This showed up in my Facebook feed.
(thumbnail photo by Frederick Hecker)

Shot in Fire Island, New York, this film captures the secrets of eternal youth as Maia Helles, a Russian ballet dancer turns 95 but still remains resolutely independent, healthy and as fit as a forty year old. Made by Julia Warr, artist and film maker (juliawarr.com) met Maia on a plane 4 years ago and became utterly convinced by the benefits of her daily exercise routine, which Maia perfected, together with her Mother, over 60 years ago, long before exercise classes were ever invented. (2011)

My friend Maia from julia warr on Vimeo.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Molissa Fenley presents two NY premieres on a single evening program, at Judson Memorial Church, Monday, January 9, 2012 at 7pm. Tickets are $25. The one-night-only program features two new ensemble works, Credo in US, set to music by John Cage, and The Vessel Stories, set to music by Philip Glass. Fenley has choreographed over 75 works in her 35-year career in dance. Both Cenotaph and State of Darkness were awarded Bessies for choreography in 1985 and 1988 respectively. She is an associate professor of dance at Mills College, in residence in the spring semesters, and often teaches choreography at the Experimental Theater Wing of New York University.

Having been immersed in large-group, college-based ensemble dances as an undergrad, Fenley’s State of Darkness was something of a game-changer for me as a young dancer. Performed to Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps Fenley was a small, powerful female artist who revealed a durational depth for solo performance that I was completely unprepared for. We spoke this morning about her newest works and the shifts between her solo and ensemble works.

Can you tell me about these newest works? How did you come to each of them?

Credo in US is to the work by the same name, composed by John Cage. I was commissioned by Mills College to use this piece of music. It’s great to be given an assignment like that and another stipulation was that it had to take place in the Mills College Art Museum. Our college was welcoming a new president and we wanted to showcase the new gallery. I walked in to check out the space and there were these walls everywhere and I decided to use live feed so that anyone anywhere in the gallery could see what was happening elsewhere. Of course, Judson doesn’t have that and we’ve also done the work in a proscenium space, which gives us a different way through the work, as well.

Last year’s Prop Dances at Joyce Soho was a foray into working with whatever items the various artists made. I would have to live with what they gave me, so I got into this idea of working with props, so I asked the dancers to listen to the music and to write free associatively with any images that came up. They did this for two days. Pots and pans came up – the music is a range with gamelan, radio, buzzer, a wonderful cage work where it’s all over the place, piano and a boogie woogie sound and early jazz – so the dancers gave me these images of a foot stomping diety, call and response, helmets, fighter planes, soldiers, forks and knives. I put their lists together, pulled out some similarities and went to Home Depot and found anything I could in common with their images and with these props, the work made itself. I also asked each dancer to choose a minute of the score and to make a phrase from it and incorporated them into the whole thing. That’s one of those shifts from my solo to group work, where I involved the group in my choreographic process.

with Phillip Glass

Vessel Stories is a very different affair. It’s a Philip Glass string quartet composed in 1987 in homage to Brian Buczak, an artist who had died of aids and was a partner of the Fluxus artist Geoffery Hendricks. Geoffrey was celebrating his 80^th birthday and he commissioned me to make a dance piece to the music piece he’d commissioned many years before. It’s in 3 parts. I was using ideas from Brian’s writings and his interests in Masonic architecture and I’m using the space as he would have used a painting. The music is very beautiful and melodic, not what you’d associate with Glass. His string quartets are very romantic, gentle and moving. That’s something Im focusing on – gentleness and togetherness.

How is the work changing for New York?

The last time we performed at the Judson Church, I really enjoyed the 3-sided audience versus just the one front. As a dancer, performing that way, it’s interesting to have wherever you are serve as a new front. Credo’s been done with a front that’s everywhere and a proscenium, this will be it’s first time with the 3 sides, that takes it back to its original form. I’m looking forward to that. And the Judson is so wonderful, warm and embracing and that floor is beautiful. We’re not bringing in lights and embracing the intimacy. It allows you to truly see what you’re seeing. Theatrical lighting puts things at a distance and the ambient light puts us all in the same space, we’re not in the void and the dark.

It’s wonderful to see your company working too, to see these wonderful dancers do this work. Are you working more collaboratively with your dancers now?

For 94 Feathers in Prop dances, I was at Mills and my dancers where here in NYC. So, I wrote out a series of instructions like

94 Feathers

plie here and stretch here and sent it to them and asked them to translate it in their own ways. There is a clear understanding between us, so if I said “use your arm like it was an axe” they know what that means in my vocabulary. They introduced their own idea of what it might mean and what it might do. I used that more in Credo in the sense that they would come up with the phrase, but I worked very formally in Vessel Stories. No one made up any material but me. I’ve been interested in exploring in new ways of creating, but I have a deep interest in formal choreography.

How do you manage the distance creation?

I’m usually at Mills from Mid Jan- Mid May and then I come back. I have a New York gang and a California gang. The California dancers have just arrived, so I am getting the New York company together with the California company. I have this bi-coastal life, having been at Mills since 1999. There are a lot of dancers out there that I have personally trained. They’re dancing coming up through the MFA program and go on to their own work. The program is very intimate, I spend a lot of time with the MFA candidates on their projects and final thesis concerts. We all keep in touch.

