Harry Belafonte: Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, 2014

https://youtu.be/Yfj6Ja86lCs

Artists Reach Out: Michael Maag

Dear friends,

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

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

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

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Michael Maag

Michael Maag, a white man,
smiles at the camera with twinkling eyes.
He has white/blond hair with an impressive long beard,
glasses and a light complexion.
(photo: Jenny Graham)

Alice Sheppard, Laurel Lawson, and Michael Maag
sit side by side in their chairs, on gray marley and lit by stage lighting.
Alice is a light skinned Black woman with short curly hair,
Laurel is a white woman with very short silver hair,
and Michael is a white man with long blonde hair
and a flowing white/blonde beard.
They are wearing casual and rehearsal clothing,
and all three are grinning at someone in the audience.
(photo: Chris Cameron/MANCC)

Michael Maag is the video, projection, and lighting designer for Kinetic Light, a project-based ensemble working at the intersections of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology. Maag designs at the intersection of lighting, video, and projection for theater, dance, musicals, opera, and planetariums across the United States. He sculpts with light and shadow to create lighting environments that tell a story, believing that lighting in support of the performance is the key to unlocking our audience’s emotions. Maag has built custom optics for projections in theaters, museums and planetariums; he also designs and builds electronics and lighting for costumes and scenery.

As a wheelchair user, Maag is passionate about bringing the perspective of a disabled artist to technical theater and design. He is currently the Resident Lighting Designer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His designs have been seen on the Festival’s stages for the last 20 years, as well as at Arena Stage, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Utah Shakespearean Festival, Florida Studio Theatre, and the Henry Hudson Planetary, Albany.

Alice Sheppard, a light-skinned Black woman,
and Laurel Lawson, a white woman, are both in their wheelchairs
with a vibrant multicolor sunset in the background.
Alice is crawling on her forearms with her knees in Laurel's footplate,
and Laurel is arching her back on the ground as she is dragged along the floor.
Alice is exerting effort, and Laurel is in surrender.
(photo: M A N C C / Chris Cameron)

Laurel Lawson, a white woman, is flying in the air
with arms spread wide, wheels spinning,
and supported by Alice Sheppard.
Alice, a light-skinned Black woman,
is lifting from the ground below.
Behind them appear a dark blue sky and mountainscape;
figures appear in the key, bursting with light.
(photo: Jay Newman/BRITT Festival)

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

Yes. Like everyone in the entertainment industry, it seems like my work, my art, my life is on hold. I am a member of the project-based disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light and our residency work on a new piece, Wired, has been postponed as have the performance dates at The Shed, though some development and design work has continued remotely. Our piece DESCENT was supposed to perform in Hong Kong in February, and our US dates have been postponed. My work as the Resident Lighting Designer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is on pause, as is my mentoring practice with the FAIR Program.

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

The Theater enticed me into the arts at a young age, and I became a Lighting Designer when I discovered that light communicates emotion directly to the subconscious of the audience. This happened the first time I touched a Lighting Control Panel. At that time, those were enormous panels of levers often labeled with the color of the gel in the lights. I had a dream that night in which the levers were labeled with the emotions the light conveyed. I have been living that dream ever since. My practice is to use light to tell the story, and to immerse the audience (all of them) in the emotional journey.

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

My practice is collaborative and inclusive. I work with choreographers, directors, scenic and costume designers to create meaningful art. As a disabled artist, I am particularly interested in working from a disabled perspective, with a focus on access. To me, this means two things: to create accessible work for the disabled community that speaks to and reflects their experience, and to welcome the able-bodied into our environment.

At Kinetic Light, we work at the intersection of disability, race and gender. The horrific ongoing systemic racism in this country must end. We must interrogate the origin, meaning and reasons for the societal contracts we have made or have been forced onto us. Those societal contracts that no longer serve must be dismantled. We can come up with a better way to run a “free” society than one that uses principles like democracy and capitalism to perpetuate injustice. It is our job as artists to provide vision, hope and guidance for our society. Most importantly, we must act in an anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-sexist manner throughout our process.

I envision art that helps our society realize our failures to others and ourselves. I envision art that heals. I envision art that shines.

