Parsons Dance deal for IB readers!

Parsons Dance is offering InfiniteBody readers a 50% discount on tickets for its upcoming season at The Joyce Theater!

January 26-February 6

Three programs include two premieres by David Parsons and one by Monica Bill Barnes.

Use the code: BLOG (available for all performances except Friday and Saturday evenings)

For full program, schedule and ticketing details, click here.

Yamamoto curates the unseen

Guest curator Nami Yamamoto named her Food for Thought evening at Danspace Project "something/someone that you haven't seen." In my case, the "someone previously unseen" were two young Japanese dancer-choreographers--Michiyo Akamatsu and Yoko Maruyama--who call themselves Akamarukyugyosho. A couple of cartoonish, hard rock'n'rolling kittens from hell, they have energy to burn. I really liked the humor and raw force of their duet, Rise vs Fall, and its clever depiction of support and competition. And, coming right after I spent a couple of hours up at MOMA's On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century show, it made me want to swing by the nearest Staples and buy a bagful of markers. I hope we'll see more of Akamarukyugyosho.

Karen Sherman and Morgan Thorson--who showed part of a work-in-progress--have been seen many times before, though not often enough since making their home in Minnesota. I'm looking forward to the finished piece and whatever they care to bring us when they're next in town.

Another Minnesotan/ex-New York couple--Chris Yon and Taryn Griggs--are also dearly missed, and they were looking good in The Very Unlikeliness (I'm Going to KILL You!). Mostly, I love watching how on top of things they both are despite the off-centered nuttiness of their mission; they're a couple of artists who--like the best comics, verbal or physical--know precisely what they're doing at any given moment. After a while, you notice, with pleasure, their musicality, and it's particularly fascinating to watch them move in unison, side by side, and see how differently they approach the same moves and gestures while remaining in delicious harmony. Fun, fun, fun!

There's one more Food for Thought show this season--tonight at 8pm. Curated by Will Rawls, this one is called appearing and erasing and features work by Sahar Javedani (tranquility in the presence of others), Liliana Dirks-Goodman (Dance #3: Duet for Two Buildings, with Chorus) and Kennis Hawkins with Jocelyn Ladd (Lost in Space).

Food for Thought is Danspace Project's semiannual canned-food drive. Admission is $5 with two cans of food or $10. (details)

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church
2nd Avenue at 10th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Sarah Michelson's "Devotion"

In the right (or the wrong) hands, The Kitchen's black box theater can be a pressure cooker. I don't know whether Sarah Michelson's hands are right or wrong. I think, whenever I see her work, I'm never completely clear about that--and maybe she isn't, either--and, on some level, that's okay. But there were moments last night when I felt like bolting from my seat.

What is devotion (and Devotion)? In Michelson's hands, it is certainly a state of intensity, located just past the intersection of Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs, on the edge of danger. In the bodies of her dancers--best exemplified here by valiant Rebecca Warner--and performers from Richard Maxwell's New York City Players, it is an obsessive, mangled (and mangling) formalism that drives, strains and splays movement beyond the point where it is accceptable (and potentially beautiful) to our eyes, just as the volume and repetition of the work's accompanying music is often pushed past the point where we can absorb it without our scalps throbbing and crawling. Recently, when songwriter Gerry Rafferty died, I thought of Michelson and her similar appropriation of his melancholy hit "Baker Street"--in an endlessly looping cover version--for her piece, Daylight. 

Her theater feels at once severe and manic, a space where performers push and push and push themselves like Olympic athletes in the cold blast of eccentrically-placed light, where a gargantuan cluster of lights swings with potential lethality over their heads, where we sit, trapped in our winter clothes and too-close seats, feeling whipped up--and whipped to the bone--by the sonic, visual and kinetic energy in the room for an uninterrupted 100 minutes.

Her dancers bear--and, I mean, bear--these roles: Spirit of Religion (Nicole Mannarino), Mary (Non Griffiths), Jesus (James Tyson), Adam (Jim Fletcher), Eve (Eleanor Hullihan) and a quartet of Prophets (Neal Medlyn, Alice Downing, Liz Jenetopulos and Nancy Kim). TM Davy's icon-like portraits of Michelson and a young musician, with their black backgrounds, hang high above the black space; the evening concludes with these painted figures' luminosity being the last thing we see before we're released into the night--a kind of benediction.

With text by Richard Maxwell, original music by Pete Drungle, lighting by Michelson and Zack Tinkelman, and costumes by James Kidd, Shaina Mote and Michelson.

Devotion runs now through Saturday, January 22 at 8pm. No late seating. Schedule and tickets

The Kitchen

512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), 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.

Ellen Stewart funeral, January 17

A funeral Mass will be celebrated for La MaMa founder-artistic director Ellen Stewart on Monday, January 17 at 10am at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. 

In lieu of flowers, donations to La MaMa ETC can be sent to:

La MaMa ETC

74A East 4th Street

New York, NY 10003

or can be made online.

Memorial service for Jill Johnston (1929-2010)

There will be a celebration of writer/activist Jill Johnston's life and work on Saturday, January 29 (1pm-5pm) at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, Manhattan.

Johnston comes on like a flood, vivacious, mile-a-minute, with an uncontrollable eloquence. -- New York Review of Books

La MaMa's Ellen Stewart, 91

Ellen Stewart, Off Off Broadway Pioneer, Dies at 91

by Mel Gussow and Bruce Weber, The New York Times, January 13, 2010