Reviews 1979
When I began to write for The Village Voice in 1967, Burt used to sit in one corner of the arts editor’s pie-shaped office typing at the speed of light. Since the office was about the size of a New York bathroom, he tried to be invisible. I didn’t realize that he was a dancer (“Not much of one,” he later said modestly) and had participated in the wildly creative goings-on at Judson Church.
-From Deborah Jowitt’s Tribute
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Clues to the World Within
November 26
Min Tanaka pads backwards into the large, airy room called the auditorium of P.S. 1 shaking out his shoulders, his arms, his whole torso, with small wiggling movements which, though familiar warming-up articulations, convey a sense of decisiveness and force. Rather dark for a Japanese, he wears a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt and seems almost smokey in it. In his mouth is a whistle, which he blows shrilly at regular intervals. He keeps working out, flipping his hands, arms, elbows, in squiggly motions that have a dancerly, refined sharpness. Abrupt, wavy gestures shoot away from his body and pull back in. The whistle is sometimes so loud tit buzzes in your ears. Strongly rooted, Tanaka still covers a good deal of ground. Sometimes his movement has a kind of flung-out marionette quality, suddenly shifting directions like a flood of quarreling impulses. His elbows are often bent, foci of movement as much as his flickering, wobbling hands. Slower, sort of collapsing, he backs out.
Maybe that was a warm up. Maybe it was a piece.
Eyes closed, with his skull and pubic hair shaved, and naked except for a thick protective sock over his penis, Tanaka rolls violently out of the back room, thudding across the floor somewhere into the middle of the space. He’s curled,, loosely fetal, then opens with tentatively reaching arms, bent knees, his head held off the floor. He’s subject to quivers in the head and arms, pulsing through the body. His calves and feet, which seem slightly stiff, vibrate. His arms get softer, noodly.
It’s strange to think of this performance as a dance, yet it’s very beautiful. Tanaka’s attention seems to be turned almost entirely inward - to experience the delicate inner movements and impulses and rhythms of the body. There’s no scheme, no emotional or theoretical resonance, just the physical truth of the moment given full value. We see merely the evidence of those inner events which are the real dance.
Tanaka’s arms sink back, his head drops, then reaches up. His legs straighten, then bend slightly and lower partway to the floor. He begins to twist, leaning his weight on one side. The free arms zigzags, then one shoulder curls around and brings him up onto one knee, then into a crouch. His upper arms are wobbling. Apparently contradictory impulses seem to go through him like small shocks. But there’s no real contradiction: it’s just an unusual, uncomposed sequence.
His limbs appear unreliable, but he gets on his feet, his back arched with his weight sunk deeply into his knees, arms close to his chest. Spasmatically, they reach up and pull back. The reaching is soft and floppy. His torso runs with sweat. He teeters on his toes in a jumpy series of movements, stubbing his toes against the floor and pushing away, but maintaining a kind of erratic balance as his body jiggles and his ankles sag outwards. He moves through situations/positions that make him particularly vulnerable to muscular vibration, places where his balance is neither solid nor precarious, but where the stresses flow to the surface. He adjusts the poise of his head constantly, scribbles in the air with his arms, walks teetering in an ageless body with outstretched arms.
About half an hour or so later, Tanaka does another performance on the wet, gravelly, cruddy roof of the building, against its huge chimney stacks and slanted roofs, between the lights of the Queensborough Bridge and the LIE. It’s already late afternoon, and beginning to get fully dark. Tanaka lies by a low wall. Occasionally, conversational voices of passersby speak into your ear from four stories below. This performance is slower, barely visible in the half-darkness. early 100 people are up here watching. Tanaka seems more embryonic, more like some neutral sample of organic tissue acting and reaching. His movements are the tremors of the body listening to itself.
At P.S. 1 (November 100.
Min Tanaka pads backwards into the large, airy room called the auditorium of P.S. 1 shaking out his shoulders, his arms, his whole torso, with small wiggling movements which, though familiar warming-up articulations, convey a sense of decisiveness and force. Rather dark for a Japanese, he wears a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt and seems almost smokey in it. In his mouth is a whistle, which he blows shrilly at regular intervals. He keeps working out, flipping his hands, arms, elbows, in squiggly motions that have a dancerly, refined sharpness. Abrupt, wavy gestures shoot away from his body and pull back in. The whistle is sometimes so loud tit buzzes in your ears. Strongly rooted, Tanaka still covers a good deal of ground. Sometimes his movement has a kind of flung-out marionette quality, suddenly shifting directions like a flood of quarreling impulses. His elbows are often bent, foci of movement as much as his flickering, wobbling hands. Slower, sort of collapsing, he backs out.