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

I am on a journey, someplace on the road to an inclusive, fair and just practice. In that way I feel like I am in alignment with my dreams. I also feel like I am personally at the bottom of a steep hill and need to keep pushing my wheels up the road to completely inhabit the world I want to see.

My work as a mentor continues with many young lighting designers out in the world. I am embarking on a new fellowship through Kinetic Light to mentor a disabled lighting designer. Even in these pandemic times, we can connect and collaborate.

My practice includes continual learning. I am never bored. There is always something to learn about, or something to be better at.

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

By remotely collaborating, creating and even lighting from a distance, my art is becoming enhanced by better communication skills. At Kinetic Light, we managed to pull off one virtual, remote dance concert by “dancing in place” (you can view that event, hosted by the Rubin Foundation, on their website) and have another scheduled in July. I am spending time learning new tools and creating a library of visuals for Wired. So in a way it is not all that dissimilar to how I normally work; just a lot less time in Technical Rehearsals.

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

I’ve been meditating about the meaning of the Japanese word ma and its relevance now. The word means something like space, gap or interval. But, more deeply, it is an awareness of place, a concentration of vision between form and non-form. Here we are in the shadows between structured time. Without these shadows, there can be no awareness of light. Which I guess is a long way of saying pause, create ma, and meditate on something meaningful to you.

******

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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Artists Reach Out: Greg Purnell and Tendayi Kuumba

Dear friends,

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

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

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

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Greg Purnell and Tendayi Kuumba

Greg Purnell
(photo: AngieMLV Photography)

Tendayi Kuumba
(photo: Hayim Heron Photography)

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

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

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

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

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

Kuumba and Purnell in collaboration
(photo: AngieMLV Photography)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

******

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Eiko Otake: Distance is Malleable

Eiko Otake
at Middle Collegiate Church, East Village
during Danspace Project Platform 2016: A Body in Places
(photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

This year's Soshitsu Sen XV Distinguished Lecture on Japanese Culture--presented by Columbia University's Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture--was given by venerable dance/interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake who showed up fully as Eiko Otake, a body in places. The place, in this case, was the lobby of Columbia's Miller Theatre.

Fukushima is everywhere.

-- Eiko Otake

She showed up, as always, a wound in motion. Trailing crimson cloth behind her. Thwacking a yellow CAUTION WET-FLOOR sign on the tile floor. Darting out into the daylight of Broadway. Dropping white sheets of manifesto poetry from the theater balcony like a lazy snowstorm.

And only then talking. But not without images from her epic collaboration with photographer William Johnston that help her help us bridge the nearly 7,000 miles between New York and Fukushima, sites of mass trauma, of what she calls "fast violence and slow violence."

There's a sense of agitation in me, in finding two places so connected in me.

-- Eiko Otake

Her lecture--Distance is Malleable--gave us a mini-tour of her work of recent years, including residencies, installations and performances at Danspace Project (2016) and The Cathedral of St. John the Divine (2016-2017) that I was fortunate to attend. It came with the poetic manifesto that a reader could drop into at any point and swim for a long, long time. All told, Otake's poem and her holistic performance--I will refrain, now, from calling it a lecture--offered valuable insights into this woman and artist I have long admired.

I don't want to dance in studios. Going to places is my choreography.

-- Eiko Otake

I now more clearly grasp the consistency of her presence and witness, how she seeks to interrupt societal trance and avoidance, to archive and deliver evidence through ragged and asymmetrical aesthetics, to reshape time and distance through her body so that we, in turn, might reshape what we think important enough to care about.

People make things not knowing what to do when they break.

-- Eiko Otake

I suddenly, and enviously, get the radical freedom she has long claimed for herself--Decide where to go, when, with whom, how and for how long/Decide where to learn, when, with whom, how, and for how long--and I marvel at it. Self-curation! That's what she calls it, excitedly adding that exclamation point. (In Nguzo Saba terms, I have long exclaimed the Kwanzaa principle called Kujichagulia, self-determination, my favorite.) Otake's Self-curation! strikes me as bearing a double-meaning. Exercising your right to do what you want and need to do in your own way, yes, but also fundamentally curating a self--and doing that your way, too.

When she next writes of how the student chooses the teacher (not vice versa), I feel the strength of her determination. She knows her own mind. She has been on this path a long time and is an excellent teacher to choose.

