I’ve been thinking about how watching live performance is often an act of meditative practice for me. I’ve considered this before, but Andy’s recent post about watching performance as a spiritual practice was quite eloquent and inspiring. It has had me actively pondering how to explain a parallel (or intersecting? or shared?) theory, especially after another critic laughed when I recently told her I might use this approach in relation to responding critically to Juliette Mapp’s recent Making of Americans, seen last week at Dance Theater Workshop.

Alex Escalante

I told her I found it sublime. She scoffed and pointed out its unevenness. I agreed, but found that I was still able, often enough, to engage with the work in the same way that I cultivate meditative thinking – observing what passes with little judgment. Practicing a detachment to values and outcomes. Obviously, this is not what a typical critic does and is useless for anyone eager for praise or critique. But, in part, it may have been cultivated as a survival mechanism against the assault that is my daily schedule and the volume of work that I see at certain parts of any season/semester. It also reveals, again in part, how I’m still willing to participate in any process that ends in public commentary about other artists’ work.  I’ve often sworn I was done with reviewing. I have run well past any interest in desecrating someone else’s artistic efforts. I have plenty of opinions and aesthetic preferences, but I came to writing about dance as an act of advocacy, and think that sometimes I’m still in this game because much work simply deserves a witness and not an arbiter or play-by-play analyst.

And, often, that time sitting alone in the the dark allows the kind of quiet, still, and unplugged experience that feels increasingly rare today. Live performance is an offering and a challenge; whether offensive, provocative, illuminating, rapturous, inspiring, delightful, absurd, profound, or simple, as long as it isn’t dull I’ll take it as a cause for stimulation or consideration. That said, I admit I prefer to stick to a specific aesthetic range of concert work in an effort to limit tedious viewing experiences. Sometimes there isn’t enough “Om Namo Narayana” around to balance out boredom in a theater.

So, when a work, like Mapp’s examination of family and community in her “The Making of Americans,” opens the door to contemplations about life and legacy while providing ample space and time for reflection, I am grateful after a long day of runaround. I’m especially grateful for a beautiful duet between Mapp and Kayvon Pourazar – performed mostly laying on the floor – that distills many epic tales of love and loss into simple shifts and gestures. I’m grateful to hear Gertrude Stein read aloud; my preferred manner for consuming Stein (check here if you live in Portland and like to listen to Stein and drink wine). The repetition and rollick of her writing serves like its own evolving mantra:

…and the women, the young mothers, our grandmothers we perhaps just have seen once, carried these our fathers and our mothers into the new world inside them, those women of the old world to bear them. Some looked very weak and little women, but even these, so weak and little, were strong always, to bear many children. These certain men and women, our grandfathers and grandmothers, with their children born and unborn with them, some whose children were gone ahead to prepare a home to give them; all countries were full of women who brought with them many children…

Mapp begins her work with the performers – first, Mapp, Pourazar, and Levi Gonzalez, then, Aretha Aoki, Vanessa Anspaugh, and Molly Lieber (The Babysitters) lining up and reading text from Stein’s opus (including the selection above) and though not all of the text is delivered with equal levels of articulation and verbal command among the cast, I am grateful too for Vicky Shick’s commanding presence and readings when she joins later (along with Anna Sperber as “The Immigrants”). With the opening language, Mapp’s interweaving of her family’s history in Gary, Indiana (along with The Jacksons) and the knowledge that this was to be the last work I would see produced by DTW at DTW (before it becomes NYLA), I am easily induced to a reflective state and observe much of the resulting performance through the lens of metaphoric acts of motherhood – creative, generative, sacrificial, selfish and, yes, sublime. Especially when Shick, Mapp or Aoki is on stage (or screen). Shick and Mapp should be no surprise to anyone who has been watching dance in NYC in the past couple decades (or longer), but Aoki, a newer artist in this community, maintains a transcendent singularity next to these revered artists.  Okay… Aretha and I went to grad school and worked together in the past, so I can’t pretend there is no bias, but regardless, she resonates with a kind of sly centered knowing that makes each appearance in Mapp’s work seductively beguiling. She portrays an embodiment of the sublime mental states in Buddhist meditation that include loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity – perhaps a different reading of the word than a western philosophical understanding where “sublime” carries loftier connotations. But, perhaps not.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Hilary Clark culminates her DTW Studio Series residency tonight and tomorrow with showings at 6pm. In addition to being a 2008-09 Fresh Tracks artist, Clark was awarded a Bessie for her body of work as a performer with Tere O’Connor, Fiona Marcotty, and Luciana Achugar. She’s also danced with Jon Kinzel, Larissa Velez and Miguel Gutierrez and is presently working with Young Jean Lee.

I loved that your piece is called Working in process since that’s what pulled me into wanting to talk to all the Studio Series artist, this commitment to process based work. Can you talk a little bit about what that means in this work? I heart Studio Series, seriously. I feel like this process allowed me to feel free in terms of the constraints of time and money. With that it has shaped the way I use the time and consider the space. In a lot of ways it has felt like something can unfold in the research of an idea. It has felt luxurious in that way! I am not performing in the piece. Because that is generally the role I play, I wanted to understand how I might shape something form the outside. I understand how to locate and go deeply in the context of another structure or even my own structure, but I wanted to place that challenge on myself, and to understand and embody an experience of being an eye to it. Being inside is something different and I am able to direct and communicate something different and holistic. The material comes from me and the dancers interpret it. In that way we have been building it together and I am embodied in it, but they get to go where they will with it as performers.

