this week in dance

BLESSED UNREST: TOUCH

Touch takes place on the sidewalk, with Madison Square Park in the background (photo by Maria Baranova)

TOUCH
Blessed Unrest; NYC Open Culture Program
Saturday, May 8, 7:00, and Sunday, May 9, 3:00 & 5:00
Admission: free with RSVP (suggested donation $25)
East 26th Street (between 5th and Madison Avenue, NYC)
www.blessedunrest.org
www1.nyc.gov

The Manhattan-based Blessed Unrest company explores our deep-seated need for physical and emotional connection in Touch, a dance-theater piece performed guerrilla-style just outside Madison Square Park. Part of the city’s Open Culture Program, the forty-five-minute work takes place on the sidewalk near the southwest corner of East Twenty-Sixth St. and Broadway, the park right behind them. Wearing masks, Michael Gene Jacobs, Tatyana Kot, Ariel Polanco, and Anna Wulfekuhle nimbly move across a long bench and interact with a lamppost, a circular bike rack, and a low railing around a tree as overlapping stories are broadcast from two small, portable speakers. The narratives, based on personal stories of isolation shared by the performers and edited and expanded by Keith Hamilton Cobb (American Moor) and Teddy Jefferson (One Inch Leather, The Insomniac), involve Oedipus, a horse, and a mysterious neighbor. The socially distanced audience, also wearing masks, stand or sit in the street, which is blocked off to vehicular traffic but not to pedestrians and bicyclists, who sometimes walk or pedal right through the performance, lending an unpredictable quality to the proceedings.

Performers make use of a bench, a bike rack, a lamppost, and more in site-specific Touch (photo by Maria Baranova)

“When we finished working on our 2015 show Body: Anatomies of Being, which was also built around personal testimonials from the performers, we felt strongly that the idea of touch hadn’t been explored fully in the final work,” director Jessica Burr (The Snow Queen, Eurydice’s Dream), who founded the company in 1999, said in a statement. “It seemed particularly fitting to revisit this subject now, as the months of detachment and related touch deprivation began to take a toll on all of us. When workshopping this piece remotely, each in our own isolated bubble, we spoke about research on mirror neurons and the emotional brain. That research suggests that our witnessing of the authentic corporeal experiences of others can stimulate the very same visceral response in our own brains, as though the experience were ours. It’s the forging of literal compassion through neural growth in our audiences.”

Touch, which features music composition, arrangement, and sound design by Adrian Bridges and costumes by Sohn Plenefisch, continues May 8 and 9; admission is free with RSVP. (There is a suggested donation of $25.) Be sure to also take a walk through Madison Square Park, where Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest, consisting of forty-nine bare trees representing impending environmental calamity, is on view through mid-November.

TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY AT THE JOYCE

Who: Trisha Brown Dance Company
What: Digital program
Where: Joyce Theater online
When: April 29 – May 12, $25
Why: The pandemic lockdown might have shuttered theaters, but it has also stirred the creative instinct, particularly among dance companies, which quickly turned to streaming not only older productions but exciting new works developed over Zoom and other online platforms. This week it’s Trisha Brown’s turn, with an online spring season at the Joyce. Now in its sixth decade, the company looks back with 2002’s Geometry of Quiet, recorded at the Joyce in 2017; the intimate twenty-minute piece features music by Salvatore Sciarrino, white costumes by Christophe de Menil, and four dancers. The troupe then looks back and forward at the same time with new iterations of 1980’s semiautobiographical Locus Trio, set on a cubelike grid to an improvised score, and the 1978 short solo Watermotor, inspired by childhood memory and originally performed by Brown at the Public Theater, now danced by Marc Crousillat. The program concludes with “The Decoy Project,” a reimagining for video of 1979’s Glacial Decoy, an eleven-minute work for four dancers that Brown adapted for WNET and the company now approaches as a way to bring dancers back together again in the same physical space while reaching out to the local community. Tickets are $25 for the stream, which runs April 29 to May 12. The Joyce’s spring season continues with Limón Dance Company May 6-19, Stephen Petronio Company May 13-26, and Batsheva Dance Company May 27 – June 2.

