Dean Moss’ premieres “Nameless Forest” this week and next (Thursday-Saturday, May 19-21 and May 26-28, 8 pm) at The Kitchen. Part rite-of-passage, part meditation on the evolving processes of contemporary performance, it was developed in collaboration with Korean sculptor Sungmyung Chun and features dancers Kacie Chang, Eric Conroe, Aaron Hodges, Pedro Jiménez, DJ McDonald and Sari Nordman. In work also incorporates diary entries from photojournalist Mike Kamber, neon effects from visual artist Gandalf Gavan, an original score by Stephen Vitiello, costumes by Roxana Ramseur, and lighting and technical design by Vincent Vigilante. We spoke briefly last week.

So, you’re loading in this week and premiering the work, but it’s had many showings ASU, MANCC, and recently at Yale. But you’re in the final gathering of everything for it, right? Yes. We had three preview performances at Yale. That was a great out of town showing for a very supportive group of students and public. The Kitchen is the premiere after a week in the space and I’m very excited to have the time to ensure that the technical aspects and performers are working well in the space. So, I’m very excited to be presenting it, hosting it. I feel like I’m sharing something with my audience. It’s as if there is a gift that you’ve worked hard on, that you know is a very nice gift and you’ve gotten this very nice gift for someone you know very well and you are about to present it to them and that’s how that’s how I feel about this work.

What do you mean about the work as a meditation? It is a meditation on the work of my collaborator. The meditation is not only what I think his work means, but also what it is in the space and within the circumstances of its presentation. I start to think about myself in relationship to it, my own experience of it including what’s not in the work and what is tangentially related to the work. One can be thinking of all of these other things. It takes his exhibitions and installations into a whole other realm of experience and that process of moving from one thing to another becomes the work. The rite of passage is a method to experience the work. The work is set up for some fraction of the audience to navigate through it physically and that journey can be seen as a rite-of-passage. The passage is witnessed by the rest of the audience, but the witnessing that the audience does is like watching a ceremony that you may or may not know all the parts to. You are probably coming a way from it with an impression of how difficult this journey is. Whereas the person navigating through it may have a different experience. One primarily of the embrace that their community is giving them, the support that they are being extended. The off stage audience sees one thing and onstage audience sees another. It’s very embracing, very intimate onstage.

You have been constructing carefully considered methods for making the audience experience integral to your work. I was deeply appreciative of it during Kisaeng becomes you. What is it about this careful bringing in that interests you? I’m interested in vulnerability again as I was in Kisaeng. If you want to get at that and at compassion and at these intimate details of someone’s emotional lives, I think it’s important that the participants feel safe and I think having a community that values that enables that.

How did you come to collaborate with Sungmyung Chun? And, how did you work
together? It’s important to see his work. He makes figurative sculptures. They are the size of a child and often have his face on them, an adult head on a child’s body. The figure is often wounded – light scrapes, a little blood. As you go through his exhibition, these wounds seem self-inflicted. You never see that activity, but you have this sense that there’s no one else doing this to the figures. His work is presented not as individual pieces but as whole installations. So you see scenes. He very much likes to think of himself as a storyteller and he uses these stories to explore existential being. I was at the beginning of Kisaeng, walking the streets of Seoul and I came across his gallery. I went in, saw his work and thought it was fantastic and would make a fantastic performance work. I left my name and he speaks little English and I speak no Korean so we had a friend translating and we hit it off. He watched the making of Kisaeng. In 2007, I saw his work, then made Kisaeng and then came back in 2009 to work together with him. It’s taken a long time. Working together was and continues to be relatively easy beyond language where we alway use a translator. The idea is strong and we quickly found that we could be flexible and patient with it’s physical development. Also practically we did a lot of traveling. I have flown Sungmyung and his associate Hyangsuk Choi to the states five times in the past two years. I have gone to Korea twice during the same time. So we put high value on being together in the space and looking at the work. Part of the process was in the selection of the transferable elements of Sungmyung’s work. Asking what was going to make a transfer onto the stage that can be about more than merely animating his characters. With figures on a field, Laylah Ali and I found out right away not to do the big green heads from her pictures. With Kisaeng we wanted to avoid the dancers being seen romantically as traditional artist courtesans. With this piece, the narrative that I conceived was kind of a parallel, not based entirely on the narrative of the original work. We broke down that narrative to disrupt and comment on it. Some early inspiration was taken from the structure of Rashomon. There was some early inspiration taken from the structure of Indonesian hindu rites in Bali. We both wanted the audience onstage and that meant that if the audience is onstage how we incorporate them must be significant. The audience becomes the core of the work. You’re inviting the audience onstage and you’re creating a frame with dancers for bringing the audience in. The work originally developed in a different way. We had a showing at the Kitchen that didn’t work entirely. So, I changed the master narrative or the primary metaphor: the underlying logic of the work. The original metaphor was trying to create community with our onstage audience. That became extremely unclear when we showed it – for me and for many who saw it in process and they were right – how are you going to get from here to there. I was faced with this aesthetic problem – how do you keep what you have onstage in this specialized environment and make a circumstance or framework for community. So there became these questions: What’s the community? What’s the relationship between the performers themselves and this thing they are trying to embody on stage? What is it that artists do in their communities? Why does a community, dance community, artist community – why do they care about individual feelings and the artifact of those feelings? Why does that matter was a big question. So by changing the primary metaphor to a place of initiation – ritual of passage – allows the performers to be the performers. It allows them to take their place within this specialized space and allows us to shepherd our guests and introduce them to this space in a very specific personal way.