Follow Eiko Otake's work here.

Learn more about the illustrious history of the annual Sen Lecture here.

******

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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DANCENOISE makes some noise on West 19th

Connie Fleming performs in Lock 'em Up
(photo: Lola Flash)

Lock 'em Up

DANCENOISE
New York Live Arts
December 12-15

There's no business like show business, and the best in the biz know how to zing you with surprises here and there. So, the only thing I'll say about the opening of DANCENOISE's Lock 'em Up is some advice. Keep your coat on and your cellphone camera ready. Night's are cold, and there's so much to see and hear in our fair city.

Celebrating the 35th anniversary of DANCENOISE, the duo of Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton are back to remind us that feminism not only co-exists with raunchy humor and pugnacious slapstick, yelling at the top of one's lungs and symbolic bloodletting/bloodwearing at the expense of patriarchy but might absolutely require those things. Making space for the rageful Id we'd rather not contemplate, they are all about sprawling across the breadth of New York Live Arts' theater, filling it with the irritating noise of crumpled wads of packing paper, the insistent, rhythmic churning of half-naked dancers and a Goth-friendly, less-than-merry spill of black balloons. What's up with the dancing swastikas? Well, those noxious symbols, regaining open popularity these days, absolutely belong in the universal and cautionary time capsule that Iobst and Sexton is designing for the future of our world. Lock 'em Up is both the audacity of Nope! and a blast of energy to make you get busy with the painful and painstaking work of snatching our country back from the fascist bastards. And it's fun. You must get there.

Choreographer/directors Iobst and Sexton have lots of (great) help with this. So, here come the credits:

Performers: Tyler Ashley, Laurie Berg, Heidi Dorow, Connie Fleming, Melanie Greene, Greta Hartenstein, Anne Iobst, Madison Krekel and Lucy Sexton

Lighting design: David Jensen with Tsubasa Kamei

Video: Charles Atlas

Additional dancers on video: Yoshiko Chuma, koosil-ja, Richard Move, Heather Robles, John Walker, Edisa Weeks, Ashley R.T. Yergens

Production Direction: Lori E. Seid

Production Management: David Jensen with Tsubasa Kamei

Lock 'em Up runs through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. Tonight's show will be followed by a Stay Late conversation moderated by Cynthia Carr. Saturday's show will be followed by an after party with DJ Johnny Dynell of Jackie 60 in the lobby, free with ticket purchase. For information and tickets, click here.

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

******

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

******

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From a whisper to a shriek: Diamanda Galás's "Schrei 27"

from Schrei 27--
a film by Diamanda Galás and Davide Pepe

What has kept Diamanda Galás's metal-shredder voice going, decade after decade, while gentler singers' pipes rust over? It must be more than "drinking plenty of water," the discipline she cites in a 2017 interview. Should we revive that old legend--a secret deal with the devil? Tartini. Paganini. Robert Johnson. Diamanda Galás?

Schrei 27 (2011)--her installation in collaboration with video artist Davide Pepe--can't quite make up for the total shock-and-awe of Galás performing live right in front of you. And yet, the film--screened for the first time in the US at Performance Space New York--delivers its own body blow.

The work originated, in 1994, as a commission for radio. Then Galás transformed it into a live performance--Schrei X, 1996--set in darkness at Performance Space 122 (now Performance Space New York). So, this week's screenings were a kind of coming home, part of the newly-reopened institution's season of remembrance of the avant-garde artistic history of the East Village.

For Pepe's half-hour film, viewers entered a theater lit only by its movie screen, picked their way to seats and then took a steep descent into the hell of a mysterious medical institution. A prisoner, arrested for treason, suffers torture suggested indirectly in stark, surrealist detail--an eye is a mouth; a mouth, an eye; x-ray flashes reveal the bones of restrained hands and wrists; teeth loom like a row of tombstones in moonlight. And the sounds...those caustic, scorching sounds....

Galás's painted and drawn imagery, Pepe's photography, and the precision sound work by Blaise Dupuy and Dave Hunt create a flickering nightmare intent on seizing and scrambling the brainwaves of witnesses as we try to watch and fail to watch by squinting, looking aside, shielding our eyes. What, I wonder, do they hope to make us confess?

