I find this very interesting. Can totally relate to the queue graphic (Via)

I saw this movie yesterday and highly recommend it. I found it through Lauren Cerand’s weekly Smart Set column on Maud Newton’s blog. She often has very good suggestions for offbeat cultural things to do in NY. I wrote about the movie here.

If you’re having a lazy Sunday afternoon, here’s some reading. Some of these links are a bit old; you may have read them already:

Joan Acocella on San Francisco Ballet (she likes at least two of the same dancers as I, and gives a good overview on the company and reasoning behind its repertoire);

Robert Gottlieb reviews a new book on Balanchine by Nancy Goldner (whose writing sounds comfortably accessible, almost bloggy!) in the NY Review of Books;

Apollinaire Scherr on how to view a Wheeldon ballet, and suggestions for Wheeldon’s future in this troubled economy;

James Wolcott, in his usual hilariously hyperbolical manner, recounts his experience with ABT’s new ballet Citizen;

Alex Ross explains what went wrong between the original Doctor Atomic and the Met’s version of the opera;

Claudia La Rocco laments Gerard Mortier’s decision not to take on the directorship of New York City Opera and wonders what will happen with the planned Brokeback Mountain opera (which I was really looking forward to);

Counter Critic reflects on the passage of Proposition 8 in California.

Happy Sunday, everyone. I’m off to cover my first dance class for Explore Dance. First, meaning, I’ve never written formally about a dance class before… Please wish me luck!

…I am revealing that, at least according to the top test in the first link listed in this OpEd piece, I supposedly have a slight unconscious preference for white people but a strong unconscious preference for Barack Obama.

Of course I knew the latter assessment, but am angry at myself for the former, especially given that I practiced law as an appellate public defender in NYC representing almost all non-whites for many years. But according to the test-makers, most people, of all races and ethnicities, come up with that result. Yet, seeing as how Obama won by a pretty strong margin, there have to be a good many people who receive the same evaluation I did. Hmmmm. It looks like people were able to look past race for the election, although race is still an issue in the way people process information and view their surroundings.

Anyway, these tests are very interesting and they’re worth taking (you have to be aware of your unconscious thoughts in order to overcome them, no?). They’re made by Harvard and University of Chicago. The Chicago one is a bit creepy and speaks to the Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo cases. I think I was fair, but quite slow in my reactions… Anyway, take the tests!

By the way, yes, I know this is a dance / arts blog, which you’d never know by looking at the “recent entries” side bar. I will return to writing about dance this week (and get up to date on some posts — there are several things I’ve seen that I haven’t written about yet) This is just such a momentous time and it’s impossible not to reflect on it. (Thanks to Eva for the link to the OpEd piece.)

If you haven’t already, make sure to read (and listen to) Claudia La Rocco’s excellent WNYC post containing interviews with several NYC dance artists speaking about the role of race in their work and how they view the election. She apparently came up with the idea to do the interviews after an angry back and forth between Time Out editors and readers over the fact that the magazine’s list of top 40 New Yorkers who’ve made the most impact on the city over the last decade is, as Claudia put it, rather “monochromatic.”

At least things are different in the literary world. Check out the list of recent Whiting Award recipients. Also, Galley Cat is doing a series of author interviews about the election. Here’s one with poet Douglas Kearney over harmful language used in political speeches. His upcoming projects sound very cool.

we don’t really need them to, like, communicate intelligently or anything…

(Steve, a ballroom friend of mine, showing me his favorite newspaper for arts coverage last October, during our studio’s “field trip” to see Pasha and Anya on the SYTYCD tour)

For those who haven’t already heard, that paper, The NY Sun, folded the other day (leaving Joel Lobenthal — one of the better dance critics imo — presumably out of a job) along with two other arts-heavy alternative weeklies, The Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper (via Galley Cat).

Another unfolding drama in the literary arts world is that the Nobel prizes winners are scheduled to be announced soon, but the Swedish head of the literature committee has apparently told Americans we’re being left out of the running; we’re too insular, uninvolved in the world, we “don’t translate enough and don’t participate in the world’s great dialog of literature.” Of course this has angered many, including David Remnick, EIC of The New Yorker; here is Galley Cat’s snarling response.

I seem to buy a lot of translations so it would be nice if Mr. Engdahl was more specific on what is not being translated here, and I don’t know what he means by our failure to participate in the world’s great literary dialog, but I disagree with him that all of our writers are insular, though the ones who come to mind first who are not (Junot Diaz, Colson Whitehead, David Foster Wallace, etc.) are probably too young in their literary careers (tragically of course in Wallace’s case) to be considered for this “body of work” award. Still, this line of his resonates: “U.S. writers are ‘too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,’ dragging down the quality of their work.” I’m not sure if it’s the writers or the publishers, but I do think we’re far too concerned here with how much money the work will make, which in large part depends on how “trendy” is its topic or author. I do think we’d be hard-pressed to argue with him that a work’s artistic merit is generally more important in Europe, its dollar ‘value’ more so here. And where has this fixation on money gotten us?…

I don’t have time to write a full review but yesterday I went to the Democracy in America exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory (Lex between 67th and 66th). It’s free and definitely worth seeing. Runs only through this Saturday though. Go here for more info.

I’d gone mainly to see Steve Powers‘ Waterboard Thrill Ride, which had premiered at Coney Island over the summer; I wrote about it here. There really wasn’t much to it; you put your dollar bill into the slot and for just a number of seconds watch a life-sized robot/puppet aim the spout of a flower pitcher at a supine man’s face, which was covered with a wet cloth. The water just kind of dripped out, as if he was delicately watering flowers. I’m thinking perhaps there were too many viewers and the water supply was getting low because I’d have thought it would be coming out a little more rapidly. Still, I found the exhibit pretty frightening and don’t know how Coney Island tourists could have found otherwise.

Here’s a how-to diagram at the entrance to that artwork. Someone graffiti’d it up and wrote on the top, “This exhibit is gay.”

There are a few other interesting installations too, most of them on the main floor in the big room. There’s one by John Hawke of a make-shift shelter constructed with wood. Inside are a series of journal-like entries and pictures documenting where all the shelter was placed — usually busy city streets — who all used it — people waiting for the bus, the homeless, people needing a little place to eat, especially when it rained — and how it was treated by police and other authorities — usually taken down, dragged out to the street.

There’s another exhibit, all of photos, aligning the side wall, by Greta Pratt. The pictures, taken throughout the country between 2007 and 2008, are of various pictorial renditions of the American flag — on bumper-stickers, on sides of buildings, on the cover of a magazine, on someone’s t-shirt, on someone’s mailbox, on the face of a grocery bag, etc. Sometimes the subject paraded the flag with intent, others seemed completely unconscious of it, just happening to don a t-shirt bearing such an emblem for the day. There are hundreds of pictures and it can take you all day to look at them. What I found interesting was that they show such an expansive view of middle America, one that is somehow neither ironic nor nostalgic, or perhaps rather a combination of both.

