PREVIEW: Amy Chavasse at Triskelion Arts

Posted on by Elena Light

This weekend, choreographer Amy Chavasse is returning to New York with three dance works at Triskelion Arts’s new Greenpoint location (Saturday and Sunday at 8pm). First up, Chavasse Dance & Performance will show a remount of 2011’s Hunger the Longing (a biased history of seduction), an exploration of patriotism involving plastic horses and Woody Guthrie’s iconic song “This Land is Your Land.” Chavasse, who currently teaches at the University of Michigan, will also present a duet for herself and actor Malcolm Tulip titled deux dogtooth. Began as a collaboration with actor Peter Schmitz in 2013, the work has seen many iterations including, most recently, a high-quality video production of the work. Now, New York City will get to see it live.

The last work of the evening will be the premiere of a new solo for Chavasse titled Conspiracy Going (Amy needs a lot of empathy). The work has a long and interesting backstory: according to Chavasse, she performed a solo called Fear as a blunt tool of manipulation just before the 2008 elections at The Smithsonian Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. About five months later, Chavasse came across a blog post called CIA vs the World, Amy Needs A Lot of Empathy. A brutally long diatribe response to her performance, the anonymous author incorporated specifics from Chavasse’s performance and her artist biography while also laying out various government abuses, CIA surveillance tactics, fascist actions, and other problems with US foreign and domestic policy. The new solo (with dramaturgical insight from Charles Gushue) is a response to this blog post and to the government exploitation it detailed: a seemingly fitting theme in today’s post-Snowden world.

Chavasse’s mélange of text and movement and her willingness to tackle relevant subject matter sound intriguing. I would love to see the show, but funnily enough, I’ll be hanging out in the nation’s capital for the weekend. Spy on it for me, please?

Andy Warhol’s 15 (Color Me, Warhol) at Dixon Place

Posted on by Elena Light

You can still go see this show! Final performances are Friday, April 24 and Saturday, April 25 at 7 pm. Tickets here. 

Say the word Warhol and it’s impossible not to have a million and one expectations around who Andy Warhol is/was, what his art is/was, what the world is/was in relation to him. At this point, the man himself is probably more notorious than the Campbell’s soup cans he famously painted.

So, when I first saw—on Facebook, of course—that Raja Feather Kelly was presenting a dance titled Andy Warhol’s 15 (Color Me, Warhol) at Dixon Place this April, I thought I knew what I was in for. I imagined an evening of the Warhol faces I had seen in Raja’s promo videos, coupled with some of the highly physical, creature-y dancing I’d come to expect from the former Dorfman dancer. I thought Andy would be referenced as god and hero; I expected showmanship and performativity and dancey dance.

The wonderful part about coming with these expectations was that the entire evening exploited them. Even the beginning of the show did so: rather than going directly to our seats, the audience stood around chatting onstage, beers in hand. A Lana Del Rey musical interlude by Elaine K. purported to be separate from the show; Kelly’s performers started talking and Beth Graczyk (a stand-out performer of the evening whose excitable, squirming persona was oddly captivating) ordered pizza for the audience on her cell phone. As she asked us if we would eat it, the boundary between “truth and illusion,” as Kelly called it later, was blurred. Was this for real?

I asked myself that question many times throughout the performance. Kelly sat among the audience in the second row and would play the role of pushy director, calling out his performers on their singing and ordering them around. When the performers engaged in “random acts of humanity” throughout the show, running and screaming crazily in an improvised, chaotic fashion, they too seemed to be playing heightened versions of themselves. Most of the choreography was also exaggerated and appropriated, as Kelly pedantically explained to us. A prime example: movements from Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring were overlaid with the lyrics from A Chorus Line’s “I Hope I Get It.” Yes, it was as hilarious and ridiculous as it sounds.

Later, movements from the movie version of A Chorus Line were performed in Warhol-face, and there was a section based on So You Think You Can Dance with a hint of America’s Next Top Model (Raja = Tyra) mixed in. This was all fake and performative and not real, and yet somehow, Kelly and his performers enacted it in such a way that I was genuinely bummed when Nik Owens and Amy Gernux—my chosen favorites—were voted off the stage. They deserved to be stars, gosh darn it!