Can you talk a little more about this process with your performers? Do their personal histories come into play for you? The dancers are Molly Poerstel, Mary Read and Niv Acosta. I began in September with Mary and Molly and made a duet. I added Niv in February and it’s been a trio since then. I decided to add another person because I really liked Niv and was considering other ideas than the ones in the duet. I felt that this was in the spirit of going with impulses and appreciating the freedom that the Studio Series sets up. For the duet, I find that Molly and Mary (and Niv!) are so compelling. They go really deeply and I was exploring exposure and they have really gone with me on weird tangents and the like. The initial impulse was to explore exposure, in it’s multiple interpretations. I had been moved by this Joni Mitchell documentary in which they are talking about her album Blue and how people had thought that she had gone too far. I wanted to explore the “too far” and what that might mean to me. I am still exploring it. Where the piece situates itself at the moment is that I made this equation that exposure equals truth and truth equals sadness. So I explored that in various ways. We explored that improvisationally and through the body and through a song I developed for them. Those were some of the impulses but the work has taken many divergences. For the trio, I wanted to explore my physical history, and how movement is generated in me and what I like and despise and why. I wanted to break my own rules and figure them out.

Popularity: 4% [?]

LA's My Barbarian at the Kitchen.

Thursday night Andy went to the rat-filled fun fest that was Arturo Vidich’s Body Island. Friday night, if all goes according to plan, he will attend Jen Rosenblit’s workshop showing at DTW and then Adrienne Truscott’s show at Danspace. Saturday during the day there is a good likelihood that Andy will find himself at FEEDER at HERE Arts Center followed by an 8PM performance of the Merce Cunningham Company at the Joyce. Sunday is a wild card – who knows what cultural pleasures the day will bring? Odds are its going to be a Battlestar Galactica Marathon.

Tonight, Maura Hogan is off to National Theater of Scotland’s Beautiful Burnout at St. Ann’s.

The British National Theater’s spectacle War Horse is taking Jane up to Lincoln Center.

Maura Donohue caught Adrienne Truscott’s dress rehearsal Tuesday night for Ha! at Danspace Project, witnessed The Chocolate Factory’s off-site presentation of Arturo Vidich’s performance/installation/video shoot Body Island last night at Abrons Art Center, talked to Jen Rosenblit who shows Salivate if you could for DTW’s Studio Series tonight and tomorrow at 6pm, and plans to head to The Chocolate Factory for Sarah Maxfield’s love letter to the NYC Performance Community (interview here) tomorrow night. In between all that, she’ll be guest teaching for Dan Safer’s class at NYU’s Playwrights Horizons program, introducing her kids to the first Star Wars movie, and kiddie-show gigging on Staten Island with her old neighbors Hot Peas n’ Butter.

Alyssa is having a well-deserved vacation from culture this weekend and has nothing to report.

Like everyone else, Jeremy was checking out Arturo Vidich’s rat-filled show at Abrons last night. Tonight it’s Vampire Cowboys at the Incubator, tomorrow it’s My Barbarian’s one-night-only Broke People’s Baroque People’s Theater at the Kitchen, and then Sunday, it’s Irish Modern Dance Theater’s Fall and Recover at La MaMa.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Catherine Cabeen. Photo by Paulo Tavares.

From The Australian:

Perhaps the most famous tattoo worn by a ballerina is that on the back of actress Mila Kunis, in Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan. But in most classical dance companies, where uniformity of movement and appearance is everything, tattoos are still taboo.

Dance companies contacted by The Australian say they have no strict policy on tattoos, but ballet companies are more concerned about covering them up than contemporary dance companies.

Not only is the gap between between classical and contemporary glaring, but it’s also amusing that the most famous of tattooed dancers is…well…not actually a dancer.

But of course the root issue is that ballet, whatever you want to think of it, trades primarily in idealized forms, particularly of the feminine. As my friend Catherine Cabeen, pictured above in all her tattooed glory, once put it succinctly (though by no means is she the first to have made the point):

Pointe shoes are a very specific medium that say one thing well; women are to be light, frail and weightless. Even direct, sharp movement is made piercing and fairy-like by these apparatus that for more than 300 years have allowed/forced female ballet dancers to embody an “idealized” version of the female form. Ballerinas are to be slight and ephemeral next to the grounded power of the male dancer, who never wears pointe shoes, except in rare incidences of drag performance.

And speaking of drag, Cabeen, herself once a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company (whose 2011 season kicks off on next week on March 15 at Lincoln Center), will be performing at the end of March with Richard Move, when he returns to Dance Theater Workshop in Martha@…The 1963 Interview (March 30-April 2; tickets $20). Move offers up the grande dame of Modern dance through a performance in drag, coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of Graham’s passing, on April 1, 1991.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Photo by Yi Chun-Wu.

One of the biggest challenges facing the arts these days is professionalization. Once upon a time, artists came to their field with mixed backgrounds and could speak to broader audiences from more diverse personal experiences. Today, with college and internships and MFA programs, artists can spend their entire lives just being artists. Which means that pretty much the only thing they know about is being an artist. And in turn they make art about what they know: novelists write novels about being novelists, musicians write songs about life on the road, indie filmmakers make self-referential low-budget movies about making low-budget movies, and theater artists make plays about theater artists.

The hope, of course, is that the intense examination of one’s own experience will ultimately reveal some bigger truth about the world. It rarely works out that way. What we’re usually left with is art that comes off as self-indulgent navel-gazing from people who willingly choose to divorce themselves from the everyday challenges of everyone else, and everyone else therefore duly doesn’t give a damn about their art.

