The Joyce Theater

New York, NY
July 9–14, 2012
Performance reviewed: July 9

Ronald K. Brown’s Gatekeepers (1999) could stand as an iconic piece for his acclaimed Evidence, A Dance Company—as if almost every dance he’s made were not, in its way, iconic. To me, Brown’s oeuvre forms a seamless fabric spanning at least 27 years, less a collection of discrete works than a consistent philosophy in motion, set to music. It’s evidence.

Blessed with a sharp eye for form and talent in everything from ballet to West African dance, from Caribbean dance to hip-hop, the Tony Award winner (for The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess) also has had the good fortune to bring along dancers who could “go there” for him. I’m remembering past Evidence superstars like Shani Nwando Ikerioha Collins, Camille A. Brown, and Keon Thoulouis who could mix it all up and serve up something indescribably fresh. Today, Brown still has his stalwart Arcell Cabuag, the Bessie winner with the true grit and funk of the old days. But, as evinced in Gatekeepers, which opened the first of two repertory programs, the choreographer now leads dancers who deliver his familiar vocabulary and style with discipline, memorable more for smooth team work than individual distinction.

Maresa D'Amore Morrison, Clarice Young, and Arcell Cabuag in Gatekeepers
Photo by Ayodele Casel, Courtesy Evidence

Launching Gatekeepers, set to the aurally translucent layers of music by Wunmi and inspired by something characteristically metaphysical and ancestral, the dancers stir and clear space. Finely crafted, half-angelic “wings” scoop, fling, pump, claw, plow, or sickle while their feet twirl them in one direction after another and sidle into a typically sensual groove that can ripple the entire body. I observe, once again, how Brown works his dancers up in this way even though they’re basically often rooted in one place, locked into a line, pivoting around or fluttering out from a magnetic axis. When he does release them to space, the men’s moves can be pleasingly spongey; the women, springy—all still cool, controlled.

Calibrating Brown’s phrasing, in which movement spools out like silky or sulky poetic musings alternating with thrilling outbursts, the dancers have mastered a demanding musical timing that’s critical to Brown’s impact on audiences. They also look nothing like ballet or modern or postmodern or jazz or even Ailey dancers. They bring a way of the body to the concert stage that audiences read, and embrace, as real, sourced in something folks recognize.

So that leads us to On Earth Together/Everybody at the Table, a recently updated work based on original recordings and live cover versions of Stevie Wonder songs. “Living for the City,” “As,” “Higher Ground,” and six other tunes are offered in either literal, obvious “New York, just as I pictured it” dance scenarios—with Trayvon Martin hoodies thrown in—or unshaped, random boogie-ing among friends. Having worn out my copies of Wonder’s Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life, I can’t help but love much of On Earth Together. But I’m not impressed. If too much of what your dancers are doing onstage merely matches what I was doing in front of my bedroom mirror way back when, well...

Arcelle Cabuag and Annique Roberts in On Earth Together/Everybody at the Table
Photo by Ayodele Casel, Courtesy Evidence

I was looking for a little more choreography—not unreasonably, I think—but my attention kept straying to Chris Rob’s five-piece band and the lineup of several vocalists of varying strengths. Trevon Davis—guesting from The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess on opening night—possesses a voice that, at times, closely resembles Wonder’s and won many hearts. I no longer want the Stevie Wonder jukebox musical I used to clamor for. Just give me those old albums or, failing that, Mr. Davis at the mic, please. Thank you.

Pictured at top: Ronald K. Brown and Annique Roberts in On Earth Together/Everybody at the Table
Photo by Ayodele Casel, Courtesy Evidence

The Joyce Theater, NYC
July 3–7, 2012
Performance reviewed: July 4

Jason Samuels Smith—no longer flying those Tribe-of-Savion dreadlocks—bursts onto the tap floor at a gallop, all business. Theo Hill’s jazz quintet, with Carlos Abadie and Plume cooking on trumpet and alto saxophone, respectively, lays down the bebop framework—Charlie Parker’s “Bebop,” to be specific—with “improvographer” Samuels Smith cramming in as many beats as he can, pecking and stroking the wood with every angle and surface of his shoes, echoing the loop-di-loop of Hill’s piano, trading licks with drummer Kyle Poole. Ah-rum-di-bum-di-bum.

This opening solo, Imagine, seals the deal: Tap, at least the kind I crave, really is bebop. In fact, Samuels Smith—whose Joyce Theater season was inspired by Parker’s revolutionary music—believes that tap dancers put the beats in the ears and creative minds of the boppers, not the other way around.

With “Bebop” squared away, Samuels Smith turns spare and reflective for Horace Silver’s “Lonely Woman,” a quiet, flowing number. Here and there, he drops a few scrapes and slides, an elegant trembling of feet against floor, a few knocks. He applies the sides of his shoes with the accuracy of an elite pastry chef laying on the chocolate icing, drawing squeals from his besotted audience.

Finally, he goes a capella, enjoying his own sounds and giving us eye-and-smile, unlike Savion Glover, as if to say, “You hear this?” A voice from the audience lobs out, “Go on!” And he does—sly and cool though hard-charging.

All of this, at least for me, would have been enough, but it wouldn’t fill the program’s hour. So we were treated to Chloé Arnold, Michelle Dorrance and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards flawlessly matching Parker note for note in excerpts from Charlie’s Angels (2009). Sumbry-Edwards, in particular, is fun to watch as she smooths out the breaks with a sideways swing of her leg or a graceful pivot of her upper body.

