Name: Greg Manley
Title/Occupation: Commissioner of the Circle Rules Federation
URL: Culturebot
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6 years ago
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
“Uugghh!” to the Opera: Christopher Williams unzips “Hen’s Teeth” at DNA
below (from left): Storme Sundberg, Emily Stone, Ursula Eagly, Jennifer Lafferty, Hope Davis, and Adam Weinert
All photos by Paula Court
“Uugghh!”
says the “prince” as he lands, more or less in a heap, on the stage.
And then again, “Uugghh!”
Each entrance brings titters, giggles and outright laughs from the audience in the theater at Dance New Amsterdam. But not from the six half naked young women who continue craning their necks and torsos and cooing and squawking in swan or goose like warbles. In their meandering line behind which this somewhat startled individual male interloper arrives now and later, each time as if having fallen down a hole. Storme Sundberg, Jennifer Lafferty, Kira Blazek, Hope Davis,
Emily Stone and Ursula Eagly remain unruffled, regal; one might say serene if not for the frank and focused intensity of their demeanor.
Above: Hope Davis and Ursula Eagly twist and squawk
The women have assembled after entering in a procession marked by repeated backward arabesque leg extensions; a procession that recalls, twists and tweaks that of the 32 ballerinas in the “Kingdom of the Shades,” scene from the ballet La Bayadere. Bedecked in gold tinged costumes embellished with feathers, they have preened open
and plucked off their long sleeved bodices with their teeth revealing the shapeliest breathing collection of breasts, torsos and backs I think I have ever seen.
Above: Ursula Eagly and Hope Davis in opening sequence
Gaining his feet, the primary color clad courtier (Adam H. Weinert) makes his way in balletic lunges and leg extensions from his fallen entrance towards the front of stage where he locks eyes with the feathered femme fatale who has led the procession (Sundberg). Facing downstage toward the audience, she lights up with the electricity of their connection, and the two find themselves carried into an exhilarating extended flying duet by the other five bird-women. The swoops and twists of the swirling lifts culminate as the three supporting the swain execute a deft fly-under between the bridging pair holding high his swan,
then vanish all into the wing pursued by audience applause.
Right: Adam H. Weinert with his prince on
Had Christopher Williams’ world premiere of “Hen’s Teeth” ended here, I feel certain that we would have all gone home happy. But the choreographer/costumer/ringmaster and, in this case, troubadour harp player’s vision and ambition demands almost as much of his audience as it does of his artistic collaborators. I find it necessary to slow down my theatrical rate of expectation to that of his more measured medieval sense of time.
As if to reinforce this, the work has been set to a moody score by composer and conductor Gregory Spears, who triples as the electric organ player in the 10 piece ensemble who perform, live and visible, in the large offstage area to the right of the two fluted columns that delimit the stage space in front of the audience.
That score takes the form of a Requiem Mass sung in Breton, Middle French and Latin by the likes of half the cast of Anonymous 4 (Ruth Cunningham and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek) and 4 members of the acclaimed male a cappella vocal group Lionheart (Michael Wenger, John Olud, Lawrence Lipnik, and Kurt-Owen Richards.
Above: Ursula Eagly plucks off her top
Williams’ work requires patience. He do go on. The choreography from him that I have seen to date lives on the edge of wearing out its welcome, and in this concert it often steps over the line, challenging, perhaps taxing, the audience to remain engaged. Yet I appreciate the time and space he gives us to think and associate under the inspiration of his just–as-provocative imagery. The ephemeral nature of youth, youthful beauty and prowess, of love, of all life lies at the heart of this meditative pageant.
As he has done with past shows, Williams has included Requiem’s lyric in the program. The prelude intimates narrative. The translation reads:
A very long time ago
When hens had teeth…
Listen, if you will,
And you will hear a pretty tale.
As realized by the exquisite ensemble, the music bespeaks the mastery and majesty of human heart and mind as it rises to the constant occasion of loss.
If the tale of the lovers carries the sensation of flight in sensual beauty and hope, the rejoinder comes in the form three crones, powerfully embodied by Joan Arnold, Grazia Della Terza , and Alison Granucci. These heavily costumed apparitions, with their bald pates and their beard-like masks that, like an Islamic niqab, leave only the eyes uncovered, dance as if through mist and mud or clinch their entire bodies around the stage’s columns, their long crooked green fingernails seeming to claw the flesh of fluted steel.
Joan Arnold, Alison Granucci, and Grazia Della Terza as the crones based on the ancient Greek Graeae
The denouement of these contending tableaux comes in an extended counterpoint, as first three of the “swans” return, their torsos now swaddled in rope-mesh tunics. From behind their line, the swain re-enters with his “uugghh” and thud, as love inevitably falls to earth. The finale finds the crones displacing this quartet. They enter encased in stiff reliquary-like sarcophagi of various lengths, each of which has a different devotional door that they one at a time swing open exposing a human and vulnerable face, a breast, a forearm.
As striking, vivid and fastidiously fashioned images such as the reliquaries can be – reminiscent in their communicative quality of the Scout-encasing ham in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird -- Williams’ creativity with costuming can sometimes get in his way. The crones’ masking and headpieces limit movement and expressive possibilities, as do the tunics on Sundberg, Eagly, and Lafferty. (The program lists Andy Jordan as the designer of the evening's costuming, with additional elements by Williams and Carol Binion.)
I admire Williams’ thematic mash-ups even when they don’t quite cohere cogently. I see this as less the case with “Hen’s Teeth”, than I did with the program’s opening work-in-progress tentatively titled “Gobbledygook.” Here the stark naked and brilliantly choreographed Weinert meets a black painted plywood wall at the back of one side of the stage space before he is met with the bare chested, hakama pants wearing Eikazu Nakamura.
Nakamura sidles in near the back of the stage at the audience’s right while the blue-lit Weinert, starting prone at our feet, probes gravity and his wall like caterpillar seeking a chrysalis hook. In their single stark moment of interaction the Japanese dancer helps his hapless partner find his sticking place by pinning him to the wall with a hand around the throat.
Above: Adam H. Weinert in "Gobbledygook." All photos by Paula Court
The two intensely introverted solo sequences that follow for Nakamura have the feel of esoteric ritual, the second adding an armor-like vest made of woven reeds over the hakama.
Only had you picked up press material, consulted DNA’s web site, or had the time and sense to ask the choreographer or one of the dancers post-show, would you be likely to know that the ritual incarnates an imaginary version of the Buddhist segaki rite that concerns itself with personal atonement and easing the suffering of the wandering (slithering?) dead.
You might further have discovered, perusing these same sources, that “Hen’s Teeth” incorporates imagery inspired by the mysterious flying women found in a Breton fairytale preserved by 19th century folklorist François-Marie Luzel, the Graeae, or three swan-like crones of ancient Greek myth who share only one eye and one tooth between them, and that associated with the display of holy relics in the middle ages. Who knew?
When does such elucidating information become t.m.i. (too much information)? I ask simply because Williams generous and admirable inclination to edify his audience can sometimes backfire to limit the literal minded. I, for one, enjoy not knowing until I want to know. I then enjoy using the tools that the creator has placed within easy reach, including himself. In the meantime, I have not been prevented from intuiting a reference to Matisse’s La Danse in the midst of the topless sextet, or the choreographer’s wicked way of tilting with Petipa’s Swan Lake imagery.
In the program credits, Williams can seem to be everywhere at once. But I find it intriguing that only the press notes for “Gobbledygook” mention him alongside the program-credited David Griffin as the source for the piece’s intricate electronic sound score. This artist belongs in the opera house, and I predict that it will only be a matter of time until he lands there. That seems the only place that his production values and vision can live in uncomfortable equilibrium with the support; artistic, technical, production and financial, that will allow them all to reasonably complement or at least successfully co-exist in creative competition.
If the creator’s obsession as a medievalist may initially obscure this path to the stage, his devotion to music and spectacle makes his breakthrough, for me, a matter of when and not if. Given his ability to render, he can, like the young Robert Wilson, devise collaborative operas of his own. His vast visual frame of reference, and his dexterity in presenting both male and female form, often startlingly yet insouciantly nude in ways that allow us to recover our endless fascination and sense of humor surrounding this mortal coil, point to a future on today’s big screen performance stage.
Jacqui Kerrod, on pedal harp and Elizabeth Weinfield on baroque viola performed admirably along with the rest of the music ensemble. The excellent lighting across the board can be credited to Amanda K. Ringer. DNA’s Artist in Residence program continues to impress.
All photos by Paula Court
“Uugghh!” says the “prince” as he lands, more or less in a heap, on the stage.
And then again, “Uugghh!”