It’s been 12 years of this bi-coastal process. The semester goes by very fast. I don’t feel this huge separation. I feel that I’m continuing what I would normally do here. It hasn’t changed how I work, though I have less time. There’s no time in the studio by myself during the semester. By the summer, I am ready to make a new work. A lot of my teaching choreography is a way for me to come up with new ideas, it’s when new things get put in the back of my mind to explore for myself too. When you are mentoring someone who is doing something interesting, it becomes a diaologue that you can put into your mind about new forms or new methods. It provides me with a new way of thinking about getting into the studio. I give myself those assignments. I like to use the teaching as a real laboratory of remembering those experiments, then formulating them for myself and using the new ideas.

When you are training dancers, what are you working on? How do you work with them to get what you want from your dancers? There’s such a clarity of aesthetic that your dancers perpetuate.

There is a lot of emulation, I’m doing the phrase right next to them. I give them a phrase and we go over it and over it. The actual translation is very close. I’ve had a rehearsal director to makes sure the translation is close. There is also the eye you have for your own dancing. You can see if someone is doing something quite differently, some of it comes out of the corner of your, or a intuition. We do a lot of pure drilling and going over it like “the arm does this and the weight shifts there.”

How have your shifts from solo to group to collaborative been prompted. Does much of it come from necessity or from different interests?

Often, I want to make a work and I’m the only one around. So, it’s a solo. I’ve gone through my career of shifting from solo to group a couple times. Invariably everything could be done as a solo. It could be my part within the group form.  But, sometimes I’m working with a group and someone moves on from the group or  something disrupts the situation and I think now it’s time to trench in a make a different kind of work. I’d rather go somewhere new, rather than having to bring in a new person and restage repertory. Often, something I worked on as a soloist becomes a group work. In fact, quite often it happens that way, especially when I’m working with a new company where I take phrasing from solos and make it into a group piece and they shift. They happen side by side.

How do you work with other companies?

When I work with other companies – ballet companies – I come in completely prepared with what I’d like to do. The actual spacing is contingent on the dancers, it’s pure traffic between bodies. Dancers are great in being able find their paths, to manipulate the space to create a way to fulfill that. The actual phrasing and movement vocabulary is pretty clear. I don’t arrive and say “now what?” I have a game plan figured out. I find those situations so interesting to meet new dancers. Often, I get there and the dancers have been chosen. Rarely, do I audition them. Directors usually chose those with an affinity for what I do. It’s always been very successful, not easy, but a nice translation. The director’s usually have an idea of what I do before they ask me.

Popularity: 2% [?]

With so many known commodities invading the festivals this January, lesser-known and emerging artists can get lost in the shuffle. San Francisco-based choreographer Laura Arrington is one such artist. I first caught wind of her work a year or two ago and she’s one of the people coming in with a strong bit of buzz–Big Art Group’s Caden Manso, for instance, told me just a couple days ago not to miss her work. Hot Wings, the 2010 piece for four dancers she’s bringing to American Realness, is an exploration of gender, the body as animal, and violence. Funny and maybe a bit discomfiting, it earned plenty of praise in SF last year, and you have only two chances to catch it: 7 p.m. Thurs., Jan. 5 and 4 p.m. Sat., Jan. 7 at Abrons Arts Center (tickets $15).

Hot Wings seems to have a very interesting genesis; you’ve said it was an extension of some of the ideas you worked with in your prior piece Fingerbird, which is a response or taking off from the famous ballet The Firebird. What was Fingerbird like and what specifically continued to interest you that you took from that experience?

What was Fingerbird like…? Well, I listened to a lot of R Kelly while we made it.  No, Fingerbird was very artificial. Firebird was a source, but so were a lot of other stories of fancy symbolic birds. Kosinski’s The Painted Bird is one of my favorite books, and as an image it’s a favorite…it sort of takes the metaphor of the bird as transcendent and flips it on its head. Also, In a sort of silly way, R Kelly’s song “I believe I can fly,” this song that borrows a trite kind of plastic sentiment, sung by a complicated pop star, but that ultimately gets me…maybe I’m an idiot. But I like those silly intersections between what’s funny, meaningful, and stupid. When you know better…but, still…you still love the metaphor of flight, the image of the bird, the voice of R Kellly… I sort of likened the bird to a trite or conventional representational imagining of a broken woman.

Photo by Robbie Sweeny

You’ve said two things in relation to this piece that fascinate me: one is the idea of a woman (either gender really, but this is an exploration of gender) as an animal, the body versus the brain perhaps, and you’ve also suggested you’re interested in violence within the piece. Yet it’s pretty funny at many moments. Can you sort of elaborate on the animal and violence concepts and how they related/how you explored them in the piece?

I think the intersection btw humor and violence is a pretty high-traffic intersection. Anything that is as real as aggression or violence has the capacity to be received as funny. I mean humor is often camouflage for something darker and more real.
The animals are integral in the trio of pieces in this series. My most recent was about and starred my dog. It was called wag. A deer features prominently on Hot Wings, and Fingerbird was all birds. I love animals. That’s not super interesting but it’s true true true. There’s a lot to say about the animals, but it’s better to not…

I think even you’ve suggested that this piece is somewhat aggressive in terms of its relationship to the audience; what can the audience expect coming into the theater and why make a choice like that?

