Dance Feast

Nikhil Chopra in “Yog Raj Chitrakar Memory Drawing IX”. Performance still by Carolyn Wachnicki.

Tina Lange’s photograph of Nikhil Chopra as Yog Raj Chitrakar documents part of Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX, a 72 hour performance and perpetually transforming work unfolding November 4-8, 2009 in the gallery at the New Museum in New York, as well as on the streets of the city including Lower Manhattan, Chinatown and eventually Ellis Island. Curated by Eungie Joo for Performa 2009, with costumes by Loise Braganza, Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX, draws inspiration from the 1920’s and New York City’s changing role in history between two world wars, influenced by immigration, architecture and labor.

The semi-autobiographical character of Yog Raj Chitrakar (Chitrakar translates as picture-maker) is a draughtsman or landscape painter who chronicles the world in which we live during his expeditions. The character is loosely based on Chopra’s grandfather, Yog Raj Chopra, who was a landscape painter in Kashmir. Chopra’s embodiment of multiple personae through the character Yog Raj Chitrakar explores identity formation, incorporating additional roles of soldier, prisoner, dandy and queen.

With live performance at the center of his work, the artist transfers what he refers to in his artist statement as “an immediacy that cannot be accessed in rehearsed acts.” Chopra employs silence as a strategy of separation from the viewer, however his watching back and proximity to onlookers make clear that the audience sharing time and place become part of the long durational events occurring in slow segments. His deliberate execution of tasks suggests a ritualization of quotidian behavior – dressing, washing, and shaving. In addition, Chopra’s costumes continue the creation of his narrative and identity, with top hats, tailcoats and other nineteenth century Victorian elements juxtaposed with the contemporary landscape in which he performs. The accretion of identities combines family background, personal history and everyday life.

Furthermore, the artist’s creation of large charcoal drawings during the performance extends the theatricality. A developing set within gallery walls and in outdoor surroundings, the drawings make possible a multiplicity of places and times in which the performance can be located. The drawings remain as residue of the performance supporting the character Yog Raj Chitrakar as draughtsman and call into question the role of the art object. To view photographs of the Chopra’s character in front of his massive drawings can additionally obscure the artist’s true physical surroundings during the performance, making him appear quite alone. Chopra’s embodied performance and storytelling make visible the dynamic and unsteady nature of identity.

Mumbai-based Chopra navigates between theater, performance, painting, photography and sculpture. Born in Kolkata, the artist studied at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda from 1997-99 and completed his BFA at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore in 2001. He received his MFA in painting at Ohio State University in 2003.

Originally published September 29, 2012 on Wesleyan University’s Performance Now blog in conjunction with Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century exhibition curated by Roselee Goldberg.

Miguel Gutierrez with Mind Over Mirrors. Photo by Ian Douglas

American Realness on Friday featured Jeanine Durning, Faye Driscoll, Tony Rizzi and Miguel Gutierrez all pushing in their own ways. I want to crawl inside Durning’s head after experiencing her impressive nonstop speaking improvisation inging, which seems to emerge from lines of reasoning, free association and in response to her physical relationship to the people and place. The punctuated driving rhythm of her thought phrases with the occasional repetition of single words, each emphasized before Durning sputters on, make inging a visualization of how the brain works – a brain, Durning’s brain. When the speaking abruptly halts after a steady 30 minutes and Durning stares back at the audience, the rhythm seems to continue silently, allowing the audience to potentially detect the pace and content of the artists mind. Her skilled rambling covers topics ranging from Deleuze and dorsal planes to empathy. The speed and clarity of her comments reflect an acute presence and alertness. Skipping from meta ideas to pop songs, Durning reveals herself as curious and awake to the world in which we live.

Faye Driscoll’s duet You’re Me with Aaron Mattocks in the Playhouse manifests a continual state of becoming. The ongoing transformation of Driscoll and Zaritt involves the shedding and donning of colorful outfits, wigs and accessories, and with that, perceived identities. As we all perform identities ongoing, You’re Me interrogates what personal “costume” is worn and how quickly a look communicates a multitude of associations. Driscoll and Mattocks’s sculptural posturing in silence, develops to a section in which they alter each other’s bodies with paint. This expands to an awesome final sequence full of intensity, speed and immersive electronic music. At the end, Driscoll towers high on a box as Mattocks passes her items to rapidly wear. Straps are held between Driscoll’s hands and those of two audience members, and as the spectacle peaks, Driscoll cracks the reigns to the audience, music blaring. She is still wildly swinging her arms and mugging when the music stops. In silence as she allows her performed character to fade, the play of projection/perception softens.

On the heels of Jack Ferver’s self-reflexive work Mon Ma Mes, Tony Rizzi employs a similar transparency and orientation to the audience through his narrations in An Attempt to Fail at Groundbreaking Theater by Oina Arcade Smith. Essentially acting as his own dramaturg, Rizzi introduces Pina Bausch and Penny Arcade into his commentary on the performance, his influences and the culture of dancemaking. During Rizzi’s conversation wearing a costume split to represent Bausch on the right half of his body and Arcade on the left, he alternates offering the profile of each character. To work from failure is to offer a mirror to the audience’s the agendas, expectations and considerations toward the theater. Rizzi’s aesthetic is unpolished, raw and abrupt. The almost two-hour duration feels long and meandering. The performance did not satisfy and that’s the point. Regarding the humor employed, Rizzi’s inflammatory generalizations about dance field professionals and countries in which he has worked lack the specificity and resulting truthiness offered in Ferver’s commentary. Rizzi does however get specific in complaining about the popularity of fellow festival artist Trajal Harrell and that feels altogether tacky.

Storing the Winter by Miguel Gutierrez and Mind Over Mirrors (Jaime Fennelly) bathed the Underground Theater in super sonic and visceral vibrations. To Fennelly’s swelling harmonium and synthesizer soundscape, Gutierrez offers luminous and full bodied “dance dance.” He organizes from the torso and exerts with a holistic presence, writhing into a state of intensity and then freezing. Sweat and saliva drip to the floor as Gutierrez stands in his jeans, red t-shirt and gilded fake eyelashes on one eye. He then chants hauntingly into a microphone, looping his voice. Progressing, Gutierrez runs back and forth reaching outward and then falling with a thud each time he approaches the end of the stage. The breeze of his movement can be felt. Returning to pure dance again, Gutierrez becomes more bound and internal. An evolution, a rite of passage. Storing the Winter works in the realm of the energetic and kinetic.

