this week in dance

JAPAN PARADE AND STREET FAIR

Who: George Takei, Sandra Endo, many others
What: Japan Day celebration of the friendship between the United States and Japan
Where: Central Park West between Sixty-Eighth & Eighty-First Sts.
When: Saturday, May 14, free, 12:30 – 4:30
Why: In May 2021, the annual Japan Day festival took place online; you can check out highlights here. This year the festival is anchored by the inaugural Japan Parade, featuring floats, live performances, and more, led by Grand Marshal George Takei and emceed by LA news correspondent Sandra Endo. The parade was supposed to take place in 2020 but was postponed because of the pandemic. This year’s event honors the 150th anniversary of the establishment of Japan’s mission to the United States and the US introduction of baseball to Japan. “To see the Japanese community in New York celebrated is a beautiful thing and it will be exciting to see Japan’s friendship with New York on full display,” Takei said in a statement.

Alexandra E. Tataru won the Japan Parade grand prize for the above artwork (courtesy Alexandra E. Tataru and Japan Parade)

The opening ceremony will take place at 12:30 on Central Park West and Seventieth St., followed by the parade, which kicks off at 1:00 from CPW and Eighty-First. Among the many participants in the parade will be the cast of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon The Super Live, Hello Kitty, drummers Cobu and Soh Daiko, Japanese Folk Dance of NY, Kazanami Yosakoi Dance Project, Young People’s Chorus of New York City, sword fighters Tate Hatoryu, International Karate Organization Kyokushinkaikan, and Anime NYC. In addition, there will be a street fair from 1:00 to 4:30 on Sixty-Ninth St. between CPW and Columbus Ave., offering such food and drink as BBQ chashu bowl by Nakamura, hojicha panna cotta by Abe’s Kitchen and Mt. Fuji Japanese Steakhouse, fried chicken and onigiri by Tori-Bien, ramen by Ramen Kings, mochi donuts by Kai Sweets and Mt. Fuji Japanese Steakhouse, okonomiyaki by Otafuku, noodles by Soba-Ya, and tea from Ito En, along with a Hello Kitty photo booth, the portable Mikoshi shrine by Samukawa Jinja, origami by the Origami Therapy Association, a charity supporting the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, Japan tourism info, and more.

CARRIE AHERN DANCE: CARNAL SPILL

Carrie Ahern Dance’s “Sex Status 2.0” series takes place in private homes (photo by Julie Lemberger)

Who: Carrie Ahern Dance
What: Latest work in “Sex Status” series
Where: Private homes in Manhattan and Brooklyn
When: May 12-14, 18-21, sliding scale $25-$100, 8:00
Why: For more than two years, we watched dance online from the comfort of our our homes or wherever we were sheltering in place during the pandemic lockdown. Now, with venues back open, you can watch Carrie Ahern Dance’s (CAD) latest presentation in its ongoing “Sex Status” series from the comfort of someone else’s home. Since 2018, CAD’s “Sex Status 2.0” has reinterpreted Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex through performances that ask such questions as “What is authentic femininity?,” “Where does our power lie?,” and “What are our deepest desires?,” taking place in private homes.

“Sex Status” continues with Carnal Spill, an investigation into the language women use and receive during sex. The work features text by Ahern, who previously explored modern death (2011-16), and Vanessa DeWolf, with storytelling, word games, and original music by Anne Hege. Jay Ryan will design the sets and lighting specifically for each of the two homes, one on West Forty-Third St. in Manhattan (May 12-14), the other in Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn (May 18-21). Carnal Spill — which asks, “How does our relationship to words evoke erotic connection or disconnection; turn-on or shame?” and “What is it about our fantasy life that can expand our reality?” — will be performed by Jennifer Chin, Donna Costello, Carolyn Hall, Elke Rindfleisch, and Bennalldra Williams; tickets are available on a sliding scale from $25 to $100.