The commitment of the performers and its director made this performance work. These were people baring it all onstage: sending video letters (beautifully shot by Laura Snow) to Misty Copeland asking for some of her turnout; performing raunchy ten second solo dances; furiously rubbing purple powder on their faces; doing achingly slow arabesques on relevé.

We got to watch these hopefuls have their Warholian fifteen minutes, full of gumption and hopefulness in this Broadway/downtown dance/TV show, taking risks and going there and never making the conventional choice.

Taking a cue from the performers, I surprised myself: when the pizza came, I ate some.

Photo by Elena Light.

Premiere Division’s Winter Show

Posted on by Elena Light

There’s something magical about watching teenagers dance. In ballet especially, these not-quite-adult movers seem to project to the audience who they want to be—who they almost are but have yet to become.

Watching The Winter Show by Premiere Division, a New York City boutique ballet school led by Artistic Director Nadege Hottier, I saw this beautiful paradox of naivete coupled with virtuosity. The evening presented three contemporary interpretations of classic stories: The Little Match Girl, Rapunzel, and The Nutcracker.

The Little Match Girl was a festive 1920s affair. The live musicians performing onstage worked with dark ambient lighting to create a low-key vibe, a casualness that helped transport me to another era. Kalliope Piersol was innocent and dream-like, ethereal with her turns and melancholic visage. The Ziegfeld Girls were my favorite corps dancers of the evening: I loved their flexed feet and stylized jazzy movements. Mac Twining’s character was as debonair as a silent film star, his hips and feet moving quickly and confidently. His performance was among the most charismatic of the evening. When Ms. Piersol floated into her final, dying slumber, her port de bras was frail and trembling, creating a delicately tragic end to the story.

The next act was Hottier’s interpretation of Rapunzel—a beautiful, more classical affair. The tall, model-esque Emily Abrom fit the title role perfectly; her dainty, almost whisper-like movements epitomized the fairytale’s heroine. Guest artist Alexandre Barranco was the evil witch mother Gothel decked out in brocaded dress and horns. His movements—at one point grabbing the air with a contraction and clawed hands—coupled with his intensely passionate performance, made me believe we were in a deeply unsettling, horror-film version of the ballet, though just for a moment. Mac Twining’s calming presence as the winning prince  brought me back: his duet with Abrom was all loveliness, as the pair danced with a finesse beyond their years.

The evening’s final piece was a not-so-typical Nutcracker. The party scene was unforgettable: 60s-fashion-clad attendees bobbed their heads in unison, jutting around the space like a scene out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. With Piersol this time as Clara and Barranco as the Dandy (a sort of neb-nutcracker), the “toy shop” scene featured Spanish, Chinese, Marzipan, etc. In all this, the flowers section toward the end was a feat to behold: four couples danced a seemingly endless pas de deux, never breaking contact through arabesques and attitudes galore.

It was a long evening, to be sure, but I honestly relished the opportunity to see ballet performed by these up-and-coming dancers thanks to Premiere Division. There was something so tangible and somehow heightened about watching these young artists perform. Maybe one day I’ll get to say that I saw the next Baryshnikov or Vishneva dance in a ballet on a rainy Sunday. Too soon to tell, I suppose…

BARE Dance Company’s Venomous at LPAC

Posted on by Elena Light

I’ve gotten used to seeing dance that rejects virtuosity, or that accepts an alternative type of virtuosity, one that has nothing to do with how many turns you can do or how high your leg can go. Dances where virtuosity is more about remembering patterns and forcing oneself to improvise in a highly structured manner.

And yet, seeing BARE Dance Company‘s Venomous at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (LPAC) on a recent Sunday, I was reminded how stunning that traditional virtuosity can be: I couldn’t help but feel moved as I watched dancers take physical risks, throwing themselves to the floor and just as soon leaping dangerously into another dancer’s arms.

With choreography by BARE Artistic Director Mike Esperanza, the piece began rather untraditionally: in a so-called “pre-show” section, my dancer friend and I were led through LPAC’s old-school hallways as performers decked out in black costumes with crazy sculptural headpieces by Matthew Griffin guided us with fierce intensity (almost too much so at times). Our first encounter was in a dressing room, where a young man with a whip touched my face in an intimate, almost sexual manner. I couldn’t help but applaud his brazen demeanor and commitment to his character. Later, we were led by the hand with a group of six or so other attendees (some visibly uncomfortable with these displays) to a freight elevator where a muscly, vampy woman decked out in a bustier leered at us. Leashes kept a fellow performer locked in a chair, where the bustier-wearing woman gave her a lap dance. With all these hyper-sexual vignettes, it was Sleep No More meets BDSM dungeon.

