Rosamund S. King "Cocoon" - photo by Madhu Kaza

Belladonna: Body of Words:  Tuesday, February 15,  7 pm at Dixon Place.  The critical and kinesthetic intersection of text and physical performance featuring Alexandra Beller Dances, Rosamond S. King, Lauren Nicole Nixon, and  Sally Silvers. Tickets ($6)

Poets can make language seem to dance.  What happens when dancers duet with words?

This question bubbles up beneath next Tuesday’s installment of the literature series at Dixon Place.   I queried curator Emily Faye Skillings and her chosen artists about this, and the measure of the meter went something like this:

Hey, Emily, how did this evening come about and how did you initially become involved?

Well, I’ve been working for Belladonna*, a feminist poetry collective, for almost two years, and we have this amazing relationship with Dixon Place where they let us curate three nights per season.  I think Dixon Place is a wonderful lab for experimental performance, and when I started curating literary events there with Rachel Levitsky, Belladonna*s co-founder, I had this idea for possibly doing a dance event sometime, but wasn’t really sure how things would come together.

When Rachel asked Phoneme Choir, a movement chorus aimed by Daria Fain and Robert Kocik at de-constructing and re-structuring the English language, to perform at Dixon Place for Belladonna*s fall benefit performance, I got a better sense of how we could host an event that supported performances that are also texts.

How did you originally conceive the program, and has that conception changed significantly as you’ve worked it out?  If so, what influenced the nature of the changes?

This year Belladonna* is celebrating “the commons,”  a beautiful, very old idea that in every community there is space that is shared or able to be accessed by everyone.  In the art community, this translates to work that is somehow “multiple” (multi-authored, collaborative, hybrid etc.) and this year we are publishing works that have these characteristics.  This got me thinking about dance, and how everybody is doing this great “hybrid” work that reaches outside of dance and into different fields.  The work is hybrid, but somehow the events are not.  The events are a performance for the same people.  I go to dance performances and see the same people in the audience, and at some point I started thinking where are the architects? Where are the visual artists; where are the poets at these performances that are incorporating this beautiful poetry?  Where is the hybridization of the event, not only in terms of the audience and the content of the performance, but in the structure of the evening itself?

I knew some people who were using poetry in their dance work, and so I asked them to contribute a short, 5-15 minute piece, work in-process, or lecture demonstration.   The first four people I asked became the line-up.

First, I asked Rosamond King, whom I met this summer at Bates Dance Festival after admiring her poetry for many years.  She sings her work.  You are never bored or disengaged when she reads, but I had no idea she was a dance artist.  She was touring Bates with Cynthia Oliver’s company at the time and came into my class and we talked a little about poetry.  Months later I ran into her at the Brooklyn Book Festival and basically promised her a performance!  This is a very risky thing to do in the early stages of event-planning, but I knew I wanted her to show something.

I asked Lauren Nicole Nixon, whom I’ve collaborated with, and who I knew was making powerful solo work that incorporated her poetry. I asked Alexandra Beller, who has been my mentor for many years and who is really craving feedback from the literary community on the way she uses text.  I nervously asked Sally Silvers, a woman whose work totally embodies the text/poetry axis for me, and she said yes–and those were the perfect people.

What changed was the integration of publishing into the event.  In the past, when Belladonna* had a reading, we published a section of whatever the author was working on at the time in a “commemorative chaplet” or small chapbook.  This way, the reading/event had a life in our published work.  It was a beautiful honoring of the event.

Rachel Levisky suggested that I publish a chaplet for the event, so I solicited performance texts from the artists.  These texts are poems, handwritten notes, gatherings of ideas and they really speak to each other when they are next to each other in this little book.   In the book the texts gather in amazing conversation, which is exactly what I hope will happen the night of the performance.

What does curation mean in your mind?  How has your idea of your function or role developed in the course of your interaction with others and work on the project?

Sally Silvers photo by Lois Greenfield

To me, curation is being prepared, but not so over-prepared that things are wooden.   For instance, I’ve never met Sally Silvers, and I haven’t seen 3 of the 4 pieces in the showcase.  When everything is pre-choreographed I’ve found that it tends to stultify conversation.  I have these texts and my conversations with the artists and I’m supported by a collaborative of eleven wonderful women and that feels like enough.  On a simple level, curating is facilitating and gathering.   It’s a kind of fragile thing, making sure everyone’s individual expectations for the evening are taken care of.

Initially, I had an idea for the evening that was more streamlined.  As I spoke to the artists I realized that many of them wanted feedback, and that this event was going to be a performance lab for their work, so I knew that I would need to incorporate a lot of discussion into the evening.  This makes it more of a hybrid event in my mind.  There is the performance, the published text and the discussion of both.

Have you seen or been involved in similar events? Did you have a model in mind on which you based your approach? If so what promises to give this evening its specific brilliance?

My friend Saifan Shmerer runs an amazing series called VIP(arty) in DUMBO with her friend Sarah Rosner.  They invite choreographers to show their work in a restaurant space (which completely re-shapes your idea of the performance, when people are both eating and attending a performance and the bodies are right up next to you, unapologetically).  When the performance ends, she shepherds the audience into a semi-circle and moderates what always turns out to be a brilliant conversation.  I think these talk-backs are so successful because she first asks the artists if they have any questions for the audience. Then she opens up the conversation so that the audience can ask their own questions.  When you give the audience a point-of-entry like that, everyone feels more comfortable.

I asked Saifan to help me moderate Body of Words, so that she could bring that knowledge of facilitation to the conversations preceding and following the performance.  There is going to be a lot of talking.  I think what makes it special is that it’s a dance performance hosted by a poetry collaborative.  When does that happen?

