Your weekend must-see: Monk meets Waldman

Meredith Monk (left) and Anne Waldman
present their first collaboration.
(photo: Ian Douglas)

This week, Danspace Project hosts the first collaboration of two mages--Meredith Monk and Anne Waldman. That would be enough even without Pat Steir's paintings gushing fine, vibrant lines of vascular light from the altar wall. The evening--eighty minutes without intermission--is saturated by elemental sound, color, movement, intensity and mastery, crossing artificial barriers between word and body, song and image, human presence and the rest of nature.

Anne Waldman
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Waldman's opening set--Entanglement Variations, an incantation-in-progress--ensnares the listener. The spidery performer--part-rock star, part-downhome preacher, part-esoteric flimflam artist--stalks, distills, distorts and transmutes a motherload of words into fluid, musical sounds, clicking and hooting, gliding and hissing out her sticky, steely net. Monk, joined by ensemble members Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin and dancer Ellen Fisher, follows up with a five-song set including a work-in-progress, Cellular Songs, and makes the most of the sanctuary's warmth, dignity and sacred acoustics.

Meredith Monk
with Allison Sniffin (left) and Katie Geissinger (right),
members of Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Even without Fisher's expressive dancing (in Scared Song), it's possible to perceive the action of nerves, blood and breath inside Monk's vocal music. It feels sufficiently close to one's own internal moves and produces a near-immediate mirroring effect. Monk takes us wherever she likes, and the best of these journeys happens in between song (from impermanence), with its lyrics by Mieke van Hoek, her collaborator and companion, who passed in 2002. If there is anyone who can transport a listener, through sound, to that space "between the clouds and the night...between your hand and my hand...between the seed and the dirt," it is Meredith Monk.

Monk and Waldman
(photo: Ian Douglas)

The concluding set brings Monk and Waldman together in a juxtaposition of works and voices. The first piece--Wa-lie-oh/[Endangered] Living Thread--sounds forced, an unwieldy pattern, alternating Waldman's wilderness drift with Monk's more organized containment. But, once past that tentative beginning, they find a groove to share to the end of the night.

With sound by Ambrose Bye and lighting by Carol Mullins

Meredith Monk & Anne Waldman continues tonight and concludes  with Saturday's benefit performance for Danspace Project and The House Foundation for the Arts. As of last evening, tickets for Saturday were still available. Both evenings start at 8pm. For information, 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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Michelle Sui presents "Body of Song" at Dixon Place

Multidisciplinary artist Michelle Sui
composed and wrote lyrics for Body of Song.
(photo: Len Irish)

Performing for a small audience mainly consisting of your buddies offers a chance for a bit of insider fun. So I'm not sure if composer-vocalist Michelle Sui was speaking in earnest or having a little joke, last night at Dixon Place, when she made reference to doing "site-specific theater."

The site in question, for Songs of Body, was the Dixon Place lounge, squeezed between the famous bar--This pays the bills, folks! Drink up!--and the waiting area and box office for the theater downstairs. Dixon Place uses its lounge space for compact performances of all kinds, but they might as well erect subway poles for a couple of street dancers. That's about as much room as you get, and anyone heading from the front door to the restrooms or theater below distracts audience and performers alike.

I'm still trying to figure out if Songs of Body would just work better in a more suitable, less awkward venue. Or if Sui's singers should perform it while holding cocktails. Or if she needs to cook this work more thoroughly. Maybe all are true.

The work grew of out the artist's interest in polyphonic folk vocals of Georgia and the Balkans--"laughing songs, drinking songs, eating songs, traveling, wedding, healing, dancing--song as function." In these vocal traditions, "music becomes the medicine," Sui told her audience. "It has a life of its own."

Songs of Body is described as an exploration of  "sound as touch, voice as body and language in all its senseless disintegration and relocation." A quintet of white-clad women, including Sui, sing her lyrics--"You have dismembered all melody in my eyes...I will not remember," for example--re-configuring their orientation in space for each song and, on rare occasions, making fleeting, puzzling gestures. In the work's most body-centric moment, a singer cocks back in her chair, allowing her arms and legs to paw the air as if climbing invisible clouds. Otherwise, the women remain as stationary as dolls encased in their factory boxes.

