Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Shape of Things” continues at the armory through December 31 (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography/Park Avenue Armory)
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 31, $18 www.armoryonpark.org carriemaeweems.net
“How do we measure a life?” Carrie Mae Weems asks in her multichannel installation Cyclorama — Conditions, a Video in 7 Parts, the centerpiece of her Park Ave. Armory presentation “The Shape of Things.” Over footage of several women and one man, she asks, “Do we measure it by the forgotten / or by the remembered / by all the near misses and the exhaustion / or by the ability to endure / how / do we measure it by race / by class / by gender / by beauty / and by your lover’s love or your hater’s hate / or by pushing against the wind / against the tide / against family / against tradition / how / or do we measure it by the suffering of our friends and our enemies alike / or by the beginning / or by the end / by the way we confront life / or by the way we confront death?”
“The Shape of Things” is a masterful multidisciplinary examination of where we are today as a nation as we face systemic racism, health and income inequality, police brutality, and the perpetuation of the Big Lie. Through the seven sections of Cyclorama, organized in a large circle of screens, Weems mixes archival footage with new material shot in Syracuse, the Flea Theater, and the Watermill Center of such performers as Nona Hendryx, okwui okpokwasili, Vinson Fraley, Francesca Harper, Carl Hancock Rux, Basil Twist, and dozens of others, depicting modern times as a dangerous circus where Black and brown bodies are in constant threat. The final text is adapted from a commencement address Weems, a MacArthur Fellow, gave to the graduating class of SVA in May 2016 at Radio City Music Hall.
In front of Cyclorama is Seat or Stand and Speak, where attendees can sit in a chair or stand on a box and shout into megaphones. All Blue — A Contemplative Site is a dark space with a few steps leading to a door that opens to the moon and stars, a place of reflection, meditation, and hope. Across the way is Lincoln, Lonnie and Me, a 2012-14 work about presence and absence that is like a “Pepper’s Ghost” carnival sideshow with minstrel elements. Visitors enter an enclosed area bathed in red and stand behind a velvet rope, watching holographic-like projections of ghostly characters as we hear Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”; Weems reads a revised version of the Gettysburg Address; visual artist and activist Lonnie Graham speaks on social change; excerpts from Weems’s 2008 video Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment play, including a reenactment of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; and Weems dresses up as a Playboy bunny to Urge Overkill’s cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.”
The long side gallery features a row of several dioramas paying tribute to victims of racism, from It’s Over — A Diorama, consisting of a swan, candles, balloons, a globe, a fallen column, and photographs, to framed portraits from Weems’s “Missing Links” series from The Louisiana Project, in which she dresses up as various animals in suits, with such titles as “Happiness” and “Despair,” to The Weight, a diorama with three pink helium globes rising out of sculptures of African women’s heads, balancing the tenuous world. Also be on the lookout for a painting of Minerva, shown as a Black goddess, hanging in the hall among the portraits of white military heroes.
From December 9 to 11, dozens of performers activated the space, with live music and dance, film screenings, and panel discussions. But you don’t need others to help you activate the space for yourself as Weems places us firmly in the past, present, and future of an America that is getting more and more difficult to measure every day.
The next edition of gorno’s Yonsei f*ck f*ck is part of Pioneers Go East Collective “Crossroads” series at Judson Memorial Church
Who:Pioneers Go East Collective What:Performance series Where:Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South between Thompson & Sullivan Sts. When: Thursday, December 9 & 16, free – $50 (sliding scale), 8:00 Why: Pioneers Go East Collective was founded in 2010 as “an arts and cultural organization inspiring a lively exchange of queer art and culture by connecting people to ideas and experiences.” Focusing on social engagement, collaboration, accessibility, and relevance, the Manhattan-based group has put on such multimedia performances as My name’sound,Virgo Star, and American Mill No. 2 at such venues as La MaMa, Ars Nova, A.R.T/ New York Theatre, and Triskelion Arts. On December 9 and 16, PGEC returns to Judson Memorial Church for the performance and video series “Crossroads,” building a community of art, poetry, music, dance, film, and more around the work of multigenerational queer, BIPOC, and feminist artists.