I wouldnt say aggressive, or maybe I did… It does ask the audience to be involved in ways other pieces may not. I don’t want to say too much though. Audience participation is such a dirty word to folks, so best not to say it!

Given the ways the audience interacts with the performance, and what you’re trying to do with them, did anything happen during the original run that surprised you? Did you see anyone have a sort of memorable response? Did anyone respond negatively?

It’s always a surprise to see how people respond to instructions. It’s always a surprise to see how groups of people create their own identities and personalities. I’m always so so curious to see how my work gets read by people. A lot of people think Hot Wings is hilarious, other folks it made them cry, other folks thought it was stupid, other folks clever… You never know, or at least I never know. I’m always so curious to see how the group identity of the audience can kind of take the piece on. The end of Hot Wings had vastly different responses. Again, I dont want to say too much as I dont want to give too much away.

What it’s like creating work in San Francisco? What opportunities exist there for you as an artist and what are the biggest challenges you face?

Man, I really love SF. Its a special spot, and it feels very homey. I have a really tight knit group of collaborators/friends. The Off Center/Ernesto Sopprani, Jesse Hewit, Keith Hennessy, and a lot of other folks make it a fantastic place to make work. It’s easy to do shit there. It’s in a pretty vibrant little moment. More and more outside folks are coming in, which is great, because my biggest critique of SF is that it’s a bit isolated.

For the entire line-up of the ambitious 2012 American Realness Festival, see here, and be sure not to miss one of January’s hottest parties, American Pussy Faggot! Realness on Sat. Jan. 7, with downtown impresario Earl Dax’s Pussy Faggot!. For all Culturebot’s coverage of APAP 2012 related events, see here.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Andy beat me to it, but I’m going to play the “single mom for a week because Perry had to suddenly fly to Qatar(!?) to play shakuhachi for Vangelis” card in explaining why I couldn’t get a moment’s quiet to think and write my own wrap up before today. (Seriously? Qatar? Tomorrow? But, I have so much dance to see this weekend.) Luckily a hearty stable of babysitters allowed me to maintain most of my planned viewing of last week’s insanely amazing offering of live performance events. Man, I love this town. Right? I mean, screw backyards and your own bedroom. This is where where risk breeds, craft thrives and greatness lives (and, finally, rests). And, I suppose that describes in very short form my week’s viewing.

Fresh Tracks 2011: Pictured Left to Right: Levi Gonzalez (Fresh Tracks Adivsor), Lorene M. Bouboushian, niv Acosta, Hadar Ahuvia, Saύl Ulerio, Yanghee Lee, Aretha Aoki, Marýa Wethers (Program Manager)

On Wednesday, I caught Fresh Tracks at NY Live Arts as they continued DTW’s signature program with a roster that heralded great promise for the kind of voices we can expect the new organization to foster in the future. It’s a subtle shift, but this round, I’d hope, represented how NY Live Arts might be able to bring a healthier range of artists to the proverbial table than some of the more recent versions. Fresh Tracks remains the quintessential showcase for emerging choreographers and provides vital boosts for these artists, not only by supporting them through the presentation of their works, but more importantly through the substantial Residency Program, still under Program Manager Marya Wethers’ and Artistic Advisor Levi Gonzalez’s skillful guidance, which includes almost 60 hours of rehearsal time, performance fees, commissioning funds and dialogue and professional development workshops. Getting in doesn’t necessarily guarantee sustained achievement or involvement in the field; that is up to each artist’s tenacity, but based on the show, I hope we see more from all of them.

Hadar Ahuvia‘s solo Class/icism opened the program. She explored a rich movement vocabulary based on her grandmother’s stroke and resulting paralysis. The dance is comprised of several short variations of a movement motif of threading between limbs, bending at the joints, rolling and twisting torso, and collapsing hips accompanied by short solo piano variations played on a small boombox placed downstage right. It is a lusciously compelling movement investigation sprinkled with bits of wry wit. Ahuvia plays off an examination of immobility with grace and a light touch, while engaging highly sophisticated physical research. Aretha Aoki, who I’ve worked with in the past, offered up a fraught examination of bided time in her The Turning of Events. She seems to spend much of the work alone although she is joined and shadowed by FT alumna Vanessa Anspaugh. There are also occasional bursts on stage or quick flitting passes through the space by Kristina Dobosz and Line Haddad who are clad in short, sparkling, pink skating tunics. A computer-generated, but South Asian sounding woman’s voiceover by Aoki’s collaborator Ryan MacDonald fills the work with a tone of quieted frustration and Aoki’s contracted gut and bent legs speak of deeply seated tensions before a final kowtowing bow acquiesces to larger forces.

