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?

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…



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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

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.

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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

Urban Bush Women/Jant Bi: Les écailles de la memoire

November 19, 2008
BAM Next Wave
Compagnie Jant-Bi, Urban Bush Women
Les écailes de la memoire/The Scales of Memory

I was really excited to see last night’s performance – a collaboration between Jant-Bi (Senegal) and Urban Bush Women (Brooklyn). The dancers began with movement that reminded me of Butoh – walking in slow motion in diagonal lines toward the audience, guided by a woman white who yelled, ‘And one!’ They spoke in different languages: some in English, some in French, and others in a language I didn’t recognize, but I could tell they were saying their names and the names of their parents, grandparents, and ancestors. Through names, we write our genealogies. We state our provenance, our heritage, our history – positive and negative. Things happen—names get changed, chosen for us, mis-translated, mis-pronounced, and misunderstood, in an ever-evolving process of revision.

Through the course of the evening, the question of inheritance percolated. How do we, as movers, encode our histories and the histories of those that came before us? How can movement be recycled, co-opted, and re-contextualized? How can a violent event be reclaimed as an affirmation of self-possession? Can we see our bodies and our culture as blueprints for our past? What happens to bodies as they move across the borders of space and time? To what degree does the past stick to the bodies as a trace? What should our relationship be to that trace?

One of the best parts about Les écailles for me was the music that accompanied it. The overwhelming majority was composed of montages of different sounds (djembe, kora, talking drum, water, voice, human sounds of exertion, club music) over which the breath of the dancers was amplified and layered, adding a striking reminder of the liveness of the here and now despite engagement with the past. The movement was composed in a similar way. Salsa steps wove between traditional West African dance, club dance, modern dance, and movements that didn’t seem to fit into a category. Through this pastiche the audience travelled from slave ship to independent postcolonial nation, from auction block to jogging on the freeway.

At one point in the second half of the piece, a dancer in white stood on a long bench, clawing open her mouth with her own hands as if displaying her body for its appraisal and sale. A group of men and women stood under a spotlight with their mouths wide open – an island in the darkness – an image of yearning and extreme suffering. The woman on the bench raised her hand up, first displaying her strong arms, removing layer after layer of clothing to show her neck and back. Over time, dancers returned to the block with their left arms extended in the same way, but this time fists were closed, recycling the previous gesture but changing the meaning. Religion? Oppression? Power and hope? In the same way the abrupt change in dance and costume that followed also displayed rupture and continuity. Shortly after the scene on the bench, the dancers reappeared in party clothes and danced courtship rituals, strutting down what looked like a catwalk of light, displaying their different assets, challenging each other. I couldn’t help but think of this as reappropriation—a triumph in self-possession in which bodies were inhabited by their rightful owners in the fullest way possible.

In closing, the dancers found themselves again in diagonal formations, walking slowly forward, but this time dressed in modern clothing. They initiated the same slow movements, motivated by ‘And one!’ They repeated their names but instead of speaking one at a time, they layered their names and families over one another in a wash of sound.

“J’accept.”

“I accept.”

They closed with a suggestion for the future.

What does it mean to have a company of African men from Senegal collaborate with a company of women from Brooklyn with a mixed heritage and history? What does it say about moving forward mindfully?

The Swan Lake Matrix Effect

November 12, 2008
BAM Next Wave Festival
La La La Human Steps: Amjad




Cello music.

Three circular screens descend from the ceiling and on them are projected a video-art series of white silk, white spherical orbs, yellowish lineaments and fibers, and dark red craggy folds.

I know I’m here to see an adaptation of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty by Canadian ballet company, La La La Human Steps, so I am already prepped with image associations; through the yellow lines I can see the outline of birdlike feet, the inside of an egg, and in the crimson, the bloody mass that also signifies new life. There is something erotic to the spinning white orb-egg and the way in which they multiply, forming chains, forming pearls, forming circles. Spliced in between the images of potency—nourishing blood and food—a piece of white silk, impossibly clean washes over the outside of the shell. Strength, femininity, pain, multiplicity, violence. They begin as images and are repeated through movement.

La La La Human Steps is known for its virtuosic attack-style dancing. They dance at warp speed and execute horizontal pirouettes; they seem to nearly miss dealing each other lethal blows as their arms and legs fly out and are drawn back in just in time to miss a head, a neck, a groin. Despite astonishing physical capacity and coordination, I found myself falling asleep in my chair as even the most frenzied movement became monotone. The music, scores from two ballet classics, is made strange by reorganization, and by the minimalist performance of the results onstage by a pianist and group of four string musicians. Likewise, the costumes, spidery black sheer tights under too-high-cut leotards, strip the dancing bare of previous expectations of romantic ballet.

Over the course of the 1 hour and 45 minute performance, I found myself alternately bored, outraged, but sometimes also impressed with the dancers as they flew through a series of solos, duets, and group numbers. They danced like robots dramatically undermining the humanity they advertise in their name, and with it, dampening my sense of admiration for the dancers’ skill. They mimicked stylized ballet runs with their bony arms held rigidly behind their backs until they found their next coordinates on the stage and proceeded to pop, snap, and bend like anorexic goth Barbies in fast-forward motion…then they skittered to their next coordinate. Through these crossings they blended in with one another. Aside from the fact that one dancer was frighteningly thin and one was a head taller than everyone else, they seemed identical in appearance and function in the choreography for the majority of the piece and in addition to being interchangeable, exhibited very little agency in their duets with the male dancers. As their male partners spun the girls’ hips around, their bodies followed like finely-tuned machines but nothing more. I saw no soul and sorely longed for the dancers to show me something real.

