this week in dance

YOSHIKO CHUMA AND THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS: SHOCKWAVE DELAY

Ursula Eagly is one of many collaborators in Yoshiko Chuma’s Shockwave Delay, which explores war and utopia (photo © Julie Lemberger)

SHOCKWAVE DELAY
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
June 1-11, $35-$40 (use code FAM10 for $10 tickets)
212-475-7710
www.lamama.org

In her artistic statement for her latest show, Shockwave Delay, Bessie-winning multidisciplinary artist and creator Yoshiko Chuma explains, “My work has been called ‘choreographed chaos.’ I have intentionally avoided presenting an ordered universe in my work because I don’t see an ordered universe in my life. I don’t usually think of myself as a choreographer. Sometimes, I think of myself as a counterpoint composer, pitting note against note, placing several singular voices in parallel motion, creating a new harmony. Sometimes, I still consider myself a journalist because my work tends to begin with an outside point of view. I’m interested in the little personal issues of everyday life and how they can affect survival. It is a struggle for me to expand my concepts into something larger that an audience can share. I am always looking for a twist or a variance. Some people have called my work ‘spectacle,’ but I don’t think in these terms. ‘Organized happening’ is a term that might better suit me.”

Running at La Mama June 1-11, Shockwave Delay should be a fascinating “organized happening,” in part a culmination of a forty-year oeuvre but not a retrospective. The world premiere consists of ten unscripted docudramas overlapping twenty chapters melding sound, text, and movement, considering war and utopia in relationship to the circle of life through music, film dance, and theater, early iterations of which have been staged at numerous venues over the last handful of years. It will be performed by a rotating cast of actors (Jim Fletcher, Eileen Myles, Kate Valk), dancers (Agnê Auželyte, Ursula Eagly, Claire Fleury, Mizuho Kappa, Stephanie Maher, Miriam Parker, Emily Pope, Owen Prum, Ryuji Yamaguchi, Yoshiko Chuma), musicians (Robert Black, Jason Kao Hwang, Christopher McIntyre, Dane Terry, Aliya Ultan), and other special guests, ensuring that every performance will be unique. The team also includes visual artists Tim Clifford, Claire Fleury, Elizabeth Kresch. Jake Margolin & Nick Vaughan, Van Wifvat, and Kelly Bugden and photographers Hugh Burckhardt and Julie Lemberger. The June 11 finale will be followed by an auction of archival items accumulated by the School of Hard Knocks since its founding in New York City in 1982. In addition, forty artists and collaborators will be named to Chuma’s “Final Exam: Graduation.”

The Osaka-born Chuma adds, “It has been seventy-nine years since WWII, but Japan still smells of occupation, as if it is a US colony. The United States is my home, but the country’s aggressive influence over the world intrigues me artistically. In the sixties and early seventies, there were a growing number of anti-American and anti-war demonstrations in Japan. I was swept up in this sentiment and attended and ultimately led a number of demonstrations. A demonstration is a like a ‘production,’ and this was truly where I received my artistic training. I was not the type to stand in front of a microphone and rally the crowd, so I did the publicity papers for the demonstrations. I was a silent agitator. I still am an agitator, both silent and not so silent. Art can be revolutionary, but is not always. Art must be guided, and there are limits. I can organize people in space, but it’s hard to organize people in life.”

There’s no telling what might happen at each show, so don’t delay to get tickets to what promises to be a series of unpredictable and awe-inspiring events.

BOB FOSSE’S DANCIN’

Dancin’ “revival” gets too much backward in looking forward (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

BOB FOSSE’S DANCIN’
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 14, $114 – $318
dancinbway.com

The original Broadway production of Dancin’ was a thrilling celebration of music and movement as only Bob Fosse could do it. The superb cast included Sandahl Bergman, René Ceballos, Christopher Chadman, Wayne Cilento, Vicki Frederick, and Ann Reinking, shaking things up to a wide range of genres, from pop and jazz to classical and patriotic, with little or no plot. It was nominated for seven Tonys, with Fosse winning for Best Choreography and Jules Fisher for Best Lighting.