How do you hope and/or plan that the show and/or its artists/presenters will engage its audience?  Who do you hope will come?  At this stage, what would a successful evening look like, at least in your head?

Last night I couldn’t sleep (my feet were hot) and so I was thinking about the event.   I was thinking about this text by Eileen Myles that Belladonna* just published in a chaplet.   Myles says this about curating her poetry series, Scout:

“The crowd that came out for these women was astonishing.  Because…they should have all known each other, the people who knew each of these women—but they didn’t.   Curating, it seems to me is about remembering to draw lines between people.  Making a human chain of connections and concerns.” (From Dear Lia p. 7)

This is how I feel about this event.  The poets I know should know and be inspired by the dancers and choreographers I know, and vice versa.  A more language-focused audience will be hyper aware of a textual element that might otherwise fall into the background, and this will be useful for the choreographers.  Many poets should be more aware of their bodies—in their texts, when they read.  I hope this event forges relationships between performers, among the audience members, between the viewers and the artists.   I hope that this event will help bridge gaps between these disciplines, practices, and communities.  Also the name for the event is way too long, I think that’s why people aren’t listing it, so I hope people make fun of that.

from a guerilla performance photo by Swati Khurana

So, Lauren and Rosamond, when Emily invited you to be part of this program where did your imagination take you in terms of possibilities and/or ambitions?  How did you scale up down or sideways to what you will actually present, why, and how long or easy or challenging has that process proved?

Lauren Nicole Nixon: I started with a pretty solid idea and then things slowly fell apart, quite frankly.  I typically have a sort of game plan for how I like to work, a sort of over-organized mapping of the who/what/when/where and why of the work, but then I had to be honest with myself and realize that it wasn’t working for me so well this time around.  Once I got real with myself, I spent quite a bit of time rifling through old journals and just moving and then moving some more.  Then it just sort of spilled out of me.  I didn’t have to push it as much.  The biggest challenge came from altering my traditional work process and getting out of my own way.

Rosamond S. King: Body of Words has given me a push to gather some ideas and gestures I’ve been thinking about for a while into a presentable snippet.  I’ve been thinking about the ideas behind “Spectacle/SPECTACULAR” (the presence or absence of the poet/scholar body and the omnipresence of the drag/vogue body) for at least a year.  What will be presented at Dixon Place coalesced over the last three months.

Who, if anyone, outside of the usual suspects (whatever that might mean to you) do you hope might turn up in the audience?  How do you think, plan or hope that they will they be attracted?

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Name: Nellie Rainwater
Title/Occupation: Choreographer, Dancer, Teacher
URL (s): www.rainwaterdances.org

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up in Rhode Island.  I sort of made a circuitous route to New York after going to college in Minnesota, and then living in Korea, and Washington, D.C. for a few years. When I finished undergrad, I did not expect to be dancing in my professional life, but once I found out that life was pretty unbearable without dance, I decided I needed to weave dance back into my life and make it all work somehow.  I ended up dancing for a few modern dance companies in DC, and I moved to NYC for grad school at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU in 2008.  In May, I finished my M.F.A. in Dance and started Rainwater Dances.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

It’s hard to choose one thing!  Well, I double-majored in Dance and English in college, and one of my favorite books from then and now is Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill.  I first read it in a creative writing class, and I think one of the things about it that really stuck a chord with me was the rawness of the characters and the brutal honesty of her stories.  I am also fascinated by gender roles, and I love how she explores those dynamics without compromising what is true.  She does a wonderful job of balancing really complex characters and situations with such sweet, simple and direct language.  I love those paradoxes.  The biggest lesson I get from reading her work is to follow my instincts, even the weird ones — even when it’s easier to resist and do something safe.  I try to go to those quirky places, because that specificity and detail is what makes the work original.  I’m still learning and digging, but I think that being true to the peculiarity of my own voice actually allows people to connect with the art I create on a deeper level.  I hope so anyway!

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I am a huge introvert, but I love performing, which I know is a bit ironic.  Also, in terms of choreography, most of the time I try really hard to let my work stand for itself.  I feel as though each dance piece should be like a poem that exists in a space beyond words.  I like a certain amount of ambivalence in my dances and for that reason I don’t always enjoy talking about my work, and I’m really not very good at it!  I can be very bumbling and roundabout when trying to describe a dance, even when the piece comes from an idea that I have put a great deal of thought into.  I’m so focused on expression through movement that it can be difficult  for me to translate dance into conversation.  So for that reason, I have often wished for the ability to be at ease as a public speaker.  It would be so much easier if I could just articulate myself in an intelligible way without shyness getting in the way.  It’s something I’m working on.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

Right now I make a living through teaching yoga and doing arts administrative work.  A typical day includes giving myself a yoga class in the morning, working in the office, and rehearsing with my dancers or teaching a yoga class in the evening.  After being in school for two years, I forgot how hard it is to work in an office for extended periods of time.  Movement is so important for all our bodies and minds!  Especially for dancers though, it is so easy for us to get depressed if we’re not dancing.  You just have to keep moving no matter what.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

When I was living in D.C.,  I had just started an administrative job when I got a dance gig with Meisha Bosma, a choreographer who was doing a show with a live symphony orchestra.  I felt really badly because I think it was literally during my first week of work that I had to ask my manager at the office if I could drastically reduce my hours.  Ultimately, though, I knew I had to choose the art.  And the office ended up being understandable and flexible, which I was also very grateful for.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Name:  Christine Mladic

Title:

URL:  www.christinemladic.com/

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

Two years ago I came to New York City, from Chicago, for graduate school at NYU where I had won a full Master’s fellowship.  I got my ID, and I kept looking at it and thinking, “This has to be a scam; this has to be a joke.”  I couldn’t believe I was going to get to go to graduate school for free.

