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.

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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