Third piece of art I had a very visceral reaction to was at the back of the ground-floor room, by Jon Kessler. A big installation involving numerous barbie dolls and tiny video cameras that were projected onto several TV screens aligning the back wall. Barbies (or Ken dolls, rather) depicted men at war, men being tortured. Just imagine all the things you can do with little plastic bodies to show the horrors… It was visually stunning, compellingly, thought-provokingly disgusting.

There are several video exhibits on the mezzanine and second and fourth floors that I found less interesting, except for one, by Carlos Motta, though I can’t say I liked it. The artist is a young Colombian man who shot a bunch of videos of Latin Americans talking about their governments. They are projected onto about ten or so screens throughout the room. On one screen, however, there is simply a starving dog looking desperately for food, nearly unable to stand up. He licks the dirt ground for water. It’s so horribly upsetting, and as a viewer sitting at a remove from the dog on the screen, you’re completely helpless to do anything for him, which is perhaps the point. A shop woman finally throws the dog a chicken wing, which he gobbles down, but still, he’s all bone and fur. It’s so upsetting.

I feel like there’s got to be something legally wrong with this kind of art — with hurting, sometimes killing defenseless animals for artistic aims. Human beings can make the decision to starve themselves for a movie, etc., but non-human animals cannot. I don’t know if Motta found this dog on the streets and just decided to film him, or if he starved the dog himself in order to use him for his little film, but it really shouldn’t be legal. Animal cruelty is a felony, at least in New York, and the artwork is being distributed here.

Plus, I’m not sure that watching a starving or victimized animal or human (the artist has done other projects on human victimization) really leads the average person to think, to be more compassionate. At least public executions in the past haven’t seemed to have that effect.

I can’t believe it’s already Labor Day weekend. Whoa. Where did the summer go??

Here are some pictures I took of the Downtown Dance Festival last Sunday in Battery Park. When it ended a brief wave of sadness swept over me. This festival kind of marks the end of summer. I feel like I was just returning from the Caribbean deeply annoyed that it was still in the 50s here…

Anyway, the first company on was Figures in Flight, which is a Modern dance school for kids.

One very cool thing about this school / company, as Artistic Director Susan Slotnick spoke about, is that they also teach Modern dance to men in prison. One of Ms. Slotnick’s former students who was just released from Woodburne Correctional Facility was there. The crowd went nuts with applause for him. Made the longtime former public defender in me very happy. I know there are many prison literacy programs, but haven’t heard of a dance program until now.

The kids of Figures in Flight. Slotnick said one thing she does is try to teach kids nonviolence through dance, teaching them choreography addressing or acting / dancing out issues they may be experiencing, like bullying at school. You could see some of that in the choreography. I met someone in an acting class I took years ago who taught drama therapy to mental patients at Bellevue Hospital here in NY. He basically helped patients learn to act out their problems, to use creativity to solve them rather than internalizing or using violence toward themselves and others. I can see Slotnick doing the same thing with dance and I love it.

Next on was Battleworks Dance Company, which presented Robert Battle’s energetic, mad fun Ella, set to Ella Fitzgerald and danced by Marlena Wolfe.

And Wolfe ends her frenzied fit of a solo by collapsing backwards, completely out of breath! This is the first time I’ve seen Battleworks at this festival. So cool to see what you normally only view in a large, distancing theater just feet before you.

Axis Danz’s Mermaids.

Dancewave’s Kids Company, whom I’d never heard of, did an excellent dance — a combination of African, Modern, and Samba. It was mesmerizing. One of my favorites of the day. And man can those dancers MOVE.

isadoraNOW presented Isadora Duncan’s lovely Southern Roses.

This was an interesting company, called Undertoe Dance Project. They combined Tap with Modern, having two dancers representing each style dancing onstage at the same time. Don’t think I’ve seen that done before. It worked.

On last, ending the festival, was Battery Dance Company, headed by Jonathan Hollander, the festival’s organizer. They performed his lyrical, beatific Where There’s Smoke.

Very pretty, very spiritual.

At the end, the Battery Dance Company dancers invited audience members onstage to learn some of their just-performed choreography.

exhibiting, as Hollander announced, that dance is for everyone…

Also, here are some more pictures I took of Hostile Takeover by Richard Move’s MoveOpolis! which was performed as part of the Sitelines series of downtown site-specific works, which I briefly mentioned earlier.

They held the performance at five different Financial District-area locations. The one I saw was at the Jeff Koons sculpture in the small park at 7 World Trade Center.

The dancer, dressed as you can see in a red lacey negligee, red ballet-like diaphanous chiffon skirt, long lacey gloves, patent leather red stilettos, and a clear plastic Butoh mask and platinum blonde wig, moved in extreme slow Butoh-style motion making various poses — some sexy, some more balletic (arms held wreath-like over head, toe pointed forward in tendu). She was very unbalanced on the heels — at several points went to do a low arabesque and couldn’t lift her back leg very high or it seemed like she’d clearly fall — and I couldn’t tell if it was because she was moving so slowly, if she wasn’t used to dancing in heels (so, not a Latin dancer ), or if she was faking it, only pretending nearly to fall so as to question the beauty and/or stability of a certain kind of hyper-femininity.

After a series of poses in front of the Koons statue — and beside a small plastic red teddy bear propped up before a red umbrella and holding a little bright blue Jeff Koons ’sculpturette’ — the dancer turned toward the large sculpture. It’s funny but at this point I noticed how sexual that sculpture is, with the little orifice in the middle surrounded by the three others, and then the stamen-like arm shooting up to the side. It’s like an industrial Georgia O’Keefe figure.

She approached the little teddy bear, seemed to delight over his little toy, seemed to ask him if she could hold his “baby-doll.”

She did a little dance with the small Koons dog/doll…

… then took him to his larger cousin, and eventually placed him in its middle orifice.

The whole thing took nearly an hour, the movement was so slow. It was weirdly poetic, and rather entrancing, not only catching but holding the attention of many passersby. I wish I could have made it to some of the other locations because I liked the performance but thought it would have been more of a “Hostile Takeover” had this hyper-sexy, hyper-’feminine’, hyper-artful, hyper-slow-moving dancer been in the midst of all the crazed besuited Wall Street dudes. This little park was not only already arty but kind of removed from the hustle and bustle. Could have better illustrated the contrast between art and commerce, calm and fast-paced, perhaps masculine and feminine (the program describes the performance as a “glamorous collision of sexual desire with masculinity and femininity and real and imagined worlds”; I’d perhaps question the essentialist nature of words like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’).

Anyway, there’s one more Sitelines performance, in early/mid September. And then that’s it. Summer dance season in NY is officially over.

Happy Labor Day everyone!

There’s a really good discussion going on over at Claudia La Rocco’s The Culturist about the Olympic coverage — people are even likening it to porn!

