this week in dance

TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY

New York premiere of “I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours” is part of Trisha Brown Dance Company program at BAM (photo by Laurent Philippe)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
January 30 – February 2, $20-$70, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.trishabrowncompany.org

This past fall, BAM bid farewell to Pina Bausch as Tanztheater Wuppertal presented the final work by the legendary German choreographer, “…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…” (Like moss on a stone), who died in 2009 at the age of sixty-nine. Now BAM is saying goodbye to another dance master as Trisha Brown brings her last two pieces to the Howard Gilman Opera House from January 30 to February 2. Now seventy-six, the Washington State-born Brown has been presenting dance at BAM since January 1976. How to describe her eclectic style? In fall 1993, influential multimedia artist and choreographer Yvonne Rainer wrote in BOMB magazine, “The task of describing Trisha Brown’s unique form of dancing is daunting. Its inscrutable blend of zaniness, athleticism, delicacy, and logic, always evading mimetic clichés, similarly eludes language, like a half-forgotten word or phrase that can’t quite roll off the tip of the tongue.” The Trisha Brown Dance Company will be performing two programs at BAM. The first (January 30, February 1-2) consists of 1987’s Newark (Niweweorce), featuring audiovisual elements by minimalist Donald Judd and Peter Zummo and lighting by Ken Tabachnick; the New York premiere of Les Yeux et l’âme, set to music by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Pygmalion, with lighting by Jennifer Tipton and costumes by Elizabeth Cannon; the New York premiere of I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours, with video by Burt Barr, costumes by Kaye Voyce, and lighting by John Torres, set to Alvin Curran’s “Toss and Find”; and 1966’s Homemade, a solo danced by Vicky Shick, with an original film by theatrical happenings mainstay Robert Whitman. The second program (January 31) comprises Newark (Niweweorce), I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours, Homemade, and the thirtieth-anniversary presentation of the 1983 BAM commission Set and Reset, a collaboration with Laurie Anderson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Beverly Emmons. The company features Neal Beasley, Cecily Campbell, Tara Lorenzen, Megan Madorin, Leah Morrison, Tamara Riewe, Jamie Scott, Stuart Shugg, Nicholas Strafaccia, and Samuel Wentz. In conjunction with the performances, John Rockwell, Wendy Perron, and Stephen Petronio will participate in an “Iconic Artist Talk: On Trisha Brown” on February 2 at 5:00 at the BAM Fisher Fishman Space.

EIKO & KOMA: THE CARAVAN PROJECT

Eiko and Koma will be performing THE CARAVAN PROJECT through January 21 at MoMA (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

PERFORMING HISTORIES: LIVE ARTWORKS EXAMINING THE PAST
Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund Garden Lobby
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 21
Museum admission: $25 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.eikoandkoma.org

Although Eiko & Koma refer to their 1999 work, The Caravan Project, as “a vehicle for art activism,” it does not seek to make any comments on political or social issues. Instead, it was created to help promote art, particularly bringing it to those who either don’t have access to it or don’t know much about it. Reconfigured as part of their ongoing Retrospective Project, the 2012 version of Caravan has pulled into the MoMA lobby in front of Rodin’s “Monument to Balzac,” where the New York-based Japanese couple are performing during all hours the museum is open, through January 21. Placed right by the entrance, it forces people to see it on their way into MoMA as well as on their way out, so even if visitors intend to make a beeline straight for a specific exhibit, it is hard to miss an unhooked trailer that opens on all four sides, with a man and a woman either inside it or walking around outside, wearing decrepit white material that seems to be molting off their bodies as they move ever so slowly. It also can be seen without having to pay the $25 admission charge, furthering the dancers’ desire to bring the project to people who might not be able to afford hefty museum fees.