JODY SPERLING/TIME LAPSE DANCE PERFORMANCE SERIES

Wind Rose is part of special performance series by Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance (photo by Annie Drew)

Who: Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance
What: Climate-change-themed performance series
Where: The Theater at the 14th Street Y, 344 East Fourteenth St. between Second & Third Aves., and online
When: May 5-7, $10-$100
Why: New York–based choreographer, dancer, writer, and scholar Jody Sperling, the founding artistic director of Time Lapse Dance (TLD), continues her climate-change-themed collaboration with Alaskan-born composer, sound artist, and eco-acoustician Matthew Burtner with a series of live events May 5-7 at the Theater at the 14th Street Y. TLD will present four shows that investigate the relationship between the body and the environment, with dancers Frances Barker, Morgan Bontz, Carly Cerasuolo, Anika Hunter, Maki Kitahara, Sarah Tracy, Nicole Lemelin, and Sperling and live music by Burtner.

The bill, which marks the company’s return to live, indoor performance in front of an audience after having made numerous dance films during the pandemic, includes the stage premiere of Plastic Harvest, about plastic pollution, performed by dancers immersed in a world of plastic bags; 2019’s Wind Rose, a work about breath and atmosphere for five dancers in flowing white costumes and a soloist in black; 2015’s Ice Cycle, about the melting of the ice caps; and an excerpt from the processional American Elm. It all begins with a gala on May 5 at 7:00 featuring a full performance, an artist talk, and a benefit reception. On May 6 at 7:00, a full performance can be experienced in-person or livestreamed. There will be a family-friendly in-person program May 7 at 2:00, followed by an in-person-only finale at 7:00.

CHASING ANDY WARHOL

Audience members chase Andy Warhol through the East Village in immersive production (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

CHASING ANDY WARHOL
Astor Plaza, Broadway at East Eighth St.
Thursday, Friday, and Sunday through June 12, $80
online slide show
www.chasingandywarhol.com
www.batedbreaththeatre.org

The world has spent more than half a century chasing Andy Warhol. Our obsession with Drella, as he was known to his close friends — a combination of Dracula and Cinderella — developed quickly from his carefully constructed public image, his genre-busting films and Pop art, his (and our) fascination with celebrity, and the beautiful and unusual people he surrounded himself with, beginning with his emergence as an art superstar and fashion icon in the 1960s and continuing well past his death in 1987 at the age of fifty-eight.

In the last few years alone, works by or about Warhol, born Andrew Warhola Jr. in Pittsburgh, have been part of such exhibitions and films as “Andy Warhol: Photo Factory” at Fotografiska, the Todd Haynes documentary The Velvet Underground, “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,”“Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks at the Guggenheim,” and “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Met in addition to the brand-new Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries.

Now comes Chasing Andy Warhol, a guerrilla-theater-like immersive presentation by the Manhattan-based Bated Breath company in which an audience of no more than sixteen at a time follows Andy Warhol through the streets of the East Village, not far from many of his old haunts. The show begins in Astor Plaza, where you are given an old red plastic View Master to look at some photo collages to get you in the mood. Then an excited young “tour guide” (Jmonet Hill, Annika Rudolph, or Fé Torres; I saw Rudolph, who was delightfully energetic), carrying a small suitcase and a boombox (through which she blasts the soundtrack) and identifying herself as the world’s biggest Andy fan, is surprised by a pair of Warhols in blue dresses and heels — one of whom pops a small balloon that has the word “art” on it. They run off, and she sets out to find him.

As she leads us down Lafayette and Bowery to Great Jones and Bleecker, there are wigged Warhols in blue, black, and white everywhere (Kat Berton, Grayson Bradshaw, Alysa Finnegan, Teal French-Levine, Youran Lee, Marisa Melito, Luca Villa), but she is after the “real” one in red (Jake Malavsky, Brandon P. Raines, or Kyle Starling). The multiple Andys evoke Warhol’s silkscreen style of printing multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, flowers, Elvis Presley, and other subjects in different colors.

Along the way, as the tour guide shares snippets about Warhol’s life and art, we encounter a puppet of child Andy (operated by Taylor McKenzie or Kayla Prestel) watching Ginger Rogers (Finnegan) posing in an empty white frame; Warhol and the puppet looking into a mirror that describes one of his medical disorders, Saint Vitus’ dance, which affected his movement; Andy engaging in a flirtatious dance with a hot basketball player (Mitchell Ashe) involving a wheeled fashion rack; a movie star (Katherine Winter) posing for paparazzi in front of a Chase bank (Chase — get it?); a dance in an alcove of stone chess tables; and fated meetups with Valerie Solanas (Alessandra Ruiz, who also plays Warhol’s mother, Julia) — just wait till you see what she uses for a gun — and Edie Sedgwick (Antonia Santangelo) in a glittering short dress.

