BODY AND SOUL: Kate Mattingly: Troubling the silence

 

 

Kate Mattingly

Above: a white woman's face with curly, honey-colored hair, smiling and tilting her head slightly left. No photographer credit. Courtesy of Kate Mattingly.

This Spring, author Kate Mattingly published Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, Equity, an analysis of many decades of dance criticism in the US (University of Florida Press). As a white woman, she accepts responsibility to speak out about white supremacy. In her talk today, she shares thoughts on how white supremacy has historically defined and dominated dance criticism and continues to silence women in academia.

Dr. Mattingly has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Dance Magazine, and Pointe Magazine and is associate editor of Dance Chronicle. She is assistant professor of dance at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Listen to Dr. Mattingly's talk on Body and Soul podcast here.

Below: two dancers, a Black man and white woman, seen in profile, with his right hand holding her right hand as she leans away from his body. He stands firmly in a deep lunge while she leans into her left hip. Image of Troy Blackwell and Kate Mattingly from a workshop staging of William Forsythe's Steptext at New York University. (Photo: Peter A. Smith)

Kate Mattingly (she/her) focuses on fostering equity in dance education. As an assistant professor at Old Dominion University, she teaches ballet, dance histories, teaching principles, dance studies, and graduate research methods. Her book, Shaping Dance Canons, interrogates how critics have foreclosed opportunities for certain artists and dance forms while generating validity for others, thereby contributing to a racialized dance canon. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Dance and Pointe magazines, The Washington Post, and academic journals. She has a forthcoming anthology, called Antiracism in Ballet Teaching, that will be published by Routledge. Kate’s undergraduate degree in Architecture is from Princeton University, her MFA degree in Dance is from NYU, and her doctoral degree in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New Media is from University of California, Berkeley.

Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, Equity (University of Florida Press, 2023)
Dance Chronicle, Executive Editor
Special Issue: "Interrogating Histories and Historicizing Dance Studies"

Colleen Thomas: Woman power is persistent and global

Dance artist Colleen Thomas.
(photo: Lovin Ostenrik)

Joanna Leśnierowska (below) in light and desire
(photo: Miguel Anaya)

This year marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (August 18, 1920), which granted women citizens the right to vote. light and desire--a new, full-evening dance ensemble by Colleen Thomas and her multi-national team of collaborators--comes at a time when lack of respect for women’s political leadership is again a matter of concern and struggle. The piece will have its world premiere at New York Live Arts, March 25-28 (7:30pm), during Women’s History Month.

Colleen Thomas (US), director, performer

Ermira Goro (Albania/Greece), performer

Joanna Leśnierowska (Poland), performer

Ildikó Tóth (Hungary/Germany), performer

Rosalynde Le Blanc (US), performer

Carla Forte (Venezuela), film director, performer

Alexey Taran DP for film

Stacey-Jo Marine, lighting design

Rebecca Makus, mask design

Robert Boston, musician/composer featuring Jo Morris, voice

For further information and tickets, click here.
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Yesterday morning, I met with Thomas at Gibney to learn more about light and desire. Read on for what she had to say about the concept and making of this timely piece on women's resistance and radical expression.

Some performers in light and desire,
by Colleen Thomas and her international collaborators,
premiering at New York Live Arts, March 25-28
(photo: Nadia Halim)

In 2016, I think I was very privileged--and unaware of my privilege--as an American. With the [presidential] election, I just couldn’t believe the misogyny. I sort of woke up to the misogyny that had always been in my world. Maybe I felt I wasn’t good enough, things weren’t happening for me, wouldn’t go my way or just would feel wrong. I’m not good enough, smart enough. It was all on me.

Seeing the way that people looked at the candidates in 2016, how people talked about Hillary Clinton’s personality, which had nothing to do with what her experience was.... Meanwhile, there’s this other person whose personality isn’t great either! But, no, people are talking about her. Even my women friends--smart and artistic, some of the most intelligent, aware people--said things like “I just don’t like her. I don’t know why.” There were other people, family members in other parts of the country, who said things like, “She’s a criminal.” 

I work in academia, I work in this world, and I collaborate with a man in a lot of my work. I just started to question: What is this bias and hatred?

Because of the election, I started talking to people, to women about it. We couldn’t stop talking about it. It was like Voldemort had arrived! None of us had slept. We were in shock. Thank God for New York and our community. But I started talking to people around the globe, people I had worked and toured with for many years. Most of them had worked with us here.

