Dance New Amsterdam Presents RAW Directions

at Dance New Amsterdam's theater in Lower Manhattan, Thursday February 9, 2012, 8PM

with works by Shannon Gillen, Elisha Clark Halpin/Etch Dance Company, Philippa Kaye, and Elke Luyten and Kira Alker

Dance New Amsterdam’s RAW Directions program challenges choreographers to construct dance with elements or themes they have never used before. This evening the unusual elements include: hula-hoops, a golden chair and the theme of the shipping industry. All are presented with varying degrees of quirky movement and text. 

RAW Directions: Land of Maverick; Unbranded by Phillipa Kaye, Photo © Rasalie Knox

While some choreographers’ experiments work better than others, it is refreshing to see artists consciously depart from their usual inclinations. Philippa Kaye mentions that she often creates site-specific works (her latest took place in Central Park) and that she was constructing a group piece from a pre-existing solo. Elisha Clark Halpin reveals that she particularly avoided creating a story because she often produces narrative work. Elke Luyten and her director, Kira Alker, set out to create material from daily routines and pedestrian movement without adding any theatrical elements. Shannon Gillen, takes “an in-depth physical analysis of the international shipping industry…”

The strongest works of the evening belong to Luyten and Alker along with Gillen. That is not to say the other pieces lack potential, it’s just that Luyten, Alker, and Gillen’s intentions feel clearer.

RAW Directions: Inertia, Part I  by Elke Luyten and  Kira Alker Photo © Rasalie Knox

As Kaye’s work-in-progress, Land of Maverick; Unbranded, moves forward, American nostalgia crops up. I notice the peace sign, the spiritual “Get on Board, Little Children” and even the 1990’s computer game, Oregon Trail.  The nods to American cultural reference points don’t effectively bring the work together for me, but I do I enjoy Kaye’s experiments with use of space, particularly her construction of an entire solo within the perimeter of a hula-hoop. I wanted to see more instances like that.

RAW Directions: Land of Maverick; Unbranded by Phillipa Kaye, Photo © Rasalie Knox

The Sky is Empty, choreographed by Halpin, is a dynamic duet performed by Michele Dunleavy and Megan Moore. It is dramatic with dim lighting and opera music. While both dancers are clearly focused and technically adept in fast floor work and daring balances, I don’t understand their relationship to one another. Perhaps a little bit of narrative would have helped?

In Inertia, Part I Luyten stares intently at the audience as she moves across the stage repeating an “Irish Jig meets the 1950’s pony step” pattern. Although she looks hysterical with her ponytail violently swaying side to side, she never cracks a smile.  Luyten’s clarity throughout Inertia compels, especially as she makes intricate gestures with her fingers and wrists around a gold chair .

RAW Directions Botlek  by Shannon Gillen ( preented as a group piece every night except Thursday),Photo@ Rasalie Knox

 
Who knew that the shipping industry could be choreographed? It is in Botlek, a duet from Gillen that is the final work of the evening. The dancers wear rubber suits that remind me of the Japanese radioactivity testers I have read of in the news. Gillen does an excellent job setting the scene and capturing what it is like to work on a freighter. I can almost smell the fish and see the ocean’s mist. I empathize with the individuals who work on their ships day in and day out performing the same dreary mechanical tasks. Gillen  describes what seems a very undancerly subject with surprising inventiveness.

RAW Directions Botlek  by Shannon Gillen ( preented as a group piece every night except Thursday, when presented only as a duet )Photo@ Rasalie Knox

 
I admire each choreographers’  willingness to step out of their comfort zones and take a risk, and I look forward to seeing their subsequent performances based on based the work presented in RAW Directions.

At The Joyce Theater New York

Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 2pm

Welcome Back

©Christine Jowers for The Dance Enthusiast

Dance Theatre of Harlem II in Donald Byrd's Contested Space Photo © Rachel Neville

My first experience with ballet was with the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Coming from the multi-racial Caribbean I didn’t understand the statement that Arthur Mitchell was making when he created an all black ballet company. As far as I was concerned the dancers looked like me and all my grammar school friends.