Lorene Bouboushian

Lorene Bouboushian’s performance of her The White Lady guts flail gluttonous fail is an exercise in structured insanity and extreme performance. Seemingly similar in method to a solo by Grace Courvoisier that I saw and reviewed two weeks ago, Bouboushian mines both words and movement for their hidden agendas and exploits them to their fullest. She gives a virtuosic performance that unpacks white liberalism, sexual aggression, body image, and dance in viciously wacky ways. I want to see it again and I want all my friends to too. I wish I could give her to one of my sister’s for Christmas. It would be the best present eveRRR. Yanghee Lee’s Dusk is a personal presentation and rumination on her relationship with her deceased father. She begins seated on a chair holding a large drawing pad with words from a monologue she speaks about losing her father, being alone, her state of mind, etc. She pulls the pieces of paper off the pad, drops them to the floor, re-arranges them and dances with a studied liquidity and forcefulness, while singing along with the Korean song accompanying her dance. niv Acosta is on my hit list. Where he goes, I’m going to follow. This 23 year old, Dominican, transgender artist structured a quartet (with his mom yessenia acosta cunningham, Joey Kipp and Cason Bolton Jr) that provided me with great ammunition for my regular ‘contemporary dance is just white people getting their freak on’ debates with students. Acosta pulls from vogue, post-modern task-based practices, hip hop, disco, song, family, and film for denzel again. Somehow it is supposed to be inspired by the 1989 film Glory, I didn’t catch that, but it didn’t matter. His opening silent face-off, vogue-based duet with Bolton Jr., his song with his mom, his endurance structure with Kipp and a final downstage line-up where all four began to lip-synch a re-mix of Alice Smith’s Love Endeavour summed up to reveal a brilliant, new visionary for our field, someone as he says queering ‘brown involvement in performance’ in a way that speaks honestly and articulately from the here and now. His source materials, artistic treatments and casting are reflections of what live performance can be and who it can speak for today. Did I mention I love this city? Saul Ulerio performed a duet, of sorts, with FT alumna Mei Yamanaka. His an ocean in between begins with highly dramatic Wagner-ian Wagner music playing while the audience sits in darkness, the house lights come back on and the audience begins looking around to see if there’s some action behind them. We hear someone walking across the black stage and then following a thunderclap, Yamanaka slaps Ulerio across the face. She slaps him again. This was a, literally, striking moment. The force and sound of the slap were satisfyingly honest and I recalled a very physical, violent duet Yamanaka had performed at HT Chen’s Newsteps a few years ago. I was wondered if more of that was to come and, eventually, after quite a bit of swirling and avoiding one another, a bikini-clad Yamanaka walks in front of the languidly reclined, bikini-trunk clad Ulerio. At which point, he crushes the beer bottle he was holding in his hands, she gingerly walks on the crushed ‘glass’ and he returns with dripping red hands.

Paul Monaghan and Mathew Rogers (Niall Jones in background)

Thursday. Call me a fag hag, I’m in love with 4 gay boys. The gay cover boys Mathew Rogers, Paul Monaghan, Niall Jones, and Michael Ingle to be exact. After the performance of Cover Boy Tere O’Connor‘s latest, I felt dusted in fairy magic. And, I’m not using playful pejoratives to be wry. I want to attend to a very clear emotional experience I had with the pice because the exquisite care that O’Connor employs in his structuring of the work culminates in a deeply felt affection for the four people on the stage, especially Rogers who exudes a genuine warmth after performing physical pathos with an unrepenting sincerity that never approaches melodrama. I felt love. I felt included. I felt transported. I walked away feeling like I’d just ridden down the Mekong with these guys or maybe it was more like down the smaller, slower Russian River – landing in Guerneville, CA for some camping and intimate, low-key boy bars. Andy’s given a great review of the work already, so I won’t go into much recounting of details, but this work offered me something more than the incredibly detailed craftsmanship that Tere always provides. Like niv Acosta’s, and from Andy’s review I’d also guess like Kyle Abraham’s, this work opened up personal and political experiences in sophisticated and considered ways. In Tere’s hands, the personal and political aspects are not crutches or fodder. They are present and honest elements that are folded into a work that one can simply ride. I’m grateful to Andy for reviewing, because this work soaked its way into me in a way that makes analysis of it in a verbal or written way difficult. I’ll say this – GO. I know the shows tonight and Thursday at Danspace Project are sold out, but GO. They are releasing some now, but Go and get on the waitlist. If I weren’t still on domestic lockdown, I would go again tonight and I’d sit up close again and steep.

Friday. Okay, Cunningham. BAM. What’s to be said. The last stop on the Legacy Tour. There’s a New Year’s gig at the Armory, but basically, this was it. The end. I was exhausted, starving and managing a bronchial infection by this point. My generous colleague who shared her extra ticket with me and I made it just in time, running from the Open Lab that Dean Moss’s Live Art in the Visual Environment class performed, after throwing money at a babysitter for cab fare to get the ankle biters home and fed. But, I was there, putting in my time, paying my respects. Or, at least, that’s what I thought I was doing. “Okay, I’m here. It’s MCDC, at its end. I’m here for it. Don’t know if I’ll make it, but I made it.” And honestly for most of Pond Way was thinking “and I’m up here in the balcony, at the Opera House watching patterns and little people move around on the stage.” That’s not typically my preference. And, coming off of the intimacy and rich warmth of Tere’s piece in St. Mark’s Church, thought that this belief system was going to be strongly reinforced. I’m in it for the human-to-human scale, for the reminders of what it means to be live with other live beings in proximity. I’d rather see labor and effort and drips of sweat. But Rain Forest, Split Sides  and 2 intermissions later I was thinking “Jesus. That was I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-E. What if I had missed that out of sheer laziness?” The company was beautiful. Seeing works that were created decades apart from one another and thinking of how Merce generated something like Split Sides while in his 80s was astounding. I was properly put in my place. Alistair Macaulay actually (shhhh don’t tell anyone I’m saying this) captures the program very nicely here. So, I’m not going into detail (plus I was just a civilian attendee and didn’t bother with notes).

