this week in dance

CULTUREMART 2014

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
January 28 – February 9, $15
212-647-0202
www.here.org

The January performance festival season might be winding down, but HERE’s annual CULTUREMART is just getting under way. From January 28 to February 9, the downtown arts organization will present thirteen multidisciplinary workshop productions from current and former participants in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), with all tickets only $15. The festival kicks off January 28-29 with Bora Yoon’s Sunken Cathedral, a multimedia journey through several rooms, exploring the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Matt Marks and Paul Peers’s Mata Hari, an opera-theater piece about the WWI spy’s last month, is paired with mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn’s Science Fair, which is told through songs, slides, and live experiments. In Restless Next, choreographer Rebecca Davis examines the body’s ability to change. Joseph Silovsky uses video, oratory, robotics, and puppetry to relate the story of Sacco and Vanzetti in Send for the Million Men. Stefan Weisman and David Cote’s multimedia opera of James Hurst’s The Scarlet Ibis will be stripped down to a concert version consisting of the piano and vocal score; at two hours and fifteen minutes, it’s the longest show of the festival. (Most run between twenty and sixty minutes.)

Soomi Kim’s CHANG(E) examines the performance artist and political activist Kathy Change’s bizarre end (photo by Hunter Canning)

Soomi Kim and Mei-Yin Ng’s Chang(e), a dance-theater work about controversial performance artist Kathy Change, shares a bill with Ng’s Lost Property Unit, which deals with surveillance and robotics. Dancer-choreographer Laura Peterson is back with The Futurist, a collaboration with the very busy composer Joe Diebes that uses sound and movement to investigate what lies ahead. In Genet Porno, Yvan Greenberg and Laboratory Theater update Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers into a contemporary tale about porn and a gay prostitute. Leyna Marika Papach’s opera/movement-theater piece Glass Mouth (Part 2) delves into the nature of personal identity, with visuals by Jerry Smith Jr. CULTUREMART concludes with LEIMAY’s Frantic Beauty, in which dancer choreographer Ximena Garcia and video installation artist Shige Moriya look at dreams and desires, and Michael Bodel’s there are caves and attics, which uses Michel Foucault’s Corps Utopique to probe the concept of place. As usual, CULTUREMART provides a potpourri of intimate, experimental works from creators who are willing to take chances while both entertaining and challenging audiences.

TWI-NY TALK: JODY OBERFELDER

JODY OBERFELDER PROJECTS — 4CHAMBERS: A SENSORIAL JOURNEY INTO THE HUMAN HEART
Arts@Renaissance, Garden Level
2 Kingsland Ave. at Maspeth Ave., Greenpoint
January 21 – March 22, $60 before February 1, $75 after, Thursdays at 6:30 & 8:00, Fridays & Saturdays at 7:00 & 8:30
866-811-4111
www.jodyoberfelder.com
www.renaissancenbk.org

Last summer, New York-based choreographer, director, and filmmaker Jody Oberfelder presented 4CHAMBERS on Governors Island, an immersive journey inside the human heart in which six dancers led twelve audience members through an abandoned, specially renovated former officer’s house, each room representing another chamber, incorporating film, interactive video, factual information, and plenty of physical contact. “You will be touched by the performers, both literally and figuratively,” we wrote back in July. Although it was her first site-specific installation piece, 4CHAMBERS is not the first time Oberfelder has delved into the nature of the human heart; she previously examined the blood-pumping, life-giving organ in 2012’s Throb. For more than two decades, Jody Oberfelder Projects has been addressing such emotions as love and the search for social identity in such works as LineAge, The Title Comes Last, Approaching Climax, and Sung Heroes. Oberfelder is now bringing back 4CHAMBERS, restaging the sixty-minute piece at Arts@Renaissance in Greenpoint, in a building that previously was home to, appropriately enough, a hospital. A few days before opening night — the show runs Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from January 23 to March 22, with bonus performances January 21-22 — Oberfelder discussed transformation, collaborating with her husband, people’s hunger for real experience, and more.

twi-ny: 4CHAMBERS was initially performed on a hot and sweaty summer weekend on Governors Island, and now it will be performed in what so far has been a pretty cold winter. Even though the performance takes place inside, do you think the weather will have any impact on the audience and dancers? Cold and heat do have very different effects on the heart.

