this week in dance

CROSSING THE LINE: RACHID OURAMDANE

Rachid Ouramdane will explore political ideology and torture in two presentations at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival (photo © Patrick Imbert)

New York Live Arts
Bessie Schönberg Theater
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
ORDINARY WITNESSES: Tuesday, October 11, $24-$30, 6:30, and Wednesday, October 12, $15, 7:30
WORLD FAIR: Thursday, October 14, and Friday, October 15, $24-$30, 7:30
212-691-6500
www.newyorklivearts.org
www.rachidouramdane.com

Paris-based dancer-choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, who founded the L’A company in 2007, will be presenting a pair of fascinating programs at New York Live Arts as part of the “Endurance/Resistance/Inspiration” section of the French Institute Alliance Française’s fifth annual Crossing the Line Festival. On October 11 & 12, Ordinary Witnesses examines torture, memory, and identity in a violent world. Ouramdane, who interviewed victims of torture in putting together the evening-length piece, writes that Ordinary Witnesses takes place “at the edges of civilization and the gateways to barbarity. The instant where people exit humanity to be cast into the jaws of torture.” He continues, “Doing a portrait of people who lived through torture is an attempt to depict the unpresentable. . . . It is about trying to grasp the imagination of those who experienced such atrocities, so that this experience does not remain hushed up. It is also about awareness of history’s repeated violence now that torture seems to be tolerated and even legitimate at the very core of our democracies.” Ouramdane will give a preshow talk on October 11 and participate in a conversation with the PEN American Center’s Larry Siems following the October 12 show. On October 14 & 15, Ouramdane will stage World Fair, an exploration of the human body as it relates to social and political ideology, performed by Ouramdane and multi-instrumentalist Jean-Baptiste Julien, with an artist talk following the October 14 show.

Rachid Ouramdane’s ORDINARY WITNESSES offers an extraordinary look at torture

Update: The son of an Algerian father who was tortured, Rachid Ouramdane has been making the sociopolitical physical in such works as Cover, Discreet Death, and Far . . . , examining memory and identity through multimedia presentations involving progressive movement. On October 11 he and his Paris-based L’A company performed the mesmerizing Ordinary Witnesses at New York Live Arts, part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line interdisciplinary international arts festival. The show begins with a man’s voice detailing his emotions — or lack thereof — as he describes his reaction to having been the victim of torture. He speaks in French, his words translated on the back wall. After several minutes, Lora Juodkaite, Mille Lundt, Jean-Claude Nelson, Georgina Vila-Bruch, and Jean-Baptiste André emerge onto Sylvain Giraudeau’s dark, bare stage, their faces blank as they walk slowly around a rectangular video frame lying flat on the floor and, in one corner, a grid of sixty spotlights that go on and off at various intervals and at different levels of brightness (at times evoking interrogation lights). The dancers occasionally stop, fall to the floor, adopt yogalike poses, and then move on as Jean-Baptiste Julien’s subtle electronic score, including the low buzz of feedback from an onstage electric guitar, hovers ominously above them. At one point a female dancer breaks into a nearly endless twirl, spinning around and around in a dizzying display of agility and sheer breathlessness; watching her, one wonders just how long she can continue, the audience wanting to call out and stop the torture but too amazed to do so. Although it does get repetitive and goes on slightly too long — perhaps echoing the repetitiveness of torture itself — Ordinary Witnesses is an emotionally powerful work that makes its purposes very clear, right from the start. There are still tickets left for the second and final performance on October 12, which will be followed by a discussion between Ouramdane and Larry Siems. Ouramdane will also be presenting his solo work, World Fair, at New York Live Arts October 14-15.

