this week in dance

TRISHA BROWN: IN PLAIN SITE, WAGNER PARK, NEW YORK

Who: Trisha Brown Dance Company
What: River to River Festival
Where: Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, Battery Park City
When: Sunday, June 21, free, 4:00 & 6:00
Why: Last summer, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council paid tribute to Trisha Brown with a series of special events on Governors Island and other locations. This summer TBDC is back to perform In Plain Site, Wagner Park, New York, a site-specific project that will incorporate excerpts from the company’s vast, genre-redefining repertoire, reacting to and with Robert Wagner Park. In Plain Site could feature sections from such previous works as Scallops, Corners, Accumulation, Leaning Duet I, Group Primary Accumulation with Movers, Sticks I, Curl Curve Back Up, Sticks IV, Spanish Dance, and Figure Eight, dating back more than forty years, depending on how each fits in with Wagner Park. “Each performance not only inspired the emergence of new dance ideas based on a cumulatively evolving foundation of artistic principles, brought to fruition through their interaction with new sites of presentation,” TBDC scholar-in-resident Susan Rosenberg notes on the company’s website. “Importantly, Brown also continued to perform existing choreographies, but renewed their meanings and experiences for audiences through her works’ re-siting in new contexts.” It should be fascinating and fun to see the dialogue that they come up with for this beautiful space in the southernmost end of Battery Park City, which boasts sensational views of New Jersey and the Statue of Liberty. The River to River Festival continues through June 28 with such other dance performances as Souleymane Badolo’s Dance My Life, Rachel Tess’s Souvenir Undone, Yanira Castro / a canary torsi’s Court/Garden, Twyla Tharp’s The One Hundreds, Eiko’s A Body in a Station, and Wally Cardona, Jennifer Lacey, and Jonathan Bepler’s The Set Up: Saya Lei.

DRIFTING IN DAYLIGHT: ART IN CENTRAL PARK

Ragnar Kjartansson’s “S.S. Hangover” sails around Harlem Meer with members of the Metropolis Ensemble (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Central Park
Begin at Charles A. Dana Discovery Center
Enter at 110th St. & Fifth Ave.
Friday, June 19, and Saturday, June 20, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
creativetime.org
www.centralparknyc.org
drifting in daylight slideshow

While making my way through the wonderful “Drifting in Daylight” exhibition in Central Park, comprising eight site-specific projects commissioned by the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time and the Central Park Conservancy, I heard some beautiful music coming out of the North Woods. Believing I had found number 5B on the map, which promised “a migratory performance of contemplative movement through the North Woods,” I wandered down a path until I came upon a man and a woman playing Bach on violins. There were a few other people there, so I walked over and started taking some photos and enjoying the performance. “Excuse me,” a young man said to me as the music continued, “this is a private gathering.” Not sure whether he was being serious or that was part of the installation — you can’t always tell with contemporary art, of course — I told him that this was where the map indicated the next stop was. “It’s over there,” he said with a determined annoyance, pointing to the nearby overpass. So off I went, shortly to discover a group of dancers moving silently on the asphalt road and the grass. This time, I was where I was supposed to be, watching Lauri Stallings + Glo’s “And All Directions, I Come to You,” but as I followed them through the trees by the Pool, there were two people rehearsing Shakespeare, members of New York Classical Theatre’s free outdoor production of The Taming of the Shrew. And then two other actors passed by, a man and a woman, re-creating a scene from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums in which former spouses Royal (Gene Hackman) and Etheline Tenenbaum (Anjelica Huston) discuss how they raised their crazy kids; it is part of David Levine’s “Private Moments,” one of eight such scenes occurring throughout the park, where they were originally filmed. I suddenly didn’t know where to turn, what to see next, surrounded by a surfeit of art, yet wondering what was public and what was private. “Nothing can be written on the subject in which extreme care is not taken to discriminate between what is meant in common use of the words garden, gardening, gardener, and the art which I try to pursue,” Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmsted wrote, and indeed, there is plenty of art to pursue among the gardens in Central Park, whether part of “Drifting in Daylight” or not.

