The curtain rises. A group of elderly men dressed in suits stand and stare down the audience. “This is the last show at The Gardenia Cabaret,” a man in heels claims before introducing each man by their ebullient female show names. One by one, each shuffles forward to form a line of downtrodden figures with hunched shoulders and limited facial affect. Two individuals, very different from the seven aged men, remain in the back–a young man and a “real woman.” The last name is called. Which one will join the line? Gardenia begs the question throughout: which identity is real and which is assumed?

Inspired by the film Yo Soy Asi as well as Vanessa Van Durme herself, Gardenia, at Peak Performances through this weekend (tickets $15) is the result of a collaboration between Alain Platel, director of Ballets C de la B, and theater director Frank Van Laecke. Van Durme and her real-life transsexual and transvestite cabaret artist friends bring their poignant “realness” to life while Platel’s signature methods organize the outline of events. He effectively blurs the line between audience viewer and real-life participating voyeur while highlighting the actresses inability to communicate, perhaps symbolizing their inability to communicate as women. Their voices were at times exaggerated and altered with microphone effects. They sing, speak to and misunderstand each other in different languages. At another point, the young man gestures toward his throat that he cannot speak and later uses a translator to speak with Vanessa Van Durme.

The MC is Madame Van Durme. She summons viewers to stand in remembrance of lives lost. With one command, passive audience goer becomes active voyeur in the events to follow, which paint a wonderful 360-degree view of the human spirit as the characters transform, sing, cry, smile, pose, provoke, dance, dress, undress, and search for acceptance and love.

They waddle about in unison—an act of obedience to their aged male figures. Slowly but surely, humor, wit and floral print dresses emerge with each photographic pose, revealing individual objects of affection with each stripped layer. Later, the actresses unify in a grand metamorphosis, applying their makeup and costumes to the backdrop of Ravel’s Bolero, taking turns to strut with feminine, comical poses and statuesque walks. I found myself laughing at some poses and sometimes wondering if I should be laughing at all during more fragile displays.

The young man, Hendrick Lebon, is the only trained dancer onstage. He observes and participates in the action intermittently, neither here nor there. In one instance, he is sad and hurt–he cannot be with his family and does not understand why. Crying, the woman comes to console him and they enter into a violent struggle which leaves him with frustration, pain and sorrow.

Steven Prengels’ musical score defiantly matched obvious campy selections with an emotive ambiance. In the final scene, dressed in full costume drag, they stand in heart-rending character while Somewhere Over the Rainbow plays. This show must not end.

See here for Avia Moore’s report on Gardenia at the Festival Transámeriques in 2011.

Popularity: 2% [?]

This summer the River To River Festival, together with The Joyce Theater, will present Montréal-based choreographer Sylvain Émard’s Le Grand Continental – a festive 30-minute contemporary line dance adventure that assembles 200+ participants to show off the diversity, creativity and talent that makes New York City the greatest city in the world! If you are a dancer — professional, amateur, or just for fun — WE WANT YOU!

+ Perform in a River To River show!
+ Work with internationally renowned choreographer Sylvain Émard
+ Free and fun (skip that dance class or gym membership)
+ Meet great people from all over the city!

TIME COMMITMENT

Rehearsals:

Two nights a week from April 25^th  – June 19^th (17 total rehearsals)
Performances:
June 22 and 23 at 7PM, June 24 at 2PM on Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport.
RECRUITMENT SESSIONS:

You must attend one of the sessions below if interested in participating.

Wednesday April 4 from 7:00PM – 8:30PM
Wednesday April 4 from 8:30PM – 10:00PM
Thursday April 5 from 7:00PM – 8:30PM
Thursday April 5 from 8:30PM – 10:00PM

Learn 1 minute of the dance with a group. Wear comfortable clothes and shoes.

Ages 10 and up are welcome to attend.

Where: TBA

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO AND TO SIGN UP

Can’t decide if you’re ready for your debut? Just watch this amazing video of the work presented at the Festival TransAmériques in Montréal!:

Popularity: 2% [?]

Photo by Gadi Dagon

“I was first in line at the box office on the day tickets went on sale for Batsheva,” a friend told me in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s lobby on the way into the Israeli dance company’s performance of Hora. If I didn’t go under the auspices of press, I would have done the same.

Highly physical, abstract, yet emotionally freighted, Ohad Naharin’s works for Batsheva Dance Company are incredibly satisfying, and have made the company a regular at BAM. Hora, which only ran through this weekend, is performed by eleven dancers and is set to an eclectic assortment of western classics adapted for the synthesizer, including Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” Grieg’s “Solveig’s Song,” Strauss’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” (better known as the theme for 2001: A Space Odyssey), and Wagner’s thundering “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Hora begins with the dancers sitting on a long bench at the back of the stage, and a calculated walk in unison downstage. Together, they strike a series of poses and gestures, some frontal and some in profile, riffing on ballet’s formalism but entirely idiosyncratic. From there, the work spins off into a sea of movement, much of it individual, although duets, trios, and small groups coalesce in and out; the dancers periodically return to the opening phrase and line. The movement itself is dense, articulate, unpredictable, and definitely sensuous (the women in particular revel in a voluptuous precision). Quality-wise, the alert exactitude that pushes the movement towards its full potential is exhilarating–to say nothing of refreshing—to see.

Any experience of art is a subjective one, but nonetheless, I was taken aback by Alastair Macaulay’s scathing review of Hora in the New York Times. To obsess over the difference between fifth and third positions displayed onstage here (a matter of crossing the feet a few inches more or less when standing) was to entirely miss the larger arc of Hora and the movement vocabulary that drives it. As for his accusation of Naharin’s “making his dancers look like cogs in his surreal machine,” I can only say I’ve suffered through many an evening where the dancers are pawns in banal choreography that smacks of blind adherence to well-worn forms and yes, includes consistently crossed fifth positions. In an era when we are rehashing familiar variations on ballet vs. classic modern dance vs. post-modern vocabularies, Naharin and Batsheva represent the possibility of a different movement language and understanding of dance. What a relief.

Popularity: 3% [?]

"Sarah Michelson Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer" at 2012 Whitney Biennial, Photograph © Paula Court.

Dance is its own kind of religion. My first ballet teacher spent 15 years as a nun before returning to the dance world, and she always told the story of her conversion from ballerina to nun in terms of single-minded dedication. The object of the devotion was different, but the discipline and focus required were the same.

This memory returned to me while at Sarah Michelson’s marathon Devotion Study #1: The American Dancer, part of the Whitney Museum’s Biennial 2012 (thru March 11). One of two dance artists selected to be in residence for this year’s exhibition—Michael Clark is the other—Michelson has turned the fourth floor of the Whitney into a meditative performance space. With white walls, risers and chairs, the space is quite traditionalist, giving a nod to both performance and museum conventions: viewers get the pristine white expanse associated with visual art, but also a good, seated view of the action with the theatrical fourth wall intact. The dance floor itself is a scaled drawing of the floor plan of the Whitney’s iconic building. It’s an extraordinary detailed entity, in keeping with the spare setting, but the relationship of this to the work overall remained opaque.

Devotion Study #1 opens with a supposed dialogue between Michelson and theater director Richard Maxwell, who wrote the text. Their conversation circles around why they each create work, with the focus on Maxwell, and is a deliberate mix of the glib and the profound. The first performer, Nicole Mannarino enters during this dialogue, and begins striding backwards in circles on the balls of her feet with her arms outstretched wide in a cross-like position.  In time to the relentless ticking of a metronome, overlaid by a soundscore by Jason Lo that is vaguely reminiscent of organ chords, Mannarino describes various circles—small, large, serpentine—while maintaining a serene, but concentrated presence.  Over the course of the next 85 minutes, other dancers gradually join her and leave in reverse order, maintaining the tempo, circular structure and patterns with drill-like precision. Eleanor Hullihan briefly jumps forward(!) near the end, but other than a lengthy pause where the entire cast of six stands in a line, this is the only break from backwards locomotion.  The work concludes with an oblique narrative about the female child God fathered at the same time as Jesus, the “angel of ambivalence,” who ultimately surrenders.

There are some quietly beautiful moments here, but they are unequal to the task of sustaining the full 90 minutes of this performance marathon. Dance is about more than endurance, on either the part of the performer or the audience, but we see only one facet. The movement Michelson demands of her dancers physically recalls high heels and ballet’s pointe work—gendered, visually seductive but restrictive—and given the non-stop, repetitive backwards motion, can only be described as grueling.

