InfiniteBody Honor Roll 2021

InfiniteBody Honor Roll 2021

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

As always, this is not a Best-Of list, certainly, but a kind of memory palace of remarkable arts events and resources I connected with in 2021 during the continued pandemic. Given how things went this year, it was not a very dance-focused time for me, except where dancing was streamable, but it was great for catching up with streaming series I might have missed otherwise or books I now had more time to read.

2022 looks like it will start out pretty much the same. I send you, your loved ones, and your community best wishes for a safe, healthy, artful, and wonderful New Year!

 

Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You (HBO)

Omar Sy starring in Lupin (Netflix)

 

I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World, written and directed by Ike Holter, world premiere, Studio Theatre, streaming from December 10, 2020 through March 7, 2021

Lupin (Part 1), directed by Marcela Said, Ludovic Bernard and Louis Leterrier, starring Omar Sy, Netflix, streaming from January 8

New Sounds Presents: ETHEL with John Schaefer, The Greene Space and WNYC and WQXR, YouTube, from January 14

 

Regina King, director, One Night in Miami (photo: Evan Agostini)

Regina King in The Harder They Fall (photo: YouTube)

One Night in Miami  (Amazon Prime Video)

 

One Night in Miami, directed by Regina King, Amazon Prime Video, streaming from January 15

I May Destroy You, created by and starring Michaela Coel, directed by Sam Miller and Michaela Coel, HBO Max, streaming from June 7, 2020

Kapaemahu, directed by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson; animation director, Daniel Sousa; 2020; viewed February 2021

Black Art: In the Absence of Light, directed by Sam Pollard, HBO Max, streaming from February 13

Nomadland, directed by Chloé Zhao, Hulu, streaming from February 19

Mr. SOUL!, directed by Melissa Haizlip and Sam Pollard, released August 28, 2020; streaming on PBS from February 28

I Care A Lot, directed by J Blakeman, Netflix, streaming from September 12, 2020

Mank, directed by David Fincher, Netflix, streaming from December 4, 2020

Sound of Metal, directed by Darius Marder, Amazon Prime Video, streaming from December 4, 2020

Megan Thee Stallion on Legendary (HBO Max)

Cast of HBO Max's A Black Lady Sketch Show

Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation and Awakened Clarity, by Tracee Stanley, Shambala, 2021

Tina, directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, HBO Max, streaming from March 27

Twyla Moves, directed by Steve Cantor, American Masters, PBS, streaming from March 26

All In: The Fight for Democracy, directed by Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés, Amazon Prime Video, streaming from September 9, 2020

All the Rage, by Rosamond S. King, Nightboat Books, 2021

Chasing Magic, by Ayodele Casel, streaming on The Joyce Theater website, beginning April 8

Conversation without Walls: Alice Sheppard and iele paloumpis, YouTube, April 9

Legendary (Season 1), directed by Rik Reinholdtsen, HBO Max, streaming from May 27, 2020

Legendary (Season 2), directed by Rik Reinholdtsen, HBO Max, streaming from May 6, 2021

Romeo and Juliet, National Theatre, directed by Simon Godwin, PBS Great Performances, April 23-May 21

A Black Lady Sketch Show, created by Robin Thede, directors Dime Davis (Season 1); Lacey Duke and Brittany Scott Smith (Season 2) HBO Max, streaming from 2019-2021

A Body in Fukushima, by Eiko Otake and William Johnston, Wesleyan University Press, May 2021

DanceAfrica 2021, BAM, streaming May 29 through June 10

In Treatment (all four seasons), various directors, HBO Max

The Flight Attendant, HBO Max, streaming from November 26, 2020

 

Author Clint Smith (photo: Carletta Girma)

                                                    Author Farah Jasmine Griffin (photo: Peggy Dillard Toone) 

 

Author Annette Gordon-Reed (photo: Stephanie Mitchell)

 

Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, by Laura Raicovich, 2021

How the Word is Passed, by Clint Smith, Little, Brown & Co., 2021

Naomi Osaka, directed by Garrett Bradley, Netflix, streaming from July 16

In Our Mothers' Gardens, directed by Shantrelle P. Lewis, Netflix, streaming from 2020 

