I’m moderating a follow up to last year’s “Relevance of the University” Lobby Talk. It’s this Tuesday, 7:30 at Dance Theater Workshop – 219 W. 19th St. Panelists include Juliana May, David Neumann, Jana Feinman, Gerald Casel, and hopefully… Susan Marshall. Lobby Talks are more round table than panel, so come and plan to join in.

My notes from last year: http://www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/blog/2009/04/20/the-conversation-continuesdtw-lobby-talk-the-relevance-of-the-university/

The transcriptions from last year on Critical Correspondence – as part of the University Project I guest edited:

http://www.movementresearch.org/publishing/?q=node/542

http://movementresearch.org/publishing/?q=node/544

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Last night, video installation artists Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons bid farewell to their multi-channel video and sound installation at The Chocolate Factory with a live performance by NYC/HK dance artist, Abby Man-Yee Chan .  “Revolving Twilight” has been in the basement of the LIC theater since early December and was extended until last night.  My experience was of immediate submersion, both from the subterranean locale and the immersive sounds and lights.  With four projectors, several cameras and tv monitors, chalked drawings on the walls, tables with various nautical items, a hanging spyglass, and piles of salt, the artists have created a space that feels haunting and homey, like the captain’s quarters at dusk (oh, or maybe twilight, duh) on a long, cross-Atlantic voyage.

I was particularly held by a video projected onto a screen set inside an old shaft that runs from the basement up into the theater space.  The shaft still has two old, weathered doors and with a ghostly image of Leslie Kraus (with her stunning red hair) shaking inside it, the effect is beautiful.  Later, when Chan stands inside the shaft and the projected video hits her body she begins to glow with a snowy pattern and bears a ghostly arm across her chest.  The live performance was a pretty effective integration of dancer and installation with Chan moving through most of the different spatial environments, handling materials from the tables, and chalking the floor.  Chan veers from ghostly girlishness to sophisticated malaise with ease.  She strikes a stunning figure throughout and strengthens the tonal quality of the images and sounds that surrounded all of us.

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I promised Andy I’d send a bio months ago and instead posted a bunch of APAP blog responses. Since I’m in the midst of prepping and touring to Hawaii (yessss), I’m not seeing anything for the next week and half and can take the moment to add some background. I’m a NYC choreographer, artistic director of Maura Nguyen Donohue/inmixedcompany, assistant professor of dance at Hunter College (please excuse the site, since coming on board in Sep. I’ve taken on revamping – but it’s not published yet) and member of the board for Dance Theater Workshop, where I also served as one of the first DTW/Digital Fellows and as artistic advisor for The Mekong Project, a multi-year exchange and residency program in the US and SE Asia. I wrote for The Dance Insider from the spring of 2000 – fall of 2009, serving as Asian Bureau Chief and senior artistic advisor and covering dance and live performance in NYC, HK, India, Japan and SE Asia.  I also wrote for Dance Magazine, American Theater Journal, NY State Danceforce, and the HK Dance Journal. I was guest editor for Critical Correspondence’s University Project, a series of interviews with dance faculty across the country. Academically, I write about intersections of race, gender, and technology in live movement-based performance and serve on the board of directors for the Congress on Research in Dance. I have both a BA in Anthropology and Dance (’92) and MFA in Choreography and Performance from Smith College where I’ve served as visiting guest artist and teaching fellow. I’ve also been on faculty at Hampshire and Mt. Holyoke Colleges. I have two children.

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Japan Society Artistic Director Yoko Shioya saw Butoh in Jeremy Wade’s Bessie award-winning duet Glory and, though this was not in his movement background, sent him to Tokyo for research and then brought his work there is no end to more (sight unseen) for its world premiere last month.  Last night, it returned to the Japan Society for a one night return engagement.  The hour long solo show is directed and choreographed by Wade in collaboration with performer Jared Gradinger.  Set inside three asymmetrical white walls by Henning Ströh and surrounded by video of manga-inspired illustrations from Hiroki Otsuka and insane talking dogs, kitties, rainbows, photo collages, and more, more, more from video artist Veith Michael, Gradinger spends an hour moving through a series of free-association gestures and movement in between stops at the podium for twisted interludes in a surreal and disgusting children’s show.  During the dance sections, a constantly running voice over careens through an endless stream-of-conscious description of anime-based scenarios and activities, from flying horses to color-coordinated outfits, kissing everyone, and feeling “So Proud.”

