this week in dance

SUMMER STREETS 2014

Park Ave. & 72nd St. to Foley Square
Saturday, August 2, 9, 16, free, 7:00 am – 1:00 pm
www.nyc.gov

Now in its fifth year, Summer Streets takes place the next three Saturday mornings, as Park Ave. will be closed to vehicular traffic from 72nd St. to Foley Square and the Brooklyn Bridge from 7:00 am to 1:00 pm, encouraging people to walk, run, jog, blade, skate, and bike down the famous thoroughfare, getting exercise and enjoying the great outdoors without car exhaust, speeding taxis, and slow-moving buses. There are five rest stops along the route (Uptown at 52nd St., Midtown at 25th, Astor Pl. at Lafayette St., SoHo at Spring & Lafayette, and Foley Square at Duane & Centre), where people can stop for some food and drink, live performances, fitness classes, site-specific art installations, dog walks, bicycle and parkour workshops, ziplining, wall climbing, and other activities, all of which are free. Below are only some of the many highlights.

August 2, 9, 16
Cigna Recovery Zone classes: Bendable Body (7:00), Sunrise Salutations (7:30), Body Art (8:00), Balanced Body Yoga (8:30), Yoga Unplugged (9:00), Brazilian Burn n’ Firm Pilates (9:30), Pon De Flo (10:00), Ab Attack (10:30), Retro-Robics (11:00), Hard Knocks (11:30), Masala Bhangra (12 noon), Astor Place Rest Stop

“The Course of Emotions: A mini-golf experience by Risa Puno,” nine-hole miniature golf course in which each hole represents a different emotion, Uptown Rest Stop, 7:00 am – 1:00 pm

“Dive by Jana Winderen,” site-specific sound installation turning Park Ave. Tunnel into an underwater environment, line begins at Park Ave. & 32nd St., 7:00 am – 12:30 pm

August 2
Live music by the Poor Cousins (9:30), Yaz Band (10:00), Mecca Bodega (10:30), Robert Anderson Band (11:00), Uptown Rest Stop

Live performances by Annabella Gonzalez Dance Theatre (10:00), Salsa NY (11:00), Underground Horns (11:30), NY Laughs (12 noon), Feraba (12:30), Foley Square Rest Stop

“Matt Postal, Midtown Modern Tour,” two-hour MAS tour, Uptown Rest Stop, northwest corner of 52nd St. & Park Ave., 10:30

Food demos and talks by Veggiecation (10:30), Seeds in the Middle (10:50), Omowale Adewale (11:10), Jenne Claiborne the Nourishing Vegan (11:25), Creative Kitchen (11:45), Asphalt Green (12:07), Midtown Rest Stop

“Trumpet City: Park Avenue by Craig Shepard,” ninety-one trumpeters join musician Craig Shepard, lining up between 45th & 72nd Sts. on Park Ave., playing a one-hour piece that interacts with such natural sounds as traffic, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm

August 9
Live performances by Salieu Suso and Malang Jobateh (9:00), Caty Grier: NYC Subway Girl (9:30), Leah Coloff (10:00), TAANY Santaizi Troupe (10:30), Charly and Margaux (11:00), Afrikumba (11:30), Karikatura (12 noon), Uptown Rest Stop

Live performances by Salsa NY (10:00), Harmony Program (10:30), Cherub Improv (11:00), Improv 4 Kids (12 noon), Foley Square Rest Stop

Abolitionist Walking Tour, African Burial Ground, National Park Service tour, Foley Square Rest Stop, southwest corner of Duane & Lafayette Sts., 10:00 (also August 16 at 10:00 and 12 noon)

“Peter Laskowich, New York City: A Gateway,” two-hour MAS tour, Foley Square Rest Stop, southwest corner of Duane & Lafayette Sts., 10:00

“Tilt Brass by Chris McIntyre,” interactive sound installation using infrared technology and live trombones, trumpets, and drums, Foley Square Rest Stop, 10:30 – 1:00

Food demos and talks by Sally Graves the Supermarket Fairy (10:30), Omowale Adewale (11:10), Seeds in the Middle (11:25), Taza Chocolate (11:45), Midtown Rest Stop

