this week in dance

GUEST ARTIST SERIES: BEN MUNISTERI DANCE PROJECTS

Todd Allen, Kelly Garone, Katie Weir perform in Ben Munisteri’s BINARY 2.0, which will be part of three-piece program at DTW this week (photo by Christopher Duggan)

Dance Theater Workshop, Bessie Schönberg Theater
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
June 16–19, $20
212-924-0077
www.dancetheaterworkshop.org
www.munisteri.com

Many choreographers get caught up in theme and concept, making statements with their carefully designed visual vocabulary. Not so much Ben Munisteri. “I am more interested in the way a dance looks to its viewers than in how it feels to the dancers performing it,” the New York City-based Munisteri explains on his company’s website. “I am not a movement innovator, a dramatist, a philosopher, or a semiotician. Instead, I see myself as an excellent editor, tailor, and craftsman who manages to make something artful, meaningful, and beautiful with these skills (and with smart, generous, talented dancers).” Since 1994, Munisteri has been creating works for Ben Munisteri Dance Projects that he is continually fiddling with, constantly coming up with what he calls “remixes” or “recompositions,” regularly reinventing his oeuvre. BMDP will be at Dance Theater Workshop this week presenting three pieces: 2009’s Catalog, set to music by Radiohead; an expanded version of last year’s Binary 2.0, with music by Debussy; and the New York premiere of Robot vs Mermaid , with a score by Kirk O’Riordan. The company features dancers Katie Weir, Todd Allen, Shane Rutkowski, Anica Scott-Garrell, Cameron Burke, and Kelly Garone and associates Christine McMillan, Eric Sean Fogel, and Beau Hancock, with lighting design by Kathy Kaufmann.

TWI-NY TALK: PASCAL RIOULT

The always elegant Pascal Rioult will present two new works and repertory favorites at the Joyce this week

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
June 14-19, $10-$49
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org
www.rioult.org

New York City–based French choreographer Pascal Rioult, who established himself as a performer dancing with May O’Donnell, Paul Sanasardo, and, most famously, Martha Graham in the late 1980s and early 1990s, formed his own company in 1994 and has been challenging the precepts of contemporary dance ever since. Favoring sensual movement set to classical music, Rioult has put together such thematic evenings as “The Ravel Project,” “The Stravinsky Program,” and “Bare Bach” that combine new works with reimagined and reinterpreted classics. For his upcoming season at the Joyce, running June 14-19, he will be presenting two programs: one consisting of the all-Bach Views of the Fleeting World (“The Art of Fugue”), City (“Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord #6 in G major”), and the world premiere of Celestial Tides (the Brandenburg Concerti), the second, performed to live music, featuring Black Diamond (Stravinsky), Bolero (Ravel), and the new On Distant Shores, a beautiful dance about Helen of Troy (a sparkling Charis Haines) with a commissioned score by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Aaron J Kernis. After watching a sweaty rehearsal of On Distant Shores and Celestial Tides on an impossibly hot day, twi-ny met with the former track and field athlete, who graciously agreed to participate in a twi-ny talk as he prepared for his latest New York season.

twi-ny: You’ve devoted previous evenings to Ravel, Stravinsky, and Mozart, and you will be presenting a night of Bach at the Joyce. What are some of the specific challenges, as well as joys, in interpreting Bach onstage?

Pascal Rioult: I have always loved Bach’s music, instinctively and without understanding where the magic came from. It is specifically because of my intense work with the music of two great composition masters, Ravel and Stravinsky, in the past eight years that I felt it was time to “go to the source” of contrapuntal music and try to understand the great mystery of “Harmony.” (“Mysterium Harmonicum” was at the time of Bach an art and philosophy theory believing that there was some sort of mysterious forces that kept the Universe in balance and created a “Music of the Spheres” — a Divine Harmony.)

I love this concept in Art as in Life (I called the closing piece of the Bach program Celestial Tides). Certainly Bach’s mastery of counterpoint must come very close to this Divine Harmony.

But I also want with my dances to show that Bach’s music, contrary to common belief, is unbelievably rich emotionally.

twi-ny: Which composer might you have your sights set on next?

PR: I am not sure yet about which composer will be next, although I love Russian music and have not used it yet.

twi-ny: You also have the new series “Dance to Contemporary Composers,” which includes a newly adapted composition by Aaron J Kernis that will be performed live at the Joyce. How did that collaboration come about?

PR: It is time for me to work with contemporary composers (living composers). On the other hand, I suffer from not being able to have live music for my performances, which makes such a difference. So I decided to try to get support for the project of commissioning new music and have it played live for the next three years.

