this week in dance

DANCING FUTURES: MAY I DANCE ON YOUR SCREEN? LIVE Q&A

Who: Rourou Ye, Wendy Perron
What: Virtual Q&A about online exhibition
Where: digitaldance.space
When: Thursday, October 28, free with RSVP, 7:30
Why: “When I returned to the dance studio again in April 2021, I felt weird,” multidisciplinary artist Rourou Ye said about working during the pandemic. “The studio was empty. Not only because there was no one else there but because it also lacked the characteristics and stories inherent to one’s surroundings. What can I do with this space? There was nothing I could play with, and it made me the center of attention. I was motionless. So I went back home to create dances through video.” On October 28 at 7:30, the Chinese-born, US-based artist, who incorporates dance, shadow puppetry, everyday objects, and multimedia technology into works that defy reality, will discuss her process with teacher, writer, dancer, choreographer, and Dance magazine editor at large Wendy Perron over Zoom.

They will be delving into Ye’s online exhibition, “May I Dance on Your Screen?,” which continues through December 31 with such dance films as Daydreaming (“How can I duplicate myself so I can have a dance companion?”), Dis/Placed, (“How can I appear in my collaborator’s space even though I’m physically in another location?”), and I Followed the Moon to the River, My Far-Flung Home (“It’s been so long since I’ve been home . . .”). The program is part of the seventh annual Dancing Futures: Artist and Mentor Collaborative Residency, which “offers emerging Bronx-based and/or dance artists of color with resources, performance opportunities, mentorship, and documentation to strengthen and shine a spotlight on the Bronx as a creative incubator of new dance and performance work.”

GHOSTFOLK

River L. Ramirez will discuss their latest project, GhostFolk, in a live BAC Zoom talk

Who: River L. Ramirez, Lou Tides, Sarah Galdes, Morgan Bassichis
What: Streaming performance and live virtual discussion
Where: Baryshnikov Arts Center online
When: Live Zoom discussion October 26, free with RSVP, 7:00; performance available on demand through November 1 at 5:00, free
Why: “This is a piece about life and living and celebrating the innate ability that we all have here on Earth to love, even if there’s nothing to love sometimes, even if it’s just for you, even if it’s, you know, a feeling that’s kind of cavernous and feels so lonely,” River L. Ramirez says in their introduction to the virtual piece GhostFolk, streaming for free from the Baryshnikov Arts Center through November 1. In the forty-minute work, the Queens-based musician and comedian plays guitar and tells stories in a contemporary song cycle that explores everyday life, joined by Teeny Lieberson/Lou Tides on bass and background vocals and Sarah Galdes on drums, looking like a hip Halloween trio, with costumes by Peter Smith, makeup by Angelo Balassone, and spooky lighting by Devin Cameron. “A new day begins,” Ramirez declares in the first tune.

Over the course of forty minutes, they explore quarantine, read personal poems, find the face of Jesus in a plantain, call for babies to help us out of the mess we’re in, search for what’s next, explain that trolls are real, scream and screech, and listen to an animated frog as, occasionally, a figure in a sheet with holes dances in solitude. GhostFolk was filmed and edited by Tatyana Tenenbaum at BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater; Tenenbaum, a star of the pandemic lockdown, has also shot such BAC works as Landrover and Holland Andrews’s Museum of Calm. On October 26 at 7:00, Ramirez, whose social media name is Pile of Tears and who used to do standup as Lorelei Ramirez, will discuss GhostFolk and more with comedian Morgan Bassichis in a live Zoom Q&A.