Each entrance brings titters, giggles and outright laughs from the audience in the theater at Dance New Amsterdam. But not from the six half naked young women who continue craning their necks and torsos and cooing and squawking in swan or goose like warbles. In their meandering line behind which this somewhat startled individual male interloper arrives now and later, each time as if having fallen down a hole. Storme Sundberg, Jennifer Lafferty, Kira Blazek, Hope Davis,
Emily Stone and Ursula Eagly remain unruffled, regal; one might say serene if not for the frank and focused intensity of their demeanor.Above: Hope Davis and Ursula Eagly twist and squawk
The women have assembled after entering in a procession marked by repeated backward arabesque leg extensions; a procession that recalls, twists and tweaks that of the 32 ballerinas in the “Kingdom of the Shades,” scene from the ballet La Bayadere. Bedecked in gold tinged costumes embellished with feathers, they have preened open
and plucked off their long sleeved bodices with their teeth revealing the shapeliest breathing collection of breasts, torsos and backs I think I have ever seen.Above: Ursula Eagly and Hope Davis in opening sequence
Gaining his feet, the primary color clad courtier (Adam H. Weinert) makes his way in balletic lunges and leg extensions from his fallen entrance towards the front of stage where he locks eyes with the feathered femme fatale who has led the procession (Sundberg). Facing downstage toward the audience, she lights up with the electricity of their connection, and the two find themselves carried into an exhilarating extended flying duet by the other five bird-women. The swoops and twists of the swirling lifts culminate as the three supporting the swain execute a deft fly-under between the bridging pair holding high his swan,
then vanish all into the wing pursued by audience applause.Right: Adam H. Weinert with his prince on
Had Christopher Williams’ world premiere of “Hen’s Teeth” ended here, I feel certain that we would have all gone home happy. But the choreographer/costumer/ringmaster and, in this case, troubadour harp player’s vision and ambition demands almost as much of his audience as it does of his artistic collaborators. I find it necessary to slow down my theatrical rate of expectation to that of his more measured medieval sense of time.
As if to reinforce this, the work has been set to a moody score by composer and conductor Gregory Spears, who triples as the electric organ player in the 10 piece ensemble who perform, live and visible, in the large offstage area to the right of the two fluted columns that delimit the stage space in front of the audience.
That score takes the form of a Requiem Mass sung in Breton, Middle French and Latin by the likes of half the cast of Anonymous 4 (Ruth Cunningham and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek) and 4 members of the acclaimed male a cappella vocal group Lionheart (Michael Wenger, John Olud, Lawrence Lipnik, and Kurt-Owen Richards.Above: Ursula Eagly plucks off her top
Williams’ work requires patience. He do go on. The choreography from him that I have seen to date lives on the edge of wearing out its welcome, and in this concert it often steps over the line, challenging, perhaps taxing, the audience to remain engaged. Yet I appreciate the time and space he gives us to think and associate under the inspiration of his just–as-provocative imagery. The ephemeral nature of youth, youthful beauty and prowess, of love, of all life lies at the heart of this meditative pageant.
As he has done with past shows, Williams has included Requiem’s lyric in the program. The prelude intimates narrative. The translation reads:
A very long time ago
When hens had teeth…
Listen, if you will,
And you will hear a pretty tale.
As realized by the exquisite ensemble, the music bespeaks the mastery and majesty of human heart and mind as it rises to the constant occasion of loss.
If the tale of the lovers carries the sensation of flight in sensual beauty and hope, the rejoinder comes in the form three crones, powerfully embodied by Joan Arnold, Grazia Della Terza , and Alison Granucci. These heavily costumed apparitions, with their bald pates and their beard-like masks that, like an Islamic niqab, leave only the eyes uncovered, dance as if through mist and mud or clinch their entire bodies around the stage’s columns, their long crooked green fingernails seeming to claw the flesh of fluted steel.
Joan Arnold, Alison Granucci, and Grazia Della Terza as the crones based on the ancient Greek GraeaeThe denouement of these contending tableaux comes in an extended counterpoint, as first three of the “swans” return, their torsos now swaddled in rope-mesh tunics. From behind their line, the swain re-enters with his “uugghh” and thud, as love inevitably falls to earth. The finale finds the crones displacing this quartet. They enter encased in stiff reliquary-like sarcophagi of various lengths, each of which has a different devotional door that they one at a time swing open exposing a human and vulnerable face, a breast, a forearm.
As striking, vivid and fastidiously fashioned images such as the reliquaries can be – reminiscent in their communicative quality of the Scout-encasing ham in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird -- Williams’ creativity with costuming can sometimes get in his way. The crones’ masking and headpieces limit movement and expressive possibilities, as do the tunics on Sundberg, Eagly, and Lafferty. (The program lists Andy Jordan as the designer of the evening's costuming, with additional elements by Williams and Carol Binion.)
I admire Williams’ thematic mash-ups even when they don’t quite cohere cogently. I see this as less the case with “Hen’s Teeth”, than I did with the program’s opening work-in-progress tentatively titled “Gobbledygook.” Here the stark naked and brilliantly choreographed Weinert meets a black painted plywood wall at the back of one side of the stage space before he is met with the bare chested, hakama pants wearing Eikazu Nakamura.
Nakamura sidles in near the back of the stage at the audience’s right while the blue-lit Weinert, starting prone at our feet, probes gravity and his wall like caterpillar seeking a chrysalis hook. In their single stark moment of interaction the Japanese dancer helps his hapless partner find his sticking place by pinning him to the wall with a hand around the throat.Above: Adam H. Weinert in "Gobbledygook." All photos by Paula Court
The two intensely introverted solo sequences that follow for Nakamura have the feel of esoteric ritual, the second adding an armor-like vest made of woven reeds over the hakama.
Only had you picked up press material, consulted DNA’s web site, or had the time and sense to ask the choreographer or one of the dancers post-show, would you be likely to know that the ritual incarnates an imaginary version of the Buddhist segaki rite that concerns itself with personal atonement and easing the suffering of the wandering (slithering?) dead. You might further have discovered, perusing these same sources, that “Hen’s Teeth” incorporates imagery inspired by the mysterious flying women found in a Breton fairytale preserved by 19th century folklorist François-Marie Luzel, the Graeae, or three swan-like crones of ancient Greek myth who share only one eye and one tooth between them, and that associated with the display of holy relics in the middle ages. Who knew?
When does such elucidating information become t.m.i. (too much information)? I ask simply because Williams generous and admirable inclination to edify his audience can sometimes backfire to limit the literal minded. I, for one, enjoy not knowing until I want to know. I then enjoy using the tools that the creator has placed within easy reach, including himself. In the meantime, I have not been prevented from intuiting a reference to Matisse’s La Danse in the midst of the topless sextet, or the choreographer’s wicked way of tilting with Petipa’s Swan Lake imagery.
In the program credits, Williams can seem to be everywhere at once. But I find it intriguing that only the press notes for “Gobbledygook” mention him alongside the program-credited David Griffin as the source for the piece’s intricate electronic sound score. This artist belongs in the opera house, and I predict that it will only be a matter of time until he lands there. That seems the only place that his production values and vision can live in uncomfortable equilibrium with the support; artistic, technical, production and financial, that will allow them all to reasonably complement or at least successfully co-exist in creative competition.
If the creator’s obsession as a medievalist may initially obscure this path to the stage, his devotion to music and spectacle makes his breakthrough, for me, a matter of when and not if. Given his ability to render, he can, like the young Robert Wilson, devise collaborative operas of his own. His vast visual frame of reference, and his dexterity in presenting both male and female form, often startlingly yet insouciantly nude in ways that allow us to recover our endless fascination and sense of humor surrounding this mortal coil, point to a future on today’s big screen performance stage.
Jacqui Kerrod, on pedal harp and Elizabeth Weinfield on baroque viola performed admirably along with the rest of the music ensemble. The excellent lighting across the board can be credited to Amanda K. Ringer. DNA’s Artist in Residence program continues to impress.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
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?
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 BandieroOver 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 BandieroGoldberg 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?
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Call Me Leamhsi: Bill Shannon circumnavigates the Financial District
Bill Shannon and "Rejected Skin" at 77 Water St. photo by Catherine Peila
Bill Shannon has gone ¾ of the way around the tip of Manhattan, retracing in retrograde the route famously described by the narrator Ishmael in the opening paragraphs of Moby-Dick. And, like his fellow traveler, he pauses to wax philosophical.
Shannon perches on his crutches atop the white painted concrete platform that frames Rudolph de Harak and William Tarr’s public sculpture Rejected Skin, (1969) beneath one cantilevered corner of 77 Water St. at Old Slip. He begins a slow descent to an almost prone suspension. Having rested a found (presented by a construction worker, actually) gallon bottle of commercial iced tea on part of the artwork, he twirls and flashes first one specially made round-ended crutch then the other as he embodies the tension between flesh and rigid exoskeletar form at the heart of his unique dancing technique. The entire time he suspends and descends, he continues to discuss the challenges inherent in matching mind and muscle to metal and gravity and the constant risk in his exploration of new form and expression.
“Sometimes,” he says, his nose finally flush with the pavement, “it can look like failure.”
right: Bill Shannon caught in a "wall stall." photo by BC
And suddenly, the 40 minutes we have spent following Shannon through Traffic -
A Transient Specific Performance, suggest a larger simulacrum for human endeavor. Think Mideast peace, perhaps, or the Obama presidency.
Episodically, mesmericly, our Pequod of a chartered bus has been trying to keep up with his skiff of a skateboard as the tiny crutch powered craft buffets the tempests of rush hour traffic, and waves of tourist and commuter crowds down Broadway from Dance New Amsterdam, at Chambers, to the edge of the Battery, and back north along Water. The mother ship carries its captive audience in its hold, along with all necessary equipment and expertise -- a DJ, a VJ and two videographers -- to render the quarry. We can hear the music being pumped into Shannon’s radio headset, which, equipped with a microphone, intermittently feeds back to us his voice and the sound of his wheels. Those outside the bus can hear only the latter.