For information on upcoming performances and exhibitions at Performance Space New York, click here.

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Kinetic Light opens "DESCENT" at New York Live Arts

Scene from Alice Sheppard's DESCENT
Above: Laurel Lawson
Below: Alice Sheppard
(photo: MANCC)

Dancer-choreographer Alice Sheppard of Kinetic Light
(courtesy of the artist)

Months ago, I saw a raw showing of DESCENT, a work being developed by the disabled artist collective Kinetic Light--Alice Sheppard, Laurel Lawson and Michael Maag. Set up in a smallish GIBNEY studio, it lacked Maag's brilliant lighting and video design but was impressive even then--what with two athletically-strong women in wheelchairs tearing up and down a curvaceous ramp like competitive divas and confronting their desire for each other. Influenced by Rodin's sensuous Toilette de Vénus et Androméde and informed by the collective's interest in matters of disability and race, DESCENT's premiere run at New York Live Arts promised to be a must-see.

Rodin's Toilette de Vénus et Androméde (1886)

DESCENT
(photo: Rain Embuscado)

And so it is.

Strikingly beautiful thanks to Maag with his rotation of deep-colored, earthy landscapes and eye-popping starscapes as backdrop; lighting that conjures the play of moonlight and sun; erotic silhouettes; and ghostly, undulating waters skimming up the incline of the ingeniously-designed ramp.

Strikingly hot thanks to choreographer Sheppard and collaborator Lawson (para ice hockey athlete as well as dancer) who take passionate risks in and out of their chairs, on every surface of the ramp's peak, valley and recesses. Even when woozily swirling in their chairs, hurling themselves from one level of the ramp to another, or zooming one body and chair into the other dancer's grasp, these performers appear to be capable of joining impetuous minds. Their duets "sound" like songs to me, harmonies hard won with an outlandishness and tension about them. Will their union hold? Or will it fracture?

Lawson, in particular, made me see wings while gazing at a streamlined wheelchair and recognize a deity as an elemental force whose fire might range from warming to devastating.

DESCENT is sold out! Performances continue at New York Live Arts through tomorrow night--Saturday, 7:30pm. For information on a wait list for tickets, click here or call the box office at 212-924-0077.

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

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New video series on Black Philadelphians in ballet

Portraits of Black ballerinas
From top:
Judith Jamison, Delores Browne and Joan Myers Brown
(photos: Eva Mueller)

We are still like unicorns, and I wanted to make the invisible visible.

Theresa Ruth Howard, keynote address, Dutch National Ballet's Positioning Ballet Conference 2017

Theresa Ruth Howard--founder of MoBBallet, dedicated to the reinstatement and preservation of the history of Black artists in ballet--announces the launching of a video documentary series on its website. Funded by a $50,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, And Still They Rose: The Legacy of Black Philadelphians in Ballet will feature legendary Judith Jamison, Joan Myers Brown (Philadanco) and Delores Browne (Ballet Americana/New York Negro Ballet) discussing their early training and barrier-breaking experiences in the field. To view the series, starting October 22, click here.

Watch an excerpt:

On Saturday, October 28, join Howard for a panel with Joan Myers Brown, Delores Browne and current Black ballet performers at Philadelphia's The Painted Bride Center (3-5pm). There will also be an exhibition of Eva Mueller's portraits of Black ballet dancers. This event is free or by donation with an RSVP here. To visit the Facebook event page, click here. For directions to The Painted Bride Center, click here.

Watch Theresa Ruth Howard's excellent keynote address on diversity issues in ballet at the Dutch National Ballet's Positioning Ballet Conference (Amsterdam, February 2017).  Click here.

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"To our next...." A letter from Bill T. Jones and company

Last night, I walked away from Bill T. Jones's A Letter to My Nephew with a palpable sense of the man's unwavering concern and love for an individual as well as an entire community. Danced by the brilliant Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, the work takes inspiration from the life and personal struggles of the choreographer's nephew, dancer Lance T. Briggs. Jones reaches beyond this single relationship--described elsewhere as "complicated"--to embrace the culture and resistance of today's youth as they confront our violent, racist, homophobic society...and themselves.

