the reddi check internet battle saga minutes.

because this should be preserved:
provocation:



inspiration:


response:

snodance with me

reworked footage of the union square dansperiments


union square, death, silver and gold, snow storm

"dancing is powerful; it's how i experience my own wildness."
jennifer monson

people on the train.

i saw four people get on the train yesterday. they sat together.
three were missing half their teeth.
all were grinning.

touching.

"Greatly in need of comfort and support, I said to Elder Corelli, “I don’t suppose you’d let me hug you?”

He shook his head. “You know I can’t, Sister Welker.”

I stared at my hands, tangled in my lap. “Can I hold onto your shirt sleeve, then?”

He nodded, so I grasped the edge of his sleeve between my thumb and forefinger and held it, trying to pretend it was a form of human contact that offered any solace.

In any event, it was all I had."

(from The New York Times: Modern Love)




How often do we find ourselves in the position of approximating touch?
Old sweatshirts.
Songs.
Foods.
Dance.

Goodnight Moon, Goodnight Merce.

Goodbye Merce. You're off to space!
You'll be missed but you left us with much.

Here's some antique and newer footage:

Side Project!

Hello Friends!

I've been absent from my post...I'm working on a video blog with friends at the American Dance Festival.

http://littledanceseverywhere.blogspot.com

See you there.

Little Dances Everywhere.

July 1 Dance o' the Day

July 1st.
Locopops.

Starring: Bourbon Pecan and Ginger Lime.

Pina Bausch's Next Move

Today the world lost another great dancer, performer, artist, and icon, contemporary choreographer and visionary, Pina Bausch. I reviewed her recent work, Bamboo Blues only a few months ago.

I've always loved this clip - from A Coffee with Pina by Lee Yanor.

Here's an excerpt.

H. Art Chaos WTF?

Just came back from the H. Art Chaos show - the fourth performance in American Dance Festival's lineup "Where Ballet and Modern Meet".

I was promised "provocative and powerful dance as you've never seen it before" but throughout the evening, I felt I had indeed seen it before - in high school dance competitions, in soap operas, in heavy metal concerts, in melodramatic opera scenes, in the circus.

H. Art Chaos is, ADF assures us, "one of Japan's top dance companies" but I found the work almost unwatchable. In the first piece, Flowers of the Bones, a woman begins dangling from the ceiling in a harness to eerie horror-movie music. She writhes and bounces, thwacking her arms and legs well beyond their natural range of motion, and finally descends where she is met by a chorus of other thwackers. The costumes were kind of cool - long mermaid tails that spouted confetti but overall the piece was empty affect...kind of like suicidal hair-dancing.

The movement language seemed to borrow from martial arts, kabuki, maybe a little butoh in the white-faced aesthetic, ballet, and...drill team? Layouts, split leaps, fan kicks, and (yes) chair dances that climaxed with all of the chorus draped over their chairs backwards, one hand extended towards the audience. WTF?

The second piece was Rites of Spring, first performed in 1995. More of the same - virtuosic solo dancer twacks some more while her oppressive chorus throws chairs of her. She slits her wrists, climbs into the bath tub, then emerges from the bath tub, spins really fast in the air on a harness, and then gets back into the bath tub. More hair dancing.

Sakiko Oshima, director of HAC include the following in the program: "While refusing to be placed in advance, we explore artistic ecstasy through chaos."

Umm. yes.

I can't help but feel that something was lost in translation. Like the liner notes and the explanations of the pieces in the show, the language was garbled. Clearly someone somewhere thought it had artistic merit. What piece/cultural context/background info/translation am I missing?

Let me know.

Advice from Ohad

Last night Ohad Naharin joined the ranks of great choreographers like Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, Alwin Ailey, Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris, Trisha Brown, and Pina Bausch in recieving the Samuel H. Scripps ($50,000) Award for Lifetime Achievement.