HOPE BOYKIN: . . . AN EVENING OF HOPE

Alisha Rena Peek and Terri Ayanna Wright perform in Hope Boykin’s Redefine US, from the INside OUT at the 92nd St. Y (photo by Richard Termine / 92nd Street Y)

Who: Hope Boykin, Patrick Coker, Alisha Rena Peek, William Roberson, Deidre Rogan, Martina Viadana, Terri Ayanna Wright, Matthew Rushing
What: New York premiere and other works from HopeBoykinDance
Where: 92Y online
When: October 22-24, $15
Why: “We sometimes evaluate ourselves based on one another — the media, our neighbors, what we see from others, what they have and what we do not. Comparison is the enemy, but it can help to understand what else is out there until we, or, until I, discover my right to my own walk, giving value to trials, circumstance, and the weight of my experience as truth,” fearless dancer and choreographer Hope Boykin begins in her introduction to “. . . an evening of HOPE,” her October 21 live, in-person show at the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, available on demand through October 24 at midnight. “And until then, until then, I won’t actually go anywhere, just around in circles, but not forward, not upward, only still. So, what do I do? Keep reaching? Yes! Always reaching, constantly searching, climbing, falling some, starting again. Wanting more, doubting, and hoping — but always hoping. . . . Incorporating yesterday’s thoughts with now moments will teach you what you thought you knew and maybe unclose your mind to my truth, my movement language.” The lights then rise on Deidre Rogan performing Again, Ave, a graceful solo set to Leslie Odom Jr.’s version of “Ave Maria.”

During the pandemic lockdown, Boykin remained busy performing the “This Little Light of Mine” excerpt from Matthew Rushing’s 2014 Odetta for the December 2020 Ailey Forward Virtual Season; presenting the world premiere of the dance film . . . a movement. Journey., part of the 92Y program “Charlie Parker: Now’s the Time – Celebrating Bird at 100”; contributing a short film in honor of Zadie Smith at BAM’s 2020 virtual gala; and winning a twi-ny Pandemic Award for Best Short Zoom Dance for the Works & Process at the Guggenheim commission “. . . it’s okay too. Feel,” a collaboration with BalletX.

Hope Boykin takes an intimate and personal look at herself in 92Y program (photo by Steve Vaccariello)

The evening at the Kaufmann Concert Hall continues with Patrick Coker and William Roberson in an emotional duet set to Ledisi’s torch ballad “No, Don’t (Ne Me Quitte Pas).” Self-described educator, creator, mover, and motivator Boykin, who was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, and danced with Alvin Ailey from 2000 to 2020, focuses on herself, discussing her truth and movement language in the filmed segment About Her. Me., originally commissioned for Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre during the lockdown, sharing her thoughts about power, strength, tolerance, equality, choice, and being seen as a threat, dancing in a park over tender music by Gavin Luke.

Boykin next offers the New York City premiere of Redefine US, from the INside OUT, an Annenberg Center commission in which Alisha Rena Peek, Martina Viadana, and Terri Ayanna Wright swirl around in a changing series of long gowns for thirty minutes to a building score by Bill Laurance, yearning and demanding as they approach an exhilarating finale, joined by Boykin. The show concludes with Boykin showering praise on how the stage offers her a platform, particularly coming out of the lockdown, as Coker, Peek, Roberson, Rogan, Viadana, and Wright perform . . . with Your name, set to Kirk Franklin’s rousing gospel song “My World Needs You.”

But Boykin is not done yet, sitting down for a Q&A with Ailey associate artistic director Rushing. As she explains in a program note, “When given the opportunity to have ‘. . . an evening of HOPE,’ I wanted to take a look back at my life as a dance maker and rethink, renew, and revise what today’s Hope may have made. . . . I have waited, sometimes patiently, for my turn, permission to be given. Who have I been waiting on and why? I can’t wait anymore.”

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL 2021

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL
FIAF and other locations
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
October 20 – November 6, free – $25
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Igbo-Nigerian American multidisciplinary artist Okwui Okpokwasili has not let the pandemic lockdown slow her down. After appearing in the Public’s outstanding revival of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf in the late fall of 2019, Okpokwasili has taken part in Danspace Project’s Platform series, the New Museum exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” and numerous online discussions and special presentations. Her 2017 film, Bronx Gothic, was screened virtually by BAM. In June, she led a procession through Battery Park City for the River to River Festival. And in May, I caught her captivating project On the way, undone, in which she and a group of performers walked across the High Line wearing futuristic head gear made of light and mirrors, vocalizing as they headed toward Simone Leigh’s Brick House sculpture.

