Dedicated Space

you can read it here (with comments and other reviews) on the Dance Enthusiast:

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You are supposed to hear a soundscape of measured plops and drips. The rippling waves of noise a balm your senses as you watch the dance gather in its own amplifications. Instead, “Bathtime Studies: Duet,” choreographed by EmmaGrace Skove-Epes becomes a collaboration with an unknown guitarist performing in an adjacent room. Skove-Epes, sitting on an inset windowsill watching Gyrchel Moore and Nadia Tykulsker perform her choreography, doesn’t flinch at the overlapping of performances. It washes over her.

“Bathtime Studies” was one of countless (you could count – I didn’t, as the performances spanned four hours and multiple rooms, hallways, bathrooms) works performed at AUNTS' "Time Share: Chain Curation". The show, with an entrance fee of a donation of clothing, or beer, or “just whatever” also doubled as a flea market and snack party. You watched the dances, or ate instead. Discussed the artists’ work, meandered from one installation to the next, or just got drunk, as you pleased. Many did please, filling Arts@Renassaince in Greenpoint – a bleak structural core stripped of any decoration– so that to watch a woman fingering herself in a corner room meant pushing past a crowd. It’s odd, pushing your way through sardined bodies to get a good view of a vagina. Is closer better for a detailed view? You can see she’s shaved, and pink. But edge back a few steps. Watch the woman behind you in the red bathing suit with a wedgie and long blonde wig scrape her knees against the cement as her body shakes heavily in time to the sorrowful song of a woman wailing.

The solo form dominated the evening, and one had to wonder if choreographing for one (and usually oneself) was purposeful or by necessity. It is gratifying to watch an artist seep into an idea with singular clarity, but intention sucked some of the dances into vortexes of themselves. A dance that began with pained crawling on the floor also middled and ended on that floor, in that pain. Improvisation can find movement and expression unknown to the choreographed dance, but dance one note for ten minutes and the audience will move on. Maybe they’ll go get another beer.

A choreographed duet does not allow complete release into the dance while performing. There are parameters that you and your partner agree upon so that your singular clarity has structure and perhaps some striated thinking behind it that comes from collaboration of different mindsets. “Bathtime Studies” has great sensitivity to form – patterned time and structural grids loosened with movement - that comes from a necessity translate a singular idea to the audience that both dancers and choreographer have agreed on.

When the guitar from the other room overpowers the “Bathtime Studies” soft music, Moore and Tykulsker rely on the syncing of their internal rhythm. After a brief prelude of establishing the edges of the room in three quick jaunts around the space, the duet settles its focus on a rectangular ladder of tubs, spaced out equally in 2 rows. They begin plucking their way up and down the rows with a bucket weighing heavy in their hands, slowly pouring their burden into the bins. When Moore plunges her foot into a container that isn’t yet filled with water, the lack of physical or audible resistance suspends the step for a moment – it is the grasp of your foot as it reaches for a step that isn’t there. When both women simultaneously bury their faces into the miniature pool and blow bubbles, this gives us pleasure. When they submerge their eyes, mouth, nose, and are still, we still our breath, too.

Accessing what the audience knows of water – its density, heat and wetness – Skove-Epes creates a work that physically attunes viewer with performer.  When the dancers repeat (and repeat) a unison duet that traverses them precariously along the raised edges of the bins, their speed increases incrementally each time. The subtle intensification is enough to make your eyes, nose, mouth wonder what it will feel like to be pushed into the water this time. Your body wonders what this dance feels like, and so you are eager to keep watching.

The decaying walls of Arts@Renaissance are strong enough to enclose each performance within a dedicated space, and spatial separation is enough to justify the self-contained nature of each solo (and sometimes a duet). But the music will not stop at physical barriers, the audience can leave midway through the piece, and the desolation of the space makes each dance grey and lonely. One dance seeps into the next and their singular purpose is blurred. Perhaps it was an ensemble work all along. 

A most generous man.

I just can't. This man is my favorite. A wonderful human. A photographer with a stunning ability to catch the pauses and the crevices, in skin and soul.

His blog is almost unbearably intimate, into the lives of others (particularly in war and conflict zones).

He photographed the images used almost exclusively to promote PCDC's season.

You can read my interview with him here. But really, just go to his website and support by simply looking.