Thank you Ben Pryor and team for American Realness 2013 and thank you Bureau for the Future of Choreography for encouraging artists to write their own histories at the festival.

Originally published January 21, 2013 on Culturebytes.

A Sunday marathon at American Realness instigated thoughts about consent, the public sphere and collisions among artists. The refined schedule and pace of Ben Pryor’s festival feels welcomingly more spacious and navigable than last year. Spending the day with Jack Ferver, Maria Hassabi, Keith Hennessey’s crew, AUNTS and the Bureau for the Future of Choreography, the events at Abrons Art Center include both staged and unintended realness.

Jack Ferver knows his audience, smartly performing an inflated artist ego in a self-reflexive question and answer session for Mon Ma Mes, inserting an Yvonne Rainer joke here, nonchalantly referring to prestigious residencies and also playfully mocking the APAP crowd. Deadpan Michelle Mola circulates through the audience with a microphone and planted questions, which prompt Ferver to discuss himself. His calculated timing and delivery brilliantly frame the more vulnerable segments to follow. Progressing from the question and answer structure, Ferver performs a dance solo with spoking and circling arms and then alternating jogs as if exercising on a Nordic Track. He dramatically darts his focus to the audience exuding a presentational charisma. During the following vignettes in which Ferver reveals additional narrative and is carried and sung to by Reid Barteime, the performance evolves into earnest and human territory. As the first section offers an exaggerated dog and pony show, the second reveals a confessional nature. Therefore, when Ferver repeats his initial solo a second time, it is loaded with an awareness of his expressed loneliness, control and sexual encounters. The second reception is deeply felt and sympathetic, driving Ferver’s performance as a highlight of the festival thus far.

During Show, after about ten minutes of audience banter in the Underground Theater, much of the crowd settles on the floor as the artists enter, walking down the stairs with a quiet, charged presence. Talking in the room fades as Maria Hassabi and Hristoula Harakas lock eyes – first on each other and then on the eyes of audience members – and assume transitional positions for extended holds, seemingly a strain of endurance. Limbs quiver. Never a resting place for these bodies. They shift to new positions on the floor similar, yet less comfortable, than the audience’s seated postures. They move, deliberate and sculptural in close proximity to each other. What initially felt ambiguously tender and confrontational in their gazes, transitions to read somewhat more aggressively when the soundscape shifts to the familiar hum of voices.

Might you be alarmed if you noticed one of your recent conversations was recorded without your consent and then replayed to a room full of festival attendees during a performance? That’s exactly what occurred on Sunday during the performance of Show. While Alex Waterman’s soundscape consisted of the sounds of many people gathered together, my colleague could clearly identify her own voice and I wondered if I might distinguish mine as well. What had I been saying? I found myself paranoid by this element of surveillence. The audio evesdropping drew the performance toward the manipulative rather than one of union and compassion, which I had experienced last time I saw Hassabi in Robert and Maria during Danspace’s Platform Series. When Hassabi did focus her eyes on mine toward the conclusion of the performance at American Realness, I did experience an intensely calm and trusting moment, however the tension between that and the earlier paranoia left me conflicted about the intentions of Show, permission to be recorded and thoughts about private conversations conducted in the public sphere.

Having seen Keith Hennessey’s Turbulence in Portland and San Francisco, I wasn’t planning to attend again, however when performer Laura Arrington carried me into the Experimental Theater, I was glad to be there and see yet another version – this one the most serious I’d experienced and in a more intimate space than previous iterations. A while earlier I had noticed Julie Phelps and Emily Leap wandering the hallways of Abrons in their gold hoods from the performance and didn’t think much of the particularly uncontained Turbulence bleeding into the lobby, however when the pair entered the Playhouse where the house was opening simultaneously for Trajal Harrell’s Twenty Looks, a collision occurred that could have only happened in such a festival setting with multiple performances.

According to Phelps who discussed the encounter as part of Turbulence, Harrell firmly sent she and Leap out of his performance space. Talking into the microphone, Hennessey also commented on the incident during his performance, noting that Harrell’s confrontation had influenced the evening. While apparently unpleasant for all parties involved and as much as playing nice in the sandbox should be part of the festival environment, these simultaneous contemporary art events, involving fuzzy edges and considerations surrounding where and when the performance ends, as well as who is performing, make for an alive and loaded festival environment with loose boundaries and a multitude of possibilities.

Originally published January 15, 2013 on Culturebytes.

SQUART with Laura Arrington and Everyone Else. Photo by Robbie Sweeney

The festival. The art binge. An international crossroads of culture mafia mobilizing in time and place. At conclusion, the individuals disperse with refreshed senses to digest, address and generate contemporary performance in a multiplicity of locales and moments. With bold artists at the center ofAmerican Realness, the circulation of their ideas, practices and teachings among other makers enables a healthy rhythm of creation in cities nationwide.

In addition to the work of those in multiple areas of the dance ecosystem (presenters, funders, managers and beyond), the proliferation of artist-led platforms for the exchange of contemporary performance and experimental dance practices strengthens the generative capacity of local artist communities. These maker-centered gatherings privilege workshops, dialogue, artistic relationships and works in process rather than focusing on formal performances. Engaging with several artist-organized hubs on the West Coast, I observe DIY platforms to be populated by, what some may call, “artists’ artists” – visionary and risk-taking thinkers, teachers, collaborators and provocateurs, many of whom attend and are curated into contemporary performance festivals such as American Realness. Their sharing fuels the growth and rigor of local artistic communities in which the exchange efforts are situated.

With festivals serving as major nodes of circulation for experimental dance and performance work, events including American Realness, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time Based ArtFestival, and gatherings taking place in Europe during summer months provide opportunities for visiting artists, often those performing, to see the work of one’s peers and socialize. With performance being a major emphasis, festival formats often include workshops and artist conversations adding layers and textured interfaces to the gatherings.