This extends to skateboarder Mike Wright, an old friend of Shannon’s, who has happened into the mix near the beginning of the performance. Signing on for the rest of the journey, he becomes the Queequeg/Daggoo of the piece, participating in encounters with passersby, cops and construction workers. Such happenstances, but perhaps without Wright, promise to mark each of the remaining performances, which continue each afternoon through Friday, June 4, beginning at 4:30 pm.
“How do you make the [members of an] audience feel like they are on a skateboard?” the event’s press release asks.
I don’t know about others, but Shannon’s fluid meanderings through these madding crowds took me back to my high school days. Whenever bored of a winter’s class, I would escape to the frozen puddle that covered much of the school’s roof, don my hockey skates, and glide above the unsuspecting heads of my classmates.
Watching Shannon now, I become acutely aware of the three-dimensionality of his art, space opening and closing across the “blab of the pave,” mind calculating with intuitive speed the warping of space time all around its body. Pausing abreast of a curbside advertisement, he suspends almost horizontally on his crutches in one of his signature "wall stalls," creating a flesh and blood bas relief against the commercial grain.
Shannon scouts the route of "Traffic" by winter light
Three years in the making, Traffic’s metaphorically rich, imaginatively provocative and downright audacious adventurousness augurs well for the revitalizing Artist in Residence Program at DNA. Not to be missed, the 20 accompanying videos by the same artist that play along DNA’s gallery walls add another dimension to Shannon’s chess game with the laws of physics and those of Downtown Manhattan traffic.
In the clip playing out into Chambers St. adjacent to DNA’s entrance east of Broadway, the artist appears in jacket, tie and jaunty hat traversing the plazas around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. In dress, manner and movement he recalls, in his own unique style, the pizzaz and allure of another Pittsburgh native, the late Gene Kelly. Such talents do not mark all generations. When such a one, at the peak of his powers, wheels before you, you owe it to yourself and your children to catch him if you can.
Bill Shannon has gone ¾ of the way around the tip of Manhattan, retracing in retrograde the route famously described by the narrator Ishmael in the opening paragraphs of Moby-Dick. And, like his fellow traveler, he pauses to wax philosophical.Shannon perches on his crutches atop the white painted concrete platform that frames Rudolph de Harak and William Tarr’s public sculpture Rejected Skin, (1969) beneath one cantilevered corner of 77 Water St. at Old Slip. He begins a slow descent to an almost prone suspension. Having rested a found (presented by a construction worker, actually) gallon bottle of commercial iced tea on part of the artwork, he twirls and flashes first one specially made round-ended crutch then the other as he embodies the tension between flesh and rigid exoskeletar form at the heart of his unique dancing technique. The entire time he suspends and descends, he continues to discuss the challenges inherent in matching mind and muscle to metal and gravity and the constant risk in his exploration of new form and expression.
“Sometimes,” he says, his nose finally flush with the pavement, “it can look like failure.”right: Bill Shannon caught in a "wall stall." photo by BC
And suddenly, the 40 minutes we have spent following Shannon through Traffic -
A Transient Specific Performance, suggest a larger simulacrum for human endeavor. Think Mideast peace, perhaps, or the Obama presidency.
Episodically, mesmericly, our Pequod of a chartered bus has been trying to keep up with his skiff of a skateboard as the tiny crutch powered craft buffets the tempests of rush hour traffic, and waves of tourist and commuter crowds down Broadway from Dance New Amsterdam, at Chambers, to the edge of the Battery, and back north along Water. The mother ship carries its captive audience in its hold, along with all necessary equipment and expertise -- a DJ, a VJ and two videographers -- to render the quarry. We can hear the music being pumped into Shannon’s radio headset, which, equipped with a microphone, intermittently feeds back to us his voice and the sound of his wheels. Those outside the bus can hear only the latter.
This extends to skateboarder Mike Wright, an old friend of Shannon’s, who has happened into the mix near the beginning of the performance. Signing on for the rest of the journey, he becomes the Queequeg/Daggoo of the piece, participating in encounters with passersby, cops and construction workers. Such happenstances, but perhaps without Wright, promise to mark each of the remaining performances, which continue each afternoon through Friday, June 4, beginning at 4:30 pm.
“How do you make the [members of an] audience feel like they are on a skateboard?” the event’s press release asks.
I don’t know about others, but Shannon’s fluid meanderings through these madding crowds took me back to my high school days. Whenever bored of a winter’s class, I would escape to the frozen puddle that covered much of the school’s roof, don my hockey skates, and glide above the unsuspecting heads of my classmates.
Watching Shannon now, I become acutely aware of the three-dimensionality of his art, space opening and closing across the “blab of the pave,” mind calculating with intuitive speed the warping of space time all around its body. Pausing abreast of a curbside advertisement, he suspends almost horizontally on his crutches in one of his signature "wall stalls," creating a flesh and blood bas relief against the commercial grain.
Shannon scouts the route of "Traffic" by winter light
Three years in the making, Traffic’s metaphorically rich, imaginatively provocative and downright audacious adventurousness augurs well for the revitalizing Artist in Residence Program at DNA. Not to be missed, the 20 accompanying videos by the same artist that play along DNA’s gallery walls add another dimension to Shannon’s chess game with the laws of physics and those of Downtown Manhattan traffic.In the clip playing out into Chambers St. adjacent to DNA’s entrance east of Broadway, the artist appears in jacket, tie and jaunty hat traversing the plazas around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. In dress, manner and movement he recalls, in his own unique style, the pizzaz and allure of another Pittsburgh native, the late Gene Kelly. Such talents do not mark all generations. When such a one, at the peak of his powers, wheels before you, you owe it to yourself and your children to catch him if you can.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Painting the Town Rocha: Mad Men meet the Ladies @ Galapagos
Jenny Rocha rides into view.
photo by Melody Mudd
Jenny Rocha and her Painted Ladies have developed a following in this town since their debut in 2006. So has trumpeter, singer and bandleader Brian Newman. The two have each featured for some time now as performers in the intermittent Floating Kabarette productions of the Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, and both, in at least a part of their individual oeuvres, exhibit an interest in reclaiming and revitalizing the production values and styles of a bygone era of swanky supper clubs and New York nightlife.
So when the two teamed up at Galapagos on May 20, for their first ever shared evening of song and dance, you might have been forgiven for expecting a collaboration. As it turned out, Rocha’s production alternated segments like half-innings in a gender-specific ball game; the visiting boys of Newman’s jazz trio batting first.
Brian Newman. photo by Mark Pierson
Newman proved a genial host, except when beset by a recurring short in the microphone cord as he fondled his boxy 50’s style stand mic. Ahead of his polished side men -- Paul Francis on drums and Alex Smith on electronic keyboard -- he took the “pit,” what would normally serve as the audience left “pod” closest to the stage in Galapagos’ pool-bridging orchestra level seating scheme. Nattily tailored in a single-breasted dark suit complete with pocket square, a black pinstriped shirt with a white pointed collar and a white silk tie – Saville Row meets Bugsy Malone -- Newman welcomed the audience before turning his warm baritone, fiery trumpet and band mates loose on Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” He then introduced his hosts:
The red velour curtain parted on the home girls half of the inning to introduce all five black bra attired Painted Ladies astride white stage boxes from which they launched into a rhythm dance to recorded music by the Black Eyed Peas. Four minutes later, the jazz trio picked up to cover the set and costume changes before the Painted Ladies next number, playing a version of Marks & Simons’ popular standard “All of Me,” followed by the trio’s take on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” The evening’s pattern had been established.
photo by Melody Mudd
Rocha’s pieces, kitschy, sometimes witty amalgamations of modern and jazz dance styles in vaudeville frames with burlesque accents, lean heavily on their props as well as on their often creative, always well executed costumes. In her own dancing she welds a fierce attack to a sexy sensibility and a sense of humor. Her company: Shevaun Smythe Hiler, Jillian Hollis, Molly Merkler, and Jessy Smith, while obviously well-trained and accomplished, only rarely exhibit the same commitment and pizzaz.
This does not hold true for the rousing tap trio in which Hollis and Smith match the choreographer flap for heel, all while keeping their pastie-crowned boobs from flopping out from beneath cropped faux fur vests until the proper moment for the big titillation. The choreography often builds to such peeks and distributes 28 flavors of fan kicks and pelvic thrusts among its compositionally classic canons and counterpoints.
photo by Dmitri Wildfong Nishman
For me this happy hoofer pas de trois proved the movement highlight of the evening, save for the offhanded instant in which Rachel Prescott, a member of the wait staff, found herself momentarily suspended in action and spotlight, her back to us, in front of the red velour and the jazz trio’s rendition of Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.” For all the Karole Armitage like intensity and artisanal stage craftiness of Rocha’s creations, this haphazard moment of vulnerability and human indecision sang out as truly arresting.
Meanwhile, back at the sangspiel, Newman and his merry band kept up their half of the bargain, toodling through samples of the Great American Song Book with a quick sidetrip through a Jobim Bossa Nova. Newman’s approach to his music defies easy categorization: In his singing he channels a little Tony Bennett, a little more Mel Torme, a little less Harry Connick, Jr. He attacks his trumpet solos with be-bop like flourishes and flying fingers.