ATLANTIC ANTIC

Atlantic Ave. between Hicks St. & Fourth Ave.
Sunday, October 2, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
www.atlanticave.org

It looks like it should be quite a beautiful day for the thirty-seventh annual Atlantic Antic, where more than one million people are expected to enjoy food, art, music, dance, and more along Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn, from Hicks St. to Fourth Ave. On outdoor stages and inside bars and restaurants, you’ll be able to catch live performances by the Winsor Terrors, Les Sans Culottes, Charanga Soleil, the Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band, the Jack Grace Band, BR and Timebomb, the Black Coffee Blues Band, Alex Battles’ Whisky Rebellion, the Brotherhood of the Jug Band Blues, and many more. The afternoon also includes lots of family-friendly activities between Boerum Pl. & Smith St,, with pony rides, magicians, puppet shows, kids’ bands, face painting, inflatable rides, and plenty more. Among the participating establishments are the Chip Shop, the Waterfront Ale House, the Brazen Head, the Flying Saucer, Gumbo, and Hank’s Saloon, and there will be local booths galore selling all kinds of items you won’t find at standard street fairs. And for the eighteenth year, the New York Transit Museum is hosting the Bus Festival on Boerum Pl. between State St. & Atlantic Ave., featuring vintage buses, workshops, free tours, and other fun things.

FIRST SATURDAYS: LATINO HERITAGE

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, “Marta Moreno Vega,” pigmented ink-jet print, 2011 (© Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, October 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum will be celebrating Latino heritage at its October First Saturday program, centered on the exhibition “Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: The Latino List,” in which the photographer behind “The Black List” turns his camera on such Latino figures as Marta Moreno Vega, Pitbull, Eva Longoria, Cesar Conde, Robert Menendez, and John Leguizamo. Greenfield-Sanders will screen the HBO documentary The Latino List at 7:30 and participate in a discussion following the film. The evening will also include live performances by ABAKUÁ Afro-Latin Dance Company, Jerry Hernandez y La Orquesta Dee Jay, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jose Conde, a book-club talk by Moreno Vega about her memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo, a curator talk on “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk — An Introspective,” an art workshop, and more. Also on view are such exhibits as “Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior,” “Raw/Cooked: Kristof Wickman,” “Eva Hesse Spectres 1960,” “Matthew Buckingham: ‘The Spirit and the Letter,’” “reOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio,” and “Ten Years Later: Ground Zero Remembered.”

RISK + REWARD: PERFORMANCE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

John Kelly will welcome MAD visitors into open rehearsals of his updated version of FIND MY WAY HOME

Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Broadway
Through December 8
212-299-7777
www.madmuseum.org

The Museum of Art & Design’s extremely promising inaugural Risk + Reward performance series kicked off last Saturday with Sarah Maxfield’s all-day site-specific “Knowing the Score: An Investigation of Improvisational Structures” and continues this week with John Kelly presenting a work-in-progress reexamination of his 1988 piece Find My Way Home, which was previously revised in 1998. On September 28 from 3:00 to 6:00 and September 29 from 7:00 to 9:00, museumgoers will be able to watch Kelly conduct open rehearsals for the multimedia dance-theater project, which moves the Greek myth of Orpheus, the god of music, to the Great Depression. On September 30 at 7:00, Kelly will stage a ticketed ($15-$18) concert version of the production. Last December, Kelly, whose many risks always lead to myriad rewards, revisited his wonderful Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, at La MaMa, so we can’t wait to see what he does with Find My Way Home, which will be presented in full October 21-29 at New York Live Arts. Risk + Reward continues October 10 with the social-intervention-based performance “A New Discovery: Queer Immigration in Perspective”; on November 11-12 with Me, Michelle, a new duet about Cleopatra by choreographers Jack Ferver and Michelle Mola in conjunction with Performa 11; and concludes December 8 with “Benjamin Fredrickson, Artist,” a first-ever one-man show by the photographer dealing with his life and work.

FAB! FESTIVAL

Dan Fishback will be at the Fab! Festival performing songs that did not make it into his upcoming Dixon Place show, THIRTYNOTHING

East Fourth St. between Bowery & Second Ave.
Saturday, September 24, free, 1:00 – 5:00
www.fabnyc.org