I couldn’t help get off on a tangent about male versus female gymnastics. During the last Olympics I remember going out to dinner with a group of my feminist friends and they were bemoaning how women’s sports are taken so unseriously by the public, giving as an example the prominence of the ’silly’ ‘girl-child’ sport of female gymnastics over the more ‘real’ sports of women’s softball, etc. — the team sports. I thought the criticism was so unfair given how incredibly hard those gymnasts work, and I couldn’t understand how anyone couldn’t be in absolute awe of them as they did those impossible-looking tumbling passes and balance beam maneouvers and flying-through-the-air vaults. On the other hand, I’d played girls softball when I was young and felt there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do that the women players were doing without practice. So, why were they privileging team sports — so popular in men’s athletics — over individual sports, which women tend toward?

These friends were all lawyers and feminist legal scholars and I thought it was in large part my love of ballet and dance that made me at odds with them over this, so when I read Claudia (NYTimes dance critic, if you don’t know her) liken the female gymnasts to Jean Benet Ramsey, I thought, oh no!

After watching the women’s gymnastics last night in comparison to the men’s the night before, I did see a difference. The men do tend to be older (20-25), the women younger (16-20). And of course for anyone who watched last night, there seems to be a controversy over the actual ages of the Chinese female gymnasts. The cut-off age is 16 in the Olympic year (so you can be 15 now as long as you turn 16 by December 31, 2008), but no younger, and Bela Karolyi, among others, is questioning that some of those Chinese girls are that old. They did look quite young, but Asians are generally smaller-boned than Caucasians, and, as commenter Meg on Claudia’s blog pointed out, intense athletic training can delay the onset of puberty.

Of course the issue with the delayed onset of puberty caused by intense athletic training (which I hadn’t thought of) is an issue in itself. I’d think that’d be the case with any sport though, including Ballet. Maybe that’s one reason why ballerinas tend to be so thin, and not anorexia… And of course you don’t want to discourage female athleticism; wouldn’t that be sexist if you didn’t say the same for males? Does intense athleticism delay puberty for males though?…

And why favor female athletes so young anyway? Because they’re smaller and won’t go out of bounds on the tumbling passes? Because smaller bodies can tumble higher and get around those uneven bars at more astounding speeds, without fear of hitting the floor? Because as Karolyi said last night, youth doesn’t have as much fear of failure? Why isn’t all this the same for the men then?

The Chinese girls did seem to have more makeup on than the Americans, and they did seem to be jutting their hips and pelvises out and making poses on the floor that we might deem too sexy for their young-looking ages. But Jolene pointed out that that may be a cultural bias, and I agree. I went to an African dance performance with a Ballet friend the other night and she couldn’t stop laughing embarrasingly at the hip and pelvic movement; she’d never seen African before and didn’t know what to make of it, other than laugh at it and feel embarrassment for the dancers. Maybe their style just isn’t something we’re used to. Jolene also pointed out that the makeup seems to be an American thing, and I agree. I rarely see Asian women wearing that harsh bright aqua eyeshadow, yet that was a real fashion statement here in prior decades. They know they’re on TV, the Olympics are heavily dominated by the American press, and they’re trying to be like us. Ironically, it’s backfiring.

Finally, we’re also hearing all these stories about how awful the Chinese are to their children — forcing them into the sport, making them stay away from their families when the little girls really just want to come home, in comparison to the American stories, where the families always insist they’ve let their children decide how much dedication they wanted to give to their sport. Let’s just keep in mind that we’re hearing this all from the perspective of the American press. They assume we’ll feel better about ourselves, about our losing gold medals to the Chinese if we believe our society is so much more just. Not that I don’t believe in being critical at all of other governments; I didn’t have time to write about it, but I attended a reading organized by the PEN American Center of works by imprisoned Chinese dissident writers on the night before the Olympics began. But let’s just remember that our press exercises its own form of propaganda.

Okay, I’m done blabbering! Have a look at Claudia’s post and the responses.

I love this post by Counter Critic. Jacob’s Pillow (the esteemed summer dance festival held in Massachusetts) accepted his friend’s work but then asked her to delete some parts because the venue at which the company was to perform was deemed “for family.” CC covers all the bases: what is “family,” why accept a work then ask the artist to censor herself, why are adults even so hysterical over their children hearing the word “sex,” etc. Taylor mentioned she was attending a discussion tonight held as part of the New York Fringe Festival on issues involved in gearing dance performances to “families.” I wonder if this kind of thing will be discussed…

Because my TAC headaches have not been responding so well to my regular medication, my neurologist wants me to try something different for a while. I went to the pharmacy today to pick up my new prescription. It cost $100 after my insurance copay, for 6 doses. Six doses. I hope Glaxo Wellcome are happy with themselves for finding a way to make big bucks off of human pain and suffering.

And I know I’m hardly the only one who struggles to pay for prescription meds. I know older, retired people who have credit card debt because the only way they can pay for necessary medication is to charge it. Medicare apparently covers very little.

I hope Obama makes healthcare reform a very top priority when he becomes president. One of the reasons — the main reason actually — I’d been such a Hillary supporter is that I knew healthcare was her biggest issue. I trusted that she would work tirelessly for change, as she did when her husband was in office. I really hope we can expect the same from Obama.

Said the jumpy 20-something black man in front of my local bodega, where he usually asks passersby for money, to a 50-something white woman walking her shiny black Field Spaniel. He followed them for about a quarter block, though I’ve always known him to be harmless — it was more like he was following the thought. He stopped when she turned around, not looking him head on but making clear she was aware of him.

Has anyone noticed there seem to be more people on the streets lately? The other day, I also saw a man new to my neighborhood, who looked to be East Indian in his 40s or early 50s politely approaching people and, without speaking, holding up a sign saying he needed money or a place to stay.

“Shortly after the article [in the New York Times, about murder convict Gary Gilmore] caught his eye, almost immediately in fact, Susskind’s old friend and associate Stanley Greenberg called, and they had a good conversation. Stanley had written a TV story fifteen years ago about a man awaiting execution. The man had been so long on Death Row that he changed in character, and the question became, “Who was being executed?” Metamorphosis the play had been called, and Susskind always felt that it had had some effect on the end of capital punishment in New York State, and maybe even a little to do with the Supreme Court decision that saved a lot of men’s lives on Death Row.”

From The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer.

Intelligent lawyers leave the law because they know art produces social change, not legal arguments.

On Monday, I attended a public Hearing held in lower Manhattan convened in the wake of the Sean Bell verdict, to address ways to increase police accountability. I wrote about what went on at the hearing for the Huffington Post.

Here are a few pictures (since I wasn’t allowed to take any at trial):

Representative John Conyers from Michigan who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and who called the Hearing. He’s in the middle. Rep. Jerrold Nadler from NY is to his right.

Rep. Charles Rangel from NY (Nadler is to his left).

Nicole Paultre Bell (Sean Bell’s fiance) addressing the committee and the crowd.

Joseph Guzman, Sean Bell’s friend who the shooting officers wrongly thought had a gun and who was shot 19 times, sustaining permanent nerve damage, testifying briefly as well.