Jody Oberfelder: On Governors Island, people came in from an outside temperature of about 98.6, matching their actual body temperature. There was something beautiful about this, since our piece has so much to do with getting under the skin, an internal experience. Thankfully, at Arts@Renaissance, we have our thermostat set to a comfy 72 degrees. It’s perfect. This time people will venture out from cold, nasty weather and to an inside space that is warm and breathing and atmospheric.

twi-ny: How did you find this new space in Brooklyn?

Jody Oberfelder: I’d seen Then She Fell at Arts@Renaissance in fall of 2012. The creators, Third Rail, did a tremendous job of transforming the space as a trip down the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole. A@R has a competitive open call for their three-month residencies. Lo and behold, my project was selected.

It was clearly a raw space with potential. After several site visits with my video collaborator, Jason Bahling, lighting designer, Kryssy Wright, set designer, Juergen Riehm, and a couple of dancers (Mary Madsen and Mercedes Searer), we found where each of our four chambers could live, figured out how to create passageways that would need to be created for arteries and veins, etc., and drew up a plan of how to site this particular work. At the time of our application, we’d not yet been given the Governors Island opportunity. Our first rendering was in an old officer’s house, with built-in metaphors of house as heart — with plumbing, walls, and corridors — whereas A@R is a former hospital.

Sited work is particular. It’s not like transplanting a proscenium work to a stage where you adjust the lights and wings and find out how many steps to the green room. We have transformed the entire floor level to a labyrinthian sensorial journey.

Jody Oberfelder explores the human heart in immersive site-specific dance piece (photo by Ian Douglas)

twi-ny: Did you have to make significant changes to the space to incorporate the main themes of the show, or did you make any changes in the performance to mold it to the space?

Jody Oberfelder: One of the challenges was to carve out the flow of traffic. We conceptualized this piece as a moving in one direction like the flow of blood, through four chambers. And each room has different needs in terms of architecture, lighting, technology, and space. The floor was too hard for the performers to really go for it, so we built a custom sprung floor and created specialized wall space. (I don’t want to give too much away.)

twi-ny: You mentioned your set designer, architect Juergen Riehm, who is also your husband. What is the collaboration process like between the two of you? Is it possible to separate the professional from the personal?

Jody Oberfelder: Fun question. Let’s just say we have a rule. We set up appointments to talk with each other about the piece. Otherwise I’d be bugging him first thing in the morning, at every meal, etc. There is crossover, of course. It’s great to have a production stage manager (Katie Houff) as intermediary. On the upside, Juergen Riehm knows me, and is very sensitive to my needs, won’t let me go the way of kitsch, or schlocky, catches my abundant imagination and helps me hone.

Thankfully, there are other key collaborators. Video artist Jason Bahling has been part of this piece almost from conception. And visual elements figure in prominently. Sound is now a major factor — since Governors Island, Sean Hagerty has come in and worked some magic.

twi-ny: On Governors Island, the performers did multiple shows in one day. Will some of the dancers again be doing back-to-back shows? The performance is extremely physical. Is there any special training involved?

Jody Oberfelder: The dancers do two shows a night. Physically, dancers are athletic and endurance poses no problem. I look for dancers who are unique, not cookie cutter, whose “technique” is present and ever felt. What takes energy in 4CHAMBERS is a discreet attention to audience members. It’s like being in a relationship for a night. The ratio is 1:2. We call the performers “docents” — we guide the audience, as a museum docent might, and encourage audience members to be in their bodies — to connect. That’s an evening of intensity.

twi-ny: There is a lot of interaction between those “docents” and the audience members, whom you refer to as “guests,” including a lot of touching. Were there any surprises for you regarding how that relationship between guest and performer played out on Governors Island?

Jody Oberfelder: We’ve found that people are hungry for real experiences. That putting away multitasking for an hour and slipping into a present dilated moment is something we all are craving. The performers are instructed to try to meet guests where they are and guide. We don’t have a “toolbox” of techniques for this but have practiced and learned each guest is different. It’s individual. The most intellectual people living in their heads also have a body under their necks, and once you crack that code, the rest is porous and smooth sailing. Yes, some guests are self-conscious at first, but that goes away. That’s why we’ve chosen to do it this intimately. There are no outside voyeurs. It’s intimate.

twi-ny: What’s the most significant thing you’ve learned about the human heart during the whole 4CHAMBERS project?

Jody Oberfelder: Everybody has a human heart. The body is a container for this vital organ. We often do a drive-by of living, plow through life, with our heart doing its job of keeping us alive. I’ve learned that the heart and the mind work together. 4CHAMBERS gives people a sense of being alive.