And why wouldn’t they? I didn’t realize until I was older, and started to travel outside of my island cocoon, how revolutionary Mr. Mitchell was in 1969.

Alexandra Jacob Wilson and Samuel Wilson in Donald Byrd's Contested Space Photo © Rachel Neville

Choreography by Monica Bill Barnes
Performed by Anna Bass and Monica Bill Barnes
Special Appearances by Kevin Townley, Jeffrey Kazin and members of the Juilliard Freshman Class

Tara Sheena for The Dance Enthusiast*

The Snow Globe Show,  Photo © Christopher Duggan

SALARYMAN 

The Nagelberg Theater, Baruch Performing Arts Center, New York

Friday February 10th, 8pm

Choreography: Takehiro Ueyama ; Co-Creator/Visual/Sound: Yuko Takebe

Assistant Choreographer: Jill Echo

Lighting: Jason Jeunnette; Set Design: Yukinobu Okazaki; Costumes: Taylor Forrest 

Dancers: Kirsten Arnold, Brynt Beitman, Jill Echo, John Eirich, Kile Hotchkiss, Gina Ianni, Clinton Edward Martin, Nana Tsuda Misko, Lynda Senisi, Marie Zvosed and Takehiro Ueyama

Violinist : ANA MILOSAVLJEVIC

Enough Is As Good As A Feast.

©Christine Jowers for The Dance Enthusiast

In Take Dance’s SALARYMAN, there is a three or four minute section of movement (a brief moment within a larger chunk of material) that perfectly distills the working day of your average office drone.  

The company’s ten member cast, in virtually identical suits, go through the motions of an awful commute, a back-biting work day, the ecstasy of a cigarette break, and finally the inevitable, drunken stupor of post-work cocktails that ends with several anonymous sex romps. After a post-coital cigarette or two, and a bit of sleep, the “worker bees” waddle to their morning trains to begin the whole de-humanizing cycle again. This dancing bit is so well turned out that one could mistakenly think choreography of the literal kind is a cinch to create. But this type of precision requires a particular brilliance, and Take Dance happens to flash with it.

Take Dance in SALARYMAN Photo © Koykat

Takehiro Ueyama’s choreographic observations are keenly accurate, accessible (but not dumbed down), and expertly danced. It is challenging to take on a stereotype and not be cliché. This man needs to choreograph for Broadway, and why isn’t he?   

The dancers are also arresting. It is a pleasure to watch performers who can handle explosive and precise physicality, subtle rhythmic shifts and emotional range. In SALARYMAN the artists play with broad and and refined characterizations, acrobatic stage sparring, musicality, and bursts of athleticism coupled with quiet mystery. Both Jill Echo and Ueyama deliver poignant solos: she as a housewife looking for love amidst the crassness of cheap sex, and he as a businessman for whom even a handshake is excruciating. 

To see such talent in an intimate space is a treat to be savored.These people should be exploding on opera size stages around the world.  After attending a Broadway play the weekend before this show for which tickets were one hundred and fifty bucks a pop (I was treated), it felt especially weird to know that the price for this show and its' top shelf artists was a mere twenty dollars per seat.  Don’t get me started on the crazy economics of dance.

Take Dance in SALARYMAN Photo © KoyKat

Were there problems with SALARYMAN? Yes. It was too much and too long. For all his brilliant moments of clarity and sensitivity, Ueyama doesn’t seem to know when to stop making stuff up.  In the first act, the whole morning scene, depicting the company inside a humongous sheet-- as if in a group bed-- seems superfluous, as does,for me, the second act.

Ueyama’s tragic solo that concludes Act I -- ‘I’m worried now but I won’t be worried long’ -- employs ideas of water: water torture and a fish out of water, to reveal his characters’ incapacity to handle the office politics that can terrorize a sensitive soul. Ueyama’s massive, athletes figure is reduced to flailing and rolling along the floor while the company of cold automatons march over him.  This proves too much for Ueyama's salaryman, and finally, in a quiet moment upstage, he hangs himself.
  