He accepted the Scripps award before Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performed Decadance (2007) which includes sections from ten of his earlier pieces. But before leaving us to a buffet-style helping of his choreography, he directed the following words to all the dancers in the audience:

(from the words I scrawled on my program)


Get rid of all mirrors - I lived -- years without mirrors.

Copy...yet only copy the good things.

Feel free to change your mind.

Spend time outdoors, look at the sky.

Be silly - not stupid. Be able to laugh at yourself.

Have no secrets. Live and dance like you have nothing to hide...

...and if you win an award, make a short speech.


Decadance, July 25, 2009, Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham, NC.

Emanuel Gat: Winter Variations

Photo: Mia Alon

Two men stand off-center on a massive swath of stage. Dressed alike in blue-gray shirts and drab pants, they begin by hardly moving, accompanied by an ever-increasing drone of speakers suspended overhead.

They match, mimic, and mirror each other like shadows, brothers, friends, or two parts of one soul in an hour-long duet that progresses from separation to junction, from gentleness to violence, from grace to awkward stumbling, exploring the potential of simple movements like walking on knees.

Winter Variations, created and performed by Emanuel Gat and Roy Assaf, premiered yesterday at Duke's Reynolds Theater as part of the American Dance Festival. Set to music by Schibert (Die Krahe), Strauss (Four Last Songs), The Beatles' (A Day in the Life), and Riad al Sunbati (Awedt Eini ala Rouyack), the movement was often gestural and tactile - rooted in simplicity but woven with complexity. As the dancers walked on their knees in arcs around the stage they crossed in and out of the harshly lit areas on stage. Often they crawled into dark spots but were never totally obscured. As the lighting changed, or as they moved to different areas of the stage, their bodies changed too. Upstage in blinding illumination, their edges sharpened, moving like line-drawings in a brilliant rectangle that served as a counterpoint to the vast shadow that covered the upper area of stage. Only minutes earlier they had traded shirts in the cover of that near darkness.

Moving throughout light and shadow, space and time, music and silence, the two men anachronistically illustrate relationships: with self, other, and outside.

ADF: May We Have This Cyberdance?

Reporting from Durham, North Carolina!

Check out American Dance Festival's Blog Project: "May We Have This Cyberdance" / "Dance of the Day" by Mark Dendy and ADF faculty and students.

Today is Cyberdance inauguration day! Keep checking back for daily dances.

http://www.americandancefestival.org/cyberdance/

ghost dance

To dream...

"You have to have always a dream...and I have only one dream, that's to dream all my life."

Augusto Boal

...he's on to bigger and better things.

The Union Square (Dance) Experiments

We include in our pattern a man sitting on a railing.
We sunbathe upside down, but only upside down in relation to the scores of people who are in the same position right-side up.
We lean against a pole, and then another, and then another.
We stand still—not a particularly noteworthy activity—unless it’s raining.
We jostle to get by each other even though we’re in the most expansive part of the Square.
We glance side to side.
We sit next to people we don’t know.
We turn look back and forth, watching the watchers, taking them in, connecting to them gesturally, but also dancing.
We make circles around a certain center, each larger than the last until we gradually eat up all of the space of the square, including bodies one at a time.
We turn trashcans into islands, and jump between them.
We look down drains, we look at each other, we look at the rest of the people in the park.
When they look at us, we say hi, wave, or wink, destabilizing the distinction between performing and “just being” in the park.
…

We become them, we become us, we become we-and-them.





VISIT the Union Square (Dance) Experiments at this link.
http://dansperiments.blogspot.com/
Do you see yourself?

Come dance with us.

Trisha Brown - Planes

Planes, 1968, 2009
Brooklyn Academy of Music


We sit in darkness and numbers. Lights flood the stage revealing three dancers lying on a canvas that shifts with the morphing projections that dance across it.

No wait—they are hanging!

