(via Animal NY) – Next month, director Antoine Viviani is streaming a new documentary about “intervention artists” called In Situ. Filmed mostly in Europe, it would appear, the film explores how artists can invade the urban space to create a transformative artistic experience. Aside from that rather bland description, I unfortunately don’t know much, but visit the film’s website to sign up for email information about its multi-platform (whatever that means) launch next month.

Popularity: 9% [?]

The Neta Dance Company’s upcoming performance, 2280 Pints! (at DTW, May 25-28; tickets $20/$15), is many things. Sparked from Pulvermacher’s response to an installation at the New Museum and borne out of a summer dance workshop at The University of Florida, the piece is a celebration of the company’s 25^th anniversary and a collaboration between dance students and a professional dance company. The hour long piece is comprised of individual sections developed by company members and workshop participants, which have accumulated over the past year from experimentation with buckets. In the performance, a cast of 20 dancers inhabits a playing space of 57 white, five-gallon buckets. I discussed the work with Neta Pulvermacher, founder of The Neta Dance Company, who has created over 75 works and is founder of The A.W.A.R.D. Show! and Dance Conversations @ The Flea.

How did you become a dancer?
I was born and raised on a kibbutz in Israel, a community based on communist ideals. My parents’ generation was amongst the founders. They themselves are from Germany but they immigrated right before World War II. We would work in our little zoo and feed animals, work the land, learn art, musical instruments, and learn to think. When I was 13 I went to a neighboring kibbutz to take a dance class and that’s when I met a wonderful teacher that I’m still friends with. She taught us to listen and choreograph to music and somehow dance stuck.

Why dance?
In some ways because you don’t speak with words. In my upbringing there were so many declarations of ideals that it was so refreshing to have something with very different rules, language which is not verbal. It made me feel that I could say or express things that are difficult to do with words. With music, the ear recognizes a pattern much faster than the eye. It takes a lot more to recognize a pattern in dance because the language is a lot more complex. Dance works with linguistic principles, but it does not have the same exactitude as music. It’s more like poetry. It affects you without having to go through your submission which is another reason why I love it. You could be extraordinarily intelligent or dumb and it affects you without you needing to understand.

What are the origins of 2280 Pints!?
Last May I traveled with 11 of my students who are college dance majors to Israel for a study abroad program. I am originally from Israel and seeing my home country through their eyes was like experiencing it anew for me. I realized how that vitality and intensity of living- both joy and sorrow- is intensified by the fact that there is always an impending sense of violence in that part of the world. Going there with them for three weeks made me aware all over again about the importance of joy and not in a hokey kind of way.  Coming back home to New York City for a short time, I was going to direct a summer dance intensive in Florida for two weeks. I was tired and I didn’t feel like revisiting anything and not sure what I would work on. I read in the New York Times a review of the Rivane Neuenschwander retrospective at the New Museum and saw a picture of her piece, “Rain Rains.” I had to go see it. I walked into this room and it looked like it was raining buckets but in each of those buckets she drilled a hole, so the bucket dripped into identical buckets underneath. It was both visual rain and the sound of rain drops- very beautiful and whimsical. Then on Saturday I flew to Florida and on Sunday I said, “I don’t know what’s with these buckets, but there’s something.” So I went to Walmart and bought 30 $5 plain white buckets. I spread it on the studio floor and not a minute passed and the ceiling began to leak. There was something wrong with the AC. It was very funny.

How does this piece relate to your previous work?
I always think of my work like I’m a scientist in that there is something I research. Being in the studio and investigating is my job. I deconstruct the thing to its smallest ingredient and set it up in a way where it begins to interact and play.  I let it start to happen and I lift my hands and that’s when I see what it is. Inspiration comes from causing and enabling interactions between people, space, matter, ideas, and feelings. Those interactions are always relational. If I’m trying to understand what we make, it’s about the power of the imagination to see things other than what they are in relationship to other things and make an action in relation to another action or object. I’ve made a lot of dances, but this is not me being smart, cool, hip, I don’t’ give a shit anymore. I just want to make something that is vital and open, without any fear. To release a smile in a person’s face, a real deep body smile is a big deal.