You’ve also included several other elements. What fed that? Sumyung’s original images and installations have a pure kind of form and are editorially very straightforward. He’s really cut into his sense of self within a particular world. There’s not a lot of comment on it or distance from him. He has an interesting humor, but the work is a sincere and straightforward interior dialogue. In bringing it onto the stage, I was aware that people in the role of his figures will carry a more complex sense of presence and that there’ll automatically be a commentary. If you are a single visual artist and making work, it can be about yourself but if I take that intimate existential idea and put it on other people it becomes about other voices. So, I wanted those other voices to help form the structure of the work. The performance of Nameless forest is in three parts: the first part is homage to Sumyung’s world. It is the longest section and there’s a kind of journey well depicted. In the 2nd part, the narrative (his internal narrative) is replaced with the photojournalist Mike Kamber’s diary entries. Mike’s been in many conflicted places. (We’re friends from the early 80s when we used to squat buildings together.) He gave me his audio diaries from when he was in Somalia. Using Mikes diary entries as score the performers dance a choreographic variation on the first section. The third section is like a ritual epilogue. It sets up the work in a timeless sort of way and then it asks for a kind of participation from the audience to again fill in the narrative. The audience themselves, their own narratives complete the work.

Popularity: 4% [?]

As Executive Artistic Director and Producer Robin Staff joked with me just before Nicole Wolcott and Vanessa Walter’s Alley of the Dolls, seen last Thursday night at Joe’s Pub as part of DanceNow’s Spring Featured Artist Series: “Nicole just wants to be a rock star.” And, as dancers go, Wolcott is one – fast, hot and unrelenting. But, she’s also a comedic gemstone and in Alley of the Dolls she shines with a slyly welcoming smile as one half of the mini-dressed, big-platinum-wigged, high-heeled twin “dolls” who lead us through the evening’s collection of song, dance, gossip and glam with fembot precision.

However, Walter’s is the twin with a ferocious edge. Wolcott is a star, no doubt. But, Walter’s rocks. Though both performing the same movement vocabulary, she’s clearly wielding the satirical knife – out for blood and ready to cut down ‘our’ idols. Satire is not an easy artistic choice. The work was promoted as a satirical comment on “making it.” However, the bite of satire, its clear ridicule of its subject, doesn’t often make for as much fun as my cocktail and dinner enhanced evening was. And, if anything, the DanceNow programming at Joe’s is meant to be a lot of fun. Alley of the Dolls succeeds in playing with the cabaret setting, creating a party atmosphere by having the dancers (Leslie Cuyjet, Joe Shepard, Stephanie Dixon, Katie Rayle, Gia Mele, and a delightful scene stealing Timothy Edwards) mingling among the audience and helping themselves to patrons’ cocktails during the show. However, except for one ex-Rockette’s (Rayle) bitter expose on boob jobs and costume-created orgasms and Walter’s unwaveringly intimidating and pitiless persona, the ridicule inherent in satirizing the desire for fame is less present in a work that plays out as more of a delightful pastiche.

What I sense isn’t the use of comedy to truly skewer fame-seeking in a socio-political way, but more of a send-up of the realities of backstage bickering and a not-so-latent desire to achieve what the makers are making fun of. The original trashiness of the sources – Jacqueline Susann’s novel-turned-film Valley of the Dolls and one of my long-time late night Russ Meyer favorites (after Faster Pussycat, of course) Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – isn’t derided so much as it is amplified in a work ripe with delicious cattiness, cleavage, high heels, and big big hair. So, with semantic nit-picking aside, I notice that Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream frames both the pre- and post-show moments, and can easily see the work as the realization of playful teen desires as understood through the lens of now-veteran artists. We all remember how much we wanted to walk a runway of adoring fans (crunching the bones of our competitors) with wind blown hair and sparkling dresses, but now can measure the human cost of that dream.

Popularity: 8% [?]

This weekend, Levi Gonzales premiers his first completed work in 4 years at Brooklyn Arts Exchange.  The result of a year-long BAX Artist Residency, “Intimacy” is a solo performance that uses text, meditation and movement and was developed in collaboration with dramaturg Susan Mar Landau. I spoke with him briefly this morning.

I read in your recent Brooklyn Eagle interview that there were substantial financial issues, in addition to your artistic interest that fed the choice to make solo work. Can you talk a bit more about that? It was partly financial. I am still in debt from clusterfuck in 2007. I’ve been thinking about how to create a working process where I don’t compromise because of money and I’m working within my means. I don’t want to completely llimit myself to money, but keeping things within the realm of where resources are available without forcing myself to do less was an interesting challenge. Doing a solo seemed like it would be great with this residency. I didn’t have to worry about paying many people and I could just dig in. The way I make material is something I wanted to focus on. The role of being a director is more complicated than focusing on what it is about dance that I’m interested in. Also, knowing that I will soon be doing a group piece soon gave me permission to do a solo.

I’m interested in your use of meditation in the work. I recently wrote about watching performance as a meditative practice in response to Andy’s ‘watching performance as a spiritual act’ which was a response to Claudia LaRocco’s inspiring piece in the Brooklyn Rail about consciousness. The meditation that I’m doing is partially out of personal need. I’ve been very interested in Buddhism in the past year. It’s been a rough couple years in personal and artistic ways. I had one foot in dance and one foot out. I’ve been reconnecting to enjoying dance as a way of life. So, it’s been a hard couple years and meditation has been what has helped me. I’ve been secular about it while also studying it and reading. Because it was a practice I was already actively engaged in, I thought I’d see what I would do in the studio with it. It also anchored the solo practice. With solo work, I could get lost in confusion and insecurity, but instead it anchored my process, so that every rehearsal that began with seated meditation and movement improvisation. It was a little container that allowed me to build a practice of being in the studio and not just have that time about creating material. I kind of do meditation in the work. The whole experience for me in meditation has been about canceling out extra noise or my defenses or things that complicate or obscure. The structure of this piece has paralleled that in ways that allow me to take out elements of craft or production, to reduce it to something more direct, simple, clear, less complicated. That has in the last few months of the process been my guiding principle in uncovering the piece. The meditation practice I study is Shambhala. You sit with your eyes open and whenever your mind wanders you say  to yourself ‘thinking’ and saying that puts it in a container with the goal to do that without being upset with yourself. Even getting to the word ‘thinking’ is amazing. You can get so lost in your thoughts. In this work, people who have seen the showings catch this idea that there is this relationship between the effort to be present and the way we construct language or thoughts to avoid that; that the differences between talking about dancing and then, physically dancing are in some ways parallel to this meditative practice. Sometimes the thinking about it is the doing and sometimes the doing explodes the thinking about it. I’m trying to deal with the relationship between the two and working with text. It’s hard to work with text, it’s scary. It’s one of my biggest anxieties. I keep changing the text even today.