An email Sebastian sent recently:

A tiny story

One day before breakfast , an orange rolled off the counter and escaped its fate, bounding happily through the kitchen door.

Filled with hope the egg followed! 

And with that my obvious adoration for anyone who could send an email just containing that message becomes clear. 

it looks like a mannequin

School at Peridance Summer Intensive Postcard

How to take off a shirt.

A review of the CURRENT SESSIONS Volume III, Issue I.

The care of movement is the respect of dance. Purpose and clarity expand and fill in the moles and scratches that lay in the wake of hard breathing and unhinged limbs. In Lucy Guerin’s “Untrained,” performed at BAM in the winter of 2012, the dancers each take off their shirts while describing their actions in great detail. “I hook my thumbs under the collar like so…. I cross my arms and pull upwards…” The act of taking off their shirt becomes a codified magnification of the mundane, mesmerizing because the dancers invest full attention in the fingers, the skin of the fingers, the edges of their fingernails.

Their touch is a dance, and the CURRENT SESSIONS contained many such attuned performers and mature choreographers within its programming, which included 17 presenting artists, 3 movement workshops and a talkback.  Curated by creative director and producer Alexis Convento, co-creative director Allison Jones, and others, SESSIONS’ aesthetic, from graphic design to selected choreography, is of the hip and subtly provocative.

I will fall in love with sensitive fingers, skin and nails every time.  The dance of sensitivity requires authenticity and challenges audience expectations of what is physically alluring. This understated provocation works and should be practiced heartily.

It is, in Brendan Duggan of LoudhoundMovement’s “Tempered Skin,” Chihiro Shimizu’s “one hundred lies to tell you the truth,” Grace Courvousier’s “Fresh not Frozen,” and in Allison Jones’ “HYPOMANIAC!” From the looseness of Duggan’s dancers’ joints – femur folds in the hip crease like the folding of a wet dough– to the stuttered “I love you” that closes the piece, there is no hardness that implies insecurity. Shimizu, who performs in the duet alongside Chuck Wilt, is a calligraphic structure of sharp bones paradoxically traveling in swooping lines. The dual nature of Shimizu’s performance continues when she is pulled briefly out of a placid moment by a provoking hand gesture from Wilt. She responds with an unguarded, teeth-baring grimace that disappears before it registers. Animal, immediate.

It’s worth noting that this same tactility and responsiveness is familiar choreography. In my review of the last CURRENT SESSIONS, I wrote “the thighs splayed wide in fourth position, teasing the floor with the crotch. This is pure Gallim. Or, Gallim reflects a contemporary dance scene that is rapidly turning the new into the normal.” Allison Jones brought the crotch low, with choreography that bursts and sinks in opposing and dynamically invigorating impulses; Shimizu and Duggan pulled energetic strings from the air that evoked some of Miller’s adagios.

If you wittingly or unconsciously echo another choreographer, Gallim is a good bet. I’d rather watch the same graceful, honest dance 1,000 times than watch movement that numbs the body’s impulses. Kate Ladenheim’s “Spin Cycle” includes a repetitive vocabulary in which dancers mime daily actions – riding the bus, taking a shower, putting on a shirt… The dancers put on their shirts with an uninvolved swoop of their arms in no particular pattern or adherence to reality. There is no study and there is no interest in the visceral movement, and such disinterest reveals itself in the abrupt transitions in the piece. Donna Salgado’s “Working Walls 2,” attempts to integrate African, Salsa, yoga and contemporary dance within the confines of ballet. No style is accurately represented and instead the movement is a facsimile of generalizations of each style. The disparity between Guerin’s intensely studied performance of getting dressed and these echoes of style aligns with the audience’s corresponding interest (or disinterest) in them. 

Courvoisier’s “Fresh not Frozen” was an outlier in this program, and might be forgotten except that it imprints with its simplicity. Dancer Julia Radomyski’s urgent tapping of her breastbone. Her incessant, skin-reddening rubbing of the face. Her arcing wrists as they sweep upwards, only stopping when bone meets bone at the apex above her head. This is what I remember, and what is important, along with the feeling of anxious passion that Radomyski physicalizes, while maintaining her natural grace. More theatrical than sensitive, more subtle than miming, “Fresh not Frozen,” sandwiched between hugely ranging styles of dance, exemplifies CURRENT SESSIONS’ good taste within many genres.

