TONY review: afroFUTUREqu##r

Hey, gang! I reviewed the Friday program of afroFUTUREqu##r (curated by Thomas DeFrantz and niv Acosta) at JACK for Time Out New York, and TONY had a delay in posting it. But you can find it now at this link.

Not the Master's Tools: Dance Artists Create Alternatives

Join me and three dynamic dance artists--Sydnie L. Mosley, luciana achugar and Sarah A.O. Rosner--for the next Center Line program at Gibney Dance:

Not the Master’s Tools: Dance Artists Create Alternatives

Tuesday, November 3 (6-8pm)

moderated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

("The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House" – essay by Audre Lorde, 1984)

Artists share alternative philosophies and strategies for working in the dance profession – from making to marketing to surviving in a difficult economy and competitive city. How do we keep body and soul together, enjoy the creative process and move our work forward? Bring your own experiences and questions.

Each panelist will share a brief presentation (10-12 minutes) on an alternative philosophy or methodology that has worked for them or that they are currently exploring. After the presentations, we will open the discussion up to the audience for questions and further knowledge sharing!

 Admission free with RSVP here

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

And the 2015 Bessies go to...!

With deep regret, I missed this year's Bessies celebration at the Apollo, as I'm struggling with the horrible cold that's going around. But I'm absolutely delighted to share this list of winners. Congratulations to everyone!

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Hosts with the mostest, Carmelita Tropicana and Jock Soto
on The Apollo stage
(photo: Yi-Chun Wu)

The 2015 NY Dance and Performance Awards

Lifetime Achievement in Dance

Steve Paxton

For a relentless curiosity into the possibility of movement, from the redefinition of modern dance with the movers who gathered at Judson Church in the 1960s, to the development of contact improvisation now practiced around the world, and for his ongoing rigorous and surprising choreographic investigations.


Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance

Movement Research

For nearly four decades as a creative incubator for innovation, enquiry, and dialogue. For providing a range of platforms to disseminate ideas about dance, art, and civic life via its classes, publications and weekly performance gatherings. For championing the importance of artistic process.


Outstanding Production

Dorrance Dance with Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely for The Blues Project at The Joyce Theater

For a symphonic dialogue between a stellar company of tap artists and a groundbreaking blues band; a true fusion of dance and music, expanding the boundaries of two great American traditions.


Outstanding Production

David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group for I Understand Everything Better, Abrons Arts Center and The Chocolate Factory

For creating a mysterious and whimsical world in which to explore the dual devastations of personal loss and public destruction, taking the audience on a visceral journey through internal and external storms.


Outstanding Production

Justin Peck for ‘Rōdē,ō: Four Dance Episodes, New York City Ballet

For a bracing new interpretation of a well-known score, wiping it clean of prior associations and using it as the springboard for an entirely new ballet marked by wit, surprise, poignant intimacy, and robust ensemble energy.


Outstanding Production

Roger Guenveur Smith for Rodney King at BRIC Arts Media

For a powerful and timely performance using gesture, voice, and historical document to link the personal tragedy of Rodney King's life to our national tragedies of racism and police brutality.
For extending that conversation into the street in an improvised post-show town hall that evolved into a peaceful demonstration in reaction to the Eric Garner case unfolding in New York City.


Outstanding Revival

Alexei Ratmansky for The Sleeping Beauty, American Ballet Theatre

For recapturing the spirit and style of Petipa from 19th-century ballet notation starting with simple steps to reconstruct that world’s ideas about movement, musicality, aesthetics, and storytelling in dance.


Sustained Achievement in Performance (posthumous)

Lawrence Cassella for his work with Ivy Baldwin

For the ability to be smooth, strong, fast, fearless, dangerously sexy, and bizarrely hilarious. For more than a decade of creation in a richly intertwined collaboration with choreographer Ivy Baldwin.


Sustained Achievement in Performance

Lauren Grant for her work with the Mark Morris Dance Group

For nearly two decades’ work gracing Mark Morris’ choreography with invigorating spontaneity, expansive phrasing, and robust musicality. For bringing to life an extensive and varied repertory, embodying the essence and individual tone of each work.


