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

You Want Some Thighs With That? – Bang Group Shows down at Joe’s Pub

A year ago, David Parker and the Bang Group created a buzz with Showdown, a forty-minute pop tart of a dream ballet for 8 dancers set to recordings created for the film version of Irving Berlin’s 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun. This “pilot version” had only a two-night run at, of all places, Joe’s Pub, as part of Dance Now [NYC]’ s Dancemopolitan Modern [Dance] Musicals initiative.

Members of the cast of David Parker's "Showdown" giving us head in their Western shirts.
Thursday evening, the octet plus 3 returned to the scene of the climb with an ”expanded” version for a four performance encore that will end on Saturday with a two show closing night. I quote the producers advisedly, since expanding anything on the tiny stage of the hip cabaret, let alone a balletic quadrille, certainly seems like someone’s crack pipe dream. The performers enter onto literally a bandbox stage through a curtained opening in the acoustical baffles that line the back wall. That curtain hides a public hallway that leads directly to the backstage kitchen and bathrooms. You dance hard by someone's dinner.

The first hint that Dancemopolitan might actually succeed in its expansionist notions arrived with the appearance of the archly deadpan Monica Bill Barnes and Deborah Lohse through that curtain to a recording of a live concert by Johnny and June Carter Cash.  Dressed in black leather-like vests over red full body thermal underwear, complete with rear button fly, and brandishing silver snub nosed pistols, the pair strutted, threatened, and dryly idled its minute upon the stage until Lohse unfolded a welcome mat as the duet stalked off through the audience.
 
The mood changed abruptly as members of the Bang Group, first Bryan Campbell and Jeffrey Kazin, then Marissa Palley and Megan Flynn, then Nic Petry and Terry Duncan burst onto the stage dressed in jeans and checked work shirts to a recording of the musical’s overture. This segued to a lusty ensemble dance alongside “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” the show’s most enduring song.  Showdown’s score features the voices of Judy Garland and Howard Keel as recorded but never used for the 1950 MGM screen adaptation by erstwhile director Busby Berkeley.

Jeffrey Kazin rides high in the saddle in one of the easier lifts from "Showdown" (below)
 
This seems all of a piece with the ways in which Parker’s choreography bends, plays off of and defeats our expectations by its re-assignment and re-purposing of gender roles, relationships and formal structures.  In the first two numbers for example, the hips and derriere feature extensively in movement that swivels, sashays and displays as the sextet moves from balletic arm and leg extensions to cheeky ride ‘em cowboy hip mounts. Only occasionally will the couple in the various partnering, lifts and rides be of mixed gender.
 
Moreover, stylistic flourishes one most often associates with one sex will more often than not end up on the opposite sex, such as the ring of arms surrounding a soloist in a quote from Balanchine’s choreography for Episodes.  When the stalwart Amber Sloan takes on Kazin and Petry in dancing to “Doin’ What Comes Naturally,” it’s the two men who start a variation on the famous “Dance of the Cygnets” from Swan Lake before Sloan joins to round out the trio.
 
These three performers embody the choreographic spine and the presentational soul of Parker’s work clawing their way to the top of the heap in a piece in which who gets what attention – from either the audience or potential partners onstage – makes up a large part of the comic subtext. One marvels at Kazin’s multiple pencil turns, fearless attack when lifted and repeated spiral descents from such lifts, Petry’s barefoot soft shoe; the redoubtable Sloan’s take-no-prisoners dancing and straight man’s sense of bewilderment when, for instance, she lifts Kazin only to find her face scissored between his calves.

Amber Sloan's face (at bottom below) seems more at ease anchoring the cast. Nic Petry brackets the totem at its top.

But the matter of fact cleanliness and understated goofiness of this core group extends throughout the company and underpins the subversion at the heart of Parker’s wit.  For the choreographer’s send ups range beyond ballet tropes to a fan circle ala Busby Berkeley (sans fans), Broadway hoofing from DeMille to Fosse, and the cult of ta-da!  Parker’s intricate formal structures begin, end or continue as often outside the bounds of individual numbers as they coincide with their musical demarcations. And while the general levity would not suffice to produce a laugh track, the choreographer consistently amuses even as he devilishly pulls the rug from beneath our feet.
 