How are you relating the solo form itself? The piece is so much about performing and my personal relationship to dance. So the solo is perfect because I can’t hide behind craft and what I’ve learned is that that is what keeps getting distilled or removed. Anything that feels like traditional choreographic craft ends up feeling too calculated or removed. I started with ‘how do I arrive at form with dance.’ How can I manifest my interest in movement and the body, in presence, into form. Whenever I try to make movement I’ve been frustrated and end up cutting it mostly. Your most traditional idea of choreography tends to be what I remove from the work. Rather than define the shape and figure out how to perform it, I’m alone and figuring it out as I do it. I’m committed to making something that is more than just me and my steps. Also, by making a solo for myself, I don’t need to negotiate parameters with someone else.  I do have a dramaturg. When I have to communicate with Susan it makes it more concerte than when I’m just with myself and with her, she reminds me to be responsible to the ideas I’ve put out there, that I’ve spoken.

Popularity: 3% [?]

After six years presenting their Fall Festival at Dance Theater Workshop, DanceNow will bring the Dancemopolitan Festival from October 19 through 22, 2011 at the soon-to-be renovated Joe’s Pub. Since 2003, DanceNow has been presenting showcase format programs at Joe’s that more recently evolved into their Featured Artist Series (with Nicole Wolcott and Vanessa Walters’ premiering Alley of the Dolls: This is not a sequel this week). The Dancemopolitan 2011 Festival will be presented in a similar, but slightly new format for the newly renovated Pub and the best tiny stage in New York City. I recently spoke with Executive Artistic Director and Producer Robin Staff about the shift.

Your move makes a lot of sense in so many ways. Your dance programming at Joe’s has offered up something very different from the typical dance presentations around the city. What prompted this? It set us apart. With everything that is changing we had to take a good, hard look at ourselves and had to see what do we do best. We took our own challenge and asked ourselves how to do more with less. During our process working with Kyle Abraham for Heartbreaks and Homies he labored over creating something special for that space and with very little money (a $3,000 stipend and DanceNow paying for the production costs). I realized that this was where we should be focusing

Heartbreaks & Homies by Steven Schreiber

our energies and once I ran the numbers versus the cost of staying with what we were doing, I realized we can offer artists more to be at Joe’s. This year, for a 5-minute segment artists will get $300 this year and if an artist has more ideas they could do up to three works. I don’t mean to only talk about the shift in numbers terms. It was a perfect storm in many ways with DTW’s shift to New York Live Arts, we had to figure out if we fit within that new identity. It wasn’t easy to move on from DTW and the opportunity we gave many artists to dance on that stage (that they wouldn’t have otherwise). But, I learned about the renovations during Heartbreaks. They showed me the pictures and it’s going to be so elegant at Joe’s. No more standing room, which was a problem for dance when it gets above 150 with people standing at the bar. Now, it will be able to seat 180 people. The dressing rooms will be great and they’re going to work to give us more rehearsal space for the Featured Artists. We’ll have some access to the Public’s rehearsal spaces. We did it in green room for Fraulein and The Whiz, but now there will be renovations to the space and they’ll be able to work in a proper studio. And, Joe’s has been very generous with letting the featured artists get as much time as possible in the Pub. So, we planned to try and do The Festival in synch with their renovations. They’re going to roll us out with them as DanceNow Joe’s Pub. Our plan will be to go back to the September dates once the renovation has been rolled out.

Nicole Wolcott in Fraulein Maria Photo by Steven Schreiber

Since the beginning, DanceNow (NYC) has thought outside the box and brought new audiences to dance in your own way. You’ve been very successful with your Doug Elkins’ Fraulein Maria, Kyle’s Hearbreak & Homies, David Parker’s Showdown and Nick Leichter’s The Whiz. You’ll have David & The Bang Group back for their newest show Misters & Sisters in June and this week you have Nicole Wolcott and Vanessa Walter’s Alley of the Dolls (This is Not a Sequel) on Thursday and Friday. They’re something like Dancemopolitan staples, aren’t they? Back in 2006, Nicole Wolcott and Nicole Berger did a show Thrash N’ Rock and we always wanted to bring it back and develop it. Nicole has been an artist that I’ve wanted to promote and help for a long time. She’s so talented and I’ve been watching her since she started making work while dancing with Larry Keigwin. And, David… Well, he is so suited to the stage to the cabaret format. Also, in thinking about the shift for the Festival, I wanted to be sure the Pub would embrace us. They pretty much let us do our thing. Back in the Thrash N’ Rock days we were doing Dancemopolitan almost every month and it got to be too much. Then we cut it down to about 3-4 a year.

So you’re strengthening your partnerships. You’ve got other partnerships in the works outside of NYC. This is so valuable for your artists. You’re able to offer more than just one-off shows now. What else do you have in going on? While we’re trying to up the partnership with Joe’s I’m also now curating the tiny dance program at Steelstacks

Showdown Photo by Steven Schreiber

in Pennsylvania and it’s the same thing. It’s a music venue with some dance. That will be DanceNow SteelStacks. With a connection between Joe’s and Steelstacks, we’ll be able to take some things that premiere at Joe’s and take it out to PA and other times I’d like to try things out at Steelstacks and bring it here. Once Joe’s was on board for the switch for our Festival, the next thing was whether our funders would embrace this shift. Most of our money comes in for the Festival and later for the Dancemopolotan Series. NYSCA, Mertz, Jerome – they all said this was fantastic and would be great for our organization. We will continue accommodating an equal sized audience and eventually it could serve more, if it flies and we will be able to present more artists and give each artist more. We have all been begging for another Fraulein or something that could run, as a holiday series, for a couple weeks. In addition to fee, Featured Artists get a residency at Silo (at Kirkland Farm in Pennsylvania) for a couple weeks, and some are on the guest teaching roster at DeSales University and they might get a commission from DeSales to set work on the students. So, we’re shifting into increasing opportunities for artists in multiple venues. We’re thinking about developing new avenues for teaching and developing and maintaining long-term relationships with artists.

