this week in dance

GRACE @20

The twentieth anniversary of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace will be celebrated this week at CAP UCLA

Who: Ronald K. Brown / Evidence, a Dance Company, Barry Brannum, Arthur Jafa, MarySue Heilemann, Theo Bonner Perkins, Kristy Edmunds, Meryl Friedman
What: Three-day online celebration
Where: Center for the Art of Performance UCLA
When: November 12-14, free
Why: In December 2012, I saw Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s stunning new production of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace, which was originally commissioned and presented for AAADT in 1999; I’ve also seen Brown and his troupe, Evidence, a Dance Company, perform it at the Joyce led by Brown himself. I’ve called Grace, which is a tribute to Ailey’s legacy and is set to music by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis Jr., and Fela Anikulapo Kuti, “an exhilarating, rapturous work, filled with an innate, infectious spirituality that resonates throughout the audience.” CAP UCLA will be honoring the twentieth anniversary of the piece with “Grace@20,” a three-day program that begins November 12 at 7:00 with “Celebrating Grace@20,” consisting of a screening of a recorded performance from Bard College’s Fisher Center in July 2019, followed by a live discussion with Brown and LA-based dancer-choreographer Barry Brannum.

On November 13 at 3:00, there will be an online community class, no experience necessary, to study Brown’s unique style, heavily influenced by West African traditional movement; participation is free with RSVP here. And on November 14 at 3:00, “Let’s Say Grace and Talk About It After!” is a live conversation with Brown, artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, UCLA School of Nursing associate professor MarySue Heilemann, artist and social justice advocate Theo Bonner Perkins, and CAP UCLA artistic and executive director Kristy Edmunds, moderated by CAP UCLA director of education Meryl Friedman. I’ve had the good fortune to interview Brown twice, and he is an extraordinary person, believing in love of community, the importance of dance as story, and honoring the ancestors. In 2015, he told me, “One thing that I have also learned is that we have to make sure we are connected to those close to us . . . and then that opens up the capacity to be connected to the world.” Grace has been doing just that for twenty years, with added relevance during the pandemic lockdown.

SOIL BENEATH: AN EMPIRICAL DECAY

Soil Beneath: An Empirical Decay streams through Primary Stages this week

Who: Chesney Snow, Kevin Hillocks, Rachael Holmes, Winston Dynamite Brown, Latra Wilson, Kimille Howard, Diedre Murray
What: Choreopoem
Where: Primary Stages online
When: November 11-15, $35
Why: Beatboxer, actor, songwriter, poet, and educator Chesney Snow will debut his Primary Stages commission, Soil Beneath: An Empirical Decay, this week, livestreaming November 11-15. The sociopolitical, multidisciplinary exploration of race and class in America was created by and stars Snow (In Transit, Oo Bla Dee), who will be joined in the forty-minute show by Kevin Hillocks as Homerel, Rachael Holmes as Dori, and choreographers Winston Dynamite Brown and Latra Wilson; Soil Beneath, which includes music, dance, poetry, and storytelling, is directed by Kimille Howard and features a score by Pulitzer Prize finalist Diedre Murray (Running Man, Eli’s Comin’). The November 11 opening-night performance will be followed by a Zoom talkback with members of the cast and artistic staff.

RuckUS VOTER ACTIVATION PARADE AND POP-UP

Who: Kurt Andersen, Chavisa Woods, Siri Hustvedt, Carlos Menchaca, the Blacksmiths Marching Band, Will Calhoun, PRC Drum Team, Stefan Zeniuk, Laurie Anderson, Nona Hendryx, Masha Gessen, Tine Kindermann, Bill T. Jones, Elizabeth Streb, Batala NY, Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars, Mambembe NY, Holly Bass, Plezi Rara, Kenny Wollesen and the Himalaya
What: RuckUS 2020 get out the vote events
Where: Multiple locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan
When: Saturday, October 24, free, noon – 6:00
Why: With the election only eleven days away, events to get out the vote are ratcheting up around the country and here in New York City. RuckUS, a group started by Laurie Anderson, Arto Lindsay, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Iain Newton to advocate for voter participation and election security, will be hosting rallies in Brooklyn and Manhattan on Saturday following last week’s events in Staten Island and the Bronx, featuring special guest speakers and socially distanced live performances. (An event in Queens for Sunday has been canceled but is trying to be rescheduled.) Below is the lineup. And remember: “Register. Plan. Protect.”

