Who is this body? Anabella Lenzu at La MaMa Moves!

Anabella Lenzu
(photos: Anabella Lenzu Dance)
"This is my body. The dance is coming from my body,
not the body of a 25-year-old."
--Lenzu in her post-show conversation with director Daniel Pettrow

What I most appreciate about Anabella Lenzu (Anabella Lenzu/Dance Drama), whom I have known since she took my dance writing course at New York Live Arts, is how fully she inhabits the moment. She's all there, a force of self-determination, and that serves her well in her vivid new solo, No more beautiful dances, a world premiere for La MaMa Moves!

It's a generous presence in which Lenzu--plunging headfirst into performance after a long time focused on making work for others--ramps up what it means to be a dancer. It means your body speaks for you; it is your art, one vulnerable to the judgment of others as well as your own, offered up for display and assessment. Lenzu aims to stay honest about all that. With the audience as witness, she desires to serve, too, as her own outside eye.

She marks thick lines in menstrual red around her feet and thighs, outlines she will then fill with the same color and with furious energy. She allows two live-streaming cameras--one from above, one from below--to snoop around every surface and crevice of her 42-year-old body. This reads a bit like feminism of the My Body, My Self kind, an effort to take look at herself, journal what she observes, understand and come to grips with the changes undergone with the years and after giving birth to her two kids.

With the help of director Daniel Pettrow and the mentors she will cite after the show, this "journal" has been distilled down to about 40 minutes. But it encompasses so much--all that can be seen and all that needs to be imagined upon reflection of the viewer's own history. It stretches across the walls of The Downstairs theater's waiting area where blown-up, drawing-enhanced selfies of the dancer have been hung. It includes Lenzu's sturdy, expressive movement, of course, and her husband Todd Carroll's video projections but also Lenzu's speaking and songs recalled from her Argentinian youth--all to recapture a grounding sense of a self almost lost here in a new land.

In her post-show chat with Pettrow and the audience, Lenzu answered the inevitable question about her title, No more beautiful dances, by calling it a warning: "This dog will bite you."

Oh, yeah, I get that. When I first read the title, I thought of it as: "No more beautiful dances...for YOU, MISSY!" I also could not help but hear a poignant question: "Am I no longer able to make beauty?"

But I think an audience member figured out something better, something true of Lenzu when he offered this:

"No more pretty dances. Ah, but beauty...!"

Costumes: Jennifer Johanos
Lighting design: Hao Bai

No more beautiful dances has a final performance tonight at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

La MaMa The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), Manhattan

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Geoffrey Hendricks, 86

Geoffrey Hendricks, 86, Attention-Getting Fluxus Artist, Dies
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, May 22, 2018

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La Wilson, 93

La Wilson, 93, Dies; Made Art in Elaborate Assemblages
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, April 6, 2018

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Barbara Lekberg, 92

Barbara Lekberg, Artist With a Blowtorch, Dies at 92
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, March 2, 2018

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Peggy Cooper Cafritz, 70

Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Patron of Black Artists, Dies at 70
by Penelope Green, The New York Times, February 23, 2018

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Sonia Gechtoff, 91

Sonia Gechtoff, Acclaimed Abstract Expressionist, Dies at 91
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, February 9, 2018

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Robert Pincus-Witten, 82

Robert Pincus-Witten, Art Critic and Historian, Is Dead at 82
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, January 31, 2018

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Jack Whitten, 78

Jack Whitten, Artist of Wide-Ranging Curiosity, Dies at 78
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, January 23, 2018

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Kynaston McShine, 82

Kynaston McShine, Curator of Historic Art Exhibitions, Dies at 82
by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, January 12, 2018

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Maleek Washington brings family memories to BAAD!

Dance artist Maleek Washington
(photo: Whitney Brown)

Last night in the sudden chill, the mist-veiled, almost-full moon rode high over St. Peter's Episcopal Church, its landmark chapel, Foster Hall--home to Bronx performance space BAAD!--and its cemetery. Approaching from nearby Zerega Avenue station felt like stumbling onto the set for Michael Jackson's Thriller, a feeling intensified at first sight of signs directing visitors to enter not through the usual chapel doorway but by a side path within inches of massive gravestones.

For the opening section of Shadows of Heaven: Bronx Blues, dance artist Maleek Washington took over the familiar, modest allotment of space inside Foster Hall's entrance. So his audience had to wait downstairs in BAAD's office--stocked with refreshments and brightened by disco classics--before being let upstairs, carefully, in groups of five. I lined up, walked up and found myself in cramped quarters with a ring of people, some of whom, clearly, were family and friends of Washington. How did I know this? Well, he had strung up several mobiles to which old family snapshots were clipped. People were touching them, oohing and ahhing and wow-ing and OMG-ing at the sight of people they knew--or themselves!--so much so that they appeared to completely ignore the dancer's presence and performance.

