Tag: Experimental Dance

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EXPERIMENTAL DAY

 

 

Last Thursday I spent the afternoon at the Tribeca Film Festival watching a series of intriguing experimental shorts (some far better than others of course), and the evening at Brooklyn Academy of Music watching Trisha Brown Dance Company, whose program included a couple of pieces that are experimental, or at least were when they were created.

The reason I’d chosen the Human Landscapes series of shorts at Tribeca was that I expected most of the films to be about the landscape of the body — so kind of related to dance. But, except for two – -maybe three — all were about cityscapes — human interaction with urban environments with the focus on the latter, which I didn’t mind because I love cities.

The film that most caught my eye in the program listing was Chop Off by M.M. Serra, about a man, performance artist R.K., who sees self-amputation as an art form. At first I thought “amputation” was metaphorical, but, no no, the film revealed it was actually quite literal.

Continue reading “EXPERIMENTAL DAY”

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New Cafe at Alice Tully Hall

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Yesterday, Ariel invited me to a rehearsal at New York City Ballet. I love watching rehearsals! Especially with performers you really like; you kind of get to know their personalities a bit more. I don’t think we’re supposed to talk about anything in detail, but can I just say, methinks Tyler Angle must be every girl’s Dream partner 😀

 

Anyway, afterward, Ariel told me about the new cafe at Alice Tully Hall, the northernmost building of Lincoln Center, that houses mainly music concerts. She’d heard the restaurant portion (apparently the mac ‘n cheese) got some negative reviews, but I thought their coffee was rich and the American cheesecake we had, which was creamy and topped with little swirls of white chocolate, was delic. The spacious cafe is on the bottom floor and, encased in glass, it lets a lot of sunlight in and gives you an excellent view of the surrounding area.

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(this is facing east).

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(and this south, toward the rest of Lincoln Center. Ariel picking delicately at her cheesecake in foreground 🙂 )

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(the renovated Juilliard School aka Irene Diamond Building atop Alice Tully Hall).

Lincoln Center’s been under construction forever, so it’s nice to finally see some of the building facades begin to crawl out from under their shells.

Also, last night I went to a very intriguing performance at Dance Theater Workshop, called Kisaeng becomes you by experimental dance-makers Dean Moss and Yoon Jin Kim. It’s on for one night more — tonight — and I highly recommend it if you’re in New York. I went to see it as part of Claudia La Rocco’s WNYC performance club. I found it to be powerful but subtle, and at least in part about the commodification of Asian women in contemporary society, although club members, who discussed the performance a bit afterward at a nearby French restaurant, saw different things. Review coming soon! In the meantime, here’s Gia Kourlas’s NYTimes write-up.

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Misnomer’s BEING TOGETHER: Dance with Original Movement that Asks How Humans Connect and How Meaning is Made in Dance

 

I went to the opening night of Misnomer Dance Theater’s Being Together at the Joyce SoHo last night. I almost don’t want to write anything yet since they’ll be broadcasting live their December 14th performance. I know, how coolly innovative, right! So, I encourage everyone to watch that. It’s going to be here, on their website. Don’t worry; I’ll remind you again closer to the date 🙂

The work is divided into three sections: “Too Late Tulip”; “Rock.Paper.Flock”; and “Zipper”. All deal with different ways human beings have of connecting to each other. The second and third also deal with (a related issue, I suppose, of) how meaning is made in dance — is it due more to the choreographer or the dancers? — which to me, as someone who’s never danced anything but ballroom, is something I’ve always wondered about. I mean, with all other kinds of artists — writers, painters, composers — the work is due entirely to the person at the helm. Sure, actors (in the case of a play) and musicians over time add their own interpretations, but it’s ultimately the writer or composer’s words or notes. I’ve never understood choreographers who say they couldn’t have possibly made their dance on anyone else. That seems to contribute to the ephemeral nature of dance. And that ephemeral quality would seem to negate that a dance, like the other arts, can have a history, and a future. And yet great dances, thankfully, do survive the dancers on whom they were made.

