Looking at Lucinda, then and now

Scenes from Dance (2009) by Lucinda Childs
(photos: Sally Cohn)

I regret missing Barnard College Dance Department's recent evening with Lucinda Childs and French filmmaker Patrick Bensard, director of the 2005 documentary, Lucinda Childs. Just short of an hour, the film traces notable influences and milestones in the dance artist's career--her exposure to the aesthetics of Cunningham and Cage, explorations with her fellow Judson iconoclasts such as Yvonne Rainer, magisterial flights through the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson universe.

It is Wilson, interviewed by Bensard, who best sums up the multitude within Childs, the mixed feelings she and her elegant, minimalist aesthetic can stir in a viewer. He describes a being at once soft and severe, hot and cold, and he appears to love her every polarized contradiction. The film includes wonderful excerpts of Childs, Mikhail Baryshnikov and other dancers performing her choreography--skimming the floor and slicing through air like figure skaters, earth and its gravity mere playthings to these mercurial figures.

Worth any price of admission are the brief glimpses of her solo Carnation, made in 1964 when I was 12 and a decade away from starting to write about dance. Maybe only a woman as frosty-looking as Childs could be this wickedly clever, surreal and funny in her ritualistic precision, crowning herself with a flexible strainer basket, carefully stuffing kitchen sponges into her mouth and fanning the stack open like a duck's bill.  How I wish I could see it performed live now.

* * *

See the fall season of The Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater, November 29-December 11. The first week's program includes the New York premiere of a Joyce commission, The Sun Roars Into View (2016), and the second week features Childs's signature work, Dance (1979) with a commissioned score by Philip Glass and the original film decor by Sol LeWitt.

For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
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Kyle Abraham's neighborhood remains in motion

Choreographer Kyle Abraham
dances in Pavement.
(photo: Carrie Schneider)

What does it mean to bring a Black neighborhood into theatrical space? Like the Black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, where dance artist Kyle Abraham grew up, or historically Black sections of Brooklyn where Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion finishes its season at BAM Fisher this evening?

It takes more than lining the space with a chain-linked fence and basketball hoop, evocative though those details certainly are. It takes a sensibility large enough and a skill sharp enough to reflect the complexity of Black life through the power of dance imagery.

What other artists have done so well between the covers of a book or across a movie screen, Abraham strives to do in the hour-long Pavement, first commissioned by Harlem Stage and shown there in the fall of 2012 as the city reeled from Hurricane Sandy. That show went on even as the troupers had to make do without their set, stored away in New Jersey. The fence and hoop (and a projection that features No Loitering signs) appear in the BAM production, establishing, for our benefit, a literal sense of place.

But a neighborhood is more than its coordinates. It lives in its rhythms--its music, its laughter, its glances, its gestures of kinship, its anger and hair-trigger aggression, its desires and its hopes. With his brief, opening solo to gruff blues, Abraham first directs us to look for and read these rhythms in movements that are both hunched and earthy. Nothing's realer than the wide, boisterous roll of his pelvis. But Abraham, as choreographer, can be indirect and elusive, suspending any interpretation-minded viewer in a limbo of ambiguity because there's just so much on his page.

When a white man wraps his arms around a Black man, pulls him to the floor, face down, and gently folds the man's arms behind his back, you read many things at once. The softness of the energy between the men. The unexpected compliance of the brother. The iconic and traumatically internalized image that cannot be severed from too many videos of Black men subdued or slain by cops.

Later in the piece, dancers lower themselves atop one another in the same downward, hands-restrained position--with the same gentleness, willingness, inevitability. You see bodies piling up as Sam Cooke croons a love song--I belong to your heart /You alone can possess me/No one else can caress me /I belong to your heart--and it is simply too much to easily process.

I remember interviewing a wunderkind Abraham in 2008--a year of Hope with a capital H--and asking him some trite question about Obama. Now it is eight years later. How many Black men and women have been incarcerated or murdered by the police since that year of capital H hope? The shades of our dead pass through Pavement and cannot be ignored.

I'm intrigued by the half of the stage that often stays empty while dancers bunch in formation in the other half. I'm intrigued by the breadth of Abraham's embrace--Bach to Donny Hathaway--and the compression of contemporary dance, West African dance, ballet and hip hop, dancers confidently switching codes through these distinct states of being. They both acknowledge and defy the limitations of theater space, representing lived experience, culture and intimacy within its make-believe confines. They make a neighborhood.

With performances by Kyle Abraham, Matthew Baker, Vinson Fraley, Jr., Tamisha Guy, Thomas House, Chalvar Monteiro, Jeremy "Jae" Neal and Kevin Ricardo Tate

Pavement concludes this evening with a performance at 7:30pm. For tickets and information, click here.

BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)
 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
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Gibney company premieres "Folding In" at home

Scenes from Gina Gibney's Folding In
Above, left to right: Kassandra Cruz, Devin Oshiro and Amy Miller
Below: Nigel Campbell and Kassandra Cruz
(photos: Scott Shaw)

Gina Gibney lists her five dancers--Amy Miller, Brandon Welch, Nigel Campbell, Kassandra Cruz and Devin Oshiro--as collaborators, and dance outsiders might think that role stops when a work's first performance begins. But it continues through the last movement of the work, and Gibney's artistry foregrounds performers in a way calls to mind Yeats musing, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

The Gibney Dance Company celebrates its 25th anniversary this season with the world premiere of Folding In, Gibney's first evening-length piece since opening her organization's second home, Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center.  Set to an atmospheric score by Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, the dance bears the distinct Gibney stamp in its imagistic poetry, picturesque sculpture and sensitive relationships that initiate and flow between and among dancers. This choreographer, I suspect, continuously tinkers and crafts a world she'd like to live in.

She describes the piece as "a meditation on the cycle of extension, resolution, and return" that exposes "the natural state of the body and how it seeks inevitable but unknowable endings." The dancing fills a looming white studio space tinted with lighting designer Asami Morita's muted, shifting chroma. Intriguingly, as the audience seating is arranged, the studio also features a deep area perpendicular to the scene and out of our view--what we can't see, can't know. That recessed area has a definite presence.

What we do see--and quite clearly, as is the Gibney way--might be hard to define. A corps of white-clad dancers spread themselves across the back wall like sticky scraps of paper torn from some once-unified whole--an image reflected in the projection on the wall. They initially use the wall as a medium in which to grow, to explore the strength of their hands and the reach of their limbs, to eventually and crucially render themselves distinct from their beginnings and from one another. Felicity Sargent's interestingly different costumes suggest that they were always meant to strike out in individual ways.

They emerge--agile, spiky Miller, "rubberband man" Welch and all--in a whirlpool of motion generating solitudes and interconnections. The work requires--and receives from its performer--both remarkable plasticity and exactitude. Although the makeup of her company has changed over these many years, Gibney has always had an eye for a dancer's dancer, some of the best collaborators an artist can hope for.

Folding In continues through Wednesday, November 12. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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In review: "the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds"

Cast of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Read reviews of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, an evening of site-specific improvisation curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, part of Danspace Project's Lost and Found platform at St. Mark's Church, Saturday, October 22, 2016.

Click to read:

Maura Donohue, Culturebot

Alexis Clements, Hyperallergic

Nicole Loeffler-Gladstone, The Dance Enthusiast

Gia Kourlas, The New York Times

For information on remaining Lost and Found events, 

now through November 19, click here.

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Underexposed at Dixon Place...for now

Artists from Dixon Place's Under Exposed program
Above: Breeanah Breeden (left) with Kathleen Kelley
(photo: Andy Ribner)
Below: Sari Nordman
(photo: Shane Solow)

The Dixon Place performance series Under Exposed, curated by Doug Post, offers emerging choreographers opportunities to show work at various stages of development. New York dance watchers might discover one or more up-and-coming artists who should be on our radar. Any such testing-ground programming will be eclectic and likely uneven but not without rewards.

The following artists showed work last evening at Dixon Place:

Kathleen Kelley and Breeanah Breeden

Justin Faircloth and Maddie Schimmel

Liz Charky

Sari Nordman

Ranardo-Domeico Grays

Grays's three excerpts from Roots--performed by members of his VISIONS Contemporary Ballet--is the kind of big-hearted ensemble deployment that would benefit from more space to spread out in and more distance from the audience than Dixon Place can offer. A praise dance steeped in traditional ballet and modern techniques, it finds its life in the elegant technique and conviction of Wesley McIntyre, the one performer who reflects the roaring fire of devotion right down to the cellular level. He is a joy to watch.

I also enjoyed the chance to see a duet by Kelley--my Montclair State University colleague--and Breeden. In Orbicular, the two women--one white, one Black--start out silently, warily eyeing each other as they begin a shifting, growing interaction. Near the end, each dancer takes turns slipping behind the other in a braid of imagery that could mean any number of things. I perceived a newfound bond against external threat, a protective alliance between the two.

Charky is the artist I'll be most excited to track in the future, and you should keep up with her, too. Her funny/scary I'm Afraid of Everyone--a sort of celebrity gossip game played out as interrogation--proved to be the perfect vehicle for four performers capable of droll humor. The two Chris Isaak songs she drops are a big bonus. Dancer Elizabeth Furman's ebbing, flowing, desperately vulnerable solo set against Isaak's "Wicked Game" makes her another distinctive artist to look for again and again.

Under Exposed is closed for the season. For information on this and all Dixon Place programming, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
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James Galanos, 92

James Galanos, Fashion Designer for the Elite, Dies at 92
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Tammy Grimes, 82

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