I kept shifting--dodging these folks, trying to stay out of Washington's way, too, as he coiled and spun or abruptly darted back and forth with photos or photo albums in his hands. I admired how he managed the continuous reconfiguration of his space as people entered and moved about. I wondered if he improvised his ductile maneuvers according to whatever space was presented to him at any given moment.

There was something...a sudden lighting change, if I recall...that signaled the next phase. Filing past large painted portraits (by Sophia Dawson) and reflective "portal" paintings (by Chet Gold), we transferred to BAAD!'s theater space and, gratefully, its usual seating. "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" was in the air, and dancers--a man and a woman--posed behind huge painting frames on either side of an empty frame. A disco ball twirled, and Chic's "Le Freak" came on, which made the dancers groove, and then Smokey Robinson's "Ooo Baby Baby," which took their story further. In just the space created by two songs, you could grasp how different they are--her powerful self-possession; his sweetly easy-going, if less-focused, nature. As I type that now, I realize how stereotypical it looks--the Strong Black Woman; uncertain, emasculated Black man. But this seems drawn from personal life, Washington's history, a couple of actual portraits, and Washington is at his best, in this work, as a portraitist.

Although a first-rate dancer with extensive technical background and range, I find my attention not fully engaged with the solo material he has made for himself. I think we're meant to understand him to be the son of this couple long separated, apparently, by the man's incarceration--a story that ultimately fascinates me much more for its sensitive and moving depiction.

Performers: Danielle Mills, Sophia "Wet Paint" Dawson, Chet Gold and Maleek Washington

DJ: DTTONYMONKEY (aka Antonio Brown)

Writer: Niya Nicholson

Mentors: Sidra Bell, Francesca Harper

Shadows of Heaven: Bronx Blues (closed) was a presentation of Pepatián and BAAD!'s joint Dance Your Future: Artist & Mentor Collaborative Residency and a feature of BAAD's BlakTinX series (on through November 18).

Dance Your Future programming continues 

with the following performances:

Tatiana Desardouin / Passion Fruit Dance Company

Friday, November 10

Beatrice Capote & Miguel Aparicio / The Sabrosura Effect

Friday, November 17

Click here and scroll down for information and tickets.

BAAD!
2474 Westchester Avenue, the Bronx
(map/directions)

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Linda Nochlin, 86

Linda Nochlin, Trailblazing Feminist Art Historian, Dies at 86
by Andrew Russeth, ArtNews, October 29, 2017

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Heathcote Williams, 75

Heathcote Williams, Radical British Poet Who Helped Form Anarchist Nation, Dies at 75
by William Grimes, The New York Times, July 5, 2017

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The Guggenheim's journey into the mystic

Armand Point: The Annunciation or Ancilla Domini (L’Annonciation), 1895
Tempera on panel, 99 x 51 cm
Private collection, courtesy Sotheby’s
Photo: Courtesy Sotheby’s

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

presents

Mystical Symbolism: 
The Salon de la Rose+Croix, 1892–1897

Open now through October 4

Ferdinand Hodler: The Disappointed Souls (Les âmes déçues), 1892
Oil on canvas, 120 x 299 cm
Kuntsmuseum Bern, Staat Bern
Photo: Courtesy Kuntsmuseum Bern, Staat Bern

"The world is too much with us," wrote William Wordsworth, critiquing new realities wrought in Britain's first Industrial Age. Nearly a century later, French Rosicrucian writer Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918) struck a similar note, creating space for artists seeking refuge from a swiftly-changing Europe through the embrace of classical myth, Biblical narratives, nature's elevating beauty and the more ethereal, spiritual climes of imagination. The Guggenheim's new show, Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix, curated by Vivien Greene, samples Symbolist works that appeared in Péladan's annual salon of international works in Paris over its six years, 1892-1897.

Installation view
Photo: David Heald
©Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2017

Greene's installation spaces these works in a way that would encourage the sort of concentration and contemplation Péladan surely intended to inspire. But with its wan religious iconography intertwined with pagan flourishes, inert androgyny and women relegated to either virginal or monstrous roles, most of this visual art will likely merit attention mainly for its historical, influential connections to other artistic mediums of the period. I glanced at and breezed by much of it--the familiar (Khnopff, Delville) and the unexpected, such as Charles Maurin's remarkably political painting, The Dawn of Labor--but did find myself lingering with one pencil-and-chalk work on paper.