Okpokwasili is now the centerpiece of FIAF’s 2021 Crossing the Line Festival, taking place at multiple locations from October 20 to November 6. Throughout the festival, her video installation Before the whisper becomes the word, made with her regular collaborator, director, and husband, Peter Born, will be on view in the FIAF Gallery, exploring remembrance, community mourning, and history. On October 20 at 7:00, she will speak with festival curator Claude Grunitzky in the FIAF Skyroom about the show. “This installation is a crossroads, a midpoint, a caesura. A place caught between worlds,” she said in a statement. “Can we remember what came before while imagining the shape of a future landscape? We enter mid-song, a song that marks a singular moment in time while also expressing an entire lineage. The song is a container for an unreliable memory. From whose mouth is history born? Whose words are trusted when it comes to the telling of what happened? If the history we learn is that which is spoken aloud, what is learned by listening to the whispers that have not been written?”

Christopher Myers’s Fire in the Head will make its world premiere at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival

Okpokwasili will also be presenting On the way, undone at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn October 21-23 ($25). In a High Line video, she says about the work, “I hope it’s a kind of medicine . . . an architecture of sound, light, that is in some way trying to imagine a portal, an opening through space and time, and it’s imagining a woman’s future self, a young girl’s future self singing back to her.”

In addition, the festival includes nora chipaumire’s Nehanda, an opera that was excerpted for River to River at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and for FIAF will be broadcast in two cycles both online ($15) and in person ($25) at FIAF’s Tinker Auditorium, divided into eight “days”: natives, whites, pungwe, thinkers, komuredhi judhas nemajekenisheni, white verdict, killings, and manifesting, with an artist talk on October 30 at 5:00; a concert by Grammy nominee Somi in Florence Gould Hall on October 28 ($25); Christopher Myers’s Fire in the Head, a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky with shadow puppets taking place October 29 and 30 ($25, 7:30) at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association; and Kaneza Schaal’s work-in-progress KLII, November 4-6 in Florence Gould Hall ($25), an exorcism of colonialism and the ghost of King Leopold II, incorporating archival footage and texts by Mark Twain and Patrice Lumumba.

RECLAMATION

Breton Tyner-Bryan will premiere Reclamation in Jefferson Market Library Garden on October 16 (photo by James Jude Johnson)

Who: Breton Tyner-Bryan, Hugh Ryan, Dajuan Harris, James Jude Johnson, Tatiana Stewart
What: World premiere of site-specific work honoring the Women’s House of Detention
Where: Jefferson Market Library Garden, 10 Greenwich Ave. at Tenth St.
When: Saturday, October 16, free with advance RSVP, 5:00
Why: From March 1932 to June 1972, the Women’s House of Detention held female prisoners, including Ethel Rosenberg, Afeni Shakur, Grace Paley, Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Andrea Dworkin; it was an art deco building in which inmates facing the street could speak with passersby. The structure was demolished in 1973 and replaced with a lovely garden behind the Jefferson Market Library, designed by Pamela Berdan with a wide range of colorful plants and flowers.

On October 16 at 5:00, dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and teacher Breton Tyner-Bryan will activate the space with the world premiere of Reclamation, a piece directed, choreographed, and performed by Tyner-Bryan, joined by three members of the Breton Follies, Dajuan Harris, James Jude Johnson, and Tatiana Stewart, and featuring an original score by Brooklyn-based composer and pianist Ai Isshiki. The work explores the metaphysical energy and spiritual freedom of the garden and the location’s history, particularly as they relate to the local LGBTQIA+ community. In addition, writer, historian, and curator Hugh Ryan (When Brooklyn Was Queer) will read from his upcoming book, The Women’s House of Detention. The library itself is currently closed; when it reopens, Tyner-Bryan will present her latest films, Invicta and West of Frank, as part of the celebration.