August 16
“My (Our) Way by Nick Tobler,” interactive musical event in which Tobler will hand out between fifty and a hundred music boxes for a mass performance of “My Way,” Astor Place Rest Stop, 8:00 and 10:30

Live performances by Seya (10:00), Exit 12 (10:30), Salsa NY (11:00), Darrah Carr (12 noon), Foley Square Rest Stop

Food demos and talks by Yoli Ouiya (10:12), Creative Kitchen (10:30), Omowale Adewale (10:50), Chris Santos of Morningstar Farms (11:10), Min Liao from Culinary (11:45), and Seeds in the Middle (12:07), Midtown Rest Stop

Live performances by Matt Pana (10:30), Yung-Li Dance Company (11:00), the Vocalists (11:30), Cupcake Ladies Productions comedy wrestling (12 noon), Uptown Rest Stop

“Judy Richeimer, Public Art in New York’s Civic Center,” two-hour MAS tour, Foley Square Rest Stop, southwest corner of Duane & Lafayette Sts., 11:00

FIRST SATURDAYS: CARIBBEAN COMMUNITY

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, August 2, free, 5:00 – 11:00 ($10 discounted admission to “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum starts getting ready for the annual West Indian American Day Carnival on Labor Day with a Caribbean-themed First Saturdays program on August 2. There will be live music from the Crossfire Street Orchestra, Heritage O.P., Melanie Charles, and Request Band (RQB), a movement workshop with Candace Thompson, screenings of Hannah Roodman’s Crown Heights-set documentary 2×1 and Dalton Narine’s Mas Man, a woven-fish arts workshop, a Caribbean-inspired fashion show, and Uraga storytelling with James Lovell. In addition, you can check out a quartet of exhibitions about art and activism: “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” (which closes August 10), “Swoon: Submerged Motherlands” (which closes August 24), “Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Works, 1963–74,” and “Revolution! Works from the Black Arts Movement.”

HARLEM WEEK: A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM

U.S. Grant National Memorial Park
West 122nd St. at Riverside Dr.
Sunday, July 27, free, 12 noon – 8:30 pm
Harlem Week continues in multiple locations through August 24
877-427-5364
www.harlemweek.com

On Sunday, July 27, “A Great Day in Harlem” kicks off the annual Harlem Week festivities, a month of free events including live music, film screenings, community fairs, a college expo, and more. This year’s theme is “Forever Harlem: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” honoring the past, present, and future of this historic part of Manhattan. The event, inspired by Art Kane’s legendary 1958 photo of fifty-seven jazz musicians, takes place in U.S. Grant National Memorial Park, featuring a cultural showcase with music and dance at 1:00, a gospel caravan with Bishop Hezekiah Walker and others at 3:00, and a fashion fusion showcase at 4:30, followed by “A Concert under the Stars,” which this year salutes Motown and the Philly sound, with appearances by members of the cast of Motown: The Musical, Harold Melvin’s Blue Notes, and special guests. Harlem Week continues through August 24 with such other events as the Dance Theatre of Harlem Street Festival on August 9; the Tri-State Jr. Tennis Classic August 14-17; “Summer in the City” on August 16 with the NYC Children’s Festival, Harlem Honey & Bears, the Historic Black College Fair & Expo, Dancing in the Street, the Fashion Flava Show, the Uptown Saturday Nite party, and ImageNation’s Outdoor Film Festival; “Harlem Day” on August 17 with the Upper Manhattan Auto Show, the NY City Health Village, the Upper Manhattan Small Business Expo & Fair, day two of the NYC Children’s Festival, and three stages of music, dance, spoken word, fashion, and more; the Percy Sutton Harlem 5K Run/NYC Health Walk-a-Thon for Peace in Our Communities on August 23; Golden Hoops in Rucker Park on August 23; and the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival on August 23-24.