Is your ultimate hope for this piece to convey and inspire joy?
It’s much more than joy. It’s a bucket world. It’s a micro world created with buckets, activated by people and music. It’s not fancy. The fanciness of it comes from your ability as a viewer to go with the idea that the bucket will become anything you want it to be. It’s trying to strip human behavior and show it through buckets. The buckets become human and the dancers become more human because of their relationship to them. The imperfections become accentuated because the buckets are uniform. I wanted to make something that would be generous and open. It’s unapologetically accessible without trying hard to be that. To get to that simplicity is a long journey. Mostly I just want you to be enthralled by the end of it that you would join us in the dance party.

2280 Pints!
Performed by: The Neta Dance Company: Courtney Baron, Robin Brown, Karen Harvey, Colette Krogol-Reeves, Meghan Merrill, Lonnie Poupard, Matthew Reeves, Rebecca Warner; special guests; and students from the University of Florida MOD project – a student ensemble directed by Pulvermacher at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Wednesday – Saturday, May 25 – 28, 2011 at 7:30pm. Family matinee on Saturday, May 28 at 2pm.  Tickets are $20, or $15 for students, seniors and children.

Tickets are available by calling 212.924.0077 or online at www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/Neta_Dance

Popularity: 4% [?]

Race & “Contemporary Performance”: Last week, I published a long-ish piece wondering why, given the roadblocks in traditional theater, more black theater artists weren’t creating work in non-traditional modes. The response was actually extremely interesting–J. Holtham (99 Seats) offered a long and very thoughtful response over at Parabasis; Culture Future had a pair of responses (one and two); and in comments, African-American artist Daniel Alexander Jones politely pointed out that (as I kind of expected), I may just not know about the variety of artists making work in these veins, and gave me a host of people I need to check out. Part of the problem I encountered was defining what I was actually talking about, because in the end, “contemporary performance” is a pretty weak term. Still, I think it spoke to the text-centric bias of most theater artists; I was mostly aiming for a negative definition, modes of theater production that fell outside the normal tracks. But overall, all of it is very worth reading, and it’s a conversation that needs to be continued.

In Yer Face: Another fine and thought-provoking piece over at the Guardian‘s theater blog. Although it’s mostly framed as a piece on playwright Philip Ridley (with whom I’m only vaguely aware but now far more interested), what really caught my eye was the author’s almost off-hand analysis of Ridley’s historical moment in the early-Nineties, when a host of groundbreaking playwrights led by the likes of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill (lumped under the name “In-Yer-Face Theater” by at least one critic) burst onto the scene:

That generation of writers was somewhat cast into shadow by two things. Periodically, British theatre is gripped by the thought that playwriting is dead and devising will save us all; these moments usually pass but before they do they tend to lay waste to a few promising writers. The early 90s was such a time.

Given the back and forth in several contexts I’ve had recently over playwriting vs. non-playwright-centric modes, I found myself mulling over this thought. The arts are prone to hyperbole, and we’re always going over why this or that is “dying.” However, I think it’s true that energy shifts around from mode to mode over time. Whether there’s a logic to it, I don’t know. But periodically playwriting seems to fall into a rut, at least in some places and circles, which may or may not be the same elsewhere (America in the Sixties, for instance), and energy and innovation shifts from one space to another. I wonder if my present exasperation with text-based theater has more to do with a sense that most of the major work I see coming out just isn’t that urgent, and that I might be turning a blind eye to the reality that there’s probably a new generation out there chomping at the bit and who will blow up in a few years’ time.

Seattle’s Intiman Theater Dying?: I mention this only in passing because it concerns me in a past life (when I covered theater in Seattle) and because I think it’s an interesting case study in funding, arts management, and so on. The Intiman, one of Seattle’s three major LORT houses, is shuttering its doors for the rest of the season. Why? Well, no one really knows because the backstory is convoluted and theater’s board and management has behaved with varying levels of incompetence and–it would seem–mendacity. The news broke several months ago when a playwright/blogger published as-yet unsubstantiated rumors of the company–formerly AD’d by Broadway darling Bart Sher and currently by Broadway darling Kate Whoriskey, of Ruined fame–forced their hand. Apparently for several years they’d been dipping heavily into the endowment, and declared they needed a million dollars in additional funds to keep the theater open this year. The fault was largely laid with an abruptly departed managing director, and the endowment was emptied to pay back union dues and rent on the theater’s home. Since the beginning of the year, the Intiman leant heavily on the community pony up half a million dollars before the first of several deadlines, and although the first deadline was met, they still recently announced they were canceling the rest of the season based on the advice of their new management guru. In fact, it seems like a standard playbook that was used several years ago to save Seattle’s ACT Theater, and the (largely accurate, with hindsight) rumor mill had it that they were only staying open to beg money off the community and planned to shut down for a while from the beginning. But that was always just a rumor. In fact, no one has any idea how bad things really are at the Intiman because information only comes out piecemeal, a nice reminder that non-profit arts groups are often not actually public trusts but, in reality, just businesses with a non-profit model, every bit as prone to evasion, deceit, and managerial and fiscal incompetence as any other.

