Angels of Swedenborg from culturehub on Vimeo.

Wow oh wow is time getting away from us! Last weekend, the Ping Chong & Company, in collaboration with Great Jones Rep, opened a revival of his well-known 1985 dance theater piece Angels of Swedenborg (at La MaMa through Nov. 13; tickets $25/$20). We’ll have more on it shortly, but for now check out the video: beautifully designed, philosophically complex, and emotionally resonant, we’ll be there for the show this weekend.

Popularity: 6% [?]

This just in from Seattle’s On the Boards, where Vivarium Studio‘s beloved little gem L’Effet de Serge is supposed to be playing later this month:

We are writing to let you know that we are having to consider the possibility of canceling a production after receiving the news that the visas for our next performers, France’s Vivarium Studio, may not be issued. In our 34 year history we have brought hundreds of foreign artists to the US and this is the first time that we have encountered this kind of visa difficulty.

OtB submitted visa applications for Vivarium Studio in early February, more than the required time for these kinds of applications, and have finally received notice today (4/1) that the visas for artist travel to the US may be denied. We have worked tirelessly, especially over the past 2 weeks, to ensure that these visa would be approved, enlisting legal help from several prominent immigration lawyers and congressional offices and foreign consulate offices. This news is of particular shock, as the artists were approved to perform elsewhere in the US just this past January.

This is, of course, not the first time recently we’ve encountered the issue of visa troubles for foreign artists. Just in March, La MaMa had to push back the opening of Irish Modern Dance Theater’s Fall and Recover over visa issues. The Journal had the complete story, as we noted in The Digest a couple weeks ago. Apparently, in a courageous attempt to keep artists out of the country, the Obama administration has radically increased the level of scrutiny for artist visas, justly determining artist visas to be a major area of abuse. The Journal had some choice quotes pertaining to scrutiny of IMDT’s visa applications, for a show that features survivors of torture:

Given the multi-ethnic composition of the group and the universal subject matter of the work to be performed, USCIS is unsure whether the term ‘cultural’ applies in this case.

Why exactly the Obama administration thinks this is important is somewhat beyond me. As a resident of South Brooklyn, where the Russian mafia freely exploits the J-1 visa program to supply right-off-the-boat “talent” to strip clubs in Astoria, I think that, ahem, there might be bigger fish to fry than artist visas. Vivarium Studio, for instance, has already performed in the US, winning praise as an audience favorite at the 2010 Under the Radar Festival. And of course the company is from the rather un-radical, un-offensive nation of France, inevitably leading us to conclude that DHS’s review process is becoming increasingly arbitrary and capricious, which is a very legalistic way of saying they’re full of shit and should be worried about the new practices.

So please, if you have a moment, consider writing DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversees the US office of Citizenship and Immigration Services, at janet.napolitano(at)dhs.gov [EDITOR'S NOTE: It's come to our attention that Sec. Napolitano's public email has been disabled], as well as the office’s director, Alejandro Mayorkas at alejandro.mayorkas(at)dhs.gov.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Young Jean Lee and Future Wife. Photo by Blaine Davis.

Maura Donohue skipped town to meet her newest nephew Si Gonville. But, before that she saw Douglas Dunn’s dress rehearsal for Buridan’s Ass – the last installment in the Body Madness Platform at Danspace Project, and interviewed John Scott/Irish Modern Dance Theatre, whose Fall and Recover–with survivors of torture in the cast–continues at La Mama thru April 9, Hilary Clark, whose Studio Series showings are tonight and tomorrow at 6pm at DTW, and Stephen Petronio whose work Underland (originally created for Sydney Dance Company) gets its NY premiere at The Joyce next week. (Clark and Petronio interviews to be posted soon, check back.)

Andy is at Joe’s Pub tonight for the first performance of Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die, with her band Future Wife, and Saturday is off to the horror the horror at Abrons Arts Center.

Tonight, Jeremy M. Barker is also seeing Young Jean at Joe’s Pub, which she promised him she would try very hard to be bad at, and then Saturday he’s off to CPR for a showcase of Seattle’s Degenerate Art Ensemble.

