Short Takes

Tere O’Connor at Dance Theater Workshop. Gina Performa asked me for my autograph, a cheeky start to a fun evening.  I wrote a short review for the Urgent Artist here.  Even shorter version: O’Connor makes good dances.  And the piece looked like something I’d see at BAM.

Kinetic Cinema: Liquid Films. Great mix of art classics, historical footage, and new work.  Dancers performing in water seems to beg for nudity.

Words on Dance at the Paley Center for Media. Film of Evelyn Cisneros interviewing Maria Tallchief in 1998.  It is obvious why the world (and George Balanchine) fell for Maria Tallchief– what grace and charisma!  What undeniable American charm!  Plus snippets of her dancing onstage and in MGM’s Million Dollar Mermaid… speaking of liquid dance films, I should watch more Esther Williams.

Bill T. Jones at The Joyce.  Overly institutional (comissioned for the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth).  I wanted more challenges– this is a piece about American history, no?  No passion or urgency here.  I miss Jones’s physical presence onstage.

Ursula Endlicher at The New School. The room was all wrong– a terrible space for interactive work.  None in the audience took up Endlicher’s proposal that we dance with the performers.  Perhaps because we would have had to climb over solid rows of desks to get there.

Maura Donohue curates Food for Thought at Danspace Project. A highlight of my week-- high theatrics from Monstah Black, utter hilarity from GogGoVertigoat, and a high-energy finale by Jamal Jackson Dance Company.  I’m particularly grateful to have seen Vanessa Anspaugh’s We Are Weather; its beautifully spun relationships are still with me.

Mari Osanai and Yuko Kaseki, CAVE New York Butoh Festival at Dance New Amsterdam. The festival has moved into a new phase (butoh-khan) and I have moved, ever subtly, from total befuddlement to the faintest glimmers of connection (if not understanding) regarding butoh.  I hope to compose a longer post.

Inside and Outside the Institution: Curating, Producing, Presenting panel discussion at Center for Performance Research. Invigorating discussion of new media work, if the title was deceptive.  “Inside the Institution” was present in full force, though one of those institutions was the young, experimental venue EMPAC.  “Outside the Institution” was implied, at best.  At least someone from 3LD or even PS122 could have been included?  Still, a great start to a Sunday.  I’ve been compelled to seek out new media events ever since.

PERFORMA 09 presents Anne Collod’s Anna Halprin. I have not yet been disappointed by the Judsonites.  Heady and unsatisfying as the work can seem on paper, I am convinced, from the snippets of new work and recreations I have seen, that those artists were nothing short of brilliant.  Then, one always wonders, how much has changed in the decades that have passed?

 

 

Speaking of the Judson pioneers, I did not see Deborah Hay and Yvonne Rainer, perhaps my personal most anticipated dance event of the season.  I am trying to stay Zen about it.  What’s done is done.

Sara Joel’s Dance, Film, and Body

This summer I had my first encounter with Sara Joel, seeing her solos Enfold and Surface at the SummerDANZ: Emerging Artists program at DTW, and getting another look at Surface at the Solar Powered Dance Series at Solar One.  Her work stood out at both events.  Joel is an artist who excels at making beautiful, simple art whose focus is her own pregnant body.

Tonight I finally saw her 2007 film collaboration with Jody Oberfelder, Rapt (cinematography and editing by Leslie Avery Gould), at Kinetic Cinema’s Liquid Films evening curated by Amy Greenfield.  I am fascinated by my own fascination with her; there is nothing complicated about her movements or concepts– in a lot of ways they’re downright conventional– but there’s something undeniably compelling in her swirling, swimming, swinging imagery.

In the film screened tonight, Joel is underwater in a silky, trailing red dress, and as in Enfold, her pregnancy is not immediately apparent.  The bold garment shifts from a cloud around her to an umbilical cord to a shedding skin, and in the last images, she gathers together a rose from its petals (shot in reverse) then releases the pieces to float to the surface.