Transcendant Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi, Alfred A. Knopf, 2021

Mary J. Blige's My Life, directed by Vanessa Roth, Amazon Prime Video, 2021

Poet Warrior: A Memoir, by Joy Harjo, 2021

Surrealism Beyond Borders, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 11, 2021 through January 30, 2022

The Harder They Fall, directed by Jeymes Samuel, Netflix, streaming from November 3

 

Bo Burnham in Inside (Netflix)

Cast of Call My Agent! (Netflix)

King Richard, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, HBO Max, streaming from November 19

Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, by Farah Jasmine Griffin, W.W. Norton & Company, 2021

Succession, created by Jesse Armstrong, HBO Max, streaming from 2018

Inside, by Bo Burnham, Netflix, streaming from May 2021

On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021

Call My Agent!, Netflix, streaming from 2015

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Artists Reach Out: Mitsu Salmon

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

Mitsu Salmon

Mitsu Salmon
(photo: Rich Matheson)

Mitsu Salmon creates performance and visual works that fuse multiple disciplines. She was born in Los Angeles to a Japanese mother and an American father. Creating in differing media—translating one medium to another—is connected to the translation of differing cultures and languages. Salmon received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and her undergrad degree from New York University.  She has participated in artist residencies at Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), Incheon Art Platform (Korea), Oxbow (MI), Guildhall (NY) and PAM (LA) as well as in Chicago at Links Hall, High Concept Lab, HATCH, and the Chicago Cultural Center. She has performed solo work at places such as Performance Space 122, Dance Theater Workshop, and Highways Performance Space. She has received the Midwest Nexus Touring Grant, Chicago Dancemaker’s Lab Grant, and DCASE IAP.

Mitsu Salmon
(above: courtesy of the artist;
below: Nick Witten)

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

Yes, I was working on a solo performance called Orchid about the history and symbolism of orchids as connected to imperialism, sexuality, and the environment. The piece looks at the choreography of plants, both in terms of physical gestures and their human-intervened transportation. This work was supported through a lab grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum which is the biggest grant and opportunity I have received so far.

For the last year, I was given a rehearsal space, working weekly with a dramaturg and collaborating with sound artists. Right before the stay-at-home orders in Chicago, I was scheduled to share a work-in-progress performance of the piece. But that was canceled, and the talks for the final showing postponed.

Now I am wondering how to pick up this work again? How do I stay engaged when I have no idea when it can be performed? How do I develop the piece outside of a dance studio and in my small living room? How can this work and process feel relevant given what is happening in the world?

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

My father is a multidisciplinary artist and runs an experimental theater company, Open Gate. When I was a child, I would accompany him to his rehearsals and started dancing in his shows when I was eight. I went to an arts high school in Los Angeles, where I majored in theater. It was there I realized I actually wasn't interested in conventional theater and began making videos, writing, and doing these irreverent public performances. My practice currently blends and interweaves multiple art forms such as dance, voice, and visual arts as ways of non-linear storytelling.

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

The other day I was speaking to my friend, Nami, who is a gardener. She had been commissioned to grow specialized plants by restaurants. But now those restaurants are struggling, and she is unsure if they will need her vegetables. When I asked her what she is going to do, she said, "Keep growing!" I then said, "Do you mean internally or keep growing your plants?" She said, "Both."

This struck me. She was going to keep tending to her garden even though she doesn't know where her vegetables will go. And I will tend to my visions even though I don’t know where they will go.

As an artist right now, with only canceled or postponed opportunities and unsure of the point of my efforts, part of me wants to just let the ground go fallow. However, after speaking to her and inspired by the plants, I envision and aim towards growth. To water, weed and give sunlight to the seeds spread despite not knowing where and how their fruition manifests.

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

My current practice is talking to family and friends, cooking, taking walks, reading the news, hugging my partner, and processing what is happening through dance vignettes and watercolors.  I envision this growing into something new that I don't even know yet. I want to invest my energy into a larger project. But, with all this shifting of the world of my world, and focusing on care and grieving, I find it challenging to concentrate for things beyond the immediate. Even to respond to these questions took discipline. 