Sui erased expression of the flesh, leaving only traces to discover, contradicting the "body" part of this equation. (Sort of. I do see singing, itself, as an art of the body.) However, it does set off the voices really well because you cling to them for information. Sui's voice sounds like power constricted, reining in a mature fullness that she will let you notice and admire...from a distance. Meghan Hourigan is surprisingly jazzy in timing but like an abstract painting of a horn playing itself. A brief duet between Sui and Tayi Sanusi carries--solely because of Sanusi--an inviting lushness that makes up for the spare and shrill tone of much of the composition.

Unlike the songs that inspired Sui, Songs of Body's function is hard to discern. Its medicine remains elusive.

Closed. For information on Sui's multifaceted projects, visit her site here. For information on all events at Dixon Place, click here.

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

Adventurous voices: Odeya Nini and Gelsey Bell at Roulette

Odeya Nini
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Odeya Nini (l) and Gelsey Bell (r)
(photos courtesy of Odeya Nini)

When two barefoot wizards of vocal music sing you into sublimity, it's time to turn over for a nice, warm sleep. Unfortunately, last night, I had to leave Roulette, walk through the pre-spring chill and navigate the subway system. The charm of the final moments of A Solo Voice: Works by Odeya Nini and Gelsey Bell was, of necessity, followed by MTA charmlessness. But I will long remember singer-composers Nini (hailing from LA) and Bell (from around these parts) for their lovely efforts.

The collaborators presented a two-hour show with separate sets culminating in a jointly improvised piece, Spent Horizon, a kind of sonic woodland. Here their voices soared from opposite ends and levels of the theater, from balcony to stage, in birdlike call and response, overlapping and mingling, before the women slowly approached each other in an aisle, embraced and exchanged flyways as they drew apart.

This exploration of voice in trajectories of space is key to how Nini, in particular, wants us to understand vocal music. For her, as demonstrated in her 40-minute opening set, A Solo Voice, the moving body and the imaginative voice combine in a unified expression with elements of composition and improvisation. This carries the willing viewer and listener along through ethereal moments or ones that can pounce and grab and pierce. In other sections of this piece, Nini fills space with rich sampled sounds smoothly flowing into one another--some of this: bleating sheep, a creaking door, a whistler, gurgling water and what might have been eggs frying--and whirly tubes that simultaneously sing at varying pitches and make visible shapes in the air.

Bell's set, including four pieces before Spent Horizon, is cagey and fierce. Her combinations of vocal sounds can sound irrational with lines suddenly strangled or lyrics--briefly surfacing from her primal surround--that reveal disturbing histories. You come to suspect that even her melodic Now It Catches the Gleam of the might harbor something questionable underneath its honey-sweet and quiet, quiet, ever quieter repetitions. Those repetitions are a bit maddening. I'm thinking, Lullabye? Not so much. And, sure enough, there it is in Bell's program notes:

"Now It Catches the Gleam of the" was developed from my work with Gregory Whitehead on his radio piece Dimly Seen, which will air in May. Dimly Seen focuses on current American torture practices and uses the text of Francis Scott Key that was set in "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Click here to download Odeya Nini's debut CD, Vougheauxyice (Voice), released last April. Gelsey Bell's albums can be found here.

College seeks performers for new opera on Fannie Lou Hamer

Activist Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964

Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA) plans auditions in Boston and New York for a new opera composed by Mary D. Watkins on the life of the renowned civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Dark River, The Fannie Lou Hamer Story will premiere in April 2014 at the college to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Civil Rights. It will be conducted by Tian Hui Ng, directed by Darryl V. Jones and produced by Martha Richards.

This is a paid production.

Auditions will be held at Mount Holyoke College in the afternoon on October 20.

