Originally presented at The Chocolate Factory, I’m Nobody! Who Are You? is re-conceived for the New York Live Arts Ford Foundation Live Gallery Wall. The installation is comprised of a series of life-sized video portraits, presented in pairs, of individuals who are connected directly or tangentially to New York Live Arts. The work breaks boundaries by allowing the viewer to observe other people for longer lengths of time than would exist in standard social conditions. By observing paired portraits, viewers create relationships, and consequently narratives, between the participants despite the known conditions of the filming. I’m Nobody! Who Are You? challenges the viewer to consider how they construct their appearance for others and respond to the same construction of others. Ultimately, I’m Nobody! Who Are You? asks viewers to consider the artificiality of their assumptions about communities, individuals, institutions, and the arts.

with

 

• luciana achugar
• Vanessa Anspaugh
• Anna Azrieli
• Sidra Bell
• Michelle Boulé
• Brian Brooks
• Chloë Z. Brown
• Gabri Christa
• Jean Davidson
• Maura Nguyen Donohue
• Cathy Edwards
• Paul Engler
• Keely Garfield
• Ain Gordon
• Miguel Gutierrez
• Hristoula Harakas
• Anja Hitzenberger
• K.J. Holmes
• Bill T. Jones
• Joanna Kotze

 

• Sheila Elizabeth Lewandowski
• I-Ling, Liu
• Brian McCormick
• Jodi Melnick
• Carla Peterson
• Craig Peterson
• Brian Rogers
• Daniel Bernard Roumain
• Philip Sandström
• Valda Setterfield
• Sally Silvers
• Vicky Shick
• Megan V. Sprenger
• Laura Staton
• Elaine Summers
• Donna Uchizono
• Arturo Vidich
• Marya Wethers
• Enrico D. Wey
• Christopher Williams

http://www.newyorklivearts.org/event/imnobody

Popularity: 2% [?]

Maura’s moderating another panel for The Field’s Economic Revitalization in the Performing Arts program on Monday 1/30 at 6:30 at Joyce Soho about How Artists and Presenters Works Together .FREE.

It’s easy to forget that artists and theaters are partners birthing artworks to the world.  So often these relationships can have challenging power dynamics – let’s open communication and get down to business.  How do we work together on logistical challenges, how do we negotiate our needs?

Panelists include: Cathy Eilers, Program Manager at Joyce SoHo; Kristin Marting, hybrid director and Artistic Director of HERE; Brian Rogers, theater artist and Artistic Director of the Chocolate Factory; James Scruggs, theater artist.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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

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

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

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

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

with Phillip Glass

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

How is the work changing for New York?

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

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

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

94 Feathers

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

How do you manage the distance creation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you work with other companies?

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

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

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

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

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

Lorene Bouboushian

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

Paul Monaghan and Mathew Rogers (Niall Jones in background)

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

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

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

Popularity: 3% [?]

HT Chen has been presenting artists in his little Chinatown gem of a theater at the Chen Dance Center, formerly called Mulberry St. Theater, for almost 20 years. During his welcome to the audience on Thursday night, Chen stated that over 250 artists had been supported and presented at the theater since 1994, mostly through CDC’s Newsteps showcase. In fact, Newsteps was the first place I showed work in NYC during the program’s inaugural year and HT provided me with my first choreographic fellowship and substantial support. Chen offers a stipend and residency time in his studios as part of Newsteps. So in addition to providing newer voices with a valuable professional springboard, Newsteps serves as a laboratory for exploration, a space for younger artists to bang away at the old-school rules that dance school may have enforced. Having served on the audition panel in the relatively recent past, it was enjoyable to get back in for a fresh look at the works being presented during this round. There’s often, at least, one find on the program and those who don’t spark my personal interest still offer works that reveal an impressive level of skill in dance. This fall’s crop of artists yielded a few innovative artists (ironically, the female “solos”) I’d willingly seek out in the future and other choreographers who, while still caught in the canon show enough curiosity for me to hope they’ll push the edges further next time. Or, maybe they’ll simply continue to serve those still enamored with “purdy” dances just fine.

Chen Dance Center Theater

Effie Bowen’s duet with a droopy air mattress, sooner than already there, began with her jumping (flailing?) on a floor mat while the Annie Lennox version of Train in Vain played. She then threw herself onto the air mattress which began to rapidly deflate, she continued to lay on it while we listened to the rushing air and then dug her head further into the collapsed mattress and gathered it around her with her arms. It was a delightfully authentic moment and seemed not unfamiliar in its absurd pathos. When she shifted into ‘dance piece land,’ I found myself perfectly content watching her at length. I’ve seen Bowen in a duet with Courtney Cooke  at Dixon Place and a previous Newsteps, but within her own work the exquisite mix of awkward vulnerability within a veneer of light indifference shines.