Anchored by holes in a large set piece, they look like childhood toys: Barrel O Monkeys hanging from a Connect Four Set. Black and white costumes divide their bodies front and back but as they move, distinctions blur and they become bodily mobius strips, carefully negotiating gravity and the projected landscape. They rush through space (while moving slowly), lie in the fetal position underneath distorted footage of a woman’s legs, then fly through the air many miles above ground. They share space with a developing fetus and then wander barren earth, the images (16mm footage by experimental video artist Jud Yalkut) define them as well as their spatial orientation. They flip between walking, flying, and lying down. As we watch, and as our brains attempt to reconcile these changes, we undergo similar changes. The effect is one of being on an elusive, illusive roller coaster in which we fly while sitting still in our seats.

What are the building blocks of a human being?
The Human experience?
What are the building blocks of our environment?

In their pared-down costumes, the dancers become elementary units of life amidst the various forms (projected on the wall) that life takes. Animating the changing landscape with these dancer bodies, Brown weaves space travel with being born.

We hurtle to earth and crash into consciousness. What are the implications of this?

deep time tag in union square

Mr. Graydon Wetzler, video mastermind added "directional processing (indexing the orientation of discreet objects based on trajectory)" to some Union Square footage. Check out the bodily layers and corporal traces. Yessss.


deep time tag in union square from Graydon Wetzler on Vimeo.

Union Square April Pole Dance

Space graphing.



Happy Spring!!

Merce blasts off to 1980’s outer space in Nearly Ninety

I snuck out of essay writing mode this weekend to check out Merce Cunningham’s latest work at BAM. Dancers in signature body-revealing unitards executed the technical tilts, sustentions, contractions, and mathematical leaps and hops that Cunningham has been working with for the past 54 years of his prolific career. I love the tension between uniformity and precision that the semi-alien dancers use while simultaneously revealing themselves as acutely human in the small wobbles and sudden intakes and exhalations of breath. We marvel at what they can do with their bodies but are aware nonetheless of the intense labor that is being produced as their muscles strain under spandex.

Sitting in the first row of the mezzanine, I saw the dancers as separated from the enormous metal and plastic sparkly set piece that housed musicians John Paul Jones, Takehisa Kosugi, and Sonic Youth (!). Their plane was one of the familiar strips of Marley floor that are common to most dance studios, while other-worldly fractal-like projections inhabited the screen upstage. Meanwhile the mad scientist musicians produced enormous reverberating sounds while silhouetted abstractly against the scrim. I identify with Evan Namerow’s (of Dancing Perfectly Free ) complaint that parts of the piece seemed to lack cohesion but found something charming in the spacey set piece designed by Benedetta Tagliabue. It seemed to be almost scotch-taped together – part crystal, part satellite – a distinctly 1980’s version of the space-age. Sound produced by the musicians nestled in its elaborate spiral staircase structure exploded and sometimes upstaged the dancers who were, from my perspective, still dancing on a recognizable form of planet earth. Meanwhile, video projections by Franc Aleu animated screens and scrims hanging behind the dancers with fractals, water droplets, and other shapes that seemed to mix the aquatic, terrestrial, and the interplanetary.

photo: andrea mohin

The concerns I had with cohesion in the first half were nonexistent in the second part of the piece. Previously shielded by one or more layers of projection-covered cloth, the musicians were fully revealed, connecting them more directly to the dance as it unfolded onstage. Moments of exploding, grating sound were juxtaposed with silence, allowing us to hear the strong ejections of breath, reminding us who was peddling this crazy rickshaw space machine.

photo: andrea mohin

I was most struck by a simple movement. Underneath overlapping screens, one dancer entered the stage after a series of extremely quick, intersecting combinations had carried several other dancers back to the wings. The pulled her hands up her body and over her head, making a recognizable diving gesture. Gracefully folding, she curved downward; moments later she was joined by another dancer who repeated with her the same movement. Above them, a musicians hands demonstrated how the sound was being produced without smoke and mirrors – a Wizard of Oz-like moment in which we see the simple mechanics of rolling screws on a metal tray, amplified to sound like intergalactic collisions. Layered over the demystified music were the upside-down limbs of dancers, clearly of a different historical time, but also clearly Cunningham movers. As the number of dancers diving increased, I couldn’t help but think of passing between worlds. In a sense, Merce is going to space, layering time, and allowing us to contemplate the final leap into the beyond. With hundreds of his former dancers in attendance (they stood up to be recognized), it almost seemed like a going away party, or maybe a launching party. Merce is ninety years old. He joined the dancers for the final bows dressed in black velvet pajamas and riding in a wheelchair.