I have known and admired Aaron J Kernis’s music for many years, and we had wanted to collaborate for a while but did not get the opportunity yet. His music fits my concerns about the classical form as well as being filled with emotional content. I discussed with him my idea about a piece based on the character of Helen of Troy that I described as a “redemption fantasy.” We had to portray in a few minutes the epic of the Trojan war for the male heroes, then slip into the dream world created by Helen’s imagination and finish with a way to redemption. I knew it would be very rewarding to work with Aaron, and it has been a great collaborative experience resulting in a brilliant piece of music.

Michael Spencer Phillips and Charis Haines get hot and heavy rehearsing ON DISTANT SHORES in preparation for world premiere at the Joyce (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: What is it about Helen that drew you to her?

PR: I have always thought that Helen of Troy got a wrongful reputation. She would have been the cause of one of the most horrible wars that ever was, because she left her husband for another man. Was it not as usual the men’s unrelenting need of violence and conquest that drove them to Troy and made Helen a convenient pretext?

I found in the Euripides play Helen a similar version of the fact/myth. The mischievous gods had made a likeness of Helen from the clouds and that is the mirage that Paris took away to Troy, and it is for that “mirage” that so many lives were lost.

It was time for me to redeem Helen.

twi-ny: In addition to the obvious physical contact, your dancers make extraordinary, very emotional eye contact with one another while performing. Is that something you teach them? How important is that when you are choreographing a piece?

PR: As a matter of fact, I never give the dancers direction about expressions. On the contrary, I usually keep them from using facial expressions at all. Dancers do not need it because the expression comes forth through the body itself, from the inner core (you could say the inner self). Then the energy that creates the appropriate expression radiates towards the outside (including, at last, the face). You see, that is what we call “radiance,” “projection.” . . . You cannot help it if it comes from the right place. You don’t need to “put it on” and I don’t need to teach it.

I learned that from my mentor, Martha Graham.

TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY: ROOF PIECE

Trisha Brown Dance Company, “Roof Piece,” 1971 (photo by Babette Mangolte)

The High Line
Enter at 13th St. & Gansevoort
June 9-10, 7:00 pm
June 11, 5:00 & 7:00 pm
Admission: free
www.thehighline.org
www.trishabrowncompany.org
twi-ny slideshow

The Trisha Brown Dance Company has had quite a fortieth anniversary year, performing old and new works all over the world, including special shows at the Whitney and MoMA. They are concluding the celebration with a re-creation of their seminal 1971 dance “Roof Piece,” which will take place June 9-11 on rooftops surrounding the south end of the High Line. Unseen on outdoor rooftops since 1973, the piece, which is part of the High Line Art program, will feature the dancers — Neal Beasley, Elena Demyanenko, Dai Jian, Leah Morrison, Tamara Riewe, Nicholas Strafaccia, Laurel Tentindo, Samuel von Wentz, and Lee Serle — reacting to one another’s movement with improvisation. Admission is free and no RSVP is required, but be prepared for long lines to witness this wholly unique and exciting experience. The High Line is also likely to be crowded now that section two just opened, extending the former abandoned railway, which has been turned into a beautiful park, all the way to Thirtieth St. And keep a look-out for the various art projects along the High Line, including Kim Beck’s “Space Available,” which can also be found on surrounding rooftops; Julianne Swartz’s “Digital Empathy” sound pieces; Sarah Sze’s “Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat)”; Stephen Vitiello’s “A Bell for Every Minute” installation; Spencer Finch’s “The River That Flows Both Ways,” about the Hudson; and official High Line photographer Joel Sternfeld’s “A Railroad Artifact, 30th St., May 2000.”

Trisha Brown Dance Company triumphantly re-creates seminal “Roof Piece” along the High Line to conclude fortieth anniversary (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Update: On a beautiful early Friday evening on the High Line, Trisha Brown re-created her thrilling “Roof Piece” as hundreds of visitors lined the southern end of the High Line. Nine dancers wearing bold red outfits were spaced around the elevated park, two on the High Line itself, seven others scattered on surrounding rooftops, one dancer nearly within arm’s reach, another far off in the distance, barely visible. Improvised within a set dance vocabulary, the work begins as one dancer improvises the first move, which is then repeated as it travels from dancer to dancer in a specific order that recalls a visual game of telephone (and is then reversed), only without any mangling of the words. Although they’re all performing the same slow movements, they each come off in different manners, one dancer seen against the blue sky, another against a white brick wall, a third against the Jersey skyline, a fourth in a rectangular doorway that resembles a framed work of art. In an odd way, they recall Antony Gormley’s life-size, rooftop statues (“Event Horizon”) that filled Madison Square Park and the Flatiron District last year. There is no single place to be able to see all the dancers at once, so make your way around the area to catch each one. The thirty-minute performance, which concludes TBDC’s fortieth anniversary year, will be repeated Saturday at 5:00 and 7:00, with Sunday as a rain date in case one of the shows is canceled because of bad weather.