But then again, every so often, it does work. Spectacularly.

A case in point is the Austin-based theater company the Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun, which opened last night at Dance Theater Workshop and runs through March 12 (tickets $30). Beginning as a gentle, tongue-in-cheek ribbing of the pretensions of experimental theater, by the end the Rude Mechs have overwhelmed you nearly to (and possibly past) the point of tears with a simple but very profound set of ideas, brilliantly executed, and wrapped-up without ever really resolving the mysteries that propel the hour and forty-minute show forward.

Wandering to the subway afterward, I tried to formulate something to say about it to our editorial assistant, who accompanied me, but I was left speechless. And what better way is there to leave a theater after a show?

Conceptually, The Method Gun is structured as a documentary play developed by the Rude Mechs. Their subject is the life and work of an obscure theater director named Stella Burden, who, in the Sixties, was developing a communal, collaborative ensemble company that sought to achieve a new level of theatrical authenticity in the model of the Living Theater et al. Then suddenly, in the early Seventies, she disappeared to South America. The Rude Mechs’ research began as an attempt to resuscitate her performance method, which she called “the Approach,” similar to Stella Adler’s “Method,” but what they ultimately found more fascinating was the story of what happened to her company after she disappeared. For several years, they continued rehearsing the show she’d been developing, which they performed exactly once: a production of A Streetcar Named Desire without the characters of Stanley, Stella, Blanche, and Mitch.

The Method Gun unfolds as a series of short scenes, tracing the Stella Burden Company’s rehearsals over the years, going through each scene of Streetcar, interspersed with re-enactments of interviews with the company members that jump forward nearly thirty years to the present, a motley assortment of would-be actors and idealists who themselves careen towards insanity. Occasionally the Rude Mechs break character to simply deliver lectures explaining Burden’s radical methods, which come from the stew of Sixties’ idealism. It’s Apocalypse Now meets Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, all leading up to a moment that recalls the power of Gob Squad’s Kitchen (the last show I saw that really surprised and affected me), where all the gimmicks and meta-commentary and conceptualization provide the context that finally reveals the raw, moving power of a work of art that is otherwise dead and lost to us.

The company would start rehearsal before dawn so they can watch the sun rise. They also drink at every rehearsal. Art comes from personal truth, so no one can have thoughts secret from the company. One woman prays constantly, and Burden instructed her to pray out loud, through a microphone. Her actors would write the names of people who inspired them on pieces of paper at the beginning of rehearsals, which she’d then burn both to honor and exorcise the influence of teachers. And finally there’s the “method gun” itself, which, in a Chris Burden-esque twist on Chekhov’s Gun, is simply the presence of actual loaded gun onstage at all times to introduce real risk into performance, since at any time anyone could shoot anyone else.

So yes, the script is, in fact, deeply referential and meta, but the result is brilliant. The members of Burden’s company go down a seemingly endless spiral of booze-fueled self-doubt, slavishly devoted to a guru who ironically preached complete artistic independence. The irony is biting. They’re tertiary figures in the history of American theater, playing secondary characters in one of America’s most famous plays, confused, lost children of Sixties idealism, giving up the best years of the lives in pursuit of a single artistic achievement.

But what the Rude Mechs pull out the miasma is a powerful, heartfelt story that achieves what virtually any performance method, from Adler to Burden, aims for: the representation of essential human dignity. The Rude Mechs bring these small-scale tragic characters to life, and the ending works a neat double-trick: on the one hand, it begs the question of whether or not art is worth the cost, while at the same time, the process of getting to the climax–the performance of Streetcar reduced to five minutes and featuring none of the main characters–provides you a context to see what they finally put up through fresh eyes, and it is, in a word, stunning.

All I can say is get tickets to this show. It is absolutely not to be missed.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Stacy Grossfield, Miriam Wolf, Natalie Green, Anna Carapetyan in "nerves like tombs, nerves like nettles." Photo by Yi-Chun Wu

Heading into Dance Theater Workshop last week for a shared evening of new work from Juliana F. May/MAYDANCE and Natalie Green, I did a sort of mental preparation. Only a couple weeks before I’d been at DTW for another shared bill of GALLIM Dance and Sidra Bell, and my review was basically anything but flattering, for which I caught a bit of flak in these digital pages. Not that I don’t stand by it (and I wasn’t the only one), but it did get me thinking. One of the things I generally believe about reviewing is that it shouldn’t be a reductive thumbs-up/thumbs-down thing that treats the work like a cheap movie. I want to be engaged and my writing to be part of a larger discourse about the art.

In a response to a different story here, Eva Yaa Asantewaa of the dance blog Infinite Body even referenced a thought she had recently that criticism should be viewed less as a job than as a practice, an act that’s as engaged in the form in its own way as the artists themselves are–something I totally agree with (even if I’m not remotely presumptuous enough to put myself or my work anywhere near the level of the artists whose work I’m lucky enough to experience). And another friend of mine had also written something cautioning viewers (and not just the ones who scribble about it afterward) to keep in mind that art is also a matter of gift exchange between the artist and the viewer, and that audiences of whatever stripe stand to benefit from at least occasionally opening themselves up to the experience, taking off their critical, nitpicking hats, and not looking the gift horse of art in the mouth.

All of which is awesome, and all of which I tried to internalize going in to the theater. Keep an on open mind, I told myself. Engage what you see. Don’t start from a judgmental perspective. Try to inhabit the world the artist is creating.

And then I saw the show, which reminded me of something else: One of the reasons we sometimes fail to accept the gift is that there isn’t much of one, and one of the reasons critical perspective is important is because some artists are more deserving of note than others.