Jane is going to see Young Jean with Jeremy and Andy tonight. Those are her weekend plans. She’s going hiking all day tomorrow and then trying to get to the Whitney Sunday.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Irish Modern Dance Theatre artistic director John Scott”s Fall and Recover is currently running at La Mama thru April 9. He and I recently met to talk specifically about his process working with survivors of torture who now live in Ireland. He spoke to Andy last year for a previous Five Questions.

How did you come to this project? You should look up the UN definition of torture. In summary: “Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed, or intimidating him or other persons.” It is meant to destroy a person without killing them. I was asked to do some workshops and I’m not a therapist or anything, but the survivors were doing art therapy at the Centre for Care for Survivors of Torture in Dublin and they’d asked for dance. They’d been working in drama and one of them, Kiribu, said it was too close to therapy because you’d talk about yourself and they didn’t feel safe doing it. There’s shame and guilt and trying to comprehend the horror of it all. Kiribu said that in Africa you dance all the time – when you work, when you’re happy, sad, at funerals. Dance is so much a part of their feeling that they wanted to try it and to feel good in their bodies again. They’ve said that the effect of the torture is something like having your shadow in front of you all your life. Sometimes they can’t get out of bed in the morning, they have skin problems, allergies, one of the performers has a severe asthma, so she carries a letter for doctors, and she was a gymnast. They have insomnia and paranoia and there is always the risk of that an event, anything, can be a trigger for a flashback. Laying on a cold floor can trigger a flashback. There’s a piece I hope to bring next year where the dancers stand still for a long time and one of them said “I can’t do that. When it happened to me I had to stand still for hours and I can’t stand still anymore.” So it can be a position or a sound. The composer had a sound in rehearsals that reminded several of them with aerial bombardment. They asked him to take it out and he did. It’s all about listening and respecting each other.

How did you start the process with them? I did my normal dance workshop based on what I learned with Pablo Vela, Meredith Monk, Anna Sokolow, etc. We did these exercises with our names – singing and moving, writing your names in space. I’d say something like run your name across the room and all the Arabic speakers ran to the other side of the room because the script runs the other way and we had instant choreography. I was told to never ask what happened to them. You could ask names and where are you from. So I walked into a room and they looked just like people, you know and I’d been asked if I’d like having a therapist to sit in the workshops. I said no, that was in 2003 and I haven’t needed one yet. Dancers are sensitive and this work requires a heightened sensitivity. People sometimes become aggressive or very quiet. When you’re working with longtime collaborators you know if they’re in a difficult mood, you see it coming. But with these guys it’s very quick. It may have been festering for a week, but suddenly BING! They pull themselves through it though. So I said: “My name is John, I’m a choreographer. I haven’t come a very long distance. But, I know some of you have left your homes and left your countries and I’m sorry for what you have been through. I want you to know I will never ask you what happened. My work is abstract and I don’t use stories. I use symbols and ideas. My dancers bring in ideas and we have fun. You can call me anytime day or night. Say anything you like.” It was two years later when one of them told me that made them feel safe and they knew they could work without giving anything away. Imagine, if a woman was tortured maybe her husband, son, daughter, mother could have been killed and she might feel shame for surviving. Your life is never the same.

