slowly placing one foot, then the other, in front of her as if testing how, and if, her Black body could relate to the white floor gleaming beneath it.

On either side of the space, pianists began to apply intensity, sharp against ear and mind. One by one, or in duos or groupings, dancers began to layer the space with roughly off-centered, loosely flung and floppy movement tumbling in front of a wide backdrop, Roderick Murray's lighting only slightly revealing ashy streaks rising from a dark, murky surface. Like Westwater's enigmatic title, Seung Jae Lee's visual design compels interest but dances forever out of reach. By the end of the hour-plus piece, past a moment of diminished intensity and complexity, we see things more clearly but still do not gain reliable understanding of what we are seeing.

The work of some dancers stood out for me--Alex Romania, vividly bearing down into giving way into seamless motion; Paul Singh letting his backbone slip; Thomas F. DeFrantz eventually slowing the rush of matters to find his hips, find himself, find his life in the midst of chaos. And, although his gift to the work is relatively brief, countertenor M. Lamar introducing an ambiguity that can be both a place of rest and of lush articulation.

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Choreographed by Kathy Westwater in collaboration with
the performers

Directed by Kathy Westwater

Performed by Ilona Bito, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Alex Romania,
Rakia Seaborn, Stacy Lynn Smith, Paul Singh and Kathy Westwater

Music by Julius Eastman, performed by Joseph Kubera and
Adam Tendler, with Patrick Gallagher and others; and
M. Lamar, performed by M. Lamar

Set and Visual Design by Seung Jae Lee

Lighting Design by Roderick Murray

Costumes by fufu

Dramaturgy by Melanie George

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Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part continues through tomorrow with performances at 7:30. For information and tickets, click here.

Visitor Information/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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Antonio Ramos: For love of the body

L-r: Antonio Ramos, Darrin Wright and Alvaro Gonzalez
in Almodóvar Dystopia, premiering next month at Dixon Place
Below: l-r, Wright, Gonzalez, Luke Miller and Ramos
(photos: Peter Yesley)

When I read about Antonio Ramos and The Gangbangers planning a world-premiere Dixon Place commission described as "part Latinx-flavored 'asstravaganza,' part humorous celebration of queer culture, and part an outrageous political statement against the body-negative and repressed nature of the world we live in" and, btw, "the work is performed in the nude," I must admit I thought: 'Great. Queer. Check. POC. Check. Nude and body positive. Check and check. Dixon Place. But, of course." I envisioned the delightfully Tricksterish Ramos bringing coals to Newcastle or...whatever would be the appropriate metaphor in this case. The famously-inclusive, provocative Dixon Place is not exactly enemy territory for any of the communities or sensibilities Ramos represents.

The work's title, Almodóvar Dystopia, references Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar with whom Ramos feels creative kinship. Award-winning playwright/director/actor David Drake is onboard as dramaturg, and Ramos is joined in performance by Luke Miller, Darrin Wright, Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy, Angie Pittman, Sarah White-Ayón and Awilda Rodriguez Lora--a diverse cast who "cull exaggerated personae from their personal backgrounds, exploring the challenges, anxieties, and neuroses entailed in the process of dance-making."

I asked Ramos, the self-identified "Queer-Puerto-Rican-Cha-Cha-Heels-Shaman," to share more about the mission and vulnerability behind the new work and how he hopes to relate to his audiences. Here are some excerpts from his remarks.

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I wish an audience that is not used to seeing this kind of work would come to see it. I really want people to understand the importance of body respect and that, in my work, all bodies are beautiful. Right now, in society, there’s this whole thing about how the body should look and how the body should be. That’s affecting us on so many levels, even in the queer community. We call each other names, and I have a problem with that.

I’m actually doing a lot of work on genitals in Almodóvar Dystopia, about how society views genitals as disgusting, taboo, that we constantly have to cover them. It’s an issue I deal with myself: why, if we are made beautiful, we have to cover, and we treat people like they are perverts. To me, that’s the perversity–finding the nude body disgusting and sinful.

