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.

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.

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?

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/

Inbal-Pinto, Shaker

First we hear sound. A man in a striped suit plays a wind machine as a woman in a blue nightie/evening gown twirls a ribbon. The scene is part Narnia, part North Pole, part Peter Pan.

Snow on the ground.

The whistling wind machine stops but the sound continues.

Shaker transports the viewer to an uncannily familiar yet simultaneously strange world where limbs move in sleepy, fluid motion and then crumple to the ground, as if asleep.

Gender – women and their hair. Women spun by their hair. Women with their hair covered up.

While watching I had visions of dead bodies in the desert sand, unconscious stirrings and outbursts, and a sleepy return to life with eyes closed.

At the end the dancers were in body suits of different colors, sleeping in a row. One would get up and repeat quotidian but very gendered gestures. Despite being de-sexed by their covering costumes the women sewed, the men rode machines and checked their watches.

Where does life begin and dreaming end?

Are we waking or sleeping?

The piece was visually stunning. The entire performance took place in the snow – little Styrofoam pellets that looked like sand (time) or snow. Snow flew out as they walked, made a sshhhing sound with every motion, followed the dancers in arcs as movement’s residue. It left a visible trace of the space they created with their bodies, and at other times threatened to cover them up, erase them. I worried that it would get caught in their noses, throats, underwear – that they would slip – but they didn’t.

They moved according to collisions, gentle and more intense, and according to lines, planes, and momentum, swinging in arcs, bouncing off one and other, and falling quickly after hanging suspended at the top or bottom of a circle.

Check it out!

Yaa Samar! Dance Theater

Friday 11/14 and Saturday 11/15, 8PM
LaGuardia Performing Art Center
http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/lpac/entire_season.aspx