Andy is never without his camera, and the audience is encouraged to take photos and video, but don’t get too caught up in documenting it or you’ll miss lots of cute small touches and clever references. A significant part of the fun is also watching people on the street passing by, wondering what’s going on. Of course, they immediately know it’s Warhol — has there ever been a more recognizable figure in New York City? — and many of them stop and take pictures, big smiles on their faces. But as one of the lucky sixteen audience members, wearing a clearly visible yellow Andy sticker, you can’t help but feel special, like you’re part of Warhol’s inner Factory circle. And the cast, which performs the seventy-five-minute show in forty-five-minute overlapping intervals, deserves extra kudos for strutting their stuff on the sidewalks of New York, particularly during these fraught times, where anything can happen at any time.

Chasing Andy Warhol is created and directed by Bated Breath artistic director Mara Lieberman, with fanciful choreography by Rachel Leigh Dolan, jubilant costumes by Christopher F. Metzger, sets by Christian Fleming, Meg McGuigan, and Jerry Schiffer, lighting by Joyce Liao, and sound and projections by Mark Van Hare. I have to admit that I was disappointed in two of the company’s recent indoor productions, Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec and Beneath the Gavel, but now I’m kicking myself for having missed its immersive, outdoor, on-the-move Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec, which they staged during the pandemic.

Chasing Andy Warhol concludes in an empty bar, where Warhol’s legacy as the original social media superstar is briefly explored. Could there ever have been a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok without Warhol’s obsession with public image and infectious celebration of celebrity and oneself? And, in turn, our obsession with Warhol, who managed his public persona like no one else?

“I am a deeply superficial person,” Warhol said. He also pointed out, “It’s not what you are that counts; it’s what they think you are.” In Chasing Andy Warhol, Lieberman and her talented team delve into the complex enigmatic character in unique, spirited ways, without avoiding his blemishes, as they pursue the mystery that was, and ever will be, Andy Warhol.

HOMECOMING: DANCE

Who: Marc Nuñez and Gotham Dance Theater, Candace Brown and Soul Project Dance
What: World premiere dance works
Where: The Tank’s Proscenium Theater, 312 West 36th St.
When: April 29 – May 13, $35-$50
Why: The Tank’s 2022 Homecoming Season, which began with Miriam Pultro’s rock requiem Glass Town, the Cybertank fiction game Feast, and Ioli Andreadi and Aris Asproulis’s history play Filiki Eteria: The Brotherhood behind the Revolution, continues with a pair of world-premiere dances dealing with crisis, adversity, and recovery.

First up is Gotham Dance Theater’s re:motions, running April 29 to May 8. Directed and choreographed by Marc Nuñez, who founded GDT in 2015 as a contemporary and street dance company dedicated to social involvement and diversity, the piece, a melding of music, movement, and theater, looks at love and loss in a world overtaken by technology; it will be danced by writer Nadia Khayrallah, rehearsal assistants Davonna Batt and Michaela Ternasky-Holland, and Sarina Gonzalez, Celinna Haber, Jasmine Huang, and Stephanie Shin, with spoken-word narration by Lyndsay Dru Corbett.

May 4-13 brings Candace Brown’s While We Wait: A Tale of Fallen Fruit to the Tank’s Proscenium Theater, the evening-length debut from the dancer, teacher, director, and choreographer’s new company, Soul Project Dance. Exploring love and community while inspiring and uplifting both the artists and the audience, the work will be performed by Julia Alaimo, Andrew Mulet, Hamly Tavarez, Jada Clark, Masumi Hambayashi, Byron Tittle, Nicole Cardona, Jackie Torres, Caitlin Marks, Jay Mills, LJ Bologna, and Leah Joy Faircloth.