Odds & Ends: East of Borneo with a great piece on the correspondence of Roberto Bolano and Enrique Lihn (yes, it involves lists) - Exeunt mag (UK) on the line-up of the 2011 Pulse Fest – Dance/USA’s e-journal’s continuing series on self-producing dance shows – TCG Circle on “transmedia,” complete with serious cultural biases – Critical Correspondence interviews the artists of MGM Grand, whose show opens tonight (April 20) at the Kitchen – Bellyflop interviews Australian choreographer Rosalind Crisp.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Mike Daisey's "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" at Berkley Rep.

In the Studio: I have something I like to call the “Facebook rule”–I post links to articles on Facebook all the time, and if one of them takes off with tons of comments, no matter how innocuous I think the subject is, then I figure there’s actually something interesting there. Case in point, this little piece from the Guardian‘s theater blog. Now, I don’t want to get bogged down in the details (ballet vs. contemporary, etc.), suffice it to say that what I found interesting was the initial premise: “Whenever I have an opportunity to interview a director or choreographer,” the author writes, “I always ask if I can watch them rehearse. The theatre chaps usually decline.” Choreographers, on the other hand, are less wont to do so. That’s definitely been my experience as well, which I’ve always found interesting. Admittedly, a number of dancers and choreographers made clear that there’s a big part of their process that’s off limits, but I’ve been in rehearsal for run-throughs, techs, and even setting work on brand new dancers. I’ve never been invited to watch so much as a run-through of an experimental piece before opening night. So come on Culturebot readers, give us your thoughts. That’s what comments are for.

Challenge vs. Abuse: Over at Parabasis, Issac Butler has an interesting little note about a conversation he had with a director about “the whole theatre artists saying they want to make challenging work, and he said ‘well, it depends on whose definition of challenging you’re using. What community is being challenged? And by whom? And how do you define what is challenging?’” Butler lays out his dichotomy: it’s one thing to be challenging by pushing your audience in uncomfortable ways, another to just plain abuse them. For my part, though, I think it risks becoming a cop-out to suggest that context is the only delineator, because theater is usually preaching to the choir. Avant-garde work is usually about as challenging for its audiences as the sort of thing you see at a regional theater or on Broadway, because audiences self-select. The real question that’s unasked is, “How entertaining should it be?” Because it’s the entertainment value–which, if you want to be cultured, is often an act of paying to see a “challenging” show–that keeps the butt in seats, which is precisely why I see the logic of actually abusing your audience: the difference between “challenging” and “abuse” is often just another way of delineating whether the artists kept up their end of a transaction.

Terry Teachout, Playwright?: Well, maybe he already was (probably, in fact) but I didn’t know. I have, however, appreciated his work as a critic (for the Journal and online) for quite a while, and was surprised to learn he’s deep into a residency at Rollins College working on a one-man-show about the relationship between Louis Armstrong and his manager Joe Glaser. Which, um, well, let’s help the WIP showing goes well for Teachout, because it’s his first time directing, and even a seasoned actor may need some help flipping back and forth. But what particularly caught me was this comment: “The play itself is probably not what you’d expect. Most one-man shows about famous people are unchallenging, sweet-tempered exercises in hagiography. Not Satchmo at the Waldorf. I’ve tried to show Armstrong as he really was and make him speak the way he really spoke–this is absolutely not a show for kids, unless you’re the kind of parent who’d take your kids to see American Buffalo–and I’ve also tried to suggest the knotty complexity of his quasi-filial relationship with Glaser, an ex-gangster from Chicago who ran his career with an iron hand.” Teachout has a stellar rep for being one of the most engaged critics with mainstream American theater, so if he’s saying that, I can only assume he’s actually pushing some buttons.

