this week in dance

WELCOME TO IMAGI*NATION: THE TRILOGY

Welcome to imagi*Nation asks the audience to participate in deciding what happens next (photo by Julia Discenza)

WELCOME TO IMAGI*NATION: THE TRILOGY
Sanctuary Space at the Center at West Park
165 West Eighty-Sixth St.
October 27-29, $25, 7:30
www.eventbrite.com
www.carmencaceres.com

Audiences get to choose their own adventure in the world premiere of New York-based Argentinian choreographer Carmen Caceres and DanceAction’s Welcome to imagi*Nation, taking place October 27-29 at the Sanctuary Space at the Center at West Park. The three-part work focuses on the the battle over natural resources, labor shortages, and immigration policy, inspired by Caceres’s own story as well as Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 tome Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. “The book flows with the grace of a tale,” Isabel Allende writes in the introduction. “His arguments, his rage, and his passion would be overwhelming if they were not expressed with such superb style, with such masterful timing and suspense. Galeano denounces exploitation with uncompromising ferocity, yet this book is almost poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival in the midst of the worst kind of despoliation.”

Welcome to imagi*Nation is performed by Caceres (who also designed the costumes), Israel Harris, Jenna Purcell, Lydia Perakis, Mallory Markham-Miller, Mar Orozco Arango, and Sofia Baeta, playing multiple characters, with video by Daniel Hess and music by Emilio Teubal and others. “From the very beginning of the process, this has been an extremely personal project,” Caceres said in a statement. “Having moved to the US as an immigrant over a decade ago, I’ve been thrown right into a whirlpool of issues that are rarely considered in the policymaking arena but dramatically affect everyone who needs to adapt to a new reality, language, and identity. I learned that for every choice you make, you leave something behind. This work — drawing from my own life and those of my collaborators/performers and inspired by Galeano’s seminal study of the struggle over power, resources, and access between the US and the South American countries — is an invitation for the audience to experience this firsthand, by engaging with potentially life-changing decisions on behalf of my characters.”

LAZARUS 1972–2022

Christopher Caines stars as the title character in Ping Chong’s mesmerizing update of Lazarus

LAZARUS 1972–2022
La MaMa Downstairs Theater
66 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Thursday – Sunday through October 16, $25-$30
www.lamama.org
www.pingchong.org

For his final work as artistic director for his troupe, Ping Chong revisits his past while looking to the future in Lazarus 1972–2022, a contemporary reimagining of his first independent piece. In 1972, Ping presented Lazarus at Meredith Monk’s loft studio; as part of Ping Chong and Company’s fiftieth anniversary, the thrilling update is running at La MaMa, just a few blocks from that studio, through October 16.

The evening begins with a film of the stars in the galaxy, followed by a video countdown of the Toronto-born Ping’s previous works. Then Watoko Ueno’s delicate, enchanting set is intricately put together by two women (Chaesong Kim and Nancy McArthur) dressed all in black who bring in a white glass table and a white chair and place dining items on them — a coffee cup and saucer, salt and pepper shakers, a serving tray, silverware in a napkin — arranging and rearranging them with great delicacy, each making a loud noise as they are put on the table. Behind the table is a backdrop with alternating vertical panels. A hanging lamp is occasionally set in motion, moving back and forth like a pendulum clock running out of time as it slows down. (The haunting lighting, which turns from white to red to blue to pitch-black, is by Hao Bai, with expert sound design by Ernesto Valenzuela.)

Eventually, Lazarus (Christopher Caines) enters the room; he is wearing black pants, a white button-down shirt, and black shoes, his face covered in white bandages except for his eyes and mouth. He evokes both Claude Rains in The Invisible Man and Edith Scob in Eyes without a Face, another character whose true self goes unseen by the world. In this case, Lazarus has risen to life in 2022 New York City and feels alienated from a society not so quick to welcome strangers, echoing Ping’s experience when he moved out of Chinatown, where he was raised. Lazarus deliberately repositions the items on the table and prepares to eat, but he is soon distracted.