Michelle Dorrance, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, and Chloé Arnold

 © AK47 Division, Courtesy of Divine Rhythm Productions

I’m of two minds about Charlie’s Angels, loving its forceful tribute to the virtuosity of women in tap—from yesterday’s chorus girls right up through personable young innovators like Dorrance. A few years on, though, that tight marriage of steps to the Parker music starts to feel restrictive, arbitrary, and unnecessary in light of the masterful bebop lesson Samuels Smith has already taught us in Imagine.

The excerpts from Chasing the Bird (2012) are, sort of, Charlie's Angels spliced with a morality tale about temptation by, let's call him, the Devil of Commercial Fame, played by Frank Harts. (“All you need to know is how many behinds you can get in those seats!”) Arnold, Dorrance, and Sumbry-Edwards are, once again, vivacious and fun, but the awkward, largely inaudible vocal elements of this piece (spoken word and song) leave an amateurish impression. And besides, isn’t bebop hoofing capable of speaking for itself?

Pictured at top: Jason Samuels Smith. © AK47 Division, Courtesy of Divine Rhythm Productions

The Invisible Dog Art Center

Brooklyn, NY

June 12–15, 2013

A dance performance inspired by a riot, no matter how violent in execution, will never be a riot. No dance will ever capture or adequately explain what happened at New York’s Attica Correctional Facility in 1971, when prisoners rose up, took hostages and voiced demands. Their confrontation with state authorities, police, and the National Guard resulted in 39 deaths. Setting that aside, we can look at what Rebecca Lazier, with her outstanding dancers and collaborators, has accomplished in Coming Together/Attica, a premiere at The Invisible Dog Art Center.

Set to two works on the Attica uprising by Frederic Rzewski, performed live by the indie-classical ensemble Newspeak, this piece packs more into its 50 minutes than most dance productions manage to deliver in twice the time. The audience—lining all four sides of the initial performance area—finds itself confined with Lazier’s artists within a small, drab space, the dim lighting unrelieved by a faint glow from frosted windows. With the orchestra’s startling first bang, dancers appear, nothing separating us from them. They sit, gazing and occasionally slouching atop metal folding chairs, just like us and on our level. Tubes of fluorescent light, placed beneath their seats, pop on or flash, only adding to the bleakness.

This first section, “Coming Together”—with Rzewski’s driving, percussive rhythm and Mellissa Hughes spitting text from a letter by slain Attica leader Sam Melville—suggests what it might feel like to be in a prison in meltdown. In a long, punishing sequence, dancers Asli Bulbul, Pierre Guilbault, Jennifer Lafferty, Rashaun Mitchell, Christopher Ralph, and Silas Riener manhandle and abuse one another, grappling and struggling. One question: Since they wear indentical grey, zippered coveralls—Mary-Jo Mecca’s rendering of prison garb–where, in all this terrifying action, are Attica’s corrections officers and outside forces?

Hurling themselves from one corner of the space to another like water breaching a ship, the dancers show an astonishing openness—even feral appetite—for Lazier’s vision of chaos. Watching them, we fear for their safety—and our own.

With the arrival of Part II—“Silence”—dancers and audience quickly reposition themselves surrounding another space. (To my knowledge, no one issued directions, and this appeared to work with quiet, follow-the-leader efficiency.) Like the Attica rebels with their barriers constructed from tables, the dancers stack a few tables atop a larger one. Lined up across this watchtower, they look down upon the audience with disinterest and boredom, drooping or fidgeting in myriad ways. Riener pulls at strands of his luxuriant hair. Bulbul snatches an imaginary fly from the air and eats it. Silence forces us to fix our attention on every detail of their lack of attention. We feel the space’s energy slacken, sucked away.

In Part III—“Attica”—Lazier switches to Rzewski's interpretation of the words of Richard X. Clark, a riot survivor later freed on parole. When asked how it felt to leave Attica behind him, Clark replied, “Attica is in front of me now.” More than 40 years later, the business of Attica and racism in the U.S. prison system remains unfinished. Perhaps Lazier’s audiences will ponder this. For now, she chooses to throw her work’s final space open to powerfully cleansing movement.

Here music returns as does energy and even a measure of outside light with the opening of window blinds to the view of a neighboring tree. Rzewski’s repetitive, accumulating phrases introduce a peaceful drone and chime. Once again, the audience turns to sit along a new space. Here dancers, now in white sleeveless shirts, shorts, and jazz shoes, airily scythe and crisscross, their movements resounding like struck bells. Where did Rzewski and Lazier find these angels?

I momentarily closed my eyes and felt a stinging chill on my cheek as a dancer—Riener, I think—brushed past me. I felt awakened, if not quite released.

Pictured at top: Part III "Attica" of Rebecca Lazier's Coming Together/Attica; photo by Julie Lemberger.

New York Live Arts, NYC

May 15–18, 2013

Performance reviewed: May 16

Shortly before attending Pam Tanowitz’ new work, The Spectators, I watched a TED Talk video on how anxious people can improve their chances of being taken seriously. Just do what animals do. Stop that shrinking and slumping, that clutching of hands to face or neck. Make your body look larger, physically spreading out to claim more actual and psychological space. Doing so—say, before walking into a job interview or a business presentation–releases brain chemicals that help you, in the words of the speaker, “fake it until you become it.” I thought about this when Tanowitz’s troupe, supported by music and lighting, completely occupied New York Live Arts’ space in a rare spirit of arrival and command.

Irresistible to critics for whom the aesthetics of neoclassicism and of Merce Cunningham, and the not unreasonable intertwining of the two, are a surefire draw, Tanowitz nevertheless has taken her knocks for last spring’s premiere, Untitled (Blue Ballet), a work that even she now regards with regret. The Spectators is her comeback attempt, and it’s luscious.