Grace Courvoisier’s Sister Republic initially set off mini-warning bells in my head (she was singing Canadian folk trio The Wailin’ Jennys Long Time Traveller) as a potentially painful theater/dance/female/solo (you know the emotionally cathartic kind). But, the work soon revealed itself to be a highly sophisticated and deftly crafted tour-de-force for Courvoisier who managed mercurial shifts in tone and focus. Her treatment of the movement and language inter-relationship was clearly fed by some hearty exposure to Tere O’Connor who teaches (along with several other impressive faculty) at her alma mater out in Illinois. Despite carrying some heavy baggage about the state of our country, she employs a compelling range of physical and verbal play. I felt deliciously whiplashed trying to keep up with her rapidly firing, non-linear investigations, while enjoying her quieting device of smacking her lips for a “Pop” while calmly sitting and seeming to pull the idea out of her brain and crumbling it away in her fingers.

Megan Harrold & Charlie Rauh

Dancer Megan Harrold and musician Charlie Rauh employed a method that involved transposing Christiana Rauh’s poetry into movement and music through the intervals in the alphabet in there How Would I Rate The Quality of My Afternoon. The process read as rich for discovery and did provide an interesting movement vocabulary that Harrold executed with rich confidence, but it seemed to limit the scope of physical investigation by anchoring it too literally. As with the Bowen and Courvoisier’s pieces, the showcase structure worked to make these explorations that could have held my attention for longer, if part of the individual artist’s sustained exploration, seem a little long. Essentially, I’d like to see where these three artists would go with more time to both sustain and unravel their ideas.

The other works on the program included technically strong dancing, but mostly standard modern dance fare that only lightly tackled the ideas behind them. Clinton Edward Martin’s Green Light was a quartet using playground activities like hop skotch and Red Light/Green Light primarily as bookends. The work was shaped very clearly and dancers Allison Sale, Lynda Senisi, Jenni Berthelot, and Alessandra Marconi performed beautifully, handling transitions to and from the floor with fluidity but the main substance of the work seemed more focused on choreographic phrase work and less on the evolution of play ground structures. Cori Marquis performed a duet, F=Gm1m2/y2 (the formula for gravity), with Alexander Dones. The partnering was intricate and perfectly executed, but Salem’s dreamy techno cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” wrapped the work in a gloss that got tedious and lulled me away from what could have been (based on the dance’s subject) highly compelling. Alexis Convento’s a desire, but want to brought a return performance from Dones, Sale, and Senisi. Convento is the founder/producer of The Current Sessions, a work-in-progress series for choreographers in their 20s that Jeremy recently covered. Unlike his commentary about the work shown there, I’d guess that Convento is actually asking interesting questions from dance about freedom, unique movement, attack and curiosity, but this is based on her PR description and not the piece that seemed intent on upholding collegiate rules for group dance composition. I don’t fault Convento for adhering to the values championed to her, but the conservative nature of education is a topic that is starting to stew. As a mother of 2 in the NYC public school system and an educator at the other end of the line in the City University of New York, I can’t help but wonder how anyone here can develop autonomous practices or innovative work when there is so much maintenance of the status quo.

Several years ago I was on a Fresh Tracks audition panel (which I’ll be checking out tomorrow, and where I was presented a few months after Newsteps) with Tere asking “What are they teaching these people in college?” At the time, he was teaching at NYU, now he holds THE rock star deal for an artist-in-academia (and, I’ll be seeing his latest at Danspace on Thursday), and we (Hunter College, where I’m now on faculty) are actively woo-ing him for some guest-based creative brilliance. So, now that I’m in the game of teaching college students, I get the answer and, ironically, it is the opposite of what I was hinting at, probably around 10-years ago, with that pointed question. If the faculty are among the diligent majority, their students are getting comp’d. Seriously comp’d in what can seem like a dance-by-numbers way. There’s the level change, there’s the accumulation, oh a little retrograde, some counterpoint, ah don’t forget to develop your motif… Original voice? Risk taking? How about asking some really good questions of your work and yourself? But, I’m learning my lesson about academia’s deeply rooted conservatism on many levels, artistically it works to uphold and reinforce age-old, borrowed values from visual and musical arts. So many programs seem to push the notion that following traditional compositional structures equals proper choreography, not rigorous investigation, not contextual understanding. Maybe this is a conservatory versus liberal arts question. I suppose the field will eventually weed out those less intent on research and discovery, and time will cull individual voices from each crop of maturing artists, but couldn’t artistry be served from some progressive expectations within the academy? I’m not going to pull out the John Dewey and Howard Gardner references yet, but a couple years ago, I guest edited The University Project, a series of interviews and DTW Lobby Talks about the ranks of active choreographers who had taken academic posts, for Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence and I’m thinking it might be time for a follow up.