To the moon…and beyond…



------------------------------


Read More:

New York Times: "This Probably Isn't Possible But...
"Bionic Theater | Nearly Ninety at BAM"
"Nearly Ninety: Meanings Still Pour From Movement"

Dancing Perfectly Free: Merce Cunningham's Nearly Ninety at BAM

Union Square #2

Dansperiment #2



We made it snow (Watch carefully and maximize if you want to see the secret dances).

Union Square Dansperiments

Here are the most recent fruits of our collective labor...or at least our collective play.

From José Gil's Paradoxical Body:

"Let us remember that the space of the body does not come about except by the projection-secretion of interior space on exterior space"

"In truth, there is no fixed and autonomous space o the body. The space of the body varies according to the velocities of its unfolding, in such a way that it is dependent upon the time the movement takes in opening the space of the body. This time depends on the texture--more or less dense, more or less viscous--of the space of the body, which is born from the energy involved."

The body is not a "phenomenon", not a "visible and concrete perception moving in the objective Cartesian space" but "simultaneously visible and virtual, a cluster of forces, a transformer of space and time [...] a body inhabited by--ad inhabiting--other bodies and other minds, a body existing at the same time at the opening toward the world provided by language and sensorial contact, and in the seclusion of its singularity and non-inscription."

Union Square is already choreographed: in the types of activities permissible in different spaces, in the orchestration of viewership - places for watching, places for acting, security guards and cameras making sure people don't act or watch out of place. Controlled mayhem, inscribed patterns, how might we confuse the boundaries between dancing and being? How might we entwine our body spaces with the spaces of others? In fact we can't avoid doing this.

Music is for fun and to keep ourselves from taking things too seriously :)

Headless Dancing in Confined Spaces

Performing Body Symposium: NYU

Saturday 9:30-5:30pm
721 Broadway, NYU

NYU is having a one-day symposium bringing together theorists and practitioners of embodiment and movement from different traditions. One of a series of attempts to bring mind and body together. Some of my perennial favorites will be there as well as a few new faces! Come and mind-meld.

Wanderlust

San Cristóbal de las Casas: Chiapas: Mexico.

prevalent graffiti in the historic neighborhood of san cris;
goddesses and guerrillas.

captured outside a dance studio in san cristóbal.

Performance, Q&A, and Dance Workshop with Lacina Coulibaly

My friend and teacher, Lacina Coulibaly, is coming to town to share his new choreography and teach an open dance workshop. All are welcome!

photo by Antoine Tempe

PERFORMANCE:
Thursday, March 26, 7pm
721 Broadway
Dept. of Performance Studies, 6th Floor
212.998.1620
Free and open to the public

WORKSHOP:
Sunday, March 29th, 4-6pm
62 E. 4th St.
Rod Rogers Dance Studio
$13 students/$15 general
All levels welcome

Lacina Coulibaly, from Burkina Faso, has trained and performed in both traditional African dance (as a member of Kongo Bâ) and contemporary modern dance (with Lassann Congo, one of the most well-known African choreographers). In 1995, Lacina created the Cie Kongo Ba Teria with Souleymane Badolo and Ousseni Sako. Their creations, Frères sans stèles (1999), Vin Nem (2001) and Hydou Bye (2004) toured around the world and won international awards. In addition, Lacina has danced and choreographed with other international dance companies including Faso danse theatre. He has dedicated his last three years to teaching African dance at American universities including Yale and Brown University.