So, I thought I would test out the ID.  I went to the library to swipe it, and was certain that it would be rejected.

The library is not open to the public.  They have glass doors that slide open once you swipe your card, similar to subway turnstiles. I swiped my card and sure enough–they opened up and I walked through.  To me it was a symbolic action–it seemed possible that I could connect all of these seemingly disparate parts of my life through my Master’s studies.  Being accepted into the program showed me that somebody else thought that they might be connected in interesting ways as well.  To give you an idea, I have a  BFA in Photography, a BA in English Lit, I have worked in communications, I volunteered in South America and developed a photography program for young women, I have worked on an online community magazine in Chicago–somehow they all came together in a Master’s in Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

2.  Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

Recently, the Brooklyn Public Library had a free talk on Gabriel Orozco’s work after which free tickets were handed out to go see his show at the MoMA.  So my boyfriend and I did both.  While I’m not too excited to hear other people talk about Orozco’s work, it was really cool to hear him talk about his work in the free audio tour.

He impressed me with the way that he lives his life: he doesn’t believe in the isolation of the studio;  he walks around, and he interacts with people and objects.  One of his pieces we saw at the MoMa was a sculpture made by patching together different inner tubes from tires.  It looked like a huge rock.  My boyfriend and I really liked it, because it was this mundane object that he turned into something fascinating.  The piece was enhanced by Orozco’s story of how it was made.  I feel that, lately, Orozco has had an impact on me, and how I think about being creative on a daily basis.

3.  What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I can’t stay up all night as easily as in the past, and I wish I could.  Because when you have been awake all night, when most other people are sleeping, there’s a different kind of consciousness that I don’t think you can access in the day.
4.  What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

RIght now I don’t have a regular schedule, so I’ll tell you about a day a year ago, and then I’ll tell you about a recent day:

A year ago there was this day in which I actually did, for once, stay out dancing all night.  I was in Cusco, Peru, with a group of friends.  We had met a group of Peruvians, and they took us out dancing.  It was a lot of fun.

After staying up all night, my friend (who was in visiting from New York) and I took a bus to a small town outside of Cusco named Pisac.  We met up with an indigenous family and stayed with them for the rest of the evening and the next morning.  I practiced my Quechua with them, the kids and I took short videos of their guinea pigs, and they shared their family photos with me.  That was a great day.

Recently, I went to an arts fair in Philadelphia.  One vendor hollowed out old books and made secret compartments in them.  It was a brilliant idea, and I thought that my brother and his wife would love one.  So I went to the Strand, and I got a book from 1929 for a dollar.  I already have hollowed it out, and am working on the secret compartment.  It’s not the only thing I’ve been doing with my time, but it’s exemplary my work style.  I try to do things that are interesting to me, or things that I feel are important.  And I’ve been very lucky that so far, it’s worked out.  The bills get paid.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

Sometimes, within limitations, you can actually become more creative.  One time my sister sat me down with a blank sheet of paper and she said, “If you had a magic wand and you could do anything you wanted, what would you do?” I made a list.  Then we tried to figure out how I could achieve each item.  It was an interesting exercise.  We decided that in order for my wishes to be fulfilled the first step would be to obtain what we called an “enabling job” for a limited amount of time.  After that, I would have the means to pursue other items on the list. Luckily, I can do more than one thing at the same time.  But there’s always a balancing act between what you’re completely passionate about and things that need to get done.  It’s more complicated than an either/or situation. 

Popularity: 2% [?]

Name: Greg Manley
Title/Occupation: Commissioner of the Circle Rules Federation
URL (s): www.circlerulesfootball.com

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up in Oakland, California and came out to NYC for college.  Right now, I’m upstate working for my third summer with the Mettawee River Theatre Company as an actor/puppeteer.  I played sports my whole life, and I got bit by the drama bug when I was in 5^th grade, so I spent a long time trying to reconcile those two interests.  Eventually, when I was in my last year at drama school, I looked around me and said “Hold up. Where did all the athletes go?”  So I made a sport in drama school and called it a play.  Sooner or later the athletes showed up.  The good news is the drama kids showed up as well.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

I saw Hamlet performed at the Old Vic theater in London when I was 13.  It was unabridged, with no gimmicks, no great new concept, and no celebrities; just four hours of good acting and great storytelling.  It’s the best play I’ve ever seen, and it was goddamn Hamlet, the most overdone play in the world!  But it goes to show that doing something well (I mean really WELL) goes a lot farther than reckless innovation.  It’s the same with cooking.

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

Languages.  I wish I could pick up languages really quickly.  Then I could be a chameleon.  I already have the ambiguously brown thing going for me.  If I could speak a bunch of languages, I could pass for Brazilian, Afghani, Persian, Indian, Egyptian; the list goes on.  There are plenty of practical uses I’m sure, but the best part would be all the insider information.  I ought to buy Rosetta Stone.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

Christ.  It seems like my whole year happens in the summer.  So my normal days are only normal for about a season at a time.  I’m still acting occasionally, I teach afterschool sports invention and drama regularly.  I do some production management for festivals around NYC, and the rest of the time I work on the Circle Rules Federation from home or on the field.  Sometimes I’m doing all those jobs in one day, sometimes I’m just left to my own devices.  Money’s tight, but I manage to live a pretty lush life.  I’ve got a room that opens onto the backyard, where we have a nice garden with a hammock, and a firepit.  I guess a normal day is just waking up and making it happen.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

All those lines have been blurring.  Lately, I’ve been choosing Circle Rules Football work over acting.  So I’ve been in the peculiar place of having acting in theater as a backup job.  So my work is art and my art, (Circle Rules Football – the whole reason I’m doing this interview), is work.  Maybe that’s just not a very helpful distinction.   About a month ago one of my housemates who had started working for the Census said, “Greg, you’d better get a job now.  You’re the only one in the house who hasn’t filled out a W2 this year.”  I got pissed.  I think as soon as you consider your art your work, it is.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Hope Davis and Ursula Eagly twist and squawk All photos by Paula Court

“Uugghh!” says the “prince” as he lands, more or less in a heap, on the stage.