Alicia Framis’s “Cartas al Cielo” gives visitors a chance to send a message to someone not of this earth any longer (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The centerpiece of the Central Park Conservancy’s thirty-fifth anniversary celebration, “Drifting in Daylight,” a kind of art scavenger hunt, begins behind the Charles A. Dana Discovery Center, where Ragnar Kjartansson’s “S.S. Hangover” starts its musical journey around Harlem Meer, its Pegasus flag swirling in the wind, with a brass sextet from the Metropolitan Ensemble on board, playing a dirgelike composition by Kjartan Sveinsson. The 1934 wooden fishing boat has been refashioned into a boat from James Whale’s 1935 film, Remember Last Night?, which was based on the Adam Hobhouse novel The Hangover Murders about a group of characters too drunk to recall a killing. The winding path next leads to Karyn Olivier’s “Here and Now/Glacier, Shard, Rock,” a triptych lenticular billboard that evokes the history of Central Park by shifting between shots of a glacier, a broken piece of pottery from Seneca Village, and rocks, bringing them all together as they appear and disappear. As you approach Conservatory Garden, which is now in beautiful full bloom, you can stop at Spencer Finch’s “Sunset (Central Park),” a solar-powered painted ice-cream truck that offers free soft-serve ice cream that changes colors matching the setting sun. Finch, who also currently has hue-based artworks at the Morgan Library and on the High Line, calls is an “edible monochrome.” But more important, it’s rather soothing on a hot summer’s day.

Lauri Stallings + Glo’s “And All Directions, I Come to You” gracefully and dramatically moves through the north end of Central Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

On the south side of Conservatory Garden, Alicia Framis’s “Cartas al Cielo” sits atop a hill, a large, reflective silver orb that glitters in the sunlight. Meaning “letters to the sky,” the participatory sculpture, which is like a doorway to a more ethereal kind of Central Park, invites people to fill out a postcard to someone not on this earth and slip it into one of the globe’s mail slots. You can send a missive to a lost loved one or even an alien, as it boasts otherworldly qualities. Heading toward the Ravine, you’ll soon see nine women — Anicka Zaneta Austin, Kristina Marie Brown, Jennifer Cara Clark, Mary Virginia Coleman, Ashley I Daye, Christina Kelly, Mary Jane Pennington, Cailan Orn, and Katherine Maxwell — performing Atlanta-based choreographer Stallings “And All Directions, I Come to You,” in which the dancers, wearing long dresses of different solid colors forming a unique rainbow, fall on the grass, sit on the path, weave around trees, and invite the audience to join a group circle. Also taking place by the North Woods and the Loch, it’s fast-paced and unpredictable, especially to people who are in the area but have no idea what’s going on, just spending an afternoon in the park. Meanwhile, along North End Drive, three of Nina Katchadourian’s handwoven bird nests, collectively known as “The Lamppost Weavers,” hang from streetlamps, including one consisting of repurposed sneakers that evoke the runners passing by but don’t offer the birds much of a place to set up house. The lampposts are not exactly easy to find; nor are all eight of Levine’s “Private Moments,” which are scattered throughout the park and also feature actors re-creating scenes from Bullets Over Broadway, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Six Degrees of Separation, Portrait of Jennie, The Out-of-Towners, Cruel Intentions, and Marathon Man, in which one brave soul spends all afternoon jogging around the Reservoir.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s “Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos” provides a powerful conclusion to park project (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The eighth and final project, Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s “Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos,” is the most powerful. On the Great Hill, taking place on a parachute in colors evoking the flags of Africa and with multiple translations of the phrase “black joy” running around its perimeter, five actors, a violinist, and a cellist, all wearing fatigue pants and red hoodies, mix dance, music, theater, and spoken word as they provide a full-frontal assault on the race war dominating the country, asserting their individual and group identity as they invoke such names as Michael Stewart, Sean Bell, and Freddie Gray. At the end of the riveting performance, people are asked to help lift the parachute, but once it’s raised, it’s dropped again, not remaining up, as we still has quite a way to go before inviting everyone inside the big tent. It’s a compelling experience, and one that puts a provocative cap on a thoroughly engaging exhibition that highlights the diverse nature of Central Park and of New York City and recalls what the Olmsted brothers wrote in 1903 in a report on parks in Portland, Oregon: “All agree that parks not only add to the beauty of a city and to the pleasure of living in it, but are exceedingly important factors in developing the healthfulness, morality, intelligence, and business prosperity of its residents. Indeed it is not too much to say that a liberal provision of parks in a city is one of the surest manifestations of the intelligence, degree of civilization, and progressiveness of its citizens.”

ANYWHERE IN TIME: A CONLON NANCARROW FESTIVAL

The life and career of one-of-a-kind composer Conlon Nancarrow will be celebrated at twelve-day fest at the new Whitney (photo courtesy Charles Amirkhanian)

Whitney Museum of American Art
Susan and John Hess Family Theater, third floor
99 Gansevoort St.
June 17-28, $22 (includes admission to galleries)
212-570-3600
whitney.org