In this case, Green’s nerves like tombs, nerves like nettles was so much more thoughtful and engaging than May’s Gutter Gate that it frankly made the latter look that much worse. I can’t speak to all the details, but as DTW’s own notes make clear, these are two young choreographers of roughly the same age and background, working with what I assume are similar resources (though I may be wrong on that count), but Green worked wonders in her witty, stylish, and thoughtful exploration of the psyche, while May’s piece drags with little discernible content through 30 minutes of what looks like touch-improv based choreography deconstructing itself before finally, in the last five minutes, offering us a beautiful piece of movement it seems hell-bent on making us distrust.

For May’s piece, the audience was seated in a horseshoe formation on stage with the performance occurring in the middle. Four women and one man costumed in the current dance vogue–their workout outfits–come out and begin to perform. The vocabulary is often drawn from natural movement; shaking fists or hands comes up throughout. Most phrases, though, are initiated by one dancer pushing or shoving another, initiating a short phrase of maybe only three or four distinct movements before reaching a static moment, at which the dancers drop it and return to a neutral stance, often repeating the same phrase several times at different places on stage.

What struck me as odd about it, and why I think it was off-putting to me, was that for most of the show, the dancers’ primary duty seemed to be pushing or initiating someone else’s movement, shifting the focus from the movements themselves. And I never had the sense that there was any motivation to what the initiator was doing. It simply caused a reaction in someone else, who, in turn, didn’t seem to have much motivation (other than being shoved) for why they were moving. Most of it came off as purely abstract, reinforced by the position the dancers were frequently called upon to hold their hands in: stiff, fingers extended and pressed together, like paddles, which usually cements the sense that this purely formal, gestural work, as it disconnects the hand from the flow of the arm and even the rest of the body. Fluidity is lost along with any logical completion; an arm is just an arm, the dancer a pose-able object, dehumanized. We’re left examining a gesture in the abstract.

Additionally troublesome to me was some of the imagery May used. Dancers frequently removed either their tops or their bottoms (though rarely both), the point of which seemed to be to allow for gravity to do its work on body parts while in motion. The male dancer Ben Asriel performed a stuttery, jumpy bit that left his male bits jiggling, and I believe all four women took turns on all fours while topless, breasts dangling, which really put me to mind of certain barnyard imagery that I can’t imaging was the intended purpose (and not exactly politically correct to boot).

Or maybe in a sense, that was the point. A dangling breast is a dangling breast, and breasts also have a quotidian purpose, which perhaps comes to the fore through a rigorous de-eroticization, which was certainly the effect. As I mentioned, the final sequence–three nude female dancers, the feminine form returned to a whole, and liberated from touch-intitiation to pursue long, fluid phrases with the occasional thoughtful pairings occurring, complemented by predictable but nevertheless dramatic sideways lighting–was quite compelling and a stark contrast to the rest of the piece. From the costuming to the devices that focused attention on the specific details of the movement and body, to the lighting (pretty much work-light level illumination) and seating arrangement that made the audience cognizant of being an audience, down to the rehearsal dance clothes…in comparison to the end, most of the piece felt a like it was watching a rehearsal-style process.

And I suspect that was the point. For thirty-some minutes, May asks us to look at the process, to see the nuts and bolts, to disconnect concrete choices from the final product, in order to see how the piece is made.

And on one level, I certainly respect that. Self-interrogation is one of the most important things artists can do, as it lays the basis for development of form and style. It’s the bedrock of innovation. But as a finished piece, Gutter Gate is oddly passive towards its audience; rather than using that approach to ask provocative questions or placing demands on the audience (aside from the requirement we engage or succumb to boredom), it merely asks us to look at the pieces and see how they become a whole, which ironically fuels a deep skepticism (at least on my part) of the artistic enterprise. Devoid of content, the emotional resonances we experience at the end are reduced to mere tricks of the trade, employed for no other purpose than to manipulate and titillate an audience, the choreographic equivalent of a swelling film score at a dramatic moment in a movie, or sensual lighting to eroticize a woman’s face. Which is fine, I suppose, to have pointed out, but the vision of dance the end offers is remarkably conservative, a combination of traditional dance lighting and a focus on both graceful movement and the feminine form. That’s not even a particularly big target to deconstruct, far less dynamic than even moderately thoughtful contemporary choreographers regularly put up.

Still, it did give me pause for a moment with Natalie Green’s phantasmagoria nerves like tombs, nerves like nettles, before I decided to put May’s skepticism aside and take my friend’s advice to experience the piece like a gift and just give myself over to it, to let Green, in other words, seduce me into the world she conjures onstage. Which isn’t a half-bad thing to indulge. One of the things I love to see in choreography is for the personality of the choreographer to come through, for the movement onstage to reveal a sense of its creator. That is, I think, a sign of success on the artist’s part, bending a language to her own ends. And by that count, Green does a pretty fine job, the 40-minute or so piece rife with quirky tidbits, thoughtful images, a bit of humor, and even a touch of raunch.

Four female dancers enter in near-darkness, wearing identical hooded white capes. The piece begins with their backs to the audience, the complexity of the movement developing gradually as the dancers shuffle around the stage, lines forming and then breaking, movement synchronizing then dissembling. Conjuring up what I can only assume is a fragmentary psyche, Green draws strong distinctions as we move through the piece, by delineating area on the stage (achieved with functional subtlety by lighting designer Chloe Z. Brown, who also designed for Gutter Gate) and off, in fact, as well as shifting the style and tone of the movement, which moved from stuttery shuffling to balletic to simple natural movement.