While related, artist-created exchanges remain distinct from festival structures. These maker-centered grassroots platforms also differ in emphasis from artist-curated performance programs. While in New York, contemporary artistic learning exchanges are encouraged and supported by formalized organizations such as Movement Research and Center for Performance Research, communities of artists without such specifically dedicated venues for makers are creating similar opportunities and functions through DIY collaborations, space acquisitions and word-of-mouth invitations. They also embrace a raw aesthetic conducive to process, research and experimentation.

I see these workshops and process-based activities by artists as outcroppings and extensions of festival events with a specialized focus on fellow makers. Many of the same individuals circulate through both festivals and DIY exchanges in the United States, however, the grassroots communities of practice conducting the exchanges with local and visiting artists extend the impact of contemporary performance festivals by expanding the geography and duration in which the artistic voices reverberate. In these platforms, the practices of colliding artists stretch and adopt localized translations of ideas and approaches. The function of makers in regional artist-created containers is to shape the engagement into one of generative possibilities.

Artists, especially those operating outside The Big Apple, seize ownership for their growth and devise opportunities to develop artistically and provide platforms for contemporary work, which may not get presented in a particular region due to the local venue mix or existing curatorial visions at established institutions. While exciting and invigorating to flock to say, New York City in January or Europe in the summer to be exposed to new practices and ideas, the artist-created platforms and exchanges ensure vitality on an ongoing local level in areas that do not possess formal festivals and organizations dedicated to experimentation and research. The exchanges are vitamins for rich and progressive contemporary performance communities nationally. Not unlike some of the autodidactic “public school” models, which emerged from the Occupy movement, DIY artist exchanges are often based openly on skill and idea barter without a curriculum or affiliation to institution.

To cite a potent example, Meg Wolfe’s Showbox L.A. is one location of grassroots exchange, which has developed a place for Los Angeles’s experimental dance community, serving as umbrella for a number of collaborative artist-led projects and partnerships. The environment fosters work by local makers and invests in building relationships with artists nationally and internationally. Creatively conducting events in spaces like the gilded Palm Court Ballroom in the Hotel Alexandria and the Bootleg Theater, Showbox L.A. features local performances and workshops alongside visitors like Miguel Gutierrez, Gob Squad and Ishmael Houston Jones, deepening the critical dialogue related to performance in the city. Supporting creative research, they publish itch Dance Journal, host Wild Mind conversations and advocate for the craft. During the past few years, Showbox L.A.’s grassroots efforts have created a powerful hub of experimental practice and dialogue that did not previously exist in the area.

Another example is Kunst-Stoff Art Building Consortium in San Francisco formed by Kunst-Stoff Arts,Alternative Conservatory and The Off Center. The collaborative body hosts an artist-run Visiting Artist Series Exchange (VASE) with a similar commitment to creating opportunities for local makers to learn from and share knowledge with national and international artists. “We live in a fast developing global maker community. To hold space for this made complete sense to us. So here we are.” comments organizer Ernesto Sopprani. He also mentions American Realness artists Jeremy Wade, Tony Rizzi, as well as, Katie Duck, Papiluk Supernova as visitors in 2013 conducting classes, lectures, workshops and showings, mostly independent of formally presented performance engagements.

The artist-identified goal of the consortium is for the area to grow as a hub for contemporary artistic expression and discourse while deepening the Bay Area’s presence and connectivity with makers in other cities. Their dynamic Fresh Festival does just that, incorporating San Francisco artists including Sara Shelton Mann, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Keith Hennessey, Jess Curtis, Abby Crain, Laura Arrington and Jesse Hewit. Similar efforts by committed artist organizers in the city have brought Action Hero to CounterPulse and Robert Steijn to the Joe Goode Annex.

There are, no doubt, numerous other DIY exchanges mobilized and growing in the United States to create junctions on the global maker community map, increasing connectivity, inquiry and exchange. The DIY efforts feel distinctly American, emerging from ingenuity, self reliance and a driven work ethic. Additionally, the grassroots platforms are part of contemporary performance making, pushing at the edges, challenging existing frameworks and addressing gaps.

Through creative efforts to identify allies, collaborate and pool resources for the circulation of artists, the experimentation and fresh contemporary performance fed by communities of practice echo through American Realness. The festival electrifies the circuit, offering a node of exchange, which has maker-centered outcroppings across the country. This essay serves as a starting point for a public conversation on Culturebot, in which we’ll continue investigating platforms for grassroots exchange within localized communities of practice, which link and connect makers. So as you are challenged, provoked and awakened by your art binge at the festival, consider this fast developing global maker community and the very real and American way in which many of these artists are creating across geographies during this contemporary moment.

Originally published January 12, 2013 on Culturebot. A version of the article appeared in the American Realness 2013 festival zine, Reading, edited by Buck Wanner.

Bebe Miller’s “A History”. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

In advance of her company’s West Coast premiere of A History January 25 and 26 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), Bebe Miller made a visit to San Francisco in November, part of Performing Arts Director Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s intent to extend the artist relationship with the local community and presenting institution beyond the performance run. Among the pre-tour activities, Miller taught at San Francisco State University, shot video around town and also caught up with Bay Area collaborator, dance artist and teacher, Kathleen Hermesdorf.

“I met Kathleen at Bates Dance Festival in the 90s and we hit it off. She’s a fabulous dancer and improviser.” commented Miller. The choreographer says she chooses dancers based on how their personality comes through the movement with awareness that she is forming a community of workers. “I choose dancers who take their performance from their current line of thought.” About half of the artists in A History also make their own work and all of them use improvisation as a strategy.

Since the Bebe Miller Company operates as a virtual company with members living in locations around the United States, new work is developed over a period of years in residencies that bring project collaborators together for creative development and rehearsals. Therefore, Miller prefers to tighten the score of the approach instead of prescribing movement. Rather than memorizing and executing the specifics of an action, the artists develop the skills of what Miller calls “dancing specifically” from a particular nature or line of thought. When reconvening, Miller brings the video from the last rehearsal and the dancers begin by observing.