Popularity: 2% [?]

890 Broadway

Gibney Dance Center is hosting an Open House/Launch Party for the Center’s integrated complex of 7 studios located in the historic 890 Broadway Building on the 5th Floor tonight (Thu, 9/22). Doors open at 6pm, followed by a champagne toast and special remarks at 6:30 by  Gina Gibney, Artistic Director of Gibney Dance and Lane Harwell, Executive Director of Dance/NYC. At 7pm there will be Pop-up performances and a dance party with music by DJ Plasticdragon.

In addition to providing high-quality, affordable space for rehearsals, classes, and showings, the expanded facility will allow the Center to build on its existing roster of community-focused programs and act as a creative hub for dance artists. Since 1991, Gina Gibney has operated a single studio at 890 Broadway. In 2010, she officially launched the Center when she acquired two additional spacious studios. Since then, GDC has added 8,400 square feet of pillar-free space to its home. This new expansion, which had a soft launch in July of this year, includes four additional studios, all of which are available for rehearsals, showings, classes, and other events. The expanded facility also provides a green room, dressing rooms, storage rooms, production offices, a media room, and new office space.

I was able to speak with Gina briefly in the midst of many last minute preparations.

It’s heartening to hear about a dance space growing right now. Right, we’ve been back there in 5-2 for a long time and have felt very fortunate when so many studios went out of business. I never anticipated this, but when the space started to become available, after having seen other organizations struggle to find space, it seemed, not only because of the physical attributes but also because of the building’s history, that it would have been horrible to not do anything. In this field at this time, people are used to the opposite kind of news – that artists and organizations are leaving the center of Manhattan or changing so much. It’s not that change is bad, but there hasn’t been a lot people can feel secure about. With 5-2 as a constant for so many years, it was nice to grow with so many of the people who having been coming through for classes. So, I feel a great responsibility to make it a great place to be. I want to send the right messages that this will be the kind of place with respect for everyone who works here. I want to make sure people can have everything we can give without charging them extra. So that it’s not “you are renting but you have to pay extra because it’s not your space.” We have these resources and we want to make them available to everyone.

First Rehearsals in Studio 5 (from GGD blog)

What kind of resources? Well, being a choreographer has shaped the space in a way. I’ve done work in ideal situations and challenging situations, so I know what people really need and what they don’t. The main thing is to treat people with respect. I want to have a friendly environment without a capital “F.” It should be supportive and respectful, a space where you feel welcome, but when you leave you close the door. People kept saying we should have couches, but I don’t want couches. You come here to work in a rigorous environment and not just to hang out. There is a green room with tables and chairs. Meetings can be here, but I want it to be a place where you enjoy working and connect with others around their work. I don’t want it to feel like there’s a point of view either. Anybody could be rehearsing right next door and you don’t make work like each other and you may like it or not, but can still work together and learn from one another. We could have the most emerging artist across from a well-funded musical. It could be a real learning experience.  Also, we thought about how much equipment do you need to feel supported without feeling that the equipment will take over – choreographers need reliable sound systems, a dvd player without paying extra, water in the studios, maybe a little candy around. Little things. We’ll have print outs with the dimensions of many of the performing venues around town (that comes directly from Fractured Atlas) with tape and tape measure around, so you can work inside the actual playing space. People comment about our candy dish. It’s a kind of example of how people want to feel supported without feeling like they have to answer to something. I want people to feel like someone is giving them a lot of space.  Artists are able to see out, there is lots of light, with windows open to outside, but doors that shut. So you can work with the door open to the hallway or you can privacy without feeling isolated, because you can see outside – maybe even looking down on Union Square. We’re also working hard to figure out storage. We have these high ceilings and we’re trying to figure out the logistics of how to let people, during certain chunks of time, have somewhere to leave some props or sets while working.

It is such a huge undertaking for an organization, let alone a single choreographer dance company, to undertake. How did you make this happen? First of all, Eliot Feld is amazing. It is great to have an artist for a landlord. He is such a visionary human being. I had a great relationship with him, being here for 20 years. I felt like a little fish in the back, but he was willing to take a risk on us and he liked what we did in our first range of expansions. If he didn’t have faith, it wouldn’t have been an idea. He’s just a creative enough entrepreneur/risktaker/visionary that though it wasn’t the most logical choice or safe bet, he was willing. And, secondly, I had the support of my board, it was not rational. It was a huge undertaking, doubled the size of our budget. But when they saw, when they looked around at the space they understood, and they were able to take the leap with me. It seemed like it would work. Our staff has been incredible, Stephanie Mas and Michelle Wilson, who started as a part-timer and now is a full time operations manager, have been great. The Chris Pennington at the Jerome Robbins Foundation was very supportive and they provided the first contribution for this project. Mertz-Gilmore provided funding. It was a huge leap of faith, but people saw the need and responded.