Melissa Toogood (far right) in Pam Tanowitz' The Spectators
Photo by Ian Douglas, Courtesy NYLA

To open, Tanowitz deals one of her veteran dancers—former Cunningham star Melissa Toogood, flawless of technique and bearing a classic Hollywood face—like a card from a hot hand. She sends her skimming out into the space alone. Dressed in a wine-red melange of ballet-wear, Toogood sets a tone sustained throughout—cool, light, just a hint of the jazzy. Like Dan Siegler’s expansive winds and drumming, the dancer simply carves open and cleans the space before her. For sure, those living-large neurochemicals get popping—for both Toogood and audience. And from this heraldic start to the work’s finish, Tanowitz’s focused choreography exudes clarity of purpose. The regularity of its precision stitch work and practiced patterns reassures and entertains. You never ask yourself, “Why did she do this thing and not that?”  “What’s that doing there?” Or the killer: “That again?”

Maggie Cloud enters next—a teal-colored dragonfly darting over a pond. Like Toogood, her moves can be soft and shapely, yet rigorous, nothing out of place. And so it goes, with the appearance of more of this presentable sextet whose every port de bras and rond de jambe à terre, though familiar, seem fresh and natural in this new context.

The score—Part 1 by Siegler, Part 2 by Annie Gosfield—catches us up in fancifully layered, imageful atmospheres that engulf the performance space. It’s possible to find yourself wondering how that distant marching band you can almost hear and see at times will make it over those sands where heavy breakers surge.

Dylan Crossman and Melissa Toogood
Photo by Ian Douglas, Courtesy NYLA

On one occasion, Davison Scandrett’s lighting design surprises as he redirects sharp beams, and our attention, to busy feet and shins. At another moment, he wavers between revealing the dancers—Toogood, especially, twirling into a distant corner—and plunging them into darkness as he briefly trains a faint light on the audience. With blaring light, he will dramatize dancers invading the bare margins of the theater’s space, or he will flash a magical mini-aurora over the brief kiss in the grand pas de deux between Toogood and another Cunningham vet, Dylan Crossman. If Tanowitz’s dancers execute steps and sequences with strict dispassion, Scandrett’s job seems to be to use light to express thinking, feeling, and drunkenness not demonstrated elsewhere. Or perhaps he represents our own giddy spectator eyes at play.

Pictured at top: Pam Tanowitz' The Spectators. Photo by Ian Douglas, Courtesy NYLA.

February 22–24, 2013
92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival
New York, NY
Performance reviewed: February 22
   
Stripped/Dressed—a dance-demystifying strategy Doug Varone created a few years ago—is, in theory, a great notion. “A way to help audiences feel at ease and take ownership of their ideas,” he calls it. “A way to see the company close and dirty.”

A Stripped/Dressed event begins with an informal talk about the genesis and process of making dance and a demo illustrated by dancers in practice clothes. After intermission—during which, this time, we were invited to watch a video of Varone performers dancing in children’s hospital rooms—the group gives a formal presentation of a work. It concludes with a Q&A. All of that can add up to a lengthy evening, as it did on Varone’s recent bill in the Y’s intimate, dance-historic Buttenwieser Hall. The audience needs as much focus and stamina as the Varone dancers, and theirs are downright legendary. I can’t say mine held up nearly as well.

Doug Varone and Dancers certainly made the case for the persuasiveness of seeing dance live and close up. For their Harkness Dance Festival program, the troupe demo-ed the reconstructed Rise (1993), set to music by John Adams. This rousing dance has no business being shown just a few feet from our noses, but here it is—an abstract ensemble with the expansive feel of a zooming, bustling city of massive forces, risk-takers, big appetites, bigger ambitions. Varone rolls his dancers like dice, throwing them hard, way off center where they cling to Earth with tenacity. If you’re going along for this ride, pack your Dramamine.

From left: Eddie Taketa, Alex Springer, Erin Owen and Julia Burrer in Doug Varone's Mouth Above Water
Photo by Julie Lemberger, Courtesy 92nd St. Y

Mouth Above Water, the new work, shares some of those qualities but compresses the surges and blaring movement into tighter, more disturbing intersections and interactions among the eight dancers–Hollis Bartlett, Erin Owen, Xan Burley, Alex Springer, Hsiao-Jou Tang, Julia Burrer, Eddie Taketa and Colin Stillwell. For the Harkness premiere, Varone used the stage space for a kind of Punch and Judy show of three performers and their looming jet-black shadows. The rest danced on the floor in front of us, as they had during the demo, with the tall and willowy, breathtakingly expressive Burrer appearing to be a sacrificial victim. These performances and composer Julia Wolfe’s orchestral string piece—“Cruel Sister,” inspired by an old English ballad about two sisters’ lethal rivalry over a man--made me shift in my seat to release the effects that this tension and violence had on my own body.

Bottom line: Doug Varone’s troupe might be the last one that needs to sell an audience on its methods. If this work and these dancers can’t move you, I don’t know what would.

Pictured at top: Xan Burley (right) and Hsiao-Jou Tang in Doug Varone's Mouth Above Water
Photo by Julie Lemberger, Courtesy 92nd St. Y

Next Wave Festival

Brooklyn Academy of Music

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space

Brooklyn, NY
Nov. 27–Dec. 1, 2012
Performance reviewed: Nov. 27

So, Lucy Guerin, what is this fascination with civilians? I silently asked this question every time I saw promotion for the U.S. premiere of her 2009 work, Untrained. The Australian choreographer apparently enjoys the looks of untrained dance performers—the way they throw themselves into an exercise with no tricks to fall back upon, no theoretical filter, no prior orientation to space or to a “dancerly” use of their bodies.