Rocha likes to fly, too. One fondly hopes that these Painted Ladies and mad tailored men will someday find “a little old place where we can get together. Love shack, baby.”
photo by Melody Mudd
Jenny Rocha and her Painted Ladies have developed a following in this town since their debut in 2006. So has trumpeter, singer and bandleader Brian Newman. The two have each featured for some time now as performers in the intermittent Floating Kabarette productions of the Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, and both, in at least a part of their individual oeuvres, exhibit an interest in reclaiming and revitalizing the production values and styles of a bygone era of swanky supper clubs and New York nightlife. So when the two teamed up at Galapagos on May 20, for their first ever shared evening of song and dance, you might have been forgiven for expecting a collaboration. As it turned out, Rocha’s production alternated segments like half-innings in a gender-specific ball game; the visiting boys of Newman’s jazz trio batting first.
Brian Newman. photo by Mark Pierson
Newman proved a genial host, except when beset by a recurring short in the microphone cord as he fondled his boxy 50’s style stand mic. Ahead of his polished side men -- Paul Francis on drums and Alex Smith on electronic keyboard -- he took the “pit,” what would normally serve as the audience left “pod” closest to the stage in Galapagos’ pool-bridging orchestra level seating scheme. Nattily tailored in a single-breasted dark suit complete with pocket square, a black pinstriped shirt with a white pointed collar and a white silk tie – Saville Row meets Bugsy Malone -- Newman welcomed the audience before turning his warm baritone, fiery trumpet and band mates loose on Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” He then introduced his hosts: The red velour curtain parted on the home girls half of the inning to introduce all five black bra attired Painted Ladies astride white stage boxes from which they launched into a rhythm dance to recorded music by the Black Eyed Peas. Four minutes later, the jazz trio picked up to cover the set and costume changes before the Painted Ladies next number, playing a version of Marks & Simons’ popular standard “All of Me,” followed by the trio’s take on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” The evening’s pattern had been established.
photo by Melody Mudd
Rocha’s pieces, kitschy, sometimes witty amalgamations of modern and jazz dance styles in vaudeville frames with burlesque accents, lean heavily on their props as well as on their often creative, always well executed costumes. In her own dancing she welds a fierce attack to a sexy sensibility and a sense of humor. Her company: Shevaun Smythe Hiler, Jillian Hollis, Molly Merkler, and Jessy Smith, while obviously well-trained and accomplished, only rarely exhibit the same commitment and pizzaz.
This does not hold true for the rousing tap trio in which Hollis and Smith match the choreographer flap for heel, all while keeping their pastie-crowned boobs from flopping out from beneath cropped faux fur vests until the proper moment for the big titillation. The choreography often builds to such peeks
photo by Dmitri Wildfong NishmanFor me this happy hoofer pas de trois proved the movement highlight of the evening, save for the offhanded instant in which Rachel Prescott, a member of the wait staff, found herself momentarily suspended in action and spotlight, her back to us, in front of the red velour and the jazz trio’s rendition of Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.” For all the Karole Armitage like intensity and artisanal stage craftiness of Rocha’s creations, this haphazard moment of vulnerability and human indecision sang out as truly arresting.
Meanwhile, back at the sangspiel, Newman and his merry band kept up their half of the bargain, toodling through samples of the Great American Song Book with a quick sidetrip through a Jobim Bossa Nova. Newman’s approach to his music defies easy categorization: In his singing he channels a little Tony Bennett, a little more Mel Torme, a little less Harry Connick, Jr. He attacks his trumpet solos with be-bop like flourishes and flying fingers.
Rocha likes to fly, too. One fondly hopes that these Painted Ladies and mad tailored men will someday find
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Love & Dance: Nora Petroliunas / The Pharmacy Project present Bricks & Honey at 100 Grand, May 7 & 8
below: (from top to bottom): Hsaio-Jou Tang, Amber Morgan, Tess Igarta, Sarah Rose Bodley, Meredith-Lyn Olivieri. photo by Mistral Hay
The audience has just been moved. Literally. The handsome couple, who have perched so exquisitely atop the coffee table placed against the mirror at the west wall of 100 Grand, find themselves momentarily separated when the musical chairs-like redistribution of spectators-in-the-round calls for us to claim new seats. But across the gap now between them, he beckons her to an adjoining empty chair. Their union restored, an open seat now offers itself next to me. Soon, Bill Young, the loft’s proprietor sidles into it.
As the action onstage resumes, he leans over and whispers conspiratorially, “I just love her work.”
And I have to now admit that I do as well.
And what’s not to love? Nora Petroliunas has always, in the two years that I’ve been watching her art develop, been more than generous with her audience. She has already established a knack for serving up quirky and surprising sensual feasts that fully exploit the imaginative possibilities of the architecture, the furniture, and the dancers that she selects to frame her visions. With Bricks & Honey, her very first one-woman show, she has emerged as a first rate dance maker as well.
In this she owes a great deal to the performers with whom she has long been collaborating. In this case they include Sarah Rose Bodley, Tess Igarta, Amber Morgan, Meredith-Lyn Olivieri, Hsaio-Jou Tang. Only Morgan is new to me. I have never seen the others dance with such consummate ease, grace and unabashed sensual beauty. The quality of their five-fold collective realization of the creator’s compositional craft proves enough even to touch the heart of a dance curmudgeon such as me.
Hsaio-Jou Tang attached to Amber Morgan
photo by Paula Lobo
The weight of touch; the gravity of desire play key roles in the troupe’s investigation of space. In repeated patterns of partnering, we see relationships rendered as leg irons as, one after another, individual dancers struggle to walk with a prone partner grasping one ankle. First Bodley and later Igarta execute electrifying and virtuosic solos, each of which includes an extended series of jumps taking off from and landing on the performer’s shins as her legs remain folded beneath her.
These two represent only the first among equals in distributing the simple gifts that Petroliunas flings around. Bodley has often featured in the choreographer’s canon, and her two solos here seem to build on and extend her role as muse-in-chief. (That’s mis-chief to you, buddy). Igarta, on the other hand, who also plays the loft’s piano to accompany Bodley’s first solo, breaks through as a master of the kind of weighted lyricism that has begun to emerge as a Petroliunas leitmotif.
left: Tess Igarta
photo by Paula Lobo
Olivieri, subsequently, charms and intrigues in an introspective passage in which she builds a ziggurat of furniture using as foundation one of the loft’s sturdy kitchen tables. Atop of this she sits to imbibe a wistful glass of wine that she pours from one of the 32 bottles that have been lined up like footlights along one edge of the space. Soon the other four perform a kind of barnacle ballet along the edges of the supporting table.
The wine bottles, almost all partially filled with water, along with several similarly ablutionary clear glass jars, have been handed out to arriving members of the audience and later collected by the dancers just before the big move. In case you might have misapprehended that Petroliunas would be leaving you alone to sit back in anonymous idiot peace during her show, greeter Sarah Oppenheim has also handed you a book of matches at the door with “the pharmacy project” scrawled in black ink across its white cover. Souvenirs, as usual, to be had, and used, at the spectacle.
Meredith-Lyn Olivieri prepares her ziggurat
photo by Mistral Hay
The further deployment of these elements, as well as those of such inveterate Petroliunas creative touches as table lamps, other furniture, a galvanized washtub and water buckets, and musical compositions ranging from those of contemporary collaborators Ed Donohue (donny hue and the colors) and Saul Simon Macwilliams to recording artists Doris Troy (Just One Look) and Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts (Angel of the Morning) I’ll leave for later. I encourage the reader to see this piece, should it ever be revived, and wouldn’t want to give away the plot.
But I have a personal confession. I found myself somewhat reluctant to commit to attending this production, enamored as I have been of the creator’s past efforts. Like an infatuated lover, I felt afraid of the possibility of finding myself let down, and equally skittish of the idea of making anyone my “critic’s darling.”
I needn’t have worried. Here I sit on a soft and lovely Spring evening, gazing across Bill Young’s lovely, haphazardly cluttered, workaday loft through a veil of gorgeous dancing and a compelling lack of drama at other members of this audience and the choreographer herself, hard at work on the sound score controlled by the Macbook on her lap. And I find myself absorbed into her dream; taken by the possibilities the poet Auden proposes in his Lullaby:
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
The microcosms Petroliunas shapes play their parts almost completely in poetic terms, many footed and raw. There exist “certain evenings when the heart relaxes.” Bricks & Honey provides plenty of suggestive space in which one can be persuaded to try again. When an artist can open her heart, and mine, to the possibilities of new life even in the face of inevitable loss, and do it in the wordless wonder of dance, I consider myself glad to have made the trip and lucky to be a witness.
The audience has just been moved. Literally. The handsome couple, who have perched so exquisitely atop the coffee table placed against the mirror at the west wall of 100 Grand, find themselves momentarily separated when the musical chairs-like redistribution of spectators-in-the-round calls for us to claim new seats. But across the gap now between them, he beckons her to an adjoining empty chair. Their union restored, an open seat now offers itself next to me. Soon, Bill Young, the loft’s proprietor sidles into it.As the action onstage resumes, he leans over and whispers conspiratorially, “I just love her work.”
And I have to now admit that I do as well.
And what’s not to love? Nora Petroliunas has always, in the two years that I’ve been watching her art develop, been more than generous with her audience. She has already established a knack for serving up quirky and surprising sensual feasts that fully exploit the imaginative possibilities of the architecture, the furniture, and the dancers that she selects to frame her visions. With Bricks & Honey, her very first one-woman show, she has emerged as a first rate dance maker as well.