The FAB! Festival, sponsored by the nonprofit Fourth Arts Block, which supports arts and culture in the East Village, features a host of free live performances, site-specific installations, arts and crafts booths, film screenings, theater previews, yoga classes, writing workshops, and food vendors this afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00 on East Fourth St. between Bowery & Second Ave. Among the highlights are a double feature of Celia Rowlson-Hall’s Three of a Feather, a short film with choreography by Monica Bill Barnes, and Marc Kirsch’s TenduTV; WOW! Wow Cabaret with JZ Bich, Micia Mosely, and Kim Howard; dance presentations by Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Theater, Classical Contemporary Ballet Theatre, Suzanne Beahrs and Dancers, Theater in Asylum (Frankenstein), Sobers & Godley (The Lesser of Two Sobers & Godley), Maia Ramnath and Constellation Moving Company, Li Chiao-Ping Dance, JT Lotus Dance Company Beyond, Rod Rodgers Dance Company, and others; cabaret and poetry from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Dixon Place, the New York Neo-Futurists, La MaMa E.T.C., and Judith Malina’s Living Theater, including a sneak peek at Dan Fischback’s thirtynothing; and much, much more.

DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL

Sean Boggs’s “Blue Monster” is among the many multimedia projects at this year’s DUMBO Arts Festival

Multiple venues in DUMBO
September 23-25, free
www.dumboartsfestival.com

The fifteenth annual DUMBO Arts Festival begins today, kicking off a weekend of live performances, art exhibitions, site-specific projections and installations, and just about anything else you can think of inside and outside of the thriving neighborhood Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Such locations as St. Ann’s Warehouse, Tobacco Warehouse, Smack Mellon, Superfine, and Brooklyn Bridge Park will host Tajna Tanovic, the Great Small Works Procession, the Jack Grace Band, a panel discussion on immersive surfaces, the White Wave Dance Company, the “Runaway Cape-Cart,” Janet Biggs’s “Wet Exit” multimedia presentation on the East River, “Kafkaesque Hammock,” the “Samsara” scroll, arm wrestling, a Mobile Tea Garden, “The Dumpster Project,” a series of virtual pavilions, Sean Boggs’s “Blue Monster,” the Fisher Ensemble’s Kocho, a steel cage Battle Royal, “Foop,” Carl Skelton and Luke DuBois’s interactive “Sweet Stream Love’s River,” readings by Sapphire and Samantha Thornhill, Bubby’s Pie Social, the newly moved and reopened Jane’s Carousel, and art projects just about everywhere you look, in stores, on street corners, in lobbies, and up in the sky.

TOOL IS LOOT

Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey combine their yearlong collaborations in TOOL IS LOOT (image design by Adam Shecter)

The Kitchen
512 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
September 22-24, September 29 – October 1, $15, 8:00
212-255-5793 ext11
www.thekitchen.org

Over the course of the last year, dancers and choreographers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey held week-long collaborations with experts from outside the dance world to create unique pieces incorporating a range of disciplines, from science and architecture to social activism and wine, each of which began with an “empty solo.” The Brooklyn-based Cardona and the Paris-based Lacey will present the results of their experimental year — Cardona’s “Interventions” and Lacey’s “My First Time with a Dramaturg” — in TOOL IS LOOT, a duet running September 22-24 and September 29 – October 1 at the Kitchen. Curated by Yasuko Yokoshi and featuring original music by Jonathan Bepler (The Cremaster Cycle) and lighting by Thomas Dunn, TOOL IS LOOT explores artistic identity through a “performance-based process of aesthetic disorientation.” (To read our February 2011 twi-ny talk with Cardona about the project, please click here.)

Jennifer Lacey has an onstage fling with a chair in TOOL IS LOOT

Update: In putting together TOOL IS LOOT, Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey spent a year apart, the former holding Interventions with experts from non-dance fields in upstate Troy, Washington, DC, Florida, and New York City, while the latter did her research, “My First Time with a Dramaturg,” overseas. That physical separation continues through much of TOOL IS LOOT, which begins with Lacey performing a duet with a folding chair, representing not only the body as object but referring to the no-longer-present collaborators Cardona and Lacey worked with over the past twelve months. Later, Cardona comes out to have his own private rendezvous with another chair, in the guise of a prince who has fallen in love with a sailor. During the seventy-five-minute production, the two performers move alternately to Jonathan Bepler’s ever-changing score, to silence, or to offstage narration dictated by the other. And yes, eventually, they do meet, leading to a beautiful if somewhat baffling conclusion. Continuing at the Kitchen Thursday through Saturday, TOOL IS LOOT is a humorous, subtly charming meditation on sexuality, style, and storytelling as well as the art of collaboration itself.