You’ve done a lot of community-based work. Do you see this as an obvious outgrowth of that? So much of the work that my company has done in the community has been so remote, the work in domestic violence shelters. It’s a tremendous amount of work, but so decentralized. It feels as if, for the last 10 years, I’ve been throwing little ping pong balls out into space and now I feel like they are falling down on my head here now, in a good way. Throughout the years, I’ve done a lot of work on the boards of other organizations and learned a lot. It is a conscious redefinition of community for me. The classes at 5-2 were wonderful but they took up a lot time and the amount of time I had to use that space for my own work was limited. Because of that we developed creative programming around the limitations of time. We had more ways to serve once we started getting more space. It is as if our roots where in a pot and now that we’re in a bigger pot, we’re flourishing. Our community work (in addition to the dance community) with domestic violence will be able to grow and take on different aspects within this space.

You provided the DanceNow Challenge winner with free rehearsal space. Are there other strategic partnerships in the works? We are doing a couple great partnerships, working with Movement Research and class, class,class. I love Brooklyn and Queens, but it’s nice to have a central Manhattan location. We’re partnering with DNA for some specialty classes, starting with a floor barre in October. We’re only doing classes in 5-2 so that the other spaces will be available for rehearsal. Red Currant Collective are a group of NYU grads who are working as care-takers in exchange for use of our space. They come in and mop floors, re-fill the water, etc. We have an advisory group that allows us to figure out how things are facilitated, etc. Jennifer Edwards and Sydney Skybetter are doing strategic planning consultancy work here. There is a lot going on and we’re looking for there to be more.  I just wanted to revitalize the place and I want people to feel that it is open to everyone. There is not one aesthetic, age or sensibility at work here.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Ellis Wood will be performing her evening-length solo “Mom” at NYU/Tisch this Friday at 7:30. I’ve known Ellis since we both performed solos for DTW’s Fresh Tracks back in 1995 and have seen early versions of this solo, which won last year’s DanceNow (NYC) Challenge. We spoke last month prior to (and then, just following) a performance of the work at Symphony Space.

Thanks for rescheduling due to my field trip chaperone duty conflict. I appreciated your comment about how it was appropriate to the subject matter, after all.

It was funny. A writer from the New Yorker was coming to rehearsal and called saying he’d lost childcare and was hoping he could bring his 5 month-old given the nature of my show.

It’s hard to do get things done with kids. I know that is just one aspect of “Mom”-ness, but the logistical, energy reserve, physical tolls are substantial. You can’t really know the full weight until you are in it. I often feel that the idolization of young, new voices (and bodies) in dance can create a focus in our field that ignores the realities for maturing artists – family responsibilities, aging, health care, etc. I remember the days of your Gender Project. Things felt very urgent and frustrating then. I now wonder whether things are truly different or if I simply am. Is it any easier to ‘make it’ in dance as a female artist or have we just altered our priorities enough that those other issues are still present, but mean less now?

Everything you are saying, I feel like I’m saying every day. You mentioned The Gender Project, I feel like in those days I fought a lot harder. Now, my energy is spent elsewhere – even though I notice what you are saying. I don’t fight through it. It has been different, to be in the dance world not fighting. I’m more interested in accepting what is and making my own path through, so that I feel fulfilled and happy and comfortable with what I’m able to put out there. This piece is not the biggest production that I’ve ever put on. Looking at it from the outside it seems not big in scale, but I’ve never been so nervous, insecure, proud and excited all at the same time. And, I can kind of remember this feeling from that first solo I did on that Fresh Tracks we were both in – in 1995. I remember needing the shift from dancing in other people’s companies to making my own way. I had this feeling of total rawness – and I feel that again 15/16 years later. I think finding Fran Kirmser, a development director I started working with 4/5 years ago, helped me shift to this moment. I felt lost in the dance world about what my next step was. She guided me toward finding what makes me happy. It keeps me honest. Well I’m certainly not going to do it if I’m miserable and just doing what other people think I should be doing. If this piece weren’t called “MOM” I wouldn’t have made it through. I can’t tell you how many times I couldn’t go to a rehearsal, with space paid for. I had one 6-week stretch where some kid in my family was sick and I couldn’t rehearse. And, the only way I could go back in was to say: “hey, this is what it means to be a mom.” I used to rehearse everyday for 4 hours a day. I used to be in a certain kind of shape and didn’t have 3 c-sections. I used to hold myself to such rules and I can’t do that any more. When I started back after my third child, if I went to rehearsal and created something new and my body didn’t hurt – it was such victory. I can’t believe I put this thing together. Anyone without a child knows getting a work up is a huge accomplishment and anyone who can do it with a child is amazing.