That’s where I woke up to my privilege: Oh, I think it’s so horrible here in America, but they’ve lived through having to move out of their own country to somewhere else where they felt they could have a life. They had personal stories about growing up in a new country. It was really interesting to work with and very cathartic in a way.

All of these women are just extraordinary people. I wanted to work with them because of their dancing and because of who they are, but they are all older now--we’re all older now!--they’re “successful,” whatever that means. We’ve got these jobs, we’re creating art, we’re chairs of departments, we’re successful women. And it’s just interesting to me because I’m not sure we feel that success.

How we feel our power was really interesting to me, how we moved through obstacles. I was interested in telling some personal stories about these women, hopefully something that other people also experience. It went from a political, angry place to “How do we heal? How do we move through? How do we get to this place where we can feel our power, go into our communities and support that?" At the beginning, I was focused on all the negatives: There’s no hope. There’s never going to be a woman president. It’s so deep. And [reflecting on the current presidential candidacy of Elizabeth Warren], we are physically exhausted. I am at the place now where I can’t even read the news.

The stories are an important part of the work. I always work with people’s personal history. That’s what’s real for me rather than having them do something that’s in my mind. Collaboration is so interesting.

There are five other women besides myself, and one--Carla Forte--is Venezuelan-born, a dancer and a documentary and feature filmmaker. She lives in Miami now, but I met her in Venezuela fifteen years ago, and we worked together, toured in different places together. I think she has lived in Miami--where I’m from--ten years now.

When Venezuela just sort of got crazy, she and her husband came here to America. I started off asking each artist how they moved through hard times, passed through their obstacles, and she started talking about being seen a certain way as a Venezuelan in America and even how her mother or their culture expected certain things.

I have a teenage daughter who’s going through a major transition. My husband said this one day--because he’s a man!--”I was a boy, and I went through puberty, and I could just do whatever I wanted.” And he was watching his daughter be seen a different way for that moment of transition where, all of a sudden, other people are seeing you differently, you’re seeing yourself differently, and there’s some kind of freedom that’s lost through how other people look at her. So he just had this epiphany. Really? (laughing hard) Now? At this age, you’re just realizing it now?

So, the piece has become about this idea of transitions, what happens in those moments in between change--slowing down those moments to see what those shifts are. We started with the idea of slowing down the film Carla created for the piece. When things are very, very slow, you can’t tell very clearly what’s happening. Singing can look like a scream...or a laugh. You’re not really sure. That became really interesting to me, the transitions in all forms--women getting older, women moving through hard times, transitions of getting to power, transitions of giving up. Do you give up and move out of your country because it’s so bad there?

Carla talked about her mother wanting her to be a kind of woman like Miss Venezuela--beautiful with the makeup--and she wasn’t. She talked about people in Miami calling her whore because she’s Spanish-speaking. And I talked to people like Ildikó Tóth who lives in Germany, and she said she never felt objectified or anything like that. She said, “I just always dressed like a boy.” Ermira Goro, she lives in Greece now, and she danced with us as well and was here for many years, and then she went on to DV8 [Physical Theatre, a London-based troupe]. She talked about when she moved from Albania to Greece and living with a friend, not having her family there. Everybody seemed to have stories that pertained to their moms and, because I was interested in my daughter’s changes, there's a little flicker of mom stuff in there.

Joanna Leśnierowska is not primarily a dancer; she’s a curator, dramaturg and designer, born in Poland, running a festival. Doing body research with her was really interesting. She’s just so real. She connects to what the truth of the movement is right away, even though she questions, “I’m not a dancer. Should I be doing this?”

I was getting so inspired by my students at Barnard [College] and by [climate change activist] Greta Thunberg, by all these young people who are active out there trying to make change, and they’re like “You guys fucked it up, and we need to do something.” There’s a lot of work I watch my students do that I’m sort of amazed. The idea of having a chorus in the piece, bringing these [local community] people in, was a representation of the inspiration and hope they bring to what’s happening now. 

At first, I wanted a lot of women to take the stage and just stand there, make the audience feel uncomfortable. I was so angry! But then I started workshopping with them. I hope that when I get to do this piece in other places, I will get to workshop with women in these communities. The workshop--working with them through improvisation and talking about their own experiences--it was different because they are a lot younger [than the main cast]. There’s power afforded to us because we have some experience, and we feel strength from the places that we’ve moved through. But the hope that I feel is in working with these young people, talking with them about when they’ve felt erased or objectified or passed over and how they got up and kept going.