This New York premiere of this 70-minute work for BAM Next Wave, presented in association with New York Live Arts, will run through this Saturday evening at BAM Harvey.

Jones keeps current--even adding the words "Las Vegas" to his acknowledgments of settings of atrocity, displacement and natural devastation. One feels two realities continuously entwine--the pain of life and the raw energy life offers us to make art and meaning. Jones and his team walk a perilous edge yet craft a meaningful world out of exhilarating energy.

Radiating across the marked-off intersection of performance space, their work blends street, ball and contemporary dance with the ingenious manipulation of a large prop. Movement within the body and among bodies flows with silky sophistication. The dance might be a hospitalized patient's fever dream of turf fights and catwalks in an environment changing so swiftly, so unpredictably, that one must shapeshift in order to survive. The poise and malleability of Jones's dancers--as individuals and as an ensemble--make this idea spring to life. Along with Jones and associate artistic director Janet Wong, the nine dancers contributed to the choreography and are given due credit. Let's celebrate them here, too: Vinson Fraley, Jr., Barrington Hinds, Shane Larson, I-Ling Liu, Penda N'Diaye, Jenna Riegel, Christina Robson, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, Huiwang Zhang.

Original score: Nick Hallett
Live vocals: Matthew Gamble
Set design: Bjorn Amelan
Lighting design: Robert Wierzel
Costume design: Liz Prince
Projection design: Janet Wong
Sound design: Samuel Crawford

A Letter to My Nephew runs through Saturday, October 7 with performances at 7:30pm. For information on other BAM Next Wave events, click here.

BAM Harvey
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Black unlimited: André M. Zachery untames space

André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group
dances the world premiere of Untamed Space
this week at Danspace Project.
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Untamed Space--a new work by André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group at Danspace Project--is an epic fantasia envisioning Black creativity and survival on a grand scale. And I mean a really grand, world-regenerating intent the likes of which one might find in a fantasy or sci-fi novel but with everything animated for you outside the confines of your own brain. Zachery is a Black artist with his eye on the past (renegade "maroon" colonies of escaped African slaves), the fraught present, and the future (a new Great Migration with the stars our destination). Abstract and subtly metaphoric, this work is 70 minutes of heady stuff, including Zachery's trippy visual projections, Carol Mullins's fanciful lighting and an electronic stew, by composer/sound artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, evolving in depth and intensity.

Zachery's initial projections--liquified, distorting shapes that appear derived from Haitian veve symbols in eye-popping acid green and turquoise--flow and undulate against a dark screen. The choreographer, in similar fashion, has created a dance style emphasizing organic forms--bendy, furling and unfurling, rolling and cascading, reaching and twining good green things that break through and spring up no matter how much death surrounds them. At one point, too, these beautiful movers--Kentoria Earle, Candace Thompson, Nehemoyia Young and Zachery--reminded me of starfish. I didn't remember at the time, but starfish--or, sea stars, as researchers call them--can grow a new limb if one has been severed or, in rare cases, even regenerate their central disk. Zachery's dancers forever shoot out and deploy limbs and energy from their own "central disks."

Starting with a gradual procession of dancers into the space, the dance accumulates in urgency--first earthbound and propulsive movements, then standing, sometimes interactive behavior, either lyrical or percussive. Vocal passages in the music--such as a warm, muffled remix of Mahalia Jackson "in the upper room...talkin' with my Lord"--seem to herald emergence of desire and new language. As noted by dramaturge Rosamond S. King, Zachery has drawn from his cultural roots in Haiti, the American south and Chicago and a variety of dance styles. Reaching into this rich heritage, he embraces Afrofuturism as a way to understand how Black people have existed, what forces sustain our existence and how it might continue.

At times, Untamed Space and its dancers seem overpowered and diffused by the performance space. A time, its starscape journey yields too much similarity in  movement. Its seventy minutes can seem unnecessarily stretched. Still, Zachery leads us to a final image suggestive of unity and preparedness. The future exists within and among us. It's up to us to bring it to light.