Sunday’s afternoon program, one of 4 distinct performances within this CURRENT SESSIONS, also saw choreography by many other artists. A Parisian-costumed Alexander Dones performed another random assemblage of voguing, popping, whacking and contemporary dance. Also highlighted in the program was a dance for camera, capturing the beauty of the body encased in the beauty of a sandy, golden shore, directed by Ruben Graciani, and the most linear piece in the program, “mujeres” by Enza DePalma, which found strength in spatial patterns and pulsating movement.

THE CURRENT SESSIONS

I wrote this some time ago, but only published it to Dance Enthusiast. In an effort to keep everything in one place, here it is too many months later. The more recent CURRENT SESSIONS review is in the following post. 

THE CURRENT SESSIONS: Sunday July 15^th, 7:30 pm

a review

Andrea Miller, choreographer and Artistic Director of the well-known contemporary dance company Gallim Dance was in the audience during Sunday night’s The CURRENT SESSIONS. Even though Miller was most likely there to support dancers and co-workers who were featured throughout the night, it was not hard to imagine that some of the dancers were using this performance as an informal audition for Gallim, which has its first female audition in three years soon (dancers, go ahead and search on dancenyc now, just finish reading this when you’re done).

In line with Gallim’s penchant for the physically improbable, many dances presented in The CURRENT SESSIONS were comfortable playing with extremes. The use of the instep as a viable support for body weight. The thighs splayed wide in fourth position, teasing the floor with the crotch. This is pure Gallim. Or, Gallim reflects a contemporary dance scene that is rapidly turning the new into the normal. But in spite of a sometimes-similar movement vocabulary, The CURRENT SESSIONS’ Sunday night performance (one of three separate compilations of choreographers that weekend) at The Wild Project was a showcase of “today’s best emerging contemporary choreographers.” One could feel their deep desire to differentiate themselves from their peers through different, bold choices.

One Side of the Story opens the show with a pawing, licking grace. It is sensual like a sleek cat is sensual, stretching nonchalantly then darting across the floor. The five female dancers performing for Yin Yue Dance (including Yin Yue) are alternately cool, relaxed and then in a moment they are muscular and taut. This is the most choreographed piece of the night, with clean unison displaying well-rehearsed movement.

Although still well rehearsed, the other pieces rely more on the dancers to create a sense of union within the choreography. Circumstantial Amy, choreographed by Brendan Duggan, transitions between sections with undirected stumbling. The dancers have to navigate around one another in the moment. The stumbling (which sometimes progresses into tripping…oops) seems vague and somewhat arbitrary.  When there is specific movement to work with – a bird-like flapping, a simple phrase— the dancers are finally able to respond to one another with intention.

Jonathan Royse Windham’s Two duets, some awkward moments, a long silence and a slow dance doesn’t even try to transition through the choreography: it stops the music and starts again. The playful structure of the piece, complete with hilarious, adolescent performances by decidedly mature performers, thrives when the eight dancers’ animated personalities react to external events according to their distinct characters. The overblown characters necessitate confident performers and Francesca Romo (with her silly side sneer) and the seven other dancers are satisfying to watch.

SHAPESHIFT, choreographed by Betheny Merola, uses two bodies as propellers. The dark-haired duo is a forceful instigator of coolly understated movement that often works its way towards a lift or roll. Mallory Rosenthal’s duet, As Our Buttons Are Cast in Bone needs less force and more space. The dance is a rippling extenuation of the two dancers’ first moment onstage and if it is the simplest piece, it is also the most kinesthetically conscious one in the show.  Performers Emily Terndrup and TJ Spaur, with their slightly rounded, thinking bodies, are self-aware to the point of excluding all else. The best and often repeated moment is when Terndrup opens her arms and her collarbone finally seeks something above. Even though it lasts only for a second, it seems forever that she dangles, her weight seeping off of suspended bones.

The seconds of beauty last longer in The Wild Project’s intimate theater than they might have in a larger venue. For this group of emerging choreographers, close up is good. It lets you see the beauty of dance that often comes in the form of distorted extremes. But they are distortions that are enticing and interesting and to watch. The physical courage of the dancers makes it clear that beauty is brave and uncontrollable and sometimes a little bit dirty.