Ohad Naharin/Batsheva Dance Company: Max

Photo by Gadi Dagon

When the curtains open to five pairs of dancers scattered across the huge, bare stage at the Howard Gilman Opera House in Brooklyn, I experience the sheer thrill and anticipation of watching humans about to move onstage. One dancer in each couple has their back to the audience, the other facing but obscured – all lit in a wash of red and green, rendering their flesh eerily other-worldly but very definitely alive. Sinking to their knees, the dancers with their backs to us wait, sculptural, froglike, in silence before thunking all together onto their left knees, a set of waits set off balance, or perhaps blocks of wood shifting. In silence and stillness, the anticipation builds.

Ohad Naharin, the choreographer of Batsheva Dance Company (of Israel) creates through exploration using his own technique or “movement language”, Gaga, which among other things aims at the discovery of new motion through mental and physical practices, as well as the pure pleasure in movement and sensation. I got to take a workshop last month with Batsheva dancer and artistic director, Yoshifumi Inao and among the suggestions he made to the group were “Separate your bones from your flesh,” “Have at least two ideas at all times. If you have only one, throw it out and get two more,” and perhaps most importantly, “Don’t become dead meat.” Watching “Max” last night, I was struck by the breadth of movement qualities and velocities on the dancers’ bodies.

In Max, Naharin consciously strips away embellishment; the dancers wear different dark-colored tank tops and shirts that allow the audience to see their flesh jump and their muscles shake and rebound with exertion, the stage is black except for the color of the lights that shift from red to gray to blue, always a mix of hues, scene changes are coordinated via blackouts and the dancers appear without biographical notes in the program. The soundscape alternates between silence, breath, heartbeat, and vocals in a mixed-up, made-up language, a cacophony of syllables that is vaguely familiar and yet totally strange. Freed of distraction we are made more away of light, sound, and movement that conveys a here but not-here, a known but slightly uncanny, a dance but not-dance.

The dancers’ movement, like the sound, was part of a language that was familiar – I recognized myself in the turned-in stretches of a leg, the twitch of a shoulder, the split-second convulsion followed by reasserted bodily control – yet as with the soundscape, the dance left me feeling isolated despite my almost-identification. I was an outsider, a watcher, brushing through movements of physical empathy and then pushed back into my place in the mezzanine. Singing along at the end, it was clear that the words (of which I could recognize only shattered syllables) held power and meaning to the dancers that shouted them, just as the movements, communicated a language and an affect separate from the one that was occurring for me.


Shifting between abstract dancerly movement and immediately recognizable quotidian movement, Naharin shows us pain, ugliness, awkwardness, severity and darkness but also weaves in moments of humor. Several times I would find myself taking the piece incredibly seriously, a somber spectator, and all of a sudden be looking at a row of male dancers jutting their pelvises out or women skittering coquettishly but laughably across the stage; later they matched up in vaguely sexual positions and then “nope, it’s not just your mind in the gutter” – they are slapping crotches together, thighs and hips rocking in a blatant “hump” dance.

For me, Max is a dance of the hyper-human. We watch the dancers bared onstage as they move but also as they are jerked, lifted, spun, and stretched by invisible forces – not the upward pull of the ballet dancer but perhaps by a tension pulling at the neck, a thread at the shoulder, a past experience yanking the hip out of place. But all the while, Naharin troubles this description of complete freedom in movement; the motion that appears so organic and lifelike is strung together in repeating combinations or executed in unison, a meaningful gibberish, like looking at familiar versions of ourselves through the expansive micro-distance of a microscope.