SOCIAL! THE SOCIAL DISTANCE DANCE CLUB

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
April 9-22, $45 ($35 standby tickets available)
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Twister is the most physical of board games. The more people come into contact with one another on the plastic mat — which contains colored circles that participants must touch with one of their hands or feet depending on what the spinner tells them to do — the more fun it is to play and to watch. The same can be said for dancing, a social activity that brings people together in numerous ways. In a 2015 study, Bronwyn Tarr, Jacques Launay, Emma Cohen, and Robin Dunbar explained, “All human cultures perform and enjoy forms of music and dance in a group setting. Dancing involves people synchronizing their movements to a predictable, rhythmic beat (usually provided by music) and to each other. In this manner, dance is fundamentally cooperative in nature, and may have served the evolutionary function of encouraging social bonds, cooperation, and prosocial behaviors between group members. To date, empirical support for this social bonding hypothesis is based mainly on a link between synchrony (i.e. performing the same movement at the same time) and bonding.” In a twist on both Twister and dancing, the Park Ave. Armory commission Social! the social distance dance club incorporates people, colorful circles on the floor, and synchronous bonding in an immensely boisterous evening of interaction that features no touching whatsoever.

The armory was supposed to kick off its Social Distance Hall series with Bill T. Jones’s Afterwardsness, but several positive Covid tests in the company led to its postponement until May, after Party in the Bardo, a collaboration between Laurie Anderson and Jason Moran running May 5-9. Conceived by choreographer Steven Hoggett (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), Tony-winning set designer and solo show specialist Christine Jones (American Idiot, Here We Are: Theatre for One), and multidisciplinary artist David Byrne (Talking Heads, American Utopia), Social! takes place in the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill, where nearly one hundred ticket holders spend fifty-five minutes moving and grooving in their own private circle.

Audience members must arrive about an hour before showtime to have a Covid-19 shallow-swab rapid response test. While waiting for the results — anyone who comes up positive will need to immediately leave the building with the rest of their party (and will be refunded the $45 ticket price) — groups of about twenty-four waited in different locations in the historic armory, where monitors displayed quotes about dancing from a March 2021 Financial Times article, “Covid will not squash our deep-seated need to dance,” by Will Coldwell, who references the above study in his piece, along with YouTube videos of men, women, and children from around the world dancing with joy. (For example, “Dance provides us with a universal language — one deeper and more emotional than words — that helps us to bond with other, often unfamiliar, people.”) Eventually we audience members were marched into the drill hall in formation, and each was sent to an assigned spotlight, spaced at twelve-to-fifteen-foot intervals. (The lighting design, which includes the projection of abstract shapes and a disco ball, is by Kevin Adams; the above videos are © DBOX.) In the center, on a slowly revolving raised platform, is DJ Mad Love (Tony nominee Karine Plantadit), who spins tunes on two computers (mixed by DJ Natasha Diggs) while Byrne’s disembodied voice guides us, suggesting specific movements and encouraging self-expression. (His instructions were done in conjunction with choreographer Yasmine Lee.)

To songs by D-Train, Daft Punk, James Brown, Benny Goodman, Olivia Newton-John, Fatback, Byrne, and others, the former Talking Heads leader prompts us through various scenarios (hands waving in the air, weaving through a subway car, balancing at the edge of your circle, swaying slowly, etc., although some of it is hard to hear amid the thumping beats) before leading up to the grand finale, a unified dance that we were advised to rehearse in advance via a video in which Byrne demonstrates the moves.

The drill hall is a judgment-free space; no one is going to laugh at your dancing, and you’re not going to laugh at anyone else’s. It’s a time to kick loose and let it all go, immerse yourself in a worry-free hour of nonstop exhilaration. It’s not always easy — several people in my vicinity had to take rests, and one woman spent much of the show sitting in her circle — but the more you are able to put into it, the more you will get out of it. (Coldwell explains, “As we now know so well, it’s far easier to start dancing than it is to stop.”) And when you are taken back to your seat, a small, relevant little gift is waiting for you, one last reminder that even if we can’t be together in a physical way — Twister might not be on the menu for a bit longer — we can now gather safely and bond, as long as we’re tested, masked, socially distanced, and ready to have a blast.

