Stretch it! Flaunt It! LaMaMa takes Tisch around the corner for fun and profundity

Stretch. And be smart about it.

Translate into Latin (Tendo, Quod operor is purpureus?), and that might become a motto for NYU Tisch School of the Arts Dance Program.

standing (l to r): Jamie Graham, Rebecca Woll, Moses Kaplan, Alex Schell, Maggie Ronan, Jessica Thomas; seated (l):Penny Dannenberg. Photo by Eric Bandiero

Over the past several months I have encountered Department Chair Cherylyn Lavagnino, and faculty member Jaclynn Villamil with graduate students in tow both at DIA Beacon for the dress rehearsal of the Trisha Brown Dance Company‘s performances there in February, and at Danspace St. Mark’s. Granted, the latter happens to be just up Second Avenue from the Department’s home at 6th St. But wouldn’t that be a smart stretch?

Last Friday, those two along with faculty project facilitator Jim Sutton could be found in the first and second rows of La MaMa Annex around the corner on E. 4th St. And some of the graduate students, along with a number of newly minted BFA’s and MFA’s could be found on the stage. There, in the evening’s most intriguing and compelling spectacle four of them found themselves fully integrated into Naomi Goldberg Haas’ “Uprooting,” a piece that incorporates three generations of performers to suggest passages both physical and metaphysical.

at rear: (l to r) Moses Kaplan, Jamie Graham, Maggie Ronan, Jackie Ferrara. front: Penny Dannenberg, Ani Javian. Photo by Eric Bandiero

Goldberg Haas has been directing her Dances For A Variable Population since 2005, with professional company members ranging in age from 25 to 81. The seamless addition of NYU dancers Moses Kaplan, Maggie Ronan, Alex Schell and Jessica Thomas highlights one of the choreography’s strengths. Set to several propulsive folk-inspired recordings by the Polish combo Warsaw Village Band, “Uprooting” manages to find and challenge each of its 13 performers at or near the limit of her/his technical and expressive potential, and to transcend this challenge by suggesting the existential humanity of yearning, striving, transformation, and reflection from youth to age and memory back to immediate experience.

The performances of senior members Penny Dannenberg, Jackie Ferrara, Judith Chazen Walsh and Betty Williams, while remarkable in their own right, create a frame of dimension and depth for those of their youthful collaborators. Their regard of the youngsters manages to encompass a mixture of dispassionate assessment with intimations of mentoring, longing, and sassy competitiveness and even one-upmanship that leavens the poignancy of both the music and the dancing with pith and wit. In one exquisitely simple and memorable moment Dannenberg and Geraldine Bartlett slowly sit down back to back to share one of the folding chairs that has been brought on to the stage. Their mirror images present in such a way as to leave open the question, expertly poised, of who might be a reflection of whom.

below (l to r) M. Lindsay Smith, Jackie Ferrara Photo by Eric Bandiero

Add to this interplay the lusty way in which Goldberg Haas’ young professionals Jamie Graham, Ani Javian, M. Lindsay Smith and Rebecca Woll bite into the music and movement as if to both throw down a challenge and lead the way among their younger and older counterparts, and you have a work that begins to transform the creative potential energy of Dances For A Variable Population into a power to move and inspire its audience as much as its own members. In this, rehearsal director Smith, of the high-arched and articulate feet and whip-smart torso, and the equally fiery Graham set the tone as firsts among equals. With any luck, this cross-generational ensemble, including its new-found Tisch quartet, will manage to hold together long enough to re-present an outdoor version of this work at the end of September in cooperation with Hudson Guild Fulton Senior Center along the High Line Park in Chelsea.

below (l to r): Ani Javian, M. Lindsay Smith, Jamie Graham, Rebecca Woll. Photo by Eric Bandiero
One can only wish as much for Selina Chau’s “The New York Exchange.” This witty, cheeky, extremely well crafted send up of everything from dance style pretensions to kung fu movies features fine performances by Monica Barbaro as a wayward ballet princess, Austin J. Diaz and Gierre J. Godley, as various NY dance, street and martial arts types, and Mandarin Wu as the archetypal femme fatale with the fan.Mandarin Wu (with fan) Gierre J. Godley, and Monica Barbaro photo by Tony Dougherty

Chau displays a sharp eye and a supple mind for theatrical type and form, fable, kitsch, and the way pop culture co-opts all of the above. Set to an ingenious score by Kyle Olson that mashes up his own “New York Exchange” with passages from Adolphe Adams’ score for Giselle and Romani and Bellini’s “Costa Diva” from Norma, interrupted by Chinese text passages written by Chau and comically delivered by co-writer Wu, the work sets up and then undermines expectations in a way that satisfyingly compliments that of Goldberg Haas. Like the latter dance maker, Chau has keen sense of theatrical and, especially in her case, comic timing and the delicacy of gesture that allows us the comfort of recognition just as she twists to tickle and subvert our prejudice.

Such rare gifts more than justify Tisch’s repeated presence in the annual LaMaMa Moves Festival. When you’ve got it, why not go the extra mile -- or two blocks – beyond your building and perhaps your comfort zone to flaunt it?