It has also been hard for me to find dancers who have that sense of freedom and to deal with photographers who have strict limits on what they can show in their photographs. They don’t have to be rude about it, though. If you’re a photographer, you should find a way to work with the nudity. Their discomfort can be funny, but it’s also offensive to me. Again, it’s the issue of how we deal with genitals in this country. For me, the body is sacred. This is the real thing. We’re real people who sweat. We’re real people who shit and fart.

I am grateful for my dancers' courage, for being vulnerable and naked with me, and for believing in the work.

When you look at Almodóvar’s work, I think he’s always been interested in Hollywood and how to copy Hollywood. I’m not interested in that. I’m more interested in his process and how that process of creating is very similar to mine. It’s almost like the meta of the meta of the meta. Kind of doing a play that is being recorded or making a film of and, at the same time, you see the inside of the film, and you see the actors showing you the process of making the film. I do that a lot--show you how the work is done. I have a collage of images--things happening right now, things happening to me, things happening in the world, in Latin America. I’m excited to work with David Drake as my dramaturg. He has been really great.

I’m using elements I haven’t used before, like green screen and livestream. My video designer Alex Romania has helped me with that. Live music. I wanted to make it like you’re in the studio making a film, making a dance and trying to make sense of this mess we live in.

I feel like I have to get my voice out there, and this is my practice to deal with how we are treating one another.

In terms of shamanism, it is my spiritual practice, and I’m trying to do it within my dance. It is my way of living, my way of breaking through. It’s not a dogma, not a religion, not a rule, but more things that come through nature. I feel related to that. A lot of the source material comes from my journey, connecting with nature. Some of this is connected to my mother’s illness and death.

I’ve always been interested in herbalism. I’m a massage therapist. I like energy work. I’m very involved with all that. This sustains the work and my practice as a shaman, as a healer. And I go in nature, I get undressed, and I do my little video in the sea, in the mountains. And somehow that material gets filtrated into the dance, and the dancers learn from these improvisations. The process keeps changing, but the process also keeps creating and setting things from that process.

I don't want to give too much away about the piece, but I always have food in my pieces, and it's a symbol of unity and family, getting people together--the warmth of the food, the sweetness of it. It's part of my Latin culture.

In Almodóvar Dystopia, it's a gift to the audience. I'm grateful to the audience for taking this journey with me. Regardless if you see me as dirty, nasty, queer, perverse, there's always the sweetness. 

I hope people laugh and have fun!

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Antonio Ramos is a dancer, choreographer, and licenced massage therapist / Feldenkrais practitioner from Puerto Rico whose recent work has been presented at American Realness, The Center for Performance Research, JACK, and Museo del Barrio. He is currently a resident artist at Gibney Dance and Danspace Project. Ramos is the artistic director and choreographer for Antonio Ramos & the Gangbangers. As a performer, Antonio has danced with choreographers Mark Dendy, Neil Greenberg, Jeremy Nelson, Stephen Petronio, Merian Soto, Kevin Wynn, Ori Flomin, Donna Uchizono and Larissa Velez-Jackson/YACKEZ, among others.

 The Gangbangers find inspiration in pop music, queer identities,  shiny objects, all forms of dance, and the fabulous way a wig can enhance how one presents themselves to others.

Catch Almodóvar Dystopia at Dixon Place on Fridays and Saturdays, September 15-30 at 7:30pm. For information and ticketing, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Movement Research presents "Body Disrupt" at Abrons

Mat Fraser as The Beast
(with Jonny Dixon and Jess Mabel Jones)
in the 2014 production of
Beauty and the Beast at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Sheila Burnett)

Below: Julie Atlas Muz as Beauty
(photo: Sin Bozkurt)

Artists with disabilities and artists whose work disrupts normative notions of what constitutes a dancing body will come together in conversation.

 --about Body Disrupt, a Movement Research Studies Project panel

Body Disrupt
--a panel convened and moderated by dance artist Kathy Westwater at Abrons Arts Center for Movement Research--left my head buzzing, not so much with a bunch of questions or final answers but rich points of departure. In that way, I found it satisfying--again, not in the sense of finality or feeling sated but in the sense of deliciousness. Each panelist--Wendy Whelan, Petra Kuppers, Julie Atlas Muz (representing her husband and creative collaborator, Mat Fraser), Marissa Perel, Cathy Weis, and Westwater herself--offered a different history, pathway, insight and flavor. I consider them all guides who lead you to a good place and leave you there with confidence that you're smart enough to push on forward in your own way.