TELEPHONE 2021

Telephone connects artists from around the world (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)

TELEPHONE
Opened April 10, free
phonebook.gallery
satellitecollective.org

In April 2015, New York City–based Satellite Collective launched its unique take on the game of Telephone; instead of people forming a line and whispering phrases to one another to see how much the words change, the project connected more than 300 artists from 42 countries, each developing a new piece based on multiple works they were sent, inspired by the sentence “O god, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” Five years later, Telephone is back, bringing together 950 artists from 70 countries and 5 continents during a pandemic that has seen arts venues shuttered and travel decreased significantly. Starting on March 23, 2020, a message was given to one artist; the text of that message has not been revealed. It was passed via multiple art forms — painting, photography, music, film, dance, poetry, sculpture, prose — creating a vast network of artists primarily selected by word-of-mouth. An online grid allows viewers to explore one work, complete with image/video, artist bio and statement, and map placing where they are from. You can then follow the branch in one of two directions to see what each piece inspires or navigate the game by artist, discipline, or location.

“It took me a while to let the message reach me. I listened again and again. But I heard an echo, and the work I created is exactly that: a soft, natural response to what was sent my way. I hope it keeps moving and changing,” explains Elizabeth Schmuhl of Detroit, whose watercolor is connected to artists from Helsinki, Los Angeles, and Ulster County. “Translating another’s work is harder than expected, especially from a field different from the one you practice. I translated a written work into an illustrator after a lot of sketching and reading between the lines, and then, when making my own drawing, I had to make sure with myself between time to time that I’m still on the right track and conveying the message I believed I have been given,” writes Keren-or Radiano of Tel-Aviv, whose black-and-white piece links to Lauren Baines of San Jose and Timothy Ralphs of Vancouver, who in turn says about his song, “I have to admit that my own work can sometimes be a bit dark and brooding, but because I wanted to honor the spirit of the works that were forwarded to me, I knew I’d have to (at least temporarily) put that pessimism aside. As I meditated on the works, I began to see them as not only being about inspiration but as being an inspiration in themselves. There was a real sense of delight in creation in those works, and I felt touched by the artists’ generosity of spirit. I only hope I was able to pass on some of that to those that come after me.”

Multidisciplinary artists gain inspiration from participants in online game of Telephone (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)

Poet Rebecca Williams of Fort Collins describes, “Writing this piece was in some ways challenging. Usually, I don’t write given a prompt. I normally avoid it. Having participated in a similar telephone game recently for which I wrote a song, I was eager to participate in this one of a global scale. I participated because creating in the circumstances which we face (a global pandemic) has been challenging. My band has been forced to a complete standstill and it puts you face-to-face with the question of why you are actually creating in the first place. Of course, in the end, it is the love and passion for creation, and without it, I truly feel empty. I think my apprehension comes from a kind of distaste for mediocrity. Something which I have always battled and struggled with. I was given such a beautiful work of art to be inspired by, and while I looked at it, and studied it, I asked myself what it meant to me, then the words came easily. Perfection doesn’t exist. Mediocrity does, but beautiful things are always a bit imperfect.” And writer, musician, and Torah teacher Alicia Jo Rabins of Portland, Oregon, points out, “All art is translation, transcription, and transmission. It was fun to collaborate with a mysterious fellow translator/transcriber/transmitter — at the risk of sounding totally woo, it made me feel more grounded in the source of the great flowing stream of art and consciousness that happens at all times. It’s easy to feel alone and it was nice to have company. I think I got what the previous artist was trying to convey. I hope I get to meet them someday.”

Conceived, developed, designed, edited, directed, engineered, and curated by Kevin Draper, Katelyn Watkins, Matt Diehl, Ben Sarsgard, Kelly Jones, Ramon M. Rodriguez, Jennifer Spriggs, Sergio Rodriguez, Madeline Hoak, Sean Tomas Redmond, and Nathan Langston, Telephone can occupy you for hours on end, looking at different ekphrastic works or visualizing it as one giant multidisciplinary, collaborative canvas that expresses our never-ending deep desire for creativity, inspiration, and connection, especially in times of isolation and doubt.