These are all my alums of different ages. I have such a personal connection to everybody in this cast. We rehearsed the other day, and I cried after they ran this one section. I realized I know their stories, you know?

The mood I feel, through them, is support--for me, for this piece--and comraderie, community, kind of like the Buddhist sangha. I feel the strength through them. They’re not giving up. They are in a place where they believe they can make change and, just like the masks they wear in the piece, the grotesque becomes beautiful. All of these dancers are able to be vulnerable, which is not always pretty. They have nothing to prove.

That’s the other thing. Maybe that comes with being over 50: I’m done trying to be something. We’re all trying to share this experience with the audience. It gets ugly and uncomfortable, but then, somehow, we work through it--I hope! (laughing hard)

-- Colleen Thomas

See light and desire at New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan (map/directions). For further information and tickets, click here.

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

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The Joyce's American Dance Platform: UBW and DCDC

Chanon Judson of Urban Bush Women
(photo: Gennia Cui)

American Dance Platform: Urban Bush Women and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
January 7 and 12

If it's true what they say about how viewers' mirror neurons respond when audiences look at dancers moving, and you attended The Joyce on Tuesday night for American Dance Platform, your mirror neurons likely got a serious workout. Evidence for that, from me, is how exhausted I felt the next morning as if even every toe nail and eyelash I possess were worked to max from watching Urban Bush Women (UBW) and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC), two troupes of extraordinary physical daring and power. More evidence came from the way the opening night audience responded in the moment. I'm not talking about the expected, and justified, standing Os and rousing cheers; I mean those very Black mmmhmmms, the audible sighs, the cries, the groans and other unrestrained vocalizing that greeted DCDC dancers killing it during Abby Zbikowski's Indestructible (2018) with apparently zero fear of bodily wear-and-tear. If, in a sense, we all danced along with UBW and DCDC as we witnessed them, I await my Bessie nomination.

With the very recent departure of Du'Bois A'Keen, UBW is back to being an all-woman company. My favorite on the evening's bill (to be repeated this coming Sunday) was UBW's Women's Resistance, an excerpt from les écailles de la mémoire (Scales of Memory) with choreographic direction from founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Germaine Acogny with additional choreography from eight former and current UBW members. It takes a village. And, indeed, looks like a village...of disciplined women warriors demonstrating their earth-sprung, spring-loaded battle-readiness within a sonic environment where shredding mechanical rhythms suggest both how formidable these women are and how menacing are the forces they are up against. UBW paired this ensemble with Zollar's 1989 I Don't Know, But I Been Told, If You Keep On Dancin' You Never Grow Old, which now includes segments from visible (2011), made by nora chipaumire and Marguerite Hemmings. And, yes, there is a definite connection and throughline--similar resourcefulness, ingenuity and high skill even in the midst of play that some might unwisely consider trivial.

UBW performers: Courtney J. Cook, Melissa Cobblah Gutierrez (Understudy), Jasmine Hearn, Chanon Judson (Co-Artistic Director), Love Muwwakkil, Samantha Spies (Co-Artistic Director), Elaisa van der Kust, Makaila Ware

Taking on Indestructible, Ohio's venerable DCDC--founded in 1968 by Jeraldyne Blunden and now directed by her daughter, Debbie Blunden-Diggs--was right in tune with the night's audacious mood. The main difference is, with Abby Z high-impact, daredevil choreography, neither you nor the dancers get a chance to chill. So, again, those mirror neurons.... Add occasional blasts from the electronic, industrial hip hop band Death Grips. The evening wrapped up with DCDC's excerpt from Donald Byrd's The Geography of the Cotton Field (2014) which paints, with an elegant hand, a canvas at once sweepingly abstract and epically specific.