SUSAN MARSHALL & COMPANY: ADAMANTINE & FRAME DANCES

Kristen Hollinsworth trips the light fantastic in Susan Marshall’s ADAMANTINE (photo by Rosalie O’Connor)

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
June 9-11, $25
www.susanmarshallandcompany.org
www.bacnyc.org

Susan Marshall & Company will be celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this weekend with a pair of fascinating productions at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, both of which were originally commissioned by Peak Performances @ Montclair. From June 9 to 11, the New York City-based troupe will present the fifty-minute Frame Dances visual art and dance installation in the Howard Gilman Performance Space at 7:00, followed by the New York premiere of the forty-minute Adamantine in the Jerome Robbins Theater at 8:00, and Frame Dances again at 9:15; audiences can select whether they want to start the program at 7:00 or 8:00. The June 9 performance of Adamantine can be purchased as part of a benefit gala ($150) or individually for $20. Adamantine is a beguiling multimedia work featuring live music by Peter Whitehead (with Elton Bradman), sound design by Jane Shaw, costumes by Olivera Gajic, and shadowy projections courtesy of Mark Stanley. Set in small boxes of grass or sand, the multimedia Frame Dances offers an interactive element, as the audience is able to move within the space to choose what they want to see. Whitehead again composed the score, with costumes by Mary Kokie McNaughter and video design and projections by Ryan Holsapple and Roderick Murray. The company consists of dancers Kristen Hollinsworth, Luke Miller, Joseph Poulson, Ildiko Toth, Petra van Noort, and Darrin Wright. It should be quite an unusual evening of dance, art, music, and theater coming together in unique, unpredictable ways.

SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS AT THE MET

Shen Wei will perform the first site-specific dance in the Met’s history June 6 & 13 (photo courtesy Shen Wei Dance Arts)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Charles Engelhard Court
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Monday, June 6 & 13, $30-$75, 7:00
212-570-3949
www.shenweidancearts.org
www.metmuseum.org

Born in Hunan, China, in 1968 and based in New York City since 1995, visual artist, dancer, and choreographer Shen Wei founded Shen Wei Dance Arts in July 2000, appearing over the last ten years at such prestigious venues as the Venice Biennale, the Lincoln Center Festival, the Kennedy Center, the New York City Opera, the Sidney Opera, and the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In June 2009, SWDA performed a thrilling site-specific dance in and around Ernesto Neto’s “anthropodino” sculpture in the Park Ave. Armory, and this June they’re set for another unique experience: On June 6 and 13, SWDA, which favors slow, careful movement, will present the first-ever site-specific dance in the long history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The company, which consists of Javier J. Baca, Cecily Campbell, Hunter Carter, Sarah Lisette Chiesa, Evan Copeland, Jenna Fakhoury, Sara Procopio, Joan Wadopian, Adam H. Weinert, and Brandon Whited, will perform a new multimedia piece, with costumes by Shen Wei and Austin Scarlett and a live electronic score by Illusion of Safety’s Daniel Burke, in addition to a piece from their repertoire. The event will be held in the recently renovated Charles Engelhard Court of the America Wing, among works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Frederick William MacMonnies, Hiram Powers, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, Janet Scudder, John La Farge, Daniel Chester French, and Paul Manship as well as Martin E. Thompson’s massive Branch Bank of the United States facade. “I am looking forward to the experience of joining the beauty of bodies in stillness and the beauty of movement,” Shen Wei said in a statement, explaining that he has created “a piece celebrating the body in works of art of the past and the body in movement in the present.” Part of the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Series, the performance can be seen seated around the court ($60) or standing in the Balcony Galleries above ($30). The June 6 performance will be followed by a reception with Shen Wei and the dancers (an additional $15).

GOTHAM DANCE FESTIVAL: ABRAHAM, DRISCOLL, DOLBASHIAN

Gregory Dolbashian’s DASH Ensemble will present LIKE THE EAGLE at Summer Sampler Matinee at the Joyce

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
June 4-5, $10-$39, 2:00
Festival runs through June 12
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org

The Gotham Dance Festival continues at the Joyce this weekend with two matinee performances featuring a trio of exciting young choreographers. Brooklyn-based dancer and choreographer Kyle Abraham, who has danced with David Dorfman, Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane, and the Kevin Wynn Collection, among others, will lead his hip-hop-influenced Abraham.In.Motion company in the new work The Quiet Dance. Also based in Brooklyn, the hugely talented Faye Driscoll, who has staged such unique and fascinating productions as 837 Venice Blvd. and There is so much mad in me and was included in the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” exhibit of emerging talent under the age of thirty-three, will present not…not, part I, which looks at beauty, power, and desire, with her Faye Driscoll Dance Group. New York City native Gregory Dolbashian, who debuted at the tender age of eight with the Glimmerglass Opera, was the resident choreographer for the Chicago Ballet and CorbinDances before forming the DASH Ensemble, which will perform Like the Eagle. Next week’s Summer Sampler Matinee will feature works by Julian Barnett, Ashleigh Leite, and Sydney Skybetter.