4CHAMBERS runs January 21 – March 22 at Arts@Renaissance and is performed by Megan Bascom, Zachary Denison, Rayvawn Johnson, Joey Kipp, Mary Madsen, Shane Rutkowski, Mercedes Searer, Lonnie Poupard Jr, and Lily Bo Shapiro, with set design by Juergen Riehm, lighting by Kryssy Wright, sound by Sean Hagerty, and music by Matt McBane, Richard Einhorn, and Jonathan Melville Pratt. Film and video feature appearances by Ishmael Houston-Jones, Edward Einhorn, Dr. Wendy A. Suzuki, Dr. André A. Fenton, Sarah Trignano, Lonnie Poupard Jr, Christina Noel Reaves, Jake Szczypek, and Jessica Weiss.

BALLETNEXT: THREE WORKS BY BRIAN REEDER

Michele Wiles and Jens Weber will perform in an updated version of Brian Reeder’s PICNIC as part of BalletNext season at NYLA this week (photo by Nisian Hughes)

SURMISABLE UNITS / DIFFERENT HOMES / PICNIC
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
January 14-18, $15-$30
212-691-6500
www.newyorklivearts.org
www.balletnext.com

Founded in 2011 by longtime ABT dancer Michele Wiles, BalletNext is a platform for the Baltimore-born Wiles to collaborate with a wide range of dancers, choreographers, and musicians, encouraging risk-taking as the company explores the future of classical ballet. From January 14 to 18, BalletNext will be at New York Live Arts, presenting three works choreographed by former NYCB and ABT dancer Brian Reeder. The world premiere of Surmisable Units, set to Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase,” opens with a solo by Wiles, who is then joined by the rest of the company. In the New York premiere of Different Homes, Wiles and former Ballet Nacional de Monte Carlo principal Jens Weber perform a pas de deux to music by Benjamin Britten, their hands never touching. The program also includes an updated version of the 2012 work Picnic, based on Peter Weir’s 1975 film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, about young girls who go missing during a school outing in Australia; the piece features Edwardian costumes and music by Dmitri Shostakovich. The music to all three works will be performed live by the BalletNext Ensemble, led by Israeli cellist Elad Kabilio and featuring Juilliard pianist Ben Laude; the well-pedigreed company consists of Wiles, Weber, former NYCB dancer Kaitlyn Gilliland, NYBT principal Steven Melendez, former Morphoses dancer Sarah Atkins, BalletNext dancer Tiffany Mangulabnan, and Manhattan Youth Ballet alumna Brittany Cioce, now a BalletNext apprentice.

AMERICAN REALNESS: COMMENTARY=NOT THING

Juliana F. May’s revealing COMMENTARY=NOT THING returns for American Realness festival (photo by Alex Escalante)

JULIANA F. MAY / MAYDANCE: COMMENTARY=not thing
Abrons Arts Center Playhouse
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Through January 13, $20
212-598-0400
www.americanrealness.com
www.maydance.org

For the American Realness festival, Juliana F. May and her MAYDANCE company are restaging Commentary=not thing, a daring, intimate hour-long piece that debuted at New York Live Arts in February 2013. In certain ways a follow-up to February 2011’s Gutter Gate, Commentary=not thing explores interpersonal communication through speech and the body and, like Gutter Gate, features a bold dose of nudity. With the audience sitting in three rows on two sides of the stage at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse — get there early if it matters whether you sit on a chair, a stool, or on the floor — Benjamin Asriel, Tanya Epstein, and Kayvon Pourazar enter fully clothed and proceed to walk and run around the space with a heavy concentration of spinning and arm movement. They occasionally make guttural noises or shout out snippets of text that are repeated by Epstein and Pourazar, the former demanding to know what’s happening because he shouts that the latter is his wife. (The spoken text, delivered at a variety of volumes and occasionally while breathing inward, is a collaboration between May and original dancers Asriel, Pourazar, and Maggie Thom.) Soon Asriel brings out some wooden tables and chairs — the only other objects on Brad Kisicki’s spare set are three speakers hanging at different levels from the ceiling — clothes come off, and Pourazar and Epstein continue to argue while Asriel coolly stays out of it. The piece then arrives at its centerpoint, a thrilling series of circles around the stage in which the dancers form an ever-changing chain, reaching out and touching the person in front of and behind them, then switching places like a very adult take on the childhood game of leapfrog. The moves, which involve, among other things, the cupping of the others’ genitals two at a time, are not as shocking or erotic as one might expect but rather feel natural as the dancers abstractly and repetitively explore the human body. Costumer Reid Bartelme’s contemporary clothing continues to come on and off as the dancers are joined by Chris Seeds’s electronic score. All three dancers give powerful performances; Asriel in particular seems to have become the go-to guy when it comes to nudity, as he has previously taken it all off for John Jasperse’s Fort Blossom Revisited at NYLA in 2012 as well as for Gutter Gate. With Commentary=not thing, May has created a piece that is not about nudity itself but more about everything that surrounds it — from such emotions as love, shame, and guilt to societal, religious, and performance taboos and the artistic expression of personal and individual freedom.