Anyway, choreographer Christopher Elam says his dances are completely open to interpretation, but my interpretation of the first, “Too Late Tulip” was that it’s the story of a woman who has trouble connecting to others. She enjoys swaying to the music on her own, but when others try to join her, to connect with her in various shapes, she kicks out at them, pushes them away. Soon, she is taken with a male dancer, who has a female partner already. The effect is at times chaotic, at times sweet.

The second part I really can’t write about because so much of it was improvised, albeit “directed” on the spot by the choreographer, by Elam. His commands to the dancers are at times hilarious in their generality or seeming contradictions: “Coco, I want you to do what I am thinking” (she playfully shoved another dancer); “Dorian, take center stage with intention and an air of mystery stage and then act like a bowling trophy”; “Luke, focus intensely on something beyond our comprehension” (this was actually rather mesmerizing); “Coco, transform yourself into a magical being and engage in a battle and negotiation with Luke”; etc. It was hilarious watching the dancers take on these commands and this section will be the most interesting to watch repeated on December 14th.

The third part, “Zipper,” seemed to be an extension of the themes of the first two. A dancer (Coco Karol, pictured above with Elam) moved her arms about as if conducting an orchestra. Two dancers would at points move along with her gestures, like they were her instruments, and she’d smile; at other times they’d do their own thing and her face would express surprise or concern. Was she in control or were they? Later, Elam dances, conveying (to me) a loner trying desperately to connect, at times with Karol, at times with the other male dancer in the troupe, Luke Gutgsell.

One thing about Elam — his movement language is so original, something I can’t say of many other choreographers. I’m sure this is the effect of having lived and studied abroad, working in a variety of non-Western cultures. The movement is somehow still evocative of the familiar though, and emotionally moving — the creatures he creates can be funny, sad, pathetic, cute, always endearing. (If you watched So You Think You Can Dance, think Mark Kanemura). In “Zipper”, he moves at times like a gorilla, at times like a crab. To me, this speaks to the interconnectedness of life forms, of how humans can be animalistic and non-human animals human-like. It’s worth going to see his work just to see such unique movement and partnering.

So watch on December 14th! And hopefully, they’ll put a permanent video on the website for watchers who aren’t before a computer at that time…

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Last Days of Summer

Today’s such a nice day in NY (70s, woo hoo!), that, although I have an absolute load of work to do inside, I couldn’t resist spending at least a little of the afternoon in the park. I then realized I’d taken a bunch of pictures in Central Park and elsewhere in the city about a month ago and, because of my trip to North Carolina, hadn’t ever had time to post them:

Boaters on the pond.

Water kind of looks a bit Monet, no?

I stopped for a glass of wine in the boathouse bar and sat next to a family of tourists. After the waiter withdrew the cork from their Chardonnay bottle, the woman took it from him, wiped it gently with her napkin, and took a pen from her purse. “Mommy, what are you doing,” the little boy asked. She explained she was saving the cork, as she always does for special events. She still had the Cabernet from the night their father proposed, the Chardonnay from the first honeymoon meal, the Merlot from the family’s first trip to Disneyland, etc. all meticulously labeled and in a glass jar on the fireplace mantle. I thought it was so sweet.

By the way, the Boathouse has an excellent “house” Sauvignon Blanc. It smelled of a dewy morning meadow. I almost didn’t want to drink it…

At the fountain, a man participating in Burning Man festivities (whom I’d recognized as one of my fellow participants in the Judson Movement Research festival) giving a man and his child some bubbles to play with.

They gave me some spicy red Mardi Gras beads, which went well with my scarf.

And this is in the Mall area across from the fountain where they have that retro disco roller derby thing on weekends. This guy’s always there. I love watching.

More disco rollers, or roller-skating disco dancers, or what have you.

Is anyone else kind of annoyed by this new breed of park transportation: the rickshaw bicycle cabbies? They’re everywhere in the park; they come up speeding behind you, nearly run you over. And for the most part, the guys just sit stationary in the tourist areas, waiting to find a customer. If they’re meant as a replacement for the horse-drawn carriages, then I’m all for it (while those are quaint and all, I’ve seen more than one horse go down, especially in the heat, and I think they’re abusive to the animals), but I still see the horse ‘n buggies aligning Central Park South.

Here’s a pic of the Brooklyn Book Festival (sorry; I’m really behind on my posting – -this took place about a month ago).