Koma emerges from the trailer and takes a slow walk in MoMA lobby (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Koma emerges from trailer and takes slow walk in MoMA lobby (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Held in conjunction with the “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde” show, the “Art Theater Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema, 1960–1986” film series, and the “Performing Histories: Live Artworks Examining the Past” exhibition, The Caravan Project is for the first time being presented indoors without the Jeep that drives them to the site at the beginning and takes them away at the end. Instead, Eiko and Koma have become one with the museum, much as their work throughout the years has seen them merge with the natural environment, either real or constructed, in works such as Naked and Water. With The Caravan Project, at times they’ll be playing to a large crowd surrounding the trailer, where visitors are allowed to get within three feet of them, while at other moments there might be no one watching, just museumgoers passing by without even glancing their way, but that is all part of this compelling living installation. The trailer itself is filled with bare tree branches and beehive-like detritus above and below, with Eiko and Koma, in all white, emerging in between as if coming out of cocoons following an apocalyptic nightmare. Spiderwebs are wrapped around their faces, making it appear that they’ve been dormant for a long time before rising again. Their Butoh-like movements are painstakingly slow; it is electrifying when they actually touch each other, appearing to be so desperately in need of human contact in this barren, desolate scene, the only sound coming from the crowd itself. “Performing Histories” continues through May 25 with such upcoming programs as Kelly Nipper’s Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture, Fabian Barba’s A Mary Wigman Dance Evening, and El Arakawa’s Paris & Wizard: The Musical.

COIL: MAGICAL

Anne Juren exposes her body and more in MAGICAL collaboration with Annie Dorsen at New York Live Arts

ANNE JUREN AND ANNIE DORSEN: MAGICAL
New York Live Arts, Bessie Schönberg Theater
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
January 17-18, 7:30, and January 19, 6:00, $30
212-691-6500
www.newyorklivearts.org

In Magical, Anne Juren and Annie Dorsen recontextualize five seminal works in the history of feminist performance art, restaging them as theatrical entertainment for the twenty-first century. New Yorker Dorsen (cocreator of Passing Strange) and the Vienna-based Juren (founder of Wiener Tanz-und Kunstbewegung), who previously collaborated on Pièce Sans Paroles, explore ideas of illusion and transformation as Juren brings together the five radical pieces, which all date from between 1964 and 1975, taking them out of the avant-garde art gallery world and into a respected performance venue dedicated to movement artistry. They also add numerous magic tricks, designed by Steve Cuiffo, that play with reality and spectators’ perception. “Perhaps our generation has gotten a little comfortable inside the trap,” Dorsen tells Olivia Jane Smith in the program notes. “Have we won the right to self-exploit? Or self-objectivize?” The solo piece examines these questions and more in five re-creations, beginning with Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll, in which Schneeman’s voice can be heard in a moving gold box, reading text that, back in 1975, came out of her vagina. Juren next appears in a kitchen as she reimagines Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, picking up a knife and making violent motions and exposing a breast and filling a cup with milk. She then takes on Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, using scissors to snip away pieces of her dress and undergarments until she is naked, then wraps part of the dress around her face and, as Marina Abramović did in Freeing the Body, starts dancing wildly, but this time to loud music that includes Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” in which Robert Plant famously screams, “Way down inside.”

After a film clip of Schneeman’s Meat Joy, Juren returns to Interior Scroll, pulling surprising things out of her vagina that deal with power, further exerting her control over the proceedings. It’s a tour-de-force sixty minutes that both honors those performance artists who came before her and forces the audience to consider issues of voyeurism, nudity, and the continually changing role of women in society. Back in the ’60s, Virginia Slims might have proclaimed, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” but Magical confirms what we all know: There’s still a long way to go. Magical continues at New York Live Arts through January 19 as part of PS 122’s Coil festival. The January 17 performance will be proceeded at 6:30 by the Come Early Conversation “The Feminist Performance Art Canon,” while the January 18 show will be followed by the Stay Late Discussion “Strategies of Illusion and Transformation in Modern Performance,” with Vallejo Gantner and Carla Peterson. Juren and Dorsen will also host a Shared Practice class on January 19 at 1:30 involving trance and improvisation in choreography.