In a 1981 letter to Charles Amirkhanian, György Ligeti wrote, “This music is the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives . . . something great and important for all music history! His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed but at the same time emotional . . . for me it’s the best of any composer living today.” Ligeti was referring to the little-known Conlon Nancarrow, an American-born composer who had become a Mexican citizen and had done extraordinary work with the player piano. The recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, Nancarrow, who passed away in 1997 at the age of eighty-four, will be celebrated at the new Whitney Museum of American Art with “Anywhere in Time: A Conlon Nancarrow Festival,” twelve days of special live performances, talks, and films paying tribute to Nancarrow’s influential career. Among those taking the stage in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater will be Steve Coleman and Five Elements, dancers from the Merce Cunningham Trust Fellowship Program performing Crises (1960) (reconstructed and staged by Jennifer Goggans), percussionist Chris Froh, Alarm Will Sound, and Henry Kaiser and Lukas Ligeti with Charles Amirkhanian. Cocurated by Dominic Murcott and Jay Sanders, “Anywhere in Time” also features screenings of James Greeson’s 2012 documentary Conlon Nancarrow: Virtuoso of the Player Piano, the panel discussion “Nancarrow Deconstructed” with Froh and Murcott, and a 1921 Marshall and Wendell Ampico upright player piano on view on the veranda with Nancarrow’s “Study #36” piano roll, which will occasionally play. “Conlon Nancarrow had perhaps the most single-minded career of any great American composer, devoting his life to exploring the rhythmic possibilities of juxtaposing multiple simultaneous tempos,” notes Alarm Will Sound conductor and artistic director Alan Pierson. “The combination of Nancarrow’s catchy materials and the complex way he deals with them puts his work in a sweet spot of immediacy and complexity occupied by much of the music we love. And the challenge of performing music not meant to be played by human beings is a stimulating one.” The festival comes to a close on June 28 with the eight-hour “Complete Studies for Player Piano: A Marathon Concert Event,” presented in numerical order from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm and including appearances by Nancarrow’s wife, Yoko, and their son, Mako. Most of the events require ticketing, and it’s best if you get them in advance; the cost is the same as museum admission, and the ticket gets you into all the galleries.

HUDSON RIVER DANCE FESTIVAL

Paul Taylor Dance is one of three local companies performing at the free, inaugural Hudson Dance Festival this week (photo by Paul B. Goode)

Who: Paul Taylor Dance Company, Parsons Dance, Ballet Hispanico
What: Hudson River Dance Festival
Where: Pier 63, Hudson River Park, cross at West 22nd & 24th Sts.
When: Wednesday, June 17, and Thursday, June 18, free, 6:30
Why: The inaugural Hudson River Dance Festival consists of three New York City companies presenting works for free outdoors on Pier 63 in Hudson River Park this week, two nights of modern movement featuring pieces by Paul Taylor Dance Company, Parsons Dance, and Ballet Hispanico. Attendees can bring blankets, but no chairs are allowed on the lawn.

AILEY AT LINCOLN CENTER 2015

AAADT’s Antonio Douthit-Boyd and Linda Celeste Sims perform in Wayne McGregor’s CHROMA (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will be performing Wayne McGregor’s CHROMA for the last time at Lincoln Center, while also saying farewell to longtime dancer Antonio Douthit-Boyd (and his husband, fellow dancer Kirven Douthit-Boyd) (photo by Paul Kolnik)

David H. Koch Theater
20 Lincoln Center Plaza
June 10-21, $25 – $135
212-496-0600
www.alvinailey.org
www.davidhkochtheater.com

In June 2013, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performed at Lincoln Center for the first time in thirteen years. The late-spring season is now becoming an annual event, as the troupe, which takes over City Center every December, will be back at the David Koch Theater for the third straight year. From June 10 to 21, AAADT will present eighteen works across fourteen programs, in addition to an opening-night gala. New pieces include the world premiere of Rennie Harris’s Exodus, the company premiere of artistic director Robert Battle’s No Longer Silent, and new productions of Talley Beatty’s Toccata and Judith Jamison’s “A Case of You” duet from Reminiscin’. Also on the schedule are Battle’s Strange Humors and whirlwind Takademe, Ronald K. Brown’s elegant Grace, Jacqulyn Buglisi’s female celebration Suspended Women, Ulysses Dove’s Bad Blood, Matthew Rushing’s overly earnest ODETTA, Hofesh Shechter’s exhilarating Uprising, and Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain Pas de Deux, along with the Ailey classics Night Creature and Revelations. The Saturday afternoon family matinees will be followed by Q&As with the dancers, and Ailey Extension instructor Eddie Stockton will lead a free house dance class on June 11 at 6:00 on Josie Robertson Plaza, with music by DJ C Boogie. The company will also be presenting Wayne McGregor’s physically exertive Chroma for the final time while also saying goodbye to two longtime members, married couple Antonio and Kirven Douthit-Boyd, who will stay with Ailey through a Paris engagement at the Théâtre du Châtelet in July, then become the artistic directors of the Center of Creative Arts in St. Louis.