In this she owes a great deal to the performers with whom she has long been collaborating. In this case they include Sarah Rose Bodley, Tess Igarta, Amber Morgan, Meredith-Lyn Olivieri, Hsaio-Jou Tang. Only Morgan is new to me. I have never seen the others dance with such consummate ease, grace and unabashed sensual beauty. The quality of their five-fold collective realization of the creator’s compositional craft proves enough even to touch the heart of a dance curmudgeon such as me.
Hsaio-Jou Tang attached to Amber Morgan photo by Paula Lobo
The weight of touch; the gravity of desire play key roles in the troupe’s investigation of space. In repeated patterns of partnering, we see relationships rendered as leg irons as, one after another, individual dancers struggle to walk with a prone partner grasping one ankle. First Bodley and later Igarta execute electrifying and virtuosic solos, each of which includes an extended series of jumps taking off from and landing on the performer’s shins as her legs remain folded beneath her.
These two represent only the first among equals in distributing the simple gifts that Petroliunas flings around. Bodley has often featured in the choreographer’s canon, and her two solos here seem to build on and extend her role as muse-in-chief. (That’s mis-chief to you, buddy). Igarta, on the other hand, who also plays the loft’s piano to accompany Bodley’s first solo, breaks through as a master of the kind of weighted lyricism that has begun to emerge as a Petroliunas leitmotif.left: Tess Igarta
photo by Paula Lobo
Olivieri, subsequently, charms and intrigues in an introspective passage in which she builds a ziggurat of furniture using as foundation one of the loft’s sturdy kitchen tables. Atop of this she sits to imbibe a wistful glass of wine that she pours from one of the 32 bottles that have been lined up like footlights along one edge of the space. Soon the other four perform a kind of barnacle ballet along the edges of the supporting table.
The wine bottles, almost all partially filled with water, along with several similarly ablutionary clear glass jars, have been handed out to arriving members of the audience and later collected by the dancers just before the big move. In case you might have misapprehended that Petroliunas would be leaving you alone to sit back in anonymous idiot peace during her show, greeter Sarah Oppenheim has also handed you a book of matches at the door with “the pharmacy project” scrawled in black ink across its white cover. Souvenirs, as usual, to be had, and used, at the spectacle.
Meredith-Lyn Olivieri prepares her ziggurat photo by Mistral Hay
The further deployment of these elements, as well as those of such inveterate Petroliunas creative touches as table lamps, other furniture, a galvanized washtub and water buckets, and musical compositions ranging from those of contemporary collaborators Ed Donohue (donny hue and the colors) and Saul Simon Macwilliams to recording artists Doris Troy (Just One Look) and Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts (Angel of the Morning) I’ll leave for later. I encourage the reader to see this piece, should it ever be revived, and wouldn’t want to give away the plot.
But I have a personal confession. I found myself somewhat reluctant to commit to attending this production, enamored as I have been of the creator’s past efforts. Like an infatuated lover, I felt afraid of the possibility of finding myself let down, and equally skittish of the idea of making anyone my “critic’s darling.”
I needn’t have worried. Here I sit on a soft and lovely Spring evening, gazing across Bill Young’s lovely, haphazardly cluttered, workaday loft through a veil of gorgeous dancing and a compelling lack of drama at other members of this audience and the choreographer herself, hard at work on the sound score controlled by the Macbook on her lap. And I find myself absorbed into her dream; taken by the possibilities the poet Auden proposes in his Lullaby:
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
The microcosms Petroliunas shapes play their parts almost completely in poetic terms, many footed and raw. There exist “certain evenings when the heart relaxes.” Bricks & Honey provides plenty of suggestive space in which one can be persuaded to try again. When an artist can open her heart, and mine, to the possibilities of new life even in the face of inevitable loss, and do it in the wordless wonder of dance, I consider myself glad to have made the trip and lucky to be a witness.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Counting Cards at Grandma's: Nan Swid and Donald Kaufman Recent Work at Gallery 9E
I leaned down to speak to a charming young girl in a maroon dress staring candidly up at Nan Swid’s Combination Wall 2 (2009) at Gallery 9E, 508 West 26th St. in Chelsea, Thursday evening.
“What do you see?” I asked confidentially, hoping for a pithy, surprising, funny or illuminating quote.
The light of the golden hour transfigured her blonde curls as she turned away from the window and the roughly 24 square foot wall-mounted construction, fashioned from panel, disassembled book paper, and nails, variously coated by encaustic wax that stood before us. She leveled her clear and steady gaze at me.
Nan Swid’s Combination Wall 2 (2009) at Gallery 9E
all photos by Rodin Banica
“Grandma’s art work.”Well, that threw me for a loop.
“How often do you see it?” I queried, regaining my friendly poise.
She looked puzzled. I changed tactics.
“How old are you?”
“Nine.”
“You’ve been seeing it your whole life, then.”
right: Nan Swid's Day Window (2010)
Duh, her blankness seemed to say as she flipped her hair turning away towards the window. I might have been the only one counting.
I did a lot of counting at the show of recent work that Swid shared with Donald Kaufman at 9E. I counted the disassembled books in Swid’s wall relief’s, framed assemblages building from materials similar to those of the the wall mounts, to foil-like assemblages of dark to brightly colored and clear cellophanes, leading finally to ones encrusted with gold leaf over index pages from manila legal files: N – O, or Z – X for instance.left: Donald Kaufman's Graph 2010
In Kaufman’s room, around an open L-shaped corner, I counted cards. His 19 gauche on paper works present jarring as well as subtle juxtapositions of color. Said to have been inspired by architectural color samples, they depict variegated rectangle shaped single color fields in repeated flat patterns. Within each image, these rectangular color fields keep to a more or less uniform size and their arrangement suggests to the mind a set of overlapping cards upon a table as seen from above. The “table top” consists of a single, often strong, color that serves as background or field framing the arrangement of the card-like smaller rectangles.
My notes for these pieces read something like: “12 on olive” for Canyon (2010), or “7 on NECO” for Graph (2010) the latter color recalling in its gouache texture, the kind of plum brown I remember from NECO valentine Sweethearts. Across from Swid’s relatively expansive pieces, often amplified by their simple but elegant frames, Kauffman’s unframed jazz riffs on Albers, which, all in portrait orientation, range in size from only 70 to 432 square inches rectangular, look diminutive.
The design and even the fashion pedigree of both artists can easily be discerned in the way they handle their materials, while the counterpoint of Kaufman’s dry understatement with Swid’s sometimes playful sometimes sultry sensual and textural interplay proves effectively complementary. The show continues through Sunday, May 9.
Above: Donald Kaufman's room at Gallery 9E, 508 West 26th St, New York
Sunday, April 25, 2010
A Midwinter's Night Wet Dream: Fullstop's "Foreplays" in the Galapagos, Feb. 8 - 23
“They be scared and lonely. “
So says Michael Micalizzi as the thug wannabe Mikey in Patrick Shaw’s “Mad Twitterpated,” directed by Alexandra Bassett. He pleads this in reference to the orphaned bear cubs he has been cluster adopting over Facebook on behalf of Cliff Campbell’s character Clifford. But his observation goes far beyond its immediate context.
(l to r:) Caroline Calkins as Girl, Michael Micalizzi as Mikey; Cliff Campbell as Clifford in Patrick Shaw’s “Mad Twitterpated,”
all photos by Brian Hashimoto
It seems to be a (mostly urban) jungle out there for most of the young lovers, or rather love aspirants and acolytes, who strutted their hours upon the stage, screen, aisles, balcony and waters of Galapagos Art Space in February in Fullstop Collective’s Foreplays. The eight brief plays, two short videos, and live musical interludes that comprised this showcase on the Mondays bracketing Valentine’s Day, provided a mid-winter night’s scheme of the trials and tribulations of romantic love among a certain slice of the population in a highly mediated age. If most of the characters find themselves lost in the woods and among the thickets of hook ups and hang ups in a bewildering array of polymorphously perverse potential permutations, then perhaps we can sympathize with their desire to hang on to the cuddlier, if stuffed, versions of lions, tigers and bears with which they grapple, even as they long for each other.
So if Cliff and Mikey’s play within a play involves dream visualization projected via, uh, Droid, and ends with kids and a mortgage, their confusion cannot be considered uncommon. Consider the women in Lillian Meredith’s “there is no part of me that wants to have sex with you right now and yet here we are.” They confide in one another that they have never had an orgasm during sex, simulate coitus with their giant teddy bears, have trouble deciding whether they want it “hard” or “soft,” and rant about being insulated, via Midol, from the emotional roller coaster of their own natural cycles. They ponder existential and psycho-political questions around penetration:
(Above r:) Sarah Ann Masse posts her panda in Lillian Meredith’s “there is no part of me..."
After admitting to her friend that penetration is what she wants from her lovers, Lauren Weinberger’s character frets that, “maybe that’s scary. Maybe that’s not the healthiest way to have a permanent and meaningful relationship with someone – to have them constantly be inside you but you’re never inside them. I mean, … the problem I keep running into is how can I ever have an equal un-patronizing, non-sexually frightening relationship with a man when I really really want him to dominate me and pound me into tomorrow?”
Sarah Ann Masse’s character thinks her friend may be, “doing [her]self a big disservice thinking this way….
“Well, I mean, you’ve just completely negated for yourself the possibility of ever having a permanent, sexually satisfying relationship with anyone….
“including yourself.”