Depending on your view, her’s could be a hopelessly outdated, idealized vision of femininity, or an empowering testament to the grace and creative potential of the female body.  My critical, studied eye sees Woman-as-Womb, Body-as-Vessel (reject! reject! down with patriarchal concepts and Rousseau’s Sophie!) and Joel does situate the pregnant form in otherworldy, “nature” realms: the air and the water.  But the work also rejects our Western medicalization of the body and its functions.  She doesn’t really do anything dangerous, but there is a touch of “fuck you, hospitalized birth and fear-induced epidurals” to hanging from the ceiling upside-down with a third trimester belly popping out.

But what I think really makes it all work is that it isn’t so overtly political or goddess-worshipping.  She’s a dancer (former Cirque du Soleil) making dances that are informed by her own body’s talents and capabilities.  Short, soft movement poems of roundness and life.

https://www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/emerging_artistsSummerDANZ:

This Friday: Tough Decisions

One of the best and most frustrating things about living in New York is that the realm of cool stuff to do and see is so much wider than the realm of what can be done.  Even for dance.  This Friday is coming at me like a speeding train, and I am indecisive in the face of so many options!  Competing for my attention (and yours?) are:

Food For Thought at St Marks Church
Danspace’s food drive series, just in time for Thanksgiving, is just $5 with two cans of food (or $10 without).  On Friday, the passionate and multi-talented Maura Donohue curates.  I am not familiar with all of the artists, but I’ve been curious to get another look at Monstah Black since his studio showing at DTW.

60×60 Dance at the World Financial Center Winter Garden
One-minute dances by 60 choreographers.  The Urgent Artist tipped me off about this series here (scroll down).  It sounds refreshing.

Facebook User Labor Enactments by Ursula Endlicher at the New School’s The Internet as Playground and Factory Conference on Digital Labor
I know that’s a mouthful, and visiting those links may or may not illuminate what it is that is actually going on.  I just know that I saw Endlicher’s last show (reviewed here in the Rail) and I want to catch as much as I can before she jets out of New York and off to Japan for her next installation.  The New School performance starts at 6:00 PM.

Performance Club goes to Cycatrix Aptitude at 100 Grand St

I hate to miss PClub events (though I do, often), and Claudia’s phrase “Psychopoetic Romanian Vaudeville” is so appealing.  But I’d still need to RSVP.

Here’s hoping some of you may decide to spend your Friday evening at one of these events, so I cannot see them all.

Update: The Ursula Endlicher event is at 66 West 12th, Room 404.  Admission is free but you must register.

http://www.voxnovus.com/60×60/60×60_Dance.htm

New Works at The Tank: Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith

When the lights went out on Molly Leiber and Eleanor Smith’s Blanket Saturday night at The Tank, you could feel the collective “wow” coursing through the audience.  Quietly but undeniably expressive, Blanket was a work of absorbing beauty and unexpected power.

There were no interpretive notes or explanations in the program, but the title implications were clear in performance: connection, comfort, physical contact.  Separation anxiety.  Blurred boundaries of self—are we separate, or are we one?  Is a body whole, or a part?  The dancers were inextricable halves, whether actively touching, dancing in unison, or maintaining counterpoint while unable to see one another.

Equally essential to Blanket was another pair, musicians Aaron Harris and Yos Munro of the Brooklyn band Steel Phantoms.  Using silence, ambient electronic hums, wordless vocalization, shimmering percussion, claps, and bursts of full, toe-tapping and head-bobbing music, sound fit dance like a glove.  Harris and Munro’s connection to each other mirrored the dancers’ relationship, and they remained exquisitely attuned to the stage.

That stage bore sultry, casual bodies.  They began on opposite sides of the stage, slumped against the wall, but came together to pose.  Positions didn’t call attention to their own performativity, by quoting beauty pageants or dance technique manuals.  Instead, they made simple, pleasing shapes, interesting on their own but also loaded with shades of dependence—at once tender and uncomfortable.  When they separated, the space between them was charged with those tensions.  Their outstretched arms drifted toward each other without ever reaching directly.  When dancing together in a swell of sound, they moved as one.