As for the audience, we had it relatively easy in comparison, although there were a couple of walk-outs, plus that pause in the middle was heavily used to handle emails and texts. Did we benefit from sitting captive for 90 minutes? My reaction might have been more positive if Devotion Study #1 were half as long, or it was staged as an installation, where the audience could move around the space at will. Instead, the “devotion” was forced: the dancers were obliged to execute the relentless choreography, and we the audience sat stationary, obediently following performance conventions.

The Whitney Museum’s materials state that the Biennial “provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America.” In this framework, as one of two dance artists selected for the 2012 Biennial, Michelson disproportionately represents the entire field. Repetition and minimalism had their heyday in the dance and performance world 25+ years ago, and I presume it was a conscious choice to tap these structures for Devotion Study #1. Here, Michelson has taken walking, a pedestrian movement emblematic of the Judson Dance Theater’s explorations of the 1960s, and made it both highly physical and stylized by moving backwards on half-toe.

If Devotion Study #1 is a way of refiltering dance’s recent history through a contemporary lens, as the notes on Michelson’s residency imply, what is the larger take-away? Is the dance field looking backwards, revisiting its past in a circular fashion? Arguably yes, although the same could be said for the current state of other art forms, and Devotion Study #1 doesn’t tackle the issue in a particularly illuminating way.

Secondly, Devotion Study #1 throws into sharp relief the long-standing, problematic relationship between physical sacrifice (repetition and endurance in this context) and a murky notion of Beauty or High Art. Dance requires a lot of the human body, and that cost or effort is usually hidden from the audience. By putting the dancer’s physical effort center stage, Michelson’s choreography exposes the exertion required at the same time it exploits it: two of the women are onstage and constantly moving the duration of the piece, and are quickly drenched in sweat, yet they persevere. Do we find the work more beautiful or awe-inspiring because of the physical struggle on display? For the audience, there is something discomfiting about complacently sitting and watching this strenuous, yet mind-numbing effort. While my calves gave a sympathetic twinge, I remained emotionally unmoved by Devotion Study #1: although it touches on ideas of substance, it retreads familiar territory with little resolution.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM's "The You Show," at BAC this Thurs. & Fri.

“As the evening goes along, the pieces become more and more dramatic, and more and more epic,” Crystal Pite explained of the four pieces that make up The You Show. “I was interested in the idea that even though these stories of heartbreak and love loss arevery intimate stories, that are small in scale, to the person to they’re happening to they’re huge and epic and massive. They’re like earthquakes. They’re these huge shifts. And I was interested in trying to physicalize that. To make things bigger than us, superhuman, to make them as epic as they feel to the individual.”

Mid last week I was on the phone with the Victoria-born, Vancouver, B.C.-based choreographer Pite, conducting an interview over a crackling line courtesy of her hotel in Budapest, where her company was performing their 2009 piece Dark Matters at the Trafó. Starting tonight, her company Kidd Pivot brings one of their 2010 work The You Show to the Baryshnikov Arts Center for a brief run that is apparently nearly sold out.

Somewhat surprisingly, this is the company’s first New York presentation, despite Pite being a rising star on the international dance scene (admittedly, Dark Matters was at the Peak Performance Series at Montclair last year). After starting her career as a dancer with a BC ballet company, Pite joined the Ballet Frankfurt, where she worked with William Forsythe from 1996 to 2001. (“He’s also really great at destroying his work,” she told me. “I learned a lot watching how he would edit and remove things. There was as much for me to learn from that as from what he created.”). After Ballet Frankfurt, she returned to Canada and started her company around 2002. By 2006, she was producing works like Lost Action, which toured widely and generated further co-commissions, leading to the company’s current engagement as the resident company of the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt. All of which places New York a bit behind the curve when it comes to Pite’s work–it’s been everywhere else, why not here?

As we were talking, she was also spending time with her son, who’d occasionally intrude with a brief wail. “We’ve been on tour off and on since he was seven weeks old,” she said, “and now he’s almost 14 months. He’s a great little traveler. He’s a really good sport.”

I first caught her work in 2008, with Lost Action, and was duly impressed. In the extremely technical parlance of the contemporary dance world, Pite’s work falls into the “dance-y dance” category: her work is deeply informed by her background in ballet, relying on a rich and intense physical vocabulary, emotionally resonant imagery, and even narrative, as compared to the often conceptual work that leans toward natural and somatic movement we see in New York. But while I can’t comment on her choreography for companies like Cedar Lake Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theater, the Kidd Pivot work I’ve seen is extremely contemporary and completely lacking in the academic dryness one might expect from that description. Pite’s vocabulary is several steps beyond traditional ballet, very rich and idiosyncratic. There’s also often a surprisingly mechanical component to it, with dancers pushing, pulling, and shaping other dancers’ movement, which has provocative intersections with the content of her shows–Dark Matters, for instance, explore the idea of the puppet and puppeteer.

“It always comes back down to the content, the subject I’m working with,” Pite said of her approach to creating dance. In Dark Matters, for instance, “[T]here’s a lot of imagery of the body collapsing and unfolding. It looks like a lot of manipulation done to the body from the outside, as if you’re a puppet and there’s an invisible puppeteer moving you. The joints are folding and unfolding accordingly. There’s a real sense of not being control. So we developed a lot of movement around that idea because I was interested in the unknown, I was interested in the unseen forces at work on the mind and the body, and doing a dance with the unknown and being in a state of not-knowing. And so that was the concept of that piece, so my work was to encourage the body to feel that, the sense of the body being danced as opposed to dancing.”

The You Show, though, is a completely different animal. Dark Matters, its immediate predecessor, functioned as a sort of diptych, the first part given over to a straight narrative component featuring a puppet show on a stunning scale, which follows the trajectory of the Pygmalion myth and ends the first half with the entire set destroyed. In the second part, the company does a more abstract dance performance informed by–and informing–the themes and ideas raised by the first. By contrast, The You Show scales back the spectacle substantially, serving up instead a quartet of duets of sorts (the final one, for instance, features the entire company).

“My first impulse was to work with duets. I have nine dancers in the company, and I wanted to do an evening of duets, so I was thinking of relationships, and what were some of the different things I wanted to explore between two people,” Pite told me, adding also: “I was interested also in narrative, I was interested in story, and I always have been. And I’m more and more interested in it as I go along, but I was interested in not necessarily telling a new story, but telling a story everyone knows. Familiar story-lines of love and conflict and loss, and heartbreak, because I was curious about working with themes the audience already has within them. That they could inhabit the performance. These are all stories we share together. I was really hoping with The You Show–even in the title–to make a piece about the viewer, so that the viewer would really feel that the show was about them.”

“I have a favorite proverb, and it is, ‘Talk to a man about himself, and he will listen for hours.’ And I was thinking this might be really good advice for theater-making, that if the audience really feels the show is about them, that they are inhabiting the work, that it’s them represented on stage, that maybe they’re that much more engaged.”

In order to achieve the effect, The You Show starts (in the piece “A Picture of You Falling”) with a form of direct audience address, asking the audience to see themselves as a dancer. As the piece unfolds, this identification leads the audience members on a gender- and identity-bending journey that proceeds through the subsequent pieces, including “The Other You,” which explores the conflict between Self and Other, “Das Glashaus,” about the experience of personal disaster, and finally “A Picture of You Flying.”

“They’re kind of climbing on one another, they alternate being the climber and being the climbed,” she explained of the final piece. “And so that imagery is quite rich, in terms of the relationship between these two people, and seeing that sense of support and then seeing that striving and climbing and pushing down, I guess overcoming each other.”

Sadly, the engagement at Baryshnikov is only two nights, and ticket availability is limited to on-call at best. But hopefully it’s only the first opportunity for New York audiences to catch Kidd Pivot’s work, which is ever more in-demand. When I asked Pite about what it was like to be a resident company, allowing for maintaining a full company during the residency, she praised the opportunity to explore a deeper engagement with her dancers, even as she noted with a laugh: “Of course what’s happened is because of that we have more activity than we’ve ever had before, we have more tours and therefore we have more exposure, more interest in the company because of our visibility. And so now we’re getting incredibly busy so we still feel like we’re very rushed and have little time to prepare.”

