this week in dance

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.

FOCUS 2014: FOCUS DANCE

Keely Garfield’s TWIN PINES is part of Focus Dance at the Joyce

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 7-12, $10-$39
212-242-0800
www.focusdance.us
www.joyce.org

The third edition of Focus Dance, the annual celebration of American movement-based art, will take place January 7-12 with four programs presented by the Joyce Theater in conjunction with Gotham Arts Exchange. Curated by Laurie Uprichard, each performance runs between eighty-five and one hundred minutes and features two U.S.-based companies, beginning January 7 with Vicky Shick and Dancers’ Everything You See and doug elkins choreography, etc.’s Scott, Queen of Marys (also January 12). Morgan Thorson’s The Thing of It Is and Keely Garfield Dance’s Twin Pines (part real, part arboreal) double up on January 8 and 11, while Yvonne Rainer and Group’s Assisted Living: Do You Have Any Money? and Urban Bush Women’s Dark Swan team up on January 9 and 12. The final program pairs Jean Butler’s Hurry with Mark Haim Dance and Theater’s This Land Is Your Land. The pieces are a mix of old and new works and offer a concise yet broad look at the current American dance scene.

COIL 2014

Multiple venues
January 3 – February 1, $15-$20
212-352-2101
www.ps122.org

PS122’s East Village home might be under renovation, but that isn’t stopping the organization from presenting the ninth annual incarnation of its winter performance festival, Coil. This year’s festivities comprise nine cutting-edge works in various disciplines, with tickets for all shows only $20, so there’s no reason not to check out at least one of these unique, unusual productions. Reid Farrington stages the ultimate heavyweight match in the world premiere of Tyson vs. Ali at the 3LD Art & Technology Center (January 3-19), in which live action and multiple screens pit Mike Tyson against Muhammad Ali. Mac Wellman’s Muazzez at the Chocolate Factory (January 7-17), from “A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds,” transports the audience, and actor Steve Mellor, into outer space. Heather Kravas’s a quartet at the Kitchen (January 8-12) consists of four dancers performing four dances in four parts each. Director Phil Soltanoff, systems designer Rob Ramirez, and writer Joe Diebes boldly go where no one has gone before in An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk at the New Ohio Theatre (January 9-12), creating a hybrid work highlighted by humans interacting with video clips of words spoken by Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek but strung into new thoughts and statements. Tina Satter’s highly stylized House of Dance at Abrons Arts Center (January 9-13) investigates a tap-dance contest and the relationship between a teacher and his student. The performance series CATCH 60 celebrates its tenth anniversary with the one-night-only CATCH Takes the Decade at the Invisible Dog Art Center (January 11), with works by Cynthia Hopkins, Molly Lieber & Eleanor Smith, Anna Sperber, Ivy Baldwin, and others. Okwui Okpokwasili’s solo Bronx Gothic at Danspace Project (January 14 – February 1) is a song-and-movement-based coming-of-age story about two eleven-year-old girls. All three parts of Jeremy Xido’s solo piece The Angola Project will take place at the Invisible Dog (January 14-17). And family tragedy lies at the center of Brokentalkers’ Have I No Mouth at Baryshnikov Arts Center (January 14-26), with company director Feidlim Cannon and his mother trying to put things back together. In addition, the Red + White Party will get folks mingling as SPIN New York on January 12 ($30 and up) with Elevator Repair Service, and the SPAN conversation series will be held at NYU on January 18.

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER: ALL NEW 2013

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

New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through January 5, $25-$135
212-581-1212
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

In its twenty-fifth season since the passing of its founder, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater continues to widen its repertoire by looking both to the past and the future. For its current season, which runs through January 5 at City Center, AADT is presenting the world premieres of Ronald K. Brown’s Four Corners and Aszure Barton’s Lift, the company premieres of Bill T. Jones’s D-Man in the Waters (Part 1) and Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, and new productions of Alvin Ailey’s Pas de Duke and The River. On December 26, an all-new program began with a stirring, sexually charged version of British choreographer McGregor’s 2006 Chroma. Featuring a loud, aggressive score by Jody Talbot with orchestrations by the White Stripes’ Jack White, Chroma takes place on British minimalist John Pawson’s ever-more-surprising set, which changes colors courtesy of Lucy Carter’s lighting and offers an inventive backdrop that becomes much more than it first appears. Restaged by longtime Wayne McGregor | Random Dance member Antoine Vereecken, Chroma is a physically exertive twenty-nine-minute ballet performed by ten dancers who often get up close and very personal with one another, beginning with a bold pas de deux in which a woman suggestively sniffs up a man’s body before they attack each other. Interestingly, the men and women wear the same costume, a rectangular top held up by spaghetti straps, over a barely there bottom.

AAADT’s Linda Celeste Sims and Jamar Roberts get up close and personal in Aszure Barton’s LIFT (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton’s Ailey commission, Lift, is driven by Curtis Macdonald’s heavily percussive score, which leads the company through twenty-five energetic minutes, the men sweaty and bare-chested, the women elegant in Fritz Masten’s feathery skirts. The dancers often use their feet as rhythmic instruments in a piece that Barton built based on her interaction with the performers, and the joy they display onstage is contagious, especially during a lovely solo by rehearsal director and guest artist Matthew Rushing, who was honored with a special program on December 17. With this commission, third-year artistic director Robert Battle is once again exploring exciting new ventures for AAADT.

AAADT revisits Alvin Ailey’s THE RIVER at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

The evening concluded with associate artistic director Masazumi Chaya’s restaging of Ailey’s 1970 ballet, The River, which Ailey choreographed for ABT in 1970 and added to the company repertoire ten years later. Set to the music of Duke Ellington, The River is divided into eight sections, exploring birth, life, and rebirth using water as a continuing metaphor as the dancers make their way beautifully through such parts as “Spring,” “Meander,” “Lake,” and “Falls,” highlighted by Megan Jakel and Daniel Harder’s pas de deux in “Giggling Rapids” and Hope Boykin’s solo in “Vortex” while showcasing several awe-inspiring men’s bodies throughout. For thirty-four wonderful minutes, The River melds classical and contemporary movement in Ailey’s trademark style, a fitting end to a terrific evening of dance. Chroma can be seen again on January 2, Lift on January 2 and 4, and The River on January 5.