I care about roots and relationships. Roots reaching and grounded in the body, in life, in family, in history, and in possibilities. Relationships of care. Seeing now more than ever how deeply interdependent we all are.

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

My practice is in the world now, in sanitizing, grieving, foraging for food, breathing, avoiding people, washing my hands, taking Instagram dance classes, zoom birthday parties, worrying, more worrying, and then feeling okay for a moment.

******

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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In an octopus's garden at Performance Space New York

Performance Space New York
introduced its new Octopus series
with an afternoon of performance
curated by Gillian Walsh.

Octopus: Inverted Jester
Organized by Gillian Walsh
Presented by Performance Space New York
Saturday, December 8, 2018

Performance Space New York has a cooler way for us to think about activated networks--not spider webs this time but, instead, an octopus with arms stretching, flexing, rippling and sensing in multiple directions, each of these arms a nimble outpost of the central brain. Wouldn't you like to have what is, essentially, nine brains with which to navigate this mad, mad world?

For the first of Performance Space New York's four, artist-curated Octopus programs, dance artist Gillian Walsh ran with this concept and produced a smart show entitled Inverted Jester, a name that, for me, immediately called up the image of that jester's many-tentacled fool's cap as another octopus-like thing in our universe. And sure as can be, Walsh's many-tentacled program also invoked the historic role of jester as provocative wiseass.

We had Davon Rainey, in barely-there sparkles and stilettos, lip syncing Björk ("Bachelorette") and Nina Simone ("I Loves You, Porgy"), both songs supercharged by the blend of race and gender in one glamorous, sinewy body. It was enough of an exacting performance at a comfortable distance from Rainey's audience, but when he strode into the aisle between seats, a viewer could clearly see, close up, the intelligent complexity of his body, especially his face, in every moment and movement.

Sophia Cleary's website describes her as "a genreless, childless & interdisciplinary artist working with jokes, video, dance, music, and more," and I thank Walsh for making sure I can add Cleary's intense, aggressive weirdness to my long list of experiences in life. Our paths might not have crossed otherwise. Like electric coils wrapping ever more tightly around your sensibilities, her humor demands, and it dares, and then it delivers an unbelievable, nightmarish lap dance to someone you know.

The last Octopus arm I saw--I couldn't stay for Cherry Iocovozzi and Silver Cousler--was Lorelei Ramirez's stand-up act plus her Joy of Painting-style demo. For the latter, just imagine if the late Bob Ross had not been Bob Ross but, rather, a queer Latinx with a laptop loaded with Adobe Illustrator and a mind loaded with a sneaky kind of scary. As her website reveals, "my mother thinks I am possessed and I have accepted this as my only beautiful truth." Mom might know what she's talking about. I had to leave after Ramirez to go feed my cat and get a bite to eat before an evening show elsewhere, but I came away with a serious case of Adobe Illustrator-envy--that Brush Library!!--and I am not at all a visual artist.

Performance Space New York's Octopus is potentially fun and worth checking out if you like taking a chance on something unexpected. Future editions, all at 4pm include:

Saturday, February 23—organized by the Ethyl Eichelberger Committee
Saturday, March 23—organized by Richard Kennedy
Saturday, June 1—organized by Charlotte Brathwaite

For program details and ticketing for each show, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), 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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An audience with Angie Pittman

Dancer-choreographer Angie Pittman (photo: Scott Shaw)

Sequined Kisses and Vazlean is a diptych that grapples with ways to give love, receive love, be cool, be resilient, achieve survival, and daydream. Sequined Kisses... is an exploration of interiority, and its relationship to compression, love and joy within the context of historical trauma against Black folk. ...VazLean centers “cool” as an African Diasporic concept through greasiness, lubrication, and James Brown cape choreography. Together, these two pieces are a journey towards what Donnell Alexander calls “finding the essential soul while being essentially lost.”

Presented as part of The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness at The Kitchen, Angie Pittman's performance of conjoined solos--Sequined Kisses and Vazlean--seemed like a half-hallucinated audience with Black shamanic or ancestral royalty. The James Brown/Prince lineage, in particular. One night only--and for your eyes only, lucky ones.