Update: The first of four Gotham Dance Festival Summer Sampler Matinees was an at times subdued but overall inspired affair, consisting of three short works that all included extended moments of silence. Abraham.In.Motion’s The Quiet Dance was indeed quiet, starting off with Abraham dancing to no music, then joined by the quartet of Chalvar Monteiro, Elyse Morris, Rachelle Rafailedes, and Hsiao-Jou Tang, who remained relatively fixed in position on the left side of the stage as they danced in place to jazz legend Bill Evans’s gorgeous piano solo “Some Other Time.” For most of the piece, the performers do not make contact with one another until they break off into duets, having changed into dungarees and button-down shirts. Faye Driscoll takes a very different approach in not…not (part 1): If you pretend you are drowning / I will pretend I am saving you (a teaser of which can be seen above, from her March residency at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University), in which she, in a Moe-ish moptop, and Jesse Zaritt, in a Larry Fine-like curly fro, play a pair of rather not-very-good dancers performing a rather poorly choreographed work, making silly muscular gestures, unable to properly complete twists, stretches, and turns, displaying clearly overstated, ridiculously fake emotions, and acting out some extremely awkward and absurd sexual situations. Set to no music at all (although the Playbill credits Brandon Wolcott and Emil Abramyan, furthering the production’s purposeful ineptness by making mistakes in the printed program and, later, with the closing curtain), it’s a very funny work that concludes with Driscoll’s tour-de-force flurry through a seemingly endless bag of props. Driscoll and Zaritt were a tough act to follow, having laid the groundwork for an audience ready for further silly choreography that would make Leonard Pinth-Garnell proud, but Gregory Dolbashian’s DASH Ensemble quickly dashed those concerns, as Like the Eagle soared with a series of virtuosic moves by Antonio Brown, joined by Mor Gur-Arie, Alexandra Johnson, Rebecca Niziol, and Christopher Ralph. Transitioning from silent passages to quotes about inspiration from a WNYC RadioLab broadcast to music by Marsen Jules, Hauschka, Godspeed You Black Emperor, and Hoarse, Like the Eagle featured the most aggressive choreography of the afternoon. The well-curated three-piece program will be performed again on Sunday afternoon, offering another chance to see wonderful work by three extremely talented and inventive young choreographers.

HOWL! FESTIVAL 2011

This weekend’s Howl! Festival pays tribute to what would have been Allen Ginsberg’s eighty-fifth birthday

Tompkins Square Park
Ave. A to Ave. B between Seventh & Tenth Sts.
June 3-5, free
www.howlfestival.com

The somewhat annual Howl! Festival has moved from the end of the summer to the beginning of the season, kicking off June 3 with the group reading of Allen Ginsberg’s epic 1955 poem “Howl,” with its unforgettable opening: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. . . .” Getting under way at 5:00 in Tompkins Square Park, the free gathering, which also will be celebrating what would have been Ginsberg’s eighty-fifth birthday, will include such local literary luminaries as Darian Dauchan, Nicole Wallace, Curtis Jensen, Fay Chiang, Eliot Katz, Bob Rosenthal, John Giorno, Hettie Jones, and others, led by Bob Holman. The party continues on Saturday with the Great Howl! Out Loud Carnival for children (12 noon – 7:00 pm, Sunday also), with arts & crafts, games, miniature golf, face painting, balloon art, and more; the Hot Howl! Disco (1:00 to 4:00), with DJ Johnny Dynell; and live performances (2:00 to 7:00) by International Street Cannibals, Ekayani and the Tom Glide Space, Timbila, Emily XYZ, the Living Theater, LJ Murphy, John S. Hall & Musicians, Church of Betty, Bina Shariff, Vangeline Theater, Ed Sanders & Steven Taylor, Tyler Burba, and Arthur’s Landing, in addition to yoga classes, chanting monks, painting and sculpture, poetry circles, and other activities. On Sunday, Hip Hop Howl! (2:00 – 2:30) will feature a live mixtape showcase, House of Howl! (3:00 – 5:00) will consist of live music and dance under the theme “The High Life,” and Low Life 5: Flaming Queens (5:00 – 7:00) will conclude things with the much-loved two-hour production that this year pays tribute to the East Village’s LGBT artistic community and history, with such performers as Sade Pendavis, Vangeline Theater, the Pixie Harlots, Rachel Klein Theater, Go-Go Harder, and many more, dressed in elaborate costumes.