Over the course of about an hour, Lazarus meets a mysterious lady in red (Jeannie Hutchins) and another young woman in black (Tiffany Tan), becomes a puppet, encounters a strange truck, and considers what is next for him in this unyielding city, which at one point flies past him on multiple screens. (The projections are by Kate Freer, with costumes by Stefani Mar.) The only words are spoken in voiceover by Louise Smith or Ping (“There is a room; there is nothing in the room.”); there is no dialogue, only sound, light, and movement in a mesmerizingly beautiful piece.

The Canadian-born Caines, who runs his own dance company, has performed previously with Ping and is hypnotic as Lazarus; you can feel his alienation and suspicion as his eyes and body shift to surprise noises or he just stands tall and still, waiting for something to happen to break him out of his loneliness. But don’t let me mislead you; the show is also very funny.

“Time passes, and with time passing the poignancy of loss multiplies, which is to say Lazarus has lived the fullness of life through time,” Ping writes in a program note. “By now, it must be obvious that I am Lazarus and Lazarus is me. The theme of Lazarus, the theme of Otherness, runs through all my work. Who could be more Other than Lazarus. . . . I have chosen to complete my life as an artist with this work that started it all. Coming full circle seemed appropriate.”

Lazarus 1972–2022 is a fitting finale for Ping, a longtime leader in the avant-garde theater that rose up in downtown New York City in the 1970s and who is now saying farewell having come full circle, for all our benefit.

LMCC TAKE CARE SERIES: SUN SEEKERS INDUCTION CEREMONY

“Sun Seekers Induction Ceremony” will take place in the Oculus on October 15 (photo courtesy LMCC)

Who: Amy Khoshbin, Jennifer Khoshbin, Merced Searer, Ching-I Chang, Malcom McMichael, Alex Koi, Jon Panikkar
What: LMCC Take Care Series
Where: The Oculus, Westfield World Trade Center, 185 Greenwich St.
When: Saturday, October 15, free with RSVP, 3:00
Why: Continuing through October 30 on Governors Island, Iranian-American sisters Amy and Jennifer Khoshbin’s “Sun Seekers” is an interactive sci-fi installation in which visitors are encouraged to remove their shoes and put away their cellphones, leaving behind the Wreck-tangle, and immerse themselves in the healing aspects of the natural world. The exhibition consists of four portals that incorporate sound, movement, touch, and smell. “Enter the sun portal, the source of all life,” one portal offers. “Close your eyes, breathe, and listen. Be reborn as a Sun Seeker.” As you walk among the works, encountering spinning seats, a musical chair, futuristic clothing, and a central portal you can enter, you discover “The Great Forgetting” and “The Great Remembering. ”

On October 15 at 3:00, Amy Khoshbin will host an hourlong “Sun Seekers Induction Ceremony” at the Oculus at the Westfield World Trade Center; part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Take Care Series, the event, cowritten with Yuliya Tsukerman, features performers Merced Searer, Ching-I Chang, and Malcom McMichael and musicians Alex Koi and Jon Panikkar and gives the audience the opportunity to connect with the sun, the environment, and their bodies in a group healing ritual. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

BEING FUTURE BEING: LAND/CELESTIAL and INSIDE/OUTWARDS

Emily Johnson’s Being Future Being comes to New York Live Arts October 20-22

Who: Emily Johnson/Catalyst
What: Being Future Being
Where: New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th St., 212-727-7476
When: Land/Celestial: October 15, $10-$30, 3:00 & 5:00; Inside/Outwards: October 20-23, $15-$40, 7:30
Why: In a July 2021 illustrated lecture to students at the Bates Dance Festival in Maine, where she was presenting the outdoor section of her work in progress Being Future Being, maker, gatherer, and protector Emily Johnson (Yup’ik) said, “We spent a lot of time in class earlier today thinking of the ground lifting up with us and also thinking about how we are always in relationship to the ground and thinking about ways in which we might be in better ongoing relationship with ground, with land, with water, with air, with relations. And from that I want to say that one day, the civil rights and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples will be recognized in relation to land, and that power imbalance and extraction will not be the default relationship in our working lives, and that theft of and abuses on and lack of recognition of Indigenous land and water and peoples will not be tolerated. And that’s the kind of future I look forward to making with all of you; that’s the kind of future I enjoy being in already with all of you.”