And then again,  “Uugghh!”

Each entrance brings titters, giggles and outright laughs from the audience in the theater at Dance New Amsterdam.  But not from the six half-naked young women who continue craning their necks and torsos and cooing and squawking in swan or goose like warbles.  In their meandering line behind which this somewhat startled individual male interloper arrives now and later, each time as if having fallen down a hole,  Storme Sundberg, Jennifer Lafferty, Kira Blazek, Hope Davis, Emily Stone and Ursula Eagly remain unruffled, regal; one might say serene if not for the frank and focused intensity of their demeanor.

from left: Ursula Eagly and Hope Davis in opening sequence

The women have assembled after entering in a procession marked by repeated backward arabesque leg extensions; a procession that recalls, twists and tweaks that of the 32 ballerinas in the “Kingdom of the Shades,” scene from the ballet La Bayadere.  Bedecked in gold tinged costumes embellished with feathers, they have preened open and plucked off their long sleeved bodices with their teeth revealing the shapeliest breathing collection of  breasts, torsos and backs I think I have ever seen.

Gaining his feet, the primary color clad courtier (Adam H. Weinert) makes his way in balletic lunges and leg extensions from his fallen entrance towards the front of stage where he locks eyes with the feathered femme fatale who has led the procession (Sundberg).  Facing downstage toward the audience, she lights up with the electricity of their connection, and the two find themselves carried into an exhilarating extended flying duet by the other five bird-women. The swoops and twists of the swirling lifts culminate as the three supporting the swain execute a deft fly-under between the bridging pair holding high his swan, then vanish all into the wing pursued by audience applause.

Adam H. Weinert with his prince on

Had Christopher Williams’ world premiere of “Hen’s Teeth” ended here, I feel certain that we would have all gone home happy.  But the choreographer/costumer/ringmaster and, in this case, troubadour harp player’s vision and ambition demands almost as much of his audience as it does of his artistic collaborators.  I find it necessary to slow down my theatrical rate of expectation to that of his more measured medieval sense of time.

As if to reinforce this, the work has been set to a moody score by composer and conductor Gregory Spears, who triples as the electric organ player in the 10 piece ensemble who perform, live and visible, in the large offstage area to the right of the two fluted columns that delimit the stage space in front of the audience.  That score takes the form of a Requiem Mass sung in Breton, Middle French and Latin by the likes of half the cast of Anonymous 4 (Ruth Cunningham and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek) and 4 members of the acclaimed male a cappella vocal group Lionheart (Michael Wenger, John Olud, Lawrence Lipnik, and Kurt-Owen Richards).

Williams’ work requires patience.  He do go on.   The choreography from him that I have seen to date lives on the edge of wearing out its welcome, and in this concert it often steps over the line, challenging, perhaps taxing, the audience to remain engaged.  Yet I appreciate the time and space he gives us to think and associate under the inspiration of his just–as-provocative imagery.  The ephemeral nature of youth, youthful beauty and prowess, of love, of all life lies at the heart of this meditative pageant.

Ursula Eagly plucks off her top

As he has done with past shows, Williams has included Requiem’s lyric in the program.  The prelude intimates narrative.  The translation reads:

A very long time ago
When hens had teeth…
Listen, if you will,
And you will hear a pretty tale.

As realized by the exquisite ensemble, the music bespeaks the mastery and majesty of human heart and mind as it rises to the constant occasion of loss.    If the tale of the lovers carries the sensation of flight in sensual beauty and hope, the rejoinder comes in the form three crones, powerfully embodied by Joan Arnold, Grazia Della Terza , and Alison Granucci.  These heavily costumed apparitions, with their bald pates and their beard-like masks that, like an Islamic niqab, leave only the eyes uncovered, dance as if through mist and mud or clinch their entire bodies around the stage’s columns, their long crooked green fingernails seeming to claw the flesh of fluted steel.

The denouement of these contending tableaux comes in an extended counterpoint, as first three of the “swans” return, their torsos now swaddled in rope-mesh tunics.  From behind their line, the swain re-enters with his “uugghh” and thud, as love inevitably falls to earth.  The finale finds the crones displacing this quartet.  They enter encased in stiff reliquary-like sarcophagi of various lengths, each of which has a different devotional door that they one at a time swing open exposing a human and vulnerable face, a breast, a forearm.

Joan Arnold, Alison Granucci, and Grazia Della Terza as the crones

As striking, vivid and fastidiously fashioned images such as the reliquaries can be – reminiscent in their communicative quality of the Scout-encasing ham in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird — Williams’ creativity with costuming can sometimes get in his way.  The crones’ masking and headpieces limit movement and expressive possibilities, as do the tunics on Sundberg, Eagly, and Lafferty.  (The program lists Andy Jordan as the designer of the evening’s costuming, with additional elements by Williams and Carol Binion. )

I admire Williams’ thematic mash-ups even when they don’t quite cohere cogently.  I see this as less the case with “Hen’s Teeth,” than I did with the program’s opening work-in-progress tentatively titled “Gobbledygook.”  Here the stark naked and brilliantly choreographed Weinert meets a black painted plywood wall at the back of one side of the stage space before he is met with the bare chested, hakama pants wearing Eikazu Nakamura.  Nakamura sidles in near the back of the stage at the audience’s right while the blue-lit Weinert, starting prone at our feet, probes gravity and his wall like caterpillar seeking a chrysalis hook.  In their single stark moment of interaction the Japanese dancer helps his hapless partner find his sticking place by pinning him to the wall with a hand around the throat.