As we continued winding through a surreally-lit maze of spaces, some with mundane objects still in full view, it became clear that we were walking through the theater’s backstage area. When we arrived onstage, facing out to the theater’s hundreds of seats, a fierce-eyed young woman led us to our seats and then continued pacing the stage. She turned at intervals to clap abruptly, signaling to someone out in the sea of seats to stop making shadows with their hands. 

Soon, the stage lighting dimmed and a single sinewy male dancer joined her onstage. From there, the piece moved swiftly through a leash-filled duet and high-energy group sections of all males, all females, and at times, the entire seventeen-person company. All of the dancers were fierce, their movements heavy with confidence and determination, though maintaining impressive balletic lines. Venomous often felt rather like an action film, full of male-on-male fight scenes and female scrambles, bodies tangling and dispersing in quick succession. Sometimes, this sensory overload was too much to take in and fully appreciate; at other times, I was rapt.

And yet, the reliance on high-gloss virtuosity (pirouettes into tilts into jumps into body rolls) and parlor-trick light elements left me wanting more. It was beautiful, to be sure, but perhaps too theatrical.

The final scene was especially high drama: the sinewy male dancer (a protagonist of sorts) was given a belt upon which each of his fellow sixteen dancers strapped a leash. They fanned out around him to create a human wheel and began to lift him along with the cadence of the music. His body flailed about and collapsed—submission was the only possible conclusion, and it was simultaneously stunning and heart-wrenching to watch. In fact, I almost wished the entire dance had been that single scene: an image of the individual submitting to his environment, capitulating to societal stresses—to this venomous world—despite himself.

Photo by Ayaha Otsuka

Premiere of Bare Dance Company’s Venomous

Posted on by Elena Light

You’re in a dark alleyway. You can’t quite make out what’s in front of you. Suddenly, you hear a slight growl and begin to make out the outlines of a creature straining against a leash. It’s an attack dog. You can’t help but think it could break free and hurt you at any moment—you’re powerless to the sinister experience unfolding in front of you.

This is what Bare Dance Company Artistic Director Mike Esperanza says you can expect from this weekend’s premiere of Venomous at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, helmed by Managing Director Steven Hitt.  With shows on Saturday, November 15 at 8pm and Sunday, November 16 at 2pm and 8pm, Esperanza’s seventeen-person-large company is taking over the entirety of LPAC’s huge mainstage theater as part of the inaugural CUNY Dance Initiative, through which the company received a residency. When I say the entirety of the space, I mean they’ll be performing in and among not just the stage, but the rest of the theater as well. Get ready for a full-body experience, says Esperanza.

The choreographer is a California transplant who is now working with the newest iteration of Bare, originally founded in 2005. Describing his current dancers, Esperanza explained that a few are from the original company; some are students of his from California; and some are recent New York additions. Watching a segment of rehearsal, I noted that it’s a highly virtuosic group of young, ethnically diverse performers; I witnessed them use their classical lines to construct innovative duets involving weight-sharing (between both males and females). From what I saw, Esperanza’s description of his work as urban contemporary dance is right on point: these twenty-first-century dancers appear to get low one minute and do parkour the next.

This attention to form is the first building block in Esperanza’s choreographic process. He begins with a library of phrases or movement ideas that he finds resonant; he then brings these to rehearsal, and the dancers learn this library of movements. From there, they’re given specific scores or tasks that guide them in arranging the various phrases. It’s an ongoing dialogue between the dancers having the agency to arrange movements, and the choreographer weighing in on what the dancers have put together. According to Esperanza, this is all informed by the emotion he wants to generate in the audience: “I want to trigger something, even if that’s different for each person.”