Maybe that was a warm up. Maybe it was a piece.
Eyes closed, with his skull and pubic hair shaved, and naked except for a thick protective sock over his penis, Tanaka rolls violently out of the back room, thudding across the floor somewhere into the middle of the space. He’s curled,, loosely fetal, then opens with tentatively reaching arms, bent knees, his head held off the floor. He’s subject to quivers in the head and arms, pulsing through the body. His calves and feet, which seem slightly stiff, vibrate. His arms get softer, noodly.
It’s strange to think of this performance as a dance, yet it’s very beautiful. Tanaka’s attention seems to be turned almost entirely inward - to experience the delicate inner movements and impulses and rhythms of the body. There’s no scheme, no emotional or theoretical resonance, just the physical truth of the moment given full value. We see merely the evidence of those inner events which are the real dance.
Tanaka’s arms sink back, his head drops, then reaches up. His legs straighten, then bend slightly and lower partway to the floor. He begins to twist, leaning his weight on one side. The free arms zigzags, then one shoulder curls around and brings him up onto one knee, then into a crouch. His upper arms are wobbling. Apparently contradictory impulses seem to go through him like small shocks. But there’s no real contradiction: it’s just an unusual, uncomposed sequence.
His limbs appear unreliable, but he gets on his feet, his back arched with his weight sunk deeply into his knees, arms close to his chest. Spasmatically, they reach up and pull back. The reaching is soft and floppy. His torso runs with sweat. He teeters on his toes in a jumpy series of movements, stubbing his toes against the floor and pushing away, but maintaining a kind of erratic balance as his body jiggles and his ankles sag outwards. He moves through situations/positions that make him particularly vulnerable to muscular vibration, places where his balance is neither solid nor precarious, but where the stresses flow to the surface. He adjusts the poise of his head constantly, scribbles in the air with his arms, walks teetering in an ageless body with outstretched arms.
About half an hour or so later, Tanaka does another performance on the wet, gravelly, cruddy roof of the building, against its huge chimney stacks and slanted roofs, between the lights of the Queensborough Bridge and the LIE. It’s already late afternoon, and beginning to get fully dark. Tanaka lies by a low wall. Occasionally, conversational voices of passersby speak into your ear from four stories below. This performance is slower, barely visible in the half-darkness. early 100 people are up here watching. Tanaka seems more embryonic, more like some neutral sample of organic tissue acting and reaching. His movements are the tremors of the body listening to itself.
At P.S. 1 (November 100.
Gimme the Shirt Off Your Back
November 19
Johanna Boyce’s Pass was the longest and most interesting of the seven very different pieces for trained and untrained dancers she presented on the Kitchen’s “Dance Now” series. Most were grounded in “ordinary” movement - walking, running, flinging, galumphing, jumping, crude ways of picking up and carrying people and then maybe dumping them. Boyce’s explorations of clear movement ideas are serious, but not serious. You don’t have to respect them before you can look at the work. She doesn’t go on with an idea until the dancers drop or you do; before it palls, she cuts it off and goes on. Maybe she’ll return to it later in a new context. The transitions are often abrupt, and sometimes surprising, but never jarring, because the spirit of the work is playful and unflagging and has a kind of vigorous gaiety. More basically, you come to trust her instincts.
Nine men and women, wearing especially ugly light blue or green polo shirts and blue shorts, sit neatly on the floor counting aloud. At a particular count, some heads turn to the wall; at another, others (or some of the same ones) look up to the ceiling. The numbers they’ve been speaking become words. “Wall. View. You. All. Small.” Soon they begin to sing them. Then they walk in distinct patterns, cluster and spread out, turned in different directions. The space is filled with standing bodies. One man rushes through this garden of static figures. Two women tear wildly around. When they’re about to stop, each calls the name of someone else to continue the running. The running is in such a flood of energy that you hardly see who stops and who starts. The immobile figures begin pacing slowly, chanting the words. They face front. Their singing becomes harmonic, swells and resonates like early church music. The words elongate. “Waaall. Smaaall.” It’s quite beautiful. They begin to run again maybe bump, pick up somebody and carry them along, freeze. They speak a Robert Frost poem that incorporates the words we’ve been hearing.