It was so far from my Wednesday and Thursday, but by the end of my Friday I kept thinking: “God, I love this town.”

Popularity: 3% [?]

Photo by Erell Melscoët.

Mid-way through Ordinary Witnesses, there’s a long section during which one of the dancers simply spins. Arms cast out in the same direction, she twirls herself around as fast as she can while slowly snaking about circle at center stage. The other four dancers surround her on the periphery of the stage, while a soundscape of roaring guitar hum rumbles through the space. It’s a very simple sort of choice, but that just goes to show the simplicity often makes for compelling art. Because the moment was riveting: visceral, intense, pushing the boundaries of the body (isn’t she dizzy? why doesn’t she fall down?), it builds itself up slowly until it’s overwhelming. At the climax, Andy, who was sitting next to me, tapped my knee and hissed, “That’s amazing!” with a look of pleasant astonishment on his face.

Ordinary Witnesses is part one of a twofer of French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane‘s work that’s going down at New York Live Arts, presented as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival. Ordinary Witnesses plays again tonight, then Friday and Saturday they present World Fair (tickets $24).

Nearly 90 minutes long, Ordinary Witnesses has a slightly misleading title: Although the piece is about the experience of trauma (genocide, war, torture), it’s more about the victims of the experience than the witnesses to it. The work is bookended with long audio recordings of interviews with survivors–an African refugee from genocidal war, an Argentine torture survivor. The opening segment occurs in near blackout save for the supertitles translating from French (I assume there was no projection at all in the original, which would have heightened the effect; even a supertitle projector does a lot to illuminate a theater). For ten minutes or more, the audience is left to ponder these descriptions of experiencing trauma, but there’s a very interesting component to the narratives: they’re very consciously told from the perspective of the speakers’ present, with the trauma in the past. These are not so much witness-bearing accounts as they are descriptions of how violent trauma interrupted the lives of the speakers, and transformed their perspectives moving forward.

The choreography focuses on this sense of interruption, of intrusive events which transform the course of one’s life. The flow of the piece is set in sequences in which the five dancers simply walk–slowly, but purposefully–around the stage, only to break into some other sort of action, often alone, with the others continuing their courses. Rhythmically the piece rarely changes tempo, but the contrast between the flow of the walking and the expression of the trauma is jarring.

I also have to specifically call out the conceptual design of the piece, because it was actually quite remarkable. The lighting was exclusively generated by a large panel of stage lights–I think maybe ten rows of ten–upstage-right, aimed horizontally across the stage. Most of the performance is cast in low light, with the dancers moving through a dim, amber-hued space. But the lights would occasionally roar up to full wattage, essentially blinding the audience. And fascinatingly, the lights were incorporated into the soundscore by Jean-Baptiste Julien. Early on, an electric guitar is brought out onstage and laid in from of the lighting grid. As the lights rise and fall, and even cooler, as they illuminate in various patterns, the single-coil pick-ups project various hums and feedbacks. Essentially, the guitar is played by the lights, with I believe pre-recorded soundscapes and additional live additions also on electric guitar, played by (I assume) Julien himself, seated behind the audience.

There were some problems with the piece. As is often the case with abstract expressions of thematic content, the score unfolds as a series of variations on its central theme, and eventually they come to feel redundant and/or too blunt. The woman’s spinning solo was a powerful expression of the human response to trauma. A later sequence in which the dancers would take turns standing on their heads only to fall down (and then slowly exiting one by one until only one performer remained onstage) came off as too blunt, and less articulate, particularly because the graceful stage falls from the handstands looked too performative and were less affecting than something as physically intense as the spinning. But that’s a minor complaint, I guess. Overall, Ordinary Witnesses did a remarkable job of translating some of the worst that human experience has to offer into a powerful work of art, that speaks to essential human dignity and the capacity to keep going. Highly recommended.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Dancer and choreographer Heather Olson.

Dancer and choreographer Heather Olson, a long-time performer with both Tere O’Connor and Yanira Castro, has a vaguely doll-like face. I’m not sure why this stands out in my mind, but it does. Somehow, it adds yet another subtle layer of enjoyment to her new work Shy Showoff, at the Chocolate Factory through Sept. 24. The title pretty efficiently delineates the polarities the work bounces between, and all I can say is that somehow, Olson’s innocent expression adds something to the end of a cheeky little phrase, when she glances past the audience, perhaps on all fours, before crawling off behind a screen.

I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect going in on Wednesday, but I left impressed, and not just by Olson’s clever and subtle sense of humor shining through the choreography. The show isn’t fast-paced, but it races by in short sequences that veer between introverted and extroverted, vulnerability and glee in exposure. The piece features three dancers–Olson, visibly pregnant, is joined by Levi Gonzalez and Erin Gerken, all in matching light-gray tones. Olson more often than not performs solo, or in a trio, while Gonzalez and Gerken pair off for segments. The movement switches between abstract choreography and natural movement, leaving the crew shifting between syncronized movement and crawling across the floor. On one wall, text–more often than not absurd or contradictory–is occasionally projected on the wall. Towards the end, it even announces a dance break. From a dance piece. Just a little taste of Olson’s wit.