(l to r:) Laura Wiese, Lauren Weinberger, Sean McIntyre and Sarah Ann Masse
The expectations and the etiquette of politically correct sex in an epoch of texting, drinking binges, supercharged sex toys, internet porn, post-feminist and post-Freudian politics, and pop psychology emerge as preoccupations in Brian Hashimoto’s “porn.edu,” and Bassett’s “Lust Trust,” directed by David Jaffe. The latter two of these themes also crop up with less contemporary reference as kinky Viennese proto-fascist subtexts in Benjamin Smolen’s “The Lewis Family Waltz,” directed by Shaw, with its dancing couples stuttering and undone over the name “Germany,” and Lucy Gillespie’s mock-historic “Fore-Shadow-Play.”
Louiza Collins and Conrado De La Rosa with other cast members in Benjamin Smolen’s “The Lewis Family Waltz,”
The first three of these have all been created with imaginative theatrical conceits and hint at the range, if not always the reach, of talent that Bassett, as artistic director of Foreplays, has deployed in challenging her collaborators to bring this showcase to life. That talent achieves its fullest realization in her staging of Anton Handel’s “Analogue,” which uses the formal stage, the exposed areas of wading pool over which Galapagos has suspended its orchestra-level booths, and the railings and ledges of the surrounding balcony to weave an Avatar meets Matrix style videogame fantasy into a family sitcom all within a theater artist’s restaurant day job narrative. Here the spirited performances by Celeste Arias, Analise Hartnett, Meredith, Scott Morse and Brenden Rogers meet Bassett’s creative handling of Handel’s script in the evening’s most ambitious spectacle.
To be sure, the allure of ambition and energy emerge as the hallmark of this long evening even if the short videos “Hobo Proposal” by Ironic T-Shirt, and the satirically sharper “Call My Boyfriend,” by Diana Wright, as well as the soul cover sets by the quartet Quiet Loudly might have been more imaginatively integrated to facilitate the flow of events and interactivity. Bassett and her collaborators sometimes betray a literary and theatrical reverence that smells more of the perfume of a fine liberal arts education than it does of teen spirit, but the strength of their cooperative rests in a sense of shared adventure and risk. The more they continue to challenge each other, and to raise their realization to the level of their ambition, the more Fullstop will distinguish itself as a collective not only worth watching, but dating long term.
(Above:) Celeste Arias and Scott Morse in Anton Handel’s “Analogue,”
So says Michael Micalizzi as the thug wannabe Mikey in Patrick Shaw’s “Mad Twitterpated,” directed by Alexandra Bassett. He pleads this in reference to the orphaned bear cubs he has been cluster adopting over Facebook on behalf of Cliff Campbell’s character Clifford. But his observation goes far beyond its immediate context.(l to r:) Caroline Calkins as Girl, Michael Micalizzi as Mikey; Cliff Campbell as Clifford in Patrick Shaw’s “Mad Twitterpated,”
all photos by Brian Hashimoto
It seems to be a (mostly urban) jungle out there for most of the young lovers, or rather love aspirants and acolytes, who strutted their hours upon the stage, screen, aisles, balcony and waters of Galapagos Art Space in February in Fullstop Collective’s Foreplays. The eight brief plays, two short videos, and live musical interludes that comprised this showcase on the Mondays bracketing Valentine’s Day, provided a mid-winter night’s scheme of the trials and tribulations of romantic love among a certain slice of the population in a highly mediated age. If most of the characters find themselves lost in the woods and among the thickets of hook ups and hang ups in a bewildering array of polymorphously perverse potential permutations, then perhaps we can sympathize with their desire to hang on to the cuddlier, if stuffed, versions of lions, tigers and bears with which they grapple, even as they long for each other.
So if Cliff and Mikey’s play within a play involves dream visualization projected via, uh, Droid, and ends with kids and a mortgage, their confusion cannot be considered uncommon. Consider the women in Lillian Meredith’s “there is no part of me that wants to have sex with you right now and yet here we are.” They confide in one another that they have never had an orgasm during sex, simulate coitus with their giant teddy bears, have trouble deciding whether they want it “hard” or “soft,” and rant about being insulated, via Midol, from the emotional roller coaster of their own natural cycles. They ponder existential and psycho-political questions around penetration:(Above r:) Sarah Ann Masse posts her panda in Lillian Meredith’s “there is no part of me..."
After admitting to her friend that penetration is what she wants from her lovers, Lauren Weinberger’s character frets that, “maybe that’s scary. Maybe that’s not the healthiest way to have a permanent and meaningful relationship with someone – to have them constantly be inside you but you’re never inside them. I mean, … the problem I keep running into is how can I ever have an equal un-patronizing, non-sexually frightening relationship with a man when I really really want him to dominate me and pound me into tomorrow?”
Sarah Ann Masse’s character thinks her friend may be, “doing [her]self a big disservice thinking this way….
“Well, I mean, you’ve just completely negated for yourself the possibility of ever having a permanent, sexually satisfying relationship with anyone….
“including yourself.”
(l to r:) Laura Wiese, Lauren Weinberger, Sean McIntyre and Sarah Ann Masse
The expectations and the etiquette of politically correct sex in an epoch of texting, drinking binges, supercharged sex toys, internet porn, post-feminist and post-Freudian politics, and pop psychology emerge as preoccupations in Brian Hashimoto’s “porn.edu,” and Bassett’s “Lust Trust,” directed by David Jaffe. The latter two of these themes also crop up with less contemporary reference as kinky Viennese proto-fascist subtexts in Benjamin Smolen’s “The Lewis Family Waltz,” directed by Shaw, with its dancing couples stuttering and undone over the name “Germany,” and Lucy Gillespie’s mock-historic “Fore-Shadow-Play.” Louiza Collins and Conrado De La Rosa with other cast members in Benjamin Smolen’s “The Lewis Family Waltz,”
The first three of these have all been created with imaginative theatrical conceits and hint at the range, if not always the reach, of talent that Bassett, as artistic director of Foreplays, has deployed in challenging her collaborators to bring this showcase to life. That talent achieves its fullest realization in her staging of Anton Handel’s “Analogue,” which uses the formal stage, the exposed areas of wading pool over which Galapagos has suspended its orchestra-level booths, and the railings and ledges of the surrounding balcony to weave an Avatar meets Matrix style videogame fantasy into a family sitcom all within a theater artist’s restaurant day job narrative. Here the spirited performances by Celeste Arias, Analise Hartnett, Meredith, Scott Morse and Brenden Rogers meet Bassett’s creative handling of Handel’s script in the evening’s most ambitious spectacle.
To be sure, the allure of ambition and energy emerge as the hallmark of this long evening even if the short videos “Hobo Proposal” by Ironic T-Shirt, and the satirically sharper “Call My Boyfriend,” by Diana Wright, as well as the soul cover sets by the quartet Quiet Loudly might have been more imaginatively integrated to facilitate the flow of events and interactivity. Bassett and her collaborators sometimes betray a literary and theatrical reverence that smells more of the perfume of a fine liberal arts education than it does of teen spirit, but the strength of their cooperative rests in a sense of shared adventure and risk. The more they continue to challenge each other, and to raise their realization to the level of their ambition, the more Fullstop will distinguish itself as a collective not only worth watching, but dating long term.(Above:) Celeste Arias and Scott Morse in Anton Handel’s “Analogue,”
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Three places in the Art world - "Denim" at 80WSE
When I think back on Denim, the exhibition curated by David Rimanelli, NYU visiting assistant professor of art history and Artforum contributing editor, February 2 - March 12, at the University’s 80WSE gallery, a couple of images, a film and a bowl of chocolate coated raisins leap to mind. And then I think of the people. Context is king.
The first of the images happens to be one of the late Karlheinz Weinberger’s gelatin silver prints, a set of which took up an entire large wall in the first interior gallery. Titled Männlicher Akt, the image in question dates from around 1975, and depicts a somewhat hairy 20’s something male nude, glancing offhandedly towards the camera/viewer. His tattooed arms and hands frame a slouched torso and his flaccid, ample cock and balls rest within the V of his thighs, which spread to straddle the platform, covered with a striped fabric, on which he sits.
I had just come from the large gallery 1, its picture window looking west across Washington Square, where the growing darkness of the winter evening seemed to mimic the sky-to-midnight blue shadings of Jack Pierson’s or for mercy, a more than 30 square foot folded pigment print from 2009. This piece fairly dominated a room in which Tom Burr’s construction Slacks, from 2008, and Rob Pruitt’s pair of blue jeans and concrete benches from his 2006 Esprit du Corps provided counterpoint.
Right below: Jack Pierson's "or for mercy" 2009
The gallery’s press release had offered the following:
“Denim’s cult status as a rebel uniform emerged in the public mind largely through classic Hollywood cinema—for instance, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and later as the preferred style for certain subcultures, for example gay subculture, as can be seen in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos; or, returning to Hollywood, William Friedkin’s controversial Cruising.
“In DENIM, these cinematic references commingle with denim’s “high-art” associations, which have become ingrained through the ‘60s image of the “artist-worker,” exemplified by minimalists like Robert Morris, or by Carl Andre, habitually attired in overalls. Andy Warhol is a key figure in this respect, both in his own sartorial inclinations but particularly in his art and films.”