DCDC performers: Devin Baker, Qarrianne Blayr (Associate Artistic Director), Breanna Dorsey, Alexandria Flewellen, Michael Green, Steve Lamblin, Robert Pulido, Elizabeth Ramsey, Nile Alicia Ruff, Nabachwa Ssensalo (Actress), Quentin Apollovaughn Sledge, Matthew J. Talley, Countess V. Winfrey

One show remains--this Sunday at 7:30pm--but tickets are sold out.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue at West 19th Street, Manhattan

(directions)

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

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Okpokwasili and Born's "Adaku's Revolt"

Okwui Okpokwasili
(photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Adaku's Revolt
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
Abrons Arts Center
March 14-24

One young black girl becomes alert to her inner signals, finds the strength to resist expectations, and revolts against efforts to straighten her hair. -- from Abrons Arts Center's website

Out of the blue, a thought visited me over breakfast today:

No, you can't touch my hair. My hair is part of my body. I do not give you permission to touch my body. So, why do you think you can touch my hair?

I'd swear I don't know where that came from, but I do know it's something I should have said, years ago, to one man--the husband of a fellow dance critic--whose white hand shot out and touched my woolly head. Happened so fast, I didn't have time to cringe, flinch or launch a preemptive strike, which I now so wish I had done.

And I also know Okwui Okpokwasili (with director/designer Peter Born) must have triggered something with a new ensemble work, Adaku's Revolt, just opened at Abrons Arts Center. It's not about white people touching Black people's hair, the site of both painful and glorious historical experience and culture. But it is about how white aesthetics touch Black people's hair...and bodies...and values...and lives.

Dear Okwui, as you must imagine, I know all about the perils of getting the "kitchen" straightened with a hot comb. I think you must have reached out and touched a nerve.

Urban Bush Women's dancers are also looking at the Black hair thing this season with Hair & Other Stories. But Okpokwasili's concept and Born's visual design appear to have the potential to help Adaku's Revolt work down into the subconscious in a way that UBW's far more direct piece--with audience participation that keeps our conscious minds centered and on high alert--might not.

Above: Dancer AJ Wilmore as Adaku
Below: Wilmore with Okwui Okpokwasili
(photos: Ian Douglas)

The audience is directed to its place on the stage of Abrons's theater through a back channel and instructed to take seats lining three sides of the performance space. As we enter and get settled, the scene has already been set, a compelling visual atmosphere already built. Before a white screen, four dancers lie on the floor with torsos stiffly arched and heads thrown back. Above them, a large windsock of pearly-white gossamer continuously flows out from a big fan, its hypnotizing, watery fabric reaching for another dancer, our Adaku (AJ Wilmore), who writhes, wriggles, tilts, chops and revs up as she sits in a chair. A dense assemblage of what appear to be ordinary desk lamps lights the area.

Within Born's vision, Okpokwasili's placement and movement of individual and group bodies take the shape of dreams with nonlinear but soul-tugging storytelling. White fabric engulfing and molding itself across faces. Bodies emerging from beneath pulsating fabric. Hips and feet twisting, pelvises rocking and left hands raised high in the air over a captivating--and destabilizing--polyrhythm of music and women's voice-overs and live singing.

I tried to jot down something Wilmore said before her turbulent yet mutually-supportive duet with Okpokwasili, and I think I got it right:

I'm going to open all the doors in my head.

Doors opening bring music and voices--both louder, brighter, undeniable--and the birth-like reclamation of bodies. I think the piece, just under an hour, seemed longer. For me, its conclusion fell short of grace or definitude. But something about it all clearly reminded me to revolt.

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Choreographed and created in collaboration with Peter Born and performers Khadidiatou Bangoura, Peter Born, Audrey Hailes, Breyanna Maples and AJ Wilmore

Adaku's Revolt runs through March 24 with performances at various times. For information and tickets, click here.

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


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

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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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Bobbie Louise Hawkins, 87

Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Beat Poet and Author, Dies at 87
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, May 18, 2018

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Emily Nasrallah, 86

Emily Nasrallah, Lebanese Novelist and Activist, Dies at 86
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, March 16, 2018

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Oprah Winfrey, Cecil B. deMille Award, 2018 Golden Globes

Time's up!

A new day is on the horizon!

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Shared Evening: Jasmine Hearn and Mariana Valencia

This weekend, Danspace Project presents shared evenings of work
by dance artists Jasmine Hearn (above) and Mariana Valencia (below).
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Maybe this Earth is a bed where each of us rests on the threshold of a dream or all of us can dream collectively. Sitting down to take in this spell by Jasmine Hearn (shook at Danspace Project) means drawing near a fire to hear old, passed-down stories, but the fire is invisible, the stories and songs muffled, the images shadowy, blurry. It might not matter if you can't pick up distinct words, follow sentences; if a song is made up of one word that trails off in the air or is simple sounds intoned in a flutey voice. It calls you to take part in the making.