Guerin’s one-hour quartet for men—two of them superbly trained and experienced dancers; two, untrained and wonderfully brave guys from other fields—seems, in its description, a slight project to bring to BAM’s prestigious Next Wave Festival. And maybe that’s why the packed opening night audience in Fishman Space fell head over heels. Unpretentious, at times moving, Untrained is unabashedly all about being flesh-and-blood human. In its ability to draw performers and audience into a big embrace, it puts a lot of highfalutin’ dance experiments to shame.

The current cast includes dancers Ross McCormack and Alisdair Macindoe along with Michael Dunbar (described as a “freelance interaction designer,” a mournful-faced bear of a guy) and Jake Shackleton (an environmental engineer whose education ranged from music to chemistry to business management). This is not Dancing With the Stars. Scruffy-looking T-shirts and sweat pants or shorts bring everyone to the same ordinary, unkempt level. Dudes willing to play Follow the (trained) Leader in ballet flourishes, b-boy downrocking, or the gnarliest, wackiest abstract sequences make us root for them. We come to expect neither more nor less of any of them, and that makes us lean forward for a closer look at everything they do. Guerin is not alone in her fascination!

Michael Dunbar, Ross McCormack, Alisdair Macindoe, and Jake Shackleton in Untrained.

Photo by Julieta Cervantes, Courtesy BAM.

McCormack has facile, minute control of his rubbery body, but it’s every bit as much fun to observe Dunbar and Shackleton making sense of his outbursts in their own way. We learn that there’s a sharp line between what’s awkward and what’s alternative; Dunbar and Shackleton walk that line like Philippe Petit on a high wire. It’s marked by genuine humor relished by the audience out of empathy, I believe. Dance critics who imagine cruelty in the audience’s chuckling are projecting their own expectations and discomfort at the sight of untrained movers.

Shackleton reveals himself to be great at suggesting imagery to Macindoe (who must play an expanding and deflating hot-air balloon) and a natural at reenacting over-the-top movie scenes. I’m tempted to say “A star is born,” but Untrained really leads us back to Sly Stone: “Everybody is a Star.” 

Along the way, Dunbar reveals that, because of his weight, he suffered bullying in school. As a new husband, he says, he suddenly feels more concerned about health. Macindoe explains the red skin blotches that we’ve all noticed and wondered about, and other bits of background and interior life are offered up in straightforward, concise ways—just enough to make all of these men, trained or untrained, less objects of our gaze than our kin in this thing called life.

Untrained continues at BAM through Dec. 1.

Pictured at top: Ross McCormack, Alisdair Macindoe (center) with Michael Dunbar and Jake Shackleton on the sidelines. Photo by Julieta Cervantes, Courtesy BAM.

New York Live Arts
September 18–19, 21–22, 2012
Performance reviewed:

Program A, Sept. 18

We humans—and especially those of us living in privileged nations—label things in order to act upon them, to control, to sell, and consume. With regard to those useful yet often troubling people, places, and things “over there” at a safe distance, our claim to the right to label can be critically strategic; it permits us to view and treat The Other as suits our current needs.

The African continent, virtually a map of labels imposed from outside, is home to three dancer/choreographers, recently presented at New York Live Arts, who subvert Western stereotypes of Africa, its women, and its art. They flip the script, appropriating non-African cultural artifacts and behavior and turning them to their own artistic and political ends. They demonstrate that African peoples have creative agency, are not frozen in time and are—for better or worse—active players in this world that we have all wrought.             

          
Nelisiwe Xaba (South Africa), Kettly Noël (Haitian-born, living in Mali) and Nadia Beugré (Cote d’Ivoire) introduced two impressive works during Program A of the touring festival Voices of Strength: Contemporary Dance and Theater by Women from Africa, curated by Mapp International’s Cathy Zimmerman. None of these three women artists care to conform to American expectations, nor to any manner of theatrical reticence. They say yes to raucous humor, yes to glamour (in either their person or, in the case of Beugré, extravagant stage design), yes to repeatedly invading your space, yes to intimations of sexuality and undercurrents of violence.

Nelisiwe Xaba and Kettly Noël in Correspondances

Collaborating on Correspondances, Xaba and Noël depict affluent, ultra-stylish ladies whose notion of dance is as far from tribal tradition as you can imagine. For instance, they might take inspiration from rock videos, nailing the Eurythmic hit, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” with deceptively cute, gestural intensity. They interpret ballet terms like piqué with nearly lethal literalness. They ratchet up an initially chummy butt bump with bumper-car velocity. And they turn the ridiculous (two milk-filled, udder-shaped balloons descending to the dancers’ mouths) into the sublime (what if the sensual Vollmond had wet Bausch’s dancers not with water but milk?) and back to the ridiculous (bodies wildly slipping over a milk-slicked floor). And while these charismatic buddies make viewers chuckle, they sometimes chill the blood. In one segment, a reclining Xaba unfurls a gorgeous leg, raising and dangling a white-gowned, white-skinned doll that she appears to have impaled on her black stiletto heel. Later, as we listen to a Blossom Dearie recording of “Satin Doll,” Xaba looms over the pitiable marionette, “walking” its tiny feet and coolly manipulating it in what, for white people in the audience, cannot be a comfortable image.

Nelisiwe Xaba in Correspondances.

All photos by Ian Douglas, courtesy New York Live Arts.

Beugré's Quartiers Libres provokes more discomfort. Beugré, sitting among the audience, prettily sings the famed Swahili love song/lullaby “Malaika” (“Angel”). But all is not well. In short order, she launches a long, self-punishing journey in which the heavy microphone cable looped around her neck and chest will turn burdensome; its rubber clenched between her lips will distort her face. The audience must ponder whether the space this dancer inhabits is truly free, as the solo’s title suggests. Throughout her physically and emotionally difficult performance, we witness freedom continuously toggling on and off.