This solo was too stunning and powerful to be followed by the film ( however intriguing) and the huge, colorfully costumed, happy piece etcetera etcetera that made up ACT 2 of SALARYMAN. I needed time to contemplate and digest.







 

Take Dance in SALARYMAN Photo @Koykat

Le Projet Rodin (The Rodin Project)

February 9, 2012

The Birth of a Dance

Alexander Zekke's music for this production is beautiful in and of itself. I keep hearing that sweet, low voice of the opening cello. It enters my blood stream. I mean, it's that beautiful! The movement, however, happens in a world apart from the music. Clear and often abrupt shifts in the score seem uncalled for and unrelated to the dance. This disconnect appears without purpose and, in spite of its beauty, I don't find the the lulling quality of the music helpful.

Russell Maliphant's The Rodin Project- Photo ©Charlotte MacMillan

A capoeira-like duet between Tommy Franzen and Thomasin Gülgeç holds some lovely moments. The men move together with a smooth power and fluid control I have seldom seen. The duet in the second half, with Tommy Franzen and Dickson Mbi, is unforgettable. Franzen and Mbi move up and down and upside-down the face of a black wall, defying gravity as gently as if they were in free fall. We know that  great effort must be required to hang by one hand and slide smoothly down the side of a wall, but we don't see it and we don't feel it. Instead we feel the tenderness of cat feet and kindness as the men  help each other explore this vertical surface.It is impossible to ignore the reference to Rodin's masterpiece, The Gates of Hell, because of the sculptural play along the vertical plane. But it remains a reference to an inspiration, rather than an interpretation or reproduction of another artist's work.

Russell Maliphant's The Rodin Project- Photo ©Charlotte MacMillan

Presented by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Dance Films Association

January 27^th-31^st 2012

Festival Curator: Deirdre Towers

Five Bright Days in the Dark

©Cory Nakasue for The Dance Enthusiast

Labryinth Within by Pontus Lidburg

At the onset of any sort of festival, I brace myself. I breathe. I prepare, not unlike an athlete for a test of endurance.There are often hurdles to keeping the mind agile and the eyes fresh, such as sitting through work that doesn’t interest you regardless of its quality, or work that you deem qualitatively questionable. Presentation, pacing and curatorial clarity also figure in to the difficulty or ease of the course. Although I did not see every single film in the festival (which I heartily regret), I saw most of them, and it was a walk in the park. 

The juried festival boasts 35 films that include feature-length documentaries, narrative shorts, and video art from emerging and veteran choreographers and filmmakers. The overall quality of the films was extremely high. This speaks to a growing trend of collaboration between choreographers and experienced filmmakers, which was not the norm 10 years ago, especially with younger artists. It is through these collaborations that the language of dance film is starting to find itself.

A First Position, Rebecca Housknecht (pictured center), film by Bess Kargman

In the “I love you I hate you” duet driven narrative films especially, such as Coup de Grace by Clara van Gool and prize winner Labyrinth Within by Pontus Lidburg, we can feel the push and pull between cinematic tradition and choreographic tradition, with some exciting glimpses of a new dance film tradition being born. We are also witness to a growing facility and in some cases genius (I have to cite Labyrinth again) in the second phase of choreography, editing. The cuts in this thriller are razor sharp, creating an extreme tension that is not present in the choreography.

The crown jewel, at least in terms of mainstream crossover appeal was the feature documentary, A First Position by Bess Kargman which follows six gifted ballet

Cari Shim Sham of Sri Susilowat in David Rousseve's Two Seconds of Laughter

students from disparate backgrounds as they prepare for the career making Youth America Grand Prix. There is just enough reality TV appeal to make this one sell-able, without pandering.  It humanizes the often caricatured world of ballet With integrity and grace. 
 