Al Sharpton (resting his chin in his hand) is preparing to testify, while listening to Hazel Dukes, president of the NAACP, sitting next to him, as she speaks.

There was a pretty good turnout.

My favorite witness was Kamau Karl Franklin, a race justice fellow at the prestigious Center For Constitutional Rights here in NY. He had some very intriguing ideas for new legislation, which I wrote about here.

Coast of samana, dominican republic

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

Beautiful beautiful land but very very poor. Children run to you with open hands wanting u.s. $. No running water, no electricity. Sad but wonderful people.

Here’s a brief OpEd piece I wrote on the trial. Please feel free to comment on Huffington too if you wish — if you can figure out how to log in… I can’t stop thinking about the case; there’s so much to say, so many different aspects from the legal issues at trial, to all of the individual people involved, to the larger social issues…

Here’s another perspective that focuses on the legal history of officer acquittals. On a not unrelated note, here’s an interesting article about race and the death penalty. Thanks to Capital Defense Weekly for both links.

For people (like me) who like historian Howard Zinn, he’s got a new book coming out, this one a history of the U.S. in graphic novel form, which will be followed by a movie, starring, amongst others, Ben Affleck. Thanks to Maud Newton for the info.

Enjoying well-needed glass of wine

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

At Algonquin, between headache-inducing trial testimony from ’suv guy’ & ny bar discussion on race & crim justice.

Update: So, that lecture on Race and Criminal Justice was really interesting, albeit short. It was given by the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I’ll write more about it this weekend.

Fabio Coicou, the SUV guy whose testimony we’ve all been waiting for, was on today in the Sean Bell Shooting trial, and, as I said, it gave me a big headache. It was really confusing; it didn’t make complete sense to me, and he contradicted himself a lot — both within his testimony today, and between today’s testimony and his earlier Grand Jury testimony and statements he made to the investigating DAs shortly after the shooting.

I have to go to sleep because I’ve been working like nuts and have seriously got a total of about four hours of sleep since Sunday night, but in a nutshell Coicou really tried to downplay that there was any real confrontation between him and Sean Bell’s group outside the nightclub at all. Said he was waiting for his girlfriend, a dancer at the club, to come out, when Sean Bell went into the club. As he passed by, Coicou told him he had “bread in there,” (ie: money — his girlfriend — in the club) and that “alcohol was taking control of the situation.” When Bell emerged from the club, he approached Coicou, standing “chest to chest” with him, and told Coicou that he “was not letting alcohol take control.”

Bell and his friends then asked Coicou where he was from, Coicou said “Atlanta” but lived in Far Rockaway now. Guzman said he lived in a section of Far Rockaway as well and Coicou told him he may see him around and if he did, this SUV was his car. He backed toward the SUV and had his hands in his pockets but wasn’t scared. Bell and his friends left and Coicou decided he would drive around the block, then return to the club and wait for his girlfriend, which he did. He said he didn’t drive around the block because he was nervous or suspected the men were going to return and harm him, and claimed he never saw men peeking around the corner after the Bell group left. After a defense attorney read to him his Grand Jury testimony, Coicou admitted he did see men peeking around the corner but he wasn’t nervous and didn’t suspect anything. Later in cross examination he said he thought the men leaving might be a “diversion” so he drove around the corner.

After driving around the corner, he returned to the club and waited for his girlfriend. He never heard shots and wasn’t told about them until his girlfriend emerged from Kalua. He maintained he never heard anyone say “go get my gat” (gat being slang for gun), but according to the DA’s notes from Coicou’s meeting with them, he told them he heard those exact words before the men left. The DA stipulated that the notes were accurate.

Coicou’s personality was curious to me. On one hand, he kept fighting with the defense attorneys, saying things like “I’m not on trial here,” when counsel would ask him about his prior crimes or “I’m just trying to be like you,” in response to the question “Mr. Coicou, do you know what ‘diversion’ means or are you using words you don’t know?” On the other hand, he walked with his head down, shoulders hunched over, and seemed nervous. Throughout the testimony, there were a lot of harrumphs and snickers on the defense side of the courtroom, in contrast to comments like, “That’s right, you’re not on trial!” and knowing laughter from the prosecution side. I think the two sides had vastly different interpretations of the value of his testimony.

Anyway, I’ve gone on for far too long. I think both Coicou’s testimony and courtroom reactions to it were very interesting and I’ll write more about it this weekend. After … sleep!

At sean bell shooting trial

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

Nicole testified this morning. So sad. Small protest in morning but huge when we came out for lunch. Cameras everywhere. More to come…

I am so sick of the way the media is making the Democratic race into a race and gender war and the terms they’re using to construct it falsely. All I heard all night was that Clinton won among “women” while Obama prevailed among “Blacks.” What exactly are Black women then — doesn’t this language kind of negate them? Just when my blood was boiling over it, the reporter added, “oh and a footnote, a footnote: Black women voted for Obama by …” (whatever the percentage was). “A footnote”? How insulting.

While I’m mostly pleased with the Super Tuesday results, I am thoroughly disgusted by the media coverage, at least on network TV. They act like Hillary’s a big loser for not doing better, when, hello, she secured the most delegates and won the biggest states. On the other hand, the way they talk about Obama, it’s as if they’re patting him on the head, saying ‘good boy, good boy, you did really well, considering…’ Considering what? That he’s Black? That he’s young? It’s like he’s a child or someone with some huge handicap.

And right now on ABC some male jackass pundit is saying the Democratic party needs to decide whether it wants to be forward-looking, appealing to young people aged 30 and under, or looking backward to the good old days, appealing to the 60 plus crowd. Could the party possibly be both, dumbass? Ugh. Idiots. Okay, I’m tired and going to bed…

Looks like we won’t be seeing what a jury of their peers decides after all. Always a bad idea to waive a jury trial, IMO, for anyone… Still, I’m going to be watching this case with great interest.

This post isn’t about dance, but one of my other deep interests: issues of criminal and social justice. There was a lot of talk here yesterday about the Appellate Court decision denying defense attorneys’ requests in the trial of Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora, and Marc Cooper — police officers charged with the 2006 shooting death of African American man Sean Bell outside of a Queens strip club — to change the venue of the trial on grounds that publicity has made it impossible for the men to receive a fair trial in Queens. I think publicity about the case, though, is so widespread, it would be the same anywhere. I remember when I first heard about the shooting I was sitting in the reception area of a doctor’s office in North Carolina with my mom. The news came over the TV and the room became very quite; everyone just kind of regarded each other in silence. When I got back to my mom’s house, where I was spending Thanksgiving, I checked some of my favorite political blogs, like this one, based nowhere near New York, and which already had posts up about it. There’s been loads of publicity everywhere.