For the current reimagining of the show at the Music Box — there are too many changes to properly call it a revival — they have added Fosse’s name to the title, but that ends up being a disservice to the late, magnificent choreographer (and sometimes director) of Sweet Charity, Damn Yankees, The Pajama Game, Pippin, Chicago, and the film version of Cabaret, who is unlikely to have been thrilled with this 2023 iteration, which opened March 19 and has just posted an early closing notice of May 14 after receiving no love from the Tonys, coming up empty-handed.

Cilento is back, this time as director and musical stager, with Christine Colby Jacques credited with “reproduction of Mr. Fosse’s choreography” and David Dabbon with “new music and dance arrangements.” Cilento had his work cut out for him, as there was no script and no recordings of the original presentation, so he and Jacques, who understudied for the 1978 Broadway show, used muscle memory and YouTube videos of other productions. The result is a hot mess from start to finish, but it won’t tarnish Fosse’s legacy, as he can’t take any of the blame for this one. (Notably, however, Nicole Fosse, his daughter with Gwen Verdon, is one of the producers.)

Dancin’ will be closing early after coming up with no Tony noms (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The so-called Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ features a whole lotta hats, cigarette smoking, shoulder shimmying, sequins, and jazz hands as the cast prances and twirls in, on, and around tall metal scaffolding towers and in front of occasionally dizzying projections on a back screen. The imposing industrial set is by Robert Brill, with projections by Finn Ross, over-the-top sound by Peter Hylenski, excessive lighting by David Grill, and inconsistent costumes by Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme.

“Recollections of an Old Dancer” kicks off with tone-deaf archival footage of Bill “Mr. Bojangles” Robinson. “Big City Mime,” which was understandably cut in 1978, returns, a sleazy depiction of New York as a town of hookers and pimps. “Big Deal” is a failed attempt at noir. “The Female Star Spot” goes woke on Dolly Parton’s “Here You Come Again.” The “America” segment, with such red, white, and blue tunes as “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and “Gary Owen,” feels today like parody. (At least they cut “Dixie”; other numbers were left out because of rights issues.) “The Dream Barre” has been banished.

The second act opens with the still-stellar “Benny’s Number,” a rousing performance of the Benny Goodman Orchestra’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” with drummer Gary Seligson soloing up high on a platform, although it goes on too long; uncoincidentally, the original company performed the first part of the piece at the Tonys, so it is in this piece that Fosse’s choreography is most closely replicated in 2023.

And speaking of singing, we are told at the beginning that there will be some singing, but it turns out that there is a significant amount, and most of the vocals are undistinguished, delivered more like the performers are on The Voice or American Idol than on a Broadway stage. The individual scenes are like flashy MTV videos that have little to do with one another; Dancin’ 1978 worked as individual set pieces, but Dancin’ 2023 doesn’t trust the dancing enough and instead bombards the audience with posturing glitz and glamour to grab our attention. That continues during the curtain call, in which each dancer takes a bow with their name projected hugely on the screen, as if we need to remember who is who when we vote.

The only name we’d prefer not to see is Bob Fosse’s on the marquee.

JULIANA F. MAY: FAMILY HAPPINESS

Juliana F. May explores intergenerational trauma and more in new show at Abrons Arts Center (photo by Maria Baranova)

JULIANA F. MAY: FAMILY HAPPINESS
Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
May 3-13, $25 (benefit May 10)
www.abronsartscenter.org
chocolatefactorytheater.org

“This work examines Jewish violence, victimhood, and intergenerational trauma,” New York–based choreographer Juliana F. May says about her latest piece, Family Happiness, making its world premiere May 3–13 at the Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center. A co-commission with the Chocolate Factory, Family Happiness is part of the twentieth anniversary celebration of May’s company, MAYDANCE, and follows such powerful works as Folk Incest, Commentary=not thing, and Gutter Gate.