The festival belonged to the dance documentary, in particular, Wayne McGregor—Going Somewhere by Catherine Maximoff, Two Seconds of Laughter by David Rousseve, Seven Solos: A Documentary by Douglas Rosenberg, and Restaging Shelter by Bruce Berryhill & Martha Curtis. The documentary being a more mature (and well funded) art form is fertile ground to explore and delineate the world of dance. The narrative work could devolve into an ownership race between the choreographer, the director, or the editor, or flower into a hybrid born of perfect collaboration.

Wayne McGregor—Going Somewhere , Film  by Catherine Maximoff, Courtesy of lensfilmsdupresent

Exhibit of Dance and the Visual Arts

At the Centre Pompidou, Paris

February 2012 –April 2, 2012

©Ann Moradian for The Dance Enthusiast

Less than 20 steps into the Danser sa vie (Dance Your Life) Exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, it is clear that seeing dance demands a shift in habitual rhythm. You really have to slow down. If the exhibit had only been made up of paintings, photos and text, I am sure I wouldn't have noticed or thought much about it.

Le Saut de Palucca (vers 1922-23) Photography Charlotte Rudolph Collection Centre Pompidou, Musee National d'art moderne

Fortunately, the Pompidou Centre has an extraordinary collection of dance films and a number of these were central to their exhibit. Many were projected onto huge screens that brought the recordings to life. Live performances were lightly peppered in as well. The balance between all of the different mediums was well measured-- at least through the first half of the exhibit-- and invited a sense of total immersion into an era or an idea.

The exhibit reveals, before our very eyes, the relationship between dance and the visual arts, and the "hidden side of the avant-gardes" where dance, we learn, played an important and pivotal role. Choreographic works are displayed not only in relation to each other, but also in relation to the flow of history and a culture in constant transition.

Seeing Isadora Duncan's free-flowing body projected alongside the work of artists she inspired, like Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle, sheds a tangible light on her influence to their work. Similarly, Vaslav Nijinski's Afternoon of a Faun performed by the Paris Opera Ballet and projected in grand format, is displayed with artists he inspired and collaborated with, like Leon Bakst, the Russian painter who designed the costumes and sets for this virile and controversial work.

The films of Mary Wigman's Hexentanz (Witch Dance) and Totenmal (Call of the Dead) are potent, and made even more so when placed in relation to World War II and the Third Reich, with whom she cooperated. The precursor to the iconic, masked, robotic monster, Darth Vadar (from George Lucas’ Star Wars,) appears not only in Wigman's Totenmal but also in The Green Table by choreographer, Kurt Joos, who fled Germany in 1933.

 Rudolf von Laban, a Hungarian known in the United States mostly for developing Laban Movement Analysis and Laban Dance Notation, is revealed to be not only an extraordinary performer, but also the creator of what might be described as an arts commune (which looked to me like it was mostly made up himself and a troop of adoring female dancers.) I was as surprised by this as I was to learn that Laban also cooperated with the Third Reich, working with the Ministry of Propaganda.

Descriptive texts weave a path throughout the exhibit and bring a new understanding to the relationships at play on an historic level. Sometimes the words offer insight into the personal explorations and motivations of the artists.

Totentanze der Mary Wigman Painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1926-28 Witchtrach/Berne, Galerie Henze& Ketterer& Triebold

I had never heard of Sonia Delaunay before, but I loved reading her writing about how the rhythms of the foxtrot and tango made them want to explore the dance of color on canvas--and she did in her abstract work La Bal Bullier.

 A film by Theirry de mey, Counter Phrases, featuring the contemporary Belgian choreographer, Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker, is the centerpiece in yet another room. This film follows the Duncan and Nijinski presentations and ,unusually, it appears to be a thread spooling out from the much earlier work. Normally I would associate de Keersmaeker with the more minimalist choreography of someone like Lucinda Childs, but here links to the beginnings of the early modern dance movement are made visible.