The costumes are equally indistinct, cobbled together as if by a child who had leafed through pages of history, falling asleep atop them, dreaming and dreaming. The fabric--how unruly, voluminous, billowing, ennobling...or thrown together with function if not sense. The movements--how softly fluid, swirly, simple, repetitive, shifting, un-insistent, graceful, agile (Hearn, Angie Pittman, Dominica Greene...these three and also the traces of all who made this, continue to make this, one spectre floating into the other....) You see what you will see. You dream what you will dream, unfolding a chiffon dream engulfing altar steps like sea foam slipping over a shoreline.

"This is the answer to my 7 year old self who casted spells in her bathtub...spells that dripped honey, affirmation, and the belief that magic lives in the marrow of our bones."

"I am looking to evoke a realm, a place, a time, a memory when/where black women are not doubted." -- Jasmine Hearn

Concept and direction: Jasmine Hearn
Choreography and performance: Maria Bauman, Kayla Farrish, Dominica Greene, Jasmine Hearn, Catherine Kirk and Angie Pittman
Costumes made in collaboration with Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency
Sound: Jasmine Hearn (includes a rework of Sylvan Esso's Die Young)
Video: Alisha B. Wormsley
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Scene from shook
Angie Pittman (at left) and Dominica Greene (center)
with Hearn
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Mariana Valencia performs Yugoslavia
(photo: Ian Douglas)

"What are we if we are together but not related?"

In her solo, Yugoslavia, Mariana Valencia asks this question, specifically referring to her relationship to her Polish stepfather (and, I guess, in a way, her Polish stepfather's relationship to her Guatemalan mom).

One word that recurs in the work is blend. Spoken with Valencia's characteristic clarity and evenness, the word blend has its own physical pose. She hits it, and you watch it...for a few seconds. You might not understand it, but you can see it and recognize it when it comes around again. You learn a piece of movement language by immersive process.

Yugoslavia finds Valencia blending a lengthy monologue into movement in a way that seals any divide between verbal language and dance. That seems to work, although at least one person I spoke with afterwards found the piece to be not very dance-y. To me, it was a poetic marathon, a work of impressive endurance and grace under the pressure to tell a story with a lot of unexpected and seemingly unrelated moving parts and somehow make them hold together. Or not. I think, mostly, not.

At least, not for me. For me, they stayed demarcated, and that seemed okay. Or more than okay. That seemed the right thing.

In Yugoslavia, I intersect the First World, the Second World, the countryside, the imaginary plane and vampires. Factual, humorous, and grave observations depict my herstorical frame,” writes Valencia. With Yugoslavia, “I’m in search of the spiritual, in observation of the physical, and in awe of the artificial.” 

See, those commas and "ands" work well, and the way Valencia speaks shows you one thing after another. And that seems the right thing. More juxtaposition than blend. Blend might be an aspiration. Or not.

Writing about her inspiration for the piece, Valencia says, "visiting the Balkans (Serbia and Macedonia) has awakened my lineage through Slavic languages. I'll be tuning into identities that are landless, homeless, nameless, wandering, and exiled." In other words, not so blended.

Mention of the Balkans also brings me to that word derived from their situation--Balkanization, fragmentation often with tense and hostile juxtaposition of the separate entities. And then there's the discomfort of a young girl, Valencia, trying to sing Leonard Cohen lyrics with her dad without revealing her pleasure in the racy verses. Blending by omission? There's a single painting--just one--by her dad on a tripod in all of St. Mark's roomy space. And something about vampires because, we're told, the word vampire originates in the Serbian language. A lot of thingy things.

I watched Valencia take sheets of raspberry red construction paper and cut them into letters that she then arranged on the floor. I'm not particularly good with cutting paper with any degree of accuracy. But, apparently, she is. She went right to it, and the letters turned out well-shaped. They looked like themselves and like nothing else.

Choreography, script, costume, set and performance: Mariana Valencia
Original score: Mariana Valencia
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann

Shared Evening: Jasmine Hearn & Mariana Valencia continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 8pm. No late seating. 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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Lea Marshall: Who--and what--reinvigorates ballet?