On December 9 at 8:00, curator Hilary Brown-Istrefi brings together ALEXA GRÆ’s eve’s witness. 2 soliloquies to the night, created by GRÆ, Jon Wes, and Matthew Ozawa with text by Connie Edgemon; Arien Wilkerson’s climate change performance installation Equators, made in collaboration with David Borawski, Jon-Paul LaRocco, and Domenic Pellegrini; and gorno’s (Glenn Potter-Takata) Yonsei f*ck f*ck pt. 12, a collaboration with evan ray suzuki and Kimiko Tanabe. The program on December 16 consists of dancer Lydia Mokdessi and musician Jason Bartell’s Devotion Devotion IV, joined by vocalist Syd Island; Marija Krtolica’s Infinite Subjectivity, a dance-theater piece performed by Michael Mangieri and Krtolica, with live music and reading by Jason Ciaccio and text by Søren Kierkegaard; and Janessa Clark’s film Future Becomes Past, with dancer Courtney Drasner revisiting a 2003 solo, photographed by Kathleen Kelley with music by Ben Lukas Boysen and Sebastian Plano, along with an untitled work in progress by Clark.
Jamar Roberts will perform new solo on December 9 in final appearance as Ailey dancer (photo by Paul Kolnik)
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
December 1-19, $29-$159
212-581-1212 www.alvinailey.org www.nycitycenter.org
Jamar Roberts has spent nearly half his life with Alvin Ailey. First with Ailey II, then with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater since 2002, the thirty-nine-year-old Miami-born Bessie Award winner was named the company’s first resident choreographer in 2019; has created such works as 2016’s Gêmeos, 2017’s Members Don’t Get Weary, 2019’s Ode, and 2020’s A Jam Session for Troubling Times, which was filmed on the roof of the troupe’s midtown studio at the Joan Weill Center for Dance.
During the pandemic, Roberts also created two short films for the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series, the fierce and unrelenting solo Cooped and A Chronicle of a Pivot at a Point in Time, a piece for five dancers in the corner of a studio, their shadows echoing hauntingly against one wall; both feature a tense electronic score by David Watson. In addition, Roberts debuted his fifteen-minute solo, Morani/Mungu (Black Warrior/Black God), at City Center’s 2021 digital Fall for Dance program.
On December 9, as part of AAADT’s annual winter season at City Center, Roberts will perform for the final time; he is retiring from dancing with the six-minute solo You Are the Golden Hour That Would Soon Evanesce, accompanied by pianist and visual artist Jason Moran playing his composition “Only the Shadow Knows (Honey).” On December 3, Ailey premiered Roberts’s mesmerizing Holding Space, which was first seen virtually. The twenty-four-minute piece for thirteen dancers, set to an electronic score by Canadian musician Tim Hecker and featuring scenic design and costumes by Roberts, explores healing and presence and is highlighted by a movable onstage open cube in which dancers perform brief solos. At the debut, I was sitting across the aisle from Roberts, whose eyes were zeroed in on the stage every second.
I spoke with the easily likable Roberts, who smiles and laughs often, over Zoom about his transition from dancer to choreographer, the future of virtual presentations, his newfound love of jazz, and more.