Rimanelli’s exhibition seemed to trade on these juxtapositions while implying and perhaps provoking a series of questions using our familiar relationship a fabric as a point of reference, or, if you prefer, departure. Hell, the jeans encasing Burr’s bent kneed concrete represented the only real denim in the show. Meanwhile Warhol, represented at the Gallery by his early film Blow Job, (1964), and a framed 1971 record jacket sleeve for the Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers, complete, we’re told, with working zipper, made his cameo count with only a practical picture of pants on a commercial art product and a hint of no pants in action. Warhol at NYU? What a way to make the most of your Lady Gaga moment.
A concern with fashion, in fact, both actual and artistic/cultural, lay just below the surface in this runway of art featuring work in many media from 11 artists and ranging over the last half century. That would place the work in response to the “emergence” referenced in the press release, but squarely inside the “ingraining.” Said to have been originally inspired in part by the guns prominent in the Export performance artist’s work of the late 60’ and 70’s, the show veered instead towards the spectacle of artists’ depictions of our meta erotic fascination with what we wear and how we let it represent us. Thus we have Valie Export's gelatin silver image Genital Panic, 1969, from the Action Pants series, in which she has photographed herself with her crotch partially exposed while holding a rifle – a proto Patty Hearst.
Talking ‘bout a revolution, well, you know, the press release mentions that, too:
“The artists in DENIM explore the multifarious connotations of a material that began its life as a fabric for work clothes, but has become, over the past few decades, a material for fashion, both instant and high-end couture. For Rimanelli, denim not only refers to fashion but also functions as a psychic material, sheathing ideas that range from the erotic to the implicitly revolutionary.”
Multifarious connotations sheathing ideas? Sounds erotically revolutionary to me. But then again so do work clothes, at least in this context. Standing among the elements of Mike Smith’s single channel video installation Secret Horror, 1980, I found myself dipping in to the bowl of chocolate covered raisins and coffee beans, thoughtfully provided as part of the piece. Yes, Virginia, you can eat art, even as you begin counting the patrons at the opening decked out in denim, and beginning with yours truly.
After all, ain’t it the people with their romantic hopes and dreams of better living through cotton and commerce that make all this worthwhile? Mind the gap, and while we’re counting, recall that old perhaps apocryphal slogan of the French Situationists from roughly the same time period referenced in the emergence and the ingraining: “Désirs érotiques saper les fondements de l'ordre établi [Erotic desires undermine the basis of the established order].”
I slipped in through the curtain cordoning off the gallery screening Blow Job from the one containing Secret Horror. I tuned in to the small gestures of both the movie and the mostly student/academic crowd. In the few times I’ve visited 80WSE, I’ve become impressed with it as a jewel box for quirky and provocative little exhibitions introducing the younger artists now making their way through the academy to Denim, Stuart Sherman and the like, even as it adds its soft spoken voice to the loud and crowded New York art circus. Now it stands to serve in turn, in its current annual MFA show, as these student artists’ portal opening on to this fabulous fashion city’s art scene.
Wandering back to the first interior gallery, I encountered the publicist Deborah Hughes and the two women from her firm helping her handle PR for the opening. All exuded a cool and casual elegance in their no-nonsense pony tails, figure flattering sweaters, and heeled boots under, you guessed it, well fitted designer jeans. These women service the real fashion world and their presence and their attire (their uniform; their work clothes, actually) seemed to point many of the questions the show begged to ask. If anything comes between them and their [you name the designer], it would truly have to be a work of art.
The first of the images happens to be one of the late Karlheinz Weinberger’s gelatin silver prints, a set of which took up an entire large wall in the first interior gallery. Titled Männlicher Akt, the image in question dates from around 1975, and depicts a somewhat hairy 20’s something male nude, glancing offhandedly towards the camera/viewer. His tattooed arms and hands frame a slouched torso and his flaccid, ample cock and balls rest within the V of his thighs, which spread to straddle the platform, covered with a striped fabric, on which he sits.I had just come from the large gallery 1, its picture window looking west across Washington Square, where the growing darkness of the winter evening seemed to mimic the sky-to-midnight blue shadings of Jack Pierson’s or for mercy, a more than 30 square foot folded pigment print from 2009. This piece fairly dominated a room in which Tom Burr’s construction Slacks, from 2008, and Rob Pruitt’s pair of blue jeans and concrete benches from his 2006 Esprit du Corps provided counterpoint.
Right below: Jack Pierson's "or for mercy" 2009
The gallery’s press release had offered the following:
“Denim’s cult status as a rebel uniform emerged in the public mind largely through classic Hollywood cinema—for instance, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and later as the preferred style for certain subcultures, for example gay subculture, as can be seen in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos; or, returning to Hollywood, William Friedkin’s controversial Cruising.“In DENIM, these cinematic references commingle with denim’s “high-art” associations, which have become ingrained through the ‘60s image of the “artist-worker,” exemplified by minimalists like Robert Morris, or by Carl Andre, habitually attired in overalls. Andy Warhol is a key figure in this respect, both in his own sartorial inclinations but particularly in his art and films.”
Rimanelli’s exhibition seemed to trade on these juxtapositions while implying and perhaps provoking a series of questions using our familiar relationship a fabric as a point of reference, or, if you prefer, departure. Hell, the jeans encasing Burr’s bent kneed concrete represented the only real denim in the show. Meanwhile Warhol, represented at the Gallery by his early film Blow Job, (1964), and a framed 1971 record jacket sleeve for the Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers, complete, we’re told, with working zipper, made his cameo count with only a practical picture of pants on a commercial art product and a hint of no pants in action. Warhol at NYU? What a way to make the most of your Lady Gaga moment.
A concern with fashion, in fact, both actual and artistic/cultural, lay just below the surface in this runway of art featuring work in many media from 11 artists and ranging over the last half century. That would place the work in response to the “emergence” referenced in the press release, but squarely inside the “ingraining.” Said to have been originally inspired in part by the guns prominent in the Export performance artist’s work of the late 60’ and 70’s, the show veered instead towards the spectacle of artists’ depictions of our meta erotic fascination with what we wear and how we let it represent us. Thus we have Valie Export's gelatin silver image Genital Panic, 1969, from the Action Pants series, in which she has photographed herself with her crotch partially exposed while holding a rifle – a proto Patty Hearst.Talking ‘bout a revolution, well, you know, the press release mentions that, too:
“The artists in DENIM explore the multifarious connotations of a material that began its life as a fabric for work clothes, but has become, over the past few decades, a material for fashion, both instant and high-end couture. For Rimanelli, denim not only refers to fashion but also functions as a psychic material, sheathing ideas that range from the erotic to the implicitly revolutionary.”
Multifarious connotations sheathing ideas? Sounds erotically revolutionary to me. But then again so do work clothes, at least in this context. Standing among the elements of Mike Smith’s single channel video installation Secret Horror, 1980, I found myself dipping in to the bowl of chocolate covered raisins and coffee beans, thoughtfully provided as part of the piece. Yes, Virginia, you can eat art, even as you begin counting the patrons at the opening decked out in denim, and beginning with yours truly.
After all, ain’t it the people with their romantic hopes and dreams of better living through cotton and commerce that make all this worthwhile? Mind the gap, and while we’re counting, recall that old perhaps apocryphal slogan of the French Situationists from roughly the same time period referenced in the emergence and the ingraining: “Désirs érotiques saper les fondements de l'ordre établi [Erotic desires undermine the basis of the established order].”
I slipped in through the curtain cordoning off the gallery screening Blow Job from the one containing Secret Horror. I tuned in to the small gestures of both the movie and the mostly student/academic crowd. In the few times I’ve visited 80WSE, I’ve become impressed with it as a jewel box for quirky and provocative little exhibitions introducing the younger artists now making their way through the academy to Denim, Stuart Sherman and the like, even as it adds its soft spoken voice to the loud and crowded New York art circus. Now it stands to serve in turn, in its current annual MFA show, as these student artists’ portal opening on to this fabulous fashion city’s art scene.
Wandering back to the first interior gallery, I encountered the publicist Deborah Hughes and the two women from her firm helping her handle PR for the opening. All exuded a cool and casual elegance in their no-nonsense pony tails, figure flattering sweaters, and heeled boots under, you guessed it, well fitted designer jeans. These women service the real fashion world and their presence and their attire (their uniform; their work clothes, actually) seemed to point many of the questions the show begged to ask. If anything comes between them and their [you name the designer], it would truly have to be a work of art.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Studies in Whimsy and Flesh: dear peter, love nora @ 100 Grand, August 28
The first hint of whimsy arrives in the form of the riot of old fashioned table lamps, complete with shades, hung upside down from the ceiling and replacing the normal lighting in the main dance space of the second floor loft at 100 Grand St. in Manhattan. Chairs for the audience have been ranged along the windowed wall overlooking the eponymous street, and at a ¾ angle in the loft’s southeastern corner. Facing this latter quadrant after the lights dim and then resume their warm glow Peter Chamberlin begins “19/20,” a 6 minute solo that sets the tone for an engaging evening of dance exploration.Peter Chamberlin in "19/20"
photos by Hope Davis
Chamberlin’s work features the focused miniaturized quality of etudes. But these studies exhibit technical and compositional acumen of a budding master. In “19/20” he appears to lay a repeating series of 19 patterns for the upper body: head, torso, shoulders, arms, hands , over 20 variations for the legs and particularly the feet. The shifting transitions from one combination to the next steadily increase in tempo to match that of the quickening staccato thump underpinning Sam Crawford’s chordal accompanying recorded score.