DANCE GOTHAM 2014

Ronald K. Brown’s powerful TORCH is part of Dance Gotham festival at NYU’s Skirball Center (photo by Ayodele Casel)

New York University, Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl. at Washington Square South)
January 10-12, $18
212-352-3101
www.focusdance.us
www.nyuskirball.org

Part of Focus, the annual celebration of American dance, the seventh edition of Dance Gotham moves into the NYU Skirball Center this weekend, boasting an all-star lineup curated by American Dance Festival director Jodee Nimerichter. The January 10 program consists of the multimedia, unconventional The Very Unlikeliness (I’m Going to KILL You!) by Chris Yon (makes / dances), Stephen Petronio Company’s bold and beautiful Like Lazarus Did (LLD), Rosie Herrera Dance Theater’s immersive food-related Dining Alone, and Camille A. Brown & Dancers’ New Second Line, which was inspired by Hurricane Katrina. Saturday night brings together Paul Taylor 2’s Arden Court, which recently joined the Alvin Ailey repertoire; Adele Myers and Dancers’ Einstein’s Happiest Thought, which examines different usages of the word “fall,” particularly regarding imbalance; Gallim Dance’s Fold Here, Andrea Miller’s piece incorporating cardboard boxes; and Ronald K. Brown/Evidence’s Torch, a touching tribute to the life and memory of former Brown student Beth Young, who passed away in January 2012. And January 12 features David Dorfman Dance’s Come, and Back Again, about messiness, family, and love; Hubbard Street 2’s By the Skin of My Teeth, choreographed by Gregory Dolbashian; Dušan Týnek Dance Theatre’s mysterious Transparent Walls; and preview excerpts from LeeSaar the Company’s latest work, Princes Crocodile.

AMERICAN REALNESS 2014

Adrienne Truscott moves from her day job at the Kitchen to live performance at Abrons Arts Center in …TOO FREEDOM…

Abrons Arts Center and other venues
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 9-19, $20
212-598-0400
www.americanrealness.com
www.abronsartscenter.org

January in New York City is a veritable feast of live performance festivals, including PS 122’s Coil, the Public’s Under the Radar, Here’s Prototype, and Winter Jazzfest. Over at Abrons Art Center, American Realness will be celebrating its fifth anniversary with seventeen new movement-based shows and encore presentations as well as several off-site events. Tina Satter’s House of Dance (also part of Coil) follows a tense tap-dance competition. Ishmael Houston-Jones and Emily Wexler team up for the world premiere of 13 Love Songs: dot dot dot, which involves deconstructing romantic lyrics by Bryan Adams, Mary J. Blige, Ja Rule, Stephen Merritt, Nina Simone, Madonna, and others. Miguel Gutierrez explores gay sex and lost love in the intimate myendlesslove. Eleanor Bauer combines text, music, and movement in Midday and Eternity (The Time Piece); she’ll also lead the “Dancing, not the Dancer” class and host the anything goes Bauer Hour on January 19. Choreographer Juliana F. May and dancers Benjamin Asriel, Talya Epstein, and Kayvon Pourazar explore the physical and emotional naked body in Commentary=not thing. The Kitchen house manager Adrienne Truscott delves into day jobs and artistic creativity in . . . Too Freedom . . . , which also features Neal Medlyn, Gillian Walsh, Laura Sheedy, and Mickey Mahar. Lucy Sexton (the Factress), Anne Iobst (the Naked Lady), Scott Heron, and DANCENOISE join forces for Prodigal Heroes: An Evening of Legendary New York. Moriah Evans and Sarah Beth Percival play with human-connection tropes in Out of and Into (8/8): Stuff. Medlyn’s King concludes his seven-part foray into iconic stars, this time taking on Michael Jackson. And Melinda Ring’s Forgetful Snow and Roseanne Spradlin’s Indelible Disappearance — A Thought not a Title will be presented together for free on January 12.