“Does a company really just show up? In our roles we are witness to being inside a collaborative team. We wanted to reveal that.” notes Miller discussing A History. The seed of the work surfaced five years ago during a conversation between Miller in and her dramaturg Talvin Wilks about privileging the process and studio hours as material. It focuses on the artist relationship between veteran company members Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones over a ten year period. The evening-length duet makes manifest the experience of dance-making and can be seen as both the evidence and performance of artistic creation. To prepare, the company recorded hours of video and audio from rehearsal including conversations, questions, considerations and decision-making. The performers in A History then wear headphones at times to listen to the audio, which captures the nature of the studio. Miller attributes this device to The Wooster Group (also performing at YBCA this spring.)

In shifting her archive from artifacts to artwork, Miller acknowledges that her relationship to an archive is distinct from one of an archivist or curator, commenting, “As dancers and makers we have ideas about what should be preserved and presented.” In addition to the archive of materials, performers possess a physical history. “The archive is also the information embedded in their movement.” she adds. Miller keeps journals dating back to the 70s and encourages her students to do the same. “It’s good to have a record and always be gathering. At Ohio State University I tell my students to just write everything down. You are your archive. There’s also so much you carry in your own body.

A History incorporates video by Lily Skove and an accompanying digital media installation of the visual history by Maya Ciarrocchi. Through this work Miller hopes that audiences can experience what dance-making feels like, sounds like and thinks like. Ciarrocchi’s installation was part of a larger exhibition on view August 23-September 30, 2012 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, which included costumes, sets, notation, rehearsal and performance documentation, music, conversations with peers, as well as performed responses to Miller’s work, curated by Jerry Dannemiller, through a project developed at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance.

A History arrives on the heels of other body-as-archive oriented performances in San Francisco. Muriel Maffre’s performance as part of Nina Beier’s The Complete Works (December 4 and 11, 2010 at YBCA) charged the retired ballerina to perform all the roles she ever danced during her professional career as she recalls in chronological order. The work, which was also performed last October at the Tate Modern’s new performance space, The Tanks, required the artist to rely on body and memory as archive from which to draw an entire performance. In addition, Morgan Thorson’s Spaceholder Festival, an evening-length work for six performers at the ODC Theater October 5-7 2012, thrust the audience into the role of archaeologist considering what happens when the artifact is not a fixed object, but a living human body – always in flux, in a continual state of becoming and deterioration.

By noting some of these works, which pry at the accretion of body memory, one may wonder why the string of vulnerable and self-referential interrogation now? All of these works place value on the labor inherent, yet not always visible in performance. Work-in-process showings are another version of the desire to privilege the dance thinking and development. Bebe Miller Company’s A History will make public a traditionally hidden process, inviting the audience to experience her art as a group of relationships rather than a closed piece.

Bebe Miller Company’s A History will be presented by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts January 25 and 26.

Originally published in the January/February issue of In Dance.

During her 20 years of creating theatrical and humorous work in the Bay Area, Chris Black describes her shift from creating works for the stage to developing intricate site-specific dance in public space as intentional. This shift has allowed her to guide the audience so they share the mindset of the performers by entering the same environment to participate together. In these situations she points out how one cannot be passive. She hopes to fracture the assumption that performance occurs separately from the audience. As an extension of these ideals, Black increasingly works in spaces where people can happen upon a performance, as in Pastime, which was performed free to the public in multiple locations within the San Francisco Parks system. Black now even rehearses in public, as she did during her 2011 residency at the Academy of Sciences during regular museum hours, creating Extinction Burst.

On December 7 at noon Chris Black takes on the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda for the next edition of the free Rotunda Dance Series with the help of her eight-year-old daughter Tamsin’s third grade class. For the Rotunda, Black is teaching the youth at their school during the weeks leading up to the lunchtime performance to create the work,  which thematically addresses environmentalism. Introducing movement in the classroom, Black may, for example, ask “What’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?” and manipulate and direct the resulting actions presented by the youth. While the work will be performed by children, Black maintains that the material is not “kids’ dance,” but rather, artistic and crafted as work she would create with any of her adult artists. They’ll walk and flock and perform postmodern pedestrian movement in the grand city building. Black’s adult dance collaborators will perform as well in the piece created specifically for the City Hall Rotunda. Additionally, Black choreographs with all ages in mind, her hope being that children and seniors alike can access the same dance.

In her dancers, Black values personality and presence, as well as clarity and specificity, which direct the focus of audience members. These elements combined deliver the humor and theatricality for which she is recognized. It’s no surprise that her work The Adventures of Cunning & Guile, was created and performed at The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco in collaboration with Ken James, during which the two playfully bound about the walls and benches of the gallery.

As a 2011 resident artist at the Academy of Sciences, Black explored the disappearance of the great auk, imagining how this extinct species might have moved to conduct her choreographic research. “I want to re-animate kinetic memory of a creature that no longer exists,” commented Black. As a result of rehearsing in the space where the performance would be, she was able to gauge bystanders’ reactions to different sections throughout the development of Extinction Burst. In addition, songs about missing someone like “One (Is the Loneliest Number)” and “It’s Too Late” doubled to comment on animals no longer living, through composer Erik Pearson’s breakup-themed soundtrack. Black hopes to expand her work surrounding extinction during the next couple years with Project Passenger Pigeon in development for 2014. Project Passenger Pigeon illuminates environmental activities and the human impact on the earth. The project will move through different locales potentially in the Midwestern and Eastern United States responding to the study of birds and concepts around flocking. Although her path has been one of dance, Black acknowledges she has always had an interest in science.

Another question Black ponders is “How do you occupy space and move in terms of something you are not?” As a non-baseball player, she created a work, Pastime, about the sport. Now she’s developing a solo based on the boxing champion John L. Sullivan. Her research about where people held boxing fights during the 1880′s and 1890’s informs the selection of locations for this performance. Since getting paid to fight was unlawful, the events would take place secretly on trains or in private lots. As a result, Black hopes to stage her solo on a boat in the San Francisco Bay, as fights took place in the middle of the water as well.