Saturday, October 24, Manhattan
The Africa Center, 1280 Fifth Ave. & 110th St., noon
New York Public Library Main Branch, Fifth Ave. & 42nd St., 2:00
New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th St. off Seventh Ave., live performance by Holly Bass of Moneymaker, twelve-hour endurance performance, 4:00
Washington Square Park, 5:00
Speakers: musicians Laurie Anderson and Nona Hendryx, journalist Masha Gessen, visual artist Tine Kindermann, choreographers Bill T. Jones and Elizabeth Streb
Live performances: Batala NY, Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars, Mambembe NY, Plezi Rara, Kenny Wollesen and the Himalayas

Saturday, October 24, Brooklyn
Grand Army Plaza, noon
BRIC, Fulton St. & Rockwell Pl., 2:00
Cadman Plaza, 4:00
Speakers: Kurt Andersen, Councilman Carlos Menchaca, Siri Hustvedt, Chavisa Woods
Live performances: The Blacksmiths Marching Band, Will Calhoun, PRC Drum Team, Stefan Zeniuk

A CANARY TORSI | YANIRA CASTRO — LAST AUDIENCE: A PERFORMANCE MANUAL

Video still of devynn emory from “Dust,” one of twenty-eight audio, video, and/or text-based scores in Last Audience: a performance manual

Who: Yanira Castro, Kathy Couch, Stephan Moore, David Hamilton Thomson, LD DeArmon, Marshall Hatch Jr., Tara Aisha Willis
What: Sneak peek of Last Audience: a performance manual
Where: MCA Chicago Zoom
When: Saturday, October 24, $10 (manual $15-$40), 2:00
Why: When innovative choreographer Yanira Castro began working on Last Audience in the summer of 2018, she could not have predicted how timely it would become, now reinvented for a pandemic with so many of us stuck at home, trapped by a deadly virus, and entertainment venues shuttered all over the city and across the country. Influenced by the concept of reckonings, the requiem mass, Greek tragedy, and Artur von Ferraris’ 1918 painting The Last Audience of the Hapsburgs, specifically how it relates to the current president, the Puerto Rican-born, New York-based Castro (Performance | Portrait, Paradis) has forged ahead with the project as a format for people to create their own works using a manual, consisting of twenty-eight multimedia performance scores to be brought to life wherever you are sheltering in place, building a different kind of artistic community in the age of Covid-19. “This is a manual for you to make a requiem, your Last Audience,” Castro writes in an opening “Dear Participant” letter. “I understand performance as an act of complicity. Specifically, it is a call to practice a social politic — to gather, to take on roles, to repeat ritual, to weave incantation, to cite oracles, to imagine myth. Like all rituals, it is mystery. Like many communal acts, it is uneasy.” The manual, developed and produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, divides the scores into “One Body,” “Sever,” “Mercy,” “Judgment,” and “Blessing”; it also features video by Peter Richards, website design by Fei Liu, and photographs by Simon Courchel, including shots of contributing writer Leslie Cuyjet and Kirsten Michelle Schnittker in performance.

Last Audience manual features photos by Simon Courchel

On October 24 at 2:00, Castro, who runs a canary torsi, will be joined by contributing writers and audio/video performers Devynn Emory, David Hamilton Thomson, and Kathy Couch (who also compiled and designed the manual with Castro), music and audio designer Stephan Moore, project coordinator LD DeArmon, MAAFA Redemption Project executive director Marshall Hatch Jr., and MCA associate curator Tara Aisha Willis for a live discussion and Q&A, tracking the evolution of the project, which premiered October 2019 at New York Live Arts and had its virtual launch September 20 at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival. There will also be a live, private event on December 13 if you purchase the manual by October 22. As it says on the Last Audience website, in which you can add your own images and experiences, “Your refusal is yours. As is your agreement. And your ambivalence. Take care.”