These qualities dovetail perfectly with those of Barnes and Lohse as they return to bookend the evening. Originally, this pair had been scheduled to present a piece of its own entitled Southern Comfort, which would have alternated with Showdown this weekend.  Instead, artistic directors and producers Robin Staff, Sydney Skybetter and Tamara Greenfield have wisely cast them as “silent hosts” for the evening’s frivolities.  Lohse exits with a sign reading “The End” leaving us with the fading sound of the Cash’s in our ears after bringing back and holding up the entire Bang Group at gunpoint for a final bow.
 
But the true encore has already occurred. After the Big Finish, with Sloan’s shadow Annie fronting the company to a full chorus version of “There’s No Business…,” Parker takes the mic to introduce a charmingly political “bonus track.”  In a warm baritone to live keyboard accompaniment, he launches into “Old Fashioned Wedding,” a bonus hit itself from the 1966 Broadway revival of the musical.  When joined by Kazin, his real life and artistic partner and principal muse, the two turn into a vaudeville song and dance team trading rat-a-tat taps and vocal parts in the longest and most poignant number of the night.
 
At this point even the busy-ness of the cabaret seemed to settle as people put down their forks and glasses, and the waiters went into waiting. Parker’s innate New England reserve often serves to mute his wicked wit and socio-political incisiveness.  But beneath the cool exterior of his work as both creator and performer beats the vital heart of a champion entertainer.

For the Love of Dog: Dance Times Square Unleashes its Inner Animal

Melanie LaPatin and Tony Meredith, sure know how to throw a party. They’ve had a lot of practice. The oft-crowned championship Latin and Ballroom dance pair, currently So You Think You Can Dance contributing choreographers, have been doing just that with their students and fellow teachers each Spring and Fall almost since they founded the Dance Times Square social and competitive studio eight years ago. These showcases, produced by LaPatin with Administrative ProducerBronwen Carson, have taken on the added mission of support of charitable causes since last October’s fete to benefit the Helen Sawaya Fund for breast cancer survivors.

Each production features a theme of its own. DTS titled its May 11 event Ballroom Unleashed, in honor of Angel On A Leash, the evening’s beneficiary.  The showcase and a red carpet pre-show reception took place at the Danny Kaye Playhouse of Hunter College. Angel On A Leash, a Westminster Kennel Club charity, promotes work with therapy dogs in crisis intervention, rehabilitation, hospice, extended care, health care and correctional facilities and schools. 

(l to r below) Sheryl Shaker (Executive Director) and David Frei (Founder and CEO) of Angel On A Leash with Melanie LaPatin of Dance Times Square
 
LaPatin and Meredith used this connection as inspiration for dancing that explored the animal instincts that lie within student and professional dancers. Guest dancers and choreographers, who included the Parsons Dance Company in the person of Miguel Quinones; Anya Garnis and Pasha Kovalev, Sabra Johnson and Twitch from So You Think You Can Dance, Mark Stuart Eckstein Dance Theatre, and Metropolitan Opera diva Aprile Millo, brought their own. The diversity and quality of guest artists spiced the program and made for a highly intriguing evening in the theater.
 
But diversity and quality did not end with the guest artists. In a curtain speech at the top of the show LaPatin made it clear that the students performing in the show ranged in experience from near beginners to polished performers. Differences in technical level become readily apparent. But the quality of the choreography, mostly credited to LaPatin and Meredith, and the cleverness of the programming, with LaPatin as director, turned what could easily have been a deficit into an asset.
 
Dance Times Square makes a convincing case that almost anyone can dance with remarkable confidence and a sense of style, provided that the dancemaker tailors partnership and choreography to the ability and commitment of the dancers present. Almost invariably these pas de deux pair a student with a professional. But for me one of the more enjoyable moments over the long and winding course of the evening came in the form of a group a six women of various ages, shapes and sizes strutting their curves to “Jungle Boogie.” 
 
(l to r above) Mark Stuart Eckstein and Adelani Malia: contemporary jazz with benefits

While I acknowledge that such a display might not appeal to every dancegoer, the program offers up the kind of variety and pacing that virtually guarantees something appealing, entertaining, and surprising for each member of the audience. For me these came just as often in the form of student/pro duets of rhumba, samba, quickstep, tango, paso doble and jive as they did in the frequent delights of the guest artists.

The latter included several dancers from past seasons of SYTYCD. Sabra Johnson, who, at the end of season 3, became the first female winner, danced a soulful contemporary solo, while her co-competitors Anya and Pasha showed finesse in a sizzling tango. Twitch, from season 4, freestyled his way through a number in each half of the program, combining b-boy techniques and styles with fluid ease. Most of the younger half of the audience joined the teenage girls sitting next to me in wooting each time he took the stage.