----

Interview with Ohad Naharin

Anna Kisselgoff: When Dance and Politics Both Dig Their Heels In

NYTimes Dance Review: Conjuring Up a World Where Images Abound

Dancing Perfectly Free: Batsheva Performs "Max" at BAM

Union Square Log - Tai Chi and Spongebob

The fountain is not running but I grab a cup of hot cider and sit with my bags at the fountain. I watch for a minute a group of men huddled, talking. After a moment they return to their stands where they are selling Obama paraphernalia and buttons with a sort of choose-your-rebellious-cause aesthetic. There are Rasta colors, large pot leaves, Ché images, and et cetera. I realize that I’ll be much warmer in the sun (it’s one of the first sunny days in a while) so I migrate over to the South side, the main gathering place.

A man with tiny iPod speakers and a large suitcase is standing, talking…to himself? He’s wearing black and white military fatigues and a sweater vest, moving around in a slightly spastic but also intentional way. I watch him with some difficulty – the light glistening on sheets of ice that are slowly turning into pools of water is blinding. Birds sing. I can pick up a little of what he says, “I like to wear black everyday…or eat chicken everyday…BELCH.” His mumbling mixes with birds singing and the harmonious vaguely Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon music that waves out of his speakers. Curious, I look around at the other people sunning themselves; whereas in the Greenmarket, people seem to have a magnetic attraction to the red, green, and orangey-pink apples, as well as the apple cider donuts, the change in focus in the south side of the plaza is striking - every face and body is turned toward the sun. As the man gets going in his routine though, people watch with curiosity. Is it a show? Is he insane? Does he want money?

A dog barks. He answers back “Wooowooowooof!” and continues his practice, which I now begin to recognize as Tai Chi, although his pelvis is shifted forward instead of being grounded and his movements are jerky rather than the smoothness I would expect. He warms up his head, his neck, and then begins to talk about the powerful Chi center in his belly.

“Pretty interesting, huh?” says a man next to me.
“Yeah.” I reply.
“Are you taking notes?!”
“Yeah.” (sheepishly)

I sense that I’m part of a small group watching…but not entirely sure what it is we’re witnessing. To me, it seems like a lesson for the benefit of the people in Union Square…if they only cared to participate.

One man finally does approach him. He’s wearing a red shirt with a larger-than-life portrait of Tupac under his black jacket, baggy jeans, a leather had, and a bunch of necklaces. One is a crucifix and the others look like ilekes, the beaded necklaces worn by practicers of santería for protection and connection to their orishas - cultural and spiritual mash-ups are taking place on the two bodies of these men. They begin to speak in Spanish and although I’m not close enough to hear what they’re saying, I hear the second man calling the first “maestro.”

Next, two young boys leave their friends playing on the promotional lifeguard chair a few feet away to join the man - they are the first participants in his practice. I suddenly feel worried that they will ridicule him…why am I feeling protective? Somehow in watching I have become implicated, and perhaps egotistically feel like I see the performance in a way other people don’t. Not so. The boys stretch and shake and answer his questions genuinely and with smiles.

“Where to you live?”
“Brooklyn!”
“Ooh! I used to live in ---- but now I live in -----. Do you watch TV? Who do you like?”
“Spongebob!” one of them shouts, and lifts up his shirt to display his yellow spongey boxers. Then he throws himself on the ground with his legs over his head, butt in the air, Spongebob pride manifest.

After a while the kids rejoin their friends and the man continues moving, stretching, and talking about the importance of cultivating one’s Chi. Another dog passes, this time a tiny one on a leash held by a well-dressed woman. He barks at her too (the dog), but in an appropriately higher register.

“No drugs! Don’t do drugs!” he shouts at the kids, and then begins to slowly pack up his stuff, painstakingly putting on his jacket, straightening his sleeves, tucking in his shirt. He addresses all of us and no one in particular:

“I love everybody. I love New York…for at least…you know…not kicking me out.”

[I want to cry.]

He shakes his rattle a couple of times as if to bless the space he was using and the rest of us, and I shift my attention to a group of people a little younger than me talking about MySpace, STD’s, and how Rap is dead.

Video Treat!