Then they all move to the back of the space and appear to be changing clothes. The lights have become so incredibly dim that you can’t be sure, and when the lights come up, they seem to be in the same outfits. But not quite.
They start running again. And they start to pull off layer after layer of those ugly polo shirts and drop them. Singly, they bend and contort into dramatic but inexpressive positions. Two men step forward, side by side, then roll backwards together, and stand up. Another couple does it, then still others. The back rolls degenerate/transform into wide, rocking circles on the back. It’s typical of how these movement ideas are picked up, elaborated, and dissolved.
If you blink, or think, you can miss the moment when accumulating little changes suddenly seem to make a significant difference in the pattern or the action. Suddenly, it seems that the ensemble is divided in two: one in yellow polo shirts, the group opposite in blue.
Everyone starts jumping straight up and down. Then the jumps veer from side to side. The dancers start to flip off more shirts, then freeze. No one moves, except for an occasional, tiny, nervous sort of gesture. One man seems to decide to change his spot. Then another, and another Shirts lie scattered n the floor. Everyone hunkers down and brings their heads sharply up. The lights go out. Is this the end? People appear with flashlights. They’re picking up the shirts, I think, but they’re also setting out glasses of water along the front.
Lights up. The dancers are yelling. Some run forward to put on shirts, or maybe take them off. They take a sip of water. Then they all take off their last shirts and begin trading them. Bare-chested and bare-breasted they pull the shirts on, take them off immediately, and pass them on to the next person. They finish with their shirts hanging foolishly around their necks. Who are these people? Where did Boyce find them? They’re so game, so matter of fact, so generous in their involvement. What do they really do?
The next sequence happens in furious haste. They lie in a line and take turns rolling over each other. Re-forming on a diagonal, they go over a row of bent backs. The lines keep dissolving and re-forming in different spots, at different angles and levels. A horizontal line passes people underneath, between their legs. Curled up people are hefted and passed along like heavy bundles. Somebody crawls over a new row of stooped-over backs. Then, casually as can be, all stand around for a while, glasses in hand, as if at a pleasant cocktail party. You can hear scraps of conversation. They come down front to the audience, take a sip of water, tip their heads back, and pass the glasses with their arms across their bodies. They peel off and disappear. Only a cluster of glasses and a heap of shirts remain.
The Kitchen’s “Dance Now” series at Collective for Living Cinema (Wednesdays to November 31).
Johanna Boyce’s Pass was the longest and most interesting of the seven very different pieces for trained and untrained dancers she presented on the Kitchen’s “Dance Now” series. Most were grounded in “ordinary” movement - walking, running, flinging, galumphing, jumping, crude ways of picking up and carrying people and then maybe dumping them. Boyce’s explorations of clear movement ideas are serious, but not serious. You don’t have to respect them before you can look at the work. She doesn’t go on with an idea until the dancers drop or you do; before it palls, she cuts it off and goes on. Maybe she’ll return to it later in a new context. The transitions are often abrupt, and sometimes surprising, but never jarring, because the spirit of the work is playful and unflagging and has a kind of vigorous gaiety. More basically, you come to trust her instincts.
Nine men and women, wearing especially ugly light blue or green polo shirts and blue shorts, sit neatly on the floor counting aloud. At a particular count, some heads turn to the wall; at another, others (or some of the same ones) look up to the ceiling. The numbers they’ve been speaking become words. “Wall. View. You. All. Small.” Soon they begin to sing them. Then they walk in distinct patterns, cluster and spread out, turned in different directions. The space is filled with standing bodies. One man rushes through this garden of static figures. Two women tear wildly around. When they’re about to stop, each calls the name of someone else to continue the running. The running is in such a flood of energy that you hardly see who stops and who starts. The immobile figures begin pacing slowly, chanting the words. They face front. Their singing becomes harmonic, swells and resonates like early church music. The words elongate. “Waaall. Smaaall.” It’s quite beautiful. They begin to run again maybe bump, pick up somebody and carry them along, freeze. They speak a Robert Frost poem that incorporates the words we’ve been hearing.
Then they all move to the back of the space and appear to be changing clothes. The lights have become so incredibly dim that you can’t be sure, and when the lights come up, they seem to be in the same outfits. But not quite.