I was repeatedly struck by their choreographic craft.  Meaning poured through the formalism, and action was nonchalant, neither pedestrian nor dancerly.  Gaze and focus for each body were brilliantly chosen.  Their movements were often loose at the joints, sculpted in their path through space, and totally engrossing.  My mind’s eye is still flooded with striking images: the back-to-back contrast of slumped plie and arched releve like yin and yang; one sweeping the other across the stage by her arms, as she twisted, legs glued like a mermaid, across the floor on her belly; stacked bodies rowing and pedaling; two straight backs, a foot apart, adjoined to circling arms that overlapped like teeth on gears; figures on opposite corners, making a micro-adjustment in sync (did anyone else see that??)

When they grabbed each others’ shoulders—a messy, lunged action—it felt extreme.  A raw emotional outburst in a dance otherwise restrained by suggestion.   Immediately it was tempered by repetition and form.  The dancers veered in diagonal, suspended in a needy, groping action that, failing to escalate, regained its essence as composition.  Dance with a capital D.

The carefully balanced dynamic had been shaken, though.  Soon after, one of the bodies just gave out, or gave up.  The other, with childlike denial and desperation, manipulated her like a ragdoll through the final passages.  It was funny (some laughed) but also sad, and scary.  Insistent on continuing, she looked frustrated by loss even while testing mischievous limits of the control she now exercised over the other’s actions.  Finally, a whisper into her ear brought the dancer faintly back (first her eyes opened, then she consented to the last simple movements).  This uneasy resurrection, pregnant with unanswered questions, ended the show.

Brooklyn Rail Is Out! Plus, Richard Foreman’s Star, Ladies, and Ducks

Check out the Brooklyn Rail online or grab a copy at your coffee shop or independent bookstore!  I can point you to some places to find it in print; just leave a comment if you need direction.

Also, reviews for Richard Foreman’s Idiot Savant are starting to pop up (see New York Times, Huffington Post, and Epoch Times).  I was very fortunate to catch see a preview/rehearsal of the production two weeks ago at the Public, and walked out in a fog of happy bewilderment.  Foreman’s work is largely opaque to me, yet its completeness is fascinating.  Though this play is, by all accounts, deeply concerned with language, it is highly physical as well.  Willem Dafoe stars as the title character, weighted against two sensual women and a small ensemble of male (and duck) bodies.  Alenka Kraigher is riveting– a suspended, ethereal, cooing presence– while Elina Löwensohn is her earthier, spunkier rival.

Supposedly, it’s Foreman’s last show, so catch it if you can.  Idiot Savant runs through December 13.

Blog Launch!

Reinvigorated from recent experiences in the desert, on the subway, and just last night at Jadis, I am returning to my mission to get this project off the ground and into the blogosphere.  I feel just like Aphrodite coming out of the sea!  (cocooned not in dewy foam but in the glow of Brooklyn-basement flourescent)

Today, I would like to invite any overachieving readers to celebrate November by writing a novel.  It doesn’t have to be a good one; it just needs to be 50,000 words.  Why?  Because according to the folks behind National Novel Writing Month, we put off writing out of fear that our work won’t be good.  Which doesn’t accomplish anything.  From the website:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

In that spirit, I write this first post (admittedly less ambitious than a novel).  Time to stop adjusting the color settings, collecting links, and re-titling.  Dance bloggers, allow me to officially join you.

I expect this page will come to include a smattering of ballet, dance film, volunteer ushering, “downtown,” Bushwick, close readings of the body, grappling with feminism, and historical references.

Chances are that other topics may appear, like books, vegetarianism, the greenmarket, dykes, sustainable initiatives, and intentional communities.

I hope you will enjoy your visits.

Please follow some of the wonderful links on the sidebar.

Comments, questions, disagreements, and critiques of any kind are most welcome.