For your viewing pleasure: Mestre Cobra Mansa and Mestre Espiro Marrim play Capoeira Angola. It's vintage footage from I'm-not-sure-when but one of my favorites all the same.



I keep thinking of Contact Improvisation when I see this. Whereas contacters make use of pressure and momentum between bodies to move in/on/with/around each other, Cobra Mansa and Espiro Marrim communicate via pressurized space. Rather than manipulating skin to skin connection to dance together, the capoeiristas inhabit each other's body space. I feel like I'm watching them turn space into matter: expanding, compressing, exploding, disappearing.

Advice for the day: If you can't solve it right-side-up, try looking at it up-side-down.

Why?

Dance is a rhythmic motion for one or more of a number of reasons: social cohesion, psychological or physiological catharsis, exibitionism, autohypnosis, pleasure, ecstasy, sexual selection, play recreation, development of artistic values, stimulus to action, aggressive or non-aggressive, extension and affirmation of social patterns, and others.

(Katherine Dunham, "Notes on the Dance, with Special Reference to the Island of Haiti," in Seven Arts, 1954)



Dance to internalize/Dance to externalize

What's it to you?

Free/Discount Dance Classes at Djoniba Dance & Drum Center

Djoniba Dance and Drum Center is a not-for-profit, cultural institution offering multi-ethnic and often hard to find dance classes to the New York City community. Their classes are some of the more affordable in the city and their offerings some of the most diverse. This winter they announced a possible closing due to higher rents and less students able to afford classes in the environment of the current economic [ahem] "situation." But after a strong demonstration of support from students, media, and members of the community, they have been able to find temporary space and are offering a special deal THIS WEEK.

March 1-7, new students receive a free class and current students can take class for only $9 - that's half the price of a class at Broadway Dance Center and many other studios on the island.

Among the classes offered are West-African, Haitian, Samba, Afro-Brazilian, Capoeira, Sabar, Afro-Caribbean and Bugurabu.

Download this coupon and meet me at 300 West 43rd Street!

Click here for the schedule (and voucher)

Mobile New York

To create art in a “minor” mode is to make of one’s citizenship a permanent nomadic project. It is to travel long distances, across cultures, languages, dialects, ethnicities, flavors, even while staying put in the middle of the city. Or, conversely, it is to create a set of New York expatriates who, despite no longer being in the city physically, continue to permanently return to it, re-live it, expand it, re-invent it, and re-dimension it, true nomads making New York their ground and ever fertile territory.

nomadic new york then. just like that. with no capital letters.
André Lepecki

From André Lepecki, movement in new york.
http://www.hkw.de/en/ressourcen/archiv2007/new_york/texte_5/lepecki.php


here we are, ping-ponging across the planet. according to the 2000 census, 35.9% of new york city residents are foreign-born but the multitudes of us who are foreign-born somewhere else are impossible to quantify. we're whole by ourselves but in motion we make another whole - our city.

sleep.
steep.
seep.
leap.

Her Morning Elegance - Oren Lavie

Found this through a friend. Enjoy.



Her Morning Elegance
Directed by: Oren Lavie, Yuval & Merav Nathan
Featuring: Shir Shomron
Photography: Eyal Landesman
Color: Todd Iorio at Resolution
© 2009 A Quarter Past Wonderful

Showing: Lacina Coulibaly

On March 26th, Lacina Coulibaly of Kongo Ba Teria will be showing his new work (title TBA) at the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. All are welcome. More information coming.


http://kongobateria.chez-alice.fr/

Merce: Final Beacon Performance

For those interested, the final installation of Events will take place on May 22nd. Tickets will be available in March!

http://www.diacenter.org/prg/special/merce/

Merce Cunningham: Event at Dia:Beacon

Sunday February 22, 2009

Beacon Event 2009

“Presented without intermission, this Event consists of dances from the repertory and new sequences arranged for the particular performance and place, with the possibility of several separate activities happening at the same time—to allow not so much an afternoon of dances as the experience of dance.” – Merce Cunningham


I was lucky enough to tag along with Douglas Crimp’s Dance in Film Class (Performance Studies, NYU) today to Dia:Beacon in upstate New York where we saw the most recent of Merce Cunningham’s Events at the museum. Amidst sculptures made from steel, metal, wood, sand, and glass, the dancers fleshiness was made pronounced. They should have looked the same – clad in coordinated unitards designed by Anna Finke, and carefully moving through the precise postures and sequences designed by Cunningham, they might have been machines or androids – yet what was most striking to me was the degree to which the dancers’ personalities and humanity blasted out.