They start running again. And they start to pull off layer after layer of those ugly polo shirts and drop them. Singly, they bend and contort into dramatic but inexpressive positions. Two men step forward, side by side, then roll backwards together, and stand up. Another couple does it, then still others. The back rolls degenerate/transform into wide, rocking circles on the back. It’s typical of how these movement ideas are picked up, elaborated, and dissolved.
If you blink, or think, you can miss the moment when accumulating little changes suddenly seem to make a significant difference in the pattern or the action. Suddenly, it seems that the ensemble is divided in two: one in yellow polo shirts, the group opposite in blue.
Everyone starts jumping straight up and down. Then the jumps veer from side to side. The dancers start to flip off more shirts, then freeze. No one moves, except for an occasional, tiny, nervous sort of gesture. One man seems to decide to change his spot. Then another, and another Shirts lie scattered n the floor. Everyone hunkers down and brings their heads sharply up. The lights go out. Is this the end? People appear with flashlights. They’re picking up the shirts, I think, but they’re also setting out glasses of water along the front.
Lights up. The dancers are yelling. Some run forward to put on shirts, or maybe take them off. They take a sip of water. Then they all take off their last shirts and begin trading them. Bare-chested and bare-breasted they pull the shirts on, take them off immediately, and pass them on to the next person. They finish with their shirts hanging foolishly around their necks. Who are these people? Where did Boyce find them? They’re so game, so matter of fact, so generous in their involvement. What do they really do?
The next sequence happens in furious haste. They lie in a line and take turns rolling over each other. Re-forming on a diagonal, they go over a row of bent backs. The lines keep dissolving and re-forming in different spots, at different angles and levels. A horizontal line passes people underneath, between their legs. Curled up people are hefted and passed along like heavy bundles. Somebody crawls over a new row of stooped-over backs. Then, casually as can be, all stand around for a while, glasses in hand, as if at a pleasant cocktail party. You can hear scraps of conversation. They come down front to the audience, take a sip of water, tip their heads back, and pass the glasses with their arms across their bodies. They peel off and disappear. Only a cluster of glasses and a heap of shirts remain.
The Kitchen’s “Dance Now” series at Collective for Living Cinema (Wednesdays to November 31).
A Can of Worms
November 5
The titles of Cesc and Toni Gelabert’s two pieces - Action-O-Body and Mind and Action-I-Life and Death - are too broad to mean anything. Gelabert - a mostly self-taught dancer from Barcelona, seems to be concerned with Man in a struggling, unformed, only semi-conscious state. But the works seems unformed as well. The dancers start out slowly and sensibly, and move from a state of mobility and/or unconsciousness to a sort of wakefulness or alertness. Then they become incoherent.
In Cesc Gelabert’s Action-O-Body and Mind, Gelabert is crouched in a pinkish spot when you enter the Cunningham studio. His head is down, elbows bowed out, two fingers of each hand seeming to couch his hidden face. There’s a quality of vulnerability and translucence suggested by the lighting on his bare back. The music (and excellent score by Levin Richter), starts to rumble, like a subway passing underneath or the beginning of an earthquake. Gelabert doesn’t move. Then slowly, he lifts his head from the floor, and slowly he brings his fingers together. The rumbling increases, begins to buzz, takes on a higher, throbbing pitch, like takeoff, and goes into a screaming whine. Gelabert’s knees come off the ground and he pushes his pelvis back into a deep squat and straightens his arms. He brings his hands to his face, begins to straighten his legs, unwinds his back to come erect. He looks very thin from the way the light strikes a shadow off each vertebra. Erect, you see that his greeny-yellow tights are stained red at the crotch and on the lower belly.
Eyes closed, he begins to open his arms. The hands are softly cupped for a moment, and the way he holds them, as if they were something apart, suggests they might bear stigmata. His fingers open, his mouth opens, and his reaching arms pull his body out of symmetrical lateral alignment for the first time.
He wriggles his tongue lasciviously. I don’t understand why. He hardly seems to breathe, then collapses forward.