Also, I can’t close without noting the sheer talent of the company. Olson is a splendid dancer, even if somewhat restrained due, no doubt, to being pregnant. But pretty much everyone I spoke to was incredibly impressed with Gerken’s performance. She has a remarkable presence, and her movement demonstrates a supreme sort of control and precision that I don’t always see. All of which is not to say that Gonzalez isn’t good–I’ve seen him before, and as always he throws himself into the role with gusto–but in this piece, at least, he’s doesn’t stand out against his fellow performers.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Photo by Yi-Chun Wu

“It was a site-specific work, and the site was a church courtyard, at John Street United Methodist,” choreographer Deganit Shemy explained of the inspiration for her most recent work. “And we were there exploring the space, and the space was really amazing, between old and new, and the the holy and the…” she trailed off, searching for the right word.

“Profane?” I offered. “Sacred and profane?”

She chuckled, smiled, and responded, “Yes.”

This was a little over a week ago, and Shemy and I were sitting barefoot on the floor of one of the studios at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where 2 kilos of sea opens this Thursday (through Sunday; tickets $20). It was right after rehearsal, and as the tech staff gathered up the scenographic bric-a-brac, we lounged in the sunlight spilling across the floor to discuss how the piece has evolved over the past year from a site-specific performance to a mainstage presentation.

Born in Israel and raised on a kibbutz, in person, Shemy speaks quietly and reservedly, until she finds a tangent that animates her. In part this is due to concern (generally misplaced, as I discovered) over English not being her first language. Originally a visual artist, Shemy came to dance late, at around 26, while she was studying Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation with the intention of becoming a physical therapist. But the methodical approach to understanding body movement, and the relationship of the body to the space it inhabits, opened up new artistic ground for Shemy. A near chance collaboration with dancer Denisa Musilova–who continues to work with Shemy and will be appearing in the piece–led to Shemy’s first choreographic work and a new career.

These days, Israel has emerged as a heavyweight on the international dance scene, led by Batsheva’s Ohad Naharin, whose “gaga” method has seen a rapid, global embrace. Asked about the difference between creating work in Israel and New York, I was unsurprised when Shemy responded: “I think in Israel, there’s a lot of emphasis on the movement, the vocabulary. Like, really researching the movement, where is the body. I think here there’s more that’s conceptual, or ironic,” she suggested, referencing the legacy of Judson Dance Theater. Then she smiled and explained: “I want to work in between.”

Photo by Yi-Chun Wu

Given her unconventional background, it’s unsurprising that collaboration with her dancers is a core part of Shemy’s process. Along with Musilova, 2 kilos of sea also features Savina Theodorou with whom Shemy has also been working for nearly seven years, as well as three other dancers brought on for the project. “They wake me up all the time, with what they bring, the questions they ask,” she said of how she relies on the pair. “This is how I want to work with my dancers. I know something, but I want to be in a place where I don’t know, and they lead me. I think it’s an oxymoron, but when you know the most, you can let go the most. You trust more, you trust them that they’ll find it.”

2 kilos of sea served as a bit of a departure for Shemy. Though she admits that “I want to drop any preconceptions about dance” whenever she begins a new project, to approach the form from as fresh a perspective as possible, the way the piece was developed as a site-specific performance, as part of the Sitelines program at the 2010 River to River Festival (which, full disclosure, is programed by Culturebot editor Andy Horwitz through the LMCC) opened up new avenues.

“I like to start a dance from a different place always, so this time, I thought, ‘How do I start with story?’” she told me. “Because usually it’s not a story for me. It can be a concept, or something more abstract. And the space led somehow to story. It wasn’t so much linear story–like, you can read it in different ways. It can look like a loop. You can start from the end. But you know, there was the space and hol[iness] that led to morality questions, and relationships. Love. What’s wrong, what’s right. And how we choose when things happen to us.”

“In every work, the space affects [the choreography]. The site-specific performance really opened up my eyes. It was really great. I realized that to have more space really helped me to create. Before there was lots of architecture in the movement, I’m curious about it, about the different direction of movement, between open and closed space, about zooming in and out, focusing, simultaneously opposite movement, how you lead the eye…I’ve always been interested in it.”

As the original space deeply informed the contruction of the piece, the biggest challenge Shemy and her performers faced after being invited to present it at BAC was translating the work onto the stage. At the church, not only were the tensions of past and present, holy and secular, captured by the setting, but the architecture, with its warren of spaces and levels, allowed for the differentiation of segments and character experiences. Initially, Shemy set out to present 2 kilos of sea without any set pieces, but ultimately determined that something was missing. After initially developing the choreography for the new space, Shemy worked with designer Lenore Doxsee to translate, conceptually, some of the thematic elements inherent to John Street. What they ultimately settled on, oddly enough, are a set of elements more at home on a construction site: bright orange net fencing, green fake grass like you might use for an indoor putting green, and a long telescoping yellow air duct.