And, to do an evening-length solo that you told me (after performing part of it at the Fresh Tracks Gala at DTW) could only be done in a one-off situation.

I’ve actually built up to it be something I could do as a 2 or 3 night performance run. But, the build has been so slow. After my last kid (who is 2.5), it was difficult to do a second position plie. It’s taken me 2.5 years to be able to feel like I can do this piece and get through and not hurt myself and do it a few times in a row. I didn’t think I could pull myself together to do a solo. Funny enough it was my mom and Fran who were actually the ones saying: “Well, you could.” And I said no and that went on for a long time before they started to point out that I already was. A couple years ago I went back onstage and it was hard and it was a slow build. Then Robin Staff at DanceNow sent me that application for the Fall Festival and I thought, “I’m just going to do this!” It got me back and I am forever grateful. I needed something somewhere to make me do it. And, it felt so good. DTW was where I did my first solo.

I love that you came back with a solo called “MOM” and that it won DanceNow’s challenge.  That seemed like a validating moment, saying maybe we are growing up and maybe opening to realities that valuable working artists can also be active parents. It seems to me that you are fighting by example now. It reminds me of a central theme in Joan Acocella’s “28 Artists and 2 Saints” book. How she said that female artists experience significant gaps or ends to their creative lives because the domestic burdens of caring for other human beings (young or old) fell most often on them. I don’t think that has changed that substantially, but I’d like to think more of us are managing to maintain both rich personal and creative lives.

Sometimes there’s that gap and sometimes there’s a departure. There’s a certain kind of push that I don’t want to do have anything to do with, the push from ten years ago. That’s kind of what Fran guided me away from, and why I did this piece. The reality is that my kids have to go to school and eat and considerations include finances, time, energy, how do I split my life and all those things. I do the bulk of scheduling and doctor’s and dentists and I have to be available if somebody’s sick and how does dance work around this. I had these two incredible women who were mothers who gave me a vote of confidence and I needed that. Also, the video artist Robyn Tomlin, who is a single mother, stepped in – and the project really started coming together. I’d love to say that I was all confident moving forward, but I needed some votes of confidence. My mother, pregnant 5 times in 4 years and losing 2 of them while dancing with Martha Graham, knew what she was talking about too. While in the middle of dancing in Martha’s company, she suffered all those changes to her body. God knows that was insanely difficult, but Martha was always clear that she could come back after having the kids.

So, how does this all make its way into the work? Or does it?

It’s about 45 minutes and there are different sections and each represents a different time and vibe in a mother’s life. There are two sections that are the most intense or poignant for me. About half way in, there is a section with an elastic band. Most everything before that leads up to getting pregnant. The band represents an umbilical cord and most everything after represents life after kids. What I do during that section is intricate enough that it’s all I can concentrate on – which is different from my usual looking out at the audience and playing with expressivity. It’s all I can do to get through this section and it feels very real. Sometimes you’re doing the world out there and it’s crazy and then there are moments – pregnant, giving birth, with the kids – where you’re tangled and caught and also maneuvering through it with great intricacy and I know this is Freudian but I’m really attached to this section. Also the last section is special to me because it is the first one I made.

How did the piece go? What was it like to perform this work?

Better than I had imagined. Doing it just made me want to do it more. Something about doing it for the first time meant that I could live in it in a very real way. I couldn’t fake much because it was so raw – I felt like I was living in the moment. My kids, husband and my sister and my own mom were there and I love that. Dancing is a place where I can actually be something other than a wife and mother at this point– so it means a lot to me for them to see that part of me as well. There are certain things – even about motherhood – that I only express on stage. How funny that a stage seems like such a safe place for me to express some things I don’t quite know how to express in my life.  Anyway, I am going to keep working on the piece and will continue to do it for a while. Thanks for asking.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Susan Marshall & Company celebrated its 25th anniversary last weekend with a pair of works using both performance spaces at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. The company is at New Haven’s Festival of Arts and Ideas (curated by Cathy Edwards) with versions of both works opening tomorrow and running through Saturday.