Electronic mwum-mwum sounds and slow doyoyooooyngs accompany Gelabert as he writhes on the floor. All this seems very studied, very internal. He twists, opens his eyes, and takes in the audience for the first time. There’s the same wobble in his neck that you hear in the music. Kneeling, he moves his head in a beaky, serpent-like way: I think of a baby bird, just hatching - big eyes, skinny, sopping wet, and rather beastly. From this point on, the actions happen more quickly, and some consume more space. But the sequence makes no sense to me and I don’t understand the occasion for these sufferings. You can’t follow any thread in his experiences and there are no external events or referents. His head and hands tremble. He makes sounds by squeezing the saliva between his teeth. He throws himself forward in a leap and crashes, and you see that his tights are stained red at the rectum also. He thrashes, jelly-like, hitting himself in the middle of the back. He gurgles inarticulate sounds like someone who needs desperately to speak but knows no language; then his painful sounds become rhythmic and nearly ecstatic. So much of what he does seems intimate without being personal or even particularly human. The result is a can of worms, a moody jumble of repellent impulses and habits, pitiful and monstrous without a structure or point of view to make them bearable or intelligible.
In Action-I-Life- and Death, choreographed and performed by Cesc Gelabert and his voluptuous older sister Toni, they are apparently encased or rolled up in a large rounded fabric forms (like curled-up leaves), which slowly, and with great hesitancy, begin to flutter slightly, and eventually open. They face in opposite ways: two unconscious beings. I see her naked back and buttocks exposed, and then his foot shaking near her head. They open more decisively. The fabric forms are like huge, squarish wings (hers orange, his brown) laced through with thin, flexible wooden struts to give them solidity. Their heads and legs and arms stick through cuts in the front; their naked rumps and backs hang out behind.
He is the first to struggle up, hampered b the contraption he is wearing and nearly wrecking it at one point. When they see each other, they become more alert, and act rather coy. They walk together, a moving wall of fabric. She wheels around him and folds herself against his body in a very sexual way, then unwraps herself and clings against his back.
Their activity develops into a contest and a battle, where they run, shove, and leap against each other, exploiting the grand effects of the massed fabric. The wood struts keep popping out of the fabric, and when the Gelaberts enter the audience for no reason I can understand, you hope you won’t accidentally get poked with a piece of wood. At the end, they climb out of their “wings”, in a metamorphosis or some sort of new birth. They touch, and walk forward. They arch and twine, feeling themselves with limp, searching fingers. The mood is peaceful, but suggests to me the expulsion from Eden.
At the Cunningham Studio (October 19 to 21).
The titles of Cesc and Toni Gelabert’s two pieces - Action-O-Body and Mind and Action-I-Life and Death - are too broad to mean anything. Gelabert - a mostly self-taught dancer from Barcelona, seems to be concerned with Man in a struggling, unformed, only semi-conscious state. But the works seems unformed as well. The dancers start out slowly and sensibly, and move from a state of mobility and/or unconsciousness to a sort of wakefulness or alertness. Then they become incoherent.
In Cesc Gelabert’s Action-O-Body and Mind, Gelabert is crouched in a pinkish spot when you enter the Cunningham studio. His head is down, elbows bowed out, two fingers of each hand seeming to couch his hidden face. There’s a quality of vulnerability and translucence suggested by the lighting on his bare back. The music (and excellent score by Levin Richter), starts to rumble, like a subway passing underneath or the beginning of an earthquake. Gelabert doesn’t move. Then slowly, he lifts his head from the floor, and slowly he brings his fingers together. The rumbling increases, begins to buzz, takes on a higher, throbbing pitch, like takeoff, and goes into a screaming whine. Gelabert’s knees come off the ground and he pushes his pelvis back into a deep squat and straightens his arms. He brings his hands to his face, begins to straighten his legs, unwinds his back to come erect. He looks very thin from the way the light strikes a shadow off each vertebra. Erect, you see that his greeny-yellow tights are stained red at the crotch and on the lower belly.
Eyes closed, he begins to open his arms. The hands are softly cupped for a moment, and the way he holds them, as if they were something apart, suggests they might bear stigmata. His fingers open, his mouth opens, and his reaching arms pull his body out of symmetrical lateral alignment for the first time.
He wriggles his tongue lasciviously. I don’t understand why. He hardly seems to breathe, then collapses forward.