The new piece is written, directed, and choreographed by May and features a familiar roster of MAYDANCE favorites: Leslie Cuyjet, Tess Dworman, Lucy Kaminsky, Molly Poerstel, and Kayvon Pourazar, who all collaborated with May on the original songs. The music is by Tatyana Tenenbaum, with lighting by Chloe Z. Brown and costumes by Mariana Valencia. The narrative explores Zionism, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Holocaust, individual and group communication, grief, and trauma through text, dance, and music.

Performer Tess Dworman created a pecial poster for new work by Juliana F. May

“I worked on the beginning ideas of the piece during the pandemic in Tel Aviv, where my partner has family,” Guggenheim Fellow May explained in a statement. “I am a choreographer, but there is a lot of text in my work. I wrote this project ‘treatment’ on the tails of a dream I had about my father committing suicide and Trump losing the election. There’s a figure of a boy who looks like a scarecrow next to a pitchfork, a bird, and a half moon. He passes by the dog beach, the separate beach, the smoking beach, and eventually arrives at the sex beach. There are hundreds of naked people sitting on top of each other with legs intertwined in a series of eights. The dogs migrate over to the sex beach. Peripheral backward strokes follow a lunging and spreading and in an instant, the animals start to bite and peel skin away from bone, prying the upper extremities down towards the sand while the genitals remain connected like a roundabout on a playground. There is a rising smoke from the skinning like Christ being prepped with a soldering iron. The bodies smell like cocaine, synthetic cotton, or some kind of polyblend as they thrash around in the sand trying to free themselves from each locked jaw. They get close to the water and almost break free but realize they don’t know how to surf.”

May promises that Family Happiness “will be a big dance performance.” With that kind of description, how could it be anything else?

PUBLIC ART FUND TALKS: JACOLBY SATTERWHITE

Jacolby Satterwhite’s An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time is on view at Lincoln Center (photo by Nicholas Knight)

Who: Jacolby Satterwhite
What: Public Art Fund Talk
Where: The Cooper Union’s Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq., Third Ave. at Seventh St.
When: Wednesday, April 26, free with advance RSVP for in-person or livestream, 6:30
Why: In a 2021 “Meet the Artist” interview with the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich, multimedia artist Jacolby Satterwhite explains, “The influences I draw on are from pop culture, politics, my family, my personal histories, queer theory, art history, postructuralism and design, gaming. It’s sort of like, you know, the simulacra of the universe.” Born in 1986 in Columbia, South Carolina, the New York–based Satterwhite’s latest installation is An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time, on view on the fifty-foot-long Hauser Digital Wall in the Karen and Richard LeFrak Lobby in David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic.

Commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem and Public Art Fund, the nearly half-hour work explores the past, present, and future of Lincoln Center, featuring more than seventy-five dancers and more than fifty musicians from local performing art schools amid HD color video and 3D animation incorporating real-life figures, archival footage, trees, buildings, text, paintings, and photographs. On April 26 at 6:30, Satterwhite will be at the Cooper Union’s Frederick P. Rose Auditorium to discuss An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time and place it within the context of his career as well as the arts community it celebrates. “I wanted to describe time and history through a vehicle of abstraction, using color, shape, landscape, horizontality, and movement as a way to kind of reorient the history in a way that it hasn’t been normally told,” he says in the above Lincoln Center video. You can hear more on April 26 either at the Cooper Union or via livestream, both free with advance RSVP.

DOUGLAS DUNN + DANCERS: GARDEN PARTY

Alexandra Berger, Janet Charleston, and Christopher Williams rehearse Douglas Dunn’s Garden Party (photo by Mimi Gross)

GARDEN PARTY
Douglas Dunn Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts., third floor
April 24-30, $15-$20
www.douglasdunndance.com
www.mimigross.com

All dancer and choreographer Douglas Dunn needed to do was give Mimi Gross the title of his new production and the painter, set and costume designer, installation artist, and teacher was off to the races.