Two of the other guests deserve special attention. About one third of the way through the 17 events on the first half of the program, 9 dancers from Company C Dance Club of Toledo, Ohio, took the stage with painted faces.  Over the next three minutes, they executed the well-crafted contemporary jazz styled choreography of Cassie Dzienny with a ferocity, fearlessness and crispness of attack and execution that made them resemble an entire troupe of nascent Louise Lecavalier’s. 
 
Dzienny’s designs often broke the group into three trios with sophisticated variations in shape, level – from splits on the floor to explosive leaps – and tempo to create and maintain a riveting dynamic tension.  Only when I encountered them in the lobby at intermission did I come to realize that this powerful ensemble consisted of tween and teen girls, the youngest of whom, they told me, hadn’t yet turned 10.  Woe to the respectable cha cha couple who had to follow them in one of the evening’s few programming faux pas. The act one charity appeal that followed the cha cha would have been better placed here instead.
 
The first half concluded with Miguel Quinones fine performance of David Parson’s signature solo “Caught,” with it’s man-in-space stage effects born of leaps and jumps frozen in strobe light flashes accompanied by Robert Fripp’s atmospheric electronic score.  I have seen this piece a score of times if I’ve seen it once, performed most frequently by its creator, but also by half a dozen other male and female interpreters. I found myself both surprised and moved by the standing ovation that still, 25 years on, greets its introduction to what I took to be a new audience. Quinones, to my mind, gets more out of the role than any other performer since the choreographer himself.
 
(above)Tony Meredith and Melanie LaPatin with the cast of "Ballroom Unleashed"

And if the DTS audience came away more, well, “enlightened” after an encounter with this contemporary classic, I found lessons among the 31 segments of the Ballroom Unleashed extravaganza that the contemporary concert dance world, particularly its “downtown” branch, might do well to observe.  For one thing, without any nudity whatsoever, these dancers and choreographers managed to convey a warm and unabashed sexuality, and more to the point perhaps, sensuality that made many of their more politically erotic modern dance peers look paradoxically puritanical by comparison.

For all their own formal clichés – the ending with man on the floor as the woman walks off and leaves him representing only the most oft repeated in this concert – the DTS artists seemed to accept both their bodies and their own desires without angst or apology. This made flirtation, seduction, infatuation, romance and yes, sex, look attractive and fun; like something you might like to do instead of something you might like to think or make a statement about doing. And while the ritualized relationship violence that seemed to percolate through the evening’s very first three pieces gave me pause, it did not reprise throughout the remainder of the program. Moreover, if brevity can be considered the soul of wit, the program leathered its sole with a refreshing amount of wit. Once or twice, a piece wore out its welcome. Even then, it would go on for an extra minute or two, not a minute or ten.
 
I didn’t get to stick around for the “after party,” back at the studio, which encourages the audience, I gather, to supply its physical rejoinder to the onstage cavorting. But Dance Times Square seems committed to the idea that everyone should come (and dance) as they are while raising money for noble causes. Who knew that doing good could be so sexy and so much fun?
 
Photos by Lauren Duque.

This post produced in cooperation with Tonya Plank of Swan Lake Samba Girl

Crotch Tiara: Keigwin Kabaret stuffs its strut on the down low under Symphony Space, NYC

By guest blogger Joey Lico

At 8:30 pm at the beginning of the weekend, a hush falls over the candle-lit Leonard Nimoy Thalia.  Over a microphone, a female flight attendant encourages passengers to order drinks: sex on the beach, rim jobs, panty rippers, buttery nipples. Blue papers rise from the audience to call the bartenders.
 
Enter the cast of Keigwin Kabaret, gliding around the stage with the angular fluidity that Larry Keigwin has perfected since his days dancing backup on Club MTV with Downtown Julie Brown. The performers, led by Ying-Ying Shiau, humorously pantomime airline safety instructions; buckling safety belts, pointing to exits and securing oxygen masks while the audience laughs with familiarity. The dancers’ depiction of flight attendants is the only subtlety of this sexed-out variety show.
 