Sustained Achievement in Performance

Amar Ramasar for his work with New York City Ballet

For his natural ease and contemporary presence on the classical stage. For his ongoing contributions to a wide range of new ballet work, and for his sensitivity and skill in the demanding and sometimes unseen art of partnering.


Outstanding Performance

Ryoji Sasamoto in OQ by Kota Yamazaki at Japan Society

For his mastery and presence in a dance palace filled with extraordinary movers. For a never-ending flow of movement merging an ingrained sense of lock and pop with a contemporary sense of fluid release.


Outstanding Performance

Melissa Toogood for her work in the 2014−15 season with Pam Tanowitz, Kimberly Bartosik, Merce Cunningham, Rashaun Mitchell, Stephen Petronio, and Sally Silvers

For dancing so precise and fluid, elegant and electric, it captivates the viewer in each work in which she appears. For committing herself so completely to enhancing and transforming the vision of an astounding number of unique choreographers.


Outstanding Sound Design

Tei Blow for I Understand Everything Better by David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group, Abrons Arts Center and The Chocolate Factory

For a virtuosic live audio performance mixing recorded sounds, percussive rhythms, a live mic, and spinning vinyl to transport the audience from the mountains of Japan to the hurricane-ravaged shores of New York.


Outstanding Visual Design

Geoff Sobelle, Steven Dufala, Christopher Kuhl, Nick Kourtides, Jamie Boyle, and Rachel McIntosh for The Object Lesson by Geoff Sobelle at BAM Fisher

For creating an immersive environment built from the material debris of an individual life. For sparking curiosity in the audience about the need, meaning, and weight of their own lives’ objects.


As previously announced, the 2015 Emerging Choreographer Award was given to Storyboard P for fusing various styles of hip-hop with elements of modern and jazz dance, creating a cinematic choreographic vision for new dance narratives and abstract movement-based works. The 2015 Juried Bessie Award was given to Pavel Zuštiak for his poetic layering of movement and visual imagery, and conceiving of the stage space as a decentralized world in which the corporeal body is the focus and canvas for a wide range of human expression.


The full list of nominees can be found at: http://bessies.org/2015-nominees-announced/.


2014−15 Bessie Committees

The Bessie Awards Steering Committee, responsible for setting policy and providing oversight of the Bessie Awards throughout the year, is comprised of Cora Cahan, Beverly D’Anne, Lane Harwell, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Stanford Makishi, Carla Peterson, Laurie Uprichard, and Martin Wechsler.

The Bessie Awards Selection Committee consists of Nolini Barretto, Diana Byer, Kim Chan, H.T. Chen, Blondell Cummings, Nancy Dalva, Andrew Dinwiddie, Maura Donohue, Simon Dove, Boo Froebel, Laurel George, Caleb Hammons, Zhenesse Heinemann, Iréne Hultman, Robert LaFosse, Matthew Lyons, Nicole Macotsis, Caridad Martinez, Harold Norris, Nicky Paraiso, Mathew Pokoik, Susan Reiter, Rokafella, Walter Rutledge, Sue Samuels, Philip Sandstrom, Gus Solomons Jr., Sally Sommer, Risa Steinberg, Carrie Stern, Kay Takeda, David Thomson, Muna Tseng, Kay Turner, Tony Waag, Edisa Weeks, Ryan Wenzel, Adrienne Westwood, and Elizabeth Zimmer.


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ABOUT THE BESSIES

The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 31 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize exceptional work in choreography, performance, music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a 39-member selection committee comprised of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the NY Dance and Performance League, as members participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee. www.bessies.org

Encountering Moriah Evans at Danspace Project

(Photo courtesy of Moriah Evans)

My heart sank a little when I heard the words "You'll be sitting on cushions" as I waited in line to be admitted to Moriah Evans's new ensemble piece SOCIAL DANCE 9-12: ENCOUNTER last night at Danspace Project. But when my group's usher led the ten of us up stairs and around the St. Mark's balcony, I was thrilled to look down upon the sanctuary's light-filled space, the gleaming white floor covering and its sprinkling of dancers in black-and-white unitards, the rim of observers already perched on their spartan foam cushions.