Clearly, this project presented very different challenges. How do they manage working on this while recovering from the unspeakable? They also have the issues of a strange country, a strange language, culture/racial hostility and suspicion and then, having your case accepted and receiving refugee status. For every 100 people in Ireland who apply, only 6 to 10 might get that. It can take 2-7 years to go through this process. One guy in our group (who couldn’t come because he doesn’t have status) has been waiting 6 years and he’s 22 years old. He’s covered in beating marks and burns. The other performers told me he would never take his shirt off in the changing room. When he asked me and my manager to help him with his case, I said I can ask an immigration lawyer who can help you, but were you beaten and then he took off his shirt. It was shocking and those scars are 6 years old. He said when he did dance classes and performed, he didn’t have to take his medication. He’s still waiting to hear if he’s going to be deported. You can also apply for Humanitarian Leave to remain and if you can get 5 years out of that, then you can apply for citizenship. He has a file, psychological evaluations, they interview them, but the hearing is alone – basically with retired judges. You have to prove you will be killed if you go home. They can acknowledge the wounds, the medical file, that you will have trouble if you go back. But, if there is not enough evidence to prove that if you go back to your country you will be killed, they can’t grant you status. There’s a powerful book Human Cargo by Elizabeth Morehead. I couldn’t read it all, I’m too close to it, but she talks about what’s happening to refugees around the world especially after 9/11 when the US shut its doors and it all came down to Europe. Different countries in the EU have a lot autonomy and they don’t cooperate, but when it comes to immigration they cooperate very well. There’s an EU organization that deals with border enforcement. They will round up people and stop in a few EU countries. In Ireland, you apply for status and you’re usually living in a hostel. You get breakfast at 8, Lunch at 12, dinner at 5, a dorm room, your medical expenses covered and are given 19 euros a week. So, if they had dance practice til 5, they’d miss their dinner across town. It all could really make you give up. But, I wasn’t aware of any of that when I started.

When did you begin actually making this work with them? In our first exercise, we stood in a circle and were raising arms and they were looking at me and I felt this huge responsibility and great need in the way they were moving. I wanted to cry and I was inspired. Kiribu just kept reaching up and there was this young kid who had a perfect second position. He was a shepherd from Sudan, but he could jump and I thought he was a professional dancer. He’d gone up to the hills one day and some group had sacked the village and his mother and brother were killed. His father gave someone money to get him out and he was brought to Turkey and got on a plane thinking he was going to America and got off in Ireland. The trafficker tricked him. Everyone in the group was very gifted, with technical and beautiful qualities. I kept thinking this is so interesting. We’ll make a little piece in 2003 for the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. I kept thinking it would be amazing to make a piece with them, but they’re not used to any kind of rehearsal structure. So, we got a grant to bring in 2 professional dancers and went through a 2-month rehearsal process that was the most enjoyable experience creatively and personally. It was joyous and funny and stressful. We did it at The Project Arts Centre in Dublin, in the small auditorium. Word got out and radio show interviewed me and, suddenly, there was a line around the block. We brought it back 3 times, toured the country. I put it to bed in ’06 and continued working with some of them on a different piece. We toured to Rio, Israel, etc.

I saw your work at La Mama Moves last year. It was highly physical and pretty virtuosic. You brought two professional dancers into this. How does that integration work in your cast? It’s so interesting. My dance dance is often very technical and virtuosic, but this particular group of people have different levels of spiritual and physical virtuosity. It’s a great human palette. In Ireland, the people don’t notice the massive change in our culture. All these people with new skin colors identifying themselves as Irish. We found someone from Eretria, he’s 65 and dancing. He’s incredible. So, we have people of many skills now. We’re working with a retired ballerina. At 71 years old, she’s dancing with us. I’ve started to perform more, even as my body is in decline. We have different bodies different sizes and shapes. We put everyone in this work. There is no disqualificaiton. Everyone who was in a rehearsal could be in it. We never turned a person away, the door was always open. It’s been joyous seeing people grow in confiedence, get married, having kids getting jobs. As one of the dancers described the process as thus: ‘We are fallen. We have come up. When you get the chance to move on, we move on. It is essential that someone has to lift you up – when you get up you can help the next person up.’

For more information, you can listen to John and cast on with Leonard Lopate last week and with the BBC a couple years ago.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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% [?]

Irish Modern Dance Theater's "Fall and Recover" at La MaMa.

They forgot to mention a tip jar: Last week, on March 17, a group called the Collective Arts Think Tank, consisting of the directors of PS122, DTW, the Chocolate Factory, the Field, and others, released a letter addressed to the community regarding the results of a year-long endeavor try to re-think how artists are compensated for their work. The entire thing is certainly interesting and worth reading, particularly because the people involved actually put some actions behind their big ideas (a rare enough thing to see), and I think we here at Culturebot will be returning to it in the near future. But that said, for as much as I appreciate their efforts, I’m going to have to dissent from a fair bit of what they have to say, particularly big statements like: “Art is a profession; and artists who do not get paid are not professionals. Period.”

