Something out of Nothing

 --  By Tom Phillips 

Still from For a Dance Never Choreographed, 2021. Photo: Stefano Croci 

For artists and introverts, the Pandemic of 2020-22 was a window of opportunity -- a chance to observe the world in the absence of normal human activity.  During lockdown and quarantine periods, as we walked through deserted streets or sat in empty public spaces, we could suddenly see form without function --- the structure of civilization without its uses.   

Italian artist-choreographer Luca Veggetti found himself stuck in his hometown of Bologna, Italy, when the pandemic struck in 2020.  So he made something out of nothing.  

Veggetti’s film For a Dance Never Choreographed (2021) takes place in an empty plaza designed by Japanese architect Isamu Noguchi, with a text of notes by Martha Graham for a dance she never made.  The movement of the earth around the sun is represented by dark shadows creeping over the plaza, and the only human presence is the sound of voices crying, whispering, gasping and groaning --- expression minus words.  The whole impression is made by taking things away, removing the contents of  civilization and examining its substrate of earth and bricks, light and shade, desire and discontent. 

The 22-minute film is now permanently on view in the digital collection of the Noguchi Museum in New York.  To watch, click here and follow the link to the museum.  

Now--- shhhh. 

-- Copyright 2022 by Tom Phillips 

Blow it Up: A Plan for Lincoln Center

 --  By Tom Phillips 

                                    

With the Holidays just around the corner, box offices were open today at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the place was buzzing with...construction noise.  Philharmonic (now Geffen) Hall is being gutted again, with a scaled-down plan for renovation.  Across 66th Street the Juilliard School is also getting some kind of a makeover.

I have a better idea for fixing Lincoln Center. With federal infrastructure money flowing in to rebuild New York neighborhoods, try this: 

Blow it up. Tear it down. Bury it.  

Womanspreading: Butoh Redefined

Vangeline 
"Eternity 123" 
Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn 
October 30, 2021

 --  By Tom Phillips 

Butoh queen Vangeline describes her solo "Eternity 123" as a "symbolic journey of women's liberation across time."  I tossed the program note aside and watched the show with an open mind, with which the artist proceeded to play.   

The piece begins with nothing but a dress -- a full-length, frilly see-through chiffon -- draped over a slip, revolving in the air.  In time the dancer appears behind it as a pair of feet and two sets of fiddling fingers, and proceeds to inhabit the garment.  

This is woman as clothes hanger -- seen but not heard, seen but not seen. Blackout.  

The next scene has the dancer wearing the dress, to the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Facing rear, she does nothing but turn her head into profile, then back, moving imperceptibly over a span of eight minutes. The music, built on a single rhythmic motif, moves majestically through a minor march and a major fantasia, ending like a wave breaking over the rocks of some desolate shore. Vangeline's sound score adds birdsongs in the background.  By the middle of the movement I scribbled excitedly in my notebook Art, Nature, and Humanity--- and felt a half-forgotten sensation creeping up from my entrails.  Mesmerized by the beauty of that half-turned face, I was falling in love!  

This is woman as ideal, semi-paralyzed on a pedestal. Blackout, reset. 

To crowd noise and the strains of the Blue Danube Waltz, the next scene has the dancer again facing rear, but with the arms in motion, rising in a super slo-mo port de bras, then twining the fingers behind the neck, then down behind the back -- until voila! off slips the frilly vest, leaving the torso and arms in just a translucent slip.  Here's a hint of burlesque, a strip-tease --- woman as object, but a fleshly object, as real as any man.  Blackout.  

By this time I was feeling like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, morphing through centuries of changing gender roles -- ready for anything in the 21st.  

Bare-legged now and sprawled on the floor, a blob of wounded flesh, Vangeline appears helpless. Will she die?  The answer comes in a metamorphosis. She begins to move in jerks and spasms, face contorted as she works her jaws as if for the first time. Slowly and steadily, her strength and control increase as she extends her limbs, pushes herself up, then balances on her hips in a flying V-shape--- hands and feet in the air, body held in place by nothing but bands of abdominal steel. Finally, she takes a quarter-turn to face the audience, and eases her body into a symmetrical shape -- knees spread, toes touching on the floor, a perfect quadrangle below the waist, spine lifted above -- balanced in meditation, eyes open, living and breathing, meeting the gaze of the audience, equal and opposite. . 

You know "Manspreading?" This is Womanspreading.  And it's here to stay.  

Next up for "Eternity 123," a US tour.  It's E-Vangelism at its best. 

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 
Photos by Bryan Kwon 

Miracle on 76th Street: Denishawn Dances Again

Denishawn
Dances by Ruth St. Denis & Ted Shawn 
The Theatre at St. Jean's, New York  
October 2, 2021

-- By Tom Phillips 

Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis are known as the "mother and father of American Modern Dance," but the works they created  and performed have been lost for years.  All that remained were dusty photographs and flickering, black-and-white films.  It was a case study in the ephemeral nature of dance--- until it all began again.  