Black teaches a variety of classes in technique, composition, and dance appreciation, recently creating work for students at Iowa State University as well as the University of San Francisco. Her approach to dance appreciation is to create empathy for and transfer the experience of the performer. “I want to capture the sense of joy and visceral aspect of it.” comments Black. In her classes she encourages revealing personality, specificity and clarity – elements she admires in the dancers with whom she collaborates. When asked what recent work she finds particularly exciting, Black names Lizz Roman as a vibrant choreographic voice, with whom she has also worked.

In addition to creating her own work and teaching, Black (along with dance artists Miguel Gutierrez and Amy Seiwert) is contributing to Monique Jenkinson’s new solo Instrument.  Black has known Jenkinson for close to two decades. The work premieres at CounterPulse November 29 as the final performance of Jenkinson’s de Young Artist Fellows residency. With Instrument Jenkinson hopes to “Expose and undermine the roles of dancer as workhorse and choreographer as auteur. The artist’s relationship to authorship is a major theme, as is the dancing body as translator, container of knowledge and preserver of culture.” Gutierrez, Black, and Seiwert employ diverse approaches to movement-making and will each choreograph something for Jenkinson’s body. She considers the ‘putting on’ of movement to be aligned with her obsession with clothing and costumes. “The choreographers will use a dictatorial studio practice to create movement on my body. This phrase, ‘on my body’, common in traditional choreographic parlance, evokes the creation of a bespoke garment, but makes the distinction that the movement does not come from the dancer’s body.” remarks Jenkinson in the Instrument press release.

From embodying boxers, baseball players and extinct birds, to creating work for museums and directing third graders in a site-specific dance, Black, with her smart and humorous signature, will host a vivacious lunchtime in the City Hall Rotunda.

Chris Black performs at the free Rotunda Dance Series presented by Dancers’ Group and World Arts West on Friday, December 7 at noon in the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda.

Originally published in the December issue of In Dance.

Turbulence at YBCA. Photo by Tommy Lau.

As Turbulence rolls into New York Live Arts this week for its final stop on the fall tour, the performers will adopt a new architecture with a fresh set of ground rules for the staged collapse of Keith Hennessy’s dance. Those ground rules at the Imago Theater in Portland included no peeing on electrical instruments or on the trap door. At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco no audience members could enter the upper catwalk grid.

For full disclosure, my perspective is that of a program staff member in Community Engagement at YBCA, which presented the work last week. I also attended a rehearsal and performance of Turbulence in Portland during PICA’s Time Based Art festival making me privy to certain details about the structure, process and venues.

By changing locations and three performers with each run, the work resists fixed or rehearsed outcomes. Extended engagement with the artists and the work revealed dynamic possibilities of the construction (and collapse), daring performances and presence, as well as the sometimes thoughtful, sometimes ranting conversations of the artists who considered any exchange–personal, monetary or otherwise–an economy and potential research for the work, which would be discussed in a circle at the start of rehearsal. Hennessy also shared a list written on cardboard during rehearsal of the ten things he insisted happen in the performance including the creation of a human pyramid, fake healing, “the party” and reading a quote about love by Peggy Phelan.

The mood during the rehearsal I observed felt fairly serious with critical discussion among the performers bookending many of the improvisational scores. Then in performance, particularly at the Imago Theater, much of the gravity surprisingly lifted to reveal chaotic moments of joie de vivre. The unrestricted actions included a naked slip-n-slide and patrons on the trapeze, lending a charge to the room. You really didn’t know what was going to happen or who might get hurt. (At the Portland performance, I held the eyeglasses of two audience members who had entered a mob of intensely physical leaning.)

During a performance in San Francisco, Hennessy advised the audience that when you don’t know what to do next, the best thing to do is watch what’s already happening, which he did keenly throughout the evening, shifting from the center of the action to the periphery, one moment delivering a speech into a microphone on a swinging trapeze as someone tugged at his pants, and another moment directing a floor light upward to illuminate a glimmering scene in the ceiling grid featuring Hana Erdman and Jesse Hewit lounging nude underneath golden fabric. They silenced the room with a gorgeous harmony, as did Gabriel Todd later in song.

During another moment Hennessy joined Ray Chung, closely mimicking his slow sensitive steps in close proximity, the two exhibiting total body organization and control within the madness. (Chung has worked with Steve Paxton and was a quiet and stunning asset to the cast in San Francisco.) On closing night at YBCA, Hennessy shared sips of whiskey from the bottle and spoke of the fancy pork eateries as indicators of gentrification in Portland and San Francisco, as well as his disgust surrounding the monstrosity that is the Oracle boat docked in the bay for the Americas Cup.

The performances of Turbulence become intensely personal with few theatrical cues to direct one’s gaze. The post-performance small group discussion I facilitate as part of YBCA’s Smart Night Out program made clear the diversity of responses and choices about how to watch and interact with Turbulence. Some people thrived on the energy in the room and others were stressed or annoyed by the environment. Several people conversed about the distinctions between failure and regret and the relationship between the two sentiments. When one of the attendees mentioned that no one wants to see her baby boomer body nude, a visiting Hennessy confirmed that’s one of the reasons they indeed show bodies in performance. Ok, New York. Now it’s your turn to get down with the chaos.

Originally published October 5, 2012 on Culturebot.

Keith Hennessy’s Turbulence. Photo by Robbie Sweeney.

With recent appearances at PICA’s Time Based Art Festival in Portland and Velocity Dance Center in Seattle, Turbulence continues to shift, with three local artists added to the core group at each location. The “collaborative failure” orchestrated by Keith Hennessy opens at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco this week, followed by performances at New York Live Arts Oct. 4-6. Back at his Mission District apartment on Aug. 28, Hennessy talked about his recipe for instability and chaos, which compose Turbulence. Below is an abbreviated version of the interview.

Some of your students have mentioned that your way of pushing is to destabilize yourself and the performance container. Can you talk about this way of working?

Two big cliches are to work from failure or to work in relation to failure or unstable structures or destabilization. If people are slightly snobbier they’ll use Deleuze’s term deterritorialization. I think that these theories are ways of trying to look at oppressive structures or closed loop power dynamics. For people to have any sense of personal or communal power we then need to disturb or destabilize structures in order to have any free space. The ideas of failure out there are super trendy.