I also found myself far more engaged with the dancers, including Anna Carapetyan, who did double-duty in both pieces being presented and was thankfully given room to shine by Green, who also performed in the piece herself.

To quibble with it, I’d say that thematically an exploration of the psyche isn’t particularly risky or original territory (and the bunny cradled by the man who leaves the audience to wander the wings was too Freudian–though I probably wouldn’t say that if it had been real), and by the end, I was really wishing Green had pushed her crew harder in several directions. Pacing was largely constant throughout, which left me wishing for a little diversity, and the physicality never really pushed the dancers too hard, I don’t think (mid-tempo phrases that just end with the dancers dropping posture to rearrange themselves abound). Not that that’s necessary for a good piece, of course, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that Green left me wanting to see more of what she could do, go in even more diverse directions, and fascinated by the prospect of what she’s capable of beyond what I’d seen. She’s definitely a choreographer whose work I’ll check out again, and a high point of a pair of otherwise disappointing evenings at DTW in January.

Popularity: 4% [?]

DTW’s Studio Series kicks off tonight at 6pm with Souleymane Badolo showing work-in-process Solo’s Solo/”Basic”- a study on how NOT to go so low or too deep (with changes in direction). During Souleymane’s 100-hour creative residency he and choreographer Reggie Wilson met to investigate movement, gesture, repetition, and structure.  Looking to see when, how, and if narrative can arise from form and structure. Focusing on order, rhythm, patterns, texture, comparison and relationship they have abandoned improvisation, movement-invention, character and emotion.  There will be another showing tomorrow (Saturday) night at 6pm with In-Process Talks after each showing moderated by Nora Chipaumire.

The Studio Series offers an opportunity for research and development in a creative residency format, providing resources of time, space, and a commission. The Studio Series is a laboratory for physical explorations and new movement investigations with a focus on process, not final performance/product. The “performances” are intended to be informal public showings to share ideas with an audience in the intimate working space of the studio.  This season, I will be having quick conversations with each Studio Series artist to highlight the valuable investigatory nature of this program.

So, how did you and Reggie come to work together?

When I saw the performance he made with Andreya [Ouamba], it was a new thing for me as a way to make dance.  After that, I talked with Nora and we had an idea about asking him to make a solo for me.  His way of working was something I wanted to understand. I asked him and it took a while for him to say he could make some time to work together.  When I got the Studio Series, I said “I have space and time to show something.  Let’s work.”  So, our first step was to make something for the Dance Kings of Black Brooklyn in the fall.  Reggie was getting an award as an important black male dancer and choreographer in Brooklyn and I showed the first version of our dance for him at this.  Then, we came back and developed this dance out of a gesture. It isn’t only that I want to work with Reggie. There are many African American choreographers who work differently; the way they are moving is completely different. They don’t do ballet. It’s not African. It’s their own. It’s very different for me.  Like Trajal [Harrell], I spoke with him. I would like him to make some work for me.  I want to learn new things. I’m a dancer and a choreographer and I’d worked with a lot of people in Europe and the way they work here is different. It’s important to work with these artists and learn more, it’s for my own education, my own black, African education. I need this, I need these Americans to help me learn more about what they are doing and who I am and who we are. For me, I never went to school for dance like them.  I learned from the company and for events. I learned it by doing it and doing it. I want to work with people who think about dance with ideas that are exciting for me, like Ralph Lemon and Gus Solomon. For me, it’s important to talk with them and make the possibilities to make this work. When I see what people are doing in NYC, it is very contemporary and I’m very excited.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Gallim Dance: Jonathan Royse Windham, Arika Yamada, Troy Ogilvie, Caroline Fermin, Dan Walczak, Francesa Romo. Photo Yi-Chun Wu

Last night, I slogged the few blocks from my office to Dance Theater Workshop for the 7:30 double-bill of Andrea Miller’s Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell Dance (through Jan. 22; tickets $20).

This was my second taste of Andrea Miller’s choreography, and the first time I left feeling pretty ambivalent about it. With her second piece under my belt, I feel a bit more confident in admitting that although there are some things she’s clearly gifted at, choreographically her work just doesn’t quite come together in a very meaningful way.

The weaknesses are, unfortunately, on display from the very beginning of For Glenn Gould, which opens with her company in a balletic mode that they just can’t quite pull off. There were moments where the synchronization was simply sloppy looking–sloppy for professionals, yes, but sloppy nonetheless. And even then, Miller didn’t seem to have much interest in the balletic mode other than for its purely formal aesthetics, a lengthy exercise in asking us to look at graceful composition paired with the first of two recordings of Gould’s Goldberg Variations that bookend the piece–as they did the pianist’s career.

What follows quickly moves into the more familiar mode I saw Wonderland, the first piece of Miller’s I caught at the Joyce last summer. There’s some human contortionism involving a set of chairs and some odd bits where the dancers balance themselves on the bric-a-brac brought in to litter the stage (road cones, empty water cooler bottles, stacks of books), but what the piece really boils down to, despite the occasional brief pairing, is a series of intense solos that prove–again–that Miller has a real capacity for crafting extremely physical and athletic movement. Some of them were quite good, particularly those by Arika Yamada and Troy Ogilvie.