As Shemy explained, the bright, plastic colors were inspired by how the grass and the costumes (designed by Shemy and Musilova) popped against the gray backdrop of the church courtyard. Situated against a backdrop and gray Marley at BAC, the new set elements should retain that sense of contrast, while furthering the thematic association of a set of characters trapped within their own personal narratives. “It led me to cartoons,” she explained. “The very bright colors. But also the mechanism of the movement of the characters. The characters trapped in their own mechanism, as they repeat. We all repeat, unless maybe we go through therapy,” she added with a chuckle. “You don’t realize it usually, but even if you do, you’re still caught in this mechanism. Like in a cartoon. You know this character that runs runs runs, and they don’t know they’re in [mid] air, and only the moment they see [do] they fall.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

(via Animal NY) – Next month, director Antoine Viviani is streaming a new documentary about “intervention artists” called In Situ. Filmed mostly in Europe, it would appear, the film explores how artists can invade the urban space to create a transformative artistic experience. Aside from that rather bland description, I unfortunately don’t know much, but visit the film’s website to sign up for email information about its multi-platform (whatever that means) launch next month.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The Neta Dance Company’s upcoming performance, 2280 Pints! (at DTW, May 25-28; tickets $20/$15), is many things. Sparked from Pulvermacher’s response to an installation at the New Museum and borne out of a summer dance workshop at The University of Florida, the piece is a celebration of the company’s 25^th anniversary and a collaboration between dance students and a professional dance company. The hour long piece is comprised of individual sections developed by company members and workshop participants, which have accumulated over the past year from experimentation with buckets. In the performance, a cast of 20 dancers inhabits a playing space of 57 white, five-gallon buckets. I discussed the work with Neta Pulvermacher, founder of The Neta Dance Company, who has created over 75 works and is founder of The A.W.A.R.D. Show! and Dance Conversations @ The Flea.

How did you become a dancer?
I was born and raised on a kibbutz in Israel, a community based on communist ideals. My parents’ generation was amongst the founders. They themselves are from Germany but they immigrated right before World War II. We would work in our little zoo and feed animals, work the land, learn art, musical instruments, and learn to think. When I was 13 I went to a neighboring kibbutz to take a dance class and that’s when I met a wonderful teacher that I’m still friends with. She taught us to listen and choreograph to music and somehow dance stuck.

Why dance?
In some ways because you don’t speak with words. In my upbringing there were so many declarations of ideals that it was so refreshing to have something with very different rules, language which is not verbal. It made me feel that I could say or express things that are difficult to do with words. With music, the ear recognizes a pattern much faster than the eye. It takes a lot more to recognize a pattern in dance because the language is a lot more complex. Dance works with linguistic principles, but it does not have the same exactitude as music. It’s more like poetry. It affects you without having to go through your submission which is another reason why I love it. You could be extraordinarily intelligent or dumb and it affects you without you needing to understand.

What are the origins of 2280 Pints!?
Last May I traveled with 11 of my students who are college dance majors to Israel for a study abroad program. I am originally from Israel and seeing my home country through their eyes was like experiencing it anew for me. I realized how that vitality and intensity of living- both joy and sorrow- is intensified by the fact that there is always an impending sense of violence in that part of the world. Going there with them for three weeks made me aware all over again about the importance of joy and not in a hokey kind of way.  Coming back home to New York City for a short time, I was going to direct a summer dance intensive in Florida for two weeks. I was tired and I didn’t feel like revisiting anything and not sure what I would work on. I read in the New York Times a review of the Rivane Neuenschwander retrospective at the New Museum and saw a picture of her piece, “Rain Rains.” I had to go see it. I walked into this room and it looked like it was raining buckets but in each of those buckets she drilled a hole, so the bucket dripped into identical buckets underneath. It was both visual rain and the sound of rain drops- very beautiful and whimsical. Then on Saturday I flew to Florida and on Sunday I said, “I don’t know what’s with these buckets, but there’s something.” So I went to Walmart and bought 30 $5 plain white buckets. I spread it on the studio floor and not a minute passed and the ceiling began to leak. There was something wrong with the AC. It was very funny.

How does this piece relate to your previous work?
I always think of my work like I’m a scientist in that there is something I research. Being in the studio and investigating is my job. I deconstruct the thing to its smallest ingredient and set it up in a way where it begins to interact and play.  I let it start to happen and I lift my hands and that’s when I see what it is. Inspiration comes from causing and enabling interactions between people, space, matter, ideas, and feelings. Those interactions are always relational. If I’m trying to understand what we make, it’s about the power of the imagination to see things other than what they are in relationship to other things and make an action in relation to another action or object. I’ve made a lot of dances, but this is not me being smart, cool, hip, I don’t’ give a shit anymore. I just want to make something that is vital and open, without any fear. To release a smile in a person’s face, a real deep body smile is a big deal.

Is your ultimate hope for this piece to convey and inspire joy?
It’s much more than joy. It’s a bucket world. It’s a micro world created with buckets, activated by people and music. It’s not fancy. The fanciness of it comes from your ability as a viewer to go with the idea that the bucket will become anything you want it to be. It’s trying to strip human behavior and show it through buckets. The buckets become human and the dancers become more human because of their relationship to them. The imperfections become accentuated because the buckets are uniform. I wanted to make something that would be generous and open. It’s unapologetically accessible without trying hard to be that. To get to that simplicity is a long journey. Mostly I just want you to be enthralled by the end of it that you would join us in the dance party.