Jamar Roberts discusses the pandemic and his career during Zoom interview (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)
twi-ny: When you started at Ailey, did you ever anticipate transitioning to choreography? Not all dancers want to become choreographers.
jamar roberts: No, not at all. When I got into the Ailey company, I wanted to be a fashion designer; that was the main thing on my list, and then there were three or four other things. Choreography was, like, number ten.
twi-ny: What were some of the others?
jr: Illustrator, animator, meteorologist, those kinds of things.
twi-ny: So what was your initial feeling when you were named the first resident choreographer in the company’s history?
jr: I was like, cool, only because they had hinted at it before, so I kind of felt it coming, but it didn’t really hit or register until I was well into my second piece.
twi-ny: What’s it like choreographing for your friends and colleagues?
jr: Oh, it’s great. I don’t really like the hierarchy, you know, where it’s like, I am the choreographer, I sit in the chair, you listen to me and you do what I say. I don’t really like that, so I get on the floor and I do the movements too, so for me it’s great because it feels like more of a collaborative effort, that we’re all in it trying to make the same thing. I always tell them I know everything and I know nothing at the same time. I can get the conversation started, but by the end of the day, you’re going to be the ones onstage dancing the work, so your input is essential.
twi-ny: During the pandemic you’ve been incredibly active and prolific. When did you first decide to forge ahead with virtual works?
jr: I didn’t make a decision; I would just get a commission and I would accept it. So I guess the answer to that would be when I got the first commission, which was the Guggenheim Works & Process virtual commission [Cooped.]
twi-ny: For that commission, you’re performer, choreographer, and film director. You really threw yourself right into the whole thing.
jr: Yeah, but if you make something, you’re going to have an opinion about how it should look, what environment it should be in, so the director part for me wasn’t anything more special or significant than the way that you would direct things in the studio, when you make a dance for the theater.
twi-ny: You could have put the iPhone somewhere else and not captured the same claustrophobic effect of confinement.
jr: It’s true. I think that artmaking is part, what, 20% skill, and the rest is taste; the majority of it is taste, and problem solving, and if you’re a person that’s making things and you’re relatively bright and you have a pretty good understanding of what works and what doesn’t — and some of us have that to varying degrees — you just trust your instincts and you go. I am no filmmaker, although I appreciate the sentiment; I’m not a director, but I’m an artist, I’m a person who likes creating, I’m a person who likes to see what I like to see, and if other people like to see what my eye is drawn to, then that’s great. But I’m not really here to put a title on anything. I’m just here to enjoy what it is I’m doing and feel good about it when it’s done.
twi-ny: The reaction to Cooped and so many of your other works has been phenomenal; people do want to see what you want to see. You followed Cooped with Morani/Mungu (Black Warrior/Black God), an intimate solo, and then the exhilarating Jam Session for Troubling Times, which you filmed with a team of dancers outside, although the dancers weren’t allowed to touch each other. What was it like to finally work with dancers, get out in the fresh air, yet still have this barrier, this space between each performer?
jr: When somebody tells you that you have to make a dance but they can’t touch each other, immediately it’s the end of discussion. You just have to deal with the cards you’ve been dealt. I guess at that point I just figured out, well, how am I going to do this. I didn’t really think too much about it because it was what it was.
twi-ny: It was so exciting to watch because just seeing people dance outside in this space was freeing for the viewer too. Your work during the pandemic was very much about space: Cooped is claustrophobic, Jam Session is on the Ailey rooftop, Chronicle has the dancers in a corner, and then with Holding Space you actually have a huge open cage that’s both threatening and liberating. Did these spatial elements progress naturally, or were you looking for confining imagery?
jr: The only one where I specifically looked for confining imagery was for the film Cooped. Everything else happened naturally. I think that because it happened naturally speaks to the kind of person I am. I know some people had a hard time during quarantine, stuck in their apartments, but I actually found it quite . . . great. There’s an aspect of my personality that feels very comfortable at home in confined spaces. I’m also six-four, so I’m always forced into confined spaces, like cars or airplanes. I don’t know, maybe subconsciously there’s a thing there.
twi-ny: Well, I’m much shorter than you and I don’t feel quite as confined, I think, as you do. What part of the city were you quarantining in?
jr: I was in Inwood. We were on tour in Texas in March 2020, and it got shut down. I was at home for about a week and then went to St. Louis to try to ride it out with some friends there. Cooped was made in the basement of their home. So the majority of it was in Missouri, and back and forth to New York.