Electronic mwum-mwum sounds and slow doyoyooooyngs accompany Gelabert as he writhes on the floor. All this seems very studied, very internal. He twists, opens his eyes, and takes in the audience for the first time. There’s the same wobble in his neck that you hear in the music. Kneeling, he moves his head in a beaky, serpent-like way: I think of a baby bird, just hatching - big eyes, skinny, sopping wet, and rather beastly. From this point on, the actions happen more quickly, and some consume more space. But the sequence makes no sense to me and I don’t understand the occasion for these sufferings. You can’t follow any thread in his experiences and there are no external events or referents. His head and hands tremble. He makes sounds by squeezing the saliva between his teeth. He throws himself forward in a leap and crashes, and you see that his tights are stained red at the rectum also. He thrashes, jelly-like, hitting himself in the middle of the back. He gurgles inarticulate sounds like someone who needs desperately to speak but knows no language; then his painful sounds become rhythmic and nearly ecstatic. So much of what he does seems intimate without being personal or even particularly human. The result is a can of worms, a moody jumble of repellent impulses and habits, pitiful and monstrous without a structure or point of view to make them bearable or intelligible.
In Action-I-Life- and Death, choreographed and performed by Cesc Gelabert and his voluptuous older sister Toni, they are apparently encased or rolled up in a large rounded fabric forms (like curled-up leaves), which slowly, and with great hesitancy, begin to flutter slightly, and eventually open. They face in opposite ways: two unconscious beings. I see her naked back and buttocks exposed, and then his foot shaking near her head. They open more decisively. The fabric forms are like huge, squarish wings (hers orange, his brown) laced through with thin, flexible wooden struts to give them solidity. Their heads and legs and arms stick through cuts in the front; their naked rumps and backs hang out behind.
He is the first to struggle up, hampered b the contraption he is wearing and nearly wrecking it at one point. When they see each other, they become more alert, and act rather coy. They walk together, a moving wall of fabric. She wheels around him and folds herself against his body in a very sexual way, then unwraps herself and clings against his back.
Their activity develops into a contest and a battle, where they run, shove, and leap against each other, exploiting the grand effects of the massed fabric. The wood struts keep popping out of the fabric, and when the Gelaberts enter the audience for no reason I can understand, you hope you won’t accidentally get poked with a piece of wood. At the end, they climb out of their “wings”, in a metamorphosis or some sort of new birth. They touch, and walk forward. They arch and twine, feeling themselves with limp, searching fingers. The mood is peaceful, but suggests to me the expulsion from Eden.
At the Cunningham Studio (October 19 to 21).
Is Dance a Loft Art?
October 15
For the first LoftDance Festival, two years ago, Kevan Cleary, president of the SoHo Performing Artists Association, made a map for the flyer indicating all the lofts were performances would be held. This year there is no map: the locations sprawl too far, from Richard Bull’s Improvisational Dance Ensemble down on Warren Street to Ritha Devi’s loft on 21st Street.
“What makes the festival unique,” says choreographer Michelle Berne, “is that we, as an organization, make no value judgment on the work. It’s an experimental movement and criteria for establishing quality have not been established.” To participate, a choreographer only has to have produced his or her own work in lofts in the past. “That is,” she says wryly, “they have to be ‘established’ to some extent.”
Tis year, the month-long festival, through October 28, features 25 choreographers in solo and shared programs at 17 different loft spaces. About half are new participants.
DONNA THOMAS THEATRE DANCE COMPANY
Spector Loft
99 Prince Street
RICHARD BULL IMPROVISATIONAL DANCE ENSEMBLE,
Warren Street Performance Loft
46 Warren Street
LIZ PASQUALE
168 Mercer Street
SAGA AMBEGAOKAR, FREDDI BERG, ALIX KEAST
Green Street Studio
98 Green Street
AMY GREENFIELD
Global Village
484 Broome Street
GLORIA MCLEAN
Sunrise Studios
122 2nd Avenue
KAREN BERNARD, NANCY ZENDORA
182 Duane Street
DALIENNE MAJORS
Eden’s Expressway
537 Broadway
SARA VOGELER
Fanta Se Dance Space
591 Broadway
MARY LEE KARLINS
552 Broadway
LUISE WYKELL & CO.
The Loft
114 Mercer Street
EDITH STEPHEN
Notto Gallery
542 La Guardia Place
FRANCES ALENIKOFF, SUSAN MOSAKOWSKI
Eden’s Expressway
537 Broadway
MICHELLE BERNE, ALEXANDRA OGSBURY, ALEXANDRA STRAVROU
99 Prince Street Studio
99 Prince Street
For the first LoftDance Festival, two years ago, Kevan Cleary, president of the SoHo Performing Artists Association, made a map for the flyer indicating all the lofts were performances would be held. This year there is no map: the locations sprawl too far, from Richard Bull’s Improvisational Dance Ensemble down on Warren Street to Ritha Devi’s loft on 21st Street.