Born in California in 1942, Dunn has been collaborating with Gross, a native New Yorker born in 1940, since Dunn presented Foot Rules in 1979; they’ve worked together some two dozen times since, including on 1980’s Echo, 1981’s Skid, 1988’s Matches, 1995’s Caracole, 2007’s Zorn’s Lemma, and 2017’s Antipodes. They met quite serendipitously.

“I’d been working with Charles Atlas on film, video, and costumes for several years. Being then in a moment unavailable, he suggested Mimi,” Dunn explained via email. “She made wonderful apparel for an hour-long duet for Deborah Riley and me called Foot Rules. What I noticed right away was her love of color.”

“Charlie Atlas was presenting live performances which he made up and directed. That is how I first met Charlie, and then I met Douglas,” Gross added. “They had been making dances and videos together. When Douglas asked Charlie if he could make some costumes for a new dance he was choreographing with Deborah Riley, Charlie was super busy — he was working with Merce Cunningham full-time — and recommended me to do it. I had made many costumes for movies with cardboard and hot glue . . . nothing to be washed! Or worn many times! Quite a challenge. Of course, I said sure. And then through the decades on and off we have shared many projects, sets and costumes, sometimes sets, sometimes costumes, sometimes both — very open, warm, clear mutual caring to work within our shared possibilities, never knowing how it will come out.”

Douglas Dunn emerges from his pulpit in Mimi Gross’s fantastical Garden Party installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Dunn and Gross are currently at work on their latest project, Garden Party, which runs April 24-30 at Douglas Dunn + Dancers’ SoHo loft studio. Last week I attended a rehearsal of the sixty-minute piece, which features Dunn, Grazia Della-Terza, Alexandra Berger, Janet Charleston, Vanessa Knouse, Emily Pope, Paul Singh, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Timothy Ward, and Christopher Williams moving through the spectacular space created by Gross, consisting of lushly painted trompe l’oeil walls and ceiling and a long horizontal mirror, covered with pink, yellow, and green flowers, plants and trees, clouds, raindrops, and more. While the plants at the right are fake — Dunn told me at the rehearsal that he had “planted” some of them himself — the greenery at the left is real, repurposing the plants that were already in the studio.

There’s also a colorful pulpit where Dunn spends much of the show; he had specifically requested it, asking for it to be based on the design at Grace Church on Broadway. The dancers glide across the floor like blossoming flowers, in solos, pas de deux, and trios, celebrating birth, life, and growth; however, the soundtrack of pop and classical songs (Robert de Visée, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Bach, Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris, more), birdsong, and poetry (by John Keats, Anne Waldman, Molière, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Milton, Stephanie Jacco, and others, read by Dunn, Waldman, Jacco, and Della-Terza) touch on loss and loneliness. A few of the dancers occasionally sit on an inviting white park bench, and Dunn clutches a plush bird named April.

“Mimi always helps me see color; I always see line first,” Dunn explained. “We got along just fine and knew right away how much to interact and how much to let the other alone. She often saw historical references in the dancing and she’d take off from there. We’re both dead serious but also insistent on having a good warm time relating when preparing for a new dance show. The feel of this evening was clear to me the day the title hit me (about three years ago, the pandemic postponing the project). The lavish beauty of Mimi’s set completely fulfills my initial intuition . . . as if she’d read my dancing mind.”

Douglas Dunn’s Garden Party runs April 24-30 in SoHo loft studio (photo by Jacob Burckhardt, 2023)

“The new dance had been talked about a long while ago,” Gross noted. “All of 2021-22, I made many landscape drawings, and then, when the pandemic seemed to subside, I painted these flowers last summer and called them ‘Feel Good Flowers.’ When Douglas asked me if I would make a garden and sets about ‘Early Spring,’ he said, ‘Fill up the studio.’ That was just what I was doing anyway. I asked him if I could paint it with this stylization, and that I didn’t know exactly how I would do it. He was fine with that. I made a big drawing of a bird and discussed the texture and color with Sue Julien, who fabricated it. Both Sue and David Quinn made an amazing contribution fabricating the costumes from my drawings. Douglas wanted each dancer to be different, with different leg lengths. That is all he had said. I pored over my Ballet Russe books, and Charles James and I made drawings. The only common link is the fluorescent yellow in each costume.”