2280 Pints!
Performed by: The Neta Dance Company: Courtney Baron, Robin Brown, Karen Harvey, Colette Krogol-Reeves, Meghan Merrill, Lonnie Poupard, Matthew Reeves, Rebecca Warner; special guests; and students from the University of Florida MOD project – a student ensemble directed by Pulvermacher at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Wednesday – Saturday, May 25 – 28, 2011 at 7:30pm. Family matinee on Saturday, May 28 at 2pm.  Tickets are $20, or $15 for students, seniors and children.

Tickets are available by calling 212.924.0077 or online at www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/Neta_Dance

Popularity: 3% [?]

Race & “Contemporary Performance”: Last week, I published a long-ish piece wondering why, given the roadblocks in traditional theater, more black theater artists weren’t creating work in non-traditional modes. The response was actually extremely interesting–J. Holtham (99 Seats) offered a long and very thoughtful response over at Parabasis; Culture Future had a pair of responses (one and two); and in comments, African-American artist Daniel Alexander Jones politely pointed out that (as I kind of expected), I may just not know about the variety of artists making work in these veins, and gave me a host of people I need to check out. Part of the problem I encountered was defining what I was actually talking about, because in the end, “contemporary performance” is a pretty weak term. Still, I think it spoke to the text-centric bias of most theater artists; I was mostly aiming for a negative definition, modes of theater production that fell outside the normal tracks. But overall, all of it is very worth reading, and it’s a conversation that needs to be continued.

In Yer Face: Another fine and thought-provoking piece over at the Guardian‘s theater blog. Although it’s mostly framed as a piece on playwright Philip Ridley (with whom I’m only vaguely aware but now far more interested), what really caught my eye was the author’s almost off-hand analysis of Ridley’s historical moment in the early-Nineties, when a host of groundbreaking playwrights led by the likes of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill (lumped under the name “In-Yer-Face Theater” by at least one critic) burst onto the scene:

That generation of writers was somewhat cast into shadow by two things. Periodically, British theatre is gripped by the thought that playwriting is dead and devising will save us all; these moments usually pass but before they do they tend to lay waste to a few promising writers. The early 90s was such a time.

Given the back and forth in several contexts I’ve had recently over playwriting vs. non-playwright-centric modes, I found myself mulling over this thought. The arts are prone to hyperbole, and we’re always going over why this or that is “dying.” However, I think it’s true that energy shifts around from mode to mode over time. Whether there’s a logic to it, I don’t know. But periodically playwriting seems to fall into a rut, at least in some places and circles, which may or may not be the same elsewhere (America in the Sixties, for instance), and energy and innovation shifts from one space to another. I wonder if my present exasperation with text-based theater has more to do with a sense that most of the major work I see coming out just isn’t that urgent, and that I might be turning a blind eye to the reality that there’s probably a new generation out there chomping at the bit and who will blow up in a few years’ time.

Seattle’s Intiman Theater Dying?: I mention this only in passing because it concerns me in a past life (when I covered theater in Seattle) and because I think it’s an interesting case study in funding, arts management, and so on. The Intiman, one of Seattle’s three major LORT houses, is shuttering its doors for the rest of the season. Why? Well, no one really knows because the backstory is convoluted and theater’s board and management has behaved with varying levels of incompetence and–it would seem–mendacity. The news broke several months ago when a playwright/blogger published as-yet unsubstantiated rumors of the company–formerly AD’d by Broadway darling Bart Sher and currently by Broadway darling Kate Whoriskey, of Ruined fame–forced their hand. Apparently for several years they’d been dipping heavily into the endowment, and declared they needed a million dollars in additional funds to keep the theater open this year. The fault was largely laid with an abruptly departed managing director, and the endowment was emptied to pay back union dues and rent on the theater’s home. Since the beginning of the year, the Intiman leant heavily on the community pony up half a million dollars before the first of several deadlines, and although the first deadline was met, they still recently announced they were canceling the rest of the season based on the advice of their new management guru. In fact, it seems like a standard playbook that was used several years ago to save Seattle’s ACT Theater, and the (largely accurate, with hindsight) rumor mill had it that they were only staying open to beg money off the community and planned to shut down for a while from the beginning. But that was always just a rumor. In fact, no one has any idea how bad things really are at the Intiman because information only comes out piecemeal, a nice reminder that non-profit arts groups are often not actually public trusts but, in reality, just businesses with a non-profit model, every bit as prone to evasion, deceit, and managerial and fiscal incompetence as any other.

Odds & Ends: East of Borneo with a great piece on the correspondence of Roberto Bolano and Enrique Lihn (yes, it involves lists) - Exeunt mag (UK) on the line-up of the 2011 Pulse Fest – Dance/USA’s e-journal’s continuing series on self-producing dance shows – TCG Circle on “transmedia,” complete with serious cultural biases – Critical Correspondence interviews the artists of MGM Grand, whose show opens tonight (April 20) at the Kitchen – Bellyflop interviews Australian choreographer Rosalind Crisp.

Popularity: 21% [?]