For Venomous, Esperanza is bringing in a choreographic tool he’s used in past site-specific works: a pre-show section or preface. I won’t give too much away, but Esperanza wants to create a theatrical experience that starts sooner than the dance-goer might normally expect. He wants the viewer to experience dance actively, as it’s happening. With the recent trend toward site-specific devised theater and dance (i.e. Sleep No More and Then She Fell), I’m excited to see Esperanza’s take, especially as it informs Venomous‘s story of “a man struggling to find his true sexual identity.” If the result is anything like that attack dog image, it’s sure to get my heart racing.

Photo by Christina Oliver.

Wave Rising Series at White Wave

Posted on by Elena Light

Dance festivals in New York are odd ducks. I like them because I can go for one evening and see loads of choreographers and get a feel for what’s happening in the contemporary dance scene. I dislike them because they often feel too disparate, and the viewing experience isn’t all that satisfying as your attention resets every ten minutes.

Still, I admire White Wave’s Wave Rising Series (running until tomorrow, Sunday, November 9 for a full three weeks of performances) for their diverse programming. Festivals are, perhaps more than anything else, a service to artists, an opportunity for (mostly) emerging choreographers to show their work and reach a broader audience through the split-bill format. White Wave, with their four weeks featuring twenty choreographers and companies, does this to the extreme.

This past Sunday, I ventured on a brutally windy night to DUMBO’s John Ryan Theater , a beautiful wood-floor-and-ceiling space so see Program C of the Wave Rising Series featuring the Joffrey Ballet Concert Group, Sum Bones Co, and Azul Dance Theater/Yuki Hasegawa (the Joffrey Group apparently replaced Pony Box Dance Theatre for all three of the Program C performances). To say it was diverse is a vast understatement, as the work basically came from three different planets.

As much as I was thrown off by the entrance of a group of young teenage ballerina(o)s, I actually enjoyed the Joffrey Ballet Concert Group’s performance more than I expected. Granted, this might have had more to do with the fact that I was reliving my glory days as a former bunhead, and less to do with the troupe’s dancing. Nevertheless, their performance quality was decent (despite the awkwardness of seeing classical ballet performed five feet away) and Gerald Arpino’s choreography kept me entertained. The male-female duets had more oomph than the trio or male duet, and the beginning and ending had some rather random can-can-like kicks, but the solid execution and the opportunity to see ballet in a small venue amongst contemporary dance made the piece an overall success, in my book.

Next up, almost immediately, was Sum Bones Co presenting little u choreographed by Tyler D. Patterson. Full disclosure, I’m acquainted with Tyler, as one of my coworkers is the co-director of Sum Bones with  him. Also, of the four dancers, Julia Alix Smith-Eppsteiner, Rachel Slaughter, Shannon Nash Spicer, and Derek Dimartini, I’m acquainted with Shannon and know Julia and Derek as friends. With that said, I had never seen Sum Bones perform before and knew little of what to expect. What I saw was four creatures interacting in their underwear, performing idiosyncratic, often seemingly improvised movement to create a sort of cartoon-like hipster aesthetic. There seemed to be an internal logic guiding the interactions, but I found it difficult to follow along, especially since they rarely touched or looked at one another. Still, their contorted bodies, Patterson’s unexpected transitions, and the otherworldly musical interludes kept me questioning, which is what art should do.

Ending the evening, after a brief intermission, was Yuki Hasegawa’s Azul Dance Theatre presenting Night Rainbow, performed by ten male and female dancers with music by Scuba. This piece was “dancey,” full of kicks and leaps and rolls on the floor, with bodies moving in and out to create shapes that appeared and just as soon vanished. The music had a sort of false intensity that I saw reflected in the dancers’ piercing gazes; it felt overdone to me, like an action film when you don’t actually believe the world is going to end. While the physical feats were often impressive, and there were moments of innovative partnering, the piece seemed to flow into itself with too few moments of stillness or choreographic drama. A final section saw a costume change from red and purple with black lace tops into females wearing  all-white and carrying clear plastic sheets. Soon came a blue bouncy ball, which the dancers stared at, as they formed a writhing clump on the ground. This, in my view, had almost no relation to the past ten minutes of the dance, so I was confounded as to any implied meaning. Here, physical form and feat came before substance.

I left the John Ryan Theater back into the blustery night, ready to get my footing again after what felt like a journey through outer space (and not always a smooth one). Sometimes, it feels like the amount of dance in this city is actually a galaxy’s worth. Better get my spaceship ready.