STATE OF DARKNESS

Who: Molissa Fenley, Jared Brown, Lloyd Knight, Sara Mearns, Shamel Pitts, Annique Roberts, Cassandra Trenary, Michael Trusnovec, Peter Boal
What: Livestreamed performances from the Joyce stage
Where: JoyceStream YouTube
When: October 24 – November 1, each dance $12, full Choreographers & Cocktails experience $150 per household
Why: In 1988, dancer and choreographer Molissa Fenley created State of Darkness, an American Dance Festival commission that is a solo set to Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (“Rite of Spring”); the thirty-five-minute piece was performed exclusively by Fenley through 1994, then by Peter Boal in 1999-2000 and Rachel Foster, James Moore, and Jonathan Porretta of the Pacific Northwest Ballet in June 2007. With the pandemic lockdown, Fenley, who was born in Las Vegas, grew up in Nigeria, and has been based in New York City since 1975, is revisiting the work, presenting it live on the Joyce stage to an empty house, performed October 24-25 and October 31 – November 1 by seven dancers with their own interpretations, livestreamed via the JoyceStream YouTube channel, the first live show from the Joyce stage since March. The October 24 lineup features Michael Trusnovec (formerly Paul Taylor Dance Company) at 5:00 and Jared Brown (Shechter II — Hofesh Shechter Company) at 8:00; October 25, Annique S. Roberts (Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, A Dance Company) at 5:00 and Shamel Pitts (formerly Batsheva Dance Company) at 8:00; October 31, Lloyd Knight (Martha Graham Dance Company) at 5:00 and Cassandra Trenary (American Ballet Theatre) at 8:00; and concluding November 1 with Sara Mearns (New York City Ballet principal) at 5:00. There will also be a behind-the-scenes discussion of the work on October 24 at 7:00 with Fenley and the dancers, moderated by Boal.

“It has been truly inspiring and uplifting to see the dancers and Molissa tackle State of Darkness during this difficult and unprecedented interruption to our lives,” Joyce executive director Linda Shelton said in a statement. “To me, this piece is about emerging from the darkness we have been coping with since March.” Fenley added, “In 1988, environmental, political, and social unrest inspired me to create State of Darkness. Today, a response to similar influences affecting us feels even more urgent and necessary.” Tickets for each individual dance is $12; the complete Choreographers & Cocktails experience, including all seven performances, an interview with Fenley, a live Q&A with the dancers, and a signature cocktail recipe by chef Peter Kelly, is $150 per household.

VIRTUAL BLOODLINES FESTIVAL

Who: Stephen Petronio Company
What: Virtual Bloodlines Festival
Where: Stephen Petronio Company online
When: October 23 – November 14, free with advance RSVP (donations accepted)
Why: New York-based choreographer Stephen Petronio isn’t about to let a little old pandemic lockdown stop him from his mission in life. He and his company have been busy since the spring, presenting the Zoom show #gimmeshelter as part of its #LoveSpreadsFaster gala, followed by Are You Lonesome Tonight, a duet between Nicholas Sciscione and Lloyd Knight filmed at the Petronio Residency Center in Round Top and at Hudson Hall for the Hudson Valley Dance Festival. Petronio is now revisiting his Bloodlines project, in which he restages classic works by dance masters, with the Virtual Bloodlines Festival, running online October 23 through November 14. Each week will feature recorded presentations made since Bloodlines began in 2015, with additional interviews and talks with special guests. “Having these masterpieces as part of the repertory of Stephen Petronio Company is an honor and responsibility that I hold dear,” Petronio said in a statement. “My hope is that the Virtual Bloodlines Festival brings new audiences to a group of choreographers that run through my DNA. Their artistry continues to speak boldly to the present moment.”

The first week, beginning October 23 at 7:00, includes Yvonne Rainer’s Diagonal (1963), Trio A with Flags (1966/1970), and Chair Pillow (1969) and Steve Paxton’s Jag Vill Gärna Telefonera (1964/1982), with a new conversation between Deborah Jowitt, Rainer, and Petronio. The second program kicks off October 30 at 7:00 with Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy (1979) and Merce Cunningham’s RainForest, with a talk between Wendy Perron, Davalois Fearon, and Petronio. And the third week gets going November 6 at 7:00 with Rudy Perez’s Coverage Revisited (1970) and Anna Halprin’s Courtesan and the Crone (1999), a solo performed by Petronio, followed by a chat betwen Perron and Petronio. Tickets are free (donations accepted), and each program will be available for one week. There will also be Zoom master classes taught by Tess Montoya and Petronio on November 7 and 14 at noon.