Dance writer and educator Lea Marshall
(photo: courtesy of Lea Marshall)

Guest contributor Lea Marshall responds to New York Times dance writer Roslyn Sulcas's conversation with three contemporary ballet choreographers--Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon (April 20, 2017).

*****

Open Letter to The New York Times

on the Memorable Occasion of 

“A Conversation With Three Choreographers 

Who Are Reinvigorating Ballet.”

by guest contributor Lea Marshall

Monday morning, when I opened my weekly ArtsJournal emailed roundup of dance articles from around the web, I knew better than to click on the title above. I knew better, but I clicked anyway. And then I posted the piece on Facebook with the comment, “Huh. Three white men. Imagine.”

The image alone was enough.  You wouldn’t even have to read the piece to understand whose voices are most valued in ballet today, according to the Times. There they are, all in a row: Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon--three white men.

Under my Facebook post, a friend asked: “Lea, not being into the dance scene like you, and acknowledging the racist and sexist nature of the article, if you had written this article, who would you have included?”

In response, I realized I wanted to dismantle the whole premise of the article and start over. Editors, the problem lies not just with ballet, but with you.

If we’re presented with this question--“Which choreographers have reinvigorated ballet?”--and the answer we come up with is “These three white male choreographers,” we must re-examine the question. What does it mean to “reinvigorate ballet”? Obviously, in this equation it doesn’t mean taking dramatic steps toward diversity, or critically thinking about ballet’s de facto position at the “top” of our white, western, racist, sexist, popular cultural understanding of what dance is. Rather, it appears that in this context to “reinvigorate” means to make dances that seem fresh and appeal to the tired eye of the Eurocentric or Balanchine-worshiping balletomane.

Of course these choreographers make great work. But the context for that work demands examination and discussion. Sulcas actually asks the men why more women don’t hold “major choreographer” status in ballet. For the most part, their answers are laughably inadequate.

So, let’s change the whole question so that the answer includes Dance Theatre of Harlem; includes Misty Copeland, Michaela DePrince, Yuan Yuan Tan; includes American Ballet Theatre's Project Plié’s goal to diversify American ballet companies; includes Ballez (performance, company, class and community, that invites everyone to witness and celebrate the history and performances of lesbian, queer and transgender people). New York Times, you can do so much better.

Throughout the day after the piece appeared, a great flurry arose that focused in large part on the choreographers’ responses to that question about women. But the problem, as I’d hope we all realize, extends far past the privileged men; it’s with the system that privileges them, including the Times.

There’s an easy fix for this article, as a start. Change the headline to: “Privileged Positions: Three White Male Choreographers Get Extra Credit in Ballet.”

*****

Lea Marshall is Associate Chair of the Department of Dance and Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as a dance writer, critic and poet. She writes for Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher and Richmond’s Style Weekly.

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Women comics being BAAD!

Javon Egyptt presides over Women Laugh Back,
a comedy night at BAAD!
(photo: Charles Rice-Gonzalez)

You'll rarely find me in a comedy club. It's not that I don't like to laugh. I do. I love, love, love good comedy as well as humorous elements in any of the arts I enjoy. But with everything else I cover as a critic or attend as a fan, comedy clubs are just not something I make time for.

So, I don't have hard evidence on this, but I doubt your usual comedy club features straight, queer and trans women--particularly, women of color--all gracing the same evening. No, for that, you have to hop the #6 up to the Bronx and visit BAAD!

Left to right: Elizabeth "Macha" Marrero, Robbyne Kaamil,
Javon Egyptt, Lisa Harmon and Katrina Goodlett
(photo: Charles Rice-Gonzalez)

It's Women's History Month and, while we all pray Ben Carson has nothing to say about that, BAAD! has launched its annual BAAD!ASS Women Festival. Friday night's stand-up comedy show, Women Laugh Back--MC'ed by the ebullient Javon Egyptt and her many wigs and costumes--showcased the talents of Robbyne Kaamil, Lisa Harmon, Katrina Goodlett and award-winning performance artist and BAAD! favorite, Elizabeth "Macha" Marrero in a brisk-paced if sometimes uneven lineup.