HARKNESS MAIN STAGE SERIES: AMOC’S WITH CARE

AMOC’s With Care comes to the 92nd St. Y this week (photo by Natalia Perez)

Who: Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber, Keir GoGwilt, Miranda Cuckson
What: New York City premiere of work by AMOC (American Modern Opera Company)
Where: Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd St. Y Harkness Dance Center, 1395 Lexington Ave. at Ninety-Second St., and online
When: In person Thursday, April 28, $30, 8:00; online April 29, noon, to May 1, midnight, $15
Why: In November 2018, married former Batsheva dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber debuted With Care at ODC Theater in San Francisco, a co-commission with AMOC (American Modern Opera Company). The piece, which explores caregiving, carelessness, and loss — as perceived prior to the pandemic, when those issues took center stage — was created by Smith in collaboration with violinist Keir GoGwilt; the latter performs with violinist Miranda Cuckson as current L.A. Dance Project artists-in-residence Smith and Schraiber, portraying a caregiver and a wounded spirit, move around them.

Directed by Smith and featuring music by AMOC cofounder Matthew Aucoin, the work includes chairs, small wooden slats, and sand with dance, music, and spoken word that should take on new meaning in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. “The original impetus for With Care came out of the last section of my previous work with Keir, A Study on Effort,” Smith said in a statement. “This piece consists of seven efforts, the last of which is the effort of taking care. We thought to expand this study of emotional and physical labor into a theatrical context, investigating the dynamics of caregiving and taking between four characters. Adding Or and Miranda opened a world in which the dynamics of care spiral from empathy to apathy. The more our characters attempt to break free from this cycle, the more they become lost in the maze of their commitments to each other. Yet ultimately the only solace they find is in each other. Never stop caring.”

With Care will be performed live at the 92nd St. Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall on April 28 at 8:00; a recording will be available online from April 29 at noon to May 1 at midnight. For more on Smith and Schraiber, check out Boaz Yakin’s 2019 film, Aviva, and Elvira Lind’s 2017 documentary, Bobbi Jene. The Harkness Main Stage Series continues in May with the Future Dance Festival and in June with Jonathan Fredrickson of Tanztheater Wuppertal.

EIKO OTAKE’S THE DUET PROJECT: DISTANCE IS MALLEABLE

Eiko Otake and Iris McCloughan will team up again for “The Duet Project” at NYU Skirball

Who: Eiko Otake, Ishmael Houston-Jones, DonChristian Jones, Margaret Leng Tan, Iris McCloughan
What: “The Duet Project”
Where: NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Pl. at Washington Square South
When: April 15-17, $35
Why: Following decades of dancing with her husband, Koma, in 2014, after Koma injured his ankle, Eiko Otake began exploring solo work as well as duets with other collaborators. In 2017 she launched “The Duet Project: Distance Is Malleable,” teaming up with a wide range of artists, posing the questions “How can two artists collide and return changed but whole? How can two individuals encounter and converse over their differences with or without words? How can we express both explicitly and implicitly what each of us really cares about?” Among those she’s worked with are painter Beverly McIver, filmmaker Alexis Moh, choreographers Merián Soto and Ann Carlson, dancer Chitra Vairavan, musician Ralph Samuelson, and photographer and historian William Johnston. In her choreographer’s note, Eiko explains, “In my new ‘Duet Project: Distance Is Malleable,’ I work with a diverse group of artists, living and dead. Collaborators come from different places, times, disciplines, and concerns. Together, we try to maximize the potentials of our various encounters so as to reaffirm that distance is indeed malleable.”

“The Duet Project” is now making its New York premiere April 15-17 at NYU Skirball, where Eiko’s unique experiments continue with choreographer, curator, and improvisor Ishmael Houston-Jones, painter, rapper, and organizer DonChristian Jones, avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan, and poet and performance maker Iris McCloughan. As Eiko also explains, “This endeavor is as much about conversation as it is about self-curation, developing instincts, desires, strategies, and tools for encounters with or without words. It is also about developing urges, hesitations, and resistance by looking at each other and taking time. Being physically and mindfully together is memory making. Every encounter is to affirm living and also to prepare for one’s inevitable leaving. My body is always leaning forward to the next encounter.”