LOVE STORY, THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

Yoshiko Chuma’s Love Story, The School of Hard Knocks is a twenty-four-hour durational online experience

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
Saturday, October 17, 11:00 am – Sunday, October 18, 11:00 am, $5 – $400 (pay what you can)
lamama.org/love-story

Osaka-born multidisciplinary artist Yoshiko Chuma celebrates the fortieth anniversary of her collective, “The School of Hard Knocks” (SOHK), with the live, twenty-four-hour virtual work Love Story, streaming through La MaMa beginning at eleven o’clock in the morning on October 17. SOHK debuted at the 1980 Venice Biennale and became an official company four years later; the troupe has traveled the world with such shows as AGITPROPS: The Recycling Project, 7 x 7 x 7, and Pi=3.14 . . . Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogota Endless Peripheral Border, many of which were developed and premiered at La MaMa as well as PS122 and Dixon Place here in New York. A durational performance installation that incorporates dance, music, film, visual art, and narrative storytelling, Love Story deals with such timely topics as immigration, national security, and war; Chuma, who has been based in the United States since 1977, will also be looking at her personal and professional past, present, and future, focusing on the idea of borders, which have taken on a whole new level of importance under the Trump administration while also impacting how art is now created online as well as how Chuma has shunned the limitations of genre in her career.

Love Story — which consists of live and prerecorded segments, with part of the show taking place in La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre — was conceived, choreographed, and directed by Chuma, working with artist liaison Ai Csuka, creative producer and musician Ginger Dolden, actor Ryan Leach, Middle East specialist Ruyji Yamaguchi, and dramaturgs and designers Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan. Among the cast of more than fifty international performers are Deniz Atli from Turkey, Agnè Auželytė from Amsterdam, Los Babuinos from Venezuela, Sahar Damoni from Palestine, Tanin Torabi from Iran, and Martita Abril, Mizuho Kappa, Heather Litteer, Devin Brahja Waldman, and zaybra from New York, with live, original music by Robert Black on double bass, Jason Kao Hwang on violin, Christopher McIntyre on trombone, and Dane Terry on piano.

“This week I was supposed to be in New York for performances celebrating Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks’ forty-year anniversary,” Auželytė recently wrote on Facebook. “While my physical body will stay put in Amsterdam for a long while to come, I will still be there, online and energetically, sharing the screen with a group of artists, some whom I had the opportunity to get to know for a long time already and some whom I only ever met on Zoom! (How weird is that? Is it still weird?) I am also touched to see some of them physically at the theater at La MaMa, which has been closed to the public for seven months now! We’ve had a lot of late-night conversations during this process and it continues to make me think about how to reimagine theater in the era of self-isolation and Zoom life. What does local-global mean anymore? Where are our bodies? What are our bodies?”

The multidisciplinary Love Story streams live from Saturday to Sunday morning (photo courtesy La MaMa)

The list of collaborators on Love Story is long and impressive. In addition to those listed above, there will be choreography by Yanira Castro, Ursula Eagly, Allyson Green, Jodi Melnick, Sarah Michelson, Anthony Phillips, Peter Pleyer, Kathryn Ray, Steve Recker, and Vicky Shick; poetry by Kyle Dacuyan, Bob Holman, and Anne Waldman; music by Mark Bennett, Tan Dun, Nona Hendryx, Christian Marclay, Lenny Pickett, and Marc Ribot; film and video by Chani Bockwinkel, Jacob Burckhardt, Rudy Burckhardt, Andrew Kim, Jonas Mekas, and Charlie Steiner; photography by Robert Flynt and Dona Ann McAdams; set designs by Tim Clifford, Alex Katz, Elizabeth Kresch, and Elizabeth Murray; and appearances by Barbara Bryan, Rachel Cooper, Mark Russell, Yoko Shioya, Bonnie Sue Stein, Laurie Uprichard, David White, Donald Fleming, Dan Froot, Kaja Gam, Brian Moran, Nicky Paraiso, Harry Whittaker Sheppard, Gayle Tufts, Sasha Waltz, David Zambrano, Nelson Zayao, Emily Bartsch, Peter Lanctot, Kouiki Mojadidi, Emily Marie Pope, Isaac Rosenthal, and Aldina Michelle Topcagic. Of course, it takes a lot of work to fill up 1,440 continuous minutes of performance, and Chuma has assembled quite a team.

You can get a sneak peek and behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative project on October 15 at 8:00 when La MaMa will present a livestream preview that includes archival footage, sketches, and rehearsal clips. In preparation for Love Story, La MaMa has also been hosting such live Saturday morning Zoom events as “Secret Journey: Stop Calling Them Dangerous” and “SML: Zooma — Dead End” in addition to evening shows that give a taste of what we’re all in for from Bessie Award winner Chuma and her unpredictable troupe, a virtual hybrid that should offer, at the very least, a twenty-four-hour respite from this school of hard knocks we are living through in 2020.