At times, Beugré seems energized, even fearsome. Yet she acts upon a stage decorated with a “waterfall” that, while shimmering like liquid silver, is actually an assemblage of trash—flattened plastic water bottles (brilliant work by set designer Laurent Bourgeois and lighting designer Christopher Kuhl). She will stuff a large trash bag into her mouth. She will dress herself in a “tutu” of plastic bottles and pluck them from her body like bloody arrows. In these commercial byproducts of natural resources, we recognize the deadly personal and global consequences of unbridled political and corporate power that seizes free space and destroys autonomy.

Above and pictured at top: Nadia Beugré in Quartiers Libres

Voices of Strength’s Program B, which I did not attend, features Madame Plaza, a work by Morocco’s Bouchra Ouizgen first brought to New York in 2010, and the US premiere of Sombra, a solo by Mozambique’s Maria Helena Pinto. More American viewers will have a chance to catch this exciting festival when it comes to Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Voices of Strength continues at New York Live Arts through Sept. 22.

The Joyce Theater, NYC
June 19–24, 2012
Performance reviewed: June 19

In An Unfinished Memoir, choreographer José Limón recalled first dancing a new solo—Chaconne, set to a Bach violin work—before the astonished gaze of his mentor and colleague Doris Humphrey. She declared it, he wrote, “one of the most magnificent things I have ever seen...chiefly because it is a man dancing.”

This spring, for the Limón Dance Company’s run at the Joyce, Chaconne is a woman dancing. Performances of this work honored the late Graham dancer Ethel Winter, who died earlier this year. Roxane D’Orleans Juste (who I saw on opening night) and Kathryn Alter shared the role, accompanied onstage by violinist Kinga Augustyn.

In Chaconne (1942), D’Orleans Juste brought to her performance an awareness of theater space as a malleable  reality activated by a body charged, in turn, by the deepest of human experiences and feelings. Dressed simply in tailored black slacks and white shirt—a femininity-neutralizing costume fit for a matador—she unfolds her first courtly gestures as a way of humbly, politely introducing herself. The solo then proceeds through stages of the music’s—and life’s—dynamics, handled by D’Orleans Juste with faithfulness if not fresh revelation. She achieves one critical moment that seizes the eye—her body stretched along a taut diagonal, it would seem, between heaven and earth, or heaven and hell.

Daniel Fetecua Soto as The Emperor and Durell Comedy as The Trader in The Emperor Jones.

The viewer might have hoped for signal moments like this in Limón’s The Emperor Jones, a 1956 ensemble piece reconstructed by Clay Taliaferro to open the two-hour program. Limón’s main character here—an island tyrant mentally tormented by his own cruelty and guilt—should be as fearsome, at least initially, as the hallucinations that bedevil him. Daniel Fetecua Soto—the only “Emperor” after Limón and Taliaferro—gives us the shapes and motions of Jones in a lithe, dancerly way but cannot deliver the necessary heft that would make this character, with his ineffectual pistol dangling from his crotch, seem convincingly mad, not just physically manic. Durrell Comedy’s depiction of the conniving slave trader rests on his skill at minute, slippery changes in the body that require superb physical control. He’s believable and actually quite fun to watch.

Most likely, this historic piece—with the artificiality of its wrenching, staccato style and florid clichés—has lost impact as dance-theater. Nevertheless, Limón might still speak to the dangers of unbalanced, unbridled power manifest every day from elite boardrooms and prep schools to the halls of governments here and abroad.  Eerily, the troupe’s season opened right after word arrived that Egypt’s deposed strongman, ailing and confined to a prison hospital, had come very close to death.

Logan Francis Kruger and Kristen Foote in Cathedrale Engloutie.

The company also staged a revival of JiÅ™í Kylián's La Cathédrale Engloutie, set to Debussy. The 1975 piece featured pretty references, in the dancing, to both the lyrical flow and the monumental strength of ocean waves, as well as particularly strong, resonating presence from Comedy, Logan Francis Kruger, and Kristen Foote.

But artistic director Carla Maxwell knows that the durability of her well-trained ensemble will depend on more than a museum’s worth of classic repertoire. She has scored a major popular win with a world premiere—Come With Me, the first U.S. commission for Brazilian choreographer Rodrigo Pedeneiras of Grupo Corpo and the first dance commission for Cuba-born Paquito D’Rivera, a multiple-Grammy winner and a giant of Latin music. The Limón dancers not only took to D’Rivera’s mellow Latin jazz but clearly relished Pedeneiras’ penchant for erect posture, lilt, and fleet movements. If coolness can be said to sizzle in space like surges of electricity, they are cool personified.

Aaron Selissen and Daniel Fetecua Soto in Come With Me.

Pictured at top: Logan Francis Kruger and Durell Comedy in Come With Me.

All photos by Rosalie O'Connor, courtesy Limón Company.

The Joyce Theater, NYC
May 15–27, 2012

Performance reviewed: May 15

Each time I see Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, I marvel at the earnest physical investment of its dancers: They attack each work as if they all matter equally, even ones that might not otherwise move me. I imagine choreographers would fight for the chance to have their visions interpreted by a repertory ensemble with this much commitment and intensity, not to mention technical capacity. I recently caught up with the troupe for Program A of its Joyce Theater season.

Hofesh Shechter's Violet Kid, which includes 14 dancers, almost the entire company, opens with an aggressive, grinding sound that is quickly silenced. A man's heavily-accented voice—perhaps the choreographer, an Israeli—asks, "Do I talk too much?" This seems innocent enough, and apropos of nothing, until it is repeated while one man kneels and another presses two fingers against the kneeler's head like a cocked pistol. The voiceover speaker elaborates: "If I didn't talk too much, I would have more friends." Suddenly, we're not sure where we are except that it is someplace we'd rather not be.