In such participatory works as Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at Stars, Shore, and The Ways We Love and the Ways We Love Better — Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s) in addition to her Kinstillatory Mappings series outside Abrons Arts Center, Johnson, a Bessie Award-winning dancer, choreographer, curator, writer, and social justice activist, brings people together with the land and its history, taking on power imbalance and extraction by forming communities organized around the local environment.

Emily Johnson gathers people together for The Ways We Love and the Ways We Love Better — Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s) in September 2020 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Johnson’s Being Future Being: Inside/Outwards will hold its Lenapehoking premiere October 20-22 at New York Live Arts, featuring a commissioned score by composer Raven Chacon (Navajo), sound by Chloe Alexandra Thompson (Cree), visual design by Holly Mititquq Nordlum (Iñupiaq), masks and wearables by IV Castellanos (mx Indige Quechua/Guaraní), Quilt-Beings by Korina Emmerich (Coast Salish Territory, Puyallup tribe), quilts by Maggie Thompson (Fond du Lac Ojibwe), costumes by Raphael Regan (Sisseton-Wahpeton Eastern Band of Cherokee and Diné), scenic fabrication by Joseph Silovsky, and lighting by Itohan Edoloyi. The piece will be performed by Ashley Pierre-Louis, Jasmine Shorty (Diné), Stacy Lynn Smith, and Sugar Vendil.

In addition, on October 15 there will be a special offsite performance, Land/Celestial, in Lower Manhattan; ticket holders will be advised of the specific location that day. As a whole, the creation of Being Future Being has involved four groups of collaborators, which Johnson refers to as the Branch of Knowledge, the Branch of Scholarship, the Branch of Making, and the Branch of Action. Johnson will be joined by individuals from the four branches at a Stay Late discussion following the October 21 show.

“The work asks audiences to join in community processes that move from each presentation out into the world in what I call the Speculative Architecture of the Overflow, with actions that directly support local rematriative, protection, and Land Back efforts,” Johnson explains on her website. “The Overflow is resonance, moving in the in-between, in-the-collective, in-the-invitation to GATHER HERE. Can the Overflow become supported, beyond the moment of the performance gathering, a speculative architecture resisting BUILD, but living, ongoing in an otherwise?” Johnson always asks intriguing, important questions, but the ultimate answers will have to come from each one of us.

BAM NEXT WAVE / FIAF CROSSING THE LINE: CROWD

CROWD
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 13-15, $34-$85, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/crowd
www.g-v.fr/en/shows/crowd

Franco-Austrian choreographer, filmmaker, photographer, and installation artist Gisèle Vienne’s propulsive, euphoric CROWD makes its US premiere at BAM from October 13 to 15, with three highly anticipated performances in the Howard Gilman Opera House. A joint presentation of BAM’s Next Wave and FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festivals, the ninety-minute 2017 work, which has traveled from Tokyo, Rome, and Dublin to Stockholm, Singapore, and Sao Paulo, features fifteen performers whose dialogue-free stories emerge amid a time-jumping 1990s-style Detroit rave. Lucas Bassereau, Philip Berlin, Marine Chesnais, Sylvain Decloitre, Sophie Demeyer, Vincent Dupuy, Massimo Fusco, Rehin Hollant, Georges Labbat, Oskar Landström, Theo Livesey, Louise Perming, Katia Petrowick, Linn Ragnarsson, Jonathan Schatz, Henrietta Wallberg, and Tyra Wigg move around a filthy floor littered with dirt and detritus to music by Underground Resistance, KTL, Vapour Space, DJ Rolando, Drexciya, the Martian, and others; the sound design, edits, and playlist are by Peter Rehberg, with Stephen O’Malley the sound diffusion supervisor and lighting by Patrick Riou.