Actually, I have trouble imagining how artists actually are professionals, rather than amateurs (in the Olympic athlete sense). Looking over how the various presenters are trying to offer more money to artists reveals a ridiculously low rate of pay. As PS122, this includes $450 per week before opening (for a 40-hour week) and $250 during the run. I’m not criticizing them for the amount they’re paying, it’s just that by no stretch of the imagination is $11.25 an hour actually fair compensation for an artist. Your “job” is always a transaction: you exchange your labor for a certain benefit. Artists accept less money for a reason, and there other economic exchanges occurring simultaneously to simply being paid. The signatories of the letter are certainly correct when they note that we are all “creating an ecosystem that has as its foundation labor paid for by unrecognized sources from outside of the ‘Arts Sector’ [i.e., people's day jobs],” but it’s a stretch to describe that situation as “undervaluing the artists and their product.”

In the broader sense, that suggests that the only “value” the product has is its commercial value, which is obviously quite low; in the narrower sense of this being written by commissioning presenters, I suppose that means they think they should have been paying more. However, they don’t exactly address whether it’s an issue of they should have or could have. And considering that at PS122, for instance, higher commissions and fees are being paid for by reducing the number of commissions by 15 percent, I think we have our answer.

The point is, looking at this critically, what I see is a general sense that artists aren’t compensated properly. Fair enough, but without an existing market mechanism to determine what the level of pay should be, you have artistic curators essentially deciding to do their best to nominally increase payments by decreasing other cost outlays. In practice, what that means is that if Vallejo Gantner, say, likes your work, you’ll get paid a bit more; if he doesn’t, you will in fact have less opportunity to get produced and develop your career because PS122 is producing fewer shows. And nowhere does this address the very complex commissioning process used to support big new shows, often through simultaneous commissions throughout the US tour circuit, as documented by Alyssa Alpine previously at Culturebot.

We just wanted to make sure we weren’t the ones who tortured them: The Journal has an article on the travails international artists face getting visas to perform in the US, concentrating on Irish Modern Dance Theater‘s Fall and Recover, which was meant to open last week at La MaMa but couldn’t due to visa delays (the show now opens Friday). The piece is a collaboration between members of the company and torture survivors who received asylum in Ireland, and I’ve been mulling over snarky headlines directed at the State Department for a couple weeks now. But the Journal article is a must-read just to get an idea of the insane BS artists go through. Here’s my favorite tidbit, from the Citizen and Immigration Service’s (USCIS, part of Homeland Security) review questioning IMDT’s visa applications: “Given the multi-ethnic composition of the group and the universal subject matter of the work to be performed, USCIS is unsure whether the term ‘cultural’ applies in this case.”

So “multi-ethnic” and “universal” subjects don’t count as “culture”? Apparently, America has no culture.

Tempest in a bloggy teapot: Oh, how I love the interwebs for their debates! Really I do, and I love taking part in some of them. Other times, well…I hope people have started to notice my generally sneering disregard for “big ideas.” Case in point: poor playwright Mat Smart, who dared write the piece “The Real Reasons Playwrights Fail.” TONY‘s Upstaged blog has a nice round-up, but here it is in short: Smart argues that “we’re fucking lazy.” The post is, as Isaac Butler well summarizes, “supposedly provocative” but really just “a lot of reinforcement of institutional thinking disguised as Bold Contrarian Truth Telling.”

Arturo Vidich's "Body Island," March 24 at Abrons Arts Center.

The trick is that as Helen Shaw rather sagely pointed out in Upstaged, Sharp’s post was really just saying that success is often a matter of hard work, and that many playwrights (and generally other artists) conflate personal challenges with institutional woes. Of course, he says this rather poorly, and his critics are generally right to point out that, indeed, there are institutional issues which need to be addressed. Desperately. In cases like this, I like to point people to my friend Paul Mullin, a Seattle-based playwright, who has written extensively about what it would take to make Seattle a world class theater town. His critiques and punchy but very smart, and he does (I believe) a good job separating personal challenges from legitimate structural issues.