You’ve been able to foster new voices and to support some of these long-term relationships. How does this shift enable you to do that better? So, the festival as it was at DTW was always a testing ground for what we might want to put up or grow at Joe’s. It also simply let us see what everybody was up to. So the Aha! moment came when I realized that if we’re looking for work to bring TO Joe’s why didn’t we look at it AT Joe’s. For instance, I’m looking at an artist’s work that she’s done it out of the city in another cabaret space. I have the DVD, but I’d rather see it on the Pub stage. We’re also talking to Monica Bill Barnes about her SnowGlobe piece. She had all this stuff on the cutting board that she wanted to put up at Joe’s so she’ll probably be doing some of that during the festival in the fall she’ll show another segment. So the structure of the festival, because it’s Joe’s and we only get 55 minutes a show, is that we narrowed the time limit down to 5 minutes a work. We need to make sure we can get 10 artists in there and artists are always not working within the time limits. We believe in this editing process. Pieces get so wordy and sometimes work goes on and on and it kills the piece. Less is more is a challenge for someone; to make it say something in short time. We’re keeping the DanceNow Challenge again. We want it to be suitable to the space and the winner will get the $1,000 fee and a Silo residency and Gina Gibney will provide another 20 hours of rehearsal space. Like Ellis Wood, last year’s challenge winner, she’s been working on that for a couple years and she’s been developing it out here into a full-length work.

The Whiz Photo by Steven Schreiber

And, you’re making some changes to your RAW program, which provides newer artists with their first entry into DanceNow. Yes, we did do the Raw events and we’re shifting that to be more of a mentoring project. This is a response to a difficult situation when you’re seeing work that year after year isn’t ready for the stage and the artists continue to come back year after year. How could we help them? We brought several mentor artists, including Hilary Easton in to work with them to develop their work. It was great to sit with them and listen to them and ask them questions. Most of them asked how do I create a network and get more than a couple people they know and love to see their work. So we took a handful of artists from Raw and asked them to send proposals for Joe’s this year, so that we can continue funneling new faces and familiar ones and see work that we’re considering to develop.

There’s one more thing I wanted to say. My Aha! moment after Kyle’s show was pretty similar to the Aha! moment I had when joking around with Doug about doing a modern dance version of The Sound of Music. Sometimes, it’s the whim of an idea – this is crazy fun and maybe we could do this – that proves very fruitful.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I’ve been thinking about how watching live performance is often an act of meditative practice for me. I’ve considered this before, but Andy’s recent post about watching performance as a spiritual practice was quite eloquent and inspiring. It has had me actively pondering how to explain a parallel (or intersecting? or shared?) theory, especially after another critic laughed when I recently told her I might use this approach in relation to responding critically to Juliette Mapp’s recent Making of Americans, seen last week at Dance Theater Workshop.

Alex Escalante

I told her I found it sublime. She scoffed and pointed out its unevenness. I agreed, but found that I was still able, often enough, to engage with the work in the same way that I cultivate meditative thinking – observing what passes with little judgment. Practicing a detachment to values and outcomes. Obviously, this is not what a typical critic does and is useless for anyone eager for praise or critique. But, in part, it may have been cultivated as a survival mechanism against the assault that is my daily schedule and the volume of work that I see at certain parts of any season/semester. It also reveals, again in part, how I’m still willing to participate in any process that ends in public commentary about other artists’ work.  I’ve often sworn I was done with reviewing. I have run well past any interest in desecrating someone else’s artistic efforts. I have plenty of opinions and aesthetic preferences, but I came to writing about dance as an act of advocacy, and think that sometimes I’m still in this game because much work simply deserves a witness and not an arbiter or play-by-play analyst.

And, often, that time sitting alone in the the dark allows the kind of quiet, still, and unplugged experience that feels increasingly rare today. Live performance is an offering and a challenge; whether offensive, provocative, illuminating, rapturous, inspiring, delightful, absurd, profound, or simple, as long as it isn’t dull I’ll take it as a cause for stimulation or consideration. That said, I admit I prefer to stick to a specific aesthetic range of concert work in an effort to limit tedious viewing experiences. Sometimes there isn’t enough “Om Namo Narayana” around to balance out boredom in a theater.

So, when a work, like Mapp’s examination of family and community in her “The Making of Americans,” opens the door to contemplations about life and legacy while providing ample space and time for reflection, I am grateful after a long day of runaround. I’m especially grateful for a beautiful duet between Mapp and Kayvon Pourazar – performed mostly laying on the floor – that distills many epic tales of love and loss into simple shifts and gestures. I’m grateful to hear Gertrude Stein read aloud; my preferred manner for consuming Stein (check here if you live in Portland and like to listen to Stein and drink wine). The repetition and rollick of her writing serves like its own evolving mantra:

…and the women, the young mothers, our grandmothers we perhaps just have seen once, carried these our fathers and our mothers into the new world inside them, those women of the old world to bear them. Some looked very weak and little women, but even these, so weak and little, were strong always, to bear many children. These certain men and women, our grandfathers and grandmothers, with their children born and unborn with them, some whose children were gone ahead to prepare a home to give them; all countries were full of women who brought with them many children…

Mapp begins her work with the performers – first, Mapp, Pourazar, and Levi Gonzalez, then, Aretha Aoki, Vanessa Anspaugh, and Molly Lieber (The Babysitters) lining up and reading text from Stein’s opus (including the selection above) and though not all of the text is delivered with equal levels of articulation and verbal command among the cast, I am grateful too for Vicky Shick’s commanding presence and readings when she joins later (along with Anna Sperber as “The Immigrants”). With the opening language, Mapp’s interweaving of her family’s history in Gary, Indiana (along with The Jacksons) and the knowledge that this was to be the last work I would see produced by DTW at DTW (before it becomes NYLA), I am easily induced to a reflective state and observe much of the resulting performance through the lens of metaphoric acts of motherhood – creative, generative, sacrificial, selfish and, yes, sublime. Especially when Shick, Mapp or Aoki is on stage (or screen). Shick and Mapp should be no surprise to anyone who has been watching dance in NYC in the past couple decades (or longer), but Aoki, a newer artist in this community, maintains a transcendent singularity next to these revered artists.  Okay… Aretha and I went to grad school and worked together in the past, so I can’t pretend there is no bias, but regardless, she resonates with a kind of sly centered knowing that makes each appearance in Mapp’s work seductively beguiling. She portrays an embodiment of the sublime mental states in Buddhist meditation that include loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity – perhaps a different reading of the word than a western philosophical understanding where “sublime” carries loftier connotations. But, perhaps not.