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Cassie Peterson

“Dear Mom, I hate the world so much it’s making me queer…”
(Jen Rosenblit’s informal artist statement during the making of In Mouth)

On Wednesday, February 15th, Vanessa Anspaugh’s Armed Guard Garden and Jen Rosenblit’s In Mouth will premiere at New York Live Arts. In addition to being a frothing-at-the-mouth fanatic of these two dance-makers, I have also been working as a conceptual collaborator on Vanessa’s piece and I will be hosting the pre-show conversation on opening night. In preparation, I’ve been exploring, with both of them, ways to speak about their work without reducing their visions or spoon-feeding audiences. What has ensued is an on-going dialogue and investigation into the ways that Jen and Vanessa identify as young, queer artists and how their relationships to queer inform and shape their respective works.

Before I dive headlong into the details of their art practice/process/production, let me take a moment to try to contextualize queer…

Ultimately, queer is an elusive and indefinable Poststructural paradox because its task is to actually deconstruct definitions and identifications. It sort of folds in on its self and reveals the shortcomings of our current language practices. To queer something is to both expose and disrupt the ways in which heterosexual norms achieve a naturalized, unquestioned, and privileged position in society at large.

Queer has had an interesting semiotic evolution. It derives from the German word, quer, which means across or diagonal. It entered the English language in the 16th century and was used as an adjective that meant odd or strange or suspicious. Historically, queer has referred to something being out of normative alignment and it became a derogatory and oppressive slang-term that was used to identify and describe “homosexuals.” But since these early, hateful deployments of the term, queer has also been linguistically re-appropriated by many sexual minorities as a source of great power and pride. The term was initially reclaimed by members of Queer Nation and ACT-UP, during the height of the American AIDS crisis. Since that time Queer Theory/Queer Studies has become a very well-known and legitimate theoretical framework within the Academy and supports critical thinker and writers like Judith Butler, Judith “Jack” Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz, just to name a few.

When reclaimed, the word queer represents a kind of pluralistic (un)identity that works to undo the oppressive limitations of fixed, binary sexual and gender identifications. Instead of adhering to stringent and essentializing social categories, queer embraces its ambiguous “otherness” and opts for a discursive home on the fringes and in the margins. Thus, queer rejects a legacy of dominance and (hetero)normativity, and works to protect alterity in all of its multiple, irreducible manifestations. In this way, queer is an anti-normative consciousness that is a very purposeful departure from a more mainstream, assimilationist gay and lesbian agenda.

Queering… In Mouth

Jen Rosenblit is intense. Complex and multiple. And hilarious. I can’t help but laugh at every thing she says and love everything she puts in front of an audience. Both she and performer, Addys Gonzalez, agree to meet me at Yale University on a Friday evening. They are performing a sneak preview of their new show for eager graduate students in a small theater on campus. We meet before the show in the Yale bookstore, which is actually Barnes and Noble, which is actually Starbucks. Every part of the Ivy League campus is locked, creating a distinct separation between Yale and the rest of New Haven. We feel strangely like criminals even though we’ve technically been invited here.

One of Jen’s primary characteristics as a dance maker is her rigorous investigation and her ability to thoughtfully challenge some of the basic principles of performance and dance. Specifically, in the making of In Mouth, her desire was to challenge the expectation that dance always have some kind of underlying “Structure.”

Jen: Choreographers that I respect are always talking about the “structure” of their pieces. Well, I wanted to know… “Can a piece be structure-less and if so, how? What does it look like? Feel like?”

Throughout the process, Jen experimented with different ways to subvert arising structural realities. For instance, she and Addys spent many hours in unorthodox kinds of “rehearsal” spaces. Their task was often simply to share the space of their regular, domestic lives and to call it “rehearsal.”

Jen: My primary intention was to find ways to make a dance without rehearsing.
It was like domesticity for art-making purposes. We would sweep the floors and say, “Okay, this is what I am thinking now.” Or we would do the dishes and report back our “findings.” We drank wine and watched bad television, all the while thinking, “This is what I’m doing and this is what it’s making me think and feel.” All year long, we were just trying to find new ways to activate parts of ourselves that had already been activated.

What came up for both Jen and Addys in this domestic rehearsal (anti)structure were the ways in which they are conditioned to think of themselves as the “makers” of work. Within this dominant construction of the “artist,” art making exists as a labor and a responsibility that resides inside of a singular self. In an effort to deconstruct this notion of the self-owned creative act, Jen and Addys would imagine that masses of people where in “rehearsal” with them, pushing their bodies and the work forward. Jen envisioned ways to make the (anti)structure of the piece more about allowing one’s self to be moved by the material, rather than having to produce it.

Jen: We tried to think of the work as carrying us, instead of us carrying the work. We were inspired by the Occupy Movement and this idea of a mass of bodies taking up space in resistance. This was completely exciting and inspiring to me.

Addys: There was a kind of hidden collaboration in the work. We were constantly, internally calling upon all the people in our lives and in the Occupy Movement to help us in rehearsal. Our intention was to feel as though there is a whole community, an entire mass of people behind us and behind every movement choice. Your body has to do less when there is a mob of people behind you. A singular body has to do so much, internally and externally. It has to carry all the responsibility.

Queering Bodies & Relationships…

Though it formally and “structurally” appears to be a duet, In Mouth is simultaneously working to disrupt dominant notions of duet, in multiple ways. Jen’s body of work is renowned for being consciously engaged with the politics of the body and the relationships between them. She identifies as a non-conforming body in multiple ways and understands the complex reactions that arise when she puts her queer body next to Addys’s queer body, in front of an audience — a strange juxtaposition of two very different bodies, intimately relating in space, in a way that is not easily identifiable or familiar for many audiences.

Jen: People will always say,” That’s a really beautiful duet except that Jen is…. too fat… or gay…. Or Addys is black and you are white…” or “They look so strange together”… or whatever it is. There is always something that seems to put us “outside” of what people expect from the duet form. Its as if people always put a weird asterisk next to our work, like “**It would be a beautiful dance if it weren’t for these things…” These “things” of course, being our actual bodies.

At the beginning of the creative process, Jen played with people’s perceptions of their bodies by having she and Addys performing a kind of exaggerated, beastly dumbness. They clunkily lumbered around in space, inviting people to attach clichéd characteristics to their bodies. But then, somewhere in their process, Jen decided that she also wanted to give them permission to embody beautiful and sexy and elegant because a queer body knows no bounds.

In Mouth is a beautifully moving piece. It embodies a kind of austere and precise intensity…

In addition to the overt queerness of their actual physical bodies, In Mouth is also a challenge to the conceptual expectations embedded in duet forms. There are implicit expectations of duet as a kind of energetic intertwining – an ebbing in and out of the space of self and into a unification with the other. In fact, “duet” often becomes a metaphor for “relationship,” as if it is the only way to relate – both in dance and in society. In this dominant idea of the duet, the duo becomes the dance’s focal point and every other kind of relationship becomes peripheral or even illegible. But Jen was determined to disrupt duet. She accomplished this by exposing the realities of “back-stage” and incorporating the tech and production crew right into the real-time realm of the performance. She also involved objects and audience into the sphere of primary and legitimate relationships.

Jen: What about our relationship to the audience? What about our relationship to the objects in the piece? And what about our relationship to ourselves? I think its funny that we see two bodies moving together and we automatically call it duet and then from there, we have certain expectations connected to it.

There is a section in Jen’s piece where she and Addys perform a kind an internal strip tease/peep show for one another. They take turns watching one another. And the audience watches each of them watching the other’s solo. In this, they are exploring the multiple ways to relate to each other, to the audience, and to all the objects on the ground. Every time they touch or use an object, they give it the same attention that they have generously been offering to each other. Thus, there is no privileging of certain “kinds” of relating in this piece. There is unequivocal regard for the cloth on the floor, the production crew, and for the people sitting in the audience. We are all asked to relate in a way that de-centers the primacy of the duet and of the “couple.”

I’m struck by how these disruptions of the duet mimic alternative, queer kinship patterns. Queer kinship patterns maneuver outside of the normative expectations of the married, romantic couple and the corresponding nuclear family arrangement. Queer kinship models do not subscribe to the same markers of social appropriateness. They are often bloodless and lawless relationships that redefine lover/friend/family/community. They privilege love and pleasure over power and position. Queer desires cannot be regulated. Queer affections cannot be legislated. I feel this relational multiplicity when I watch In Mouth.