On opening night at BAC, Frame Dances was a live-feed video and movement installation performed in the Howard Gilman Performance Space at 7pm and Adamantine, a 2009 concert dance work, followed in the Jerome Robbins Theater at 8. Both works were originally commissioned by Peak Performances @ Montclair. The 2008 Frame Dances, with video design and projections by Ryan Holsapple and Roderick Murray, builds upon a charming section from Marshall’s Bessie-winning 2006 Cloudless. The video (without a live-performance-feed) of that work began the evening, priming the audience for the ensuing material -  images of bodies negotiating confined space, set to evocative music selections by the delightful Peter Whitehead, before Sandstone, a dirty duet for Joseph Poulson and Kristin Hollinsworth performed live in a sandbox frame, presented them with the dueling realities of process and product. The pristine detachment of the mediated images do not reflect the messy, human labor and effort involved in generating them. The videos define a single perspective and offer no peripheral information. When a dancer is out of the frame, they are absent – visually and artistically; however, for the various audience members encircling the live performers for Sandstone and its companions Green Green Grass and Forward, the dancers outside the box provide a very animated, ontological element. We can still see them there, standing just outside the camera’s purview. Their existence – being “one who is just about to enter” or “one who has just left” – provides the audience with a constant presence that isn’t weighted as heavily in the resulting images. Their proximity offers the dirty, giggly, sweaty truth behind the slick images. Green Green Grass, in particular, is a chaotic circus on the outside, full of a large, multi-generational group of players continually changing Mary Kokie McNaughter’s costumes. The constant rush of off-camera quick-changes, the negotiation of one young boy’s shift out of his wheelchair, through the frame and back into his wheelchair, and the rapid pulling and piling of the in-frame choreography make a playful performance work and the working of the convention of performance into play. There outside the edges, we see a kind of barn-raising communal effort of shared responsibility and care. The resulting video is so tightly executed and glossy that it seems ripe for a color copier ad that fleetingly hints at those values while in pursuit of an assembly line of bodies. In fact, I’m surprised it wasn’t ripped off in the time it takes to say Improv Everywhere versus T-Mobile.

Adamantine is a multimedia work featuring live music by Peter Whitehead (with Elton Bradman), sound design by Jane Shaw, costumes by Olivera Gajic, and shadowy projections courtesy of Mark Stanley. Her company of impressive dancers Kristen Hollinsworth, Luke Miller, Joseph Poulson, Petra van Noort, and Darrin Wright with newest member Ildiko Toth put forth an impressive effort, but Adamantine notably lacks the kind of luster or edge that its title promises. The work definitely hammers away at the viewer with repeated images and an often pounding industrial score, but lacks in the ethereal wonder of Cloudless, the raucous intimacy of Sawdust Palace, and in general, the signature wit of a widely acclaimed artist (other than Whitehead’s charming on-stage moments) whose investigations seem stunted here. The work was developed during a residency in Montclair’s Alexander Kasser Theater, and in keeping with Marshall’s process includes sequences inspired by items the company found in the space. However, it’s hard to call Marshall a found object artist, too many of the material items being played with don’t accumulate beyond moments of gimmickry into a cohesive idea. And, other than Hollinsworth’s luscious swaying moments standing over an underlit floor fan or steaming under a low-hung lamp with Miller, there are few opportunities to enjoy her company as the fascinating individuals they are. For a work touted as in intersection of dance, sound design, visual art, and theater, Adamantine feels like standard concert dance fare.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Dance Theater Workshop presented Yanira Castro/a canary torsi at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens last week in her beautiful and mysterious Paradis. The first site-specific dance project in the Garden’s 100-year history, Paradis made poetic use of the acclaimed Cherry Esplanade for an edenic nocturnal visit.

Peggy Cheng in "Paradis" Photo by Charles Houghton

It began with a group of dancers (in angelic white tunics and tennis shoes) slowly approaching from across a great expanse and ended with giddy audience members singing as they strolled back through the darkened garden, after being treated to luscious counter-balanced couplings. Inspired by the final section of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique, (the film’s final scene shares the same name as this performance work’s title and several key images), Paradis continues Castro’s examination of the boundaries of performance, as well as those between participant and observer. However, unlike the installations for Center of Sleep and Wilderness, not to mention the highly intimate bathroom performances Dark Horse/Black Forest, Paradis allows the epic natural grandeur of the Botanical Garden’s Esplanade to provide the audience with plenty of breathing room. The interactions with the dancers, who danced among us common folk, were fleeting and gentle, and the management of group (audience) movement was specifically crafted while sharing a kind of organic, spring-outing sense of wanderlust and after-hours mischief.

Castro mentions Philip Auslander’s book Liveness in her program notes (received after the performance) stating that his description of a generation coming of age “where live experience of any kind is undesirable and actually distressing” was exhilarating for her. As she writes:

Performance is distressing. Even it its most “traditional forms, people come together to experience a ritual that may or not play by the current cultural “rules”: whether you will have seat, whether there is space between you and the performer, whether you have to stand up, are asked to do something, suspend disbelief, throw a tomato, clap. You don’t know what will happen. The performers don’t really know either. This is the space ripe with tension: You (the audience) are here. We (the performers) are here. “Unnervingly organic.”

Paradis frames distance: intimacy. I am standing next to you. I don’t know you. I recognize myself. You are distant.