We saw her partly in dim light and, even when bathed in spotlight, in a form that seemed indirect and indistinct, often twirling or oriented sideways, never giving us a good look in the eye. Moving and gesturing as if through a fishbowl filled with gel. Here and not here.

The radiant white-and-gold satin cape (designed by Athena Kokoronis), which Pittman wore at the top of the hour, was lifted away by a tender supplicant and only returned late in the action. Musical voices accompanying her were often unpleasantly muddled and distorted, discordant and abrasive as if they, too, represented someones not of this time. Many pasts accumulated into the present.

Our evening with Pittman unfolded in a much-transformed performance space that turned what is normally inclined rows of audience seating into dark, bleak mountain for the holy descent and re-ascent of a spiritual being. The audience--and we were many--sat in semicircular rows opposite this "mountain," watching Pittman gradually forge her path down its central steps, her movements suggesting an effort to turn a three-dimensional body into bold, iconic marks against a black surface. Ancient, enigmatic, beautiful, powerful.

Powerful, especially, when reaching the black floor and whirling nearly--but never--out of balance on the dips and surge of the music, her surefootedness a thrill and an instruction. Vulnerable to the risk of stumbling and yet taking care of herself in the midst of the ecstasy she claimed.

Angie Pittman: Sequined Kisses and Vazlean is closed.

The Kitchen's visual art exhibition of The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness continues through August 3. Artists include Josh Begley, Paul Chan, Mel Chin, Ja’Tovia Gary, Ken Gonzales-Day, Kate Greenstreet, Titus Kaphar, Baseera Khan, Charlotte Lagarde, Seung-Min Lee, Glenn Ligon, Mores McWreath, Sandeep Mukherjee, Native Art Department International, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Cindy Sherman, Rodrigo Valenzuela and Anicka Yi. For information, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (west of 10th Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Robert Indiana, 89

Robert Indiana, 89, Who Turned ‘Love’ Into Enduring Art, Is Dead
by Jori Finkel, The New York Times, May 21, 2018

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A.M. Weaver (1954–2018)

A.M. Weaver (1954–2018)
by ARTFORUM, January 24, 2018

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MOMA to explore work of Judson Dance Theater artists

Peter Moore. Performance view of Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton
in Brown’s Trillium, Concert of Dance #4, January 30, 1963.
© Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Courtesy Paula Cooper, New York

Museum of Modern Art

announces its upcoming exhibition:

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done

September 16, 2018–February 03, 2019

Ana Janevski, Curator

Thomas J. Lax, Associate Curator

with Martha Joseph, Curatorial Assistant,

Department of Media and Performance Art

For a brief period in the early 1960s, a group of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers made use of a local church to present performances that Village Voice critic Jill Johnston declared the most exciting new developments in dance in a generation. Redefining the kinds of movement that could count as dance, the Judson participants—Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, Bill Dixon, Judith Dunn, David Gordon, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Rudy Perez, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, and Elaine Summers, among others—would go on to profoundly shape all fields of art in the second half of the 20th century. Taking its name from the Judson Memorial Church, a socially engaged Protestant congregation in New York’s Greenwich Village, Judson Dance Theater was organized as a series of open workshops from which its participants developed performances. Together, the artists challenged traditional understandings of choreography, expanding dance in ways that reconsidered its place in the world. They employed new compositional methods to strip dance of its theatrical conventions, incorporating “ordinary” movements—gestures typical of the street or home, for example, rather than a stage—into their work, along with games, simple tasks, and social dances to infuse their pieces with a sense of spontaneity.

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done highlights the ongoing significance of the history of Judson Dance Theater, beginning with the workshops and classes led by Anna Halprin, Robert Ellis Dunn, and James Waring and exploring the influence of other figures working downtown such as Simone Forti and Andy Warhol, as well as venues for collective action like Judson Gallery and the Living Theatre. Through live performance and some 300 objects including film, photographic documentation, sculptural objects, scores, music, poetry, architectural drawings, and archival material, the exhibition celebrates the group’s multidisciplinary and collaborative ethos as well as the range of its participants. The Work Is Never Done includes a gallery exhibition, a print publication, and an ambitious performance program in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium.