In the business management world, there are books like Fail Better. Then in the academic world two texts came out recently. One looks at experimental theater and performance and the idea of staging failure, with narratives that fail or characters who are failures rather than heroes, called Performance Theater and the Poetics of Failure by Sara Jean Bailes. It looks at Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service. Then Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure came out.

The first book was an affirmation of a certain kind of working and way of looking at experimental theater since Brecht and what kinds of ideas peeps are pushing…even this genre of film called mumblecore, where nothing really happens is an example. It’s young people and their lives aren’t shown as being meaningful. These are failures in a way because these people are not becoming something.

How does failure function in relation to the work Turbulence?

With Turbulence the event itself is a failure and fails to meet the expectation of the audience about what the show should be…I have been trying to think really in terms of political structures and hegemony in a both psychological and institutional weave of structure that is fragile, always changing, and takes a lot to maintain. Every time it needs something to maintain the structure, those are weak points that could be exploited.

So it’s called Turbulence: A Dance About the Economy. How do you address economy?

The piece started as a dance about the economy so I’m coming back to economic structures: how they’re set up, how economically unsustainable they are, how they morph and enjoy crisis. We used to think crisis was really bad. Now we have Naomi Klein who has actually gone through the last fifty years and has shown how so much has been either a fake crisis started by the financial system or a crisis that was not predictable like a tsunami or an earthquake, or war in a small place that the larger places could not have predicted, and those crises are then exploited by the financial structures… so all of these things I think about in terms of what it means to work in instability and exploit failure…

Another strategy thats very active for me is this idea of queer. To look at what new trends are happening and to imagine they won’t fulfill your dreams. To be queering them or working outside of them. I think with Turbulence I recognize the mainstream nature in contemporary art of proposing an unstable project that exploits failure. Then I ask “what does it mean to queer that?” Do you deliver part of the spectacle or not? I sometimes just think about being nice to audiences, giving them what they want.

I think what works for me in art is somewhere between classical, modern and postmodern approaches. Somewhere in that mashup and not necessarily any one of them. If it’s just a classical or modernist work, it’s really easy to critique. The kinds of theater I like, which is what I want to make, is one where there’s a lot of inquiry, a lot of self reflection and exposing the process. It’s post-Brechtian, its postmodern, unstable in terms of what we expect from theater and also somehow has a sense of magic and ritual that you couldn’t have anticipated.

So what is the unstable structure for Turbulence?

There’s no score. I have a list I share with the dancers including things like fake healing when people come in, creating the pyramid… I decide how many things I insist on that have to happen in each show. At a certain time I might stop and say “Hey audience, I was hoping that by this time the pyramid would have happened, but it didn’t.” If I just talk about it and ruin the flow it’s a kind of failure and improv strategy…

With the Turbulence process, some of us now have been working on the piece for two years. I’m getting to know people better but I’m not making any material for people or creating situations where they’re making material. I’m really trying to create context in which to improvise and see what happens.

Every now and then I ask to try and keep something like what was created in rehearsal. Gabriel Todd wrote a song and I think he didn’t even share it with the group for like six months because he was like “Oh you’re going to insult it.” and then we did insult it. We’ve sung it in every performance since.

How did you select the artists you’re working with for this project?

I invited people who I thought were makers, even if they didn’t have a long history of being a maker. I invited people who make their own work and then I brought them into an unstable situation where the group is always changing …we’re in this weird laboratory together that’s heavily reliant on people feeling confident enough to just make images spontaneously or take action.

I’m sure in my psychic process what I’m doing is something related to the most far reaching research aspects of Sara Shelton Mann’s work. There are many moments when I think about Contraband with this group, especially now that we’ve toured a few times together…theres something really different being with each other 24 hours, seven days a week, or traveling to a foreign country together, or flying in airports together and sharing hotel rooms. Now we’re building on that set of experiences and also looking at those as economic relationships that influence the work.

How do you hope people interface with the work?

Every piece of theater speaks to the last piece of theater people saw, but it also speaks to the life they led before they walked into the theater. That’s one version. With the current piece, Turbulence, we’re working with this idea of soft boundaries. It’s not clear when it starts and when it ends, so I tell the audience that the piece is over when a certain amount of time has gone by, but we don’t leave the stage. It’s clear that so many things are broken down by then that you could just leave, or come onstage and start talking to artists that you know, or you could go over and look at the trapeze, things just keep going.

I’m hoping to bring a different perspective and a different urgency for people to look at how the economy shapes their everyday life. So the follow up to me is quite personal. I don’t think that’s about everyone deciding to participate in Occupy, but it is about considering how deeply embedded the economy is in their life or that economic relations impact their social relations, which impact the way they imagine their potential in the world, and the ways they give and receive, and how they shop and how they pay rent or mortgages. In some ways that’s just already going to fail since the piece is not a lecture. People have to enter it poetically or that won’t happen. If they’re just waiting for the content to arrive it won’t happen.

Originally published September 27, 2012 on Culturebot.

WHEN YOU LOOK at a white-walled cube or empty courtyard, do you see a performance space? If you knew the history of every hundred- or thousand-year-old painting, sculpture, and anthropological record in a museum, would you envision bodies in motion, following their own energetic impulses and trajectories, among them? This September, Dance Discourse Project #13, co-produced by Dancers’ Group and CounterPULSE, will address dance in museums in a program at the de Young Museum. Through artistic and curatorial lenses, expert panelists from the visual arts and dance realms will join us in discussing the following:

With more public programs and performances taking place within museum and gallery walls, what are the current priorities for presenting dance in this architecture? How can movement function in a space designed for another kind of art and a different mode of looking? How are museums and galleries selecting dance to activate their spaces, and how does dance change when its context comes artistically charged with a particular point of view? How does dance placed in visual arts environments support the trend of the museum as a public gathering place?

We aren’t the first ones to be talking about what happens when performance crosses into visual arts territory (think back to John Cage in the 1950s, or to Futurist performance in the early twentieth century, or perhaps further). But neither is the case closed on what to make of it.