Wade plunges into the deep, dark heart of the insidious kawaii (“cute”) culture in Japan – smashing the cheerful, mute Hello Kitty sentiment into the post-nuclear aesthetic of Akira.  Though, in truth, a bit of a lifelong kawaii consumer myself, I had found the overwhelming inanity and aggressive fetishizing of things small, large-eyed, furry, or female exhausting when I first arrived at its mecca.  Wade effectively skewers the constant process of reduction to simplistic, moronic, happy-happy statements via the children’s show scenes and then counters with visuals from Ikea catalogs and an ominous voice-over that details the pyscho-social repercussions of mass consumerism.  The experience is one of assault with the relentless “more” of conformity, the endless “more” material possessions to fill a void, the constant “more” of chatter and noise, the infinite “more” of grand, sweet, absurd, violent comic book worlds all battling to devour us like Boo-Hoo, one of Otsuka’s animated characters who looks like a friendly ghost but confesses to be full of shit and ready to spew at any moment.

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So, I’m running through the door at Hunter College late for rehearsal to remount “Rip It Open” (a work I made for PS122 7 years ago with the intention/expectation of NEVER touring it) for a tour to Hawaii (like I’d turn that down just because I’ve “moved on”) and there’s David Neumann running out the door.  “David. Maura. How are you? And, what are you doing here?” (It’s 11am on a Sunday).  He apparently has a 1-month residency with the Theater Department and though he’s a a well-regarded choreographer (read “dance”), no one thought to inform us six floors up in the Dance Program (that I’ve recently joined as full-time faculty).  Y’know, because it’s a Theater Department residency… PEOPLE – can we get over these ridiculous divisions?

I opted to return at 5pm to see his APAP showing in the Frederick Lowe Theater at Hunter.  Neumann tells us before the showing that an Emory University scientist he has been collaborating with told him there are two kinds of scientists: (1) those who separate and classify things and (2) those who seek connections between phenomena. Ironic, right?

“Big Eater” will premiere at The Kitchen in March and in its current state includes probably 50 minutes of elegant, pastoral dancing and 5 minutes of talking heads.  I’m exaggerating, but only because there is a lot of “dancy” dancing in this multi-media Theater piece.  Neumann is taking on mental appetites for knowledge, for discovery, and – in a shaking-in-my-seat-from-laughter sequence – destruction, as best represented in a re-enactment of the David Hasselhoff’s drunken stupor YouTube video by Neal Medlyn and Andrew Dinwiddie.  Dancers Natalie Agee, Kennis Hawkins, Weena Pauly, and Will Rawls perform extensive dream-like movement sections with a standard grace.  There are many sweeping arms and legs, some formal classical port-de-bras and balletic drama from Agee and Medlyn, and gentle gymnastics from Hawkins.  The projections include negative images of branches that dissolve and reform, sometimes casting luscious shapes on the dancers bodies.  During one of the few “dialogue” scenes, Actors Natalie Agee, Weena Pauly, Neal Medlyn, Andrew Dinwiddie, Kennis Hawkins, and Will Rawls debate, a la pompous academic conference panel, the value of man’s ability to dream beyond our grasp citing our desire to strive for more than we can do as the vital element that separates us from animals.  The interjection of The Drunk works to argue that our appetites can lead to binges and reduce us to primitive behaviors.  Neumann uses the sound from Hasselhoff’s video, a live portrayal of Hasselhoff’s collapsed physicality and ravenous devouring of a Big Mac, and then a progressive deconstruction of the entire scene to tease out the various forces and confusions around such excess. I grabbed burgers on my way home.

Video here.