Adam H. Weinert in "Gobbledygook." All photos by Paula Court

The two intensely introverted solo sequences that follow for Nakamura have the feel of esoteric ritual, the second adding an armor-like vest made of woven reeds over the hakama.  Only had you picked up press material, consulted DNA’s web site or had the time and sense to ask the choreographer or one of the dancers post-show, would you be likely to know that the ritual incarnates an imaginary version of the Buddhist segaki rite that concerns itself with personal atonement and easing the suffering of the wandering (slithering?) dead.   You might further have discovered, perusing these same sources , that “Hen’s Teeth” incorporates imagery inspired by the mysterious flying women found in a Breton fairytale preserved by 19th century folklorist François-Marie Luzel, the Graeae, or three swan-like crones of ancient Greek myth who share only one eye and one tooth between them, and that associated with the display of holy relics in the middle ages.  Who knew?

When does such elucidating information become t.m.i. (too much information)?  I ask simply because Williams generous and admirable inclination to edify his audience can sometimes backfire to limit the literal minded.  I, for one, enjoy not knowing until I want to know.  I then enjoy using the tools that the creator has placed within easy reach, including himself.  In the meantime, I have not been prevented from intuiting a reference to Matisse’s La Danse in the midst of the topless sextet, or the choreographer’s wicked way of tilting with Petipa’s Swan Lake imagery.

Eikazu Nakamura

In the program credits, Williams can seem to be everywhere at once.  But I find it intriguing that only the press notes for “Gobbledygook” mention him alongside the program-credited David Griffin as the source for the piece’s intricate electronic sound score.  This artist belongs in the opera house, and I predict that it will only be a matter of time until he lands there.  That seems the only place that his production values and vision can live in uncomfortable equilibrium with the support; artistic, technical, production and financial, that will allow them all to reasonably complement or at least successfully co-exist in creative competition.

If the creator’s obsessive devotion to medievalism may initially obscure this path to the stage, his devotion to music and spectacle makes his breakthrough, for me, a matter of when and not if.  Given his ability to render, he can, like the young Robert Wilson, devise collaborative operas of his own.  His vast visual frame of reference, and his dexterity in presenting both male and female form, often startlingly yet insouciantly nude  in ways that allow us to recover our endless fascination and sense of humor surrounding this mortal coil,  point to a future on today’s big screen performance stage.

Jacqui Kerrod, on pedal harp and Elizabeth Weinfield on baroque viola performed admirably along with the rest of the music ensemble.  The excellent lighting across the board can be credited to Amanda K. Ringer. DNA’s Artist in Residence program continues to impress.

More of DJ McDonald’s commentary can be found at City of Glass.

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(l to r) Penny Dannenberg (seated), Jamie Graham, Rebecca Woll, Moses Kaplan, Alex Schell, Maggie Ronan, Jessica Thomas, Betty Williams (obscured) Photo by Eric Bandiero

Stretch.  And be smart about it.

Translate into Latin  (Tendo, Quod operor is purpureus?), and that might become a motto for NYU Tisch School of the Arts Dance Program.

Over the past several months I have encountered Department Chair Cherylyn Lavagnino, and faculty member Jaclynn Villamil with graduate students in tow both at DIA Beacon for the dress rehearsal of the Trisha Brown Dance Company‘s performances there in February, and at Danspace St. Mark’s.  Granted, the latter happens to be just up Second Avenue from the Department’s home at 6^th St.  But wouldn’t that be a smart stretch?

Last Friday, those two along with faculty project facilitator Jim Sutton could be found in the first and second rows of La Mama Annex around the corner on E. 4^th St.  And some of the graduate students, along with a number of newly minted BFA’s  and MFA’s could be found on the stage. There, in the evening’s most intriguing and compelling spectacle four of them found themselves fully integrated into Naomi Goldberg Haas’ “Uprooting,” a piece that incorporates three generations of performers to suggest passages both physical and metaphysical.

at rear: (l to r) Moses Kaplan, Jamie Graham, Maggie Ronan, Jackie Ferrara. front: Penny Dannenberg, Ani Javian Photo by Eric Bandiero

Goldberg Haas has been directing her Dances For A Variable Population since 2005, with professional company members ranging in age from 25 to 81.  The seamless addition of NYU dancers Moses Kaplan, Maggie Ronan, Alex Schell and Jessica Thomas highlights one of the choreography’s strengths.  Set to several propulsive folk-inspired recordings by the Polish combo Warsaw Village Band, “Uprooting” manages to find and challenge each of its 13 performers at or near the limit of her/his technical and expressive potential, and to transcend this challenge by suggesting the existential humanity of yearning, striving, transformation, and reflection from youth to age and memory back to immediate experience.

(l to r) M. Lindsay Smith, Jackie Ferrara Photo by Eric Bandiero

The performances of senior members Penny Dannenberg, Jackie Ferrara, Judith Chazen Walsh and Betty Williams, while remarkable in their own right, create a frame of dimension and depth for those of their youthful collaborators.  Their regard of the youngsters manages to encompass a mixture of dispassionate assessment with intimations of mentoring, longing, and sassy competitiveness and even one-upmanship that leavens the poignancy of both the music and the dancing with pith and wit.  In one exquisitely simple and memorable moment Dannenberg and Geraldine Bartlett slowly sit down back to back to share one of the folding chairs that has been brought on to the stage.  Their mirror images present in such a way as to leave open the question, expertly poised, of who might be a reflection of whom.