twi-ny: A lot of your work, prepandemic, pre–George Floyd, and then after, is about the Black body, gun violence, racial injustice, and how Covid-19 disproportionately impacted communities of color while also celebrating, as you’ve said, “strength, beauty, and resilience.” How do you achieve this without expressing these elements explicitly?
jr: I think it’s because I’m a nice guy. [smiles] I mean, when the environment and the things that are going on around you are so heavy, you don’t have to say that much. For me, it really becomes about setting the tone for the moment and then on top of that just doing what dance does, which is inspire. Do you know what I mean? We inspire through images, beautiful images, beautiful movement. The rest is baked into the moment that we’re in.
twi-ny: On December ninth, you’ll be performing for what will be the final time, dancing You Are the Golden Hour That Would Soon Evanesce. Why did you decide now is the right time?
Jamar Roberts’s Holding Space is highlight of Ailey winter season at City Center (photo by Christopher Duggan)
jr: I decided now because my body is at the point where it can no longer keep up with the demands of a full-time professional dance career.
twi-ny: How do you think you’ll feel when it’s over? Are you going to be relieved, excited, sad, or do you have no idea?
jr: I don’t really think it’s the closing of a chapter; I think it’s the opening of a new one. This’ll probably be only the second time that I’ve ever been seen onstage doing my own work. I don’t know, I definitely won’t be crying, and I won’t feel sad at all.
twi-ny: As we come out of the lockdown and theaters are open and dancers can touch each other, do you anticipate making future virtual works or will you be sticking to in-person presentations?
jr: Why not both? I hope in the future they’re not called virtual pieces anymore, that they’ll just be called films. Because the word virtual makes it sound like it’s the B-plan. I think it’s all the same. You can have a virtual piece onstage — just throw a camera on the dancers as they’re dancing and have that be displayed. It’s all tools in the same bag; it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Yeah, I think dance has to think a little big bigger?
twi-ny: When you’re not involved with dance, and it seems like you’re always involved with dance, if you have any free time, what do you do?
jr: I try to connect with my friends and the people I love. I try to be a normal person and go to the clubs. I go to dinner and go and see shows. This past summer — summer in New York is always great because you can go and see so much music, jazz festivals in particular, jazz clubs, seeing live music and other performers. I try to keep my head in what’s going on.
twi-ny: You weren’t always a jazz fan, were you? [Roberts has set pieces to compositions by Moran, John Coltrane, Don Pullen, Nina Simone, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie in addition to Fela Kuti and the Last Poets.]
jr: No, I grew up with Brandy, and Britney Spears, and Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé, Alanis Morissette, Björk, and all that music. My family never played jazz in the house; it was probably some gospel music, old sermons from the ’50s, and that’s it. But I had to learn it, I had to teach myself that stuff because I was dancing these works that Alvin Ailey choreographed, and they were all to jazz music. And if I wanted to be able to interpret that work authentically, I had to know what the hell it is I was listening to, where it came from, what was happening at the time in which it was made, just so that I could as a performer come across as authentic, with conviction. I went down the rabbit hole, I guess.
Laura Peterson’s Interglacial makes its world premiere this week at Dixon Place (photo by Peter Yearsley)
INTERGLACIAL
Dixon Place
161A Chrystie St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
December 8-11, $15-$21, 7:30
212-219-0736 dixonplace.org www.openartsstudio.org
In a 2011 twi-ny talk with Laura Peterson, the New York City–based dancer and choreographer said about Wooden, “I am often influenced by visual art, and I started seriously looking at earthwork and pieces made from natural materials. I found myself thinking that those pieces are meant to change, as they are subject to time and weather.” Climate and land art are also at the center of her latest piece, Interglacial, which is having its world premiere December 8–11 at Dixon Place. Part dance, part installation, the work explores Arctic glacier loss as the performance space transforms over the length of the show.