Moriah Evans and Sarah Beth Percival team up in OUT OF AND INTO (8/8): STUFF for American Realness festival

Also on the schedule are Adam Linder’s Cult to the Built on What, Michelle Boulé’s Wonder (Boulé will also lead a “Persona & Performance” class on January 17), Rebecca Patek’s ineter(a)nal f/ear, Jillian Peña’s Polly Pocket, and Dana Michel’s Yellow Towel. The festival heads to MoMA PS1 on January 10-12 for Mårten Spångberg’s four-and-a-half-hour La Substance, but in English and to MoMA’s main Midtown location on January 15-16 for Eszter Salamon’s Dance for Nothing, based on John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing. In addition, there will be art exhibits throughout Abrons (Sarah Maxfield’s “Nonlinear Lineage: Over/Heard,” Ian Douglas’s “Instant Realness,” Medlyn and Fawn Krieger’s “The POP-MEDLYN Hall of Fame,” and Ann Liv Young’s interactive “Sherry Art Fair”), and Coil, Under the Radar, Prototype, and American Realness will be copresenting free live concerts every night from January 9 to 19 in the Lounge at the Public Theater, including Invincible, Christeene, Ethan Lipton, Heather Christian & the Arbonauts, Sky-Pony, Timur and the Dime Museum, the Middle Church Jerriesse Johnson Gospel Choir, M.A.K.U. Sound System, DJ Acidophilus, and Nick Hallett, Space Palace, and Woahmone DJs.

UNDER THE RADAR 2014

The Public Theater and other venues
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 8-19, $20-$28 (UTR Packs $75 for five shows)
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com

The tenth edition of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is another diverse collection of unique and unusual international theatrical productions, roundtable discussions, and free live music, from the strange to the familiar, the offbeat to the downright impossible to describe. Among the sixteen shows, most of which take place at the Public, are 600 Highwaymen’s The Record, a dance-theater work that brings together a roomful of strangers to comment on the relationship between performer and audience; John Hodgman’s one-man piece, I Stole Your Dad, in which the Daily Show “resident expert” shares intimate, personal stories about his family and technology while baring himself onstage; psychiatrist Kuro Tanino and his Niwa Gekidan Penino company’s The Room Nobody Knows (at Japan Society), about two brothers getting ready for the older one’s birthday party; Andrew Ondrejcak’s Feast, in which a king and his court (starring Reg E. Cathey) have a farewell dinner as Babylon collapses; and the American premiere of hip-hopper Kate Tempest and Battersea Arts Centre’s Brand New Ancients (at St. Ann’s Warehouse), a multidisciplinary show about everyday life in a changing world. Also on the roster is Sacred Stories, Toshi Reagon’s thirtieth annual birthday celebration with special guests; Roger Guenveur Smith’s one-man improvisation, Rodney King; a reimagining of Sekou Sundiata’s blessing the boats with Mike Ladd, Will Power, and Carl Hancock Rux; Cie. Philippe Saire’s Black Out (at La MaMa), Edgar Oliver’s Helen and Edgar, Lola Arias’s El Año en que nací / The year I was born (at La MaMa), SKaGeN’s BigMouth, tg STAN’s JDX — a public enemy, Sean Edward Lewis’s work-in-progress Frankenstein (at the Freeman Space), excerpts from ANIMALS’ The Baroness Is the Future, and Daniel Fish’s Eternal, the last three also part of the Incoming! Festival within a Festival.

Kate Tempest will rap about the state of the world in BRAND NEW ANCIENTS (photo by Christine Hardinge)

In addition, there will be numerous postshow talkbacks, a pair of workshops with Sara De Roo and Jolente De Keersmaker of tg STAN on January 10-11, four noon Culturebot conversations January 11-12 and 18-19, and Coil, Under the Radar, Prototype, and American Realness have joined forces to present free live concerts every night from January 9 to 19 in the Lounge at the Public, including Invincible, Christeene, Ethan Lipton, Heather Christian & the Arbonauts, Sky-Pony, Timur and the Dime Museum, the Middle Church Jerriesse Johnson Gospel Choir, M.A.K.U. Sound System, DJ Acidophilus, and Nick Hallett, Space Palace, and Woahmone DJs.