Others were less so, particularly the solo used as a filler following the initial sequence, to allow the rest of the company to drag the set pieces onstage. To an a-rhythmic song, one of the dancers performs a sort of psychic break down expressed through increasingly erratic movement phrases each of which end with the dancer casting herself across the floor. I’ve seen this done so many times that’s quickly racing to the top of my list of performance cliches I never want to see again (until, of course, someone really surprises me by making them work, which I love to see happen on the rare occasion it does), right up there with a soloist dragging him- or herself slowly across the stage to express desperation or despair, something few have added to since Balanchine choreographed it in 1929.

Sidra Bell Dance NY: Alexandra Johnson, Zach McNally. Photo by Yi-Chun Wu

As for Sidra Bell’s POOL, it’s basically a futuristic-by-way-of-the-Eighties German fetish cabaret, complete with thumping Euro-disco score, black spandex-and-pleather costumes, spotlights for against-the-wall routines, and face make-up that unfortunately recalls about every poster for Black Swan. And the truth is, I kind of liked it at first. It brought a grin to my face, because it is cheesy, but Bell really does own the concept.

The problem is, I never really grasped what the concept was meant to convey, aside from the program description of “memory, dreams, and illusions as well as the line between order and disorder.” The movement vocabulary feels mainly sculptural, and although Bell plays with some interesting pairings and aims for a dynamic use of the space, it never really feels like it comes together in a meaningful fashion (basically that was the order of the night), and at 40 minutes or so, it felt a fair bit longer.

Popularity: 4% [?]

My first meeting as a member of Dance Theater Workshop’s Board was the inaugural one in the new building.  It was 2002 and I’d considered myself part of an unofficial DTW schooling, moving through a series of programs following a Fresh Tracks in 1995.  As an Artistic Advisor for DTW’s multiyear Mekong Project, I was able to see firsthand how far reaching this organization’s impact has been.  Watching artists from various SE Asian countries engage in artistic and political discourse that transcended national boundaries during residencies both in the region and around the US affirmed my belief that DTW was about so much more than 219 W. 19^th St.

However, my entire tenure as a board member has been in observance of an organization struggling with the immensity of a gloriously hopeful, naïve, and ambitious undertaking. Last month, members of the board and supporters of the organization gathered for DTW’s last fundraising gala. This year, DTW will reincarnate its staunch spirit of support for independent artists under the name New York Live Arts as part of its merger with Bill T. Jones.  Fittingly, the final gala was a celebration of DTW’s long running Fresh Tracks program, where Bill T. showed some of his earliest work.  It felt like a homecoming for an artist deserving of a home and more concrete legacy and a promise that DTW’s mission to serve artists and the field will remain strong.

At the forefront of that mission stands DTW’s Artistic Director, Carla Peterson. I spoke with her in December.

What do you think this change means for the field of contemporary dance and performance?  How does this reflect the current moment?

What DTW has been grappling with is symptomatic of what’s happening in the field and economically everywhere. So, to have two boards to come together to talk about what a partnership might be, while partnering has been part of the DTW ethos for a while, especially after the new building opened, made perfect sense.  I don’t think it was unusual that this conversation ensued, but this was related to the institutional survival and then it morphed into a more solid reality.  Bill T. has a long, early history with DTW, a few years ago we had honored him during our Gala, and he was looking for a home. There was a big push in the landscape with funders wanting arts organizations to rethink and re-imagine who they are. If one thinks back historically about how many of these organizations proliferated over time and recognized how many were artist driven, they’d see that that was spurred on by a particular moment in social and economic history just as this is being spurred by a particular moment in social and economic history.  The Ford Foundation decided in the 1950s that they would offer philanthropic giving to cultural organizations and then the National Endowment for the Arts was formed in 1965.  Of course, there was the New Deal before this, but in the early 60s there was a shift in the country that provided federally supported cultural makers with resources available that allowed artists to create artist-centered organizations like DTW.  It was a little bit of ziegeist with a lot of artist-led art centers proliferating nationally. A lot of the smaller and scrappier National Performance Network organizations started at that time, and then Reagan came in and recessions and the culture wars, etc. and while we maintained an upper trajectory, I think it is interesting that these organizations grew but without a sense of really what had to be done to survive. The building went up with a lot of optimism and wound up in a terrible economic frame. We get to this current moment because of all of what has come before.

It’s been put to me that around the country that those close to DTW tend to be more pessimistic about this change and those with a lower affinity are more optimistic.   I know, personally, over the past year’s worth of discussions I’ve been excited and terrified, inspired and morose, both advocate and skeptic at any given moment.  I owe so much to DTW, but I feel I can be loyally detached from specific outcomes.  What’s your sense from deeper inside?

Everyone is thinking about what the loss is in relation to what the gain is.  We want to emphasize how much there is to gain, at the same time you have an artistic community who have relied on, and owe much to, DTW at various junctures in their development.  And while not as an artist, but I too, in my earlier relationships with DTW as an NPN site in Ohio, felt the same way.  As a cultural activist, I cut my teeth due to those relationships. I learned what it means to speak for the arts through my associations with DTW. So, as we morph into this new entity there is going to be a real commitment to the things that DTW has represented before.  Look at Fresh Tracks, it has been called many things along the way, and has more recently morphed into something new with the residencies.   Each incarnation is a framework that was responsive to the need of those times. Dance is so under resourced and often misunderstood.  My heart is invested in putting resources into the hands of emerging artists, but I also want to work in tandem with other people to bring dance to a more populist artist. I think that’s what this new organization will work towards without sacrificing a commitment to continuing the dialogue around new investigations. I hope that this new organization can stay connected to those more radical ways of making work that may not fit within more conventional notions of what dance is. That’s one of the ways in which artists stay in front. I would hope that NYLA will remain committed to that. I will maintain my own advocacy for that. I’m excited about opening to more hybrid work. I think this is connected to the way artists think and that doesn’t seem very different from the way I worked as DTW’s AD, like with the Norweigan company Verdensteatret whose work is not easy to categorize.  Where there is choreography but you won’t see a Limon heritage there, for example. They work with puppets, poetic narratives.  There’s already was an opening up to showing work that dance makers or artists who work within the body as their main practice are going to be interested in anyway.  It’s great to get people who go to galleries, performance art, and read performance literature in here more often, and even if we weren’t merging, I would want to continue in that direction.