Untamed Space runs through Saturday, September 30, with performances at 8pm with no late seating. Facilitated discussions run each night for a half-hour beginning at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Catch this now: A new, slow look at "Trio A"

Video installation of
David Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
at Danspace Project
(photo: Lily Cohen)

No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

--Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto

Okay, no glamour, maybe, but I am completely seduced by the wealth of physical energy and concealed/revealed information streaming through David Michalek's slowed-down video interpretation of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966), here and now at Danspace Project spanning three, large suspended video screens and performed by a succession of 46 soloists. Pat Catterson, a member of Rainer's Raindears troupe, coached performers in the tricky subtleties of Rainer's doing without DOING!  For example, if you reach down as if to pick a bottle from the floor, don't make much of it. It's just a bottle and just a reach. No drama.

David Thomson, one of 46 dancers
performing in Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
(photo: Mark Kornbluth)

Anyone thinking Rainer's so-called pedestrian movement is, in fact, simple or easy will get a big ol' surprise from Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA and might even find a kind of virtuosity in it. (If you caught Michalek's original Slow Dancing, in 2007, at Lincoln Center Plaza, you know he knows from glamorous star power, spectacle...and s-l-o-wwwwnesssss.) But, for goodness sake, was Rainer's Trio A ever anything but engagingly focused, confident, exhilarating in execution? No way will she ever not be my anti-hero hero.

Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA, presented in collaboration with Rainer, continues at Danspace Project tonight and concludes tomorrow evening. Both screenings are available from 6pm to 10pm. Viewers may come and go as they please and can also view Sally Banes' 1978 film of Rainer dancing Trio A.

Admission is free with RSVP recommended. For reservations, visit danspaceproject.org or call (866) 811.4111.

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

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What fresh hell? Enda Walsh brings "Arlington" to Brooklyn

The world beyond whatever literal, metaphoric or metaphysical rooms or shelters we construct for ourselves is a precarious place--is it not, now more than ever?--and any time spent hiding from it will be limited. Even your own body, in fact, can be thought of as a room or containing structure--illusory, in its way, and unstable.

In his 2016 play, Arlington, Irish playwright and director Enda Walsh--who collaborated with the dying David Bowie on one of his last works, the musical Lazarus--imagines the loveless, meticulously sterile environment of a waiting room, a transitional space continuously and increasingly imposed upon by a ravaged and ravaging external world. Neither the artificial potted tree (easily toppled) nor the aquarium (where are the fish?) provide reliable signs of life and warmth. And surveillance monitors deny even the solace of privacy as you wait for your number to be called.

Staged in its American premiere at St. Ann's Warehouse and co-presented with the Irish Arts Center as part of IAC's Enda Walsh in New York project, the 90-minute play overlaps its three characters' actions with radio voiceovers and highlights the physical quality of their desperation with Emma Martin's ingenious choreography. Alarming sounds, malfunctioning lights and even a small shower of what looks like blood-red ash intensify the situation for Isla (Charlie Murphy), stuck in a room in a tower, a gawky young man (Hugh O'Connor) tasked with keeping an eye on her from his monitor-cluttered security office and another oddball (Oona Doherty) who, in the midst of it all, bursts onto the scene to unleash an extraordinary dance solo. It is Doherty--in her fiery, doom-eager vigor--who dares to raise the banner for life. Although her appearance certainly kicks this play up several notches, there's continuous interest for fans of dance throughout--in particular, the brilliant angularity of Murphy's embodiment of Isla, easily a Duchamp/Marcel Marceau/Pee Wee Herman collab.

Arlington is a disturbing, bracing collage of Walsh's text, Martin's movement, music (Teho Teardo), sound (Helen Atkinson), video (Jack Phelan), scenic design (Jamie Vartan), lighting (Adam Silverman) and the riveting work of its three performers.

Arlington continues through May 28 at St. Ann's Warehouse. For information and tickets, click here.

Rooms--the companion production in the Enda Walsh in New York series--continues through May 28 at Cybert Tire, site of the future home of the Irish Arts Center. For complete information and tickets for Rooms, click here.

St. Ann's Warehouse
45 Water Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Cybert Tire
726 11th Avenue (near 51st Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Vito Acconci, 77

Vito Acconci, Performance Artist and Uncommon Architect, Dies at 77
by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, April 28, 2017

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World premiere by Aynsley Vandenbroucke comes to Abrons

Aynsley Vandenbroucke
in her solo, And
Above: Banging on a pan.
Below: Making like Spalding Gray.
(photos: Ian Douglas)

There's no end to And.