The exhibit is divided into three parts that, are not as clearly defined as they could be. The first is focused on personal expression and the second on abstraction and mechanization. The third section is labeled "performance" and covers theatrical performance, the body as a performance event, dance 'happenings', popular dance and performance art.

Performance painting #2, 2005- Nicolas Floc'h, Video HDV, Interprète Rachid Ouramdane © Adagp,Paris 2011

    SLIDE SHOW FROM THE EXHIBIT- 

Dancing Class Taker and Writer: Tara Sheena

The Class: Jennifer Nugent’s Modern Class

Location: Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church via Movement Research

131 East 10^th St (at 2^nd Avenue)

www.movementresearch.org

212.598.0551 I

The Days and Times: Varied

The Cost: $14/class

What You Should Bring:

Clothing in layers (it gets hot in the space very quickly), quick thinking skills, and stamina for the final stretch.

Why Tara Took Nugent’s Class:
I have long idolized Jennifer Nugent from afar. She is a force to be reckoned with as a dancer, with a roster of credits ranging from David Dorfman to Bill T. Jones. I knew I was in for an exciting class. Like many of the great dance classes in New York, I had an idea of how popular the class was through the grapevine of dancers I run into on a daily basis. I was advised by more than one person to get there early to ensure a spot; for good reason.

IMPRESSIONS OF: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

Story/Time at the Alexander Kasser Theatre of Montclair State University

Conceived and Directed by Bill T. Jones

Choreographed by Bill T. Jones with Janet Wong and members of the company

Featuring Bill T. Jones

And the company: Antonio Brown, Talli Jackson, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, LaMichael Leonard, Jr., I-Ling Liu, Paul Matteson, Erick Montes, Jennifer Nugent, Jenna Reigel

With Ted Coffey

Music by Ted Coffey; Text by Bill T. Jones; Dcor by Bjorn G. Amelan; Lighting Design by Robert Wierzel; Costume Design by Liz Prince

Christine Jowers for The Dance Enthusiast

The task he gives us is to sense a minute; once we feel it’s over, we must raise our hands, and keep them up--no cheating. Simple enough. And who could refuse a request from Bill T. Jones? Even walking out on stage to casually chat and share his sadness about the end of a great run of Story/Time at the Kasser Theater, he commands the space with a larger–than- life- force. Hypnotized, some of us raise our hands way before the minute is up. Our sense of timing is so poor in fact, Jones makes us start again. “Must have been a good weekend,” he chuckles to some anxious sucker in the orchestra. “One more time.”

The stage manager, Kyle Maude, measures out a minute--actually much longer than I thought. OK. That’s it. Our conceptual warm-up is finished. “This work will be filled with seventy of those,” the casual Jones easily explains. Then the performer Jones takes his place behind a simple white desk preparing to read. The story begins.

Story/Time Photo by Paul B.Goode

Story/Time is Jones’ 2012 artistic response to John Cage’s 1958 work, Indeterminancy. That performance found Cage, the gentle voiced avant-garde who would have been 100 years old this year, sitting alone at a desk reading a stream of stories at various speeds while his musical colleague, David Tudor, located somewhere not within earshot, randomly played excerpts of Cage’s compositions. It was an experiment in storytelling, music, time and chance and, according to the Smithsonian Institutions Folkways Recording Label, a “wonderfully curious way to hear stories.”

Jones questions his place in the modernist tradition by placing himself in a similar context – a man completely different than Cage, in another century contemplating stories, time, and chance-- though not with his musical compositions, but with his dances, a music collaborator, and a futuristic yet spare set.

Story/Time, like the work that inspired it, proves a wonderfully curious way to hear stories, not just for the way in which we hear Jones’ rich tales and observations, but for the way we don’t. Wanting to cling to every gem, we can miss bits by being distracted, or rather attracted, to the arresting presence of dancers catapulting around stage. The dancers- angels and acrobats- fly, contort, jiggle and are sometimes dead still. Whatever their task, it is difficult not to be riveted by these gorgeous folk.

