Karole Armitage’s Six Ft. Apart opens “WOMEN / CREATE! A Virtual Festival of Dance”

WOMEN / CREATE! A VIRTUAL FESTIVAL OF DANCE
Women / Create!; New York Live Arts online
Through May 31, free with RSVP (suggested donation $10)
www.womencreatedance.org
newyorklivearts.org

“Dance has an incredible capacity for expression and is the only form that brings us really deeply into our own self to understand how we deal with the inner core of our beings,” choreographer Jennifer Muller says during the ninth annual “WOMEN / CREATE! A Virtual Festival of Dance,” which has gone online this year and is available on demand through May 31. Presented with New York Live Arts, where two of the new works were filmed, the festival consists of six pieces — from five award-winning companies and one emerging artist — by women choreographers, who introduce their dance and participate in a Q&A moderated by singer, host, producer, and curator Danni Gee.

Karole Armitage’s Armitage Gone! Dance opens the evening with Six Ft. Apart, a socially distanced performance performed at NYLA by Sierra French and Cristian Laverde-Koenig, who are joined by Alonso Guzman wearing a baseball cap with an iPhone on it; every time he shakes his head, Agnes Fury Cameron’s abstract percussive briefly interrupts the silence, like he has rocks in his noggin. (The sound environment was initially meant to be heard over audience members’ headphones, which will eventually happen.)

In KINGS, Ailey II apprentice Meagan King, mentored by the great Renée Robinson, honors the Exonerated Five, with Christopher Taylor, Aaron Frisby, Emerick Ligonde, Isaiah Harvey, and Jayden Williams portraying the men who were previously known as the wrongly convicted Central Park Five. The music features Sound Effects Zone’s “Whispers of the Past” and Hans Zimmer’s “Solomon,” with spoken text by Wayne “Juice” Mackins.

All six choreographers join together for postshow “WOMEN / CREATE!” discussion

Sidra Bell Dance New York’s PRELUDE | IDENTITY through a window . . . with bated breath . . . is an excerpt of a longer work, with Sebastian Arbarbanell, Alonzo Blanco, Marisa Christogeorge, Drew Lewis, Misa Kinno Lucyshyn, and Sophia Halimah Parker in tight-fitting futuristic costumes (“A Global Dust Storm in Mars” by NANNERWAVE) moving to a screeching soundscape, with production, lighting, and décor by Amith Chandrashaker and videography and 3D rendering by Harrison Goodbinder.

In Island Re-Imagined, Jennifer Muller/The Works adapts the 2005 Island for the virtual stage, with Elise King, Elijah Laurant, Anna Levy, Sy Lu, Shoshana Mozlin, Minga Prather, and Cassidy Spaedt dancing over Roberto Dutesco’s photographs of wild horses on Sable Island, set to a score by Marty Beller. The performance includes text about how the video was made while also pointing out, “Creating a parallel between the wild horses confined to Sable Island and the experience of living in a Covid era, the piece echoes the sentiments of our time.”

Introducing Dance within Your Dance, Passion Fruit Dance Company founder Tatiana Desardouin explains, “I’m not trying to bring a set definition of [the groove], but I want to invite people to question, Do I really understand what it is?’” The thirteen-minute piece, made in collaboration with External Eye (Adesola Osakalumi and Miki Tuesday), takes place on a rooftop and at NYLA, with Desardouin, Mai Lê Ho, and Lauriane Ogay grooving to hip-hop and house music and a cappella vocals by Sam I Am Montolla as Desardouin soulfully highlights Black culture.

Finally, Buglisi Dance Theatre’s multimedia Invisible Embrace, choreographed by Jacqulyn Buglisi and filmed live at NYLA, comprises four parts of the five-section ballet, “Unraveling,” “Momentum,” “Soliloquy,” and “Flight,” exploring aspects of isolation and the need for human contact, merging indoors and outdoors. The work is performed by Blakeley White-McGuire, So Young An, Greta Campo, Evan Fisk, Myles Hunter, Ricardo Barrett, Carolina Rivera, and Aoi Sato, with original music by Alex Weiser recorded by the Mertz Trio (pianist Lee Dionne, violinist Brigid Coleridge, and cellist Julia Yang) with soprano Eliza Bagg, projections by Joey Moro, film by Terese Capucilli, and photography by Paul B. Goode. The narrative was inspired by Irish poet John O’Donohue, Dante’s Inferno, American poet Claudia Rankine, and others.

“WOMEN / CREATE!” is a wide-ranging collection of dance pieces, followed by a wide-ranging discussion, available for only a few more days, from six unique choreographers who speak to the past, present, and future of dance. Catch it while you can.