Well, it does end--in the literal sense--because, of course, the audience is allowed to get up and go home. But, really, it could have picked up from there and rolled on. And I'm not sure I would have had a problem just sitting there, in Abrons Arts Center, watching and listening to Aynsley Vandenbroucke mostly talking about her life and doing other things. Why not? It's an expansive life lived by a woman self-possessed, awake, curious, always ready to tilt into next. We tilt with her.

And is autobiography bridging disciplines--visual, verbal, sonic, kinetic ones. And a bibliography; Vandenbroucke's program notes include a long list of her recent and influential reading. (Spending an hour with a smart cookie who wears her smartness with accessible humanity and ease ain't half-bad.) And's maker and mover regards the work as "a series of live, three-dimensional essays." Sometimes she tucks the many pieces of her story and her preoccupations inside an inventory of statistical details, at once containing and revealing, safeguarding and sharing intimate, emotional truths. ("Number of times I questioned my relationship to the world around me: Countless.") As she recites this litany, her voice--quiet at first, increasingly warm and supple and musical--she takes her quirky statistics to a level of monastic chant.

There is the dancemaker and the academic, both driven by questions and uncertainty. ("Number of times an older choreographer told me I'd stop asking questions as I got older: 1.") There is a marriage and an entrepreneurial partnership, both adventurous, both now ended. Backstory: With her ex-- photographer Mathew Poikok--Vandenbroucke had created and directed Mt. Tremper Arts in the Catskills. Purchasing property at Mt. Tremper also figures in a monologue by the late Spalding Gray, and she shares this video with us, repeatedly interrupting her own entertaining narrative with Gray's, one of a number of ways she toys with notions of structure and constraint. Both artists are dressed in countrified plaid shirts. One frets about gypsy moths; the other worries the details of hosting an arts center, like placing mints on artists' bed pillows.

And there's single life in one's late 30s, hook-ups in the digital age. There is Vandenbroucke dancing on video, a white woman nearly dissolving in the liquid fire of house music, her hair flying, arms flinging, face a blur though her shimmying body remains a distinct, black-clad, vertical column inside this ecstacy. She and the music belong to each other--though, ultimately, she belongs to herself.

Often single words, or single quotes, briefly flash on the theater's walls. We do or do not take them in. We do or do not notice or focus on them. We might grab one and swallow it whole because it means something to us. In that way, Vandenbroucke gets us dancing for her in a space we have made inside our own minds.

At one moment, Vandenbroucke entirely removes herself from the picture, sitting out on a nearby staircase as we gaze at the visuals playing out before us. At another time, she relocates herself and the locus of focus to a space in audience territory. In both incidents, you immediately feel the difference, which speaks to the confident, convincing presence she has established as And's performer.

*Live and video materials created and performed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke
*Lighting and overall production design by Nelson Downend
*Sound and video design by Max Bernstein

And runs through Sunday, April 2 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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Amy Krouse Rosenthal, 51

Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Children’s Author and Filmmaker, Dies at 51
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, March 13, 2017

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: Dana Michel

Dana Michel performs Mercurial George
in this year's American Realness festival.

The Black Canadian dance artist Dana Michel--who made a big splash at home and here in New York in 2014 with her solo Yellow Towel--is back with a new solo, Mercurial George, at Abrons Arts Center for American Realness.

She has described the hour-long piece as an act of “wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig” asking “What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body?” A seeming extension of Yellow Towel, with its genesis in racial stereotypes, Mercurial George implies the release of an authentic identity not imposed by others.

This is pertinent for exploration. Identity and marginal otherness--from immigration status to religion to gender--are battlegrounds with renewed real life-or-death stakes in the current moment. And Michel is a curious, fearless explorer, eccentric and mercurial indeed in her body language, fascination with the odd prop oddly used, and tendency to randomly mumble or declaim. She opens dimensions of mind and body that we usually declare unseemly and diseased and seems to say, "Look what else is here."

It's an interesting task and an interesting approach, requiring a performer who can submerge her calm, charming persona and grab hold of a viewer, no matter how resistant, for the space of an hour. Not easy. Go take a look and see what else is there.