Then there is the sound score by Ted Coffey: chimes and clangs, that I notice when I am not paying attention to words or movement. Coffey underlines and enhances the action or sometimes blots it out entirely making it impossible to hear what Jones is saying. In our matinee performance, this induces laughter.In a 1981 interview with Merce Cunningham at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, John Cage said of the difficulty of hearing music, “we are more involved with our eyes then our ears.” It’s true. But what sound can do that events on stage cannot is surround us. Coffey chooses to highlight this fact when Jones talks about Arnie Zane’s death. Jones’ stage mike muffles, and his words only come to us from behind-- an eerie shift.

Story/Time Photo by Gene Pittman, courtesy of Walker Art Center

I gather when the text and dancing sync it’s chance, yet there are times when the dancers seem the very breath of the stories, directing our attention to important details. When Jones recalls a memory of Merce Cunningham, the dancers stand in a semi-squat, backs erect, wobbling their bowed- out knees as if to remind us of Cunningham performing into old age. When he speaks of the flood of Noah and describes waters rising high above the mountaintops, a few dancers roll across the floor as stage fog slowly envelops them. Suddenly we see all the animals on earth submerged and sadly churning along with the currents. When words transport us from the great flood to an ancient dwelling place on a mesa in New Mexico, gleaming, naked bodies emerge from the smoke to guide clothed, earthly figures across the stage. They slowly haul office furniture, a large sofa and a swiveling desk chair, of all things. They could be carrying their troubled lives across the River Styx toward the light of the Elysian Fields. It is transfixing how elements come together to create their own stories.

As stories bubble up and fall away, the clean, elegant playing ground where the action occurs composes us. The desk always remains in the same spot, center-ish, on a grid of twelve squares of equal size. The squares are numbered one through twelve in bright green illuminated numerals. They could represent the twelve months of a year, or the twelve hours that compose half a day, or the twelve signs of the zodiac.There is a digital clock, also with illuminated green numbers, that appears behind Jones and later off to our right. It reminds us that no matter what, time marches on.Bright green apples line the desk.The pairing of green and white, both calming and efficient, invites the eye. There is a story at the beginning of the piece about apples, which I didn’t pick up, but just looking at those simple green orbs on the “teacher’s” desk, I want to take a bite.

There is so much to take in. Personal stories: Estella, Jones’ mother; Arnie Zane, his lover and partner; relatives, friends, great artists, odd meetings; Bessie

Story/Time Photo by Gene Pittman, courtesy of Walker Art Center

Smith is singing about boiled cabbage; Estella said something about John Henry and the graveyard; the mom at the Washington Square Fountain; the prostitutes in the windows in Amsterdam; adobe, the touch of a hand, French fries floating in a flooded McDonalds; the month of March that will never be the same for that is when Zane died.Here are the details that make a life: great and small joys and tragedies and sparkly minutiae. We see the tasks that shape time. We hear the sounds that co-exist with, enrich and jar it. We are reminded of larger myths we change to suit our needs. Much happens in Story/Time. What do we grab on to? I decide to let myself be mesmerized. That feels good.

Questions arise as all of our stories and senses of time mix together. What is the difference between listening and hearing, seeing and perceiving, recalling and repeating? How do we sense a story even if we don’t hear the whole thing? Why is it when Jones’ talks about New Mexico I see “my” childhood there, for example, and not just his story? What is silence? What is music? What do we capture out of all of this? What remains? We-- with our varied, inconsistent perceptions-- are as much chance elements in this work as Bill T. Jones, Ted Coffey, and the dancers.

In the 1981 interview where John Cage and Merce Cunningham speak of their work together, Cage mentioned that before he used the I-Ching, he explored the possibilities in his creative field with questions. He was interested in radical questions because “they explore the roots rather than the surfaces”, and he described radical questions as ones that open doors. Bill T. Jones and his collaborators open a floodgate.