Add to this interplay the lusty way in which Goldberg Haas’ young professionals Jamie Graham, Ani Javian, M. Lindsay Smith and Rebecca Woll bite into the music and movement as if to both throw down a challenge and lead the way among their younger and older counterparts, and you have a work that begins to transform the creative potential energy of Dances For A Variable Population into a power to move and inspire its audience as much as its own members.

In this, rehearsal director Smith, of the high-arched and articulate feet and whip-smart torso, and the equally fiery Graham set the tone as firsts among equals.  With any luck, this cross-generational ensemble, including its new-found Tisch quartet, will manage to hold together long enough to re-present an outdoor version of this work at the end of September in cooperation with Hudson Guild Fulton Senior Center along the High Line Park in Chelsea.

(l to r): Ani Javian, M. Lindsay Smith, Jamie Graham, Rebecca Woll. Photo by Eric Bandiero

One can only wish as much for Selina Chau’s “The New York Exchange.” This witty, cheeky, extremely well crafted send up of everything from dance style pretensions to kung fu movies features fine performances by Monica Barbaro as a wayward ballet princess, Austin J. Diaz and Gierre J. Godley, as various NY dance, street and martial arts types, and Mandarin Wu as the archetypal femme fatale with the fan.

Mandarin Wu (with fan) Gierre J. Godley, and Monica Barbaro photo by Tony Dougherty

Chau displays a sharp eye and a supple mind for theatrical type and form, fable, kitsch, and the way pop culture co-opts all of the above. Set to an ingenious score by Kyle Olson that mashes up his own “New York Exchange” with passages from Adolphe Adams’ score for Giselle and Romani and Bellini’s “Costa Diva” from Norma, interrupted by Chinese text passages written by Chau and comically delivered by co-writer Wu, the work sets up and then undermines expectations in a way that satisfyingly compliments that of Goldberg Haas. Like the latter dance maker, Chau has keen sense of theatrical and, especially in her case, comic timing and the delicacy of gesture that allows us the comfort of recognition just as she twists to tickle and subvert our prejudice.

Such rare gifts more than justify Tisch’s repeated presence in the annual LaMama Moves Festival.  When you’ve got it, why not go the extra mile — or two blocks – beyond your building and perhaps your comfort zone to flaunt it?

More of DJ McDonald’s commentary can be found at City of Glass.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Bill Shannon and "Rejected Skin" at 77 Water St. photo by Catherine Peila

Bill Shannon has gone ¾ of the way around the tip of Manhattan, retracing in retrograde the route famously described by the narrator Ishmael in the opening paragraphs of Moby-Dick.  And, like his fellow traveler, he pauses to wax philosophical.

Shannon perches on his crutches atop the white painted concrete platform that frames Rudolph de Harak and William Tarr’s public sculpture Rejected Skin, (1969) beneath one cantilevered corner of 77 Water St. at Old Slip.  He begins a slow descent to an almost prone suspension.  Having rested a found (presented by a construction worker, actually) gallon bottle of commercial iced tea on part of the artwork, he twirls and flashes first one specially made round-ended crutch then the other as he embodies the tension between flesh and rigid exoskeletar form at the heart of his unique dancing technique.  The entire time he suspends and descends, he continues to discuss the challenges inherent in matching mind and muscle to metal and gravity and the constant risk in his exploration of new form and expression.

“Sometimes,” he says, his nose finally flush with the pavement, “it can look like failure.”

Bill Shannon caught in a "wall stall." photo by BC

And suddenly, the 40 minutes we have spent following Shannon through Traffic -
A Transient Specific Performance, suggest a larger simulacrum for human endeavor. Think Mideast peace, perhaps, or the Obama presidency.

Episodically, mesmericly, our Pequod of a chartered bus has been trying to keep up with his skiff of a skateboard as the tiny crutch powered craft buffets the tempests of rush hour traffic, and waves of tourist and commuter crowds down Broadway from Dance New Amsterdam, at Chambers,  to the edge of the Battery, and back north along Water.  The mother ship carries its captive audience in its hold, along with all necessary equipment and expertise — a DJ, a VJ and two videographers — to render the quarry. We can hear the music being pumped into Shannon’s radio headset, which, equipped with a microphone, intermittently feeds back to us his voice and the sound of his wheels. Those outside the bus can hear only the latter.

This extends to skateboarder Mike Wright, an old friend of Shannon’s, who has happened into the mix near the beginning of the performance. Signing on for the rest of the journey, he becomes the Queequeg/Daggoo of the piece, participating in encounters with passersby, cops and construction workers.  Such happenstances, but perhaps without Wright,  promise to mark each of the remaining performances, which continue each afternoon through Friday, June 4, beginning at 4:30 pm.

“How do you make the [members of an] audience feel like they are on a skateboard?”  the event’s press release asks.

I don’t know about others, but Shannon’s fluid meanderings through these madding crowds took me back to my high school days.  Whenever bored of a winter’s class, I would escape to the frozen puddle that covered much of the school’s roof, don my hockey skates, and glide above the unsuspecting heads of my classmates.

Watching Shannon now, I become acutely aware of the three-dimensionality of his art, space opening and closing across the “blab of the pave,” mind calculating with intuitive speed the warping of space time all around its body.  Pausing abreast of a curbside advertisement, he suspends almost horizontally on his crutches in one of his signature “wall stalls,” creating a flesh and blood bas relief against the commercial grain.