Odds & Ends: Marc Kirschner of TenduTV discusses social media policy in the arts – Modern dance and ballet come to Abu Dhabi – our pal Zachary Whittenberg on three choreographers bringing politically engaged dance to the Chicago stage – our London chums at Belly Flop magazine wonder if artists actually like sports as London prepares for the Olympics – East of Borneo has a marvelous piece on the films of William Leavitt – and don’t forget that Arturo Vidich’s Body Island goes down tomorrow at Abrons Arts Center.

Popularity: 3% [?]

tEEth Performance's "Home Made," at the Fusebox Festival in Austin this April. Photo by Aaron Rogosin.

What’s In a Joke?: Isaac Butler over at Parabasis is starting a new series of investigations of narrative. “Story Matters I” focuses on a joke about a Clown (no, not that sort of Clown Joke), which, in written rendition, utterly flops. Which is precisely his point. “The point of The Clown Joke—like all Shaggy Dog stories—is that the punch-line is miniscule and unsatisfying,” he writes.

The more grandiose the set up, the more dramatic the distance, the more perversely pleasurable the joke becomes, for the storyteller, anyway. For the listener, the point is to be indoctrinated into an inner circle of knowledge via a lengthy trial in which you have no control. You get for this a story good enough to hold your attention and the ability to play this same trick on others for your own enjoyment.

Either way, narrative has a very clearly defined role to play. This is not true in other storytelling mediums. Long have we debated the purpose, value and role that narrative plays in theatre, in fiction, in poetry, in film although the latter two seem to be more resolved on this issue (poetry rigidly against, film slavishly for). Does story serve some other goal or do those other goals serve story?

From my perspective, all too often contemporary playwrights operate like the joke-writer he describes, but with a slight twist: everyone now no doubt knows the Aristocrats, which is the ne plus ultra of the operation Butler describes and the mode most often employed by playwrights. Not only does it set up a miniscule punchline, everyone knows the punchline in advance; the success of the joke is entirely dependent on the narrative which gets you there from the beginning, which tells you where you’re going. Most contemporary plays are very essayistic like this; given the homogeneity of the typical theater artist and audience, we know that a play that starts off about war will have something bad to say about it, that a play that engages with gay issues will be pro-gay. (Someone please name me the last big pro-war or anti-gay play you saw professionally produced.) In this typology, the “narrative,” which is essentially the entire play being produced, exists to narrate a series of points that makes the predictable ending impactful, which we charitably still refer to as catharsis. This is why I generally don’t like contemporary playwriting.

That said, I like that Butler is interrogating and asking questions like this; a nice companion piece on the function of jokes came up in February’s issue of The Believer and can be read online.

Belarus Free Theater: Well, they’re not exactly “free” anymore, if by “free” you mean “free to return home,” which makes them a bit less Belarussian. Maybe. (I’m trying to be too witty. Apologies.) The point is, the Belarus Free Theater, a courageous collective of theater artists from Minsk who spent nearly a decade producing samizdat plays in the repressive state have been in the US since January, when, with the help of fellow dissidents and the international community, they managed to sneak out of the country to perform at Under the Radar. In February, they were in Chicago, and now they’re coming back to New York to produce a trio of shows at La Mama starting on April 13. Whether they’ve returned home in the interim I do not know at the moment, but I kind of doubt it. Several members were detained following the latest rigged presidential election in December, when dictator Sasha Lukashenko “won” yet another term. Government provocateurs helped incite protesters to riot, providing a thinly veiled excuse for the security services to brutally crackdown. With the world’s attention elsewhere (read: the Middle East and Africa), Lukashenko is comfortably out of the news and back to his wacky dictator stuff (did you know he nationalized the fashion modeling industry? Yup, he’s that crazy), leaving Belarus’s future as bleak as ever.