For the moment, it was as exciting as entering the arena of an ice skating show or the stands of a stadium lit up for a night game. My mood brightened and brightened still more when our usher directed me and another woman to sit, not on one of the thin, little grey cushions, but on a sturdy riser. As a few more waves of people arrived, I noticed many smiles. The trip around the balcony might have worked a similar charm for them.

The practical matter of getting an audience neatly organized meshed with the dramatic aesthetics opened up by St. Mark's Church. My first personal encounter with Moriah Evans--I had read some interviews and watched a video of earlier work--made a good first impression.

At the same time, I realized that Evans had put all of us--the audience, including numerous members of the dance press, and her dancers--on the same level. Her dancers--Maggie Cloud, Lizzie Feidelson, Iréne Hultman, Rashaun Mitchell, Lydia Okrent and Benny Olk--sat or reclined on the floor or crawled into place, at times just inches away from the front row of watchers. The big volume of the sanctuary and its dazzling white contrasted with their stillness and the smallness of the way one or another might incline his or her head. You had to be up close to a dancer to catch the momentary distorting twist of a mouth. And you had to be willing to let go of that inexplicable moment as the dancer might summarily rise and wander off to a far corner.

With Social Dance 9-12: Encounter, choreographer Moriah Evans investigates a “possible core of the choreographic” where mind and muscles are at work together in search of a dance. In the process of looking and being looked at, acts of repetition and simulation get filled with life and exchange.

"The theatrical event moves towards the transmission and circulation of sentiment through the re-positioning of its participants. What may be social in origin becomes biological and physical in effect.” –Moriah Evans

          from promotional material for Social Dance 9-12: Encounter

Now and again, Evans--usually with a dancer in tow--would cross the side risers and position herself along one end or another. It looked as if she was carrying a paperback book and something else. A dancer might carry a CD player. Under the altar arch, members of Evans's team sat at tables with laptops. A rack of clothing stood to one side and, at the other, long packing tubes were propped against the wall; neither items were touched but the arrangement left the impression of being admitted backstage to a theatrical work in development. If you had come for something definitive, perhaps think again. We are all "in search of a dance."

Dancers showed me something elusive, too--a kind of impassive, remote-controlled behavior that felt odd to see but also oddly pleasant. A dancer would pivot his or her head and chin, or gently slip into positions and rest there, or make leisurely adjustments in stance or level. I could visualize Evans fixing her gaze at a dancer's body and thinking, "You know what? I'm going to rotate her shoulders inward and make her hold them that way as she slowly hunches forward and lowers her fingers to the floor, and I'm going to do that because nobody else asks her to use her body that way. Nobody. And why not?"

At times, the dancers' physical adjustments made them look like objects of clay stripped of human agency, and I questioned, or did not question, my enjoyment of this abstract claymation. At times, the adjustments made me think of time-lapse films of unfurling flowers or sprouting ferns, at least two different kinds of visible or invisible time simultaneously working through the body.

The day/night unitards distorted any sense of the true size and weight of the dancers' bodies. My eyes registered the black area as solid dancer; the white tended to merge with the surrounding floor. When the dancers moved, these illusions made their bodies look extra-melty, bendy, stretchy. In one moment, the lights quickly dimmed, engulfing the space and dancers before gradually recovering. How strange to realize that, despite the brevity of the dancers' absence from view, I had missed them.

David Watson's sound score shimmered in and out of awareness, light as breath. How often do you stop to notice the fact and the minute workings of your breathing?

How does the spacing of the dancers across the floor--fish in Evans's aquarium-- affect our relationship to them? Close up, you can notice minute shifts and eccentricities. To connect with a dancer further away, you must shift in some way; you project something of yourself into the space, and doesn't that feel strange and marvelous?