I see the renovation of the upstairs studios into a flexible performance space as an opportunity to expand access to a wider array of body-based artistic practices.  It takes the impact of the organization beyond who shows up in the downstairs theater.  What else do you see this merger providing support for?

I think that one of the things that will be stronger will be our ability to put more substantial resource towards those artists who have been working for a while and who have developed a voice and have a language and the facility to develop full, strong work but don’t have resources. We have a few of those choreographers who may have gotten in as trust fund babies or got in on the loft scene early; but so many of our field’s choreographers in their 40s/50s, who chose to work independently and work towards intimacy, don’t have a national cultural policy that allows them support over time. What will be interesting in this amalgamation is that we’ll have someone like Bill T., who brings in a specific historical line up of choices, made over time, that include deliberate reaches to a wider audiences and honoring and engaging that and – this could be an exciting tension between us – other artists who have been working for decades without that scope.  He’s a major, recognized, choreographer who deserves a home, so we can value that and support, but not romanticize the struggle for those artists who aren’t reaching a national profile. If you want to go boring NYC versus Europe discourse it’s been said many times that there are real communities of artists in NY who know each other, hang out and see each other’s work.  Dance is a social endeavor and you need to rely on each other here in this city.  There you have artists who are supported and ensconced in beautiful facilities and they don’t’ have reasons to enter into a dialogue with each other, because they don’t depend on one another. They have a singular artistic path, and don’t necessarily share spaces or dancers or evenings.  Why do people go to Judson on Monday night? That’s your rich cultural life, though there’s no money in the bank.  There are those who intentionally make work that requires smaller venues and intimate audiences and then there are those who have mobilized their personalities and networks and built bigger support and their own centers, while others have hit their 40s/50s and aren’t doing as well. This is a chance for us to do something for experienced voices that aren’t often seen or heard as widely. However, I feel very strongly that while we will put more resources to mid-career artists, we cannot abandon supporting younger artists as they develop overtime.  I do not want to move us away from remembering the younger artists that we need to stay in contact with over time and provide with different opportunities.  We need to build relationships and don’t want to wait for artists to make a name somewhere else and then say their ready. I want us to be part of that conversation that allows artists to learn from all of their investments.  The conversation of the upstairs studio will allow us to bring in artists who aren’t too defined by formalism and codes to work in the theater space. It’s a space that allows audiences and artists the chance to continue interrogating their relationships, with a potential acknowledgement of the history of theater.  It will not be highly technical; it will have some production capability, but the advantage of it is this open large space where artists can work up there in ways beyond our current Studio Series.

I see that as an example of DTW doing what it’s always done: respond to the needs of the field in real-time.  NYLA could be a better DTW, it has that potential, to serve artists at every stage of their career and as our field matures, it’s nice to see an organization mature with it.  You’re also keeping the discourse around “What is dance?” in an expansive place.  The NY Times merger article sites the presentation of next year’s season as revealing the organizations’ new identity. I get that, in a sense, but you, clearly, will be so much more than a single roster of artists on your stage.  Plus, are you ready to move that fast?

I was sorry to see it said that the next season will define us. We’re not going to be an elephant turning into an aardvark. DTW has always morphed. DTW changed when the building landed. It has changed identity with changes of artistic leadership – from the founders to David White to Cathy Edwards and Craig Peterson to Cathy, and, most recently, me.  But in the last year, the board has done what was necessary to ensure the financial viability of the organization.  Our next season isn’t going to be a radical thing.  That’s just not how curating works and not what supporting artists looks like. It takes time to stay with an artist and support their development over time. I bring veteran experience and can work together with Bill T. while honoring who he is and knowing the history of the field to do that. Bill is going to be in a learning mode as much about DTW now and as I am going to be catching up to him.  He’s a choreographer; he’s not supposed to be running around looking at work 7 days a week, which is often what I do. Ultimately, he and I will need to develop a confidence together, feeling assured with each other, which is a process. This will happen over time in the next couple years. There will probably be larger projects with more production support behind them.. I’ve been interested for 3 years with someone, I can’t say their name, but we’ve been flirting with the idea of having them here, but that’s a project 2-3 years in the making.  I couldn’t go full steam ahead developing long-term relationships until we could solidify the merger. Next year isn’t going to suddenly answer you. Having it take time makes it organic; makes it grow from inside the organization with integrity and, besides, artists don’t make work that way.  We may have larger projects that serve as gateways to more experimental work.

It was fun to see Ellis Wood, David Parker, David Neumann & Doug Elkins showing work at Monday’s Fresh Tracks gala. It felt a lot like the DTW I came to in the 90s. I was glad to see Bill T. there.  How present is he in this process? How are you all defining this organization in the immediate day to day?