In fact, “Dancing in the museum isn’t new, but…” could have comprised a subsection of the Making Time symposium presented by UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center this April. Discussions over the weekend questioned how dance is produced and received on museum premises. We’ll be attending related events and reflecting on selected texts as we consider the topics for September’s Dance Discourse Project.

Making Time gathered curators and scholars from across the country at the Berkeley Art Museum. One of the panels, Dancing in the Museum, involved  speakers Jonah Bokaer, Judy Hussie-Taylor and Mark Franko (with response by Ralph Lemon, the panel was moderated by Kate Mattingly) discussing the implications of performance at visual arts institutions. The discussion provided a platform for leaders in contemporary dance and scholarship to address, one voice at a time, the slippery slope of mixing mediums and crossing borders.

Throughout much of the conversation, panelists considered how Western concert dance could be shaped differently for a museum than for a proscenium stage. Franko, professor of dance and chair of the theater arts department at UC Santa Cruz, asked, “Has there been such a thing as museum dance?”–versus dance placed in a museum. Instead of an answer to fill the silence that followed, another question surfaced: “What shock, tremor or displacement of force does dance communicate to a museum?” Franko’s assigning dance as a powerful, perhaps menacing, force acting upon a solid structure met prepared responses.

Bokaer, a choreographer, media artist, and dancer, described his collaborative work with visual artist Daniel Arsham. One of their efforts, Replica, which premiered in 2009, features a fractured white cube—a structure acted upon by dance, much the way Franko described. Some of the dance, performed Bokaer and Judith Sánchez Ruíz, moves through the cube, which has been punctured onstage by Ashram. Bokaer noted that performing Replica in open, public spaces disrupted the dance and the reception of the  sculpture in unintended ways. For instance, during a performance outside of one museum, audience members took liberties to move out of the intended viewing space, thus configuring their own points of view onto the sculpture and dancing. Hussie-Taylor, executive director of Danspace Project, remarked, “Conscious displacement of a work of art, live or otherwise, brings the opportunity to challenge perception,” allowing a viewer truly to see differently.

“Where the work is encountered informs how it is framed and ultimately processed,” Hussie-Taylor said. Trisha Brown’s Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, which premiered in 1970 in and around 80 Wooster Street in New York City, puts on meanings and discards others in a 2008 performance outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Hussie-Taylor showed footage of the more recent performance to encourage listeners to consider how differently an audience might respond to the same work in different contexts.

Expectations also seed divergent reactions to dance in a museum as experienced by a dance audience versus a visual arts one. Dance viewers are more accustomed to watching a work beginning to end, whereas visual arts patrons more commonly assume autonomy during their museum experience. Hussie-Taylor pointed to this phenomenon as evidenced by an interview with Sarah Michelson by Trajal Herrel this year in Movement Research Performance Journal 40. There, the choreographer recalls the reception of her work at the Whitney Museum, noting that dance and visual arts audiences demonstrated different levels of endurance in their attention.

In receiving art, whether an action in a museum or an object, can we consider why the work was made and how it functions? “To curate time-based work is to query the viewer’s expectations and assumptions about place–where they are–and time–how long they expect to be there,” Hussie-Taylor said. “To present dance out of place is to take into account the viewer’s expectations and then upend them. This is the most challenging and the most exciting aspect of dance in museums, at least in my mind,” she added.

In developing this discourse for DDP #13, we will look at dance in some of its possible places and at art that moves. We’ll look at performance that disrupts space and spatial configurations that disrupt performance. Additionally, we’ll consider actions as art objects that can be collected and presented as visual art, and the body as archive. As we refine talking points of the panel discussion, we’ll explore previous instances of dance presented in the museum, audience reactions to it, and where both might be heading.

Save the date: Dance Discourse Project #13 takes place at the de Young Museum on Saturday, September 15, from 2-4pm. This event is hosted in conjunction with Monique Jenkinson’s 2012 Artist Fellowship at the de Young.

Visit ArtPerformanceNow.wordpress.com for further reading, consideration and response to the topic by DDP #13 organizers Emily Hite and Julie Potter. We’ll be posting about other provocative dances and articles, writing our own commentary, and inviting guest bloggers to contribute to the conversation.

Photo by Adrian Arias.

This article was co-authored by Emily Hite and originally published in the June 2012 issue of In Dance, a monthly magazine published by Dancers’ Group, serving the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. dancersgroup.org. Visit the ArtPerformanceNow DDP#13 blog for collected contributions on the topic.

Shuttling from the Bay Area to disparate regions of Africa, dance professionals Janice Garrett, Byb Bibene Chanel, Kristine Elliott and Joti Singh use the art form to power exchange. Their trips with four distinct missions all share the thread of reciprocal learning and the body as a channel for communication and empowerment.

Janice Garrett, Co-Director, Garrett + Moulton Productions: Uganda
“We had a real interest in forms that facilitate people working very closely together and dancing is that at its best. Dance is something where people are capable of feeling each other and working together in a tight ensemble.”

The serendipitous impact of seeing War Dance a documentary about the trauma of children who live in a refugee camp and their healing through music and dance, reading about civil strife in countries bordering Uganda and connecting with a friend who started the Stand Tall Primary School on the outskirts of Kampala compelled Janice Garrett to work with ninety students at that junior high. Garrett visited for a month in October with composer and musician Christopher Benstead employing an approach which emerged from The Ball Passing Project: a community art form that demonstrates how cooperation creates a complex and interdependent structure. The Ball Passing Project stems from a dance created by Charles Moulton, during which performers arranged on tiered platforms pass colored Nerf balls in intricate patterns. At the Stand Tall Primary School, the idea was to explore what the kids could do with movement and music to facilitate learning how to work cooperatively and see themselves as interdependent and connected with one another.

“Ball passing and the movement choir are designed to be done when people are attuned and working as a team. Therefore, we shared these forms with the kids to engender a sense of working as a collective, as a community together, to establish a connection with one another,” says Garrett, adding “The idea that things can be ordered, precise, predictable, repeatable, and that there’s a reason to build upon that order in a group together is really affecting a part of their social consciousness in certain ways.” In addition to ball passing and movement choir approaches, the group worked in a circle and participated in rhythm and movement exercises to create something themselves, thus encouraging individual voices. A baseline beginning and structured games provided the starting points for making.