Fusebox Festival Line-up Announced: Woo-hoo! The Fusebox Festival, one of the nation’s premiere contemporary performance destinations, has announced the line-up of this year’s festival, which goes down in Austin, Texas from April 20-May 1. The fest features the work of some New York mainstays, including Young Jean Lee‘s The Shipment and choreographer Faye Driscoll‘s well-reviewed There is so much mad in me, as well as some other pieces we’ve recently seen, including Jerome Bel’s Cedrix Andrieux. But Fusebox definitely has its own treasures, some of which I will be catching the first weekend of the festival. First off, Austin’s own Rude Mechs, whose amazing The Method Gun closes at DTW this weekend, will be debuting a new work, I’ve Never Been So Happy, which plays in rep at their own theater The Off Center, with the also-local Rubber Rep‘s The Biography of Physical Sensation, an interactive biographical work that plays out for all five senses. And it looks like curator Ron Berry is one of the first nationally to hip to Portland, Oregon’s tEEth Performance, who, if I understand correctly, have only been seen once in NYC at the Joyce Soho in ’09, despite being embraced in Northwest and making repeat appearances at Fusebox. Home Made, their newest work, which is coming to Fusebox, recently captured first-prize excerpted at The A.W.A.R.D. Show! at Seattle’s On the Boards, and my sources tell me it’s amazing.

More on Looking at Dancers’ Bodies: Not had enough of “Sugarplumgate” yet? (Really? That’s what we decided to call it?) Well, over at DanceUSA’s eJournal, Houston-based writer and teacher Nancy Wozny weighs in with a personal, reflective essay, “My Eyes, Your Body,” where she admits that at a recent performance, she found herself “fixated on the circumference of a dancer’s thighs.”

“Watch the dance, not the legs,” I silently yelled at my brain. What’s wrong with me? And me, of all people, a thick-thighed somatic educator, who spent two decades teaching people to accept their bodies. This can’t be true. At war with my own attention, I missed the performance entirely by trying not to be bothered by a pair of less-than-perfect legs. Too distracted by so-called imperfection, I became a victim of my own learned blindness.

It’s a generally lovely, thoughtful, and remarkably self-excoriating piece, but what troubles me about it is the degree to which she faults herself for being, well, normal. We’re not always proud of ourselves and the way in which we look at and judge other people, but declaring your intention to force yourself to think differently seems to kowtow to political correctness. What I find fascinating is that a writer has revealed something personal about the way she experienced a show, which would likely never make it into a review. Personally, I think we need more “I” in reviews and a willingness on the part of the reviewer to reveal their actual experience, not hide behind a veneer of authorial arrogance. Does it seem mean to admit that the way a dancer looked in a performance distracted you? Maybe, particularly if you take the Alastair Macaulay route and make it a joke. But if Wozny was reviewing the performance she mentions, it’s probably worth admitting. Is it really any more mean to say so (revealing your own shortcomings in the process) than it is to give a show a bad review, and tear down someone’s hard work and a massive investment of time?

In fact, I’d argue that it’s deeply important to be that honest. Far too often, artists live in a world of positive feedback loops, where anything negative is swept under the rug. In the end, the artist is responsible for his or her choices, from casting to costuming.

Body-blind casting is as naive and problematic as race-blind casting. We’ve all seen choreographers who choreograph for dancers of a certain type and then have to make do with what pick-ups they can manage. Context is everything, of course, but I’ve been insulted on a dancer’s part more than once seeing them forced to do something they’re not built to do. Choreographers do not always choreograph in a way that supports the essential human dignity and inherent beauty of the body, and that is something they need to be held accountable for. (On a side-note, I want to point out that one of the choreographers whose work has most impressed me for her capacity to work with diverse body types in beautiful and meaningful way is none other than Angelle Hebert of tEEth, noted above.)

As for critics, we (hopefully) enter the theater seeking to experience what the artist wants us to, which is easier for people who are more familiar (like us) with the vocabulary of the art. But we do always need to take a step a back and ask how successfully they achieved their goals, and call out problematic issues. The truth is, it’s more a fear of exposure on the writer’s part that keeps us silent than anything else, and that’s disrespectful to the artists. They expose themselves in ways most of don’t have to; the least we can do is take them seriously and offer an honest response.

Popularity: 3% [?]