Fanfare for The Uncommon Woman: Naomi Goldberg Haas ties up at the Ferry Terminal

The crowd for the 1:30 pm Staten Island Ferry inside the Whitehall Terminal that hugs the southern tip of Manhattan indubitably sensed that something might be up.  A few might even have seen the 12:30 show.  But only after the gates closed behind their departure did the first fanfare sound. A cordon of 14 women dressed in white pants and tops, the middle two bearing orange flags on poles, formed up outside the entrance gates to the terminal’s great hall.
 
below (l to r): Betty Williams, Naomi Goldberg Haas (with flags), Sari Nordman, Penelope Dannenberg (atop wagon) and Rebecca Elizabeth Woll
Walking briskly through the gates, the line splits into septets, each following a flag bearer and moving swiftly to occupy one of the open areas that flank the hall’s central double rows of granite benches. Before the next ferry crowd even begins to collect, fraternal, but not identical, twin dances for 7 begin; flowing passages punctuated by freezes.   People in the waiting area begin to gather around for a better look.  The 2nd of 14 performances of the world premiere of Fanfare by Naomi Goldberg Haas/Dances for a Variable Population has begun. Performances continue with 12:30 and 1:30 pm showings June 22, 24, 36 and 27, as part of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Sitelines series.
 
Now in its 6th season as part of the 8th annual River to River Festival, Sitelines has sought to vitalize the plazas, parks, fountains, bridges, staircases, and other architectural features of old New York with site-specific dances by recognized choreographers.  Goldberg Haas’s 26 minute long Fanfare, produced by Lisa Simon, makes use of a number of recordings for brass ensembles by British contemporary composer Michael Nyman. In a program note, the choreographer links her choice of music to an evocation of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man."
 
below (l to r): M. Lindsey Smith and Jamie Graham (carrying chair) and Jackie Ferrara

She comes to her musical touchstone with a sense of mission.  “Recently,” she has written on her website, “I have been working with senior populations, mixing this community with young modern dancers, exploring how these disparate groups can learn from one another about the nature of movement and expression.”  The Fanfare cast divides roughly equally between these two groups, and the older performers add to a sense of poignant human vulnerability and passage within the work. 
 
Goldberg Haas follows her formal entrance and twin septets with segments designed for three discrete sections of the great hall’s floor space.  Each of these areas has been marked off with safety-orange-colored lines taped atop the terminal’s dark granite floor, and similarly colored flags identical to the ones Goldberg Haas and Sarah Chenoweth Kenney initially carried. The young dancers’ find their traction challenged in runs and turns on the polished surface.  M. Lindsay Smith, Jill Frere, Jamie Graham and Rebecca Elizabeth Woll feature in two pure movement quartets, which break up other activities often involving props such as a chair and a skateboard. The choreographer keeps the dance vocabulary fairly basic.
 
below (l to r): Jamie Graham, Betty Williams (top), M. Lindsey Smith (bottom), Jill Frere, Rebecca Elizabeth Woll, Penelope Dannenberg

The best scenes come when these young professionals and their peers interact with the elders.  These moments include an extended rotating lift in which Frere, Graham and Smith loft a reaching Betty Williams, and a slow diagonal procession in which Penny Dannenberg strikes a heroic pose atop a child’s red wagon while Sari Nordman and Woll push and pull her along.  A particularly resonant and charming passage occurs when Judith Chazen Walsh drags behind her a large red rolling suitcase. Kenney appears, curled up inside, reading a book.  Sometimes the educated young can come across as so much baggage.
 
The lithe Kenney later touchingly rests her head against the standing Walsh’s leg as she, Geraldine Bartlett, Goldberg Haas, and Nordman sit scattered about the floor watching as Williams goes airborne across the space.  A solo for Maxine Steinhaus sets the frailty of a lone figure against the grandeur of the hall and the vastness of the harbor and sky that can be glimpsed through the terminal’s southern windows behind her.  Carol Chave, Jackie Ferrara and Mollie Leiber join the rest of the company in bringing onlookers into the dance in its final section.
 
below (l to r): M. Lindsey Smith, Jackie Ferrara, Sarah Chenoweth Kenney, Judith Chazen Walsh

Even though choreographers such as Liz Lerman have been including older and sometimes disabled dancers in their work for over a quarter century, the presence of such performers in concert and especially in site-specific dance work remains a remarkable and laudable event.  That the entire company for this iteration of Dances for a Variable Population (Goldberg Haas' troupe) happens to be female and ostensibly of European descent might, unfortunately, prove less challenging to the inchoate expectations of an audience perhaps new to contemporary dance.  The action of stalwart stage assistant Wadson Fortune in handing props to members of the troupe at the back of the playing spaces, as well as the corps’ successful enlistment of members of the audience to join in the dancing during Fanfare's final moments, seemed only to unwittingly underscore this fact. 
 
The uninitiated among the onlookers would seem to represent just the kind of folks that a series such as Sitelines might ideally seek to serve.  In a time of economic retrenchment, as our arts strive to avoid further marginalization, the struggle of artists to fight their way out of their socio-political and economic ghettoes continues unabated.
above (l to r): Jill Frere, Lindsey Graham, Betty Williams, Jamie Graham, Rebecca Elizabeth Woll

photographs by Douglas Back, 2009, courtesy of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council