The collaboration extends to Lauren Parrish, who designed the lighting and projections, and sound designer Jacob Burckhardt. The show will be preceded by live music from guitarist and composer Tosh Sheridan, who has released such albums as Tosh, Tosh Sheridan Trio, and solo/duo.

“All of these plain facts are fine and good and relate our collaborating history, but it is the depth of poetic reality where we really collaborate,” Gross concluded, “by dance and by making an atmosphere for the dance.”

And what an atmosphere Dunn and Gross have created for Garden Party.

WEATHERING

Humanity gets caught up in the maelstrom in Faye Driscoll’s Weathering (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

WEATHERING
New York Live Arts
219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
April 5-8, 12-15, $32-$50, 7:30
212-924-0077
newyorklivearts.org
www.fayedriscoll.com

Faye Driscoll’s latest work, Weathering, is, well, everything.

The seventy-minute piece, continuing at New York Live Arts through April 15, takes place on a squishy white movable platform raft designed by Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan. The audience sits on all four sides of the object. One by one, ten performers — James Barrett, Kara Brody, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Amy Gernux, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Jennifer Nugent, Cory Seals, Eliza Tappan, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, and Jo Warren, in Karen Boyer’s costumes of everyday dress, some with backpacks, bags, and other accoutrements — step on and off the platform, eventually all standing in place and freezing, becoming what Driscoll calls a flesh sculpture.

Stage managers Emily Vizina and Ryan Gamblin, in all black, go to opposite corners and gently push the platform so it spins around, extremely slowly at first. The dancers barely move a muscle, but as the platform rotates, you can start to tell that the performers have shifted ever so slightly, lowering a knee, reaching out a hand, turning a foot, almost imperceptibly; the effect is like you are watching a living, creeping flipbook. Soon they begin touching, the connections electrifying, as if the contact is life affirming, which is especially potent as we emerge from Covid restrictions that kept us physically apart from one another. As the bodies interweave, they close gaps, filling spaces of loss and absence.

Performers encounter all five senses while spinning around the New York Live Arts stage (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

Driscoll incorporates all five senses as she and the stage managers occasionally spray the performers (and the audience) with citrus-smelling water and some of the dancers let out small groans and grunts as they put their mouths on an arm, leg, or neck that approaches them, somewhere in between the hunger for sex and the hunger of zombies seeking sustenance.

As the score builds — the sound and music direction is by Sophia Brous, with live sound and sound design by Ryan Gamblin and composition, field recordings, and sound design by Guillaume Malaret — the raft is spun around faster and faster. Personal items fall haphazardly to the ground: keys, a wallet, cellphones. Clothes start coming off, revealing more of who these people are and challenging what we might have previously thought about them while harkening back to our primeval existence, equating the beginning and the end. Chaos ensues, as the audience tries to capture as much of the action as it possibly can, not wanting to miss a single thing, as if every little movement, every sound, every change could upset the balance of this mini-universe.

Driscoll is telling us to pay attention, letting us know that humanity is failing and we are destroying the planet. The raft, evoking Earth and its orbit, sometimes slides slightly out of control, nearly hitting the people in the first row.

Faye Driscoll’s Weathering continues at NYLA through April 15 (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

The faster the raft goes, the more the audience is overcome by an intoxicating joy mixed with impending doom; it is absolutely exhilarating to follow each of the performers’ journeys, ten individuals striving to survive on their own and as a group, just as we in the audience are.