AMERICAN REALNESS — FAYE DRISCOLL: YOU’RE ME

Faye Driscoll will perform YOU’RE ME at American Realness festival this weekend (photo by Stephen Schreiber)

Abrons Arts Center Playhouse
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Friday, January 18, 7:00; Saturday, January 19, 9:00; Sunday, January 20, 4:00
Tickets: $20
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org
www.fayedriscoll.com

Bessie-award-winning choreographer Faye Driscoll creates inventive, unpredictable works that mix a sly sense of humor with serious social commentary, resulting in such engaging pieces of dance theater as There Is So Much Mad in Me, 837 Venice Blvd. and WOW, MOM, WOW. This weekend she is bringing back last year’s vastly entertaining You’re Me, which ran at the Kitchen in April 2012 and will now be presented at the Abrons Arts Center as part of the American Realness festival. In You’re Me, the New York-based Driscoll examines the complicated, ever-changing nature of interpersonal relationships. As the audience enters the space, Driscoll and a male dancer (Jesse Zaritt at the Kitchen, Aaron Mattocks at Abrons) are standing still and ridiculously tall at the back of the stage, wearing a bevy of costumes that reference Lewis Carroll’s Red and White Queens as well as Winnie from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, combining humor with absurdity. Pieces of their outfits start to fall off until the performers are reduced to their basic selves and begin exploring each other through a series of awkward movements as if on a first date, feeling out the possibilities as they touch, squirm, hug, eat, and experiment with their bodies, learning about themselves and their partner. This first section, which is performed with little or no background music and evokes silent films at times, goes on slightly too long but eventually morphs into a middle piece in which the duo goes crazy with spray paint before ending with an exhilarating display of props and costumes (courtesy of Emily Roysdon) changing at a furious pace. You’re Me is another strong, intricately conceived work from a talented choreographer who is not afraid to take chances and challenge both her audience and her dancers. Here she delves into the very essence of art and creativity as she and her partner keep going for ninety breathless minutes that allow plenty of room for improvisation, so you never can guess quite what is going to happen next. American Realness runs through January 20 and also features works by Jeanine Durning, BodyCartography Project, Miguel Gutierrez, and others. Look for Driscoll again in March, when she’ll be presenting new work at the 92Y Harkness Dance Festival.

PARSONS DANCE

The world premiere of former Parsons dancer Kate Skarpetowska’s BLACK FLOWERS is part of winter season at the Joyce (photo by Jill Orschel)

Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 15-27, $10-$59
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
www.parsonsdance.org

Parsons Dance returns to the Joyce this week for its annual winter season, running January 15-27, during which the New York–based company will present new works in addition to selections from its repertory. The program is highlighted by the world premiere of Black Flowers by guest choreographer and former Parsons dancer Kate Skarpetowska as well as the new Dawn to Dusk, a multimedia piece that is part of Wolf Trap’s Face of America: Spirit of South Florida series. For Black Flowers, Skarpetowska, who contributed A Stray’s Lullaby to last year’s program, goes back to her native Poland, using the music of Polish composer Frédéric Chopin in depicting sacred trios of women in the midst of mourning rituals. Created during a specially commissioned trip to the Sunshine State, Dawn to Dusk features music by Andrew Bird and Tiempo Libre, photographs by Clyde Butcher, and video by Blue Land Media, transporting audiences to the natural environments of Big Cypress National Preserve, Biscayne National Park, Dry Tortugas National Park, and Everglades National Park. Also on the bill are Wolfgang, an elegant ballet for three male-female duos set to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; the 2007 ensemble piece In the End, set to such Dave Matthews Band songs as “When the World Ends,” “Satellite,” and “Out of My Hands”; and 1982 company favorite Caught, in which a solo dancer moves to the music of Robert Fripp while seemingly being trapped in midair by stroboscopic lights. There will also be a special family matinee on January 26 at 2:00 that consisting of Dawn to Dusk, Wolfgang, and In the End. The current troupe who will perform at the Joyce includes Abby Silva Gavezzoli, Eric Bourne, Steven Vaughn, Melissa Ullom, Christina Ilisije, Jason Macdonald, Ian Spring, Elena D’Amario, Lauren Garson, and apprentice Leeann Ramsey.