Kaamil, above all others, won me over by the very act of scraping my last good nerve. She opened her set--unexpectedly, inexplicably--by belting and emoting her high-pitched way through "Tomorrow." Yes, that "Tomorrow." The one in which "the sun will come out." And then her irritating persona just took off, never letting us catch her catching a breath while, for instance, she pressed home the shaky argument that Annie was "a little bitch from Bed-Stuy," and check that hair if you have doubts. A curious preoccupation with Black women's first names ended in the bright idea that the National Weather Service should give Black women's names to weather threats. Do that, and you won't have all these fools thinking they'll just stay put and ride out the storm! I had to bow to Kaamil's way of putting herself--and it all--together, coherent and unrelenting. Later, in an aside about our toxic politics, she counseled, "Don't be quiet, because when you're quiet, nobody pays you no fucking mind." Kaamil will never have this problem. And if she ever did, she will never have it again. "If they don't do right, kick them the fuck out."

You GO, Kaamil!

BAAD!ASS Women Festival 2017 runs through April 8 with a variety of programs showcasing the creative work and activism of "fierce women and transwomen artists." For schedule and ticketing details, click here.

BAAD!

The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance

2474 Westchester Avenue (Westchester Square), Bronx

(map/directions)

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How to be a BAAD! badass

Above: poet Pamela Sneed
(photo courtesy of the author)
Below: dance artist Jasmine Hearn
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Comedy, dance, poetry, good company and more: BAAD! has it all in the month of March celebrating Women's History Month in full Bronx style.

Comedienne Robbyne Kaamil
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Check out BAAD!ASS Women Festival 2017, running March 9 through April 8 and featuring the creative work and activism of "fierce women and transwomen artists."

For schedule and ticketing details, click here.

BAAD!

The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance

2474 Westchester Avenue (Westchester Square), Bronx

(map/directions)

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Choreographer Hansen critiques misogyny in "Mr. Gaga" film

Anneke Hansen
(photo: Baille Younkman)

Yesterday, I received a letter dance artist Anneke Hansen sent to film producer Barak Heymann about Tomer Heymann's documentary, Mr. Gaga. After seeing the film, which deals with the life and work of acclaimed Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, Hansen spoke with the producer to voice her concerns as outlined here.

*****

Dear Mr. Heymann,

I am writing, as promised, to reiterate my dismay at the misogynistic filmmaking displayed in Mr. Gaga.

As I mentioned, I was appalled by the section of the film that covers Ohad Naharin's early years in NYC. The film shows archival footage of the women whose bodies helped realize and establish his aesthetic. It uses the voices of these women. For several minutes they occupy the screen without ever being credited by name. In contrast, a male dancer, Daniel Tishman, I believe, is identified by a caption. This is a great and offensive mistake.

The disrespect is deepened by the fact that, at the same point in the film, Mari Kajiwara is introduced as "the most beautiful woman" Ohad has ever seen. We watch Ms. Kajiwara dance for many minutes, learning of her unique artistry, her acclaimed work with Alvin Ailey, and - rather smugly - of Ohad's conquest, without ever learning her name. Again, this is shameful. It is only after several minutes that Ms. Kajiwara's first name is introduced, leaving the audience to wonder, for quite some time, what her full name might be.

This treatment of Ms. Kajiwara, and other women who danced with Mr. Naharin, is shameful. Your film treats them as lesser beings, as objects for Ohad Naharin's male brilliance, rather than the great artists who allow for the work's existence. The misogyny of your filmmaking accidentally highlights an old and ugly tradition in the field by replication: women have often been the clay from which men mold their names.

As a choreographer, I'm usually grateful to see a film about dance - especially when it receives some critical acclaim and support. In this case, however, I was left with a foul taste in my mouth.

I sincerely hope you will re-edit the film to name these women and give them respectful recognition for their work and contributions to Mr. Naharin's success. I intend to share this letter with the NYC dance press and community. I look forward to your response.