“What makes the festival unique,” says choreographer Michelle Berne, “is that we, as an organization, make no value judgment on the work. It’s an experimental movement and criteria for establishing quality have not been established.” To participate, a choreographer only has to have produced his or her own work in lofts in the past. “That is,” she says wryly, “they have to be ‘established’ to some extent.”
Tis year, the month-long festival, through October 28, features 25 choreographers in solo and shared programs at 17 different loft spaces. About half are new participants.
DONNA THOMAS THEATRE DANCE COMPANY
Spector Loft
99 Prince Street
RICHARD BULL IMPROVISATIONAL DANCE ENSEMBLE,
Warren Street Performance Loft
46 Warren Street
LIZ PASQUALE
168 Mercer Street
SAGA AMBEGAOKAR, FREDDI BERG, ALIX KEAST
Green Street Studio
98 Green Street
AMY GREENFIELD
Global Village
484 Broome Street
GLORIA MCLEAN
Sunrise Studios
122 2nd Avenue
KAREN BERNARD, NANCY ZENDORA
182 Duane Street
DALIENNE MAJORS
Eden’s Expressway
537 Broadway
SARA VOGELER
Fanta Se Dance Space
591 Broadway
MARY LEE KARLINS
552 Broadway
LUISE WYKELL & CO.
The Loft
114 Mercer Street
EDITH STEPHEN
Notto Gallery
542 La Guardia Place
FRANCES ALENIKOFF, SUSAN MOSAKOWSKI
Eden’s Expressway
537 Broadway
MICHELLE BERNE, ALEXANDRA OGSBURY, ALEXANDRA STRAVROU
99 Prince Street Studio
99 Prince Street
Only Disconnect
March 27
Everyone’s in black. And everyone - Eiko and Koma and the three skinny musicians of Static - starts out blindfolded with ears sealed up in Fluttering Black. A black cloth rectangle hangs imply over the band. Someone dribbles water along the front of the performing space so the dancers can feel where the edge is. Bags filled with soft cotton wads are passed through the audience in case the music’s too loud. The music starts with a steady beat and a heavy sullen sound, and slowly goes out of synch. The vibrations feel good against your behind, through the soles of your feet. Eiko and Koma begin to move separately, with twisted jerky movements. Eiko shakes and flashes her hands. Koma seems shrunken and as insolently secretive as a cat. Sightless, they bumble together, shoving and bumping. He hauls her across his shoulders and she grabs his hair.
Things occur without much connection.
Eiko hikes up her skirt and ties it. Koma gallops some like mad bird, slapping his thighs. Eiko pounds on a metal door, takes a pot of water, and, coming center, dumps it over herself. Koma collapses over her.
Eiko and Koma seem to have chosen a ground of deliberate confusion and deprivation to work in. And it’s too shallow for them. When one activity dries up, they must grasp at another source. Instead of spontaneity and thoughtlessness, you are made aware of premeditation and a kind of necessary willfulness. Their commitment to illogic in this piece deprives them of motive, of a pushing-off place, and undermines power and endurance. No alternative but a slosh of water to cal them down, and knock them out.
The shortened version of their 1977 Fur Seal, which opened the program, showed them in a more coherent context. They have extraordinary presence and an honesty that is disconcerting and hypnotic in a theatre. Their refinement consists partly in the way their concentration and commitment allows them to appear to us with all the polish rubbed off. Raw, but not crude. They reveal a kind of brutalized consciousness, the unhappiness of a beast just awake enough to know himself to be soulless. They have, I think, an uncanny ability to lock themselves in a kind of creative darkness and to stay there, and then to reenact the ritual they have found.
Many of the images of Fur Seal, which has ben described as a sort of mating rite, are indelible. So much of the piece seems to happen in a stupor and in inexplicable dull pain. Koma stands hunched next to a log which hangs vertically from the ceiling (Sometime, much later, he bangs his head against it as it swings slightly. It’s almost unbearably sad.) Both wear primitive black garments, and Koma a fur band around his neck. Eiko lies on the floor, turns over and hauls herself painstakingly across the floor. She stands swaying in a spotlight; Koma suddenly picks her up and throws her a few feet. When Eiko moves again, her steps are sluggish and staggering, and her body seems deformed in some inward, as well as outward, way: poisoned. Koma surrounds her from behind with his arms, covers her eyes, sways her body, and drags her backwards.