And here’s Charles Bock reading from his Beautiful Children at the festival. Charles Bock was the Where’s Waldo of my book-reading-going this summer. The man was at practically every literary festival, read on his own several times, had a full-page interview or review in every newspaper… I’m very happy for him though. His book is a poignant expressionistic tale of the underbelly of “the fabulous Las Vegas,” the real Vegas. And I find him very encouraging to new authors. He always mentions how long it took him to write his novel and get it out there (10 years); that it’s all-important to get it right even if it does seem to be taking forever. Art isn’t something to be rushed. He said he revised countless times before even looking for an agent. When he finally had it down as it was meant to be, he found an agent and publisher pretty quickly. I think I’ve done the exact opposite. I started sending it out after I finished my first draft. I have an agent, but am still revising five years later… So, listen to Charles Bock. Obviously.

Here’s a picture I took sitting outside in City Hall Park at night awaiting Ofelia Loret de Mola’s site-specific dance Available Spaces, the last of the season. I get tired of writing about dance all the time, and go to far many more programs than I can review without getting seriously burned out, but here’s the NYTimes review of that. It was basically a Mexican, Halloween-style carnival. I went at night; Roslyn Sulcas, who covered it for the Times, during the day. If you’re interested, the set of photos I took of that begin here.

Okay, back to work. Happy Friday, everyone.

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Closing Out the Summer With Some Cool Downtown Dance

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!

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… And The "Hostile Takeover" is Complete

 

Just researching a bit on Japanese Butoh before I write more about this intriguing site-specific work of performance art that took place as part of the Sitelines series. Fun thing about writing about dance — at least to me — is learning about so many different dance / art forms.

 

And write-up of Cedar Lake’s The Copier coming in a sec. I just want to think a bit more about it first. Overall I liked it, and definitely recommend it. It’s good for discussion. It’s only showing through the 23rd though so act fast if you plan to go.

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Monica Bill Barnes' Site-Specific "Game Face"

Yesterday I went to see Monica Bill Barnes’ site-specific dance Game Face, showing as part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Sitelines series. I’ve seen Barnes’ work before and have liked her in the past, and I found this one very amusing — along with the rest of the audience (comprised both of people who’d come for the show and unsuspecting tourists in the area to catch an optimal view of the Statue of Liberty), but I’m not sure if she met her stated aim.

The flyer states that the dance “compares the show business motto of ‘the show must go on’ with the current perception of finance as being an all-consuming self-sacrificing business. Exploring a performer’s endurance and ‘do or die’ attitude as an illustration of Wall Street’s reputation for tireless work, this new work is bizarre, exhausting, and boldly funny…”

I thought it was bizarre and funny, but I couldn’t see what it really had to do with Wall Street or the financial industry. It took place at the Robert Wagner Park, which is in the northeast corner of Battery Park, sandwiched between a restaurant and the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The park, as I said, offers a lovely view of the Statue of Liberty, and a large grassy area for children to play, so it’s a good area for tourists, especially with kids.

If she’d wanted to make a statement about Wall Street and financial workers, it might have been better placed at the little cobblestoned, pedestrian-only intersection of Wall Street and Broadway. Or, if that was too crowded and they couldn’t get a permit, there’s a spacious area in front of the Chase Manhattan building, where I’ve seen other dance performances; they could have even had it in Liberty Park, where another Sitelines performance was held last year — all of which are centrally located in the Financial District, set among the high buildings and rushed business people. Held here, it seemed to be making more of a statement about tourism.

First, two dancers, Deborah Lohse (wearing the green Statue of Liberty cap) and Barnes, holding her up, asked a woman — presumably a tourist — to take their picture with the Statue of Liberty in the background, in typical tourist fashion. The woman complied, not knowing she was part of the performance, as it was just about to begin.