Peggy Cheng, Luke Miller, and Shayla Vie Jenkins Photo by Yi-Chun Wu

I include Castro’s notes because I think that what she is/has been playing with, and what Dean Moss recently offered so eloquently in his Nameless forest, at The Kitchen a couple weeks ago, reveal some of the key investigations for our form at this moment in history. This question of the audience vs performer isn’t new, but feels ripe again lately (and by lately, I do mean in the last several years). I recently included Auslander in my “Ruminations on the Body Madness Platform at Danspace Project” because that Platform also offered several examples of what is alive right now in Live art. But, the calculated chaos of that Madness, the calm arrangement of Castro’s work, and the considered sophistication of Moss’s works reveal how wide the field’s reach is in considering what the nature of live performance is today. There are many examples of how the resistance against familiar notions of concert dance are being used to unsettle some audience members by separating the work apart from the generally harmless spectacle that dance often offers while physically bridging the gap between viewer and participant. As some audience members become unsettled and agitated, the informality, closeness and disruption can increase the potential for sympathetic alignment with the dancers, or as in the case of Miguel Gutierrez’s DEEP Aerobics (part of the Body Madness platform) become part of the huge writhing mass that following a single guru’s guidance. In that work resides an actual, physical, sweaty, experience. In Moss’s Nameless forest several selected audience members become actively engaged in the works unfolding; they don’t necessarily change the direction of the work and are moved and placed by the company, but their presence becomes essential to the remaining (seated) audience’s experience of the work, and our witnessing of their experience becomes essential to our enjoyment of it as well. There is a sympathetic alignment that allows them to serve as our avatars in a very precarious, exploded landscape. That there are no bows at the end of these works speaks to how the artists are thinking about the value of internal process for the active participants over the produced effect, or resulting approval. They become part of a shared experience, and we sympathetically do as well.

Auslander challenges this notion of live performance’s value as one of shared experience as flawed. For him, live performance does not create community because “performance is founded on difference, on separation and fragmentation, not unity.” That while it “places us in the living presence of the performers, other human beings with whom we desire unity and can imagine achieving it, because they are there, in front of us,” our desire will inevitably be frustrated by the impenetrable breach between performer and spectator that live performance reinforces.

Castro and Moss both lengthen their reach into that breach by requiring audience members inside their work, especially Moss for whom substantial portions of his work would not exist without those from the audience who joined the dancers on the stage. For Castro however, the audience, though noted to have influenced the resulting piano score, played live by Michael Dauphinais, seemed no more integral to the work itself beyond providing it with witnesses, albeit very closely situated witnesses. I don’t fault her the intention for a deeper engagement, and found the site-specific nature of the work itself provided the audience with its corporeal experience, very different from the stasis of the theater, but the level of interactivity she seems in search of is hard to reach when several other agendas that require, primarily, passive viewership hold sway.

The Viewer completes the work of art. – Marcel Duchamp

Artist and scholar Ann Cooper Albright treats the contagious, visceral nature of watching dance as evidence for the argument that dance viewer-ship is an experiential process that elicits the sympathetic, physical response I mention above: “Perceiving dance means more than a flat visual gaze, it also means attending to kinesthetic, aural, somatic, and spatial sensations.” She draws from America’s first dance critic John Martin’s concept of “metakinesis”—wherein movement is the medium for “transference of an aesthetic and emotional concept from the unconscious of one individual to that of another.” I could argue that metakinesis makes any dance viewing situation an interactive one and especially in Paradis, where our senses are being fed by the open air, the distant sounds of the city, the closer sounds of an amplified grand piano sitting among the cherry trees, the dancer who passes you in close proximity and looks directly in your eyes, etc.  In some way, there has been a transformative relationship, but this form of interaction is merely a mental act on my part.

Again, our presence did not necessarily change the direction of the work.  In his online 2003 essay “Dance and Interactivity,” Johannes Birringer defines interaction “as a spatial and architectural concept for performance”–wherein the emphasis gets transferred away from the dancer’s somatic awareness to their increased level of responsiveness to a shifting landscape. True responsiveness to a shifting landscape seems to beg for stronger improvisational foundation. These are not works that are truly ‘different each night based on the audience,’ they are not the kind of collective creations that Julian Beck and Judith Malina championed in their own version of paradise in the 60s. The Living Theatre’s Paradise Now, a  semi-improvisational theater work dependent on activating the audience that would run several hours beginning with “The Rite of Guerrilla Theatre” (with actors approaching the audience and speaking directly to them while building to a pitching scream with the phrases: “I am not allowed to travel without a passport”; “I don’t know how to stop the wars”; “You can’t live without money”; “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana”; “I am not allowed to take my clothes off”) moving through “The Rite of Universal Intercourse” and ending in “The Rite of I and Thou,” with actors carrying audience to the streets in search of Paradise reciting, “The theatre is in the street. The street belongs to the people. Free the theatre. Free the street. Begin.” And then, generally, being promptly arrested for indecent exposure.

