AFDT will present EVENFALL in near-total darkness at the Joyce SoHo (photo by Elazar Harel)
Joyce SoHo
155 Mercer St. between Houston & Prince Sts.
May 5-7, $18, 8:00
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
www.afdancetheater.org
San Francisco–based Alyce Finwall Dance Theater will present the New York premiere of their evening-length piece Evenfall at the Joyce SoHo this week, a work for eight women performed in near darkness. The limited lighting often makes the exposed skin of the dancers’ faces, arms, and legs the only visible elements, except when they remove each other’s black costumes, furthering their examination of feminine identity, innocence, and intimacy. Consisting primarily of slow-paced solos, duets, and trios that emphasize stretched motion, Evenfall is a collaboration with sound and video environmental artist Andrea Williams and electronic-music composer Carson Whitley, who fill the space with birdsong and other peaceful outdoor nature sounds. AFDT, whose stated mission “is to blend an unabashed movement language with dramatic expression and wry humor to create a powerful vehicle for theatrical dance,” made Evenfall as part of San Francisco’s Garage Theater Resident Artist Workshop (RAW); the piece features Madelyn Biven, Julia Hollas, Emily Jones, Malinda LaVelle, Kaitlin Parks, Joy Prendergast, Maggie Stack, and Emmaly Wiederholt. The May 6 performance will be followed by a discussion with members of the creative team.
From 1973 until her death in 2009, legendary dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch ran Tanztheater Wuppertal, the German company that changed the face of dance theater forever with such seminal productions as Rite of Spring, Café Müller, Danzón, Masurca Fogo, and so many more. In 1978 she staged Kontakthof, collaborating with Rolf Borzik, Marion Cito, and Hans Pop, set to music by Juan Llossas, Charlie Chaplin, Anton Karas, Sibelius, and other composers. In 2000, she revisited the piece with a cast of senior citizens, and eight years later she turned the roles over to a group of Wuppertal high schoolers, most of whom had never heard of her and had never danced before. Director Anne Linsel and cinematographer Rainer Hoffmann follow the development of this very different production in Dancing Dreams, speaking with the eager, nervous participants, who talk openly and honestly about their hopes and desires, as well as with rehearsal directors Jo-Ann Endicott and Benedicte Billet, who do not treat the teens with kid gloves but instead are trying to get them to reach deep inside of themselves and hold nothing back. When Bausch shows up to choose the final cast, telling the teenagers that she doesn’t bite, the tension mounts. Dancing Dreams is an intimate look at the creative process, about dedication and determination and what it takes to be an artist. It suffers at times from feeling too much like a reality television show, mixing American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance with the fictional Glee, but it also offers a last glimpse at Bausch, whose final interview is captured in the film. “You might think I’ve had enough of Kontakhtof,” she says at one point. “But every time it’s a new thing.” Dancing Dreams is screening May 1 & 2 as part of MoMA’s KINO 2011: New Cinema from Germany series, which runs April 27 – May 2 and also includes Gereon Wetzel and Jorg Adolph’s How to Make a Book with Steidl, Tom Tykwer’s Drei (Three), Friedmann Fromm’s Weissensee (The Weissensee Saga: A Berlin Love Story), Florian Cossen’s Das Lied in mir (The Day I Was Not Born), Philip Koch’s Picco, and a Next Generation presentation of short works.