Best regards,
Anneke Hansen 

*****

Anneke Hansen is a choreographer, performer, and teacher based in new york city who primarily presents dance works through her company, Anneke Hansen Dance. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence college, her work has been presented in NYC by the Chocolate Factory Theater and as part of the La Mama moves! Festival, Draftworks at Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, Dance Conversations @ The Flea, and at University Settlement. Hansen has been international guest artist-in-residence at Dance House in Dublin, Ireland, Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico, and her company has enjoyed creative residencies at Rockbridge Arts Exchange in Virginia, and Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, VT. The company's work has been featured at the Big Range Dance Festival in Houston, TX, among other venues, and her site-specific work has been performed in NYC parks and abroad in Washington D.C. and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her most recent project, a collaboration with Lori Yuill, was selected as Best of Fringe at the Houston Fringe Festival, 2016. Anneke Hansen Dance has received funding from LMCC’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund, NYFA’s BUILD grant, and the Puffin Foundation. As a performer, Hansen has had the pleasure of dancing for New York choreographers Sara Rudner and Susan Rethorst, and for Australian choreographer Russell Dumas, among others. A student of anatomy, she served as assistant to master anatomist and neuromuscular educator Irene Dowd. In addition to teaching dance in both the US and abroad, Hansen maintains a practice as a private movement instructor in NYC, specializing in rehabilitative movement and performance training, and has taught anatomy at several area colleges. www.annekehansendance.com

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Mary Tyler Moore, 80

Mary Tyler Moore, Who Incarnated the Modern Woman on TV, Dies at 80
by Virginia Heffernan, The New York Times, January 25, 2017

Donmar Warehouse brings all-woman "Tempest" to St. Ann's

Harriet Walter, above,
and Jade Anouka, below,
in the Donmar Warehouse production of The Tempest
(photo: Teddy Wolff)

How seductive--and risky--to interfere in the natural course of things for one's own ends. In The Tempest, Shakespeare's magician Prospero does just that. An aggrieved man--stripped of his noble status, surviving banishment and near-death--he fully believes in the rightness of uncommon power to control everything from the forces of nature to the romantic life of his daughter. He can twist to his designs everything from the quicksilver spirits of the air to a more fleshy, animal-like Other. Here, on his island of exile, he has enslaved two of each--Ariel, a clever sprite, and Caliban, considered uncivilized and monstrous--yet will come, at last, to learn he is the least free being of all.

As re-imagined by director Phyllida Lloyd for London's Donmar Warehouse and presented now in its US premiere run at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, The Tempest unfolds the elaborate fantasy of an inmate doing hard time in a women's prison. Played with attentive, full-throttle investment by Harriet Walter, 66-year old Hannah has served thirty-five years of a 75-years-to-life sentence for her role as getaway driver in a robbery and murder that, she explains, had radical political motivations. We first glimpse her fellow inmates--most, women of color; she is white and Jewish--as they file through the lobby and into the theater ahead of us. When we enter, we ring their performance space on all sides as if it were a basketball court shrunk in size to give us close-up views of all the action. Characters climb or dash up and down the stairs or park themselves on the highest tiers and, at one point, we even get to play a role in the visual atmosphere of the play.

The first sensations we perceive are unyielding, mercilessly metallic--from the theater's own stark, technical features to the "cell doors" positioned at the top of the audience aisles to the grinding, rumbling, thunderous sounds that suggest the deadly, unnatural storm secretly conjured by Prospero/Hannah. That initial act of will sets the play's characters on a path that will expose and undermine a magician's desire to interfere with reality.

Like previous parts of Lloyd's Shakespearean trilogy--Julius Caesar (2012) and Henry IV (2014), which I have not seen--this Tempest's male roles are played by women actors, all representing women prisoner characters you can meet in a series of short video clips here. So, reality continuously intermingles with fantasy. Lloyd's characters are based on the stories of real women inmates who collaborated with her team on the development of this work. In fact, New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, recently commuted the sentence of Judith Clark, the model for Walter's Hannah, convicted for her role in the 1981 Brinks robbery.

Shakespeare's Miranda--a female role--is played with Black punk-dyke style and zest by young Leah Harvey. Sheila Atim, her nominally-male Ferdinand, the shipwrecked prince, arrives on their wedding day in a thrift shop outfit as whimsically girly/boy-ly as her own.

Overall, the understated suppleness and focused power of these performances should quiet any objection to the non-traditional casting. It's exhilarating to see how performers like Jackie Clune (Stefano), Karen Dunbar (Trinculo) and the especially vivid and vivacious Jade Anouka (Ariel) simply muscle their way past any gender-related expectations a viewer might have. They make their characters live, and you have no say in the matter.

Composer Joan Armatrading  and movement director Ann Yee throw their own charm into the mix, especially in the wonderful wedding celebration. But for Hannah, and her audience, it's soon time to let dreams and make-believe go and face what is.

The Tempest runs through February 19. Running time: 2 hours, no intermission. For information and tickets, click here.

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

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