The show is accompanied by the companion reader Durations of Short Detail, with short pieces by dramaturg Dages Juvelier Keates (“We Are So Close”), dancer and choreographer Jesse Zaritt (“To Hold and Be Held”), and Driscoll, whose poem “Chariots of Flesh” relates, “We’ve been trembling in the trench for / Days? / Weeks? / Years? / Lifetimes? / Despite thick fog / I am overcome / By the smell of your clean shaven skin / Face, eyes, gaze, nose, mouth, fear / I try to pound you out but you latch onto my arm, / wrap your leg around me and reverse position / You try to pound me out but I latch onto your arm, / wrap my leg around you and reverse position / We are desperate to know the outcome / Desperate to know the outcome / Desperate to know the outcome. . . .”

As she has in such previous pieces as the Thank You for Coming trilogy, You’re Me, and There is so much mad in me, Driscoll investigates the intrinsic relationship between performer and audience, the imperative bond, but there is a lot more at stake in Weathering, nothing less than the future of the human race.

I don’t know that we can save the world through art, but with creators such as Driscoll, we can have a hell of a lot of terrifying fun trying.

MOVEMENT AT THE STILL POINT: AN EVENING OF DANCE

Who: Mark Mann, Sara Mearns, Megan LeCrone, Georgina Pazcoguin, Lloyd Knight, Xin Ying, Terese Capucilli, Skye Mattox, Karla Garcia, David Guzman, Ricardo Zayas, Morgan Marcell, Ryan Vandenboom, Curtis Holland, Rena Butler, Amadeo “Remy” Mangano, Ousmane “Omari” Wiles, Dardo Galletto, Alonso Guzman, Evan Ruggiero, Jie-Hung Connie Shiau, Maleek Washington, Francesca Harper, Carmen de Lavallade, Gus Solomons Jr., more
What: Book launch with live performances
Where: The Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at Nineteenth St.
When: Monday, April 10, $81-$131, 7:30
Why: Photographer Mark Mann has assembled quite a group of all-stars to launch his coffee-table book, Still Point: An Ode to Dance (Rizzoli, March 2023, $60), at the Joyce on April 10. The book features photographs of more than 140 people in the dance world, several dozen of whom will be at the Joyce to celebrate with Mann, including New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns, Martha Graham principals Lloyd Knight and Xin Ying, Broadway’s Skye Mattox and Ryan Vandenboom, voguers Amadeo “Remy” Mangano and Ousmane “Omari” Wiles, tango dancers Dardo Galletto and Alonso Guzman, tap dancer Evan Ruggiero, Ailey II artistic director Francesca Harper, and legends Carmen de Lavallade and Gus Solomons Jr. “Mark is one of a rare breed of photographers who understands dancers: how we move, the way we say things with our bodies that other people say in words, how much we love to perform for an audience — even an audience of one,” Chita Rivera writes in the foreword. “So I put on my top hat, white tie and tails, and we did our own little dance, and it shows in the images he made of me, and of all the dancers in this beautiful collection.”

Misty Copeland is among more than 140 dancers who posed for Mark Mann’s new book (photo courtesy Mark Mann / Rizzoli USA)

The Glasgow-born Mann, who had not photographed the dance community before, was inspired to do the project when commiserating with his sister-in-law, choreographer Loni Landon, about the pandemic lockdown, during which there were no live, in-person performances and Mann’s professional portraiture business had dried up. He accidentally discovered an empty warehouse space on the West Side, where he invited subjects to pose for him, with his beloved medium format Leica S that he calls Gretta. “When our first dancer, Rena Butler, came into the studio in February of 2021, I was speechless,” Mann explained in a statement. “I realized I was watching a performance tailored exclusively for my camera, and for the first few minutes I was so captivated that I actually forgot I was supposed to be taking photos. In that moment, as I began to photograph, my whole life as a photographer was turned upside down.”

In the book, many of the subjects contribute personal thoughts about their chosen discipline. “During the shoots, we spoke to the dancers about identity. The pandemic challenged a lot of us in terms of facing our true selves in a moment when we lost what had defined us,” Landon writes in the afterword. “Everyone figured out how to survive in their own way. It was astonishing to see perseverance paired with vulnerability — the resilience of these artists.” They now take the next step together on April 10 at the Joyce.