What can you say about a performance that ends with a naked, voluptuous, blonde woman, who also happens to be a female-impersonator spread out on stage like a star fish? “The World Famous Bob” turns to show the audience her jewel-encrusted vagina and the theater explodes into thunderous applause. Keigwin Kabaret has kept its promise to entertain. 
With guest appearances by Ambrose Martos, the clown-haired, sex-centered Master of Ceremonies; Bradford Scobie-a lasso wrangling, chicken- violator and Scott Lyons a paraplegic cross dressing version of Disney’s Ariel; Keigwin Kabaret is a show with a distinct sense of humor.   Trying to make sense of it all ruins the spectacle. Between the sex, glitter and hip-hop aura that is characteristic of Keigwin’s choreography, these random acts segue between the dance pieces.



Keigwin Kabaret photo by Matthew Murphy

 
At one point Martos takes up an entire 2 minutes teasing the audience by taking off fourteen pairs of underwear. Is this a clever way to kill some stage time or a well-crafted comedic interlude of Keigwin’s design? Either way, this mélange works and we’re all fascinated eagerly awaiting the next carnal display.
 
Dancer Ashley Browne moves with such a smooth funk during a rendition of Unk’s chart topping, “Walk it Out” that it’s almost shocking when she unfolds and extends her leg next to her ear in the following piece, moving with utter grace and classical control. Nicole Wolcott shines throughout the entire show; her perfectly toned body dancing each movement with ferocity. She makes tongue wagging as captivating as Keigwin’s intricate footwork.

There are delicate moments as well.  Shiau brings an unrelenting tenderness as she is softly passed from the arms of one beau to another. She’s so endearing that you almost forget the scene has been set with her rise from among a circle of men, bathrobes open, as though she has just finished giving each of them a blowjob.
 
Only one moment seemed out of place. Liz Riga’s solo comes across as a downer among the slapstick pieces we have otherwise been presented with. Although she moves with command and obvious talent, her angularity and severity foil the fun. The woman who walked out in the middle of the brilliantly sung lyric “one mans omelet is another man’s son” might have appreciated Riga’s homage to the choreographer’s alter ego as the head of Keigwin + Company.
 
Perhaps the intent is to remind us that not everything is fun and games. But the audience isn’t prepared and people let out only singular stifled chuckles in support.
 
But grin and bear it all with laughter we do for the entire 2 hours. By seamlessly blending contemporary, hip-hop and comedy under the umbrella of sexual promiscuity, Keigwin manages to put together a well-crafted work. On balance, it feels like a great way to spend a Friday night.
 

"Vice (with Mary Kay)" at the Tank on 45th St, NYC: Cakeface eats out

A small pink plastic globe of a television monitor above an empty stage greets the audience as it makes its way into the theater space on the evening of May 8. Hanging from a chain above the corner of the playing space closest to the right side front row seats, it flickers silent black and white images of the vegetarian cartoon hero Popeye the sailor, and his carnivorous foil, the aptly named hamburger-mooching Wimpy.
 
Suddenly we find ourselves confronted by the performance trio Cakeface, standing shoulder to shoulder across the front of the stage and sporting bike shorts and black bras under sheer neon tunics (costumes by performer Elle Chyun). They each hold white sheets of paper from which they begin to read, with the self-conscious aplomb of third graders, a text that might have been written by second graders. The audience begins to giggle. Then the readers stuff their scripts into their mouths and begin to chew.
 
(l to r:) Amanda Szeglowski, Jeso O’Neill and Elle Chyun of Cakeface*
Thus begins Vice (with Mary Kate), a 28 minute opus that has been, according to a program note, “inspired by grating encounters with ‘preachy vegans,’ [which] probes that which makes us feel ‘badass.’” Wimpy, the note intimates, should receive script credit as a “motivational badass,” and the source of the piece’s “vocal samplings.” 
 
“The work delves into the behaviors we adopt despite knowledge of their negative implications, including but not limited to ruthless carnivorous indulgences.”  Hence, it would seem, the paper chewing.
 
The remainder of the behavior depicted onstage consists of passages of spoken text, cheeky interaction and fierce full out dancing in the tiny space. Intermittent recorded music by DJ Tony Conquerrah, Matmos, Figurine, and The Knife sets off or accompanies these episodes. The costumes change, adding brightly colored shrugs here, day-glow fanny packs there, from which emerge prayer shawls to be worn around the performers necks.

Of these elements, the dancing makes by far the strongest positive impression. In fact, the work's most cogent moments of manifestation come in the form of a rap recording calling out the hypocrisy of holier-than-thou vegetarians to which the trio adds its muscular hip hop and modern dance flavored movement.
 
