Five Questions for Greg Manley

Name: Greg Manley
Title/Occupation: Commissioner of the Circle Rules Federation
URL: Culturebot

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,”

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. 

Girl Gown Wild: Kelly Samara's "Being Patient" at Manhattan Repertory Theatre's Summer Fest '09, August 5 - 7

"I'd rather be in the presence of that painting The Sleeping Gypsy, … and see what that does to me," Kelly Samara’s patient intimates from within her flimsy hospital johnny. Dreaming and dream life, and deep wooded magic mountains indeed represent recurrent preoccupations among several in the inner monologue of this character. And she objects to her one-piece wardrobe, especially as described by the staff:

“’Gown’ is what I fantasize about wearing to the Oscars. ‘Gown’ has the word Versace in front of it,” she declares, later imagining herself more glamorously decked out on the red carpet.

And why not? When we meet this patient, she lets us know that she been haunting the 11th floor, where “the cart squeals as it wheels slowly down the empty, odorless hallway,” for “2 months, 3 weeks and 5 days.” Over the course of 45 minutes, she will gossip, ruminate, yearn, opine, muse, define, philosophize, sing, receive an unseen visitor, and toy with a string in an abbreviated explication of cat’s cradle -- all in a series of episodes that suggest the warp of the time that hangs ever heavy on her hands.

“It’s getting to be 6 months,” she declares, about a third of the way through.

Her monologues, all but one of which address the audience directly, alternate with flashes of fierce, hip hop inflected modern jazz and, at one point, balletic dancing to music ranging from dance/trip-hop to "Teardrop" by Massive Attack. Bracketing the piece, and occasionally replacing the dance interludes, poetic incantations underscored by music pit the patient’s recorded voice against that of a disembodied male-modulated speaker with a robotic quality similar to that of the ALS afflicted physicist Stephen Hawking.

Often director AJ Heekin has the patient literally dancing in the dark, dimming Vadim Ledvin’s lighting to cross-fade with reflections from a disco ball for both the dancing and voiceover sequences. (The latter have been designed by sound architect Dave Abel.) This dark matter reinforces the evocation of both the passage of time and the concomitant chafing and discomfiture of the young woman’s spirit.

Under Heekin’s able direction, Being Patient unfolds as a mini gesamtkunstwerk, showcasing Samara’s considerable talents as a theatrical wordsmith, lyrical and physical poet, actor, dancer, and singer. On stage she reminds me intensely of a young Meryl Streep, in facial resemblance, charm, grace, physical and vocal mannerism, playfulness and dexterity.

Talent, stagecraft and direction can, however, only take us so far into the inner life of this patient. In this incarnation, the piece doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts. The choreography seems to stand at times arms length from the lyrical language. Samara dances well, but her dance designs don’t warm to, kiss off of, revel or play with the sound or sense of her word images as engagingly as she does. As perhaps the most potentially exciting and distinctive element in a distinguishing work, the dancing bristles with a broader ambition than illustration or embellishment.

“I don’t like the way this world works. I never have. It makes me sick. I think it’s what made me sick,” she says in one of the voice-overs. But Samara never presents us with the ultimate nature of her malady, whether physical, mental or psychological. In her opening monologue, she appears drunk or drugged; intermittently so later, but less so. The locus of pain seems to shift, from hip to abdomen, maybe to chest.

Perhaps its real seat can only be suggested existentially as heart or soul sickness. Could it ultimately lie outside the patient; for example in “all of the emotionally obstructed men in the world” that the author/performer somewhat sarcastically thanks in her program bio? The one monologue not addressed to the audience references an unseen visitor she calls Gabe who has just acquired a dapper dachshund puppy he has named Scooter, along with a new, perhaps problematic, perhaps romantic roommate. Perhaps both?

“Does he scoot?” the patient needles.

Later in the voice-over cited above, the patient, Hamlet like, conjures the release that death seems to offer. But ultimately someone else passes on. She has dreamed of keys, woods, vessels and houses. The yearning and sense of loss remains more hinted at than palpable. “We are porcelain,” the Stephen Hawking voice decides. But hope and longing remain, somewhere inside her doll/patient’s gown “soft, yet unyielding within my desire.” She remains unglued, “unable to mend us in this sweltering air.”

“I have a visitor?” the patient asks/declares at the end, brightening.

Being Patient reveals a theater artist and a team of collaborators replete with fresh talent, enormous energy and interesting ideas at the beginning of what look to be promising careers. If they revisit this patient, perhaps on another floor, they show every possibility of making her whole.