Matthew Rich (foreground) in Hofesh Shechter's Violet Kid

Musicians Ramon de Bruyn (double bass), Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf (cello), and Tawnya Popoff (viola) appear and disappear from a surface suspended above the stage. Fog obscures whatever holds them as if they are afloat on a cloud. The score—which also includes recorded percussion by Nathan Davis and Matthew Gold—gathers, groans, pounds, and chugs along, ominous and anxious.

Shechter's ensemble boils and spews, a gush of lava, or an ocean roiling and alive with agitated creatures. Each performer dances with more-than-human elasticity, stretching and snapping in ways that no human should move. Dancers melt into and emerge from dark spaces, at times becoming one organism, at other times splitting into distinct beings who handle one another roughly for no reason other than that's their nature. Cedar Lake dances the hell out of this bleak, terrifying work where hell, as we've heard, really is other people.

Crystal Pite's Grace Engine—premiered by Cedar Lake this year in Lyon, France—opens with an extreme, breakout solo for Jon Bond, always a company notable, now with several years under his belt and, like his colleague Nickemil Concepcion, a maturing, deepening self-presentation. But Pite, like Shechter, capitalizes on the troupe's collective rigor. Moreover, she brings out, in the men, an athletic hyper-masculinity, another capability often seized upon by Cedar Lake's commissioned dancemakers. It makes for a wow of a stage picture, although enough of it can make me long for different textures.

Cyrstal Pite's Grace Engine

Set between these two works was Angelin Preljocaj's 1995 Annociation, performed, the night I saw it, by Acacia Schachte (as the angel) and Harumi Terayama (as perhaps too girlish a virgin). Schachte handled the disruptive, alien physicality of her role very well, though neither dancer inhabited her dancing with galvanizing force.

With the inclusion of this duet and the necessity of two intermissions, Program A ran very long. It's curious how a venue can determine what is considered to be the appropriate length of a show. An hour is good enough for a production running at any of the usual “downtown, contemporary dance” spots where, admittedly, I spend the bulk of my dance-going time. If it's mounted at houses like the Joyce or City Center or at Lincoln Center, apparently nothing under 90 minutes will do. Any of the three works here could have been shown elsewhere all by itself, perhaps leading to interesting explorations of the work by the performers and greater engagement for their audiences.

Cedar Lake continues at The Joyce Theater with Program B, May 22–27. See www.joyce.org.

Pictured at top: Ana-Maria Lacaciu & Joaquim de Santana in Crystal Pite's Grace Engine

All photos by Julieta Cervantes, courtesy Cedar Lake.

La MaMa Moves! Festival
La MaMa E.T.C., NYC
May 9–19, 2012
Performance reviewed: May 12

Perhaps La MaMa Moves! curator Nicky Paraiso felt that he had to say something, following the dismissive review of Yoshiko Chuma's new multimedia production that appeared in New York's preeminent newspaper. "Art doesn't always come in tidy packages," Paraiso told the audience as he introduced a Saturday afternoon performance of Love Story, Palestine. "Sometimes it's messy. Sometimes it's fierce. And that is what Yoshiko has brought to us."

I have to agree that Love Story, Palestine does not perfectly cohere as theater. Its messiness undercuts any potential fierceness. However, something else comes through that could prove more crucial than theatrical polish, and that is visibility, contact, connection. How many of us who often read and hear about the Palestinians—and have even formed strong opinions about their situation and concerns—have ever seen or met a Palestinian?

Chuma offered these performances for free because it was important to her that we get to meet her company's Palestinian guests—dancers Anas Abu Oun and Sari Husseini—who, once again constrained by border laws, cannot work for money in the US.

In Love Story, Palestine, we see drawings and photo portraits of Palestinians. We listen to interviews of Palestinian artists, hear about their values and tragic losses. We watch videos of Ramallah's El-Funoun dance troupe and, in La MaMa's intimate space, observe the two guest dancers, live, as they perform variations on the vigorous dabke. The stomp of boots on the floor, the occasional vocalizations and flash of smiles—are all, finally, close enough.

Sari Husseini of the El-Funoun dance troup in Chuma's Love Story, Palestine

These are what Yoshiko Chuma has brought us. What she cannot bring in its entirety, however, is 6 Seconds in Ramallah, the piece she worked on with El-Funoun. Instead, she has patched together a part-literal and sometimes didactic, part-abstract and sometimes poetic meditation on El-Funoun and Palestine, made of movement, spoken and distributed text, video and set installations, audience interaction and live music—including a luscious, moody piano introduction and coda. It's a lot of overlapping data to take in at once, much of it looking rushed and unsophisticated. But maybe that's deliberate, and maybe that's okay.

I want to tell you about a section that slowly grew on me. It centered around alternating tarps—one sunny yellow, the other in camouflage print—unfurled to engulf the floor. My memory of the sequence of events is unfortunately fuzzy, but I do recall Husseini angrily bunching up the camouflage tarp around him as if weary of all that camouflaging implies. I remember the cheerful glow of the yellow tarp sliding out from under the darker one, and I think that Chuma's childlike open heart guided how she would tell her story to hearts that could similarly open.

All photos by Hugh Burckhardt, courtesy La MaMa Moves

Pictured at top: Sari Husseini and Anas Abu Oun of the El-Funoun dance troupe in Chuma's Love Story, Palestine.

The Joyce Theater, NYC
May 8–13, 2012
Performance reviewed: May 8

In Alonzo King's vision for his San Francisco-based ensemble, ballet itself appears to be a body capable of uncommon, even freakish pliancy and distorted, roughed-up lyricism. It is ballet contradicting ballet at nearly every turn, not so subtly referencing the ground but often doom eager for it.