Each of the character/performers (Jeso O’Neill and Amanda Szeglowski, alongside Chun) has her moments of strong presence, with the bemused-looking Chun the most consistently appealing. Cakeface, fond of written declamations, announces its mission in the program as “commercial abstract art.” Under the heading “vision,” the collective states that it “wants to push abstract art out of its incestuous circle and into the mainstream. Tactical collaborations, socially powered work and pop art are the ingredients of the cakeface brand.”

Except perhaps for the music, and maybe the fanny packs and Mary Kay reference, I find little of pop art in evidence in Vice beyond the Popeye animations. Were the work to be viewed as an extended sketch on Saturday Night Live it might easily be seen as of better than average quality. Certainly the intimate audience reacted to its absurdist humor as any reasonably excitable SNL crowd might have.
 
But if Cakeface wants to go the distance in realizing its larger ambitions it might do better to dig deeper into the culture it seeks to satirize or critique and wear a bit more of its heart on its gossamer sleeve.  For real human warmth and engagement, and a dialogue with popular culture it need look no further than its own post-performance champagne and cupcake theater lobby reception for a start.

*photos by Florence Baratay

Hip Obscurity's "Maybe, Tomorrow": polymorphous diversity @ Sonnet Theater of The Producer's Club, NYC

Having spent her college and first post grad years focused on directing, Andi Cohen set out to write her first drama as “the most direct-able play possible.”  She chose romantic love as her theme, and handed her opus Maybe, Tomorrow (an experiment in love and chance encounters) to three teams, each consisting of a director and two actors to have at it.

The resulting trilogy, as seen on May Day, makes for an interesting and engaging exploration in spite of some unevenness in the writing, and more in its direction and performances. Cohen manages to create a kind of music in her dialogue that has inspired each of her initial directors to musical choices of their own. And even when the text seems elliptical or awkward as human speech, it achieves in its spare repetition the kind of poetic potency that has the ring of emotional truth.
 
Besides the obvious variations in the characters’ sex: the first act features a hetero pair, the second two women; the third two men, Cohen has inserted a short divertissement in the script for each unique pair.  These provide modulations that spice each retelling with a specific flavor in mood and tenses.

Chris Hale and Sarah Kinlaw (above)

We encounter the fetching Sarah Kinlaw cradling and strumming a ukulele while perched on the park bench that serves as the major set element for all three versions of the play. Presenting the first of the three characters named Taylor, she soon finds herself joined by her Syd (Chris Hale). The first several of their episodic scenes revolve around his inability to deploy the love bomb, and end with one or another of the pair putting off the consummation with the line that gives play its title. After a sometimes melodramatic 15 minutes, which includes her rather unconvincing attempt at menace with a pistol, the act concludes with the flashback scene that will round off each pair’s journey in the moment of its inception.

Above: Debra Disbrow (left) and Janie Nutter

If Eric Hunt’s naturalistic direction of this first explication seems most solidly rooted when the appealingly present Kinlaw plays her instrument and sings, director Jeremy Williams stylized rejoinder literally never quite finds its feet. This has much to do with the demands his choreography places on Debra Disbrow’s Syd and Janie Nutter’s Taylor in their not-so-comfortable medium-heeled shoes and skirts over tights. The clarity and economy of the actors’ vocal performances and of the director’s set re-arrangements, blocking, and sometimes whimsical textural ideas crash repeatedly against a sense of physical unease. This adds an unwelcome level of discomfit to the relationship’s already intense underlying sense of lyrical negotiation, and seems to undermine strain his actors’ committed attempts at emotional honesty.

Brian Murray (left) and Amir Wachterman (below)
Morgan Gould’s direction of the gifted Amir Wachterman (Syd) and Brian Murray (Taylor) caps off the production with a queer and antic tragicomic bang. The actors’ ability to go from spraying each other with super soakers to moments of vulnerability and tenderness provides the audience with an intriguing glimpse of the kind of theatrical tour de force that Cohen may have locked up within her tight-lipped script.  One wonders, for instance what couples or directors of different ages or cultural or ethnic types might bring to a dip in this fondue, even within the gender differentials.
 
Gould and her cast have gone the farthest in pushing the envelope of both the play’s comic and dramatic possibilities. Watching Murray’s and Wachterman’s characters suggestively pump up their super soakers, cavort in various drag, sport with whipped cream and become emotionally naked and present with each other allows the pain and joy at the heart of the piece to fully emerge. Whether  each exegesis could sustain this level of invention in the hands of a single director remains a question for another day.