Many believe it was the re-location of the trial of officers who shot Amandou Diallo, from the Bronx to Albany, with a much whiter jury pool, that was responsible for the acquittal of those white detectives. Whether or not that’s true (and not all of the officers charged in the Bell shooting are white), Queens has one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the country, if not the world, being a burrough where many immigrants settle. That’s a lot of combined life experience. Juries in the outer borroughs are neither stupid nor careless; they rarely arrive at hasty verdicts, carefully examinining all evidence and taking time during deliberations, requesting numerous re-readings of charges and testimony. Often a verdict is mixed, with some charges on a single indictment resulting in acquittals, others determinations of guilt. You can tell the jury tried very hard to be fair and consider each charge separately.

I remember seeing an excellent Liz Garbus documentary called The Farm: Angola USA, about a high security prison in Louisiana. One inmate, a black man, was serving a 100-year sentence for raping two white women. The women both freely admitted they could not tell the difference between black people and couldn’t identify him as the rapist, but could state with assuredness that the rapist was black as was the man they identified in a lineup, the only one in handcuffs. There was no forensic evidence tying him to the crime (the film didn’t go into what evidence, if any, there was). The whole audience gasped; no one could believe he was convicted on that. I remember thinking, such a thing would never go down in Brooklyn, in Queens. That’s to say nothing about the various judges who preside over trials, but as for the juries of NYC, I believe in them.

(photo by Andrew Eccles, from Alvin Ailey’s REVELATIONS)

Most of us have today off from work. As we return from ski trips or take advantage of holiday sales or just veg out, let’s just not forget why.

Spent a lovely early evening at the New York City Ballet watching wonderful short film of Jock Soto’s life (more on that soon!), then came home to watch the art of dance be totally and completely demeaned worse than I’ve ever seen by the insulting new TV show, Dance War. I’ve never in my life seen more people with less dance training seeking to become “stars.” They sang their hearts out and wiggled their butts and seemed in all honesty to have no clue that ass wiggling did not constitute dance. Some actually tried to do jumps but didn’t understand the concept of line (amongst many many other things) and so looked like monkeys.

But I’m more horrified that judges Bruno Tonioli and Carrie Ann Inaba (from Dancing With the Stars) actually praised them. Carrie Ann said of one woman who did a single fouette then stumbled on the very second whip around, that she had “technique.” A man did a grand battement (really fast high kick — anyone can do one) and Bruno jumped around onstage orgiastically screaming “excellent extension, did everyone see that extension?!” I’m not even going to bother criticizing this assininity; suffice it to say the judges know the fraud they’re perpetrating on the public. They know.

On one hand, I seriously feel like boycotting “Dancing With the Stars” unless they resign. On the other, I guess what can you do when you have a TV show and these are the applicants? You’ve gotta pick someone or the show’s off the air. And you can’t call everyone a bad dancer. So you shrug your shoulders and say, as Carrie Ann did, “Well, it’s easier to teach someone who can sing to dance than someone who can dance to sing.” Could anything be more of a smack in the face to a person who deeply respects dance?

And yet I’m very conflicted. I just can’t understand why people would try out for a show that necessitated the ability to dance when it’s obvious they’ve never had a single dance lesson in their lives. But I also don’t want to sound like the horrendously elitist critics and ballet dancers and afficionados I abhor who insist that in order to be a “real” dancer, one must have “proper training,” which, to them, just happens to include a very expensive education affordable only by the very rich, who are, in our lovely society, usually the very white. A friend and I were talking the other day about how wealthy many of the New York City Ballet dancers are (NOT the aforesaid Jock Soto, by the way).

So, I say, the only way out of this dilemma is to “buy” Cuban! There dance is highly respected as an art form, it is taught by some of the world’s greatest, and it’s also completely free. And free doesn’t exactly produce shoddy. And, if you don’t believe me, take Danny Tidwell’s word More Jose’s, more, more!

Okay, it’s late and I’m tired and being a bit goofy all because I got so worked up I got over a stupid dance show… But, seriously, everyone please just watch this! Why oh why isn’t there more dance like it on TV?…

I don’t have much time to write today, so just want to point to a few good articles on the web.

1) Joel Lobenthal’s review of recent Alvin Ailey Dance premiere, “Groove to Nobody’s Business.” I loved this dance, as I wrote earlier, but Lobenthal makes me realize why with his discussion of how choreographer Camille A. Brown carefully worked out what I called the kind of spazzing out of anxious would-be subway riders to the rhythms of the music and orchestrated the dancers’ movements into a coherent whole, so that it only looks like a bunch of spastic frustrated jumping about when it’s really meticulously crafted. Also, he made me realize I’d forgotten to mention the fun centipede shape the dancers all make with their in-sync footwork while seated on the subway!

2) Tobi Tobias’s review of the other Ailey piece I just wrote about, “The Road of the Phoebe Snow.” Scroll down to the bottom of this post: I love how she talks about the advertisements for the railroad and how snow-white Phoebe was portrayed, and how choreographer Talley Beatty, who lived near those tracks and knew well the surrounding area, was showing what really went down along them. I wasn’t familiar with those advertisements and they shed light on Beatty’s work.

3) This has nothing to do with dance, but Malcolm Gladwell has an excellent article / book review in this week’s New Yorker showing how so-called IQ tests measure, basically, class. So all those claims that such tests show one race’s inherent intellectual superiority over another are all enormous mountains of racist idiocy.

Thanks to reader Sharon for alerting me to this new social networking site, Ballroom Dance Channel. Founded by Dancing With the Stars pro dancers Maksim Chmerkovskiy, Tony Dovolani, and Elena Grinenko, it is geared toward, as the name implies, fans of ballroom dance, and of the show. It’s similar to Kristin Sloan’s The Intermission (for all dance aficionados but mainly ballet), and Ken Davenport’s BroadwaySpace.com (for those involved in theater). Perhaps these more specialized social networking sites can avoid some of the pitfalls of their mammoth brethren.

Ironically, as internet technology allows people better ways to connect with each other in virtual time, it works to hamper that connection in real time. Of all the talk about Amazon’s new Kindle (basically an ipod for books, blogs and online mags), Meghan Daum’s critique is my favorite. She basically says that glancing at the cover of a fellow airplane traveler’s book was a perfect conversation starter. A fellow book lover, I agree with her — not just on planes, but in cafes, the park, the subway — recognizing a favorite book in the hands of another is a sure point of connection. I guess there’s always Shelfari though, which likely can be accessed from one’s Kindle…

In other news, it appears that Elizabeth Berkeley is to host Bravo’s new reality dance show, “Step It Up And Dance.” I knew she had some connection to dance, since I saw her on the red carpet. Also, Pasha & Anya are scheduled to perform in Stamford, Connecticut later in December (thanks to Laurel for that info!), in a ballroom dancing extravaganza called “Rhythm of Love,” which also stars some of my other favorites, new national American Smooth and Rhythm champs respectively, J.T. Thomas & Tomasz Mielnicki, and Jose DeCamps & Joanna Zacharewics. If you love ballroom and you’re not too far from southern CT, this should be a fabulous night. Book-wise, if you’re in NY, this weekend is the (free) Small and Independent Press Book Fair in midtown. Go here for a schedule of events.