Shannon scouts the route of "Traffic" by winter light

Three years in the making, Traffic’s metaphorically rich, imaginatively provocative and downright audacious adventurousness augurs well for the revitalizing Artist in Residence Program at DNA.  Not to be missed, the 20 accompanying videos by the same artist that play along DNA’s gallery walls add another dimension to Shannon’s chess game with the laws of physics and those of Downtown Manhattan traffic.

In the clip playing out into Chambers St. adjacent to DNA’s entrance east of Broadway, the artist appears in jacket, tie and jaunty hat traversing the plazas around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall.  In dress, manner and movement he recalls, in his own unique style, the pizzaz and allure of another Pittsburgh native, the late Gene Kelly.  Such talents do not mark all generations. When such a one, at the peak of his powers, wheels before you, you owe it to yourself and your children to catch him if you can.

More of DJ McDonald’s commentary can be found at City of Glass.

Popularity: 1% [?]

“They be scared and lonely. “

l to r: Caroline Calkins as Girl, Michael Micalizzi as Mikey; Cliff Campbell as Clifford in Patrick Shaw’s “Mad Twitterpated,” all photos by Brian Hashimoto

So says Michael Micalizzi as the thug wannabe Mikey in Patrick Shaw’s “Mad Twitterpated,”  directed by Alexandra Bassett. He pleads this in reference to the orphaned bear cubs he has been cluster adopting over Facebook on behalf of Cliff Campbell’s character Clifford. But his observation goes far beyond its immediate context.

It seems to be a (mostly urban) jungle out there for most of the young lovers, or rather love aspirants and acolytes, who strutted their hours upon the stage, screen, aisles, balcony and waters of Galapagos Art Space in February in Fullstop Collective’s Foreplays. The eight brief plays, two short videos, and live musical interludes that comprised this showcase on the Mondays bracketing Valentine’s Day, provided a mid-winter night’s scheme of the trials and tribulations of romantic love among a certain slice of the population in a highly mediated age.  If most of the characters find themselves lost in the woods and among the thickets of hook ups and hang ups in a bewildering array of polymorphously perverse potential permutations, then perhaps we can sympathize with their desire to hang on to the cuddlier, if stuffed, versions of lions, tigers and bears with which they grapple, even as they long for each other.

Sarah Ann Masse posts her panda in Lillian Meredith’s “there is no part of me..."

So if Cliff and Mikey’s play within a play involves dream visualization projected via, uh, Droid, and ends with kids and a mortgage, their confusion cannot be considered uncommon.  Wonder the women in Lillian Meredith’s “there is no part of me that wants to have sex with you right now and yet here we are.”  They confide in one another that they have never had an orgasm during sex, simulate coitus with their giant teddy bears, have trouble deciding whether they want it “hard” or “soft,” and rant about being insulated, via Midol, from the emotional roller coaster of their own natural cycles. They ponder existential and psycho-political questions around penetration:

After admitting to her friend that penetration is what she wants from her lovers, Lauren Weinberger’s character frets that, “maybe that’s scary. Maybe that’s not the healthiest way to have a permanent and meaningful relationship with someone – to have them constantly be inside you but you’re never inside them. I mean, … the problem I keep running into is how can I ever have an equal un-patronizing, non-sexually frightening relationship with a man when I really really want him to dominate me and pound me into tomorrow?”

Sarah Ann Masse’s character thinks her friend may be, “doing [her]self a big disservice thinking this way….

“Well, I mean, you’ve just completely negated for yourself the possibility of ever having a permanent, sexually satisfying relationship with anyone….

“including yourself.”

l to r: Laura Wiese, Lauren Weinberger, Sean McIntyre and Sarah Ann Masse

The expectations and the etiquette of politically correct sex in an epoch of texting, drinking binges, supercharged sex toys, internet porn, post-feminist and post-Freudian politics, and pop psychology emerge as preoccupations in Brian Hashimoto’s “porn.edu,” and Bassett’s “Lust Trust,” directed by David Jaffe.

Louiza Collins and Conrado De La Rosa with other cast members in Benjamin Smolen’s “The Lewis Family Waltz"

The latter two of these themes also crop up with less contemporary reference as kinky Viennese proto-fascist subtexts in Benjamin Smolen’s “The Lewis Family Waltz,” directed by Shaw, with its dancing couples stuttering and undone over the name “Germany,” and Lucy Gillespie’s mock-historic “Fore-Shadow-Play.”

The first three pieces have all been created with imaginative theatrical conceits and hint at the range, if not always the reach, of talent that Bassett, as artistic director of Foreplays, has deployed in challenging her collaborators to bring this showcase to life. That talent achieves its fullest realization in her staging of Anton Handel’s “Analogue,” which uses the formal stage, the exposed areas of wading pool over which Galapagos has suspended its orchestra-level booths, and the railings and ledges of the surrounding balcony to weave an Avatar meets Matrix style videogame fantasy into a family sitcom all within a theater artist’s restaurant day job narrative.  Here the spirited performances by Celeste Arias, Analise Hartnett, Meredith, Scott Morse and Brenden Rogers meet Bassett’s creative handling of Handel’s script in the evening’s most ambitious spectacle.

Celeste Arias and Scott Morse in Anton Handel’s “Analogue.”

To be sure, the allure of ambition and energy emerge as the hallmark of this long evening even if the short videos “Hobo Proposal” by Ironic T-Shirt, and the satirically sharper “Call My Boyfriend” by Diana Wright, as well as the soul cover sets by the quartet Quiet Loudly might have been more imaginatively integrated to facilitate the flow of events and interactivity. Bassett and her collaborators sometimes betray a literary and theatrical reverence that smells more of the perfume of a fine liberal arts education than it does of teen spirit, but the strength of their cooperative rests in a sense of shared adventure and risk.  The more they continue to challenge each other, and to raise their realization to the level of their ambition, the more Fullstop will distinguish itself as a collective not only worth watching, but dating long term.