CONTEMPORARY DANCE SHOWCASE 2013: JAPAN + EAST ASIA

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 11, and Saturday, January 12, $28, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society gathers together dancers and choreographers from Tokyo, Kyoto, and Taipei this weekend for the fifteenth annual Contemporary Dance Showcase: Japan + East Asia. Makotocluv founder Makoto Enda, who specializes in environmental performances, teams up with former Dairakudakan dancer Kumotaro Mukai on Misshitsu: Secret Honey Room – Duo Version, what is being called “post-post-post-butoh.” The officially stated goal of Tokyo-based hip-hop superstar Kentaro!! and his company, Tokyo Electrock Stairs, is “to touch your heart and break through it,” and they’ll attempt to do just that with Send It, Mr. Monster, a work set to Japanese pop songs and standards. In Kyoto-based choreographer Kosei Sakamoto’s elegiac Haigafuru~Ash is falling, five members of his Monochrome Circus company move very slowly over a stage continually changing color; the piece was inspired by his personal reaction to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. And in the multimedia, interactive Seventh Sense, Taipei-based choreographer Chieh-hua Hsieh blends sound, movement, and color as his Anarchy Dance Theatre and the audience itself influence motion sensors that reconfigure the space and alter perception. The January 11 show will be followed by a Meet-the-Artists reception.

COIL: NIICUGNI

Emily Johnson and Aretha Aoki bring a sense of shared community and responsibility to NIICUGNI (photo by Chris Cameron)

EMILY JOHNSON / CATALYST: NIICUGNI
Baryshnikov Arts Center, Howard Gilman Performance Space
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
January 9-12, $20, 7:30
212-811-4111
www.bacnyc.org
www.ps122.org

Alaska native Emily Johnson has titled her latest performance installation Niicugni, which means “to listen, to pay attention to,” and the Minneapolis-based choreographer once again proves she’s someone to pay attention to with the complex multimedia piece. Johnson incorporates themes of community and narrative in the immersive work, pronounced “nee-CHOOG-nee,” exploring people’s interconnectedness with the land, animals, and humanity itself in the past, present, and future. In a space filled with fish-skin lanterns hung at varying heights (and some containing speakers), Johnson and Aretha Aoki, wearing masks of their faces, move toward the audience like salmon swimming upstream, preparing to reproduce. Aoki tears up her mask, then puts the scraps awkwardly back on her face, introducing one of Niicugni’s central themes — the act of cutting things apart and putting them back together. “Do you remember the story I told you about the tree? I’ll tell it again,” Johnson says near the start of the show. “There was a monster that bit off my ear. Then, he cut off my arms, every branch. He cut my leg at the knee. He cut my belly and head. He kept cutting and cutting. . . . My mother stitched back my arms, my aunties sang back my legs, I poured by own blood back in.”

NIICUGNI examines interconnectedness and identity in immersive multimedia performance installation (photo by Ves Pitts)

Inspired by seeing a gallery exhibit of fish-skin art in 2009, Johnson had volunteers around the country create the lanterns, taking the dried salmon skin and sewing the pieces back together to make something new, building useful objects as well as a sense of community. Later, her father, a Yupik, received land from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which took a large section of earth and divided it up. Niicugni contains several stories relating to these ideas as it delves into the art of storytelling itself. Over the course of seventy minutes, Johnson and Aoki eagerly share tales of a duck, a bear, and a fox; are joined by men, women, and children who emerge from the crowd and backstage; interact with lighting designer Heidi Eckwall, violinist Bethany Lacktorin, and guitarist-composer James Everest (who is also Johnson’s husband); and perform pas de deux that range from the abstract to the surreal to the self-referential. Niicugni began with birth, and it ends with a discussion of death, but Johnson does so, as always, with a sly, knowing grin. Now part of a trilogy that will conclude with Shore in 2014, Niicugni can be compelling and confusing, captivating and, at times, clunky. Not all of the individual sections work, but they come together to form another of Johnson’s engaging and involving examinations of personal and collective identity and humanity’s responsibility to the planet. In November 2011, Johnson and her Catalyst company presented The Thank-You Bar at New York Live Arts, winning an Outstanding Production award at the 2012 Bessies “for gently and deftly coaxing an audience into a community, holding them spellbound with stories spoken and unspoken. . . . for reminding us that we all come from a place unknowable, yet known.” Niicugni continues those ideas more than admirably. A very hot ticket, Niicugni runs at the Baryshnikov Arts Center through January 12 as part of PS122’s Coil festival; Johnson will participate in a free SPAN conversation on January 16 at 12 noon at the COIL hub at Dixon Place.