Addys: Yes, exactly. To me it’s the multiplicity and possibility of relating that makes it queer… Can objects be in a duet? Are the fabrics in relationship to each other? Are we in relationship to the object? We’ve investigated multiple ways to access relationship with ourselves, with each other, with the audience, and with “other” things.

In this deconstruction of the duet, Jen and Addys successfully re-arrange kinship and reconstitute notions of belonging. They do this while also making subtle and abstract, visual references to the marriage institution. At one point in the performance, Jen is standing next to Addys. They are arm-in-arm and she is wearing a veil-like fabric over her face. Later in the piece, Addys puts on a wedding dress-like train and walks across the stage. He is perhaps the most beautiful bride I have ever seen.

Jen (laughing): Yeah, this was not an overt commentary or a concerted effort to politicize the work or make it topical, but “Gay Marriage” images would organically arise. It’s just a singular reading on what was happening.

But In Mouth does, in some indirect way call into question Marriage and comment on it as a heteronormative ideology. Marriage is a container that makes a request for a particular relational outcome. And when people fail at it, these failures are not embraced or celebrated. Jen Rosenblit wants to embrace the failure to arrive at specific situational outcomes. Queer celebrates failure.

Queer makes failure look so good.

Jen: Sure, let’s pass that law so that we can actually start talking about how fucking weird marriage is….

Amen sister. Amen.

Queering… Armed Guard Garden

Being perpetually locked in/out of Yale University reminds me of Vanessa’s piece, Armed Guard Garden because of the ways in which the piece explores our compulsive need to create and protect borders, boundaries, and territories. We organize ourselves around lines carved out in material and psychic spaces that work to include and exclude, depending on what side you find yourself on. A locked gate on a college campus or a beautiful garden in a gated community construct simultaneous realities – the promises the inside vs. the fate of the outside.

Queering Ways of (Un)Knowing…

Working on Armed Guard Garden means that I occasionally step into the rehearsal process and tell Vanessa what I think I’m seeing. We eat a lot of meals together and try to make sense of whatever it she is making. Vanessa is a very intuitive investigator and movement maker — making choices first and then finding ways to name and understand them much later in the process. Vanessa’s art practice is an example of a queer epistemology – an alternative process from which to “know” the world. Throughout her process, Vanessa resists conditioned ways to “know” or understand the world(s) that we create and inhabit.

Vanessa: I am a queer human in the world. Anything I shape is going to be molded by a queer way of knowing. The work doesn’t have to be about “queer” things to be queer. It’s less of an identity and more of a process. To me, queer is an identity-less identity. I like to play with identity-less-ness in my work.

The relationship between her and her work is happening on a different register — a different line of latitude that is not legible through a normative lens.

Vanessa: I like to think of queer as a religion of sorts — not in a repressive, normalizing way, but rather as a guidepost. It’s the willingness to entertain a radical and expansive consciousness and to have enough faith to let my work originate from these places. That’s how I try to approach my creative process – with an open, unknowing stance. I don’t want my work to be essentialized as one kind of experience. I want to facilitate multiple realities — a welcoming rather than a singular or controlled entry point.

Perhaps queer is the method to Armed Guard Garden’s madness.

Queering Borders…

If Jen’s piece is sparing and severe, Vanessa’s piece is busting at the seams with a kind of bizarrely wild, Technicolored melo-drama. Armed Guard Garden is a different world entirely. Utopian. Extraterrestrial. It houses unfamiliar sounds and beast-like human forms moving in grotesquely violent and erotic ways. There are protagonists and antagonists and they are constantly exchanging positions and purpose.

Vanessa constructs “the garden” and the “guard,” rendering a dual reality – each part made from shared material and only coming into being through its contrast to the other. In this way, Vanessa’s piece is a commentary on the ways that we violently put boundaries around the world in order to make sense of it.

Armed Guard Garden works to construct and then disregard these insidious binary identifications and dual notions of reality.

At the beginning of the piece, five badass performers – Aretha Aoki, Niall Noel Jones, Molly Leiber, Lydia Okrent, and Mary Read – mark up the theater in grid-like gestures. They produce literal lines and divisions on the walls and the floor. They create these divisions with chalk and flour and then spend the rest of the performance skewing the lines in the most exquisite and grandiose fashion. They roll around in their own ephemeral boundaries — disrupting them, blurring them with a total abandon and taking unabashed pleasure in their demise. The dancers queer the lines that they themselves have drawn, making a beautifully depraved mess of themselves and the space. It’s an ecstatic refusal to be bound — and a celebration of the parts of self & other that can only exist in the queer, in-between spaces that arise when The Known crumbles.

Queer Politic(s)

Armed Guard Garden resonates both on a sociopolitical scale and delves deep into the micro-politics of the interpersonal moment. AGG explores the dehumanizing effects of a militaristic society and is an embodied commentary on War as a dominant, normative practice. Interpersonal power relations mimic and mirror international relations. We learn how to relate to each other from the world we live in. Thus, how does war live inside of us? Between us? Vanessa positions bodies in opposition to one another and then in a moment, has them join and unify in a kind of inexplicable tenderness. It’s a meditation on the desire to connect and the desire to destroy. It’s a meditation on the instability of power — oppression becomes resistance and loops back again.

Vanessa: It reminds me of being at Wall Street protests and being faced by walls of police with cameras recording every face they could for their surveillance purposes. Simultaneously the protesters were filming the cops filming them, creating a feedback loop. The video screen was also split in half to show a live feed of the protestors watching the trial –watching themselves – watching themselves being watched. How does power move through this loop? Who has it? Who loses it? Gains it? And how does it shift?

Vanessa does most of her movement research through collaborative improvisational practices between she and her dancers. In this process, the performers translate the realties of the external world into the microcosmic world of her dance. She works to create a political “container of now” as a way to gather and metabolize the external world. It’s a kinetic transmission.

Vanessa: The language of improvisation is political. It’s not didactic but it’s always politically relevant. The performers act as filters – bringing the world into the work through improv. Rehearsal space is alive and active and connected to the larger context of the world. Armed Guard Garden is interdependently situated within everything that happened this year. We would all go to rehearsal after being at the protests and the power of that massive movement translated into our own singular movements in the studio.

A queer politic is not topical per say. It, like the Occupy Movement cannot be distilled to a singular demand. Rather, it is an investigation and an interrogation of the entire system and its inexcusable power arrangements and discrepancies.

Queer – movement out of stasis. Out of status quo.

Both Armed Guard Garden and In Mouth hold the tension between what is expected and what is really happening. Each piece incites a sense of a traversing and transgressing something. Everything.

For Vanessa and Jen, it is clear that queer is a kind of embodied resistance. Queer is a reference to process and practice, more than explicit content. These artists accept and employ this constellation of principles and make work that transmits it. Queer is kinetic. A queer body is a body in motion.

Vanessa: Making art with body, bodies unedited — this is queer. Bodies are always bleeding outside their own form. They get dirty and sad. They bleed and shit all over the place. They are never what you expect them to be. Bodies in motion is a radical queer politic.

Jen: Maybe modern dance is already a queer act? Modern dance is very political. In its historical context, it is a very young form of a hyper-political movement, based in radical resistance.

Addys: The performing body is a political ground. Everything we experience as people, as queers, is present in the body. You don’t have to make a piece topical to be deeply political or queer because it’s all there anyway. So in a sense, we made everyone queer with this dance… if you’re moving, dancing, you’re already embodying a queer politic.

There is no essential queer object or subject. Queer is not an objectifiable identity, domain, or dwelling, but is rather produced as a contrast against which normalcy is produced and codified. Hence, queer never is, it never fully arrives. It is always, disrupting, refusing, and resisting the ever-shifting power of (hetero)normativity and dominance, in an effort to carve out more psychic and material space for everybody.

Jen: I really wanted the ending of In Mouth to be a tangent. I don’t want it to be understood. No certainty or conventional conclusion. I want to acknowledge that it’s confusing that things end.

Cassie: Yes, it is confusing. How should we end this?

Queerly.

But what does that mean?

I don’t know….

Exactly.

Cassie Peterson is a New York-based writer, thinker, activist, healer, & lavender menace. She works as a psychotherapist by day, and moonlights as a dance/performance conversationalist, consultant, and critic. Her extemporaneous musings and inqueeries can be found on her blog, Self & Other.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I apologize for the lateness of this write-up, I have been horribly remiss in posting.  Lots of work and a week-long sojourn to Montreal have put me way behind schedule!