Ah...and isn't that how she catches us like more exotic fish for her tank?

There is a real way in which we are pulled in, plugged in and deeply implicated and impacted at a level of breath, nerves, mind. Although just one hour and 15 minutes in length, Social Dance 9-12: Encounter looks like an act of endurance and can leave even observers feeling spent.

With visual design by Strauss Bourque-La France and Moriah Evans, and lighting design by Kathy Kaufmann

SOCIAL DANCE 9-12: ENCOUNTER continues tonight and Saturday, October 17 with performances at 8pm. 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)

Decolonizing mind, language, history

Clockwise from left:
Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi (photo: Ben Carver),
Tommy Pico (photo: Tommy Pico),
Mette LouLou von Kohl (photo: Laura Bluher)

Hosted by artist-activist Dan Fishback, DECOLONIALLY QUEER drew quite a crowd to a small studio--legal capacity: 78, and things were kept legal, more or less--at NYU's Performance Studies department. The program--a collaboration of The Helix Queer Performance Network, Queer Union-NYU and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics--featured three queer artists of indigenous heritage and offered a bracing corrective to the week's traditional Columbus Day commemoration. In fact, if performers Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Tommy Pico and Mette LouLou von Kohl could agree on an anthem for Decolonially Queer, it might well be Fuck Columbus and The Ship He Rode Over In, a sentiment the evening made abundantly clear.

Each artist rallied the strength of resistance and self-definition. Kumeyaay poet Pico, self-described "weirdo Indian faggot" living in Brooklyn--opened with wry defiance of typical expectations that he'd deliver a poem about nature--like "anemones and shit," "fodder for the Noble Savage narrative" before dazzling us with cracked wit and torrential delivery. Nature emerged in Pico's own time, on his own terms, giving us images of hills with "backs that love being stroked by our eyes" and the sky as the sole "stellar inheritance" shared by himself and his ancestors.

Lady Dane--accomplished singer, dancer, writer and ritualist--declared herself "the mother of a verbal revolution" powered by the complex experience of being a trans woman at the intersection of African, Cuban and indigenous American cultures. "Growing up, I was told by my elders, 'You have to read people who look like you.'" Stripping off her high-heeled sandals--"I'm decolonizing my feet, bitches!"--she wove a partly-sung incantation designed to shake listeners awake. Later, in the talkback moderated by Marlène Ramírez-Cancio of the Hemispheric Institute, Lady Dane spoke of her influences--outspoken singers like Nina Simone and Abby Lincoln, formal gestures recorded in Egypt's ancient hieroglyphs, rich ancestral practices disrupted by colonization and now reclaimed. In her work, she confronts English, crafting ways to turn that language into a protective and healing force.

Von Kohl's performance incorporated dance, photography, video, audio and voice in a poetic and moving evocation of her Palestine at a time before Israeli occupation. With Lebanese/Palestinian (mother) and Danish (father) ancestry, she speaks only English and French; we hear speaking French as she portrays her cigarette-smoking grandmother. Unlike her grandmother, though, von Kohl speaks no Arabic, and that disconnection pains her.

In silence, she crushes an orange she had carefully, tenaciously grasped between her jaws--juice, pulp and seeds falling at her feet. "To remember is to resist," she later tells us. With that precious orange, she calls attention to the richness of the land, the once-earthy wealth of Palestine before Israeli occupation, when her parents were orange farmers. "This is not about nostalgia," she says. "This is about memory as a weapon, as noise for the silenced."

All three artists grapple with the limitations and creative possibilities of language. For queer artists of color, indeed, this struggle has high stakes, meaning the difference between erasure and empowered presence. Pico remarks that he had to "flush all the ideas I had about poetry" and, instead, focus on "how do I sound?" Lady Dane studies, she says, "who I was before colonization; that's at the heart of everything I do."

The inspired and inspiring DECOLONIALLY QUEER ran for one night only, but you can keep up on Helix Queer Performance Network's future activities by clicking here.