Disillusioned and unable to keep my eyes open, I took deep breaths to reanimate myself and finally reached for the second half of an enormous cookie I was going to save for later. Craving the sugar buzz to get through the rest of the performance, I chomped into it and irrationally told myself that I was affirming my own realness, joy de vivre and giving the rhetorical finger to the oppression, maniacism and starvation I saw happening in front of me…so there!

The middle section of Amjad departed from what I found to be a discordant beginning. Rather than clipping along at a breakneck but predictably even double-time speed, the movement in the second part of the piece was peppered with haunting stills, with dancers moving in contracting opposition to another couple that continued on the previous frequency. The music changed to washy, watery, electronically mixed sounds that hearkened to nature but remained abstract. I understood none of the narrative that was being constructed by the woman in the white dress, and her pas de trios with a slender shirtless man on pointe shoes, but I appreciated finally having something besides a blur of limbs to contemplate.

Unfortunately, in many senses, the concluding section was much like the first, recycling costumes, movement (oh the incessant flapping of Swan Lake arms…taken to an absurd degree) and music. More flurried of two-footed spins, more snapping and rebounding of ballerinas from their pelvises, more spidery anorexic goth alien Barbies posing in what should have been come-hither positions in egg shaped pools of light on the ground. It ended with booming eggs and a dead alien Barbie swan…and darkness.

Oh La La. (La Human Steps)

I thank Édouard Lock for his minimalism, for this feat of athleticism, and for pushing the envelope in terms of speed, agility, and bodily extremes of all kinds. He succeeded in transforming his female dancers into birds—fragile, skittish, and flickering, as well as challenged the audience’s perception of time both in the speed of the movement (did I see an 105 minute ballet or one four times as long which I fast-forwarded in my mind?) and the duration of the work without intermission. He has also provided me with an unexpected reaffirmation of why I love dance and what dance I love. I was saddened by the strictures put on the dancers’ bodies, by the premiums placed on speed and accuracy over affect and meaning. I felt that the dancers were moving so fast that I could scarcely see them move at all. I could scarcely see them.

Armed with very little previous knowledge of the company or the recent developments in contemporary ballet, I can only offer my subjective experience. I welcome opinions, experiences, and feedback from anyone interested.

Good Night!

Anna Teresa de Keersmaker/Steve Reich Evening/ROSAS Dance Company

The piece started with two musicians that began a pendulum-like motion of 2 microphones that made a loud interference sound as they passed over a bowl-like structure. Both started from the same height at the same time but throughout the next ten minutes or so they became further apart in tempo, and closer together as they had less space to travel.

The rest of the evening seemed to play with complex rhythms that not only could be heard in different ways but, by virtue of their complexity and repetition, necessarily overlapped according to human error. It reminded me of the Kleist essay that tries to say that humans have no grace because something always messes with the perfect lines of gravity and geometry (their souls?). Reich and de Keersmaker showed us the beauty of the mistake and of the soul by offering us repetition or sound and movement until the main rhythm/movement became the background and the inconsistencies of the human body became the events in the foreground. Two dancers spun but didn’t match up exactly. Their shadows overlapped in the middle but remained separate on another part of the scrim on which they were reflected. They were practiced and précised so that the middle shadow often looked like one dancer, but the excitement for me came when the dancer/shadow in the middle split apart. I could suddenly see two elbows, two arms. Suddenly she was Ganesh with multiple arms and a single center. Likewise, the men on the vibraphone played the same five notes voraciously in a rapid, repetitive sequence and as they accelerated, they kept slightly different rhythms, playing in the inside and outside of the other’s rhythm. Then they found consistency again.

It reminded me a lot of mom’s work with coherency and resonating, and also of the sound and movement exercises we did in RasaBoxes. Like the feedback in the microphones, we hear and respond, perhaps unconsciously to the stimuli we receive. The musicians are at once unable to sustain the lightning paced speed exactly and metronomically but as they get off course (or as the dancers’ shadows split) they play/move in dissonance for a while but then find each other again. Miraculously though, through counting or communication, they end on the same breath…exactly.

After the microphones, and the 5-note spinning top dance we were suddenly bathed in movement and complexity. Steve Reich’s multiple-instrumented piece played while women in black, gray, and white costumes of flowing silk or tailored pants and vests moved on a star-like diagram on the floor, seemingly to their own pattern but almost serendipitously (but very deliberately) matching up in spaces and movements. It seemed like each dancer was following a specific part of the music – one girl was noticeably dancing to the flute that moved faster and higher than the other instruments – and retained their characters. Although the movement was abstract the dancers related to each other as human beings, reaching out to one another, touching one another, before being whisked on their way. I was floored by the seamless weaving of path and syncopation.

It was also really interesting to watch as de Keersmaker pushed her dancers to the point of exhaustion, even if only having them spin or make one repetitive movement (or in the men’s case, stand on one leg). In the moments of exhaustion, the wiggles, the almost-falls, the near misses of another person’s body added to the experience of these random-looking associations in mimicking the pattern that life seems to take.