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First: Andy just wrote this but I’m going to post it again and pretend I said all of these things myself:  It is one thing to review shows, it is quite another to follow the work of an artist over time…worthwhile artists deserve multiple visits, in fact they require multiple visits. It is important when possible to see a body of work, to analyze how it grows and changes over time, to give artists room to grow and change. Sometimes artists succeed sometimes they fail – but to dismiss any single work out of hand is irresponsible. What fascinates me is watching artists wrestle with their obsessions over time and learn from their investigations.  That is the difference, I think, between art as commodity and art as culture – culture needs to be nurtured and needs to be appreciated in context, not merely for its entertainment value in the short term. I’m not particularly interested in consumer-focused entertainment product, I’m interested in long-term discussions over years. We should try and break out of the consumerist trap and be willing to let people “fail” – understanding that it is all a process.

Trajal Harell is an artist who deserves repeated looks. Last night, I brought someone unfamiliar, but highly excited, about his work to see the return of his Vogueing-Postmodern dance mash-up solo as part of the American Realness Festival.  She left last night’s sold-out show at The New Museum a bit disappointed.  I realized he is an acquired taste.  One of today’s serious thinkers about dance, both as editor-in-chief of Movement Research’s Performance Journal and as active working artist, he provokes via minutiae.  His continued explorations into the evolution of Cool, often sheltered in sparse works that reference early postmodern dance investigations, are infamously challenging to the viewer, providing little action or material for consumption.  They can feel like enacted performance studies dissertations – profound, mundane, considered, overblown, thoughtful, tedious, rigorous, indulgent and long. I find this challenge worthwhile and worth a return.  It is not the individual work but how this artist is adding to, reflecting on, and changing our conversation about performance, about the body, about race, gender, and class that I find most interesting.

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You can’t see everything. It’s a shared anxiety among New Yorkers, right. I mean, I know I can’t see everything – especially with a new full-time position, 2 kids and my own creative efforts. So, I’ve decided that Arts Presenters (and all the subsequent festivals that coincide with it) is my new back up plan of choice.  Next year, I might pretend to go away for several days and just see live art for days on end.  This year, I’m just going to shoot for 5 dance programs in 5 days – and then maybe some theater-ish stuff next weekend.

My first stop was with Lee Sher and Saar Harai’s LeeSaar The Company, formed in Israel 2000 and now based here.  “Prima” was at PS122 earlier this fall and is back for a return engagement as an off-site part of The COIL Festival at the Jewish Community Center. If you are a Batsheva addict, LeeSaar will satisfy any bouts of withdrawal in between North American tours.  The Company’s work appears deeply rooted in Naharin’s “Gaga” movement methodology.  A few months ago, Bobbi Smith taught a Gaga workshop at Hunter College while in town for Fall for Dance.  I haven’t been that happy moving since studying butoh in Kazuo Ohno’s little Yokohama studio.  The process takes one far into your own experience – away from visual expectations and typical classroom hierarchies – through individual explorations of mobility, strength, imagination, flexibility, and pleasure.  Oh the pleasure… I was ready to buy a ticket to Israel.

As LeeSaar’s dancers reveal, it also provides a pathway to rich individual expression.  The company begins every rehearsal with a class and that investigatory work leads to a multitude of innovative movement possibilities.  In “Prima,” the edges of violence and sexuality are slid across one another in an often exhilarating display of prowess and prowl.  Hsin-Yi Hsiang opens the work with an arresting solo.  As soon as she begins to undulate, I’m in. Game on. These bodies are going to move, move, move.  Jye-Hwei Lin follows for a brief solo and then Hyerin Lee and Candice Schnurr join for an explosive unison sequence.  All four women achieve a deep mobilization of their spines, oozing in a delicious, sinewy stew of supple dancing.  Their bodies are vessels for luscious manifestations in movement.  They all have access to great physical facility sure, but each dancer extracts her own unique portrayal of ease and awkwardness within the various sequences.  Schnurr stalks through the space with a ferocious sexuality balanced out by Hsiang’s subtle sensuality and kinetic richness.

The work wore on after about half an hour, wandering through various intervals of arbitrary stillness or silence.  The women repeatedly stood looking at the audience with blank expressions.  However, a climatic crawl forward provided a rousing moment of titillation and discomfort as the dancers came very close to the front row and stared, providing me with a few moments to compare the seductive value of a half-opened mouth versus a brazen stare.  These primas are ripe and ready for the picking.  More shows on January 9 (8pm) & 10 (3pm) at the JCC at 76th and Amsterdam. http://www.jccmanhattan.org/category.aspx?catid=1022#20298

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