For Julian Beck, collective creation was a political act. It was “the secret weapon of the people…This play is a voyage from the many to the one and from the one to the many. It’s a spiritual voyage and a political voyage, a voyage for the actors and the spectators. The play is a vertical ascent toward permanent revolution, leading to revolutionary action here and now. The revolution of which the play speaks is the beautiful, non-violent, anarchist revolution. The purpose of the play is to lead to a state of being in which non-violent revolutionary action is possible.”

Clearly, that was then. A reach for interactivity and engagement of the audience with the purpose of activating political consciousness and tearing apart the structures of traditional theater was alive and vital. Gutierrez’s “Death Electric Emo Protest Aerobics” could be the Living Theatre of today (because unfortunately, the Living Theatre are not), but within the safer, contemporary confines of live performance. It activates the entire audience (unless you prefer to lurk at the wall) into behavior that is rigorous, ridiculous and repetitive, while asking you to consider some of the global disgraces and tragedies you are willingly complicit in. Many of today’s activations of the audience are fed less by the political and artistic urgencies of the past, and executed more as an aesthetic and intellectual tool. Moss and Castro have engaged interactivity not towards its own end, nor, finally, towards a closer meeting or actual union of humans, but instead as a means to an end. Though the different works provided certain audience members with particularly intimate relationships to the performers, and to the work, the varying amounts of audience activation utilized are parts of a more complex toolbox serving very specific aesthetic inquiries.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Last night, David Parker/The Bang Group provided ample proof for musical comedy as an avenue for political action (or at least personal salvation) in an “autobiographical fiction” of his 20 year collaboration with Jeffrey Kazin and their shared “sissy boy” childhoods. Misters and Sisters (continuing tonight and tomorrow at Joe’s Pub at 7pm) as part of DanceNow’s Featured Artist Series, is a delightful and earnest homage to the power of small-town dreams, crafted with razor-sharp big-city wit.

There are few among us who are better suited to develop a show for DanceNow’s programming at Joe’s Pub than Parker. He and Kazin hit all their marks (and notes) in this production that doesn’t simply try to shrink his blend of contemporary dance, tap, and ballet to the small stage, but instead offers a real cabaret wherein the artists show off their deep-rooted (albeit long-hidden in the vocal area) song and dance chops. Parker is a master of rhythmic play and compositional structures, but here gets to belt and swoon and vamp without a hint of postmodern irony. They employ the perfect mix of banter, singing, dancing, sequins, gowns, fans, bow-ties, soft-shoe, no-shoe, pointe-shoe, tap-shoe, and narrative for a splendid evening’s entertainment sprinkled with poignancy and politics. Misters and Sisters reveals how “little gay boys” putting on their own musicals, in the different Boston suburbs they grew up in unbeknownst to one another, can grow up and own up to the bourgeois mores of an “Old Fashioned Wedding,” put on their finest suits and make us laugh through a not-so-subversive (in that how could you not know what they’re saying) commentary on marriage equality. In fact, when they tap out a morse-code version of the standard marital vows during this number, it is both clever and emotionally touching. This partnership between Parker and Kazin has lasted almost three times longer than the average median duration of most American first marriages (the second ones don’t actually fare much better). The work also includes a dream ballet, or what Parker called “a precis of his 20s,” that is a wonderful reprise of the playful threesome-ness inside the The Bang Group’s origins (when Kathryn Tufano completed the trinity).

In full disclosure, I’m partial to these people and their playlist. They just presented me at their Soaking WET Series in the West End Theater and got all of my musical theater references in a Rogers & Hammestein vs 80s Rock mashup. I was raised, interestingly enough by a south-of-Boston-escapee-Irish-Catholic-Naval-Academy-grad-Vietnam-Vet father, on a steady diet of Fred Astaire, with bits of Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Cyd Charisse thrown in. So, Parker, Kazin, and their dancing alter-egos, the glamorous Amber Sloan and the down-home charming Nic Petry, deliver the kind of tried and true showmanship that was also my first home before we all came Downtown (I hear the lights are brighter there). However, while Parker and Kazin perfect their own Dean and Jerry dynamic, Sloan and Petry enough provide luscious duets and solos to keep the camp in check and a whistling, slapping shift from All I Do is Dream of You into Tea for Two provides plenty of investigatory boundary stretching for any modern choreographic checklist keepers out there. So, If you need a little love song (and the singing is quite fine) to the stirrings that first fed your belief in something better than playing princess in your Own Little Corner, then grab your best pal (or any die-hard Debbie Reynolds fans in your building), get to Joe’s pub, order a Cosmo, and sing along in celebration of the land you once heard of, once in a lullaby.

Popularity: 2% [?]