Westwater introduced the event by talking about how her engagement with somatic practices left her at variance with their emphasis on organizing the body. In her dance practice, she said, she was "pursuing a disorganized body, trying to understand what that was."

"Why am I trying to organize my body?" she asked. "I'm an artist. I want to express the body I have." Indeed, she turned to physical "disorganization" as a stimulus for a choreography of exaggerated dis-alignment that, she says, "never stops being interesting to me."

As the panel wrapped up, Westwater revisited this language and reworked it--referencing, instead, "different organizations of bodies."

As a dance writer, I found that revision at once enjoyable and useful. It made me remember a question someone recently posed to me: "What do you look for when you go to see a dance?" My response was perhaps different from what another writer might offer: I go to engage with what's there, whatever it might be, not to look for something predeterminied. In other words, if I expect anything, it's the possibility of something different, and I've signed up for engagement with it. While that's no guarantee that I will get it or like it, it's a protective against simply failing to respect its right to exist.

Westwater and Whelan, it turns out, are old friends from youth. Even so, Whelan's presence on this panel was surprising and proved refreshing. After all, her stellar career, though evolving, has been rooted in classical ballet technique, far from Movement Research's approach to dance. But here's the thing: At age 12, Whelan was diagnosed with scoliosis (curvature and rotation of the spine) and spent months in a chin-to-hip body cast while bravely resuming her rigorous ballet training. Treatment helped, but it did not wipe away her innate sense of difference. At times, the ballerina had to endure fault-finding by members of my profession for the look of her body and her dancing.

Today, Whelan considers her condition a gateway to the truth of herself, beyond picture-perfect ballet conventions, and to the pursuit of more adventurous means of self-expression through the works of contemporary choreographers.

"I strive to be fearless," she says. "I'm never afraid to embarrass myself."

Kuppers--a German-born community performance artist and disability culture activist, now based in Michigan--impressed me with her playful approach to the world as a model of easygoing engagement based in perception and compassion. From Muz--performance and burlesque artist married to an actor with thalidomide-induced Phocomelia--I simply inhaled a renewed affirmation of my femme self and a voracious pleasure in the age-old, radical power of the Outsider. Perel spoke of disabilities and pain hidden from view--"I've been able to look like a dancer"--and, in particular, what dance critics fail to take into account when they encounter her work. A poet, installation artist, choreographer and critic, Perel says she works with forms of art that will give her agency. "I don't really care what they are." Weis, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in decades ago and facing the loss of her marriage, regained her own agency through turning not only to dance but to stained glass and, especially, to video as an extension of herself, made on equipment that she could handle by herself.

Body Disrupt offered notions of disruption that can instigate not only the work of movement artists but also the work those of us who view, process, document and critique their art. These artists encourage each of us to define and relish in our freedom.

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Movement Research Studies Project presents a series of artist-instigated panel discussions, roundtables, performances and/or other formats that engage issues of aesthetics, philosophy and social politics relevant to the dance and performance community.

All Studies Project events are free and open to the public.

UPCOMING:

June 7, 6:30pm
Festival Spring 2016 Studies Project
Curated by Aretha Aoki, Elliott Jenetopulos, Eleanor Smith and Tara Aisha Willis

Gibney Dance Choreographic Center
890 Broadway, 5th Floor, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Metropolitan Museum of Art explores "Viewpoints: Body Language"

"The idea of launching your body back, without seeing, is liberating but also terrifying."

--Francesca Harper, dancer

Viewpoints: Body Language

How does the sculpted body communicate? Hear from Met experts, leading authorities, and rising stars, each with a unique perspective on the language of gesture, facial expression, and pose.

Hear diverse viewpoints from curators, educators, musicians, theater actors and directors, neuroscientists, and a deaf American Sign Language user. Watch videos of dancers and choreographers interpret the body's expression. Share your viewpoints on social media. We'll repost selections on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

Body Language features twenty works of sculpture from three departments: European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Medieval Art, and the American Wing.

Click here to begin your exploration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Viewpoints: Body Language.