At some point in January, they will all be here. At our meeting, there will be some things relayed to staff that addresses what this might look like. Parallel to artists’ creative process, this is a creative entity that will form itself over time.  There are parameters we have set about things we want to do and that will develop as we sit here next to one another. There will be an artist advisory board that Bill T. and I will gather.  He and I have to get together to identify the terms and places from which we’ll call these people and growing that advisory board into one that also welcomes non-dance artists.  We want to populate it with people who come from different kinds of forms to generate new ideas about what we can be doing. Bill T. really wants to develop a Humanities Series and is taken with things that the 92^nd St. Y has been doing for years.  We want to animate the building with great discussions.  We’d love have rotating visual and audio artists, maybe a guest curator to do things in the lobby. We’ve got this great glass lobby to pull people in. And, why not mobilize the elevator as an experimental space for a sound artist. I’ve thought of this ever since I first went to PS1 where the lobby entrance into the gallery spaces holds this tiny TV monitor on the floor.  At first you don’t notice it and then suddenly your relationship as a vertical body towards this thing in the ground opens up a different relationship to a TV.  It brings up a different thought processes.  There are so many body related opportunities that may not look like dance, but are from body-based modalities or practices. I love Tony Orrico’s work down in our lobby right now because it’s a body-based practice and I like getting him while he’s young and not just bringing him in after he’s done his thing somewhere else.  I want artists to establish and strengthen their names here, to come home here at any point in their journey.  That’s what this organization should be.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Rebecca Patek.

Last night I caught the opening night of Fresh Tracks at DTW (through Saturday; tickets $20): six emerging dance artists chosen through a live audition process, beginning their residencies in the program. And somewhat surprisingly (it’s a mixed bill, after all), I left impressed by basically all the performances. That said, my favorites bookended the evening, so I’ll bookend my review with them.

Mei Yamanaka’s newspaper & me opened the evening. The piece is performed on a large (maybe 15-foot diameter) circle of taped together broadsheet newspapers; off to stage right, there’s also a large pile of wadded up newspapers. Yamanaka, a punkish looking Japanese woman with bleached hair, enters and slowly begins to move.

The piece unfolds in roughly three segments, but Yamanaka sold me in the first. Building from slow to fast, she performs a sort of breakdown, as though disoriented and finally overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information surrounding her. She moves as though stumbling, constantly shifting her weight and balance, a fluid sort of lurching, her shoulders changing direction a beat before her legs are finished taking a step. In short, Yamanaka is a compelling young dancer.

And so is Marjani A. Forte, in a rather different way, who presented EGO, a meditation on the body and the self. Opening with dramatic lighting, the powerful and graceful Forte proceeded through a series of repetitive phrases ending in beautiful scuptural poses, before moving on to use more of the space. Wearing flowing pants and peek-a-boo sheer top, Forte paraded about, covering her face demurely with a sheer, flirting at the audience, and finally performing a pick-up and rejection with an audience member.

The most radical piece, though, in several ways, was Yve Laris Cohen’s Duke, which starts out feeling a bit like an abstract version of Of Mice and Men, and ends as a Beckettian tragicomedy. The movement starts in the dark, with a pair of shirtless men–one tall and heavy, one short and inexplicably wearing padded football pants–moving around planks of wood. The short man picks one up, then the tall man picks up the short man and carries him around the stage to drop them off. Eventually the planks all more or less end up along the back wall, and then, both men start to cry. Two other dancers make momentary appearances to knock over the short man, and at some point a bunch of smaller planks get dumped on the stage. Extremely compelling in its simplicity, Duke demonstrates that Cohen (and his choreographic collaborator Michael Mahalchick) is willing to think outside the box about how to create movement, and also has a sense of how to use non-dancers to create engaging dance.

In comparison. Lindsay Clark’s Goodbye Mr. B and Tatyana Tenenbaum’s the near(ness) felt rather conservative. Both featured three dancers, both were extremely musical (both in fact featured the dancers singing), and finally both felt a little under-realized. Clark’s piece manic-depressively shifted from a waltzy classical number to a joyously executed duet set to Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie.” It’s not that it was bad, but it didn’t feel as though it added up to anything bigger than its parts, some of which were better than others. Tenenbaum’s the near(ness), in contrast, I found to be disappointingly predictable.

And finally, the right bookend: Rebecca Patek’s Jessica’s Story. All I can say is, wow. Patek manages to perform both a side-splitting comedy routine and a beautiful dance solo. Playing what I can only describe as a parody of a flighty dancer, she starts by passing out a two-page hand-out to the audience–a religious kitsch painting about angels helping a community rescue a little girl from a well, and a page of dialogue–before informing the audience that, originally, the piece was choreographed for two dancers, but her collaborator left so she has to do both.

It’s brilliant comic deadpan, and watching Patek walk back and forth from down-center to the wing to pick up a prop that makes her one of four characters, each of whom has exactly one line to say, is just brilliant as a sight gag that gets funnier with repetition. The story, of course, is of Baby Jessica McClure, the 18-month-old Texan who, in 1987, fell down a well and was rescued after two days of frantic effort. Patek freely invites the audience to talk with her about her process creating the piece, from why she made it (Jessica McClure’s complete and total silence about the experience forced Patek to be the one tell it), to what she wanted to evoke (asking the audience to suggest what Baby Jessica felt when she fell down the well, Patek was willing to accept “fear,” but really like some “shame” might be in there too).

The entire thing is deliciously absurd, occasionally cringe-inducingly awkward humor. In terms of movement, Patek made sure she had at least one beautifully realized solo, but also managed to throw herself around the stage in comic pratfall (with three audience volunteers, playing the people who failed Baby Jessica), as well as perform a redemptive baptism in which the audience is compelled to be the response in a quasi-religious call and response. Jessica’s Story alone would be worth the ticket price.

Popularity: 4% [?]