But I have been thinking about BLESSED, created by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and EIRA that debuted at NYLA for quite some time. We’re always fortunate when Meg Stuart comes to town, and in this case, given the recent discussions about visual art performance and performing arts, it seemed especially timely and fortunate.

BLESSED is one of those pieces that is so exceptionally well-wrought and expertly executed that you kind of end up gasping in amazement. A single performer/dancer, Francisco Camacho, is on the stage in a crisp white outfit and shower shoes, amidst a landscape comprised of a small house, a palm tree and a swan, all meticulously fashioned out of cardboard. Designed by Doris Dziersk,  they are beautiful art objects unto themselves. Camacho moves in tight, contained bursts, moving robotically around the space. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, it starts to rain and the palm tree starts to crumble, eventually falling to the ground. The swan, too, crumbles and sags and the house (more like a bus shelter really) starts to fall in from the middle of the roof.

I talked to Carla Peterson on the bus to Montclair for the Bill T. Jones show and she told me that the cardboard was scored (cut) to fall in particular ways and that all the pieces were fashioned in Europe and shipped over, in parts, to be assembled anew for each performance. Even the flow of water in the rainfall is carefully calibrated and timed to create the exact effect desired.

Camacho makes his way back to the crumbling hut and spray paints graffiti on the walls that reads  ”You are a beast”, “You don’t feel” and “Why do you sob?”, only to have the structure fall down more. He changes clothes from the white outfit into jeans, a scarf, flower hat, shoes and a fake beard, wearing a camouflage t-shirt that reads “Exercito de Jesus” or “Army of Jesus”. The rain subsides, briefly, as the score, by Hahn Rowe, moves to more tranquil and whimsical sounds, like chimes or birdsong. But this is only a brief reprieve as the rain returns and demolishes all that remains of the hut, the swan and the tree. Finally, Camacho tears it all down and assembles heaps of cardboard, fashioning them into makeshift blankets and inadequate shelter. He ends up twitching on the ground in a scene of drizzle and twilight, he rises again as rain subsides and puts some kind of stretching thing in his mouth to create a disturbing rictus of a smile and starts to makes weird singsong noises. Just then the lights go up super-bright and Katomi Nishiwaki, dressed like a Vegas showgirl, enters the stage and preens like a Phoenix. The music sounded like B.B. King, but I’m not sure. But she rocks it, incongruously, in an iridescent jump suit and platform white patent leather boots. She preens, he crawls.

After she exits, Camacho moves downstages center and strikes an iconic Jesus Christ pose, where Abraham Hurtado steps out of the audience and dresses Camacho in a variety of outfits that I interpreted as “Raver Christ”, “Sports Fan Christ”, “Fashion Christ” and “Beach Bum Christ” until finally settling on a pair of white underwear with a see-through raincoat.

Camacho wanders around some more, desolate in a wasted landscape, elliptically revisiting the movement vocabulary from the opening moments until the the rain begins yet again and the scene fades to black.

One of the things that really struck me about BLESSED was that it kept arriving at places from which it seemed there was no way forward, and somehow found a way to keep going, evolving, changing, surprising. “We can’t go on, we must go on.”

And here’s where I go back to the whole “art” argument. While Camacho is definitely a trained dancer, and Stuart a choreographer, what unfolded on the stage was something other than pure “dance”. It truly was time-based art. The sculptural elements of the set, the visual composition of the lighting and the atmospheric shifts of the score worked together with the embodied presence of the performer(s) to create a seamless, integrated, living work of art. It would be hard, I think, to judge the work purely on the merits of the movement – it was about creating a durational experience where  the compositional elements brought together onstage served as a locus for ideas, where we as an audience were not dictated to, but invited in, a conversation around ecology, around disaster, faith, and the human condition.

BLESSED was really quite moving and incredibly well-done. I look forward to Meg Stuart’s next NYC engagement.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I never thought sewing could be sexy until I saw A.O. Movement Collective’s thread duet (an excerpt from barrish) this weekend at CPR as part of “Object as Performer.” Two women deliberately sew the fronts of their shirts together with red string, and then struggle with the bond this makes between them.

Curated by Sarah Dahnke, the premise for “Object as Performer” was a little more tantalizing than it turned out to be. Two digital video projects were screened in the entrance gallery, and the performance portion consisted of four pieces in various stages of work-in-progress: barrish (A.O. Movement Collective); Restless Nest (Rebecca Davis); Under (Juri Onuki); and Backshore (Abigail Levine). As promised, all four works integrated an object; apparently this mandate also carried an unspoken correlation to nudity, following the long-established relationship between stripping down and perceiving the human body as an object.

The evening, however, got me thinking: what is the difference between an object as a prop or scenic element, and what makes it really a performer? What pushes it from the background or sidelines to center stage? Not surprisingly, in movement-based work, it seems to be physically connected to movement. In The A.O. Movement Collective’s barrish, the sewed together shirts are a driving force in the action, and become a powerful third party in what is ostensibly a duet; Davis’ Restless Nest begins in darkness with a mysterious swishing sound, which turns out to be the props being dragged along the floor. Instead of playing a passive role, inanimate objects can become animate, and that—to me—is the essence of the possibilities of performance.

Popularity: 4% [?]

A week after seeing a preview performance of Einstein on the Beach and there’s still this feeling of having taken a trip to a 1976 sci-fi time capsule. An operatic spaceship. It was a four-hour train ride from Chicago to the Power Center at the University of Michigan, a venue that in mid-January was home to epic rehearsals of the show. “There’s no doubt about it,” wrote the University Musical Society in fervent pre-show emails. “This is a seriously historic moment.” Historic, yes, but like visiting a sepia-colored dream of some NASA engineer–after a particularly long day pushing buttons in big glasses and a comb-over. Smart, beautiful, disorienting, dated.

A lot of that has to do with the set. The biggest pieces roll onstage in grey plywood slabs, from the wings, with haze and smoke billowing out around them. Prison bars made of ribbons dangle from the battens and billow slightly from the gust of passing performers. Most of the color is flat shades of white, black and grey, with very little blending, and even when we are presented with the representation of an actual building, there’s no attempt to, say, carve a faux stone façade from Styrofoam. We’re very obviously looking at a painted backdrop. Even a giant wall of chasing light bulbs is literally made of old-school yellow globes, not something more modern like LEDs. And yet, that the setting looks like it came out of a Theater History Textbook contributes to its other-worldliness, and its modern meaning.

The scenic accuracy is deliberate. It’s been 20 years since the last re-staging of Einstein on the Beach. There was one in 1984, and again in 1992, when I was 5 and 13, respectively. Creators Robert Wilson, Phillip Glass and Lucinda Childs collaborated to ensure the creation of an accurate re-staging of the original. The work has been the subject of a PBS documentary and is said to have changed perception of modern opera.

This is clear from the production in a number of ways. That the endurance required from the performers is astounding. That aspects of its composition seem tired at this point, having been aggressively adopted into modern opera. That the whole piece is basically a 4.5 hour mental workout, demanding that you stay engaged while challenging you with endless looping chants of numbers, non-narrative speeches, robotic gestures, and straight-out goofiness.

In one of the strongest sequences of the piece, featured performer Kate Moran repeats a line describing an experience in a supermarket: “There were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them,” while slowly moving through space, changing costumes. In the original production, Childs was the featured performer who recited these lines on loop. In this production, Moran owns the text. I never got tired of hearing those lines–with every repetition, the inflection and meaning would change. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, always engaging.

The same is true, to a certain extent, of Glass’ music, in which choruses sing numbers that blend into sentences and words. It’s a little bit like listening to a kaleidoscope. The chorus sings from the pit, from a jury box onstage, in amorphous groups. Everyone wears suspenders, a white dress shirt, and slacks—an outfit stereotypical for Einstein and absolutely ridiculous for anyone else.

So here I am, sitting in a theater of a marathon length of time, watching a work with sets that look like they came out of a vault, everyone’s wearing suspenders and singing numbers, and the lead violinist is actually dressed like Einstein. People are puffing their cheeks out and reciting nonsensical phrases. There is a court scene. There is a caboose scene. There are several dance sequences. There is a visual theme of a bright white line. And all throughout, people are getting up to go to the bathroom as is necessary, because there isn’t any intermission.

It feels both glorious and totally insane—like a dream.