This Thursday is the opening of Bastard, the first part of The Painted Bird, a new dance work in three parts from choreographer Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo , at La Mama (tickets $20/$25). Loosely inspired by a scene from Jerzy Kosinski’s controversial 1956 novel The Painted Bird, Zuštiak’s piece exlores “migration, displacement, and identity formation.”

As Zuštiak explained in a brief telephone interview earlier this week, the piece was inspired by one particular scene in the novel, in which a bird keeper paints a bird a different color and then releases it so that it will be attacked by its own flock, now unable to recognize it.

“The bird of the same kind is rejected by its own kind,” he told me, and that sense of having your own turn on you, of being made an outsider, resonated with Zuštiak, an immigrant who left his native country in 1993.

The Painted Bird also gave Zuštiak the opportunity to collaborate with noted Slovakian dancer Jaroslav Viňarský. “We know each other for about seventeen years,” Zuštiak said of Viňarský, who he met first as a teacher before emigrating from Slovakia. In the intervening decades, Viňarský has built a career for himself as a dancer, and for some time Zuštiak had been looking for the opoortunity to work with him.

“For him as well, the things we’re looking at hit close to home,” Zuštiak said of Viňarský.

The show also allowed Zuštiak to collaborate extensively with composer Christian Frederickson, a violinist and one of the core members of the classical-influenced indie rock outfit Rachel’s. Frederickson had become acquainted with Zuštiak when he was taken to some of Palissimo’s performances, and for The Painted Bird (at which he will be performing live, along with Ryan Rumery), he’s been involved in the process from the beginning, working along with Zuštiak and Viňarský in the studio and traveling with them to Europe, where he also had the opportunity to do some recordings for part of the score.

Bastard, as noted, is just the first of three parts for the work, the second of which will be presented at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in January and third of which goes up at PS 122 later in 2011. While all three are designed to stand on their own, taken together, Zuštiak will be shifting the audience’s perspective at each stage to follow the same sort of trajectory of confusion and identity crisis the work explores. While Part 1 takes place in a traditional theatre, part 2 will be presented in a black box, with no seating, and the dissolution of the artist-audience boundary will be completed in Part 3, which will exist as an installation work.

“I find our work successful when we get into a conversation with people through the work,” Zuštiak said.

A special event will also be taking place as part of the run: on November 18, Palissimo will be commemorating the 21st anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, the peaceful movement that overthrew communism in the former Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Night festivities, sponsored by Consulate General of Slovakia in New York and Plus421 Foundation, will take place after the performance; special tickets available here.

Popularity: 7% [?]

The final program for this year’s Dance Festival at La Mama was appropriately a mixed bill of artists hailing from far flung points of origin.  As I mentioned in my post about the Hula program I saw in the larger Ellen Stewart Theatre at The Annex just before the New York International program in the First Floor Theater on Sunday, it is the commitment to providing many rising international artists with a home in this city  that makes La Mama a special venue.  Most of the artists on Sunday night’s program would likely call themselves New Yorkers now.  But, that is the special overwhelming beauty of this global home – many locals, few natives – as Sol “La Argentinita” very passionately showed in her flamenco solo, danced to Cristian Puig’s fervent guitar playing.  Originally from Buenos Aires, she carries both the ricocheting energy of the Spanish dance form and the growl and prowl of our city.  It was a commanding performance, full of complex heel work, clapping, focus, strength, and grace.  Her “Flamenco Cabal” was a stunning performance with enough bravado to slam me out of the Hula induced bliss coma I was still languishing in.

She was followed by “Maximized Occurrence,”danced by a gorgeous trio of recent grads from my program at Hunter College.  I’ve been watching this piece develop all year and can’t comment on it with freshness, however they clearly rose to the occasion performing a series of duets with intensity and focus and reflected the curatorial mandate for the program.  Recent graduate Olsi Gjeci comes to contemporary dance via the National Albanian Folk Dance company and I expect to see much more of him.  He maintains a kind of single-minded, tunnel-vision manner that will serve his continued explorations of the form and his dancers Kobik Gordon, from Tobago, and Krista Saint-Dic, from Haiti, are absolutely fascinating on stage together.