"You're not nice!" : remembering Pina Bausch

I stood in the stage right wing of the BAM Opera House watching the brilliant performers of Tanztheater Wuppertal in their dresses, suits, button shirts and pants slide on their butts through 3 inches of water along a diagonal line from the back to the front corners of this full-stage puddle.

All hell had broken loose. Lively music percolated the scene. Elsewhere on the lake, company men and women ran on and off in dresses piling clothes on a line of women seated in chairs. Two scale model triple-masted galleons sailed towards each other across the water from opposite wings. Coming amidships they simultaneously fired full volleys, and this caused their paper sails to burst into flame.

As the sliders moved and stopped, moved and stop they found themselves constantly splashed by a lithe young woman who ran from one to another with seeming abandon. Suddenly the woman they all called Pina stood at my shoulder.

By the time of this third BAM performance of her 3 hour Arien, I already understood what her presence onstage portended. Something must have seemed off to her from her customary aisle seat in the last row of the house orchestra section. Never one to wait, she had arrived backstage to sort things out.

Taking the splasher aside, she spoke intently and rapidly to her in German, her smokey voice rumbling with low passion and no-nonsense energy. The object of her attention had not performed in this role during the first two shows, and this must have represented the dancer's debut as a torturer. Breaking into English, Pina capped off her coaching. "Remember," she exhorted with a rising emphasis, "you are not nice!"

Philipina "Pina" Bausch would never hesitate to challenge you. She has famously been quoted as saying "I'm not interested in how people move, but in what moves them."

Wild thing, like many others, particularly performers, choreographers, theater artists, filmmakers, and writers across two generations, your evening-length dream scapes moved me. You could be in equal parts inspiring and exasperating; encouraging and intimidating; exhilarating and cautionary; horrifying and incredibly funny.

I remember theater artist Robert Wilson's pithy one sentence appreciation of your poignant and hilarious 1980, the elegy you and your company created in the wake of the loss of your late lover and collaborator Rolf Borzig. The afternoon after we both had seen its opening night in your Next Wave series at BAM, I asked for his reaction. Measuring his phrases, his Texas-sized smile brightening to include wonder and glee, he intoned with increasing volume and incredulity,

"I can't believe how those dancers
could do comedy
in English!"

Truly no language of humanity has proved beyond your reach.

I had already seen your Rite of Spring, and Cafe Muller and perhaps even Bluebeard. (The sequence escapes me.) But 1980 opened a door for me.

Without really understanding why, I had spoken up for another balcony ticket when it became available the night of my conversation with Wilson. As the second 3 1/2 hours of your waking dream began to wash over me, I witnessed the beguiling Beatrice Libonati crouch to kiss the green sod that covered the stage, just as she had several times the evening before. But this time her plaintive and now reliably predictable repeated declaration made me suddenly shiver. For when she looked up as if in wonder at the end of her task to declaim her lilting Italian-accented, "This piece of meadow is six kisses wide," it finally hit me that you had taken us to the grave site. And a piece that had been merely been an intriguing and pleasant semi-comic diversion the evening before now became a piquant meditation.

I watched again one of your achingly gorgeous women -- for no matter how pretty or feminine, your girls, like you, always had steel -- amble deliberately across the back of the green as if reviewing the line of six suited men who had formed up near the left corner. They had all dropped trou and stood, bare ass to us, as she regarded with frank, evident and unhurried curiosity the sexual endowment of each one in turn. "These must be the pallbearers," I told myself, touched beyond tears by the candid humanity of the moment. I stand as one of them today, a witness in honor of you.


More to come.

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

By guest blogger Joey Lico

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



Keigwin Kabaret photo by Matthew Murphy

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Hale and Sarah Kinlaw (above)

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

Above: Debra Disbrow (left) and Janie Nutter

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

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



Brian Murray (left) and Amir Wachterman (right)

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least it’s not Taxing: Jack Ferver’s "Death is Certain" @ Danspace Project, NYC, April 18, 2009

The setting of Danspace Project’s home at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery seemed markedly different from the moment one walked in to attend Jack Ferver’s Death is Certain on Saturday night. To accommodate an intimate audience, facing double rows of chairs had been arrayed on the wooden Sanctuary floor that we usually experience as a fully open performance space. The seating arrangement stretched along the length of both sides and gave the look and feel of a fashion runway, hemmed in at the far end by a grand piano, and, on stands, a microphone and an electric guitar.

Lively chatter suddenly quieted as Ferver, John McGrew, Liz Santoro, and Tony Orrico walked in pairs between the rows of onlookers. But the house lights did not fade for many minutes. And although familiar enough to anyone who has entered a room filled with voluble folks of a sociable evening, only to have them stop and stare, the self-consciousness of these four performers smacked of a heightened sense of play at once intriguing and slightly precious.