Which is kind of the point. In the PBS documentary, Wilson speaks of the work as depicting character, not narrative. Glass talks about trusting visual and psychological associations with Einstein as a basis for the work. Both acknowledge the German physicist as a powerful, almost godlike presence in their culture. With this devoted re-staging of Einstein on the Beach, Glass and Wilson claim their own territory within the word “godlike,” and the production celebrates not Einstein but the machinations and developments of its lead artists.

With just cause. Ever watch an old movie and think “Well, this is kind of cliché,” and then realize “Wait a minute—this is the thing that MADE the clichés”? That’s what watching Einstein on the Beach is like, for some of us who didn’t grow up in the atomic age, but are instead living in its hangover. For some of us who are familiar with the visual machinations of contemporary opera. For some of us who read about Wilson in our college textbooks and have seen Phillip Glass become the subject of sketch comedy. It comes with a kind of smirking respect. Like when you’re grateful for the incredible sacrifice your grandparents made but wish they’d stop talking about themselves at the dinner table.

So if coming back from this opera is like emerging from a 1976 Time Spaceship, it’s worth the trip, if only to appreciate the contributions of works past and the developments in the field since then. Makes you want to kiss the ground. A little.

Popularity: unranked [?]

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Brad Learmonth, Director of Programming at Harlem Stage, to talk about their upcoming season and get a peek into the future.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to Harlem Stage and what you do?

Well, it’s a long story, but I’ll be here twenty-four years in February. It’s kind of a ground-up story for me. I started as an assistant to what was the executive producer at the time and within three years became Director of Education. For a decade I grew that initiative while working on other programming with the Director of Programming. I eventually became the Assistant Director of Programming and in 1998 became Director of Programming. There was a big transition – Patricia Cruz came on as Executive Director and Laura Greer, my predecessor, left that year.

Essentially what I do is oversee all of the programming of the institution. So I do the long-term planning, creation, development and implementation of programs, including education. Now, though, my program and arts education manager, Simone Eccleston, has really taken over the direction of the education program, much as I did in the 90′s. She’s really brought it back up to a good level and increased its growth.

Twenty-four years is a long time, you must have seen a lot of change. What is Harlem Stage doing now?

Well, it’s a very exciting time for us. We had a bit of an economic challenge when we moved over to the Gatehouse in 2006 after a two-year, $26 million renovation of our building, the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. As happens with a lot of organizations when they undertake something that big, we stepped out a little too far on our programming and had to pull back a bit. So we went through this turnaround and under Pat Cruz’s leadership it was a huge success. We are now in a really good place, especially given the situation in the economy. We’ve been doing extremely well for the past couple of years, not just surviving but even, I would say, in some ways thriving notwithstanding the challenges that everyone is facing, the tremendous challenges in fundraising We’ve launched a new series that has had huge success that targets young people and brought other programs back into their full realization – the film program, the Waterworks program, which is our signature commissioning initiative.

And we’re about to go into our 30^th Anniversary season! We incorporated as an institution in 1982/1983, the paperwork was filed in 1982 and it was signed, sealed and delivered in 1983. So we’re going to have kind of a soft launch of our 30^th anniversary season starting in January 2012 and go into a hard launch when we have our 30^th anniversary gala on May 21^st,. Starting in September 2012 we’ll go into a full campaign of 30^th anniversary programming which will focus on the institution, highlighted by three world premieres from our Waterworks program, along with quite a number of other significant presentations and projects.

We’re also embarking on an ambitious five-year plan. For the last year we’ve really been looking at our programming, institution and mission and honing our vision so we can really distinguish ourselves in what has become, locally – and I mean immediately locally – a very healthily competitive field in Harlem.

Where we were sort of the reigning presenting institution in Harlem for decades, there is now a real scene being created now in Harlem, again; one that’s bringing people back in a way that hasn’t happened in a long time. Harlem’s always been a vibrant community, but it tends to be under-represented in the media. While it has never lost its vibrancy, it is definitely coming back in a big way. So as we look at the immediate landscape, and the national and international landscape as well, we’re looking at ourselves as an institution and really trying to hone in on what really distinguishes us.

We’ve been working to identify what we’re going to focus on more fully as we define the future of the Harlem Stage.

What are the implications of that in terms of programming?

Well one of the ideas that we’re working with, something that we’ve identified as central to what we do, is the notion of “Dig Deeper.”

Harlem Stage presents programming that is, by its nature, investigating the deepest part of the creative process, the most expansive and innovative thinking that artists do. We also investigate issues that resonate for people in the culture today – particularly artists and people of color, because that’s what our mission represents. All of the artists we work with are in some way or another activists both in their communities, through their art and in the world. Often they’re addressing very challenging and difficult issues in their work.

So we support the creation of work that takes a deeper look, that is both socially and artistically bold and adventurous. At the same time the artists are doing it in a way that not only transmits great information but also offers the possibility of digging deeper and, dare I say, entertains you or transforms you, the way art should.

So we’re using that idea of Dig Deeper to look at how we can broaden our offerings and our activities All of our humanities components are going to be looked at more closely and marketed more visibly. They’ve always existed but sometimes it seems like it’s the best kept secret. So we’re going to be working on really letting people know what we do and giving them a way in.

You said this spring is a “soft launch” of the 30^th Anniversary. What does that mean?

Well, what you’re going to see starting in the spring is programming that reflects the “Dig Deeper” idea that came out of the focused thinking that is part of our strategic planning process, and as we move forward that’s going to get even sharper and sharper.

We begin the season with – and we actually end the season – with two vocalists who are extraordinary innovators in their field. One is Jose James who opens the season for two nights and four sets on February 10^th and 11^th.

Its kind of a pre-Valentine’s thing if you wanna look at it that way because he’s very smooth and sexy and he sings a lot about that kind of thing. But he’s an extraordinary artist with an exceptional voice and incredible vocal and stylistic range. He spans the worlds of hip-hop and soul and is very much in the jazz world as well. He’s worked with great jazz people like McCoy Tyner – he’s got several albums under his belt and with us he’s going to be doing all new material from his upcoming album. Jose’s an exceptional artist that we’ve recently discovered and we’re very excited to be presenting him.

At the end of the season in June we’re going to be presenting an artist we’ve worked with for over a decade: Tamar-kali. She comes more from the Afro-Punk movement but is also an extraordinary composer and singer who tackles everything from Nina Simone to jazz standards. We’re going to be presenting a program called Voices, which over the course of three nights will feature the three ensembles that represent different strains of her creativity. One of evenings will feature an acoustic string ensemble, then she has another project called the Pseudo-Acoustic Sirens and finally she has a group called 5ive Piece, which is a pretty hard-hitting blow-the-roof off rock band. So we’re going to be doing all three of those, for the first time for her, in one program. We’ve worked with her many times over the years. Exceptional artist.

I’m just curious – how did Tamar-kali get her name? Does she have an Indian background?

No she is African-American, I think she might be from Brooklyn but her family is largely from the Gullah community off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Tamar-kali is her created name. It has a lot of various meanings. Tamar was a very powerful female figure in the Old Testament and Kali, of course, is the creator-destroyer deity of Hindu mythology. There’s a lot of stuff going on in that name and there’s a lot going on in that artist, that person. She’s a phenomenon.

Harlem Stage has a penchant for identifying artists who, like Sekou [Sundiata], we really stick with over the years. Artists who we feel are exceptional voices with exceptional vision in their particular craft and in the field in general. We try to develop a relationship with them that nurtures them and gives them visibility while celebrating what we try to do as an institution. Tamar-kali is one of those people that we’ve really stuck with for over a decade now and we’re really trying to sit down with her to figure out what’s next. “What have you got up your sleeve that we can help you move into the world?” Same with Vijay Iyer. Jason Moran is someone we’ve worked with for over a decade, we gave him his first platform as a band leader and he’s been a great friend to Harlem Stage every since, creating great things. Of course Sekou was probably the exemplar of that relationship with us over a twenty year period, and there are others. We really try to nurture artists that gives them a platform to discover who they are or further that discovery and we just join in with them.

Great. Sorry for the digression! So back to the season – after you open with Jose James, what’s next?

Following Jose James we’re doing a four-part program, called “A Tribe Called Quest: Innovations and Legacies – A Movement in Four Parts”. That was created by Simone, our program manager, and it’s going to be really looking deeply at A Tribe Called Quest’s contribution to and influence on the whole hip-hop movement of the last decade, plus. Tribe not only created incredible. [positive, music in the genre of hip-hop, but they were really innovators in terms of blending it with jazz. They just took the genre and created a new language for the music that has been hugely influential.