Popularity: 3% [?]

A lot of great things have been said about Judy Hussie-Taylor’s Platform structures at Danspace Project. They’ve served as great mobilizers of artists as advocates, curators, and creators and as springboards for a great range of dialogues among the various audiences who attend any (or many) of the shows within any given Platform theme. They are fascinating creations themselves, the individual Platforms – with previous ones addressing loss and grace, struggle and pleasure, our own history. They offer compelling ways to think about the state of dance today, to follow through lines of inquiry from multiple perspectives, to encourage that curatorial choices carry some burden of contextual thinking and not just allow presenters to act simply as gatekeepers or tastemakers, and to engage with individual works as part of a larger system of ideas. There is a past, present and future alive in these structures, an understanding that the work being made today has its origins in earlier explorations or concepts while living within the gestalt of the present moment – fed by the conversations and aesthetics of here and now. And, in doing so, offer a constantly forming vision of where dance is going. This is the vanguard. Everything’s been done before, nothing has been done like this. The boundaries continue to crash, the underground currents surface and spark, and bodies (mostly) remain at the center.

The Winter Platform 2011 “Body Madness” had two parts; “Absurdity & Wit” was curated by Hussie-Taylor and the second “Rhythm & Humor” was curated by choreographer, teacher, writer and Danspace board member, David Parker. Each section included a round-table discussion, moderated by the curator, and other additional events aside from the performances at St. Mark’s Church. Intrigued by Hussie-Taylor’s Futurist manifesto inspired description, I saw most of the Platform (in performance or rehearsal). In being invited to re-think the Italian futurists (after having stuck them on my mental shelf as misogynist, fascists with some brilliant ideas in the history of performance art), I was able to consider that what is often discussed in studies of live art, performance, etc… is actually very true and real in a lot of today’s dance processes and that Hussie-Taylor had managed to see this and structure something so that others (we, me & the participating artists) could engage with the ensuing series of works inside a heartier discourse. In holding onto the Futurist’s polemic against classic art of the past in an embrace of their (and our) present moment (s), the smashing together of past, present and future that imbued their many passionate manifestos was clearly visible to me many an evening at St. Mark’s Church this winter. I enjoyed that. It can be enough to simply see a work, experience, respond, critique, move on. I won’t take that away from everyone else, but how satisfying to be asked to think about the work in a season as part of a larger whole, as an unfolding process in a field with a rich (and still evolving) history.

This could have been a Performance Studies PhD candidate’s dream. I’m not one and I wish I could recall all the various references that eddied around the edges of my brain, but time is short and my short term even shorter. Still, I recall squirming in my chair, itching to jump into the first round-table discussion (back in February) and, eventually, I did by referencing “liveness” as the value behind many of the works and working processes of the artists on the “Absurdity and Wit” roster. Philip Auslander spends much of his book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture arguing against my point, and Miguel Gutierrez pointed this out, but I’m sticking with Peggy Phelan’s ontology of Performance for my view of Body Madness. Taking her position that performance exists only in the moment of its happening (with any documentation or reproduction thereafter as something other than performance) allows entry to an understanding of some of my most powerful – experiential and observed – moments in the platform… where evanescent formations of live bodies mattered.

Some of this is due to the two curators deployment of artists who are avidly playing with their forms. Cori Olinghouse deconstructed vaudeville and voguing and brought Archie Burnett and Javier Ninja to the church, and those boys burned it down. Miguel Gutierrez’s DEEP Aerobics turned the entire notion of performance on its dance belted ass, with a socially-conscious happening/workout/dress-up-party/love-fest/jam. Ursula Eagly re-directed viewer responsibility in the realization of her work. Chris Schlichting rode a fascinating repeating edge of erotic-no, disturbing-no, funny gestural gender play. Arturo Vidich rode a fascinating latex-covered edge of disturbing-no, funny – no, scary, scatological and lingual species play. Mariangela Lopez brought her integrated posse of dancers and “non”-types together once again for another witnessed group experience. And, of course, Yvonne Meier anchored everything with another historic score-based evening – may Brother of Gogolorez go down in infamy. The madness was rampant and delightful. As Gia Kourlas, of the NY Times, stated (after Arturo kissed her), the risk factor was often very high for the audience. The rules of performance were being carefully dismantled many times by the Absurd and Witty artists – like good neo-futurists.

Hussie-Taylor brought in artists working with rigorous improvisational processes and improvisation gathers time, space, and process; for, in improvisation there is only one time and one place for doing: here and now.  Improvisation operates in real time with idea, execution, communication, and clock becoming one.  The past as memory, the future as intention and the present as intuition fuse into a singular strategy for immediate action. But, along with the present-tense of improvisation, there was very clearly a lively willingness to play, to change, to challenge and to have fun. Parker brought in artists investigating rhythm and/or humor. That makes them players too. I was reading a book on game theory on my way to Parker’s roundtable discussion and spent a lot of that talk thinking through how investigations of rhythm (and comedic timing) must too be rooted in play. My academic calendar impinged on my ability to see everything on the second platform in performance, but Michelle Dorrance’s shared evening with Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, provided ample examples of a rhythm worker at play. Dorrance expanded the boundaries of tap with a deft and devious hand. There’s a kind of impish glee in her crafted reconstructions of tap.