Mr. Ferver bears a strikingly impish resemblance to Rowan Atkinson of Mr. Bean fame, and has achieved a certain celebrity of his own both as a dance maker and as an actor in film and television. Having taken a seat next to McGrew on the bench at the piano, he puckishly handed sealed envelopes to Orrico and Santoro. These two, flanking the stand mic, opened his dispatches with all the pregnancy of award presenters. After exchanging slightly pained glances with the choreographer, they launched into a somewhat stilted reading of the dialogue which Ferver had ostensibly prepared just for this evening's show.

While the text has proved forgettable, the radiant performers have not. One of the many gifts Ferver has bestowed on his audience with this 50-minute dance one-act arrives in the exquisite way in which he allows us to get comfortable with and take in this talented tribe. The most telling moment in this sequence Saturday occurred when Orrico stepped on one of Santoro’s lines and the luminous Liz covered by simply repeating the phrase with wry and antic aplomb. All at once, she has overcome awkwardness with charm. Who says dancers can’t act?

Near the end of the dialogue, the script calls for Santoro to walk away from the mic toward the sanctuary entrance, stop and return. Not only does this, and its subsequent repetitions, reinforce the catwalk set up, but it also allows us to recall the group’s initial entrance. At the same time it introduces the evening’s major spatial design motif. With a minimum number of elements in movement, song, spoken word and light (as designed by Kathy Kauffman), the four performers achieve a maximum of impact through the precise deployment and development of Ferver’s themes of desire, subversion, control, chaos and social and sexual discomfit.

Below: Liz Santoro (ctr) kicks and flails away between Jack Ferver (l) and Tony Orrico

These excucursions take place in relation to a sense of gravity as a force of both physical and social attraction. Santoro kicks and flails down the runway 5 times surrounded by the ineffective ministrations of Ferver and Orrico who, at the conclusion of each pass, bundle her between them as if she were a trussed turkey and haul her back to the starting point. Orrico later drags the other two, who lie behind his feet and in tow, down this same path as he leans forward against their resistance in a hobbled and struggling walk. All three repeatedly pull their own mortal coils painfully along the floor from either a seated or prone position. Ferver’s work puts me in mind of fine architecture embellished with rude and raunchy gargoyles. The performers'intricate teamwork finds its compliment in the way each has been allowed to shine.

McGrew’s music, building from a simple five note repeated figure to related chords to hummable songs, often breaks out of its intermittent role as movement accompaniment to stand alone as the choreography stills. These oases of sound provide welcome respite amidst the angst-ridden sojourns I’ve described. Whether delivered solo in the composer’s sweet high tenor, or in harmony with Ferver’s mostly able baritone, they allow us to refresh and absorb.

Right: Tony Orrico, Jack Ferver (with mic), Liz Santoro, and John McGrew (guitar)

Ferver’s own American Idol moment, sung with the mic occupying the center of the playing space and separating Santoro from Orrico provides the single most cogent explication of Death’s themes in its lyrics and delivery. All the while it reasserts and underlines the writer/choreographer’s, well, centrality in the piece’s unfolding. This counterbalances the other two dancers’ primacy in the movement end of the evening’s proceedings.

The voluptuous Santoro, with her Bernadette Peters hair and her glorious skin shining from the scoop necked, short sleeved summer dress in which she begins the work, dances and acts vibrantly, if not always fearlessly, in her many moments as the piece’s sly kinetic catalyst. The lean and tattooed Orrico’s brilliantly off-center solo near the piece’s close matches some of the most original and profoundly humanistic choreography I have seen this year with some of the most virtuosic and soulful dancing. Combining some of the hung-from-above qualities of Petrushka with a feel for tilting invention reminiscent of Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A,” dance design and dancer meet in an unlikely apotheosis as Orrico pitches himself from side to side down the runway.

A slightly uncomfortable, somewhat sheepish adolescent quality extends to many moments in the evening and finds overemphasis in the five costume changes that the three dancers undertake; from various clothing through underwear to nakedness and back to underwear with shirts. It can also be seen in the winningly nerdy dancing that engages McGrew during a passage in which he echoes the trio's terpsichore to some of his own recorded music. Think of a masculine version of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s dancing as Elaine on Seinfeld.

Jack Ferver, Tony Orrico and Liz Santoro (l to r above) in the final moments of Death is Certain

Death is Certain plays out as a fun evening with cool and sexy friends whose hidden drives and agendas one warily and sometimes giddily perceives. But if the smell of teen spirit adheres to the work, it cannot undermine the weight and Walt Whitmanesque resistance to convention and to the dark side at its generous heart. Death may be certain, but the search for love and a place in the world can be anything but.