Steve Jobs’ Agony Doesn’t Stop Mike Daisey: Monologist and former Culturebot contributor Mike Daisey will go ahead with the new show he’s been touring, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which opens this week at Berkley Rep (in rep with The Last Cargo Cult), despite the fact that his subject recently announced he was stepping down indefinitely as CEO of Apple to pursue medical treatment. This is…not a story. Except to point out to California readers they can go see the show. Mike Daisey may be many things, but a shock-jock he ain’t. Whatever tiny lumps he may throw Steve Jobs’s way, Jobs no doubt earned them, along with his billions.

The A.W.A.R.D. Show, LA: Choreographer Barak Marshall and Body Traffic won the LA edition of The A.W.A.R.D. Show, earning a tidy $10K grant to make new work. Congrats! Insofar as it helps out emerging-ish artists produce work, I’m all for it, and next week the show turns to my old hometown of Seattle.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Hand2Mouth Theater's Erin Leddy in "My Mind Is Like An Open Meadow" playing Portland, Oregon's Fertile Ground Festival

Political Theatre’s Big: There’s a lot of buzz these days about political theatre right now, what with Belarus Free Theatre (whose NYC-run at Under the Radar ends this weekend) having become a cause celebre, the Iranians having shut down Hedda Gabler for its obscene content, and the ongoing clusterfuck in Hungary as a right-wing government maintains its commitment to Arrow Cross-style suppression Western democratic norms. The idea that theatre can challenge the dominant paradigm has Western artists swooning, though as I’ve pointed out before, if you don’t live in police state that denies the majority its voice, choir preaching doesn’t count as effective political engagement.

Toronto Dance Fights Its Isolation: All performance is local. It’s the magic of the live arts. Of course, the irony is that any locality has only a limited amount of funds, so the dream for any serious contemporary performance artist is the sought-after tour circuit. Disappointed by a lack of local festivals showcasing their talent, Toronto’s dance community has set up their own showcase, going down this weekend, both for the public and–more importantly–eight or so presenters from “Ireland, Germany and Canada.”

The A.W.A.R.D. Show SF: Last night, everyone’s favorite-cum-totally last year’s news dance competition The A.W.A.R.D. Show kicked off in SF at ODC, where 12 Bay Area choreographers compete for up to $10,000 in grant money. Unfortunately, we don’t know too many of them, but there’s at least two artists this author is familiar with, both of whom are up tomorrow: Jacinta Vlach of Liberation Dance Theater, a socially and politically engaged dance company who was SF’s contribution to the SCUBA National Tour Network last year, and Jodi Lomask of capacitor performance, a company that produces work by engaging with scientists and whose Biome, about the sub-ecosystem of the rainforest canopy, was a remarkably cool piece of performance. Merde to all involved.

Portland Theatre Fest: Next week, Portland, Oregon’s Fertile Ground Festival kicks off, ten days of new work by area artists. In my experience (and it’s my hometown, but I haven’t lived there for ten years), Portland is a really odd place to make art–cheap rents and a super hip, laid back urban core makes it a great place to live and make work, but it suffers from a depressing lack of arts infrastructure with only a nascent ecology for supporting new work. A glance at the line-up suggests that Fertile Grounds is almost like a Portland fringe fest, but there’s at least one show I know is a stand-out: Erin Leddy’s My Mind Is Like an Open Meadow. Leddy’s a member of Portland’s most prominent devised theatre company Hand2Mouth, and has become the second member to develop a solo show in the company’s laboratory, following fellow H2M artist Faith Helma, who brough her solo vocal performance adaptation of Undine to the then-Ontological-Hysteric Incubator in ’09. Leddy’s show debuted in a festival format at On the Boards in Seattle in June, and pretty much everyone agreed it was a stand-out, so if you’re in Portland, be sure to check it out.

10 Things for Dance to Be Thinking About: DanceUSA has a list of ten things to be on every dance company’s mind this year, and while I don’t agree with all of Marc Kirschner’s analyses (nor with exclusion of, um, us from his list of “new media” sites covering dance), it’s as good a starting place as I can imagine.