BIOS:

LADY DANE FIGUEROA EDIDI

“The Ancient Jazz Priestess of Mother Africa” is an African, Cuban and Indigenous American performance artist, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, Author (Yemaya’s Daughters, Brew, Baltimore: A Love Letter), playwright, healer, cohost of Inside Out Radio Show, a member of Trans Women of Color Collective Leadership Team, a volunteer at Casa Ruby, and a founding member of interdisciplinary theater company Force/Collision. She began producing her own cabarets at the age of seventeen. In 2013 she became the first trans woman of color published author of a work of fiction in DC. She has also written the book and lyrics to Roaring The Musical.

TOMMY PICO

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is the author of absentMINDR (VERBALVISUAL, 2014)—the first chapbook APP published for iOS mobile/tablet devices—was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, and [PANK]. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and with Morgan Parker co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) @heyteebs

METTE LOULOU VON KOHL

Mette Loulou von Kohl was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. Currently based in New York City, Mette Loulou is a mixed-race queer femme, born to a Lebanese/Palestinian mother and Danish father. She has lived in New York, Romania, Morocco and Denmark. She is fascinated by the intersection between her personal identities as a jumping off point to reveal, dismantle and rebuild realities and dreams. Mette Loulou weaves movement, words, and her love for the unexpected into the exploration of her embodied histories. Mette Loulou is a graduate of EMERGENYC- the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program and participant of EmergeLAB and Needing IT ALL at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She is the co-founder of the performance collective A Beautiful Desperation and has performed both nationally and internationally in Canada and across Europe.

THE HELIX QUEER PERFORMANCE NETWORK

The Helix Queer Performance Network is a collaboration between La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics, seeking to nurture emerging queer performers, empower diverse queer communities, and celebrate the legacy and lineage of queer performance in New York City. Through educational initiatives, innovative stage productions and challenging public conversations that prioritize justice across age, race, class and gender, Helix aims to foster an inter-generational, multi-racial, multi-gender performance community where artists can document a broad spectrum of queer experience in the context of a rich artistic history.

LAST CHANCE: Watch out for ponydance!

Ireland's ponydance in action
at Abrons Arts Center
(below: Neil O'Brien lifting Leonie McDonagh)
Photos: Amanda Gentile

If the desperation and mayhem of a typical night out on the Lower East Side doesn't faze you, you should really, really, really like ponydance. And you won't even miss your chance to score a drink. You can get a free one right in the performance space and sip as you watch. What could be more convenient?

The intrepid comedy dance troupe, hailing from Ireland and Northern Ireland, wraps up its run of Anybody Waitin'?  tonight at Abrons Arts Center. With a quirky arrangement of seating, ponydance has made an already small space even moreso by allowing performers a mere melon slice of room to romp in and putting the audience well within reach of kicking feet, hurling bodies and smeary lipstick. That's right, but I'm not going to tell you to sit in the back. What would be the fun of that?

You can't run. You can't hide. But you can tuck your feet in and tilt out of the way.

With a comic and choreographic aesthetic that sweatily embraces dance competitions, music videos, speed dating and pole dancing, Anybody Waitin'?  is certainly not waitin' around for Godot or anybody else. I can scarcely imagine a more proactive bunch of artists or characters, and their approach to audience engagement is more like audience forced marriage. Seriously. Have that drink.

Leonie McDonagh, Paula O'Reilly--Google Images thinks she resembles Paula Deen!--Duane Watters and Neil O'Brien dance their wildly-costumed, skit-like duets and coordinated routines like demons. Tight and with superhuman energy and edge. They are intensely funny.

The show--curated by Laurie Uprichard and co-presented with Irish Arts Center--runs roughly an hour, give or take a few audience-inspired antics I'll leave to your anticipation. Anybody Waitin'? concludes with two performances tonight: 6pm and 9pm. Click here for information and tickets.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Chantal Akerman, 65

Chantal Akerman, Whose Films Explored Women’s Inner Lives, Dies at 65
by Rachel Donadio and Cara Buckley, The New York Times, October 6, 2015