Exhibition information

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Tim Rollins, 62

Artist Tim Rollins Has Died at 62
by Benjamin Sutton, Hyperallergic, December 27, 2017

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It's complicated: Cynthia Oliver celebrates Black masculinity

At left, Duane Cyrus with Jonathan Gonzalez
in Cynthia Oliver's Virago-Man Dem
(photo: Chris Cameron)

The Latin prefix “vir” means “man”; the suffix “-ago” indicates female. Thus, the term “virago” has, since ancient times, suggested that elusive flicker between genders we know so well and deny so violently. 

--from promotional text for Cynthia Oliver's Virago-Man Dem

Dance artist Cynthia Oliver centers the human body in her adroit Virago-Man Dem, just opened at BAM's Next Wave Festival. In fact, the four bodies centered here--Duane Cyrus, Jonathan Gonzalez, Ni’Ja Whitson and Niall Noel Jones--comprise one of the most cunning, most satisfying performance ensembles on hand this season. But Virago-Man Dem also boasts visual and sonic design of strong-enough confidence to support its movement without distracting or detracting from it. Particularly impressive is the work of Black Kirby (Afro-speculative comics artists John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) with projections and animations by John Boesche and lighting designer Amanda K. Ringger's rich imagination of place, time and mood. With costume designer Susan Becker and composer Jason Finkelman in the mix, Oliver directs a dream team of adepts at BAM Fisher.

With this piece, Oliver cracks open masculinity as a fixed idea received and upheld by Black men. Inspired by her dancers' experiences as well as her dual sensibilities as a woman of Afro-Caribbean birth living and working in the US, she draws from observation of masculinities, finding material in a deceptively easy stroll down the street, a clever dash on a basketball court, a sinuous sashay along imagined catwalks and more. What makes her resulting dance not merely a patchwork of a bunch of stuff done by three male-identified performers and one gender nonconforming performer is her taste and talent for connective flow and her eye for how being willfully or ecstatically off-center or molten or in-between uncovers the more inside the person. More self, more capacity, more joy, more supple, resilient strength. It's this more that, sadly, often threatens individuals, families, communities, religions and nations. It's this more--isn't it?--that for which we secretly yearn and which artists brilliantly model for us.

It might not necessarily take a woman to watch these things from the outside and bring them to her canvas or stage, but it takes this woman, perhaps, with  apparently endless reserve of movement ideas to bring her concepts alive and keep us interested over 75 minutes. And from the work's beginning (in physical stillness and visual murkiness) through the hoodie-covered dancers' testing of bodies and selves and their growing clarity and enlivening, with Ringger enhancing the dimensions of Oliver's sculpted movement, we're kept on the edge of our seats.

Here's a journey ready to be taken more than once, but consider yourself lucky if you get to see Virago-Man Dem even just one time.

Virago-Man Dem continues tonight through Saturday evening with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Prior to tonight's performance, Cynthia Oliver will offer a free talk, Examining Black Masculinity, at 6pm in Wendy's Subway Reading Room, downstairs at BAM Fisher.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Lining up: Abigail Levine performs LeWitt at Fridman Gallery

Dance artist Abigail Levine
at Fridman Gallery, SoHo
(photos ©2017, Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Abigail Levine

Re-stagings No. 1: Choreographing LeWitt

Sound design by Dave Ruder

Fridman Gallery

Abigail Levine interprets Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #56 (1970) as a choreographic score, taking 25 hours over the course of 5 days to complete the 3,744 lines. Sound design: Dave Ruder. Choreographing LeWitt is the first in the multi-work series Re-stagings, which reads modern and postmodern visual artworks as scores for performance.

On the scaffold, she slowly walks her line, dragging splayed left hand, hip, shoulder along demarcated whiteness, smearing traces. Right hand, high, inscribing. Imperfectly, her lines marks time. A line stops. She stops, turns, regroups at its beginning, beginning beginning. A body beginning, a body makes this, lead scraping paper, with story, a woman's body.

(photos ©2017, Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Re-stagings No. 1: Choreographing LeWitt continues tomorrow and Thursday, from noon through 6pm. Thursday's closing reception is from 6pm to 8pm. Admission is free. There are a few seats.