“In Interglacial, I am trying to understand the devastating effects humans have had on our environment,” Peterson (Failure,SOLO), the artistic director of Open Arts Studio, said in a statement. “I’m exploring the intersection of the human body with landscapes and nonhuman phenomena. This work has a particular focus on the qualities of time, from the hyperspeeds of the digital world to the impossibly slow travels of a glacier across a continent, as it drags rocky material toward the sea.” Interglacial is performed by Peterson, Ching-I Chang, Jennifer Payán, and Darrin Wright, with sound by Omar Zubair, lighting by Amanda K. Ringger, and costumes by Charles Youssef.
LAND OF BROKEN DREAMS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Concerts and convenings: December 9-11, $25
Installation: Tuesday – Sunday through December 31, $18 www.armoryonpark.org
As part of Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Shape of Things” monumental multimedia installation at Park Ave. Armory, there will be three days of live music, conversations, and performances that activate the space. Tickets are going fast for the “Land of Broken Dreams” series, which features nighttime concerts by singer-songwriter Somi on December 9, the jazz trio of Vijay Iyer, Arooj Aftab, and Linda May Han Oh on December 10, and Terri Lyne Carrington and Lisa Fischer, whose latest project is “Music for Abolition,” on December 11. Tickets also include admission to a “Daytime Convening” from 1:00 to 7:00, with pop-up performances by more than 150 artists in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the Board of Officers Room, the Veterans Room, and the Colonels Room.
Among those participating are photographer Dawoud Bey, tap dancer Maurice Chestnut, painter Torkwase Dyson, theater director Scott Elliott, Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, philanthropist Agnes Gund, poet, playwright, and novelist Carl Hancock Rux, dancer and choreographer Francesca Harper, musician and author Nona Hendryx, civil rights leader Ben Jealous, interdisciplinary artist Rashid Johnson, visual artist Joan Jonas, set designer Christine Jones, artist Deborah Kass, painter Julie Mehretu, cultural theorist, poet, and scholar Fred Moten, visual artist Shirin Neshat, curator, critic, and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, multimedia installation artist Tony Oursler, poet, essayist, playwright, and editor Claudia Rankine, sculptor Alyson Shotz, conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, rapper, actor, and Roots MC Tariq Trotter, author Quincy Troupe, director Whitney White, and the Peace Poets. You might just have to move in to the armory for seventy-two hours so you don’t miss a minute of what promises to be a memorable event.
Robert Battle’s new For Four is part of his tenth anniversary celebration at Ailey (photo by Christopher Duggan)
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
December 1-19, $29-$159
212-581-1212 www.alvinailey.org www.nycitycenter.org
If you weren’t following Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater during the pandemic lockdown, you missed out on some of the best virtual presentations of the last twenty months, from online conversations,“Dancer Diaries,” and “Ailey Up Close” talks to archival performances available on Ailey All Access and brand-new works created over Zoom and outdoors. Among the highlights were a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Alvin Ailey’s Cry, members of the Ailey company, Ailey II, and the Ailey School taking on artistic director Robert Battle’s The Hunt, a special filmed edition of Revelations Reimagined, and excerpts from Camille A. Brown’s City of Rain, Rennie Harris’s Lazarus, Judith Jamison’s Divining, and Jamar Roberts’s Ode in addition to Roberts’s exhilarating outdoor work A Jam Session for Troubling Times.