“Untitled” pairs the radiant and articulate Shayla-Vie Jenkins with the coolly articulate Hsiao–Jou Tang in patterns that go from head and shoulders to feet in poses and walks shot through with swift silent and limber side falls and rises. The dancers provide such a visual and kinetic feast in the robust suppleness of their realization of Chamberlin’s choreography that even the simple crisp change of a walking pattern from vertical to horizontal orientation across the stage registers with the force of revelation. Like the dancemaker, these women make maximum use of their fabulous feet.Having watched with interest Nora Petroliunas’ work as a principal in the artistic directorship of the collective pocket engine, I stood unsurprised at intermission as the audience received square pieces of scrap paper from her dancers along with instructions for rearranging itself. Pocket engine’s piece(s) had included roles for the audience and innovative use of the space.
Once the chairs had been replaced in a U-shaped, ¾ in the round configuration; the curved end facing 100 Grand’s mirrored wall, the question of a vantage point became an intriguing one. I determined that a standing spot next to the full-sized litter basket at the bottom of the right hand arm of the U allowed an excellent view of the space including the entire audience with and without the use of the mirrors. It also took in the full span of the windows above Grand St., one of which promised to figure in some way in what would come.
Almost directly in front of me, at the edge of the main performance area, stood a decorative cast iron coat and hat stand with a yellow cotton rain coat hanging from one its curved prongs. In the far right corner, similarly situated, a four foot tall artificial Christmas tree festooned with ½ pint lavender milk cartons awaited its cameo. Three large cereal boxes occupied the opposite corner. Origami cranes strung in spiral climbed the floor stand of an empty hanging bird cage by the one open window.
(l to r) Peter Chamberlin (obscured), Tess Igarta, Sarah Bodley, Hsiao–Jou Tang
The six dancers, 4 in white dresses or skirts, 2 in white pants and shirts stand in the space facing in several directions. First 3, and then 2 more fall into motion as Saul Simon MacWilliams' recorded score brings the opus “goose” to life. Throughout the first musical segment, Lesley Garrison stands her ground while Sarah Bodley, Tess Igarta, Tang, Julia Burrer, and Chamberlin fly through a series of backwards, forwards and side runs and falls, turns, and twists in patterns that remind me of choreographic palindromes.The piece develops in trios, duets and solos in a poetry of earnest playfulness. Petroliunas proves as masterly in presenting each of her dancers as individual movers as she does in compositional craft. She also displays a penchant for whimsical distraction and displacement. After Burrer and Igarta have engaged in a solo-duet-solo sequence the rangy Burrer dons the rain coat and begins pulling a seemingly endless supply of stainless steel tea spoons out of various pockets. These she hands to individual members of the audience.
We’ve come to a pause. Tang and Bodley ask us to take out our scrap paper and lead us in an attempt to create origami frogs. The others collect them in the cereal boxes.
Chamberlin and Tang dance a charming Fred and Ginger style duet, complete with soft shoe. The milk cartons come off the Christmas tree to be distributed to the audience members lining the windows. Inside each, they find a note instructing them to go to the fire escape window and look down. Several climb out onto the balcony. One later informs me that she watched four dancers perform in sneakers on the opposite sidewalk of Grand Street.
The dancing progresses with a steady and formal attention to its compositional development. Figures I recall from earlier work come and go in lines of dancers, designs for soloists, duets, trios, ensembles. Bodley, Burrer and Tang mount the fire escape and “release” the origami cranes from their string. Garrison pulls individual members of the audience out to shadow the dancers original positions onstage. Each time she finds herself hurled aside and displaced by another dancer. When all the doppelgangers have taken their place, she can rest at last, secure in her own. The "goose" comes home.(l to r) Julia Burrer, Tess Igarta, Hsiao–Jou Tang, Lesley Garrison (in silhouette)
Petroliunas has achieved a remarkable balance between challenge and accessibility, formal rigor and serious play, and a sense of intimacy within an experience of community. With “goose” she has also announced her arrival in Manhattan as a choreographer of daring and whimsical imaginative gifts.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Dumb Show Smarts: Lucy Gillespie's "Driving: a Lesson"
photos by Brian Hashimoto
“Fucking Paki driving instructor!”
Lucy Gillespie, as the character Julie, spits out these words in the climactic and penultimate line of her 15 minute Driving: A Lesson. The play premiered on the program of Riant Theatre’s Strawberry One Act Festival at the Theatre at St. Clement’s on August 15.
The minute long denouement that follows takes place in silence as Julie and Ranit (Fawad Siddiqui), the older man she has sworn at, exchange places in the learner vehicle they have occupied. The only glances they have cast at each other during this uncomfortable interval have been sidelong, as they both regard the precipice of the chasm that has loomed up between them.
Siddiqui mimes the re-attachment of his shoulder harness and the re-engagement of the car’s ignition, while Gillespie’s Julie sits motionless.
“Seatbelt,” Ranit reminds her.
The driving instructor’s warning might have served for the audience as well. Over the course of their interaction we have had ample opportunity to watch Julie’s sense of outrage build at the casual cultural sexist arrogance of this family man, who thinks nothing of speculating on the menstrual status and practice of this suburban London university student:
“I bet you use a tampon during the day, and a towel at night.”
She has retaliated by suggesting an appropriate intimate location in which he might bury the former.
He has also revealed the humiliating frustration inherent in his servile role as driving tutor, despite his advanced degrees in Economics, English and European Literature, placing his own car at their service in the bargain. Julie’s major in History will not save either of them from that which they find themselves destined to repeat.
Siddiqui imbues Ranit with a convincing sense of moral myopia inside a physical presence that suggests a full communion with his character’s body. When he lays his arm along the seat behind his charge’s back he creates a vague sense of casual creepiness only heightened by his character’s apparent lack of awareness of, or concern with, boundaries.
Gillespie’s Julie seems much less at ease. She hunches forward at the wheel; her voice strains, rises and falls in pitch as much as her arms do in the mime sequences in which she turns an imaginary steering wheel. I wonder how these two smell to one another.
Director Brian Hashimoto seems to have striven to heighten the intimacy of the situation by enclosing this pair behind 4 black theater set cubes stacked to create a kind of dashboard square. Unfortunately, this cuts off the audience’s view of his player’s bodies below the ribs, forcing us to work with only half the physical information.
The lack of a practical steering wheel created a distracting sense of struggle in the mime. And although the sound cues for door openings and closings came off perfectly, the attention afforded their frequent repetition made them appear precious. The director, however, has a good eye for movement and the right ear for silence.
Gillespie’s Driving, in its first incarnation, stands as a lesson in theatrical shorthand with hints of full-fledged brilliance. She has sketched the essence of characters whose spirit seems willing to emerge, but whose flesh will require work to shake us as profoundly as they do in that silent minute.
“Fucking Paki driving instructor!” Lucy Gillespie, as the character Julie, spits out these words in the climactic and penultimate line of her 15 minute Driving: A Lesson. The play premiered on the program of Riant Theatre’s Strawberry One Act Festival at the Theatre at St. Clement’s on August 15.
The minute long denouement that follows takes place in silence as Julie and Ranit (Fawad Siddiqui), the older man she has sworn at, exchange places in the learner vehicle they have occupied. The only glances they have cast at each other during this uncomfortable interval have been sidelong, as they both regard the precipice of the chasm that has loomed up between them.
Siddiqui mimes the re-attachment of his shoulder harness and the re-engagement of the car’s ignition, while Gillespie’s Julie sits motionless.
“Seatbelt,” Ranit reminds her.The driving instructor’s warning might have served for the audience as well. Over the course of their interaction we have had ample opportunity to watch Julie’s sense of outrage build at the casual cultural sexist arrogance of this family man, who thinks nothing of speculating on the menstrual status and practice of this suburban London university student:
“I bet you use a tampon during the day, and a towel at night.”
She has retaliated by suggesting an appropriate intimate location in which he might bury the former.
He has also revealed the humiliating frustration inherent in his servile role as driving tutor, despite his advanced degrees in Economics, English and European Literature, placing his own car at their service in the bargain. Julie’s major in History will not save either of them from that which they find themselves destined to repeat.
Siddiqui imbues Ranit with a convincing sense of moral myopia inside a physical presence that suggests a full communion with his character’s body. When he lays his arm along the seat behind his charge’s back he creates a vague sense of casual creepiness only heightened by his character’s apparent lack of awareness of, or concern with, boundaries.Gillespie’s Julie seems much less at ease. She hunches forward at the wheel; her voice strains, rises and falls in pitch as much as her arms do in the mime sequences in which she turns an imaginary steering wheel. I wonder how these two smell to one another.
Director Brian Hashimoto seems to have striven to heighten the intimacy of the situation by enclosing this pair behind 4 black theater set cubes stacked to create a kind of dashboard square. Unfortunately, this cuts off the audience’s view of his player’s bodies below the ribs, forcing us to work with only half the physical information.
The lack of a practical steering wheel created a distracting sense of struggle in the mime. And although the sound cues for door openings and closings came off perfectly, the attention afforded their frequent repetition made them appear precious. The director, however, has a good eye for movement and the right ear for silence.
Gillespie’s Driving, in its first incarnation, stands as a lesson in theatrical shorthand with hints of full-fledged brilliance. She has sketched the essence of characters whose spirit seems willing to emerge, but whose flesh will require work to shake us as profoundly as they do in that silent minute.
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