Armand Point's April or Saint Cecilia (1896) depicts the martyred patron of musicians strumming her harp before a lush cascade of ivy. Point's chiseled modeling of the bones of Cecilia's articulated hands held my eyes once and again. We are meant to notice those bones. Although willowy and idealized in her femininity, Cecilia is neither flattened nor vague and evanescent, unlike so many of the good girls and femmes mystérieuses rendered in Symbolist allegory. She fully inhabits a defined, structured body. And like legendary Orpheus, a subject popular with the Symbolists, she expresses a transcendent power through music.

Audio introduction to the exhibit and related poetry readings: click

Related programming: click

Visitor information: click

Ticketing: click

Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue (between 88th and 89th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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James Rosenquist, 83

James Rosenquist, Pop Art Pioneer, Dies at 83
by Ken Johnson, The New York Times, April 1, 2017

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Jack Ziegler, 74

Jack Ziegler, Cartoonist at The New Yorker, Dies at 74
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, March 31, 2017

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Boaz Vaadia, 65

Boaz Vaadia, Sculptor Who Worked in Street Stone, Dies at 65
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, March 2, 2017

Rodney Smith, 68

Rodney Smith, Whimsical Photographer, Dies at 68
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, December 14, 2016

Alan to the Max at The Met Museum

Alan Cumming in Max and Alan
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

A tycoon, a trapeze artist, a nightclub owner, a sailor. German Expressionist Max Beckmann saw himself as an actor on the stage of life and often painted himself in disguise. Tony Award-winning Alan Cumming has created this personal musical work drawing on his own experience as an émigré to New York, channeling an artist who fled his native land after he was famously denounced as a "degenerate" by the Nazis. Beckmann died just sixteen months after arriving in New York, suffering a fatal heart attack while on his way to The Met. This MetLiveArts commission is inspired by the artist's all-too-brief time in New York. -- from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Cumming with Beckmann's Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket (1950)
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

I have never had the good fortune to see actor Alan Cumming perform in a cabaret--or in Cabaret, sadly. So, I can't say for sure, but if he lets loose in more intimate spaces the way he let loose in Max and Alan, his one-night-only performance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, he should be declared a vital national energy resource. We need him now--and not only because, politically-speaking, Cumming always fights the good fight.

Responding to the Met's wonderful Max Beckmann in New York show (on view through February 20), Cumming brought a startling portfolio of songs performed with the vibrant, versatile trio of Lance Horne (piano), Eleanor Norton (cello) and Alon Ilsar (percussion). His selections evoked a life lived head-on despite risk, conflict or doubt. The Scottish émigré clearly, often amusingly, identifies with Beckmann: "We quite like degenerate things in Scotland," he quipped.

In his statement for the show, Cumming wrote:

And of course we are bound by our connection and connected by our bond, to the era of the Weimar Republic, that supernova moment when art and sex and satire and politics all sidled up alongside each other and sparked so impossibly brightly for a few electric years. He was there. He was in it. I am merely a disciple, a conduit by proxy.

Kurt Weill, expected guest at Cumming's party, kept company with Miley Cyrus ("Wrecking Ball") and Kate Bush ("This Woman's Work"). Friedrich Hollaender's wistful "Falling in Love Again," approached with a rare delicate touch, was there along with Jerry Herman's button-bursting gay anthem, "I Am What I Am," from La Cage aux Folles. Between songs, Cumming offered insights into Beckmann's paintings, his loves, his world.

A song of love is a sad song, hi-lili, hi-lili, hi-lo. A song of love is a song of woe, don't ask me how I know.

It all culminated in an encore, the ominous "Mad World" (Tears for Fears), with the singer taking Horne's place at the piano. That was to be expected. In early November, Cumming had written a brooding piece in his blog on the prospect of our election ending disastrously.  Now, like all of us, he had much on his mind.

As a singer, Cumming is ever the masterful actor, using face and body as channels for a prodigious force called from I know not where, simultaneously blazing bright and blazing dark. Even the suddenly flashed, dimpled grins possess the gathered tension you see in his arms and hands as he plunges his whole being into lyrics and, for godsake, delivers them. The voice just whips out and lashes. You reel back, expecting to go away exhausted by his entire effort. Instead, you end up curiously exhilarated.

Or, at least I did. After the show, I subway-ed downtown to my Santacon-invaded East Village, feeling mentally sharp and strengthened for battle.

Thank you, Alan, so very much.

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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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Houston Conwill, 69

Houston Conwill, Whose Sculptures Celebrated Black Culture, Dies at 69
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, November 20, 2016