“To see the children and the light in their eyes–these are kids who are thrilled to be in school. They do not take this for granted at all. They know how precious it is to receive an education. There’s a fantastic sense of appreciation for what’s being offered and that was incredibly moving to me. These children recognize the gift that they are receiving. They are hungry for that experience,” Garrett comments. She found that at the end of the school day, the students did not want to go home and would walk back at the last possible moment, just as night fell. Because many families in Uganda are unable to pay for the books and uniforms that the schools require, numerous children go without education. It’s a few hundred dollars, which for many, amounts to a high percentage of the family income.

Moving forward, Garrett hopes to continue a process with the school to develop a sponsorship program for the first class of 20 graduates to attend highschool. “The feeling I have is that the work in Uganda showed up on the path of my life,” saya Garrett. “I want to encourage others to reach out in the world; to really respond to what may come along. To want to be touched by people and circumstances–we have a lot to give. We all have these opportunities.”

Byb Chanel Bibene,
Artistic Director, Kiandanda Dance Theater:
Republic of Congo
“Notice how we write with the body by creating a vocabulary. There is a way in the Congo for this writing. I invite people to come with me and inspire our way of trying to expand the vocabulary. That’s what the program is about.”

Last time Byb Chanel Bibene visited his native Republic of Congo, he developed a dance film called Taboo and Heroes. For this project, Bibene worked with dancers and conducted interviews to capture the life experiences of those living with a delicate political situation and corruption. In this context, Bibene sees dance as a way to move toward a more open dialogue. He returns to the Republic of Congo on a regular basis eager to research the contemporary social issues and encourage communication through the body. “What is African dance? Is it Africans dancing? What is Congolese dance? Each tribe has a very different style,” Bibene comments.

“We don’t have dance schools, we have parties for dancing. It’s something we learn from our elders. It happens on the streets, in public places, the neighborhood. The dance is different for each tribe. I came to dance through the tribe and popular dance. That’s our main training,” says Bibene. “We also got the American influence of hip hop. There was Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and Madonna, and also also vogueing.” Before concentrating on dance, Bibene studied acting in highschool. Later he studied contemporary, classical and modern dance at academy schools in Europe and now invites choreographers to Congo to teach workshops for his program and research initiative, Nzela Program. He hopes to eventually have a dedicated space for dance, and continues to fundraise. While he does invite people to his country to work as professional dancers, he acknowledges that where he is from dance is meshed into daily life–it serves as a ritual and has meaning.

Kristine Elliott,
Dance Professor, Stanford University:
South Africa
“It’s kind of an irony and an interesting look to see how ballet bridges cultures. It’s a universal language that around the world you place your left hand on the bar and do grande plies in first position.”

Since 2004 Kristine Elliott has been teaching ballet in Atlan, a township of South Africa beginning simply in a classroom with a cassette player, and growing her team each year with artists from LEAP (Liberal Education for Arts Professionals). “The thing that strikes me is the way that classical ballet training is important. It makes those kids stand up with a sense of pride. They have to take care of their bodies. It’s a good idea to care about what they eat and have self pride, and it translates into a lust for life, for being alive,” said Elliott, adding “Its’ a pretty tough place to survive. They don’t really look to the future in terms of living a long life. The more pride that they feel about themselves the more they feel that life is precious and to get that from their community and it comes from standing up as a dancer.”

Elliott’s has made a huge impact, opening eyes and horizons. “I am just one person and sometimes I get overwhelmed with so much hardship and poverty and the effect of AIDS, disease and the living conditions. I still believe that one by one we can help,” she says. In addition to teaching skills transferrable to life, students of hers blossomed into professional dancers working with Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, The Lion King and Ballet Rambert. “What’s marvelous of the program is that those kids have somewhere to go everyday where excellence is demanded of them and where they’re expected to show up and have discipline and be on time.”

This past year, Elliott brought Amy Seiwert’s choreography to her students in South Africa. “I set the ballet on the music with the exact intention of Amy’s work. When it was finished I looked at it and said ‘This is new!’ It had an African energy that changed the art–adding and giving its own voice. It’s a wonderful exchange,” comments Elliott, referencing the fierce bright attack of the movement. At Stanford, Elliott encourages her students to take their skills and dancing and to help the world. She concludes “It’s important to know life is precious and it’s worthwhile to stand up; that there are dreams that can come true and dance can help in that.”

Joti Singh,
Artistic Director, Duniya Dance and Drum Company:
Guinea
“The community living really left an impression on me–how much time the people spent together and outside, how much time they don’t spend by themselves.”

In December, for the second time, Joti Singh led students and artists to Guinea to better understand the art tradition in context. There, the group participated in a few busy weeks of dance and drum classes and with a heavy dose of Guinean culture. Singh visited the country for the first time in 2003 with a college dance teacher and her current trips are about meeting people there, life in the community and the culture. “We see it as an exchange. People are generally really changed by the experience, because of how different life is over there. They realize how little the people have materially but how rich they are culturally.”

Singh is looking to purchase land and start a community center. She envisions a hub of resources where people can help themselves even after Singh’s group has gone, hoping for a place for people can stay, take class, learn an instrument, a language or financial literacy. A computer center there would also allow visitors to learn additional skills and push ahead. “People are really motivated and smart and there’s just no economy there. It’s really hard. There are trained medical doctors who work for cell phone companies, people go to school and there are no jobs.”

Speaking to the role of dance in this society, Singh notes that when Guinea became an independent country from the French in 1958, the first president created a national ballet and traditional arts were cultivated. Every neighborhood has a ballet or dance group for performances at ceremonies or weddings. “People aren’t shy about dancing in the same way they are here. They do it from a young age. If you go to a party or a club, everyone is dancing. There are some families that don’t want their kids to go into dance and recommend what they see as more serious subject like law or engineering. There are others who decide to dance to get out of the country and come to the U.S. or Europe. It has become this ticket out in a way.”

Originally published in the April issue of In Dance.