Above pic is of Marissa Nadler playing at the Whitney Museum on Friday night at the Whitney’s Friday Nights Live event (soon to be renamed); and, in the background is — look, a Christopher Wheeldon Morphoses ballet! Just kidding — I’m making fun of myself for this post of course!

I spent the weekend largely looking at art. On Friday night, my friend Dee and I went to the Whitney’s Kara Walker exhibit, “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” about slavery and the Ante-Bellum South, which was excellent, and something everyone who has a chance should see. And the night before, my friend Alyssa invited me an opening of Shinique Smith’s show, “All Purpose,” at the Moti Hasson gallery in Chelsea.

This piece is titled “Thank You, Come Again.” I turned off my flash, because I’m always afraid it’s going to hurt the artwork, so the pics are a bit blurry, but this one’s comprised of several articles of clothing, all clumped together and affixed to the wall, a few scraggly threads trailing from the bottom looking to me almost like blood or tears, and a pile of socks with a sole red rose in the center beneath the wall hanging, on the floor.

Smith basically assembles her artwork from used / found objects, which reminded me of John Jasperse. Alyssa, who’s an Art history grad student specializing in African, told me using found objects rather than buying new is big among African artists right now because it symbolizes a rebellion against colonialism, globalization and the cultural imperialism of the West. (Smith is from Baltimore, but apparently is associated with African artists.)

I thought this one was charming. (Unfortunately, the gallery didn’t have the names of the artwork in its press release or on its website, so I don’t know all the names of the pieces). To me this looks like an animal, like a donkey, and I found the “head” and “ears” sweet because they’re made of a satiny fabric and tulle respectively, making me think of dance of course. Alyssa thought it looked “flamenco.” But the animal, who is carrying several adorable stuffed animals on its shoulders, appears to be carrying heavy bags on its side as well, so it looks a bit overburdened though not downtrodden.

I liked this one because it made me think of Ian McEwan’s novel “Enduring Love.” There was a rope attaching the crate to a pole in the ceiling, so it resembled a hot air balloon, and that book opens with a horrifying hot air balloon ride gone heinously wrong. The doe at the bottom is nostalgic to me, maybe because it looks like something my grandparents would always keep in a glass cabinet in their living room.

This one, the ’star’ piece, is called “Glutton.” It was made of gilded cushions, with a red velvet blanket spilling out underneath. Alyssa and her friends thought it looked like a Buddha, which I guess it does, but is Buddha associated with gluttony? I found it beautiful but somewhat hideous at the same time; like incredible wealth and how it can be so striking but can also pervert or uglify.

Alyssa in foreground with friends Alison and Kim (who is an artist in Connecticut) in back. We joked about how Alyssa is becoming the “Where’s Waldo” of my blog It was a very well-attended opening.

Anyway, I really enjoyed it, just walking around sipping Vodka (compliments of the exhibit’s sponsor), chatting with friends, and observing, investigating the art, trying to figure out how it was assembled, what materials it was made of, what all of the component objects were, what the work as a whole meant, symbolized, or evoked for me. The whole exhibit had kind of an air of nostalgia to me and made me a bit sad, sweet as the sculptures or wall figures were.

But it made me think about Jasperse too. I liked a lot of Smith’s pieces, but nothing really blew me away the way Jasperse’s clothes hanger sculpture / set did, the same way that none of his choreographic uses of found objects knocked me out like the hangers. And yet overall I still really enjoyed the Smith exhibit. But I was hard on Jasperse, coming away from the performance generally more disappointed. And I wonder why that is… if it’s that I expect more from dance (or something different anyway), if it’s that I spend more time with a dance performance, or more money on it (assuming I’m not buying the artwork anyway). Maybe it’s that I was physically closer to the art, could investigate it more thoroughly and take my time with it, or maybe it’s just that the drink and friendly chatter added to my enjoyment? … Anyway, after this exhibit, I felt like I shouldn’t have been as hard on Jasperse.

Another interesting discussion ensued amongst us ladies: whether you need to know something about the artwork in order to appreciate it or whether a work of art should stand entirely on its own. Funny to me because Jolene and I had just had a similar discussion on her blog (see comments here) regarding the two new abstract ballets ABT just put on. Alison said she didn’t necessarily need to know very much about a work, but titles and little notes did help. Sometimes. For example, the title in the top piece, “Thank You, Come Again,” which the artist’s note says is made from “ex-boyfriend’s clothes,” made her realize the pile of socks wasn’t just a mound of dirty underwear sitting on the floor for no purpose, they were remnants of the subject’s ex and they illustrated her sorrow and emptiness, a feeling made all the more powerful by the rose in the middle.

But, Alison added, Mark Rothko (whose art at least in his later years was extremely abstract, usually consisting of a sole geometric shape or different colored horizontal lines on a canvas) could give detailed names to all of his paintings until he was blue in the face and she would still see only abstract shapes.

I remember from the Kara Walker exhibit a drawing of an old white man, shirtless and with saggy male breasts, who was kind of breast-feeding a black baby. But he didn’t look so happy about it; rather, he tried to shield his rather disgusted expression from the baby’s mother. The image was striking and I kind of understood the racial aspect, but it meant so much more when I read in the curator’s explanation that the white man was famous abolitionist John Brown. So Walker is commenting upon the futility of white-led abolitionism and questioning the patriarchal reverence with which this man is held.

Another silhouette appeared to me, on first look, like a woman was jumping up excitedly, kicking her heels in the air, doing a little happy dance. But it also looked like her wrist was falling off and there was a spill on the ground below her that looked like a big mess. After reading the curator’s words I realized it was a pool of blood; she’d slit her wrist, and was dancing in excitement because by committing suicide, she’d freed herself and performed her own small role in abolishing slavery by depriving it of property.

(image copied from Kelly Salerno online art gallery)
Even just the silhouettes themselves: I hadn’t realized this little decorative art form was a fixture of, first aristocratic, then haute-bourgeois households, the poser usually being a delicate white woman; in fact, portraiture technique in the 1800s became a way of training “good ladies.” So, by painting most of her subjects in this way, Walker was turning an upper-class white art form on its head. The curator’s notes also say that the silhouette mimics the reductiveness of stereotypes, which I thought of as I was viewing the exhibit. But not knowing the history of silhouettes, I would have missed out on the class issue.

Anyway, sorry this post is all over the place. I’m starting to blab so am going to go to bed now. I also just wanted to point out that there’s a great conversation taking place on Apollinaire’s blog regarding dance-makers’ obligations to their audiences. Go here to take part. The dance blogosphere is becoming fun!

The 2007 Weblog award winners were announced today here. Again, there is no category for Dance. Nor is there a category for Performing Arts. Nor is there a category for Art. If you look at the Culture blogs, they’re all pop. Thankfully, there’s at least a category for Literature. Will I ever not be saddened by the role the arts does not occupy in our society?