In Resin (2011)—set to a suite of spiritual and secular, traditional and contemporary, instrumental and a cappella music of the Sephardic diaspora—dancers frequently propel torsos outward and downward or sink into raffish pliés or tempt fate by stretching or thrusting a movement phrase past what might be its sensible end point. Feet flattened, or skimming as if on ice, draw attention to the floor, so that pointe work, coming in brief bursts, appears more functional than aesthetic: "I rise just to get to the next place." A dancer might shoot her leg up to her ear, but she is just as likely to wind up with her rear jutting in our faces for no discernible reason. When dancers lift their partners or lock arms with them or slam into them, you feel the effort or the impact. I have rarely been more aware of—and fascinated by—the literal weight, the matter-of-factness, of ballet dancers' bodies than while watching LINES at the Joyce.

Victor Mateos Arellano in Alonzo King's Resin. Photo by RJ Muna.

At the same time, LINES can puzzle. Resin opens with the inexplicable image of a floor-length tube of fabric, first drenched in lime-green light, that trembles with the groping movements of the man within; it looks a bit foolish when this sheath lifts away, and Victor Matteos Arellano stands before us in a pair of briefs. The luminous music forms a tapestry of Mediterranean/Arabic/Near Eastern cultures, but the very nature of it—undulating melodies, alternately soothing and propulsive rhythms—seems to have engendered a sameness in movement design over a lengthy journey. I took that journey through Resin, feeling vaguely dissatisfied, unaware that I was waiting to meet someone important.

That someone turned out to be Meredith Webster—a tall switch of willow, King's most senior performer and perhaps his quirkiest. In Resin's penultimate section, backed by the male trio of David Harvey, Zack Tang and Keelan Whitmore, Webster moves against a steady beat and a woman's sonorant voice amid a chorus of male voices. King has singled her out and captured her individuality, her self-possession, her way with breath and timing that is fresh in the moment. Her vibrancy, it would seem, is the force unleashing showers of resin upon King's ensemble.

Yujin Kim in Alonzo King's Resin. Photo by Quinn B. Wharton.

Scheherazade (2009), again, does something unexpected—even unseemly—with dancers' physical reality. It nakedly displays weariness, and rightly so. Doesn't that befit a legend of a queen spinning tales for her husband through grueling hours, night after night, to save her life? Michael Montgomery, Ashley Jackson, Courtney Henry, and other LINES dancers are ready athletes, but I found it far more gripping to watch Kara Wilkes (Scheherazade) and Harvey (Shahryar) slumping, stumbling, and clinging to one another in increasing exhaustion. Contemporary ballet à la King.

Ricardo Zayas in Alonzo King's Scheherazade. Photo by RJ Muna.

Pictured at top: Meredith Webster in Alonzo King's Scheherazade. Photo by RJ Muna.

All photos Courtesy LINES.

PLATFORM 2012: Parallels
Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church, NYC
February 2–March 31, 2012

Parallels—a two-month series commissioned by Danspace and curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones—is arguably the most significant event of the current dance season. A provocative survey of innovative black choreographers, some veteran and some emerging, who work within non-mainstream dance, Parallels revisited and updated a program, also called Parallels, created by Houston-Jones 30 years ago. That series focused on an earlier generation, such as Blondell Cummings, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Fred Holland and Houston-Jones himself. “Black dance” is a quick, easy label to say and write, but what, if anything, does it mean, and what does it mean, now, to be a black choreographer?

Even the series’ launch—an “Artist’s Voice” conversation with Houston-Jones at Studio Museum in Harlem—broke with expectations. For the moment, and for a change, let’s take this out of St. Mark’s Church, take it way uptown and affirm dance as a visual and conceptual art that might prove interesting to outside artists and spectators. The SRO event acknowledged Houston-Jones, a recent Bessie Award–winner and iconoclast, beloved educator and advocate for contemporary dance. One video clip showed him, with dance partner Holland, challenging even the then-revolutionary contact improvisation community by bringing black bodies to the mix—just for starters.

By working outside the Ailey tradition and other popular black conventions, Houston-Jones and his colleagues radically broadened the aesthetic possibilities for Black dancers while making room for black perspectives within the white-predominant avant-garde. This was not without the usual difficulties of riding the turbulence between two powerful worlds.

With the updated Parallels, Houston-Jones acknowledged that, over the past few decades, our understanding of this work and its range has grown more complicated and sophisticated. “Black dance”—if that term still holds—now includes contemporary innovations from African and Caribbean artists; dance styles emerging from urban streets and clubs; and choreographers who, like the symbolic Sankofa bird, look backward to past traditions in order to surge forward in imaginative ways. One of Parallels’ guest curators, Dean Moss, even dared to select choreographers from other ethnicities—Korean-American, Latino, and white—for a program bluntly titled “Black Dance.”

No review can do justice to the varied material offered and rich questions generated by Parallels—the title of which, according to choreographer Reggie Wilson, should have been Vectors—meaning not two or more things neatly lined up but lots of things shooting in various directions. Nor can I do more than note a handful of the many artists who contributed to this historic series, like Gesel Mason, Cynthia Oliver, and Marya Wethers, sharing a program curated by Bebe Miller, whose pieces showed that the black (and black female) body cannot be considered apart from the personal and cultural history it holds, for better or for worse. The black body will tease, strain, and break the cool, neutral, movement-focused silence of postmodernism the way that Ann Liv Young, wearing blackface and a fuschia dress in the program curated by Dean Moss broke the silent decorum of her liberal, downtown dance audience. This review’s selection of events merely offers a rapid survey of some of Parallels’ highlights and issues, and I apologize to those artists whose work cannot be covered here.