Their movements become more apelike. Eiko is crawling on her belly without use of her arms, which she holds bent, close to her hips. She looks beautiful sometimes, transparent and radiant; a split second later, with hardly any change in expression or movement, the light and energy seeping through her fade and she appears ghoulish and vacant. Koma shuffles backwards, falls on her, and they entwine in a brief, hopeless effort to move as one.
Koma shambles offstage, and returns with a white chrysanthemum in his hair. They grab each other, tight and clumsy. He jams his head against her jaw. She leaps, clamping herself on his chest. When she slumps back from him, her mouth is filled with petals ripped from the flower. Curt cries rasp from Koma’s throat. More petals litter the floor.
At the Performing Garage (August 3 to 18).
Everyone’s in black. And everyone - Eiko and Koma and the three skinny musicians of Static - starts out blindfolded with ears sealed up in Fluttering Black. A black cloth rectangle hangs imply over the band. Someone dribbles water along the front of the performing space so the dancers can feel where the edge is. Bags filled with soft cotton wads are passed through the audience in case the music’s too loud. The music starts with a steady beat and a heavy sullen sound, and slowly goes out of synch. The vibrations feel good against your behind, through the soles of your feet. Eiko and Koma begin to move separately, with twisted jerky movements. Eiko shakes and flashes her hands. Koma seems shrunken and as insolently secretive as a cat. Sightless, they bumble together, shoving and bumping. He hauls her across his shoulders and she grabs his hair.
Things occur without much connection.
Eiko hikes up her skirt and ties it. Koma gallops some like mad bird, slapping his thighs. Eiko pounds on a metal door, takes a pot of water, and, coming center, dumps it over herself. Koma collapses over her.
Eiko and Koma seem to have chosen a ground of deliberate confusion and deprivation to work in. And it’s too shallow for them. When one activity dries up, they must grasp at another source. Instead of spontaneity and thoughtlessness, you are made aware of premeditation and a kind of necessary willfulness. Their commitment to illogic in this piece deprives them of motive, of a pushing-off place, and undermines power and endurance. No alternative but a slosh of water to cal them down, and knock them out.
The shortened version of their 1977 Fur Seal, which opened the program, showed them in a more coherent context. They have extraordinary presence and an honesty that is disconcerting and hypnotic in a theatre. Their refinement consists partly in the way their concentration and commitment allows them to appear to us with all the polish rubbed off. Raw, but not crude. They reveal a kind of brutalized consciousness, the unhappiness of a beast just awake enough to know himself to be soulless. They have, I think, an uncanny ability to lock themselves in a kind of creative darkness and to stay there, and then to reenact the ritual they have found.
Many of the images of Fur Seal, which has ben described as a sort of mating rite, are indelible. So much of the piece seems to happen in a stupor and in inexplicable dull pain. Koma stands hunched next to a log which hangs vertically from the ceiling (Sometime, much later, he bangs his head against it as it swings slightly. It’s almost unbearably sad.) Both wear primitive black garments, and Koma a fur band around his neck. Eiko lies on the floor, turns over and hauls herself painstakingly across the floor. She stands swaying in a spotlight; Koma suddenly picks her up and throws her a few feet. When Eiko moves again, her steps are sluggish and staggering, and her body seems deformed in some inward, as well as outward, way: poisoned. Koma surrounds her from behind with his arms, covers her eyes, sways her body, and drags her backwards.
Their movements become more apelike. Eiko is crawling on her belly without use of her arms, which she holds bent, close to her hips. She looks beautiful sometimes, transparent and radiant; a split second later, with hardly any change in expression or movement, the light and energy seeping through her fade and she appears ghoulish and vacant. Koma shuffles backwards, falls on her, and they entwine in a brief, hopeless effort to move as one.
Koma shambles offstage, and returns with a white chrysanthemum in his hair. They grab each other, tight and clumsy. He jams his head against her jaw. She leaps, clamping herself on his chest. When she slumps back from him, her mouth is filled with petals ripped from the flower. Curt cries rasp from Koma’s throat. More petals litter the floor.
At the Performing Garage (August 3 to 18).