Brian Murray (left) and Amir Wachterman (right)

Talking to Myself: My inner critic and choreographer contend over Catherine Gasta’s " A Piece of Humanity"

Didacto:
Choreographer/director Catherine Gasta, in a program note, describes her A Piece of Humanity as “a sketch of the human existence, from birth to childhood into education and working and on and on.”  And if this  “first incarnation” of the piece comes across on the whole as, well, sketchy, it also has among its several saving graces that of going on and on only intermittently.
 
Empath:
How clever (and how damning-with faint-praise)! Now you’re going pick up on that metaphor?  It’s her first production in NYC for crying out loud. Doesn’t she get a break?

From left to right:
Mi Sun Choi, Morgan Miller, Amy Jones, Michael Freeman, Joseph Brown, Michelle Silvani, Ebru Yonak, Halley Cianfarini, Raven Pease in Catherine Gasta's "A Piece of Humanity" 

Didacto:
Beginning at the edges of the stage in a dispersed circle, the black clad cast moves towards an ovum of light on the floor like slow motion ninja spermatozoa. Here they mime repeated repulsions by an invisible kung fu until one breaks through.
 
The maculate conception that follows takes us through a sequence listed in the program as “Chromosones; Childhood to Working; Sedating; Electronic Devices; and War to Restart” over the course of the following 35 minutes.  Along the way, Gasta alternates and sometimes integrates sophisticated choreographic arrangements involving the entire group with more individualized mimic characterizations.
 
The “Sedating” sequence, for instance combines a compositional quality reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch with the kind of miming that one might expect in a game of charades, depicting tippling, pot smoking, and semi-erotic spanking.  “Electronic Devices” recalls the ovum bubble of the opening sequence by insulating individual characters from their fellows within force fields of mimed texting, computing and cell phone screaming. Despite their relatively brief duration, these scenes lacked dramatic or choreographic development beyond their introduction.
 
Empath:
Russel Burton’s commissioned score seems to be driving things during these sections, often continuing a theme beyond the choreographer’s need or desire to embellish.  I recognize this trap. When one runs out of time in a rehearsal process, imagination sometimes seems to vanish as one falls back on the supportive comfort of collaborators and the familiar.

Didacto:
Gasta revels in a strong instinct for shaping stage space through the use of collective movement. Her often exquisite designs for nine weave in and out of each other with a sense of seamless and continuous flow. She has also managed, in collaboration with her dancers, to create a glimmer of the kind of committed and disciplined ensemble technique necessary to the work’s ambitions.
 
Those ambitions, however, far outstrip her ability to deliver at this stage of the game. Gasta seeks to stretch and fuse her formidable and extensive training in dance, theater, specific mime and new pantomime to embrace a universal vision. She yearns to address human existence in all its wonder, complexity and contradiction from the microbiological and neurophysical to the technological and geopolitical.  But she seems to lack the time and space to attend to the detail of her embroidery.

If Gasta, as director, has come a long way in instilling a sense of cohesion within her dancers’ body movement, she seems to have focused far less on their facial characterizations. These ranged widely among a cast diverse in shape, size, ethnicity and performance background and often seemed more like mugging than formal masking, setting them at odds with her choreographic accomplishment. In the performance I attended, Joseph JB-Ezee Brown and Amy Jones seemed to provide the most effortless models for an assimilation of the competing demands of Gasta’s physical and presentational elements.
 
Empath:
I hope my friend Raven doesn’t end up disappointed that I didn’t also single her out here. Sometimes it feels awful to sit in this seat.
 
Didacto:
Gasta closes her long director’s note in the show’s program with a wish to develop the piece further.  “I hope to add more people and create an overwhelming presence of people onstage that move together and at random as humanity does.”   More attention to detail and development and a longer incubation period with a cast no larger than this might go farther toward realizing and refining a vision that, no matter how ambitious in its scope, already seems a bit overwhelmed.
 
Empath:
Now comes the formal talk back. A row of chairs appears across the stage. We stare at them and they stare at us, and I feel sorry for everyone. Do we all wonder about the point of such exercises?  They so often feel as stilted and awkwardly polite as a blind date. Finally its over, and the real give and take in spirited imbibing and exchange can begin.