Fridman Gallery
287 Spring Street (near Hudson Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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José Luis Cuevas, 83

José Luis Cuevas, a Dark Master of Mexican Art, Dies at 83
by William Grimes, The New York Times, July 7, 2017

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Rand Castile, 78

Rand Castile, Who Opened Doors for Asian Art, Dies at 78
by William Grimes, The New York Times, May 23, 2017

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Koma Otake honors his ghosts at Danspace Project

Master dancer Koma Otake performs
the final section of his solo, The Ghost Festival,
outside St. Mark's Church, May 11.
All photos ©2017, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

all photos ©2017, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Using a mobile trailer, Koma creates an interactive visual art installment, as well as a performance space. The design, paintings, and choreography, have all been created or set by Koma himself. Only through performance and the presence of his body in relation to the set does The Ghost Festival truly come to form. Koma envisions The Ghost Festival as a meditative and communal space to honor the connection between past and present, and provide a home for lost spirits.

--from publicity for The Ghost Festival by Koma Otake 

The legends surrounding St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery--home of legendary Danspace Project--include hauntings by its 17th Century builder, Peter Stuyvesant, Secretary-General of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, who is entombed in the church's east wall. But now dance artist Koma Otake has raised other shades at St. Mark's with The Ghost Festival, his first multidisciplinary project without Eiko Otake, his wife and long time creative partner. Although not entirely without Eiko!

If you showed up at St. Mark's at 7pm to catch a five-minute preview in the little park outside the church, you'd catch a glimpse of Eiko ladling cool water onto Koma's naked but bandaged back as he crouched and bent into a trailer painted with his art and bearing a shallow pool of water in which a stand of candles float and glisten.

This mysterious preview is almost unbearably poignant, especially when Eiko carefully closes the trailer's doors around Koma's still-crouching body. One thinks of the foot injury that kept this master dancer from performing for nearly a decade and set the stage for Eiko's well-honored solo projects. It is wonderful to see Koma again. The image he presents carries dimensions of sacredness and of sadness. Of course, isn't that almost a definition of what Eiko and Koma have always done--together or apart?

Inside the church, shortly after 8pm, the performance proceeds like an offering to the spirit of Pina Bausch, an early influence on Eiko and Koma, especially heard in the Francisco Canaro milongas and tangos that fill most of the soundtrack, music that brings to mind Bausch's signature dance-theater. Butoh's genius, Kazuo Ohno, is also here, for sure, from Koma's legacy, but I do not think I am wrong to see Charlie Chaplin peeking impishly from behind an invisible curtain.

How is it possible that I have never truly focused on Koma before The Ghost Festival? How is it that I find myself now smitten by this dancer when, before, I was merely impressed? He is heartbreaking. He is sexy. He is coy and elfin and sly. His unkempt cascade of hair and soft, pliable form are illuminations. He is rumpled, dusty, disheveled, musty, imprecise as a branch in the wind that carries a current of feeling. He is one with the props that surround him, folding his entire slim and yielding body over a chair stacked with black pillows, his legs splayed behind him. He is an irresistible performer. All of this must come from the love he offers these predecessors in dance. Koma is radiant with this love for performance and performers; as the piece opens with Jacques Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas, he seems to plead for even the shadow of their presence to stay and never leave him.

In the spirit of "every goodbye ain't gone," Koma's "festival" does not end despite an assistant parading around the space with a sign that reads "Finale." We're given a fifteen-minute break, mainly to pick up our belongings and move outside the church. (People lagged a bit; it was a chilly evening.) Once assembled, we heard the strains of a Japanese folk song--one perhaps related to traditional celebrations of the departed--and Koma emerged in flowing white to engage with his intriguing trailer/temple, at one point mounting it and generally behaving like the sort of looney you rarely see anymore around this East Village neighborhood. It was fun to watch unsuspecting folks walk by and check out our crowd and Koma's commotion.

