Monday, March 30, 2009

Headless Dancing in Confined Spaces

a different dancehall, a different creature.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

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.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

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.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

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.

Monday, March 9, 2009

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

Friday, March 6, 2009

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.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

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.

Monday, March 2, 2009

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)