We twerk to resist!

source

Stapleton and Fitzgerald on nudity in dance

The naked truth about dance

In Greek mythology, the gods were depicted nude to show their higher status, but these days little inflames indignation like the sight of the naked human body. For some artists, and dancers in particular, it’s an essential, everyday part of their work.

Michael Seaver, The Irish Times, May 14, 2013

Stephen Dwoskin, Experimental Filmmaker, 73

Stephen Dwoskin, Experimental Filmmaker, Dies at 73
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, July 21, 2012

Study "The Body"

The Body

a course instructed by Terri Gordon-Zolov

The New School

15 sessions: Tuesdays, 4-5:50pm, beginning August 28

Noncredit tuition: $650

"You do not realize how the headlines that make daily history affect the muscles of the human body," the dancer Martha Graham once commented.  This course examines the relationship between politics, social tensions, and cultural values and muscles, movement, and skin--a relationship that has made the body one of the most visible signs of 20th-century culture.  We study deployments of the body in Europe and the United States, covering the historical and contemporary avant-garde; body culture and life reform movements; war and propaganda; and cabaret, dance, and performance art. How can we "read" the body? How do representations of the body reflect and support prevalent notions of race, gender and nation? In what ways do images of the body critique and subvert cultural norms? We study literature, history, art and cultural documents, including articles in the press and political manifestoes; fictional works by Kafka, Apollinaire, Junger, and Carrington; artworks by Hans Bellmer, Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman, and Orlan; and theoretical texts by Freud, Foucault, Kracauer, Sontag, and others.  We also spend class time viewing paintings, photography, and performance art. (3 credits)

Terri Gordon-Zolov, PhD, Columbia U.; assistant professor of comparative literature. New School Bachelor's Program; co-editor of "Citizenship," special issue, WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly) (Spring/Summer 2010); has published articles on Josephine Baker, cabaret, performance art, and postwar film; recipient of The New School's Distinguished Teaching Award, 2003.

For registration information, visit The New School online.

The subversive nude

Removing the Veil

by Barbara Pollack, ArtNews, December 2010

Nudity in contemporary art is tolerated increasingly in countries where it wasn't in the past.

Drawn from life

Nothing Like The Real Thing

by Gail Gregg, ArtNews, December 2010

After decades out of fashion, the practice of drawing from life models is growing in popularity.

When the state controls the body

The Body and the State: How the State Controls and Protects the Body

A Social Research Conference
at The New School

Thursday-Saturday, February 10-12

Many competing forces, including religion, science, media, and the market, influence the ideas and policies that control our bodies. Do assumptions about what is a "normal," "healthy," and "acceptable" human body lead to social policies, informal and formal, that are fundamentally unjust?  Join more than 30 distinguished experts in considering the human body as a subject of contention in the international human rights arena.

For a list of speakers, schedule and registration details, click here.

The New School
Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan

Imperiled ground, imperiled body

Belladonna and CUNY Graduate Center present

a free panel discussion

Is Ground as to Figure as Ambience is to Body? Ec(h)opoetics of the Disfigured 'Land'scape

Fri, Sept 25, 10am

Room 1, Panel 1
CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Ave, Manhattan

Discussion Organizer and Moderator: Jennifer Scappettone. Panel Members: Marcella Durand, Brenda Lijima, Kathy Westwater, Rita Wong and Linda Sormin

This discussion will sound reciprocal interference between the environment and marked (raced/gendered/polluted) corporeality in the face of landscape's harm-mediation-digitization-withdrawal. Presentations will address a poetics of systemic crisis, stalking solutions, obliging recognition of ambient relations of authority and compromise as compass through a stupefying enormity of damage: Marcella Durand on race and ecological disaster; Brenda Lijima on Agnes Denes's reclamation art; Kathy Westwater on bodily organization within transmogrifying 'nature'; Rita Wong and Linda Sormin on ongoing toxicities.

This discussion is part of the Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism Conference and is sponsored by Belladonna and CUNY Graduate Center: Center For Humanities, Poetics Group, the PhD Program in English and the Center for the Study of Women and Society. For more info: belladonna

Muscles!

Show me your muscles
by Dorothy Snarker, Dorothy Surrenders, July 30, 2009