Next, some Elvis music began playing over a couple of speakers, while four women dressed either as tourists or in athletic work-out garb danced in unison along a back wall, while Lohse began to lean on Barnes in various poses. At first, she leaned due sideways, the two women making an interesting triangular shape. Then Lohse began to lose her form, becoming almost a bag of bones, while Barnes struggled to hold her up. Eventually, Barnes picked her up and carried her off. The whole time, Lohse was facing the Statue of Liberty, and her expressions of awe at it, along with her touristy hat, indicated she was mesmerized, entranced. But too much so. Like Barnes was saying people get carried away with their worship of landmarks, of a meaningless idol, of what New York stands for, without considering what really goes on here, what Lady Liberty stands for. It could also have been making a statement of the collapsing of the American dream or something, but I think it was too light-hearted for that.

Then, the dancers all disappeared through an archway, behind a building, and emerged out on the little plaza area in front of the park. They danced briefly, to Elvis, then disappeared again, and emerged

on top of the walkway connecting a restaurant with the museum. At points they looked out at the water, standing shock still, and at points they broke into dance, all the while Elvis crooning his iconic songs. Ridiculously, the music being so iconic, I can’t even remember which songs they were; I don’t even know the names of most. One where he keeps pleading, “Believe Me, believe me…” I think “Heartbreak Hotel” was in there; the only one I remember for sure is the one they ended with, “Fools Rush In.” Anyway, this part of the dance was kind of funny in a Where’s Waldo way, losing sight of the dancers, looking around for them, seeing them pop up in a new, unexpected place.

But the best part was when a waiter at the restaurant and a seemingly random guy on a bike got in on the action, grabbing microphones and singing along with Elvis, their voices overtaking his on the speakers. I don’t know if they were officially part of the act or if Barnes had convinced them on the spot to join in, but the waiter guy looked pretty much like a genuine waiter at that restaurant.

They eventually climbed onto some benches where onlookers were seated, really belting it out. The audience went nuts with laughter.

The dancers disappeared again and re-emerged, most of them now wearing white gauzy, almost wedding-gown-looking dresses. I wasn’t sure what the significance of this was, but here they are on the little plaza again, seeming to wave at a tourist bus pulling into Battery Park.

Then they took to the grassy area.

And ended dancing, then running along the park’s cement perimeter. They disappeared and of course we continued to look for them, only knowing for certain the show was over when the words “Elvis has left the building,” came on over the speakers.

The performance was about 20 minutes altogether and it definitely had a certain charm and humor. But as a whole, I wasn’t sure what it all meant, whether it had any cohesive meaning.

If you want to check it out, it’s showing again tomorrow, Wednesday the 6th, at noon and again at 1 p.m., and Thursday the 7th at the same times, and next Monday through Thursday, Aug. 11-14, at noon and 1. It’s in the Robert Wagner park, located just north and east of Battery Park. Go here for more details.

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Ms. Toad's Wild Ride

My review of the Performance Rampage event in the Judson Movement Research Festival is up on Critical Correspondence. I really had a ridiculous amount of fun. I couldn’t participate in the entire festival since I was in Blackpool for much of it but I think I’m going to check out some of the regular Judson Movement Research events that they hold in the church every so often that Gia Kourlas of Time Out is always recommending.

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More experimental weirdness

More experimental weirdness

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.


Performance- rampage event in the Movement Research festival. We met at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea and were led through the streets down to the Village by two people on stilts, who stopped at various points to play wind instruments and show us site-specific dance performances by various dancers participating in the festival, my favorite of which was Luciana Achugar, who pretended to go spelunking in a white lacey thong, knee-high sweater tights and ski mask along the ramp railing at St. Vincent’s hospital. They had us chanting at points, “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going shopping!”

It was too funny watching passersby try to figure out what to make of us. At one point the leaders asked us to give ourselves a round of applause as we passed by a busy restaurant, patrons staring out the window open-mouthed. There must have been nearly 100 of us. The festival curators hadn’t expected such a large turnout and we held up a lot of traffic walking through the streets. We ended up at the Judson Memorial Church (where the original Judson movement began in the 60s, which many consider to mark the beginning of post-modern dance) and had a dance party.

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Judson Movement Research Festival

So I was invited to participate in and write about some of the events in the Judson Movement Research Festival this year, including the one I had such a hard time finding on Tuesday. Here is my write-up on it. I’m sorry I missed so much of it; it seems like it was really fascinating.

The festival is almost over (I missed the first week being in Blackpool), but there are a few more events between now and this Sunday. Go here for a listing and more info on the artists.