With lighting by the legendary Kathy Kaufmann

The Ghost Festival continues through Saturday with performances at 8pm as well as free 5-minute public previews, open to all, at 7pm outside St. Mark's Church. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
2nd Avenue and 10th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Magdalena Abakanowicz, 86

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sculptor of Brooding Forms, Dies at 86
by William Grimes, The New York Times, April 21, 2017

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Julian Stanczak, 88

Julian Stanczak, Abstract Painter, Dies at 88
by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, April 11, 2017

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Jay Lynch, 72

Jay Lynch, Underground Comics Creator, Dies at 72
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, March 12, 2017

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Howard Hodgkin, 84

Howard Hodgkin, Whose Paintings Were Coded With Emotion, Dies at 84
by William Grimes, The New York Times, March 9, 2017

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Artists come together for global human rights at Dixon Place

This weekend, Dixon Place hosts a new arts festival dedicated to global issues around human rights. The International Human Rights Arts Festival has been launched by DP and producer Tom Block's Institute of Prophetic Activist Art, an educational venture drawing from a spectrum of mystical philosophies, from Martin Buber to Black Elk, for creative engagement with societal concerns. Last evening's opening ceremony was introduced by the venerable television writer, producer and progressive activist Norman Lear. Richard Nixon, he reminded us, derided his groundbreaking All in the Family as a show for and about "queers, fags, homos and hippies."

Well, "queers, fags, homos and hippies," frequently make up the audience at Dixon Place and might well enjoy much that's on tap at the IHRA fest now through Sunday. And there's certainly a lot with 2016 Bessie-winner Joya Powell (Outstanding Emerging Choreographer) showing work today at 1:30 with her troupe, Movement of the People Dance Company, on a bill with Spilling Ink Dance Company, a troupe devoted to the arts of India and the Indian diaspora. Another up-and-coming dancemaker, Jessica Chen has commissioned works for a 10pm show tonight featuring her J CHEN PROJECT troupe, Tom Tsai, Karla Garcia and Heather Robles. Edisa Weeks (Delirious Dances) and Jacqueline Dugal (Dugal Dance Projects) share tomorrow evening's 9pm slot.

And, whew! That's just the dance part!

With performance, film, poetry, theater, music, visual arts, kids activities, discussions, lounge performances and the ever-handy Dixon Place bar, there's truly something for every interest. Get a schedule of events and ticket information (including day passes) here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Update on Eiko Otake at Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Eiko Otake at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine
November 2016
(photos: William Johnston)

Ask master dancer Eiko Otake about her experience of being an artist-in-residence for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine's Dignity Initiative and, among other things, she will speak of keen feelings of outsider identity. Not US born, not white, not Christian. And yet this grand, historic institution on New York's Upper West Side--with its well-known commitment to the arts, the environment and social justice--has become a space for her to connect with people from all over the world and all walks of life, most by happenstance.

Eiko's residency at the Cathedral from Eiko and Koma on Vimeo.

Last November, I wrote of Otake's engagement there in The Christa Project, a visual arts exhibition centered on images of female divinity (see post). Her unique residency continues through early March when she will join with anthropologist Marilyn Ivy (Columbia University), photographer-historian William Johnston, videographer Alexis Moh, performance artist John Kelly and other speakers and participants to commemorate the six-year anniversary of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, the most severe nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

Remembering Fukushima: Art and Conversations, presented in partnership with Asia Society and Danspace Project, will explore the relationship of body, place and history. Participating artists and speakers include:

Eiko Otake

William Johnston

Marilyn Ivy

Thomas Looser

Mark McCloughan

Alexis Moh

Nora Thompson

Megu Tagami

John Kelly

Carol Lipnik

DonChristian Jones

Geo Wyeth

Ronald Ebrecht

Ralph Samuelson

Elizabeth Brown

Jake Price

Nona Faustine Simmons

NYC iSCHOOL

Remembering Fukushima: Art and Conversations

Saturday, March 11, 1pm-5pm

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine

1047 Amsterdam Avenue (at 112th Street), Manhattan

(directions)

All are welcome. A donation of $10 is suggested but not required.

For information and updates, click here.

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John Berger, 90

John Berger, art critic and author, dies aged 90
by Mark Brown, The Guardian, January 2, 2017

John Berger, Provocative Art Critic, Dies at 90
by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, January 2, 2017