Available roles include:

Lead Roles

1 African-American Female Lead Soprano
1 African-American Male Lead Baritone

Ensemble Roles (Minor Characters and Chorus)

1 African-American Female Ensemble Soprano
2 African-American Female Ensemble Altos
1 White Female Ensemble Alto
2 African-American Male Ensemble Tenors
1 African-American Male Ensemble Baritone
1 African-American Male Ensemble Bass
2 White Male Ensemble Tenors
2 White Male Ensemble Baritones

Children's Roles

2 African-American Female Child Sopranos

For more information about the opera, audition requirements and schedule, and an online application form, click here.

Happy 70th, Meredith Monk!

I'm wishing a grand, happy birthday to Meredith Monk who got the surprise of a charming little cake last evening at Danspace Project but really gave us all the most beautiful gift.

The special program, Pioneer Days, part of Danspace's PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now programming, included a screening of filmmaker Robert Withers' reconstruction of Monk's breakthrough 16 Millimeter Earrings Judson Memorial Church performance of 1966, filmed excerpts from the transcendent site-specific Songs of Ascension (2008), and reworked selections from pieces from the early '70s, constructing mosaics out of choice, unearthed shards from the past. The early Monk prepared the way for artists who now readily cross boundaries of genre and modalities and for audiences hungry for immersion in total experience and stimulation of all modes of perception.


Her art is more than voice, but even just her voice--or, rather, voices swooping, stretching, ululating, mewing, fluttering in rapid succession--can entice listeners to journey. Monk reminded us that her project is to heal the unnatural rifts between the arts unique to the modern Western approach and to counter our tendency to rely upon secondary experiences through cyberspace. Instead, she would have us engage with the "blood, guts and nerves" of live art where "we're all in the same space at the same time."

"Nothing can substitute for that," says this sage and shaman.

Connecting voice and movement and others

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club presents

Peter Sciscioli (New York) / Ana Sofrenovic (Belgrade)
Work-in-progress showing of a cross-cultural collaboration

Sunday, April 10 (5:30pm)

Created and performed by Peter Sciscioli and Ana Sofrenovic

Moderated by Marýa Wethers, Program Manager of New York Live Arts (Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop Reimagined)

For this one time showing, New York-based performer/choreographer Peter Sciscioli teams up with Serbian actress/vocalist Ana Sofrenovic to share in a new work begun via Skype in Summer 2010. Sciscioli and Sofrenovic met during Meredith Monk’s workshop at Carnegie Hall in 2006 and have been working with, as a departure point, their mutual interest in combining voice and movement within a theatrical and choreographic context. In our ever-expanding technological and global landscape, how do we experience unseen and often indescribable connections with others across space and time?

To RSVP, please email your name and number of seats requested.

La MaMa
74A East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

"Moving Speech" on Avenue C

Moving Speech

a workshop with Mark Lorimer

Monday-Friday, February 21-25 

12:30-2:30pm

Avenue C Studio

55 Avenue C (between 4th and 5th Streets), Manhattan

(directions)

$75 for the week, $18 for drop-in

Register

info@movementresearch.org

(212) 598-0551 ext. 261

The human body and how we 'speak' with it can be extremely direct and equivocal.  After 20 years as dancers, Mark Lorimer and Cynthia Loemij (both instrumental collaborators with Rosas/Anne-Teresa De Keersmaeker) are beginning work on a duet that explores communication and intimacy with a focus on music.  In this week-long workshop, Mark Lorimer will be opening up the process to include the group to develop their own improvisational and written material. What can dance specifically express about experience?  What creates intimacy, successful communication, effective speaking and real listening?  And how do we fail to connect?

Mark Lorimer graduated from LCDS, London, in 1991 and has worked with a.o. Rosas/Anne-Teresa De Keersmaeker (on and off since 1994) ZOO/Thomas Hauert, Deborah Hay (The Match), Jonathan Burrows and The Featherstonehaughs.  He has taught at ImpulsTanz, PARTS, the Laban Centre, LCDS, and International Dance Dialogues at Panetta Movement Center.