I think both Hussie-Taylor and Parker played with the curators role. They mussed with the conventions of both parts of the phrase ‘contemporary performance’ and came out atop a fantastic accumulation of research and action. I’m an advocate for play. And, I don’t see how Absurdity and Wit & Rhythm and Humor could have been realized if play weren’t sitting at their bases. Play is the heart of exploration, the door to the present moment, and a key to survival. In a NYTimes Magazine article (Taking Play Seriously) in 2008, Robin Henig wrote: The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered.  In the words of Marc Bekoff, evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, play is at its core “a behavioral kaleidoscope”… “I think of play as training for the unexpected…Behavioral flexibility and variability is adaptive; in animals it’s really important to be able to change your behavior in a changing environment.” If presence is a state of being open and receiving to the changing landscape of each new moment and improvisation provides us with the resulting act of spontaneous creation of new landscapes, then play is the vehicle through that landscape.

Author Stephen Nachmanovitch begins his book Free Play with a quick description of the Sanskrit work lîla, which simply defined means divine play.  Lîla may be the simplest thing there is – spontaneous, childish, disarming.  But as we grow and experience the complexities of life, it may also be the most difficult and hard-won achievement imaginable, and its coming to fruition is a kind of homecoming to our true selves. Many times, during the course of this platform, I found myself actively engaged with this kind of play as both participant and observer, and yes, Danspace did feel like home.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Stephen Petronio’s acclaimed work “Underland” has its NY premiere this week (April 5-10) at The Joyce Theater. It was originally created for the Sydney Dance Company and received its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House in 2003. This is Petronio’s first restaging of the work since its premiere. The reconstruction was funded, in part, by the NEA American Masterpieces program.

I’m interested in how the American Masterpiece award allowed you to bring this work to the US. Can you talk a little bit about how you first came to make this piece? Underland was made in Australia. It was exciting to be given exactly what I needed to do what I’m capable of. They asked me what I wanted to do and then worked to make it happen for me. I devised a work with Nick Cave’s music and Tara Subkoff’s fashion and we were able to work with video. I had all the elements that I like to work with. I believe dance should be a conglomeration of things we have in the real world. In America, I often have to choose between set and music, or text and costumes. For this, I was given what I needed to make what I wanted. The Sydney Dance Company was twice as big as my company at the time. I had 8 people and they had 18 and the work went to the Sydney Opera House. I got to make this work and then it doesn’t get seen in America. In other countries, I get to work with some of the biggest and best companies and work on a big scale. In America, my company is small to medium sized. For various reasons, Underland didn’t get seen in NY when Sydney came here in past years. So, when the license came back up from Sydney, I grabbed it and applied to the Modern Masters program and received support to implement this work (and) so NY could see it.

Photo by Sarah Silver

How did you transition Underland into your own company? In Sydney, those dancers are hysterically, well trained and they really pushed me. They have great classical and modern technique. I got to address my interest in their use of the vertical axis and the speed of the feet and they were able to do the spherical exploration of the upper body and limbs that I love. They took it to the nth degree! In taking it back to my company I wondered how it would go and my dancers rose to it. My dancers understand my language better and they give it a different subtext. The main thing about shaving it back has to do with numbers of dancers and not a loss in quality. In Sydney, I had the assignment of making a dance for 18 dancers. Often, I’ll duplicate roles for multiple dancers to expand geometrically. I’ll set 2 dancers against 2 dancers to make a bigger picture. We don’t have understudies in my company. I learned early on that if only one person learns a role and is injured, no one knows it. So it was a simple to cut down from 3 people to on1. I think of it as a lean mean version.

Let’s talk about Nick Cave and your collaborators. How’d you get Nick on board? Sydney. Leigh Small was the ED and she made it happen. They got me by saying what would you want to do and I said if you can get Nick Cave I’ll do anything. And, they did. He allowed me free reign of his catalog and he gave us all sorts of back tracks and under tracks. With Tony [Cohen], his longtime producer, we were able to mix bridges with those source tracks ourselves. We got the guitar lines pulled out from The Weeping Song. Who gets to do that? So, we’d mix bridges leading into and out of these epic songs. Nick’s Australian and he’s very generous and he’s worked with Tony as a producer for a long time. I know his whole family was there in ’03, but I’m not sure if he’s seen it. With Ken Tabachnick, he has worked with me for a long time and he’s been everywhere. He’s the Dean of Arts at SUNY/Purchase and he’s got an eclectic mind and he’s been doing lighting for me for many years. He created the visual design with a triptych of screens for video and we devised the landscape of images that went onto those screens. Ken and Mike Daly created the visual vocabulary that filled the dance. Tara at the time was at the height of her work that involved taking vintage clothes and pulling them apart and putting them back together again. They go from very dark to very light with lots of color in between. It’s gorgeous.

You recently choreographed a musical. This was your first, right? How was that for you? Yes, “Prometheus Bound” for the American Repertory Theater. It premiered already and is running. It was directed by Diane Paulus and Serj Tankian of System of a Down composed the music. Steven Sater wrote it and he’s a genius. Diane is amazing. I got involved because it’s not on a stage. It had a similar lack of proscenium, so it’s immersive like The Donkey Show. The audience has to keep looking around to find out where the performance is and that goes right back to my roots. I’ve taken my company onto the proscenium stage and I’ve been adamant about that. But, it’s exciting to go back to an immersive experience. Steven wrote Prometheus as the first prisoner of conscience – that Zeus has imprisoned him for his beliefs – and the show is partnered with Amnesty International. So, each night they dedicate the show to a different prisoner to make people aware of the cases and to hopefully incite action and remedy something. It’s theater at its best. Plus, I had no experience working in theater. For one thing, Diane was the boss and that was interesting and fun and she’s a great collaborator. It was interesting to not have the last word on everything. My work is not narratively driven, so to watch her mind work that way was revelatory. I’m kind of allergic to that, to making narrative work, and it was great and new for me.