Popularity: 2% [?]

When I think back on Denim, the exhibition curated by David Rimanelli, NYU visiting assistant professor of art history and Artforum contributing editor,  February 2 – March 12,  at the University’s 80WSE gallery, a couple of images, a film and a bowl of chocolate coated raisins leap to mind.  And then I think of the people. Context is king.

The first of the images happens to be one of the late Karlheinz Weinberger’s gelatin silver prints, a set of which took up an entire large wall in the first interior gallery. Titled Männlicher Akt, the image in question  dates from around 1975, and depicts a somewhat hairy 20’s something male nude, glancing offhandedly towards the camera/viewer. His tattooed arms and hands frame a slouched torso and his flaccid, ample cock and balls rest within the V of his thighs,  which spread to straddle the platform, covered with a striped fabric, on which he sits.

I had just come from the large  gallery 1, its picture window looking west across Washington Square, where the growing darkness of the winter evening seemed to mimic the sky-to-midnight blue shadings of Jack Pierson’s or for mercy, a more than 30 square foot folded pigment print from 2009.  This piece fairly dominated a room in which Tom Burr’s construction Slacks, from 2008, and Rob Pruitt’s pair of blue jeans and concrete benches from his 2006 Esprit du Corps provided counterpoint.

The gallery’s press release had offered the following:

Jack Pierson's "or for mercy" 2009

“Denim’s cult status as a rebel uniform emerged in the public mind largely through classic Hollywood cinema—for instance, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and later as the preferred style for certain subcultures, for example gay subculture, as can be seen in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos; or, returning to Hollywood, William Friedkin’s controversial Cruising.

“In DENIM, these cinematic references commingle with denim’s “high-art” associations, which have become ingrained through the ‘60s image of the “artist-worker,” exemplified by minimalists like Robert Morris, or by Carl Andre, habitually attired in overalls. Andy Warhol is a key figure in this respect, both in his own sartorial inclinations but particularly in his art and films.”

Rimanelli’s exhibition seemed to trade on these juxtapositions while implying and perhaps provoking a series of questions using our familiar relationship a fabric as a point of reference, or, if you prefer, departure.  Hell, the jeans encasing Burr’s bent kneed concrete represented the only real denim in the show.  Meanwhile Warhol, represented at the gallery by his early film Blow Job, (1964), and a framed 1971 record jacket sleeve for the Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers, complete, we’re told, with working zipper, made his cameo count with only a practical picture of pants on a commercial art product and a hint of no pants in action.  Warhol at NYU?  What a way to make the most of your Lady Gaga moment.

A concern with fashion, in fact, both actual and artistic/cultural, lay just below the surface in this runway of art featuring work in many media from 11 artists and ranging over the last half century. That would place the work in response to the “emergence” referenced in the press release, but squarely inside the “ingraining.” Said to have been originally inspired in part by the guns prominent in the Export performance artist’s work of the late 60’ and 70’s, the show veered instead towards the spectacle of artists’ depictions of our meta erotic fascination with what we wear and how we let it represent us.  Thus we have Valie Export’s gelatin silver image Genital Panic, 1969, from the Action Pants series, in which she has photographed herself with her crotch partially exposed while holding a rifle – a proto Patty Hearst.

Talking ‘bout a revolution, well, you know, the press release mentions that, too:

“The artists in DENIM explore the multifarious connotations of a material that began its life as a fabric for work clothes, but has become, over the past few decades, a material for fashion, both instant and high-end couture. For Rimanelli, denim not only refers to fashion but also functions as a psychic material, sheathing ideas that range from the erotic to the implicitly revolutionary.”

Multifarious connotations sheathing ideas?  Sounds erotically revolutionary to me. But then again so do work clothes, at least in this context. Standing among the elements of Mike Smith’s single channel video installation Secret Horror, 1980, I found myself dipping in to the bowl of chocolate covered raisins and coffee beans, thoughtfully provided as part of the piece.  Yes, Virginia, you can eat art, even as you begin counting the patrons at the opening decked out in denim,  and beginning with yours truly.

After all, ain’t it the people with their romantic hopes and dreams of better living through cotton and commerce that make all this worthwhile? Mind the gap, and while we’re counting, recall that old perhaps apocryphal slogan of the French Situationists from roughly the same time period referenced in the emergence and the ingraining: “Désirs érotiques saper les fondements de l’ordre établi <Erotic desires undermine the basis of the established order>.”

I slipped in through the curtain cordoning off the gallery screening Blow Job from the one containing Secret Horror. I tuned in to the small gestures of both the movie and the mostly student/academic crowd. In the few times I’ve visited 80WSE, I’ve become impressed with it as a jewel box for quirky and provocative little exhibitions introducing the younger artists now making their way through the academy to Denim, Stuart Sherman and the like, even as it adds its soft spoken voice to the loud and crowded New York art circus. Now it stands to serve in turn, in its current annual MFA show, as these student artists’ portal opening on to this fabulous fashion city’s art scene.

Wandering back to the first interior gallery, I encountered the publicist Deborah Hughes and the two women from her firm helping her handle PR for the opening. All exuded a cool and casual elegance in their no-nonsense pony tails, figure flattering sweaters, and heeled boots under, you guessed it, well fitted designer jeans. These women service the real fashion world and their presence and their attire (their uniform; their work clothes, actually) seemed to point many of the questions the show begged to ask. If anything comes between them and their <you name the designer>, it would truly have to be a work of art.

Popularity: 3% [?]