That will kick off with a panel discussion called “Footprints: A Discussion on the Innovation and Impact of A Tribe Called Quest”. The next night will feature a Tribe Called Quest Tribute from the Revive The Live Big Band headed by the trumpeter Igmar Thomas with special guests. That will be followed, on the same night, by an after-party called “SPIT: Speaking In Tongues”. DJ Cosi will be playing the music of, and inspired, by the Native Tongues Collective which was comprised of the groups De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, Leaders of the New School, Black Sheep, as well as individual artists Monie Love and Queen Latifah. The final night will be a concert called “Beats, Rhymes and Beyond” featuring The J. Dilla Ensemble. J-Dilla was a producer and DJ and musician that died very young of lupus but was instrumental in moving the Tribe legacy forward. The J. Dilla Ensemble is an ensemble out of Berklee College of Music in Boston that celebrates his music.

For us this is not only a celebration of great music but it also helps us advance the idea of contextualizing these younger generations of musicians not just as songwriters or DJs but as composers. People are re-thinking what classical music is – understanding that it is not just Western European-based music but that there are classical musics around the world which are different for everybody. That’s something we’re looking at in various ways – we’re working with the Cuban composer Tania Leon and Symphony Space on their annual February series called Composers Now and Jose James fits into that as well.

But in that context the Tribe Called Quest program really represents a much deeper look at a particular movement, elevating the idea of looking at hip-hop and its innovations in a way that people like myself who aren’t really of the hip-hop generation but appreciate it – to have a greater understanding and appreciation of the work. Also we could offer a platform for Simone, whose a younger programmer, to do her thing and present it to audiences – which is important to what we do as organization.

Then in March we’ll start our monthly film series that we do with our primary partner, Black Documentary Collective, and a new partner, Media That Matters. They bring in great short films that get paired with these great documentaries.

At the end of March we’ll be presenting the Afro-Peruvian singer Eva Ayllon across the street at Aaron Davis Hall. She’s been in the business for over 40 years, celebrating Afro-Peruvian music. She’s an amazing vocalist and it’s a free concert – so that’s very exciting. We’ll be presenting that with our long-time partner, for twenty-five years, the Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert program

In April we have our annual dance series, E-Moves which is in its thirteenth season of showcasing emerging and evolving choreographers. We’ll have eight emerging choreographers who are, in many cases, presenting their very first works some of which have been supported by grants from our Fund For New Work grant program.

The E-Moves program has grown into kind of a university, that’s how we think of it. We audition artists and then we set them up with a mentor that they work with for a period of six to eight months while they create their works. They have open rehearsals where they come into Harlem Stage and present the works-in-progress with their mentors and we give them feedback and then they go on to present the full work in E-moves.

The evolving choreographers that we’re working with this year are an Indian-American choreographer from L.A. named Sheetal Ghandi and Souleymane Badolo who is from Burkina-Faso, and they’re both presenting new works. We’re very excited about that because it brings more of an international dialogue to the series.

Then in May we really concentrate on our jazz programming which includes the second annual Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival which we do in consortium with The Apollo and JazzMobile. There are between 30 and 40 events over a week’s period, they’re all $10 and the three organizations work together to celebrate the Jazz Shrines of the last 100 years. We identify the places in Harlem that were seminal in creating or providing a platform for creating the music we know as jazz.

Each of the organizations takes three or more of the shrines and celebrates them either literally, because they still exist, like the Lenox Lounge, or we recreate some idea of the shrine such as the Savoy Ballroom, and we bring in artists that pay tribute to it, though not necessarily literally, because the idea of the program is both to look back and move forward.

This year we’re celebrating Cecil Taylor with three pianists: Vijay Iyer, Amina Claudine Myers and Craig Taborn. We are also bringing Cecil in the week after the festival to perform himself, which will be an amazing experience.

We’re bringing in The Mosaic Project by Terri Lyne Carrington which is a project celebrating women in Jazz – women in music, really. She created this project a couple of years ago and I think they’re up for a Grammy this year. That will feature Terry Lyne, Nona Hendryx, Lizz Wright and a host of other artists performing with them. After that we’re going to be presenting a “Tribute to Club Havana San Juan” with The Havana San Juan Orchestra led by Louis Bauzo, then our gala is on the 21^st and we end with Tamar-kali. So we’re bookending the season, as it happens, not really by design, with these two amazing vocalists.

The program is a great mix of disciplines and has a strong intergenerational component. How is that going to play out in the humanities programs?

Well, the Tribe Called Quest program starts with a panel that will include at least one member of the original Tribe and other people that are important to the movement. The reason I’m not telling you them yet is that they’re still being confirmed and Simone is really working on that project, so I’m going to give her all the credit on that one. But that will be really looking at and understanding what Tribe’s impact was, which is why the panel is called “Footprints”. These are the tracks that these artists laid down that other people have since followed. And then the other three movements then not only celebrate their music but the people that followed them directly – Native Tongues, J.Dilla Ensemble.

With Jose James we’re trying to formulate a humanities program that is specific to him. What we try to do is work with the artists to see what’s going to resonate for them and what’s going to get their voice heard in the best possible way.

We’re going to have a much more interactive component on our website and for some of these artists the Dig Deeper aspect may only be there, but for everybody there’ll be something there. You’ll always have the opportunity to dig deeper by going to our website and seeing film clips or audio clips or reading or hearing interviews, and exploring a variety of ideas.

With our E-moves program we have discussions with the artists and the mentors that will follow two of the programs. And we’re going to be showing films this year that will highlight some of the programming that we’re doing. One of the films we’ll be showing is the 2007 film Movement (R)evolution Africa which talks about contemporary African choreographers and features Souleymane Badolo. And we’re showing a new film by David Rousseve, a short film called Two Seconds After Laughter which was filmed in Java. It doesn’t directly relate to Sheetal’s work but David Rousseve is Sheetal’s mentor and there’s some connection to the movement because of the Indian connection in Indonesia, so we’ll find a way in there. But it does give another look at a more international scope of dance and how its being interpreted from the traditional into the contemporary.

With the Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival there will be whole week of humanities components around that. We work very closely with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and they are a collaborating partner in the festival. They will be creating a series of humanities events on their own and we’re going to do symposia. We’re talking about possibly doing symposia at Columbia around Cecil Taylor and have scholars present papers that will then get published. We’re really trying to celebrate Cecil Taylor in a way that he really has not been celebrated and really deserves.

As part of celebrating Cecil we will we have the three pianists in a wonderful set-up, where we’re going to have two pianos. Each of the pianists is going to do a solo and then they’re going to do duets with each other in combinations. So some of the humanities may be artist talks where we discuss not only Cecil’s influence on them but also on the music itself. He’s one of the geniuses of the last century so he needs to be recognized.

And every film presentation is followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and a wine and cheese reception. We’re very big on receptions, because we believe that breaking bread with artists and audiences is a wonderful way to complete the experience. It also gives people an opportunity to have a little bit of one-on-one, not only with each other, but with the artists.

I was going to ask about that. It seems that you do have a lot of opportunities for people to engage in other ways beyond just being an audience member.

It’s really about building a family for Harlem Stage. We tend to look at it more in terms of family and friends – but it all amounts to community. For us it really is about creating this living organism that is more than just: “We’re the presenters and you’re the audience and you buy a ticket and come see the work and isn’t that lovely.: It’s a much more in-depth experience. And its not just about “here’s a great lecture” either – its really about rubbing elbows with people and breaking bread, and having a reception is certainly a way to always do that. We also have great dance parties – The Uptown Nights series – and we have a lot of events that begin and end with a DJ set: there’s a bar, there’s food and it’s cabaret style seating. We try to create an atmosphere, where appropriate, that’s not just a proscenium look at art.

With the Cecil tribute we’re going to put a platform in the middle of the space and we’re going to surround it with seats, probably cabaret style seating, and serve wine and some food (that doesn’t make noise!) and really celebrate this evening and celebrate this artist. We want to give people an opportunity before and after the show to mingle with themselves and mingle with the artists. That will also provide a way into the context and the content of the work whether its that night or later, online.

Another project we’re launching is the Harlem Stage Reading Circle which is more than a book club, because a lot of the works we present are inspired by literature or historical material. So we’ll be reading in groups of people and then we’ll have a potluck dinner or some kind of gathering – always with food – to explore the content and context of the work.