JEWELS: A BALLET IN THREE PARTS

San Francisco Ballet presents a dazzling virtual production of Balanchine’s Emeralds (photo by Erik Tomasson)

JEWELS
SF Ballet online
Available on demand through April 21, $29
www.sfballet.org

You’re likely to let out a gasp when the curtain rises on San Francisco Ballet’s newly filmed production of George Balanchine’s Emeralds, the first section of the legendary choreographer’s three-part masterpiece, Jewels. I know I did. Onstage are a dozen dancers, the most I’ve seen at any one time together since the pandemic lockdown started. Then Gabriel Fauré’s score kicks in — consisting of extracts from Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, Op. 29 and incidental music to Shylock, Op. 57, conducted by Martin West — and principals Misa Kuranaga and Angelo Greco touch hands, leading to another gasp. I’ve watched a lot of dance pieces made during the current health crisis, but it’s mostly been solos or works outdoors, with no contact between performers. To see a full ensemble dance without restrictions for thirty glorious minutes is exhilarating, especially every lift, throw, and turn involving physical human connection. (Of course, SFB followed all Covid-19 protocols.)

The floor of the War Memorial Opera House reflects the dancers, who are wearing dark tops with necklaces, the women in green calf-length tulle skirts. A chandelier laden with faux emeralds hangs above, while stars dot the back wall, melding inside and outside. Balanchine considered Emeralds to be “an evocation of France — the France of elegance, comfort, dress, and perfume,” and that’s precisely what comes across in this glittering production, staged by the late Elyse Borne and Sandra Jennings, with additional decor by Susan Touhy and costumes by Karinska (re-created by Haydee Morales).

The camera slowly zooms in and out and pans right and left but always stays at orchestra level while concentrating on two couples, a trio, and a corps de ballet of ten women. The many stunning moments include a line of four women in attitude position, with three men on their knees, their right leg flat behind them, all holding hands; a gorgeous solo by Kuranaga; duets first with Kuranaga and Greco, then with Sasha Mukhamedov and Aaron Robison; and a concluding trio with Greco, Robison, and Esteban Hernandez, the three men left all alone at the end, their arms reaching out dramatically.

As the curtain descends, something strange and unexpected happens; applause can be heard, getting louder as the dancers take their bows. The work was filmed on January 28 without an audience, and there was no piped-in applause at intermediary points of beauty. It’s a bit unnerving, since we know that the seats are empty, though the show is well worthy of high praise.

Emeralds debuted at the New York City Ballet on April 13, 1967, followed by Rubies and Diamonds, a sparkling trilogy inspired by Claude Arpels’s designs for jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels. For both of the latter pieces, applause is heard as the curtain rises and throughout; the former was recorded February 2, 2016, the latter March 12, 2017, both at the War Memorial as well, giving the full program an added visual continuity, making it feel as if it is all occurring over the course of one evening. It also might explain why SFB decided not to add more camera angles to the 2021 performance; it would have been exciting to see closeups as well as views from the mezzanine, but it would not have matched the next two works.

The featured trio for Rubies are Mathilde Froustey, Pascal Moulat, and Wanting Zhao; the cast is dressed in tight red bejeweled tops with frills at the waist, the women with red hair accessories. Set to Stravinsky’s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, Rubies is passionate and exuberant; in one pas de deux, Froustey, wearing a flowery red tiara, and Moulat run, bounce, and spin around the floor. The focus is on the movement itself; there is no chandelier, and the stars on the backdrop are muted.

An homage to Marius Petipa, Diamonds is an opulent, luxurious climax, taking place in an icy blue world with two chandeliers and Tchaikovsky’s lovely Symphony No. 3 in D major, Op. 29, movements 2, 3, 4 & 5, conducted by Ming Luke. It begins with a glorious seven-minute scene with first twelve, then fourteen women, in glistening white tutus, followed by a pas de deux between De Sola and Tiit Helimets. In the finale, more than thirty dancers come together for a grand ball, intersecting and weaving among themselves with an infectious romanticism as the music builds to a thrilling crescendo.

And then, one last surprise; as the dancers take their bows, audience members rise to give a standing ovation, their heads partially blocking our view. It is an apt reminder that ballet — and theater, music, opera, et al. — is meant to be seen live and in person, in a crowd of people all there for one purpose, to share an experience that is happening right then and there, in real time. May it soon be so again.

(For more on SFB’s Jewels, you can stream a virtual discussion about “three composers, three styles, three moods” with De Sola, Helimets, Mukhamedov, and Molat here; there is also extensive background information available here.)