CBOT News: Just a friendly reminded: this Saturday at 3 p.m., our own founding editor Andy Horwitz is moderating a panel discussion exploring the relationship between Tennessee Williams and avant-garde theatre. Coinciding with Travis Chamberlain’s chamber production of Green Eyes starring Erin Markey (and with the Wooster Group’s Vieux Carre coming up at BAC next month), the panel includes Chamberlain, Elizabeth LeCompte, Moises Kaufman, and and David Herskovitz. It takes place at the Museum of Arts and Design; RSVP by emailing nycgreeneyes(at)gmail.com.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Michael Kiley, Meg Foley (photos), Shannon Murphy, Christina Zani, Joshua Delpech-Ramey in Nichole Canuso Dance's "As the Eye of the Seahorse"

Nichole Canuso Dance Company’s As the Eyes of the Seahorse, a collaboration with the band The Mural and the Mint, last night at HERE Arts Center. The show continues Dec. 10 and 11, with shows at 7 p.m. and 11  p.m. (tickets $15/$20). Canuso was kind enough to take a few minutes to answer some questions for Culturebot.

From what I gather, the piece started out as a performance with your husband, Michael Kiley, of The Mural and the Mint, which you’ve developed into the show you’re presenting here. When you’re choreographing for someone else’s music, what’s the relationship between the movement and the music? How do you bring that together and what are you adding through choreography?

I’ve been gathering dancers to perform short dances to the live concerts of The Mural and The Mint for several years now.  But in the past there has been a dance to only one or two songs during the concert.  Eventually we decided to make an evening-length project bringing dance into focus throughout the set: “As the Eyes of the Seahorse” was born.

TM&TM’s music is soulfull, hopefull, full of depth and full of beauty.  There is complexity in the musicianship but a clarity and simplicity in tone.

I try to match these qualities in the choreography.  I’m aiming to create movement that allows the presence and openness of the performers to come forward without overpowering the presence of the band.

One of the things I’ve read is that the piece breaks down the distinction between musician and dancer–musicians will be moving and dancers will be playing instruments, right?

We really perform as an ensemble (musicians and dancers), overlapping in space and following one anothers cues.  The musicians join in the choreography quite a bit and the dancers sing on several songs but there is no instrument swapping.

You both grew up in and remain based in Philadelphia. How is Philadelphia as a place to make art–and dance more specifically?

I grew up in Philadelphia.  Mike moved to Philadelphia as an adult.

It’s the ideal community for the work we are creating.  There is a great deal of support from foundations, audience members and peers for cross disciplinary explorations.  There’s an abundance of exciting hybrid work being created right now and audiences are really ready for it.

How do you try to engage your audience when you’re creating work?

It varies, but I always keep the audience in mind. For a while I was known for creating humorous dances, acknowledging the audience through eye contact during the performance.   As my work shifted tone and direction I remained interested in the exchange between the audience and the performer.  I wanted to explore the range of this interaction.

About four years ago I created a work Wandering Alice as an immersive performance in which 20 audience members at a time were led on a journey through several floors of a building.  A cast of 13 dancers and musicians performed in an around the audience allowing them to be surrounded, to enter the work and to fill in the visual picture of the dance.

TAKES was a performance (performed by myself and Dito VanReigersberg) in the evenings and a gallery by day.  The gallery was an interactive performance for two participants at a time:  aural instructions that led the two participants to create their own duet inside the live-feed video installation we’d created.

What should people know about Nichole Canuso?

Although I guide each process I invite collaborative creation.  I believe in acknowledging the qualities that make each collaborative team unique and try to create space for all the intelligence in the room.  Creating “As the Eyes of the Seahorse” has been a warm and rewarding experience.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I’m a little late to the party, but since I wrote a piece on the issues involved in talking about how artists look a while back, I’m going to throw in my two cents’ worth. On November 28, the Times’ dance critic Alastair Macaulay invited a storm of criticism when he took issue with the weight of two of the performers in NYCB’s Nutcracker. On December 3, he wrote a response defending his decision to comment on the weight of performers, full of allusions to visual art, reference to gender, and so on.

Now, I’m probably not the first person to make this point, but in my own humble opinion, it’s not that Macaulay’s point is entirely invalid, it’s that what he actually wrote was completely asinine. Jenifer Ringer “looked as if she’d eaten one sugarplum too many”? Jared Angle “seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm”? That’s what passes for serious criticism these days?