Last night I had my first Jerome Bel experience at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. I went to see the latest work by the French experimental choreographer known for refusing to return the money of disgruntled customers, entitled “Pichet Klunchun and myself.” In the piece, which the program says is an exploration of “very problematic notions such as euro-centrism, inter-culturalism or cultural globalization,” Bel and Thai dancer Klunchun (who is brilliant, by the way) sit on chairs across from each other, Bel with a laptop on his knees. Bel first interviews Klunchun, asking him about his work, Thai culture, the type of dance he practices — “Khon” — a centuries-old Thai dance, and asks him to illustrate various moves. Klunchun then queries Bel about the same regarding himself. The first half of the program I found fascinating and I recommend that everyone in NYC go see it (showing through Saturday, the 10th) for that reason alone.

Khon, Klunchun reveals, began with a Thai king, who danced himself, and is a celebration of Buddha. The body is literally like a temple, the Buddha contained within both the center of the body and the center of the temple. So, arms legs, hands and feet, like Thai architecture, are shaped so that the energy flows out from the center, down through the limbs and rooftop structures, and is then re-directed back to the center, to the Buddha of the temple and soul. That’s why Thai dancers hold their hands and feet as such, which the fingers and toes splayed and flexed outward and upward. After he gives this explanation and begins dancing, you can really see the arcs of energy radiating out and back and out and back. Thai dancers practice flexing their fingers backward, and he shows us how. Ouch! Bel tried to flex his own, but to no avail. I tried as well, equally unsuccessful. It looks like it takes as much work as balletic turnout.

I found his this fascinating, along with Klunchun’s illustrations. At one point, he walks slowly slowly slowly across the room, showing how the spirit of a character who has died inhabits the stage (this after Bel asks him to feign dying onstage and Klunchun says he can’t; for a character to die onstage is for the king to die, for the country to die). Anyway, in his walks, the feet slowly lift from the floor, almost toe by toe, then the knee slowly bends, the leg rises, lifts, extends out, bends, the foot slowly drops to the floor, the step only ending when the last toe has touched ground. I can’t explain — you just have to see for yourself — but it was mesmerizing. His movements were so perfectly stylized down to the very last detail, so formalized, not a skin cell out of place. It really made me want to see the Thai dancer in David Michalek’s Slow Dancing films again, especially now that I understand the movement. He illustrated the four main characters of Khon: male, female, demon, and monkey — demon being his specialty; monkey he can’t do to save his life (my word choice of course; his language, like his dancing was very formal and ascetic). At first I couldn’t see the difference between the characters, but after Bel asked him to explain, I understood. Everything is so subtle. You have to watch really closely. And you will because it’s really so breathtaking in its simplicity. When Klunchun finally danced the role of a woman learning that her husband had died, I understood every movement, every discreet but articulated gesture to a tee. Beautiful! Bel thought so too.

Throughout Bel’s interrogatories, there were little culture clashes, most of which I felt were forced and contrived. Bel exclaims to Klunchun that Western dance (meaning ballet) also originated from a king — King Louis. But it’s a superficial similarity, of course, as, far from having the energy re-directed to one’s inward Buddha: the French king demanded that his court dancers have their bodies always turned not straight ahead, but toward him, thus the balletic turnout. “You direct your energy out,” Klunchun says at one point, demonstrating a very funny faux grand jete. “Out, out, out,” he said as he leaped through the air throwing his arms up. He was really quite an actor and could be very funny in his deadpan seriousness.

Then Bel turned the tables and asked Klunchun what he would like to know. After the exchange of some personal details intended to reveal cultural differences (Klunchun doesn’t understand how Bel can be unmarried and have a child, for example), Bel gets up and illustrates his work. He plays music from his computer. The song is “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie. Bel walks to center stage and stands stationary, looking out at the audience, eyeing us left to right. After about a minute, he begins jumping around, breaking into an unsophisticated version of club dance. After another minute or two of doing that, he sits. Klunchun, playing the outsider / voice of reason asks him, basically, WTF?? (my words again). Bel explains that in France they had a Revolution during which commoners overthrew all of the royals, sparing no family members. Hence, long live the French principle of egalite. He is deconstructing the spectator / performer dichotomy, showing the audience that he is just like them, no better. “But why then would they pay?” asks the voice of reason. “Well, they sometimes want their money back, in fact,” says Bel. The audience erupts with laughter — clearly these are all Bel groupies in the know about his history. “And do you give it back?” asks Klunchun. “No.” You see, Bel explains, he is a “contemporary” artist — this means not ballet, not Swan Lake, not the Nutcracker. “Contemporary” means there can be no expectations, no preconceived notions. It’s in the present. The government pays him a lot of money to go out and do research on this present state of things, about which he then produces work. He walks back to center stage, throws a vase of pencils and other small object onto the floor, falls down, and pretends to fall asleep atop the objects. Not to sound like a philistine, but I really don’t understand what kind of research one needs to do in order to come up with this, Mr. Bel?

Later, Bel talks about the work I think he is most known for, “Jerome Bel,” in which a man and woman, both naked, come out onstage, stand, look down at their bodies, and begin scrunching together a role of fat from their waists, which they kneed up and down and all around, distributing the fat throughout their torsos. “The body is such a marvel in and of itself,” Bel exclaims orgiastically, “who needs movement!” With this piece, he says, he was trying to explore the bare essentials of theater. What better way to do that than by having a stage with no props, no costumes and hardly any light?

Okay, knowing me, this is the kind of thing I would have thought was brilliant — or maybe not brilliant but something I would have at least been into — when I was in college, so I do see where he has his followers. After last night, I have decided that I am not, however, one of them, if my tone hasn’t made that obvious. Having only seen this one piece of his, though, I could be missing something. Here is another perspective from someone I highly admire.

At the end, Bel has just finished sleeping onstage for several minutes to “Killing Me Softly,” when he gets up and begins to pull down his pants. “No, no,” Klunchun stops him. “I don’t, I don’t want to see you naked, Mr. Bel, it is not right.” “Why,” says Bel unzipping. “Because in Thailand, there are certain people you, you don’t share nakedness with,” Klunchun says visibly distraught. “But, Mr. Klunchun,” Bel snickers, “in Bangkok clubs, there’s lots of nudity.” “That’s different,” Klunchun says, averting his eyes, unable to hide a look of disgust, “they’re, they’re working.” “I’m working too,” Bel says with the tone of a high-schooler. “But in Bangkok, they’re working for tourists.” With this the Bel groupies moaned as if the skies had parted. The international trafficking of women as sex slaves has long been one of the most disturbing social issues to me, so this may well not be everyone’s reaction, but I found it completely insulting that Bel assumed that I didn’t already know the truth of Klunchun’s last line, that that was supposed to be a revelation to me as a white person.

Anyway, as I said, “Pichet Klunchun and myself” is totally worth seeing for Klunchun alone. Who knows, you may up enjoying the deconstructionist French guy as well. Go here for tix.

(all photos by Julieta Cervantes).