John Scott’s “Actions,” a duet for his “Irish Modern Dance Theatre,” took a similar task-based foundation but expanded the scope with the more current style of bright (less-theatrical) lighting and casual spoken interplay between Marcus Bellamy and Michael Snipe Jr.  These two men, both Julliard alumni and former Parsons, Battleworks, Sean Curran, and Broadway veterans, are a powerhouse duo, athletic in sneakers and drenching their sweat pants in a sheen of sweat after extensive explosive movement sequences. Scott understands how to employ irony and play to a work, though the dancers’ bodies had so much more to say in that respect than any of the spoken dialogues.  Also on the program were an excerpt of “Target: Furnace,”a solo choreographed for Marya Wethers by Daria Fain (France), and works by Antonia Katranddjieva (Bulgaria) and Paul Ibey (Greece).

Popularity: 1% [?]

Hula is the soul of Hawaii expressed through dance, reflecting central ideas and historic or mythic events in tales told through hand gestures, chants and/or songs.  Though once a form of worship, it has survived both the Protestant missionaries who banned it in 1800s and Hollywood’s ridiculous bastardization, and remains a rich, vibrant tradition. After remaining largely hidden until 1883 when King Kalakaua proclaimed hula as “the language of the heart and therefore the heartbeat of the Hawaiian people,” it enjoyed a resurgence that, later, struggled through the early parts of the 20^th century when major tourist attractions and pop-culture depictions threatened to eradicate the form’s true essence with grass skirts and coconut bras.

However, since the 1970s, Hula has enjoyed another period of growth with the instrumental help of the regal and generous Kumu Hula (master teacher), Robert Uluwehi Cazimero,who opened the touching and impressive closing program, The Power of Hula, in the Ellen Stewart Theater for the LaMama Moves Dance Festival.  He welcomed the packed-to-the-rafters crowd with a chant and then opened the second act with a  song and dance dedicated to La Mama’s Co-Artistic Director and La Mama Moves Co-curator, Mia Yoo.  Both Cazimero and fellow Kumu Hula Vicky Holt Takamine expressed deep gratitude for Mia’s support in bringing them to LaMama.  This is an impressive feat, for though we may have our first “Hawaiian” President, and it requires no passport to get there, Hawaii is a vastly different state with cultural mores highly divergent from the mainland’s.  While Yoo and co-curator Nicky Paraiso have worked very diligently with the festival to turn LaMama into a destination for dance in NYC, I was struck that Yoo is effectively continuing LaMama’s greatest tradition of giving some of the best artists from far away shores a proper home in New York City.

The program included dynamic performances from Takamine’s son and fellow Kumu Hula Jeff Kanekaiwilani Takamamine who worked both his hips and the crowd with finesse.  There were several dances from the New York City based Na Lehua Melemele hui, or group, directed by Lisette Kaualena Flanary, a noted filmmaker whose “American Aloha: Hula Beyond Hawai’i” is standard viewing in my Dance and Culture classes.  Keo Woolford, whose one-man show “I-Land” blending hula, hip hop and storytelling has been presented at several venues around NYC performed a few delightful dances, including the witty “Tewe Tewe” that used the o’opu or goby fish as a metaphor for lovemaking.

Rules regarding the study and performance of hula dance can be very strict and students of a halau hula (hula school) are required to respect them.  So, the study of hula outside of Hawaii can be difficult and teachers hard to find. Somehow, though, Vicky Holt Takamine has managed to offer a New York version of her Pua Ali’I ‘Ilima and after mentioning that they had spent the previous day chanting, singing and dancing beside Ellen Stewart’s bed for her, brought out a company of local dancers, led in song by the lovely Marina Celander, that included LaMama’s marketing director, Kiku Sakai and Ford Foundation Program Officer/Director/Dramaturg extraordinaire, Roberta Uno.  This unexpected surprise, as well as Flanary’s diverse group of practitioners, was an inspiration that lead me to visions of a movement pursuit that can easily endure for decades.

Popularity: 1% [?]