FAREWELL, CEDAR LAKE

Matthew Rich leads the final Cedar Lake revolution at BAM in MY GENERATION (photo by Juliet Cervantes)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
June 3-6, $20-$55
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
cedarlakedance.com

It was hard not to be stirred when, during Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s final week ever, in the world premiere of My Generation, longtime company member Matthew Rich grooved to the front of BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House stage and lip synced to Atom™’s loud, industrial remix of the Who’s 1965 revolutionary classic, defiantly mouthing, “People try to put us d-down / Just because we g-g-get around / Things they do look awful c-c-cold / I hope I die before I get old,” followed by a false ending, as the curtain came down and then rose up again and the piece continued. This past March, it was announced that the Chelsea-based company, which began in 2003 financed solely by Walmart heiress Nancy Laurie — earning it both envy and jealousy from other dance organizations that have to struggle for money — would be shutting its doors because Laurie was removing her funding. Cedar Lake is at BAM June 3–6 for its farewell performances, and on Friday night they dazzled the loyal, dedicated crowd, which hooted and hollered regularly during My Generation, a dynamic, energetic work, choreographed by Richard Siegal, that shows off the dancers’ sheer athleticism (with nods to Alvin Ailey, Karole Armitage, Ronald K. Brown, and others). Bernhard Willhelm’s colorful costumes might be silly and frilly, but that didn’t detract from some jaw-dropping movement, especially by Ebony Williams, who towered over everyone while en pointe, then lifted her muscular legs impossibly toward the sky, and Rich, who gyrated with exhilarating abandon.

Crystal Pite’s TEN DUETS ON A THEME OF RESCUE is centerpiece of Cedar Lake farewell at BAM (photo by Juliet Cervantes)

Things calmed down considerably with the evening’s middle section, one of the company’s signature works, Crystal Pite’s lovely, meditative Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue, a series of pas de deux performed within a semicircle of fifteen Klieg lights on movable poles and three spots above. Joaquim de Santana, Vânia Doutel Vaz, Joseph Kudra, Navarra Novy-Williams, and Rich take turns on the otherwise black and smoky stage, coming together to instrumental music from Cliff Martinez’s soundtrack for Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris. If anything, Ten Duets is too short at less than twenty minutes, which perhaps only adds to its poignant intimacy — as does its title, which takes on new meaning since the company itself could not be rescued. The evening concluded with the New York premiere of Johan Inger’s Rain Dogs, a Pina Bausch–inspired piece of dance theater in which Bond, Concepcion, Santana, Doutel Vaz, Novy-Williams, Guillaume Quéau, Rich, Ida Saki, and Jin Young Won, wearing subtle, everyday clothing (that changes fabulously midway through), glide, slide, writhe, and line up to such Tom Waits songs as “Make It Rain,” “Dirt in the Ground,” “Hoist That Rag,” and “The Piano Has Been Drinking.” The work, which contains playful humor, whispering to the audience, and clever, inventive set pieces built around old radios, tape recorders, and speakers, was particularly bittersweet given that the Howard Gilman Opera House has been the New York home of Tanztheater Wuppertal for more than thirty years, and now not only is Bausch herself gone, having passed away in 2009, but this week we have to say goodbye to the immensely talented Cedar Lake, who on Saturday night will take its final bow and just f-f-fade away after presenting Jiří Kylián’s Indigo Rose, Ten Duets, and Jo Strømgren’s Necessity, Again.

EGG ROLLS, EGG CREAMS, AND EMPANADAS FESTIVAL 2015

Museum at Eldridge Street
12 Eldridge St. between Canal & Division Sts.
Sunday, June 7, free, 12 noon – 4:00 pm
212-219-0302
www.eldridgestreet.org

The fifteenth annual Egg Rolls & Egg Creams block party is adding quite a twist this year, bringing together not only the Jewish and Chinese communities of the Lower East Side but also the Puerto Rican community. Taking place June 7, the festival will include food and drink, live music (klezmer, salsa, bomba, and plena) and dance, history, culture, and lots more. Among the highlights of the festival are the kosher egg creams and egg rolls — and new this year, empanadas — as well as yarmulke and challah workshops, tea ceremonies, Yiddish, Mandarin, and Spanish lessons, Hebrew and Chinese calligraphy classes, mah jongg, cantorial songs, Peking Opera, Chinese and Puerto Rican mask making, face painting, and free tours of the wonderfully renovated Eldridge St. Synagogue, which boasts the East Window designed by Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans. In past years, the festival has included performances by the Chinatown Senior Center Folk Orchestra, Qi Shu Fang’s Peking Opera, the Shashmaqam Bukharan Jewish Cultural Group, Ray Muziker Klezmer Ensemble, and Cantor Eric Freeman, some of whom will be back again for this year’s multicultural celebration.