I have to ask you about Hampshire College. As a fellow Five College alumn, you’re a beloved poster favorite up there. How was that for you? I loved Hampshire. It was amazing for me. I went there to study medicine and discovered dance and they gave me a full scholarship and sent me to NY to study for a year. I was an improviser and when I met Steve Paxton, I was so inspired. That exploration of movement language and an improvisational aesthetic was exciting to work with in relation to the more traditional virtuosity of the Sydney dancers. I was interested in the context where you think of the world as a 360degree composition instead of a flat surface. So, merging that 3 dimensional spherical view with the 2-dimensitonality of the proscenium stage is a significant investigation for me.

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Hilary Clark culminates her DTW Studio Series residency tonight and tomorrow with showings at 6pm. In addition to being a 2008-09 Fresh Tracks artist, Clark was awarded a Bessie for her body of work as a performer with Tere O’Connor, Fiona Marcotty, and Luciana Achugar. She’s also danced with Jon Kinzel, Larissa Velez and Miguel Gutierrez and is presently working with Young Jean Lee.

I loved that your piece is called Working in process since that’s what pulled me into wanting to talk to all the Studio Series artist, this commitment to process based work. Can you talk a little bit about what that means in this work? I heart Studio Series, seriously. I feel like this process allowed me to feel free in terms of the constraints of time and money. With that it has shaped the way I use the time and consider the space. In a lot of ways it has felt like something can unfold in the research of an idea. It has felt luxurious in that way! I am not performing in the piece. Because that is generally the role I play, I wanted to understand how I might shape something form the outside. I understand how to locate and go deeply in the context of another structure or even my own structure, but I wanted to place that challenge on myself, and to understand and embody an experience of being an eye to it. Being inside is something different and I am able to direct and communicate something different and holistic. The material comes from me and the dancers interpret it. In that way we have been building it together and I am embodied in it, but they get to go where they will with it as performers.

Can you talk a little more about this process with your performers? Do their personal histories come into play for you? The dancers are Molly Poerstel, Mary Read and Niv Acosta. I began in September with Mary and Molly and made a duet. I added Niv in February and it’s been a trio since then. I decided to add another person because I really liked Niv and was considering other ideas than the ones in the duet. I felt that this was in the spirit of going with impulses and appreciating the freedom that the Studio Series sets up. For the duet, I find that Molly and Mary (and Niv!) are so compelling. They go really deeply and I was exploring exposure and they have really gone with me on weird tangents and the like. The initial impulse was to explore exposure, in it’s multiple interpretations. I had been moved by this Joni Mitchell documentary in which they are talking about her album Blue and how people had thought that she had gone too far. I wanted to explore the “too far” and what that might mean to me. I am still exploring it. Where the piece situates itself at the moment is that I made this equation that exposure equals truth and truth equals sadness. So I explored that in various ways. We explored that improvisationally and through the body and through a song I developed for them. Those were some of the impulses but the work has taken many divergences. For the trio, I wanted to explore my physical history, and how movement is generated in me and what I like and despise and why. I wanted to break my own rules and figure them out.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Irish Modern Dance Theatre artistic director John Scott”s Fall and Recover is currently running at La Mama thru April 9. He and I recently met to talk specifically about his process working with survivors of torture who now live in Ireland. He spoke to Andy last year for a previous Five Questions.

How did you come to this project? You should look up the UN definition of torture. In summary: “Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed, or intimidating him or other persons.” It is meant to destroy a person without killing them. I was asked to do some workshops and I’m not a therapist or anything, but the survivors were doing art therapy at the Centre for Care for Survivors of Torture in Dublin and they’d asked for dance. They’d been working in drama and one of them, Kiribu, said it was too close to therapy because you’d talk about yourself and they didn’t feel safe doing it. There’s shame and guilt and trying to comprehend the horror of it all. Kiribu said that in Africa you dance all the time – when you work, when you’re happy, sad, at funerals. Dance is so much a part of their feeling that they wanted to try it and to feel good in their bodies again. They’ve said that the effect of the torture is something like having your shadow in front of you all your life. Sometimes they can’t get out of bed in the morning, they have skin problems, allergies, one of the performers has a severe asthma, so she carries a letter for doctors, and she was a gymnast. They have insomnia and paranoia and there is always the risk of that an event, anything, can be a trigger for a flashback. Laying on a cold floor can trigger a flashback. There’s a piece I hope to bring next year where the dancers stand still for a long time and one of them said “I can’t do that. When it happened to me I had to stand still for hours and I can’t stand still anymore.” So it can be a position or a sound. The composer had a sound in rehearsals that reminded several of them with aerial bombardment. They asked him to take it out and he did. It’s all about listening and respecting each other.

How did you start the process with them? I did my normal dance workshop based on what I learned with Pablo Vela, Meredith Monk, Anna Sokolow, etc. We did these exercises with our names – singing and moving, writing your names in space. I’d say something like run your name across the room and all the Arabic speakers ran to the other side of the room because the script runs the other way and we had instant choreography. I was told to never ask what happened to them. You could ask names and where are you from. So I walked into a room and they looked just like people, you know and I’d been asked if I’d like having a therapist to sit in the workshops. I said no, that was in 2003 and I haven’t needed one yet. Dancers are sensitive and this work requires a heightened sensitivity. People sometimes become aggressive or very quiet. When you’re working with longtime collaborators you know if they’re in a difficult mood, you see it coming. But with these guys it’s very quick. It may have been festering for a week, but suddenly BING! They pull themselves through it though. So I said: “My name is John, I’m a choreographer. I haven’t come a very long distance. But, I know some of you have left your homes and left your countries and I’m sorry for what you have been through. I want you to know I will never ask you what happened. My work is abstract and I don’t use stories. I use symbols and ideas. My dancers bring in ideas and we have fun. You can call me anytime day or night. Say anything you like.” It was two years later when one of them told me that made them feel safe and they knew they could work without giving anything away. Imagine, if a woman was tortured maybe her husband, son, daughter, mother could have been killed and she might feel shame for surviving. Your life is never the same.