HERSTORY OF THE UNIVERSE@GOVERNORS ISLAND

PeiJu Chien-Pott performs Amaterasu, part of site-specific dance presentation on Governors Island (photo by Slobodan Randjelović)

Who: Richard Move and MoveOpolis!
What: Site-specific dance performances
Where: Governors Island
When: Saturday, October 9 & 16, free with advance RSVP, 1:00 – 4:00
Why: Governors Island is an oasis in New York City, a historic area initially settled by the Lenape before being stolen by the Dutch and later taken over by the British and the United States. It was home to a fort and a castle that held Confederate prisoners during the Civil War and served as headquarters for the army and the coast guard prior to opening to the public in 2003 as a park. On October 9 and 16, the island will host its first-ever performance commission, the site-specific Herstory of the Universe@Governors Island by Richard Move and MoveOpolis! The three-hour show will move across the island, making six fifteen-minute stops, at Nolan Park, Hammock Grove, Outlook Hill, and Rachel Whiteread’s Cabin sculpture, among other locations. Robyn Cascio, Megumi Eda, Lisa Giobbi, Celeste Hastings, PeiJu Chien-Pott, Natasha M. Diamond-Walker, and Gabrielle Willis will perform such pieces as Demolition Angels, Ascent, and Amaterasu, making use of the trees, the buildings, the grass, the rocks, and other natural and manufactured elements of the beautiful island, celebrating its unique ecosystem, storied past, and outstanding views.

Gabrielle Wills and Natasha Diamond Walker rehearse Demolition Angels on Governors Island (photo by Slobodan Randjelović)

Commissioned by the Trust for Governors Island, Herstory invites the audience to follow along with a special keepsake map designed by Connie Fleming, which can be picked up at the Climate Museum in Nolan Park Building 18. A dancer, teacher, choreographer, and filmmaker, Move has previously created site-specific works for the European Capitol of Culture in France, the Guggenheim in New York, the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, the Cannes Film Festival, the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore, and the LMCC Sitelines Festival as well as at a bus station in Sao Paulo. If you haven’t been to Governors Island in a while, Herstory provides an excellent opportunity to refamiliarize yourself with its majesty, which currently also includes installations by Duke Riley, Mark Handforth, Beam Camp City, NYC Audubon, Pratt Gaud, West Harlem Art Fund, the Endangered Language Alliance, American Indian Community House, Harvestworks, Flux Factory, the Swale Floating Food Forest, and others, all free.

FJK DANCE: RESET

Who: FJK Dance
What: Two world premieres and a repertoire work
Where: New York Live Arts, 219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
When: October 7-9, $20-$45, 7:30
Why: Founded in 2014 by Fadi J. Khoury and Sevin Ceviker, FJK Dance is devoted to multicultural movement that breaks down barriers and borders. This week the New York–based company emerges from the pandemic lockdown with Reset, consisting of two world premieres and one repertory piece, running October 7-9 at New York Live Arts. The program includes Mirage, incorporating human stories from the Middle East, set to Schubert’s piano trio in E-flat, performed by Tim Ward, Sarita Apel, Estefano Gil, Khoury, and Elisa Toro Franky; Khoury’s solo Forbidden, about seeking love, with music by Abdel Wahab and Hossam Shaker; and Ravel’s Bolero, a 2019 work that investigates duality.

Bolero is one of three pieces FJK Dance will perform at New York Live Arts

The evening is dedicated to editor and FJK Dance founding board member Genevieve Young, who passed away in February 2020 at the age of eighty-nine. “In this time of reflection and finding hope, the production of this program is a dream dedicated to all the souls that we have lost during this pandemic,” the company announced in a statement. Khoury, who was born in Baghdad and raised in Iraq and Lebanon, added, “What began as a blended choreographic form has become something larger — my role is not to just create fusion choreography but to use dance as a message of peace for the world at large.”