AFTERWARDSNESS

AFTERWARDSNESS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
May 19-26, $45 (limited tickets go on sale April 1)
www.armoryonpark.org

I’ve been tentative about the return of live, indoor music, dance, and theater, wondering how comfortable I would feel in an enclosed area with other audience members and onstage performers. Many of my colleagues who cover the arts are steadfastly against going to shows right now as things open up, while others have been having a ball going to the movies and eating inside. But when I received my invitation to see Afterwardsness at the Park Avenue Armory on March 24, I surprised myself with how much immediate glee I felt, how instantly exhilarated I was to finally, at last, see a show, in the same space with actual human beings. But my excitement was broken when it was announced that several members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company had tested positive for Covid-19 and the show, which had sold out quickly, had to be postponed. But now it’s back as part of the Armory’s Social Distance Hall season, running May 19 to 26; original ticket holders will get first dibs, with remaining tickets going on sale to the general public April 1. “Creating new, body-based work at a time when physical proximity is discouraged is no small feat,” Jones said in a statement. “However, as is often the case when artists are forced to push through limitations, this is when things get really good. Having the drill hall, this grand and glorious space to create and dance in, was quite liberating. The armory is a space like no other in New York City—and if it’s like no other in New York City, then it’s pretty unique in the world.”

The sixty-five minute show, named for Freud’s concept of “a mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events,” will take place in the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where one hundred audience members will be seated in chairs nine to twelve feet apart in all directions as the action unfolds around them. The hall has been updated with air-refreshing methods that exceed CDC and ASHRAE standards; there will be onsite testing and strict masking and social distancing policies. The work explores the isolation felt during the pandemic as well as the impact of the George Floyd protests and BLM movement. The choreography is by Tony winner Jones, with a new vocal composition by Holland Andrews, whose Museum of Calm recently streamed through the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Musical director Pauline Kim Harris will perform the violin solo “8:46” in tribute to Floyd, and there will also be new compositions by company members Vinson Fraley Jr. and Chanel Howard as well as excerpts from Olivier Messaien’s 1941 chamber piece Quartet for the End of Time, written while he was a POW in a German prison. The lighting is by Brian H. Scott, with sound by Mark Grey. The inaugural program at the armory is now Social! The Social Distance Dance Club, a collaboration between Steven Hoggett, Christine Jones, and David Byrne that runs April 9-22 and gives each audience member their own spotlight in which to move to choreography by Yasmine Lee.

MUSEUM OF CALM — IN CONVERSATION: HOLLAND ANDREWS WITH MORGAN BASSICHIS

Vocalist, composer, and performance artist Holland Andrews will discuss Museum of Calm on March 24 (photo by Maria Baranova)

Who: Holland Andrews, Morgan Bassichis
What: Live discussion about streaming performance film
Where: Baryshnikov Arts Center Zoom
When: Wednesday, March 24, free with RSVP, 8:00 (film available through March 29)
Why: Baryshnikov Arts Center’s free digital spring season continues with Holland Andrews’s Museum of Calm, a sixteen-minute performance filmed by Tatyana Tenenbaum at BAC’s John Cage & Merce Cunningham Studio on West Thirty-Seventh St. “For me, a lot of what I had been focusing on was channeling all of my focus on my interior world,” Andrews, who previously recorded albums under the name Like a Villain, says in a video introduction. “And meditation, thinking a lot about tending to what was going on inside of my emotional world because, with everything from the external being cut off, this was all I had,” they add, bringing their hands to their chest. “So the idea of Museum of Calm is your own self being your Museum of Calm, whether or not you like it because, you know, what we were attached to in finding peace, in finding calm, had been taken away.”

In the piece, a barefoot Andrews (Wordless, There You Are), whose recent Onè at Issue Project Room dealt with ancestral loss, family tragedy, and healing, incorporates a yellow ball — the kind generally used in physical therapy, but here it is more involved with psychological therapy as Andrews roams the empty studio, beautifully vocalizes words and melodies into a microphone (“I spent so much time feeling I was no good”; “How do I feel better?”), plays the clarinet, layers the different sounds into an audio palimpsest using foot pedals, and watches the sun set over the Hudson River. On March 24 at 8:00 — the day Afterwardsness, their collaboration with Bill T. Jones, was scheduled to premiere at the Park Avenue Armory but had to be postponed indefinitely because some members of the company contracted Covid even in their bubble — Andrews will take part in a live Zoom discussion and Q&A with performer and author Morgan Bassichis (The Odd Years, Nibbling the Hand That Feeds Me) about the BAC commission. The lovely and moving recording of Museum of Calm will be available on YouTube through March 29 at 5:00.