Last night I went to see experimental choreographer John Jasperse’s new work “Misuse Liable to Prosecution” at BAM’s Harvey theater in Brooklyn. Fun night! I went with Tony Schultz from the Winger, and we met up with some of his friends, one of whom is Ashley Byler, an up and coming choreographer who also contributes to the Winger and just landed a coveted residency at experimental dance venue Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. (Her first show will be in May.) We all went out for drinks and little foodie things afterward at nearby Scopello, which I loved. Very good food, spacious comfy area and very decent prices. I guess this is why people live in the outer boroughs… Everyone was so smart and it was a great time hanging out and talking about dance and art and Jasperse and Chuck Close and Labannotation, and all kinds of compelling stuff! I didn’t get home until early this morning, which is why I’m late with my review…

Anyway, Jasperse. Ashley and Tony loved it, I liked but didn’t love it, but thought certain parts were brilliant. According to the program notes, Jasperse began with the idea, “What is it like to exist in a capitalist society with little or no capital?” Sets and props are comprised of other people’s discarded items — clothes hangers, brooms, milk crates, bottles, etc., which Jasperse and his group of four dancers seek to re-invent, finding new, poetic meaning in society’s refuse. So, I guess by finding new uses and meaning in what society deems trash, while starting with the initial capitalist question, he is in a roundabout way perhaps questioning what a capitalist society finds meaningful (work that produces money) and what it doesn’t (experimental art / art in general).

I felt that the most brilliant reinvention of trash was the set. As I walked into the theater, my eye was immediately drawn to the stage, which looked ablaze with gleaming white holiday lights weaved into some kind of intricate snowflake formation. It was really breathtaking. Once I sat down and looked more closely though, I realized the Christmas lights were actually about 1,000 ordinary clear plastic clothes hangers. The way the plastic was lit by stage lights produced the glowing effect. It reminded of a sculpture I once saw in an American exhibit in the then newly-opened Kiasma Museum of contemporary art in Helsinki. From afar this striking piece hanging from the ceiling looked like a gorgeous chandelier. But on closer inspection I realized it was made entirely of chicken bones, which made me momentarily disgusted. I had to walk away, but I then kept returning to that piece, it was so jarringly mesmerizing. When I first saw the coat hanger sculpture, part of which hung quite close to the stage, forcing the dancers to interact with pieces of it, I thought it was brilliant. I felt that the movement, though, just didn’t rise to that same level.

As four dancers walked slowly around the stage carefully balancing several tied-together broomsticks on their heads, Jasperse came up front, sat on a milk crate (the name of the work, by the way, comes from a warning on a milk crate, which is really rather funny when you think about it — what possible wrongful, prosecution-inducing uses are there for a milk crate?), propped an orange traffic cone on top of a broomstick, and used the cone as a bullhorn reading various economic statistics through it: Judge Judy’s salary is something like $26 million more than that of all of the United States Supreme Court justices combined (which enrages me), employees of small arthouse BAM make half of what those of Manhattan’s posh Lincoln Center do, how much our government spends on the Iraq war as compared to funding for the arts (don’t even ask), how much money Jasperse makes ($26,000), and his various expenses, including those involved in transporting props to the studio, rehearsal space fees, food, and, most audience-wowing, his apartment — $500 a month, in the Village! Well, that’s certainly a thing of value, Mr. Jasperse! (For non-New Yorkers, the average teensy one-bedroom in the Village is currently going for $3350, says my friend who is looking.)

Anyway, after these stats are read, Mr. Jasperse joins the other dancers interacting with various props. Music is played by a woman (musician Zeena Parkins) standing off to the side wearing a mini-dress made of FedEx envelopes who plays a homemade industrial-looking harp. Bagpipes occasionally sound from above, from musicians standing on the balcony sides.

Some of my favorite moments: a dancer brings Mr. Jasperse a large box containing an item he seems to have purchased. He opens the box, finds a bean bag chair. He takes the chair out and looks quizzically at it, as the dancer throws the open box over his head. He takes the box off and begins playing with the bean bag chair, eventually with others, who throw it at each other like a giant hacky sack. Eventually, when the players tire of the game, Jasperse winds up with the bean bag chair over his head, walking around stage completely unable to see or breathe, stumbling into the clothes hanger sculpture. So, it’s like he’s been consumed by his own consumption.

Another favorite moment: four dancers take off their jeans. They then sit down on the ground and meticulously begin to fold the pants, like you see Banana Republic and Gap employees often doing. As soon as they’ve smoothed them all out, ready to be presented to the customer on the display table, the dancers lie down on them, use them as bed and blanket, wend their feet through the pants legs, eventually getting all tangled up. They then rise, untangle themselves, take the pants in one hand, grab the bottom of a leg, and begin whirling them around over head like a lasso. They whip the pants at the floor, each other, and eventually into the back wall. I saw in this well-founded anger at all those horrendous chain stores that have completely taken over and all but ruined parts of the city like SoHo, which, for non-New Yorkers, used to be the gallery district and is now basically a mall.

At another point, a male and female dancer take a clothes line on which several garments are hung, lie down, and, using only their feet, somehow weave the clothes all into the woman’s top. She ends up a Humpty-Dumpty-esque literal “stuffed shirt.”

A part the audience found amazing, judging by the ooohs and aaaahs: two women roll out a sheet as if they’re about to have a picnic. They disappear into the wings and return with several water bottles, which they put onto their picnic cloth. They disappear again, making me think they were going to get their baskets filled with food. But instead they return with more bottles, then more and more, until it’s not they who are having a picnic at all but the water bottles themselves. They then lie on the sheets amongst the bottles, and, using only their feet and legs, scrunch up the sheet so that eventually they have several water bottles lined up between their legs. They lift their legs in the air, rotate them, the bottles still held tightly between legs, then one by one deposit each bottle into the sheet, still using only their legs. I guess it is a difficult feat, but what was this supposed to mean? At another point, one which takes up a large part of the whole, a mattress is brought out and dancers thrash themselves at it, the mattress eventually enveloping a dancer as had the bean bag chair earlier. But the bean bag chair had arrived in a box, so it was like a purchase; the mattress was just lugged out onstage. A lot of these kinds of uses of the props were comical and interesting and involved difficult feats using entwined limbs, but some of them I couldn’t figure any meaning into, and none had the poetry of the clothes hanger set.

At the end, Jasperse returns to his traffic-cone megaphone and tells the audience that he couldn’t really figure out how to end the piece. He thought of lining the theater’s edges with explosives and setting them off like firecrackers so that the walls would fall like dominoes and the ceiling would open up so we could see the sky. The audience cracked up at this. Realizing that wouldn’t do, he asked us all to take a deep breath and open our imaginations instead. He gave us a moment to do so, then told us all he hoped we enjoyed the rest of our evenings. It felt like the end of a yoga class.

I guess it’s kind of one of those things where everyone takes away something different. Here’s Counter Critic’s review, and here’s Jennifer Dunning’s in the Times. It’s showing tonight and tomorrow, go here for tix.