Also included in this performance: Discontinue: Part II choreographed by Sarah Mettin/ Mettin Movement Collective and Lonely Woman choreographed by Theodora Boguszewski.

Periapsis Music & Dance

When the lights fade, the dancer vibrates in an expectation of release that is only achieved through stretching, pulling time tight and close as they become aware of an end of this time, this dance. The body’s anticipation of completion saturates movement – making it fuller – and echoes though the pores, illuminating the skin. The lights fade, the body glows.

Periapsis Music and Dance’s Inaugural Concert merges dance and music, with equal weight given to both art forms. This leaves you to watch the movement or close your eyes and simply listen, as you please. I am sorry that I cannot close my eyes and tell you about what I listened to with anything approaching analytical comprehension. This, then, is a commentary on the dancing. Specifically, on the moment before the end of the dancing, so close to “FIN” it might as well be the credits. That time, that last inward breath, is when Periapsis is sublime. 

And it ends.

From the last, Periapsis is urgent and wonderfully greedy with time and space. Sarah Mettin’s “Crescit eundo” has 5 dancers. They are individually huge performers. Travelling, shifting low or pricking the ground neatly, the pelvis accepts the strength of the floor. They are flesh merged with wood. Calm energy of each performer is broken by movement that invokes an idea of martial arts, with quick punctuations and blows. Damani Pompey and Weaver Rhodes, the two males in this piece, make complicated and uncodified lifts an inevitability. Air slips aside as the bodies merge. Mettin has gathered a group of dancers too smart to make the movement about themselves. From the start to finish, they are complete and generous, bringing us into their buzzing chamber of energy until the lights fade. And then the concert is over.

This is not how Periapsis middles or begins, although there are moments of great connection between dancer and musician or dancer and the dance. Leigh Schanfein’s “Tra:verse Re:verse,” performed by Schanfein and Mike Hodges and performed to “MOERAE” by Mary Kouyoumdjian, is often a study in poses, forming shapes in time with music in a way that simultaneously respects the score and underestimates its intricacies. Instead of stopping to show the audience Mike’s impressive arm balance or Leigh’s curling backbend, “Tra:verse Re:verse” could loosen itself from the grips of time and choreography and let music and the wiles of the body take over. This occurs as the piece slows into a an undulating improvisation; anticipating an end, the duet became free and wild. Leigh’s head throw back to reveal a dip underneath the chin that hollows even more deeply as she arched backwards. The throat’s skin turns white as it pulled taut. Time expands and the body grows with it, as the dance shushes to a close.

If taut skin is pleasurable in moments of stretching outwards, it is dissatisfying when it contracts inwards as if seeking bone. Insecure dancers in other works pulled the choreography in towards themselves and held onto memorized movement with tightness that that should only exist for the musicians’ string instruments. A small, two-tiered stage with a slippery floor and musicians often crowding a large part of the downstage area are undoubtedly disconcerting obstacles and responsible for the dancers apprehensions. But the choreography also sometimes felt stilted and unsure, with an adherence to the music’s downbeat and not enough exploration of the score. Alisa Fendley’s “Exhume” was a repetitive dance of theme and variation that spanned 6 musical movements and failed to to arc or spiral with the serpentine playing of the two violinists alongside them onstage.

The musicians exercised playfulness in their execution of the art form that many of the night’s dances missed. It was as though in the dancers and choreographers desire to fulfill and acknowledge the live musical accompaniment, they forgot to challenge and defy expectations.  Where did Merce Cunningham of ‘chance procedures’ go? John Cage’s musical descendants were certainly playing in Periapsis’s Inaugural Concert. It was in the dancing that excitement of the unknown was missed.

In these two artists – Cunningham the choreographer and Cage the composer – Periapsis finds good company. Dance and music are often linked and in Periapsis, neither  art form upstages the other. Periapsis makes the dance and music equals, but it is up to the artists to match one another. When one falters, Periapsis provides the great bonus allowing the viewer to shift focus to the visual or auditory, making no part of the evening unsatisfying. The opportunity this forum gives for choreographers to create dance, often on original musical scores, can only heighten the propensity for chance, for excitement and for the unknown.