Look, the reality is that on one level, he’s right–the performer’s build in dance is important, and particularly in the high stakes world of professional ballet. It’s a reality, and it’s part of the cost of making art that we sometimes have a lot of trouble talking about, mostly because we like to think of art as good, versus more commerical pursuits as bad. We criticize fashion for creating negative body images in women, but art is supposed to be empowering, right? Never mind that dance is a terrible thing to do to your body, and ballet in particular. (I once asked a burlesque dancer about what it was like to perform complex choreography in six inch heels; her succinct response was that it wasn’t half as bad for her feet as performing in point shoes).

A while back I was talking to a widely noted choreographer about his reputation for being particularly hard on his female dancers. His response, and I’m paraphrasing here, was basically that, “Yeah, I’m hard on you. But that’s what you signed up for, because that’s what the work demands, so I don’t want to talk to the person who’s complaining right now, I want to talk to the person who auditioned and wanted to work with me.”

That may seem insensitive (and is probably blunter than he actually put it), but he’s right. If you want to achieve a certain art, a certain style, a certain aesthetic, there’s a cost. I won’t argue it’s necessary or better than ones more forgiving to the body (or different body types), but that’s just how it is. Art is perceived and judged by its finished product, and if something like the weight of a dancer affects that meaningfully, well then it does.

Criticism, however, is also judged on its finished product, and Macaulay’s defense on Friday was a lame example of trying to justify how he said what he said by arguing he was right. I don’t suppose I’m in any position to tell the Times’ dance critic how to write, but I do tend to think he said what he said because of the convenience of turning a phrase, allowing what he chose a week later to portray as high-minded criticism to become nothing more than snarky ridicule, and personally I think the accomplishment of being a lead NYCB dancer should probably earn someone sufficient respect to be above being mocked by one of the most influential dance critics in the country. It would be easier to appreciate his defense and response if it wasn’t just an intellectual justification for being flippant in the first place.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The New York Dance and Performance Awards, aka THE BESSIES, return after last year’s hiatus. The ceremony will take place on Monday October 18, 2010 at Symphony Space in Manhattan.

Dance work from the last two seasons will be honored, and there will be speeches and announcements from esteemed members of New York’s wide ranging dance world on the new and improved vision for the Bessie Awards going forward. All lovers of dance are invited! Admission is free. Tickets will be available soon on the Symphony Space site.

Established in 1983, the New York Dance and Performance Awards or Bessie Awards—in honor of the treasured dancer and teacher Bessie Schonberg— acknowledge outstanding creative work by independent artists in the fields of dance and related performance in New York City.

They honor exceptional choreography, performance, music composition, visual design and others areas of dance and performance. The awards are currently determined by the Bessie Awards Committee, which consists of artists, dance presenters, producers, journalists, critics and academics.

The awards were initiated by David White and originally produced by Dance Theater Workshop (DTW). In recent years have been co-administered and produced by DTW, Danspace Project, and The Joyce Theater.

The New York Dance and Performance Awards were suspended for 2008-09 season. During this hiatus, the producers began the work of re-imagining the awards to better meet the needs of both the dance/performance community and the public and to retain and enhance the value of the awards.

Popularity: 1% [?]

In September 2008, 150 feet below the earth’s surface, at the bottom of a massive granite quarry in Waite Park, Minnesota, legendary dance innovator Merce Cunningham staged Ocean, one of the largest, most ambitious works of his 60-year career. This landmark performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) was presented by the Walker Art Center together with the Benedicta Arts Center of the College of Saint Benedict and Northrop Dance at the University of Minnesota. On the two-year anniversary of this epic production, the public is invited to join renowned filmmaker and longtime Cunningham collaborator Charles Atlas at the Walker for the world premiere screening of Ocean, Atlas’ extraordinary film of that performance, on Wednesday, September 15, at 7 pm in the Walker Cinema. With Cunningham’s death in July 2009, the release of Atlas’ new documentary will be the final living record of this stunning work, which was performed by MCDC in the round, with 150 musicians from the St. Cloud Symphony Orchestra performing an orchestral score realized by Andrew Culver (inspired by John Cage) and electronic score by David Tudor. The ticket price includes a post-screening reception with the filmmaker and a cash bar for all ticket-holders. Proceeds from this historic event will benefit the Cunningham Dance Foundation’s Legacy Plan.

