Edge of the Universe

Kyle Marshall Choreography
"Stellar" 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
June 7-21, 2021 (online) 

-- By Tom Phillips 

Which comes first, music or dance?  In Kyle Marshall's choreography, it's neither.  Music and dance are two sides of one art form, improvising against each other:  friction, ignition, liftoff, jazz. 

Marshall's new "Stellar" knits together city streets with the loneliness of deep space, and grounds them in the earth of Mother Africa.  All in little more than twenty minutes.  

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"Stellar" is a video for three dancers---Marshall and two female partners, Bree Breeden and Ariana Speight, and a multi-instrumentalist composer-performer, Kwami Winfield.  It begins with long, plaintive single notes from a cornet---the signature solo instrument of early jazz---and bodies shot in close-up, rising and swirling as they seem to grow out of the floor at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.  They're wearing loose sweatpants and hoodies that look tie-dyed and painted. With hoods up they look like space suits.   

The dancers walk, dip and dive in circular patterns around the bare stage, as if in orbit, held in their paths by invisible forces---gravity, family, tribe.  They make music with hands and feet, stomping and clapping a syncopated beat while Winfield scratches out a background, rubbing and shaking bits of metal in his hands.  This feels like ritual dance, waking up the earth.  The two women then take center stage in turn, and execute a series of spectacular whole-body pirouettes, whipping around with torsos bent, feet flexed, legs flying -- tropical storms in human form.  Marshall then launches into a broken break-dance, like a tree whipped in the wind, as the musician toggles from random notes on the keyboard to chaotic background sounds.

The section ends in a total blackout, long enough so you wonder what happened.  When it lifts, the dancers are in outer darkness, scuttling along the perimeter of the stage, the edge of the universe.  The music changes to buzzes, bleeps and bloops---the mysterious energy of the ether.  Then the sound picks up density as the dancers gradually come together, then fall away.  Last time I checked, the Big Bang theory had been replaced by the Bang-Bang theory---in which the expansion and contraction of the cosmos is a repetitive cycle.  That's what happens in the dance.  It ends with a traditional folk-dance figure, a three-hand star, which then explodes into the wings. 

Marshall says the piece was inspired by the most ethereal kind of jazz---the cosmic mysticism of Sun Ra, and the legacy of John Coltrane's meditative trips. But it's still jazz, born of the earth and the streets.  "Stellar" was created during a year of deadly racial turmoil and pandemic disease, but it makes no direct reference to either.  This illustrates one legitimate way that artists, and notably Black artists, have dealt with the world's chronic crises:  Transcendence. 

"Stellar" can be seen on demand through June 21. To view, click here. 

• Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips
  Photo by Maria Baranova 

 

Sick Time: Pits of the Pandemic

-- By Tom Phillips  

Kolonial: Stefanie Batten Bland 

America is starting to emerge from 14 months of viral living, but like all traumas, this pandemic year will live on in mind and body. Reams of research and acres of art will record how we lived and died with the coronavirus, and how it changed us.  Ahead of the game, the Baryshnikov Arts Center of New York is offering the first fruits of an ugly season --- a piece created and performed during the pandemic, under medically-prescribed COVID health and safety protocols. 

Choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland assembled half a dozen dancers in BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater, in an installation by Conrad Quesen. They begin the drama in separate plastic bubbles, close enough to see each other but barred from touching.  In a recorded introduction, Bland says Kolonial is about isolation, being on display, voyeurism, the desire to touch; finding ways to be with others, and then finding why we can’t be. The 20-minute video performance captures the recurring misery of pandemic life, its constant approach and avoidance of human contact, its multiple barriers of plastic.   

Parable of the Plant Kingdom

"Estado Vegetal" 
Manuela Infante 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York 
May 3, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips 

In medical Spanish, "Estado Vegetal" means a vegetative state, where basic life functions go on but consciousness and thought are lost. Politically, a "Vegetative State" could mean rule by the plant kingdom. This intense theatrical piece, starring a young Chilean woman and an array of potted plants, suggests such a state is exactly where humanity is headed.

Beyond Butoh

"Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination"
Kota Yamazaki/Fluid hug-hug
Baryshnikov Arts Center,  New York
December 14, 2017
--by Tom Phillips

Five dancers take part in Kota Yamazaki’s “Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination,” but for the most part each dances on his or her own, on a shiny floor, with a diaphanous rectangle of silver fabric hanging overhead.  The overall effect is of slow, liquid movement, but with fits and starts disrupting the surface calm.

  

Of the dancers Joanna Kotze commanded my attention most, stepping slowly like a long-legged wading bird, or like a child with autism, on tiptoes, whiffling her fingers under her chin and wrinkling her nose as if puzzling over an insoluble private riddle. At one point she spoke up to say she saw three power lines, or maybe it was four.

Raja Feather Kelly stood still with his mouth open for long periods. When he moved it was in long lines, opening into eccentric arabesques. Wearing a white shirt and blue pants, he rolled over with his back upright, so that his blue butt formed a dome over what looked like a featureless white face, and then began to talk animatedly with his hands. Later he lay down and said out loud that he smelled cigarette smoke, coming from next door. “Maybe it was hers?” he mused. This was the only mention of another person made by any character.  

Julian Barnett, wearing a black skirt over his pants and a diaphanous robe outside his shirt, pinched in on himself as if stuck in a contraction.  He stared and glared in stillness, then lurched around the space, moving spasmodically, as if he had something to say but couldn’t. 

The Body Speaks

-- By Tom Phillips

Midway through "Unwanted," a woman steps forward and begins to sing "Ave Maria," in a sweet, clear soprano -- then suddenly rips the name of Mary into a horrific shriek. It's a heart-stopping moment that encapsulates the theme of this piece: the trauma of women raped in war, and the horror they experience bearing the children of their tormentors.

"Unwanted" is the work of Dorothee Munyaneza, a pastor's daughter who was 12 during the genocidal civil war in Rwanda, in 1994. She escaped the war with her family, but years later went back to interview the women who were among its victims -- who carried the unwanted children, often the offspring of men who had murdered their fathers and brothers. These mothers instinctively nursed their babies, against the wishes of their relatives. One recounts a conversation with an aunt who advised her to kill the child before it opened its eyes. "Look," said her auntie, "your child resembles a hyena. How can you nurse a hyena?"  Munyaneza, writhing and recoiling, embodies the emotions of the mother as she kept the boy, nursed the hyena, hid her face from her own kin.