CEDAR LAB

Five Cedar Lake dancers will present new choreographic works as part of new Cedar Lab initiative

Cedar Lake Theater
547 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday, July 29, and Wednesday, July 30, free, 7:00 & 8:30
www.cedarlakedance.com

In the last few odd-numbered years, Chelsea-based Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has presented a summer intensive where dance students work with the sixteen-member company to create an immersive 360° installation in which the performance reaches into a variety of physical spaces. This summer, recently promoted artistic director Alexandra Damiani has created Cedar Lab, an initiative in which five of the dancers will choreograph new pieces; the works-in-progress will be unveiled to the public for free July 29-30. “As we reach our ten-year anniversary, this is an opportune time for Cedar Lake to consider where we would like to go in the next decade,” Damiani, who was ballet master under pervious artistic director Benoit-Swan Pouffer, said in a statement. “By investing in the talent of our dancers, who have time and again proven themselves to be insatiably gifted individuals, I hope that Cedar Lab will open new creative doors for our dancers and reinforce our position as a leading voice in the creation and performance of contemporary dance.” The five dancers — Jon Bond (The Devil Was Me), Navarra Novy-Williams (three solos for women), Matthew Rich (dance film), Joaquim de Santana (gender-defying duet), and Vânia Doutel Vaz (seven dancers exploring communication) — will not just choreograph the pieces but work with lighting, set and costume design, and music and sound to get the full experience. The shows will take place at 7:00 and 8:30; admission is free, first come, first served.

HOT! FESTIVAL: KIDNAP ME

Tyler Ashley’s KIDNAP ME premieres July 21 at the HOT! Festival at Dixon Place (photo by Catherine Sun)

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street
Monday, July 21, $12-$15, 7:30
Festival continues through August 5
www.dixonplace.org
www.tylerashleyinfo.tumblr.com

Things are liable to get even hotter when Tyler Ashley premieres his latest work, Kidnap Me, at the twenty-third annual HOT! Festival: The NYC Celebration of Queer Culture. Last summer, the Brooklyn-based choreographer and dancer shed his clothes for Swadhisthana: The Event at NYPAC; the multidisciplinary genderqueer artist has also presented pieces on the High Line and Times Square while also dancing with STREB, Walter Dundervill, and others. His first evening-length work, the ninety-minute Kidnap Me, is a durational performance, inspired by Béla Tarr’s 2011 film The Turin Horse and the music of the late African American composer and performer Julius Eastman, that examines hunger, family, and stardom, focusing on the creative process. In his artist statement for New York Live Arts, Ashley explains, “I conduct experiments in desire, endurance, vulnerability, and determination by creating image-based dances inspired by sport, nightlife, physical labor, and excessiveness. . . . I work to push myself closer to the audience, challenging what they may expect and unsettling the performance space. I exploit the chaos present in the search for resolution.” Kidnap Me premieres July 21 at Dixon Place and will be performed by Ashley, Aranzazu Araujo, Sarah McSherry, Diego Montoya, Shane O’Neill, Rakia Seaborn, and Gillian Walsh. HOT! continues at Dixon Place through August 5 with such other programs as Lucas Brooks’s Cootie Catcher, Vincent Caruso’s Clueless, Joe Castle Baker’s Just Let Go, Anna/Kate’s Fear City / Fun City, Jack Feldstein’s Three Months with Pook, and J. Stephen Brantley’s Chicken-Fried Ciccone: A Twangy True Tale of Transformation.

CELEBRATE BROOKLYN! SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS

Shen Wei Dance Arts will perform MAP and more in free Celebrate Brooklyn show in Prospect Park on July 17

Prospect Park Bandshell
Prospect Park West & Ninth St.
Wednesday, July 17, free (suggested donation $3), 7:00
www.bricartsmedia.org
www.shenweidancearts.org

MacArthur Genius Shen Wei has led his New York City–based dance troupe into a wide range of locations since founding Shen Wei Dance Arts in 1995; the company has performed at the Park Avenue Armory, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Venice Biennale, and the Collezione Maramotti gallery in Italy, and the Chinese-born Shen was the lead choreographer for the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. On July 17, SWDA will take the stage at the Prospect Park Bandshell as part of the annual free Celebrate Brooklyn! festival. The company will perform the 2005 piece Map, a physically aggressive work about inner and outer movement, set to Steve Reich’s “The Desert Music” and featuring choreography, costumes, visual design, and set design by the multidisciplinary Shen. Also on the program is the “Zero-12” solo from last year’s Collective Measures, a physically aggressive work about isolation, set to music by Daniel Burke, with video projections by Shen, who designed the costumes with Austin Scarlett and the lighting with Matthew F. Lewandowski II. Shen’s works are always beautifully elegant, with stark, stunning costumes, intelligent music choices, and lovely movement vocabulary filled with unexpected treats, as evidenced by such presentations as Folding, Still Moving, Behind Resonance, and Rite of Spring.