Mercurial George
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Here's a mini-interview with Dana Michel

on the occasion of her January 2014 presentation of Yellow Towel

for American Realness.

(And here is my review of that show.)

Mercurial George will be presented again on Monday, January 9 at 4pm and Tuesday, January 10 at 7pm. Run Time: 55 minutes. For information on this and other American Realness events, now through January 12, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
(Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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A nearly-winter Wonderland of art at Invisible Dog

You're in Wonderland
in Boerum Hill's The Invisible Dog Art Center.
(photos: Maria Baranova)

Dance artist Yanira Castro of a canary torsi has made her first venture into video installation with PERFORMANCE | PORTRAIT, part of Wonderland, a new exhibition at The Invisible Dog, the Boerum Hill art center directed by Lucien Zayan. I found Castro's work here--which I won't spoil for you--to be an experience to be seduced by, to breathe with. I don't know if this video actually recalibrates one's seeing, but if you then look around the rest of Wonderland, you might notice similar invitations to take your time, lean in close and savor what's tiny and intricate and often interestingly elusive.

Lead Collaborators
Yanira Castro (Concept/Choreographer)
Kathy Couch (Installation Artist)
Stephan Moore (Interaction Designer)
Julie Wyman (Filmmaker)

Performer Collaborators
Anna Azrieli
Leslie Cuyjet
Peter Schmitz
David Thomson

Viewing schedule for PERFORMANCE | PORTRAIT:
In main space: December 3-30
In the glass house: January 5-15

WONDERLAND 

features over twenty artists:

Douglas Adesko, Matilde Alessandra, Vanessa Belli, Connie Bree, Guillaume Bresson, Tegan Brozyna, Jon Burgerman, Halsey Chait, Timothy Corbett, Andrea DeFelice, Digby and Iona, Lars van Dooren, Shannon Finnegan, Ryan Frank, Camille de Galbert, Crystal Gregory, Michael Hili, Oliver Jeffers, Caitlin Masley, Spencer Merolla, Anne Mourier, Dara Oshin, Mac Premo, Patrick Reynolds, Rachel Selekman, William Suran, Ian Trask, Peter Treiber, Nikita Vishnevskiy, Kevin Waldron and Alexa Williams

Viewing schedule for WONDERLAND:
Saturday, December 3 to Friday, December 30

Special Gallery Hours:
Monday to Saturday from 12pm to 7pm
Sunday from 12pm to 5pm

The Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen Street, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn
(directions/map)

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Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.: Receiving our spiritual nourishment

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

is a choreographer who researches, illustrates and creates

 from an African-American male perspective. 

In his work, he tackles issues resulting from 

a capitalistic imperialist patriarchal white supremacist system.

(photo by Ricarrdo Valentine)

***

Love & Forgiveness: I am really interested in the social function of love and forgiveness. I question a society that calls itself a “Christian nation” yet remains at odds with the practice of that very philosophy. I’ve found that love and forgiveness in this society is derived out of a white heterosexual patriarchal religious structure. In order to receive these vibrations (because we are humans and understand frequencies i.e. feelings, hence the use), according to the dominant socio-religion you have to assimilate to the specific ways in which love and forgiveness is imparted to you. For me the concept of love and forgiveness is found in the humanity of my mother’s and grandmother’s hands. Where do we receive our spiritual nourishment?

Collard greens and Corn bread go together like love and forgiveness an ancient healing practice. Most of us forget the ways in which we’ve fucked up. Our mothers and grandmothers, and this a general statement, are always there fueling us since birth. It’s up to us as growing citizens of our communities to look at these finite yet very embodied experiences of love and forgiveness as tools of resistance. I ingested the magic of my mother and grandmother, becoming realized, knowing that in order for me to pass through this plane of existence I’d need to learn how to love myself and forgive myself and reciprocate that with others. How do we become active in love and forgiveness? Let’s cook more, sharing the warmth of our souls with hungry hearts and stomachs.  

-- Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

how to survive a plague

by Brother(hood) Dance! 

(Ricarrdo Valentine and Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.)

Danspace Project at St.Marks Church

Platform 2016: Lost & Found

Co-curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Will Rawls

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