David Appel "The World is Spinning (and so are we)"
Company:
David Appel
Choreographer David Appel premieres The World is Spinning (and so are we), a new collection of short small group pieces, Friday May 9th and Saturday May 10th at the Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway, 2nd Floor (between Prince and Spring) in New York City. The performances start promptly at 7:30pm, and latecomers cannot be admitted. Tickets are $15 general and $12 for students, seniors, and artists, and may be purchased at the door (cash only). Seating is extremely limited, and reservations (suggested) can be made at: appel_reservations@verizon.net. For more information call 347-359-3839.
The World is Spinning (and so are we) is the fourth of these groupings of relatively short dances growing from dissimilar choreographic underpinnings, weaving variously-composed blends of set and improvised dancing. The pieces (which in the past have ranged from 38 seconds to 8-1/2 minutes long) are most immediately “about” how the dancers—individually and collectively—wield their abilities to manifest, play through fluidly, and enliven the progression of each one. They reflect Appel’s interest in the conversation between planned interactivity and that which we compose in the moment: he is continually curious about how the structuring mechanisms we find (invented or intuited) subsequently shape, color, extend, and focus the dancing we generate to progress through them. These dances ride a sense of possibility, and whether mapping/illuminating a path or embodying a way of being, they celebrate our ability to articulately engage each other—and to reject rigidity in favor of pliable and vibrant responses within the worlds we encounter and re-create.
The previous collections to arise from this project (begun during the summer of 2012)—all presented on shared evening programs—have been performed in theaters where the audience/performer spatial relationship was necessarily a more conventional one. But the nature of this particular venue has suggested another option: to have the work occur around the audience, on all sides. Going down this road has affected not only the process of developing and situating these new pieces, but raises interesting questions about (among other things) the play of time, attention, visibility, and perspective, and the dynamics of shared space.
The performers are Ellen Smith Ahern, Jenni Hong, Hannah Seidel, Darla Stanley, and David Appel.
David Appel is a choreographer, performer, and teacher whose work has been presented in a variety of contexts and situations throughout North America, Europe, and in Mexico since 1973. While primarily following his own path, Appel has also had the opportunity to perform with Simone Forti, City Dance Theater of Boston (a company touring innovative pieces during the early 1970s), several dance/music collaborative and improvisation groups, and many other individual artists in a variety of media. He has received a number of grants and awards, among them three NEA Choreographers Fellowships, and has been invited to festivals in both the United States and abroad.
Appel came of age in the post-Judson period. He is influenced and intrigued by a range of learned and/or discovered approaches to dancing and dance-making, as well as by his experience of the popular social dancing from that era that has served as a jumping-off point and anchor for the development of his evolving kinesthetic sense. He explores relationships between the body’s capacity to be more subtly articulate, the ways we find to move together, and our connections to and within the world around us. [www.youtinydancer.com]
A BIT OF PREVIOUS PRESS ABOUT DAVID APPEL’S WORK:
“…performances that draw you right into the path of the movement…a trust in and respect for the material of movement and for the dancers who contribute to it…full of intelligence…”
[Anne Pierce, Washington DanceView]
“Watching Appel and his dancers move, one immediately recognizes the characteristic elements of his work—the remarkable clarity and precision with which each movement is executed, juxtaposed with an uncanny sensitivity to subtleties of form and expression…it is his distinctive use of improvisational techniques which accounts for the highly individual quality of his dances…What they have in common is a beauty of abstract movement and complexity of internal structure which combine to create a movement language capable of expressing meaning on many levels…"
[Kathryn Temple, Contact Quarterly]