WARM UP 2014 / HY-FI BY THE LIVING

Expect major crowds at weekly MoMA PS1 Warm Up dance party (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Warm Up: Saturdays through September 6, $18-$20, 3:00 – 9:00
“Hy-Fi”: Thursday – Monday through September 7, suggested admission $10 (free with paid MoMA ticket within fourteen days except during Warm Up), 12 noon – 6:00
718-784-2084
www.momaps1.org/warmup
www.momaps1.org/yap

The summer’s sweatiest dance party takes places every Saturday in Long Island City, as thousands of people gather in MoMA PS1’s courtyard for the weekly Warm Up celebration. Now in its seventeenth year, Warm Up features an international roster of prominent DJs and live performances on Saturdays from 3:00 to 9:00 on the dance floor located between the winning Young Architects Program urban design installation in the courtyard and the entrance to the old school building that became an arena for cutting-edge art back in 1971. During Warm Up, M. Wells Dinette serves alcoholic drinks indoors and hot food and cold drinks outdoors, including fried chicken, grilled mackerel yellow bean salad, a grilled veal heart hero, and maple water. On Saturdays, the exhibitions on the second and third floors close at 3:00, but the first-floor and basement shows (“Maria Lassnig,” “Korakrit Arunanondchai,” “Gavin Kenyon: Reliquary Void”) continue through 6:00. This week boasts one of the best lineups of the summer, with DJ sets by Mister Saturday Night (Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter) and Auntie Flo and live music by Cibo Matto, Archie Pelago, and Gabriel Garzón Montano; July 19 brings together Robert Hood, Objekt, Rrose, Vatican Shadow, Conatiner, and Young Male, while July 26 sees Cashmere Cat, Total Freedom, GoldLink, UNiiQU3, and Suicideyear take the stage at the top of the steps, joined by a rotating series of installations by CONFETTISYSTEM, Nightwood, the Principals, and others. Tickets are available for $18 in advance and $20 at the door; be prepared for some long lines the later you go. It’s incredibly easy to get to MoMA PS1, which is the third stop on the 7 from Grand Central. Once you get off the train, just follow the thumping music, which reverberates throughout the neighborhood.

Environmentally friendly organic towers rise in MoMA PS1 courtyard (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Next to the Warm Up area, in the center of the courtyard, stands “Hy-Fi,” the winner of MoMA PS1’s fifteenth annual Young Architects Program. Created by New York-based firm the Living headed by 2013 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow David Benjamin, the three conjoined towers were made using nearly 100% fully compostable and environmentally sustainable biological technologies in collaboration with Ecovative, 3M, Advanced Metal Coatings, Shabd Simon-Alexander and Audrey Louisere, Build It Green Compost, Brooklyn Digital Foundry, Columbia University (where Benjamin is an assistant professor in the Living Architecture Lab), and others. “Hy-Fi” contains approximately ten thousand remarkably light handmade bricks consisting of such organic waste materials as cornstalks and mushroom mycelium, held together by mortar. The shiny, glittering bricks at the top are actually the molds in which the rest of the bricks were grown. (There are also several vertical wooden beams that hold up the entryways, primarily as protection against strong winds and storms, which came in handy last week.) The small gaps between some of the bricks are strictly artistic, resulting in streams of sunlight and shadows. Construction required no energy (except for human) and almost zero carbon emissions; when the installation, which also provides much-needed cooling, is brought down after September 7, the entire structure will be recycled. Unfortunately, because of the size and unpredictability of the crowds during Warm Up, on Saturdays visitors are not allowed inside the twisting structure, which was influenced by the designs of Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí, but you can take a break in the small pool and sit in other circular areas while drinking wine, beer, and other cocktails. The Living, which was founded in 2006 with “the mission of creating the architecture of the future,” won the YAP commission this year over Collective-LOK, LAMAS, Pita + Bloom, and Fake Industries Architectural Agonism; you can currently see an exhibition on all five submissions, as well as finalists from similar competitions in Italy, Chile, and South Korea, at MoMA’s midtown location.