Ocean culminates 40 years of collaboration between Cunningham and Atlas, who first began working together during the early 1970s. Atlas served as MCDC’s filmmaker-in-residence from 1974 through 1983, and it was during these years that Atlas and Cunningham pioneered the genre of the “film dance”–in which the choreography is deliberately altered to take advantage of the perspectives and cinematic possibilities afforded by the camera. The last film Atlas made with Cunningham, Ocean beautifully captures the monumental performance of Cunningham’s landmark work.

This premiere is a benefit for the Cunningham Dance Foundation’s Legacy Plan.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Kate Weare's "Bright Land," Leslie Kraus and Douglas Gillespie foreground. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Last night’s performance at the Joyce Theatre—the other half of the alternating double-bills they’re running this week—is a perfect illustration of what I was writing about yesterday when I faulted Camille A. Barnes’ choreography for relying too heavily on the music, and letting her own voice get lost against the structure and content of the score. Kate Weare‘s Bright Land serves as a brilliant contrast. She, too, sets out to work with a distinct musical style, setting the piece opposite a live bluegrass band. But aside from an occasional visual reference to traditional folkdancing, Weare lets her company of four extremely gifted dancers work in a manner completely distinct from the aesthetic suggested by the music.

Weare establishes the tone quickly: as Bright Land opens, the band playing a tune upstage right, the four dancers, two male and two female, come in and form pairs around a square of light on the floor. But nearly as soon as the traditional square dance has been suggested, Weare changes the mood, sending the two male dancers into a intense bit of floor work.

There are a lot of wonderful parts of Bright Land as Weare competently leads you through the dramatic flow of the roughly 45-minute piece. Marlena Penny Oden and Douglas Gillespie perform a fantastic duet, Oden by turns playing fierce and then vulnerable, while singer Jeff Kazor, whose gravelly voice recalls Nick Cave, growls a ballad that reaches for the upper limits of his range, the slight cracking of his voice adding a poignant touch to the song’s yearning moroseness.

Bright Land plays across more than a dozen songs, giving Weare plenty of room to explore different moods and themes. Toward the end, she works some beautiful sculptural magic with the ensemble performing in silhouette. And my personal favorite moment followed a pas de deux in which dancer Leslie Kraus wound up straddling her partner lying on the floor, leaning up at an angle to face her. As the music finishes, she suddenly lurches forward, headbutting him in the chest, the dull thud reverberating in the theatre. Three or four headbutts later, she’s beat him down to the floor, each blow, followed by a long pause, evoking something powerful and feminine that would have been lost had Weare relied too much on traditional dance forms and their gender roles, which was throughout a subtext to the work.

Monica Bill Barnes‘s Another Parade was a slightly less ambitious work but one that surprised me by the end. Barnes’s company of four female dancers are all dressed in similar, slightly frumpy outfits (turtleneck sweaters and wool skirts—you have to give them credit for performing in those costumes in this weather alone). The dancers begin and frequently return to slightly stilted, closed postures, but over the course of the piece (which alternates between inward looking, expressionistic sequences set to classical music and outward, socially focused bits set to pop by James Brown and Elvis), through establishing a sort of group support system, they encourage one another to open up and sort of let it all out.

The press notes describe the piece as being a “celebration” of the joy of being onstage, but you could read it just as well as a narrative about young women struggling to express themselves in a social situation that discourages their individuality. Or in other words, a story about wallflowers at a party. Another Parade opens with Celia Rowlson-Hall soloing stiffly across the stage, making guarded, almost threatening eyes at the audience, and flashing the occasional bit of midriff.

That action becomes a motif throughout, the four women risking exposing themselves onstage (in a rather tame and metaphorical way, through pulling up their sweaters to expose stomach or flashing a bit of shoulder). At first, I was nervous that the comic, fourth-wall breaking components would eventually render the piece a saccharine-sweet story about young women overcoming their fear of embarrassment and learning to respect themselves and love their bodies. But while that is a part of it, ultimately Barnes allows so much richness to be developed throughout, and juggles the comedy with personal expressiveness so deftly, that by the end, when the four women grab partners from the audience to dance with onstage, the potentially cheesy bit plays precisely because you’ve be won over—a not too shabby feat.

The joint bill of Monica Bill Barnes and Kate Weare plays again Thurs., Aug. 12 and Sat., Aug. 14 in an alternating repertory with works by Andrea Miller/Gallim Dance and Camille A. Barnes. Saturday, there’s a “family friendly” matinee featuring selections from all four choreographers.See here for tickets.

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