Inspired by her time dancing in clubs in early 1990s Berlin, creator, choreographer, and scenic designer Vienne (I Apologize, Kindertotenlieder, Jerk) developed the characters and narrative with longtime collaborator Dennis Cooper, the American poet and novelist who has written such books as the George Miles Cycle and was the founder and editor of the 1970s–’80s punk zine Little Caesar. “If you see CROWD live, audiences have said they feel a little bit different afterwards than before they came into the theatre, a slightly altered way of being,” Vienne told the UK Guardian in September 2019. “I think there is this double feeling of being very sharp — because it has slowed down, you can see detail in a sharper way than usual — and then a little bit of this stoned feeling.”

“HELLZAPOPPIN’: WHAT ABOUT THE BEES?”

Yvonne Rainer’s “last dance” includes a pillow fight at New York Live Arts

Who: Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, Kathleen Chalfant
What: World premiere
Where: New York Live Arts Theater, 219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
When: October 5-8, $15-$85
Why: Legendary dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, author, and activist Yvonne Rainer asks, “What about the bees?” in what she has announced will be her “last dance.” Premiering October 5-8 at New York Live Arts, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” takes on systemic racism through text, movement, and live projections, including excerpts from the 1941 Hollywood musical Hellzapoppin’, a reality-busting movie melding film and theater starring Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, Martha Raye, Mischa Auer, Shemp Howard, Slim and Slam, and Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and Jean Vigo’s highly influential 1933 antiestablishment film about boarding school, Zero for Conduct. The evening begins with a screening of Rainer’s 2002 half-hour film After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid, which expands on a piece she choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project incorporating texts by Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein and rehearsal footage shot by Charles Atlas and Natsuko Inue.

“HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” runs October 5-8 at NYLA

A coproduction of NYLA and Performa, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” will be performed by a mix of dancers and actors, featuring Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, and Kathleen Chalfant. Rainer also harkens back to her fictional character Apollo Musagetes, leader of the muses, who in 2020 presented “Revisions: A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies: A Rant Dance, Lecture, and Letter to Humanity.” “I’m going to be veering back and forth between various topics: my aging self-pity, my ‘permanently recovering racism,’ my sometimes evasive appropriation of the notion that not all white people, and not all white women, are racists, and various historical and cultural reflections,” Rainer, who is now eighty-seven, said in a statement. Rainer will participate in a Stay Late conversation with Bill T. Jones following the October 6 show.

CANCELED: MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP IN BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK

Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Water and more at Brooklyn Bridge Park on October 1 (photo by John Eng)

Who: Mark Morris Dance Group
What: Free outdoor performances
Where: Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, Harbor View Lawn
When: Saturday, October 1, free, 2:00 & 4:00, workshop at 3:00 {ed. note: This event is now canceled because of the weather]
Why: Brooklyn-based favorites Mark Morris Dance Group will be in Brooklyn Bridge Park on Saturday, October 1, to present a pair of free programs on the Harbor View Lawn at Pier 1, at 2:00 and 4:00, with an all-ages workshop at 3:00. The troupe, founded in 1980 by Morris, will perform Water, a nine-minute 2021 piece for fourteen dancers set to music by George Frideric Handel; Greek to Me, a five-minute solo from 1998 set to Harry Partch’s “Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales” from “Eleven Intrusions”; the twenty-two-minute 2007 Suite from Orfeo ed Euridice set to the score by Christoph Willibald Gluck; and the eighteen-minute 1998 work Dancing Honeymoon, featuring seven dancers in yellow and music by Ethan Iverson.