The idea originated with veteran dance publicist Audrey Ross -- once a dancer --  who recruited an all-star cast of friends, supporters, students and protegees to excavate the attic of the past, and re-create the the dawn of Denishawn.  Several years in the making, the project was put on hold by the pandemic. It finally went up last week---from a theater in a church basement, a 21st-Century resurrection.  

It began at the beginning, with a new generation of dancers.  Seven nubile nymphs from the Limon2 company performed Shawn's "Floor Plastique," a heretical piece circa 1916 done  entirely on the floor.  As recreated by choreographer Henning Rubsam, the piece contains the fundamental gestures of a new era -- contraction and release, shifting weight and momentum.  Denishawn dancers Martha Graham, Charles Weidman and Doris Humphrey would elaborate these gestures into new styles and schools of movement.  In the bodies of the Limon apprentices, 1916 and 2021 came together -- two violent turning points, vortexes of desire and despair.   

Shawn and St. Denis looked far and wide for different ways to move, and found them in exotic places -- India, Java, Japan.  Ballet legend Valentina Kozlova re-created St. Denis's "Incense," based on Hindu ritual, with actual incense and authentic feeling.  Antonio Fini brought the Hindu god of destruction Shiva off his pedestal and into motion, ending with the deity's signature delicate balance. Bradley Shelver performed Shawn's "Japanese Spear Dance" with the controlled rage of ritual fighting.  And Peiju Chien-Pott seduced the entire audience in a slinky silk gown, in St. Denis's version of a court dance from Java. 

A lively post-performance chat centered on an objection to Denishawn's appropriation of other cultures. Dancers defended the work -- this was not hootchy-kootchy Orientalism but anthropological adventure,  an attempt to give western dance a global vocabulary.  The most subtle talkback came from Puerto Rican Nuevayorker Arthur Aviles, who performed Shawn's "Danse Americaine." The piece makes fun of a small-time dude, who like Frank Zappa's "Dancing Fool," thinks he's really something. Even in a too-shiny green suit, Aviles gave the character dignity -- OK, he's a naive narcissist, but he's really being his "best self."   

The program concluded with a solo waltz, a piece that originated when Ruth St. Denis spontaneously began to dance at a party, and the pianist couldn't stop playing, going seamlessly from  Brahms to Lizst, extending the moment. The dancer was former Graham great Christine Dakin, the pianist Jonathan Howard Katz.  The performance was inspired, alive, authentic.  As Faulkner wrote--- the past isn't dead.  It isn't even past.    

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips .  

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.  

---

"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 

 

Pleasure and the Pandemic: Is it Over?

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Downtown Art/Alpha Omega, 19 E. 3rd St. 

Sixty years after the Sixties, The East Village can still feel like the most sensuous part of New York.  Like their spiritual forebears, people in this low-rise, low-rent district live for pleasure – erotic, psychedelic and aesthetic.  So it felt right that a graffiti-scarred vacant lot on East 3^rd Street was the scene for a revival of live experimental theater in the dying days of the pandemic.  Interdisciplinary artists Jasmine Hearn and Sugar Vendil concluded the 2021 LaMama Moves! Dance Festival with emotionally charged solos, under a blue sky on a sultry Sunday.     

Jasmine Hearn:  Photo by Steven Pisano 

The stage covered half the lot, but it didn’t seem big enough for Hearn (pronoun “they”) who danced and sang along with three songs from their new album Pleasure Memories. A child of south Texas, Hearn whirled, dove, and slid across the floor, spilling over the edge, slamming up against the wall of the adjacent building.  They undressed and dressed on stage, pulled pants on inside-out, then ducked into what looked like a slave’s gunny sack. All this was mockumented by a buddy called Missy, who scrawled squiggles upside-down on a poster board held like an apron. Inside-out, upside-down and all over the place, they smiled recalling pleasures of the past and cried out with desire for pleasures to come. Their bottom line was survival, and they made it through. 

Sugar Vendil, a second-generation Filipinx-American, took a grimmer view of a year that saw racial and political turmoil erupt into anti-Asian violence.  She performed several of her Test Sites, brief experiments in process and form—whose title is also a reminder of post-war US nuclear tests that devastated Pacific islands, leaving them radioactive to this day.  (Anyone remember Eniwetok?)

Like Hearn, Vendil’s ambience was a mix of live song and processed soundtrack, with various forms of the piano: In one piece, she plunked the keys of a toy baby grand.  In another she ran her hands wildly across a miniature keyboard. 

In “This Too Shall Pass,” Vendil used repetitive movement clashing with inchoate sound to evoke the madness of pandemic life—one day just like another, amid a storm of conflicting emotions.  At the end of this exercise she invited the audience to join in a primal scream, which felt good – conclusive, hopeful, fun. 

At the end of her set she was joined by five Asian women, planted in the audience, who came to the stage bearing wildflower bouquets and bubble tea in plastic cups.  Vendil helped herself to a bubble tea and was surrounded by sweetness, community and love.  Thus passes the pandemic, we pray.  

The bulk of the festival took place online.  The earlier shows--- wildly varied, a la LaMama --- are available on demand through June 30 at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lamamamoves21

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 
Performance photos by Steven Pisano 

 

 

 

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.