We lined up, buzzing with excitement, in the gallery. Familiar gray marley-covered mini-stages were placed strategically in front of Dan Flavin’s neon lightscape installation, networked with black runways of carpeting which were monitored by some very gruff guards who forbid us from stepping on, hopping over, or even approaching the black swaths. Arty New York types in pointy silver Doc Martens, starkly framed glasses, and extraordinary scarves twittered to each other while their equally creatively-dressed offspring did their best to behave while waiting for the dancers to appear. Finally they did, filing in and taking their respective places on the separate stages, or “backstage” in full view, covering up with blankets with water, tissues, foot tape, and Styrofoam rollers at the ready. Watching them watch the other dancers from this naked backstage added a fun layer to the performance.

The dancers began to move slowly and methodically, bodies streamlined by exercise regimens and the lines of their costumes, rising with arms extended, bending in deep plié with their torsos extended all the way to one side – everything uniform and intentional. From my vantage ten feet away, it was impossible not to notice Julie Cunningham as she wobbled slightly in a parallel relevé (some of my friends and I later wondered aloud if we would have been able to see these details in a concert setting). Other dancers sustained arabesques and attitudes while they tilted and hinged from different joints. They too shook slightly, their muscles straining to maintain the prescribed positions, making the watchers acutely aware of the labor involved, and breaking the illusion that sometimes forms of mystical creatures with machinelike grace. In their shaking they became human, and furthermore, human in a relationship with the other humans watching them while set against the dramatic rock, slate and shale of the Upstate Landscape and the metal materials of the various exhibits. Within moments, small pockets of sweat began to form on the gray spandex covering them: first under the arms, then at the navel, between the legs, and then running down the spine.

Exchanging places and partners, repeating abstract movements, the dancers moved amidst conditions of interchangeability but just as Julie Cunningham’s slight shake brought us rocketing back to physical awareness, the subtle shifts in facial expression and gaze opened up expressions of individuality. It was interesting to think about what elements I might have missed had I seen the piece in a theater. Certainly I would have been able to see more of the piece had I been looking from a further vantage but close up, I was party to silent interactions between dancers that I would have missed otherwise. Emma Desjardins seemed innocent, barely aware of the things her body was doing, a serene look on her face as she shifted and morphed, while Robert Swinston, a veteran Merce dancer was resolute, hard-eyed, and intense. Daniel Madoff knew something everyone else didn’t and lorded it over us the entire time, laughing at a secret joke, turning the tables and watching us as we tried to soak him in. He looked at me (or so I thought) directly, as if to say: “Oh hey. What’s up.” The tension between precision and uniformity on one hand and the overflowing of life, personality, and mortality was delicious.

Finally, as I walked through the rest of the gallery I passed Mr. Cunningham in his wheelchair, surrounded by admirers. He wore little black moon shoes and his face looked inflated, his worn body showing many if not all of his 90 years. There was the masterful manipulator of bodies, arrested in his own form – humbling me and inspiring me both at once.

Jungle King

Rum, lighter fluid, sweat and char. Jungle King blends modern, Jamaican folkloric, and African dance with bravado and irony as he dances for drunken tourists in Negril, Jamaica. Teeth white, beguiling women who have had too many on vacation to come and shake it...until they realize what they've walked into.

Spit. Fire.

By day he's a revered dance teacher to my friend Natasha's daughter.