Cynthia Oliver and Leslie Cuyjet in Oliver's Where We're Calling From

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s curated evening, "Black Jam," asserted improvisation as an inherent feature of black culture and art—undeniable in tap dance and jazz, for sure, but less well recognized in contemporary dance. Zollar presented a loose cluster of segments—movement jams, a movement game, improvised storytelling, a flock of house dancers. Not all of these activities gelled as performance or argument, but improvisation’s creative intelligence was reflected in Zollar’s three main dancers—Hunter Carter, Samantha Speis, and Marya Wethers. How slyly they met, locked in, assisted, complicated, manipulated, interrupted, enabled, contained, and transformed one another. Speis, like a star jazz player, could be counted on to stir in some wilder, funkier ideas that changed the equation and compelled us to watch.

If the performers in Zollar’s club dancing segment were surprisingly listless, we only needed to wait a week for “From the Streets, From the Clubs, From the Houses.” This program, featuring works by Regina Rocke, Niall Jones, Darrell Jones and Nicholas Leichter, opened with the screening of a trailer for Check Your Body at the Door, the acclaimed documentary on house dancing (done right), produced by critic/historian Sally Sommer. Houston-Jones introduced the evening by invoking Pearl Primus and Dianne McIntyre for their role in adapting black forms of social dancing to the Western concert stage.

Darrell Jones’ Hoo-ha (twister pump breakdown) did not just drop vogueing and house dancing into a postmodern setting; he underscored the discrete, almost ritualistic vocabulary, arrangement and timing of club dance movement, arguing for it as contemporary choreography. Leichter, the club dancer turned choreographer whose Twenty Twenty, a scorching, irrepressibly sexy duet-in-progress with Bryan Strimpel, amused everyone who suddenly remembered that—omg!—Danspace Project is housed in a church.

Darrell Jones' Hoo-ha

In Rocke’s duet Boy Troubles, danced with Niall Jones, Rocke alternates between between spiky, expansive swagger and balletic twirl, her superpowers. Who is she? Whoever she wants to be. And so goes Jones–aka niall jones or niall phoenix jones, sometimes identified as male, other times as female—who drifts into soft submissiveness as easily as slipping off a flannel shirt. Rocke clears space to employ variety in technique as well as gender fluidity and complexity. Leichter queers contemporary Black culture (R&B, hip hop), staking out territory for frank eroticism in a duet with a partner who is white, male and a generation younger.

Regina Rocke's Boy Troubles

Three choreographers presented here would crown any season even without Parallels’ special framing: Nora Chipaumire, originally from Zimbabwe; Okwui Okpokwasili, born in the Bronx of Nigerian parentage; and one of New York dance’s latest wunderkinds, Kyle Abraham.

Okpokwasili’s solo, Bronx Gothic, called to mind Kara Walker’s provocative cutout silhouettes of generic characters from the days of slavery. But it was as if one of these figures had touched the third rail. Grotesquely shimmying, twitching and panting, the dancer reenacted a half-amusing, half-alarming event from her youth. In this narrative, two pre-teens trade correspondence about sex. One claims a lot of experience; the other, bemused but fascinated, asks naive questions. Then comes the day when Okpokwasili’s mother discovers this exchange and launches a relentless interrogation. The trembling dancer gave voice to all three characters in this nightmare. In moments of song, an angelic voice chillingly emerged from a face rendered demonic by the lighting.

Chipaumire’s solo, The Last Heifer, followed Bronx Gothic, and audience seating was rearranged to form a neat square around a small version of a boxing ring. Even just sitting and staring at this platform engendered dramatic anticipation. Chipaumire has become a rock star of downtown dance, with a majestic quality that blows everything else out of the water. We waited for her.

Nora Chipaumire's The Last Heifer

The word “heifer” means “cow,” but, in black America, it’s also a popular and terrible insult hurled by one woman against another. Chipaumire’s often exposed nipples and languid movement suggest something cow-like. But I recognized in her jet-black costuming and movement a huge raptor or a mythic harpy. I saw her soaring on thermals, hovering over mountaintops with her astounding wingspan, skillfully negotiating rocky ledges. But she also gave off vibes that might draw disapproval—and the “heifer” epithet—from those with less self-possession. Her slow trajectory, heroically sustained, remained focused on precarious edges. She might have been trapped physically—sweat pouring down her mask-like face—but, in her mind, she was free.

To watch Abraham’s Boyz N’ The Hood: Pavement, with news of Trayvon Martin’s shooting fresh in mind, was to sit with heart in mouth as dancers continuously reinforced the image of a man pulled down to the floor and cuffed with his hands behind his back. What swiftly morphed from a contact improv encounter to the image of an arrest, also came to resemble an act of affection or of sex, body stacked atop body. But then, the bodies continued to stack as if you had stumbled across a scene of mass slaughter. There’s much more to Boyz N’ The Hood: Pavement than I have room to discuss, but it represents a new unfolding and triumph for Abraham. Exploring the limits and possibilities of black manhood in American culture, he is developing fine skill in blending bold imagery with subtle, telling mutations. His theater has become a multidimensional tapestry of visual, sonic, energetic, and emotional depth.

Kyle Abraham's Boyz N' The Hood: Pavement

In short, Abraham’s work is black in the way that dancer-scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz observes, where Africa and Africanisms underlie much of what we see and hear. Starting Performing Black, his 30-minute performance lecture for Parallels, DeFrantz warned that “What is black dance?” is a trick question. He then proceeded, trickster-like, to speed us through history and theory with stops along the way for rapid-fire tap dancing and an Africanist nod to Merce Cunningham’s love of the unplanned and unexpected.

“Black is less about being something,” he concluded, “than doing something.”

All photos by Ian Douglas, Courtesy Danspace