Clearly, this project presented very different challenges. How do they manage working on this while recovering from the unspeakable? They also have the issues of a strange country, a strange language, culture/racial hostility and suspicion and then, having your case accepted and receiving refugee status. For every 100 people in Ireland who apply, only 6 to 10 might get that. It can take 2-7 years to go through this process. One guy in our group (who couldn’t come because he doesn’t have status) has been waiting 6 years and he’s 22 years old. He’s covered in beating marks and burns. The other performers told me he would never take his shirt off in the changing room. When he asked me and my manager to help him with his case, I said I can ask an immigration lawyer who can help you, but were you beaten and then he took off his shirt. It was shocking and those scars are 6 years old. He said when he did dance classes and performed, he didn’t have to take his medication. He’s still waiting to hear if he’s going to be deported. You can also apply for Humanitarian Leave to remain and if you can get 5 years out of that, then you can apply for citizenship. He has a file, psychological evaluations, they interview them, but the hearing is alone – basically with retired judges. You have to prove you will be killed if you go home. They can acknowledge the wounds, the medical file, that you will have trouble if you go back. But, if there is not enough evidence to prove that if you go back to your country you will be killed, they can’t grant you status. There’s a powerful book Human Cargo by Elizabeth Morehead. I couldn’t read it all, I’m too close to it, but she talks about what’s happening to refugees around the world especially after 9/11 when the US shut its doors and it all came down to Europe. Different countries in the EU have a lot autonomy and they don’t cooperate, but when it comes to immigration they cooperate very well. There’s an EU organization that deals with border enforcement. They will round up people and stop in a few EU countries. In Ireland, you apply for status and you’re usually living in a hostel. You get breakfast at 8, Lunch at 12, dinner at 5, a dorm room, your medical expenses covered and are given 19 euros a week. So, if they had dance practice til 5, they’d miss their dinner across town. It all could really make you give up. But, I wasn’t aware of any of that when I started.

When did you begin actually making this work with them? In our first exercise, we stood in a circle and were raising arms and they were looking at me and I felt this huge responsibility and great need in the way they were moving. I wanted to cry and I was inspired. Kiribu just kept reaching up and there was this young kid who had a perfect second position. He was a shepherd from Sudan, but he could jump and I thought he was a professional dancer. He’d gone up to the hills one day and some group had sacked the village and his mother and brother were killed. His father gave someone money to get him out and he was brought to Turkey and got on a plane thinking he was going to America and got off in Ireland. The trafficker tricked him. Everyone in the group was very gifted, with technical and beautiful qualities. I kept thinking this is so interesting. We’ll make a little piece in 2003 for the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. I kept thinking it would be amazing to make a piece with them, but they’re not used to any kind of rehearsal structure. So, we got a grant to bring in 2 professional dancers and went through a 2-month rehearsal process that was the most enjoyable experience creatively and personally. It was joyous and funny and stressful. We did it at The Project Arts Centre in Dublin, in the small auditorium. Word got out and radio show interviewed me and, suddenly, there was a line around the block. We brought it back 3 times, toured the country. I put it to bed in ’06 and continued working with some of them on a different piece. We toured to Rio, Israel, etc.

I saw your work at La Mama Moves last year. It was highly physical and pretty virtuosic. You brought two professional dancers into this. How does that integration work in your cast? It’s so interesting. My dance dance is often very technical and virtuosic, but this particular group of people have different levels of spiritual and physical virtuosity. It’s a great human palette. In Ireland, the people don’t notice the massive change in our culture. All these people with new skin colors identifying themselves as Irish. We found someone from Eretria, he’s 65 and dancing. He’s incredible. So, we have people of many skills now. We’re working with a retired ballerina. At 71 years old, she’s dancing with us. I’ve started to perform more, even as my body is in decline. We have different bodies different sizes and shapes. We put everyone in this work. There is no disqualificaiton. Everyone who was in a rehearsal could be in it. We never turned a person away, the door was always open. It’s been joyous seeing people grow in confiedence, get married, having kids getting jobs. As one of the dancers described the process as thus: ‘We are fallen. We have come up. When you get the chance to move on, we move on. It is essential that someone has to lift you up – when you get up you can help the next person up.’

For more information, you can listen to John and cast on with Leonard Lopate last week and with the BBC a couple years ago.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Sarah Maxfield made me cry. On Saturday night. At The Chocolate Factory. In her performed love letter to the NY performance community titled We deserve each other. I’d spoken with her a few days earlier for an interview and I wasn’t caught off guard. I knew the nostalgia would hit and felt the sentimentality and, you know, I’m okay with that. Maybe it’s a mom thing. Maybe it’s an age thing. But, I get it. I live Here. Now. But, I miss what’s gone because precious things dissolve and shift and everything changes. And, being okay with the present doesn’t mean that I can’t feel a kind of tenderness for that which has passed and that which is past.

The relative mildness of Maxfield’s manner mixed with the various items in her installation in the basement and the various voices that provide a lot of the substance of the work provide a lot of space for reflection. She asks a couple questions about first subway rides and the first time we saw the city at night and opens doors for our own reflection inside her autobiographical, oral history, retrospective that includes a few other people’s highlights from their time here. She sets me off to thinking about the first work I saw – Muna Tseng’s The Pink at La Mama – and I’m recalling how that’s where I first laid eyes on the man who puts my children to bed every night (while I continue to feed my addiction to Maxfield’s beloved community).

And, yeah – I miss those days. There is a discussion about what was and what isn’t anymore – not simply the ephemeral performances, but the ways of being, of being with work and with the body and issues around quality of living, and I thought of Arturo Vidich’s Body Island and how some artists are still willing to put the body on the line (not to mention his participation in THEM which bridges the what was with the what is in a real, deep, stinky, and gut wrenching way) and I found myself grateful that there are presenters like the Chocolate Factory that can support both kinds of work in the space of one week and still collectively think with others about how to sustain artists lives in performance. The work succeeded in its intention. It drew me back, pulled me forward, and made me think about all the art that’s been made since I’ve been here and left me grateful that someone’s been watching, including me and including you.

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