The Manhattan-based troupe, with new members Lloyd A. Boyd III, Caroline T. Dartey, Ashley Kaylynn Green, and Ashley Mayeux, is now back in person for its annual season at City Center, running December 1 to 19. In past years, AAADT has bid farewell to retiring dancers Linda Celeste Sims (now assistant to the rehearsal director) and Matthew Rushing (now associate artistic director) and longtime associate artistic director Masazumi Chaya; the winter run is centered around Bessie winner Roberts’s final performance, as he turns his attention to serving as AAADT’s resident choreographer. On December 9, Roberts will dance his last solo, You Are the Golden Hour That Would Soon Evanesce, with pianist Jason Moran playing his song “Only the Shadow Knows (Honey)” live; the evening also includes the world premiere of Roberts’s Holding Space, which was first seen virtually during the pandemic. Set to an electronic score by Canadian musician Tim Hecker, the piece features an onstage open cube that Roberts calls “a metaphor for many things: quarantine, being confined in a small space — if you were to, let’s say, look at an apartment building and you see the window and you see different people living in the apartment building, but the cube was sort of like taking a magnifying glass and going deeper into just one apartment unit and seeing what that experience is like, experiencing one person out of the whole.”
At City Center, AAADT will also present the in-person world premiere of Battle’s For Four, previously seen only online, with music by Wynton Marsalis. There will be new productions of Ailey’s 1976 Pas de Duke, restaged by Rushing and rehearsal director Ronni Favors, comprising five solos and duets set to songs by Duke Ellington; Reflections in D, Ailey’s 1963 solo restaged by Jamison; The River, Ailey’s thirty-four-minute 1970 opus with an original score by Ellington, restaged by Rushing, Favors, and Clifton Brown; and Battle’s Unfold, a 2007 duet set to Leontyne Price’s rendition of Gustave Charpentier’s “Depuis Le Jour,” restaged by Ailey dancer Kanji Segawa.
AAADT celebrates Battle’s tenth anniversary as artistic director with an evening consisting of Mass,Ella,In/Side,For Four,Unfold,Takademe, and the finale from Love Stories. Also on the schedule are Lazarus,Cry, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter, Aszure Barton’s BUSK, and Ailey’s Blues Suite and Memoria, divided into such programs as “New Works,” “All Ailey,” “50 Years of Cry,” and “Ailey & Ellington.” As always, the Saturday matinees will be followed by a Q&A with members of the company.
Seeing Ailey on its home stage at City Center is a rite of passage, something all New Yorkers must experience; just don’t be surprised when it becomes an annual December sojourn.
Tickets are going fast for Big Dance Theater’s The Mood Room, coming to BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space November 30 to December 7. The sixty-minute world premiere, presented in association with the Kitchen, combines music, dance, theater, opera, and text, adapted from Guy de Cointet’s 1982 play The Five Sisters and Anton Chekhov’s 1900 classic The Three Sisters. In a program note, BDT cofounder, choreographer, and director Annie-B Parson explains, “Sometimes you find an artistic soul mate in the simple act of opening a book. This is what happened to me when I read the late 20th c. ‘plays’ of visual artist Guy de Cointet. You see, they are not really plays, they are visual events with texts that bask in the hot mess of the non-narrative posing as narrative — a state I would call living! Here is where de Cointet and I intersect: he is devoted to detours, departures, tonal shifts, and the unconfirmed. An atmosphere of codes, exits, and non-results permeate the writing. He quotes without substantiation or reason, he is a-historic, is liberated from achieving even a glimmer of resolution, and his authorial voice is intentionally cracking. His theater is both textual and visually based, without any hierarchy for language, truth, or the answer — and the physical objects in the texts have no stable meaning throughout the play. No one changes; no one learns anything.”
The multimedia piece takes place in Los Angeles in the Reagan 1980s of rampant consumerism and trickle-down economics. Elizabeth DeMent, Theda Hammel, Kate Moran, Myssi Robinson, and Michelle Sui portray the five sisters, with an experimental score by Holly Herndon, sound and recomposition by Mark degli Antoni, set design by Lauren Machen, costumes by Baille Younkman and Samantha Mcelrath, lighting by Joe Levasseur, and video by Keith Skretch. You should always expect the unexpected with BDT, whose previous works include Comme Toujours Here I Stand,Antigonick, and Short Form, and it sounds like The Mood Room will be no different.