For instance we’re working on developing an opera called Makandal by Carl Hancock Rux that was originally inspired by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. So we’ll offer an opportunity for people to read the book and then gather – it could be a dozen people, just a half-dozen people – twith Carl and other artists connected with the work in question. We’ll discuss the book, discuss the work, discuss the content and the context of it as it relates to the work that’s been created or is being created along with how it resonates with the world today.

We’re also developing a project with with Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd that looks at veterans of color in conflicts. We’ll be looking at what it means to be a veteran of color in this day and age in the United States military. What does it mean to go over to another country, be shooting at people of color and then come home to the challenges of being a person of color here.

These are all things that are resonating in the world as we speak, and that move through the art that we’re creating. Makandal deals with freedom, immigration, revolution – all these things that couldn’t be more appropriate or poignant to be creating a major work now that deals with those issues.

So we’re interested in finding ways to engage those people who want to be engaged in a deeper conversation and discover how that can be a further transformative experience beyond just coming to the show. The performance can be an extraordinary experience in and of itself – but how do we take it deeper and offer something to people that choose to take that journey, encourage those people that are on the fence and drag the rest…

These sound like big projects. Are these Waterworks commissions?

Yes, Makandal and Vijay Iyer’s project Holding It Down – The Veteran’s Dream Project are Waterworks commissions. The 30^th Anniversary season will start in September 2012 with Holding It Down, which has been in development for several years now. It is being created by Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd with Maurice Decaul who is a veteran poet. Patricia McGregor is directing and it has a wonderful ensemble including Guillermo Brown, Pamela Z. and Kassa Overall.

Then we’ll close the year and the 30^th anniversary season with the world premiere of Makandal which we’re also producing, which is somewhat new for us. We produced one other project over ten years ago that was kind of a “trial by fire” experience. We have ventured into that land again a little by default – and that’s a really long story I won’t go into – but Makandal has been in the works for over four years. It was written and conceived by Carl and conceived of by Carl. It is composed by Yosvany Terry, the Cuban composer and saxophonist with the visual design is by Edouard Duval Carrie who is a celebrated Haitian-American artist. And now its being directed by Lars Jan, who is this kind of wunderkind out of CalArts and we’re going fully into the next phase of development beginning in January.

So these works – Holding it Down and Makandal in particular – will be in full development stages through the spring and in Makandal‘s case through next year.

And once again we’ll be creating “Dig Deeper” kinds of events so people are aware of these projects as they’re in development. While there will be some of the traditional show-and-tell work-in-progress showings or open rehearsals, we really want to use the Reading Circle to build awareness and engagement with the work. Its especially appropriate to Holding it Down in which they’ve taken the dreams of veterans and woven the poetry of veterans into an evening of music, text and video design – it’s a really powerful piece. So we’ll be looking at veteran poetry and other relevant works.

Makandal deals with Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba in contemporary, historical and mythical settings. So for that the Reading Circle might engage with any number of works that inform the process – the writing of Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende’s recent book Island Beneath the Sea, the works of Maya Deren which also includes film. All these things are sort of ripe for the picking for a reading circle that looks at the history of Haiti, its revolution and the consequences of that revolution. It provided and still provides a lot of inspiration to the world. And of course there’s the complicated relationship between Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba – not to mention the rest of the world – and how those intertwined histories inform those islands and those cultures – and how they’ve informed our culture. You know when the Haitian revolution happened a lot of those slaves came to New Orleans and that’s one of the reasons you have vodun in New Orleans. And how the music came from Cuba to New York. I mean, there are so many connections and so much information that we just don’t know – we certainly don’t know the details. We know broad swipes of information if we’re into the music or the culture, but there’s so much detail there, so much complexity. And its really rich material.

So we want to find ways to investigate all that information because Carl certainly does, if you know his writing. He’s a brilliant writer with a wealth of knowledge and in that libretto is buried a treasure of historical and mythological information. Unpacking that a little bit is not only fun but allows you to enjoy the piece even more.

What’s the history of Waterworks?

Waterworks was created as the signature commissioning program for Harlem Stage when we re-branded the institution and moved over to The Gatehouse in 2006. We had previously been Aaron Davis Hall, Inc. – that still is our legal name – but now we’re Harlem Stage. Waterworks looks at master artists who are really exemplary in the field, giving them larger commissions and extended development periods to create new work that has artistic merit but also looks at issues of social justice, arts and activism. Four works were created to open the building, including one by Sekou – 51^st Dream State, Roger Guenveur Smith, Tania Leon and Bill T. Jones were the other three artists that created work. And its gone on to be our most significant commissioning program.

I remember coming up to meet you when Bill T. was loading in. I remember a lot of red drapes.

That was the piece he created for Waterworks and it was created specifically for the Gatehouse. He was very inspired by the space. He saw the space when it was completely gutted and empty four stories down. It was magnificent. We’re going to be celebrating that renovation more as we move forward. He created Chapel/Chapter for the space and he completely wrapped the inside in red drapery and it was all done in the round. It was a great piece.

The Gatehouse is a historic landmark building that was part of the aqueduct system of New York State in the 1800′s. It literally fed the first clean drinking water to New York City in the 1890′s. It was the gatehouse where the water was gated as it flowed down from Croton Aqueduct. So we work with that water imagery/metaphor a lot and it definitely feeds the institution in many ways. Not the least of which is…. Well, you know, if you believe in such things, there’s a real kind of spiritual connection when you come into the Gatehouse building. A lot of artists feel that. They feel very – they feel a real energy in there that’s powerful to them and allows them to embrace their creativity. So a number of works have been created for it.

What are the other commissioning programs beyond Waterworks?

Commissioning is something that is really significant to what we do, and from what I’ve gathered in the field we seem to be one of the few organizations who are trying to hang on to the idea of being major commissioners.

We also have a commissioning program called the Fund For New Work, that gives emerging artists their very first commissions and opportunities to develop new work. And we’re looking more deeply at giving mid-career or evolving artists more support. That’s an area where we haven’t had funding. We’ve had funding for emerging from the Jerome Foundation and for the Waterworks program primarily from Time-Warner but also other organizations like Nathan Cummings, but the evolving part has been elusive. We’re going to be more aggressively looking at that because that’s a huge bunch of artists that need support.

One examples of that is we’re commissioning Kyle Abraham for his new work Boys In The Hood which will have its premiere at Harlem Stage next November. He’s an artist we gave his first emerging artist grants to, and we’ve been working with him ever since and he’s come up to be a really celebrated choreographer. We’re going to be giving him his own week of presentation in November. He’s an amazing young artist who’s really grown a lot and I really love working with him, he’s a great spirit.

So Waterworks is our major, signature commissioning program but commissioning overall is a big thing for us. We’ve actually created a Commissioning Circle which is another way of allowing individuals to support work – you can become a commissioner of a work or a co-commissioner of a work at different levels. So we’re giving people an opportunity to invest in work in multiple ways, including financially.

That’s an interesting idea – letting donors target their donations to a specific project.

Well, it’s a way of offering people a form of targeted giving that may resonate more for them. And they have a personal investment in the creation of a work that gives them access to to the creative process in a way that not everyone will have – special meetings with artists, and things like that.

But moving commissioning front-and-center seems pretty innovative, or at least it sends a message about the organization.

A lot of organizations have very creative ways of parsing out ways of donating. You know. you can buy a year’s worth of toe shoes for this much money. A lot of dance companies have been innovative in that way – but this is specifically toward commissioning, and really letting people know what that means and what’s involved in bringing a work from concept to presentation.

We want to get supporters involved in the process in a way that works not only for them, but for the artist. It works very differently for each artist: their process is different, their comfort level at being exposed while they’re in the creative process is different. And there’s a dialogue that goes on there. Some artists become more comfortable and find ways that really inform the work for them. You know, they discover that being a little more vulnerable or open in the creative process can be a win-win. So it’s a wonderful opportunity for audiences and it opens up the dialogue for artists to find new ways to connect through their art.

One of the things we’re really looking at as we move forward is the fact that not enough people – especially people that are, in theory, really close to us either geographically or in the arts field – really know the breadth and scope of what we do. So we’re looking to find ways to make ourselves more visible and to let people really know what’s going on at Harlem Stage. And we’re really going to be looking at that as we move into the 30^th anniversary and the future. We’re doing a lot of great work and we want people to know about it and be a part of it.

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