Who: DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers, Women of the Calabash, the Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble, Siren — Protectors of the Rainforest, DJ YB, more What:DanceAfrica Festival 2024 Where:BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave. When: May 24-27, many events free, Gilman dances $22-$95, film screenings $16 Why: The coming of summer means the arrival of one of the best festivals of every year, BAM’s DanceAfrica. The forty-seventh annual iteration focuses on Cameroon, with four companies performing “The Origin of Communities / A Calabash of Cultures” in BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House: DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers, Women of the Calabash, the Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble, and Siren — Protectors of the Rainforest, highlighting movement and music from the Central African nation. Curated by artistic director Abdel R. Salaam, the festival also includes the DanceAfrica Bazaar with more than 150 vendors, dance workshops and master classes in Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Mark Morris Dance Center, Salifou Lindou’s art installation La course 2,the Council of Elders Roundtable: Legacy & Preservation, and a late night dance party with DJ YB.
This year’s FilmAfrica screenings and cinema conversations range from Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa’s 1975 Muna Moto and Mohamed Challouf’s The Many Moods of Muna Moto to Jean-Marie Téno’s Colonial Misunderstanding, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s 2005 Les Saignantes (The Bloodettes), and Gordon Main’s 2023 London Recruits, all followed by Q&As with the directors.
“This year’s DanceAfrica is a journey into the heart of Cameroon, driven by a quest to explore the ancient roots of African culture and answer profound questions about humanity’s earliest origins,” Salaam said in his mission statement. “How timeless is Africa, and was it the land of the most ancient beings? What were the origins of humanity, thought, consciousness, art, culture, creativity, and civilization?”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
“Are Americans always in a hurry?” dancer and choreographer Jody Oberfelder asked in a May 2022 diary entry published in The Dance Enthusiast.
She was writing about her site-specific piece Splash Dance, which took place in the pool in the John Madejski Garden at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but she could have been referring to so much of her work.
Founded in New York City in 1988, Jody Oberfelder Projects has staged immersive, participatory, and/or site-specific performances in an officers house on Governors Island, at the since-demolished amphitheater in East River Park, on pedestrian bridges in Germany, and in the 6½ Ave. corridor in midtown Manhattan, among other locations around the United States and the globe. This weekend, Oberfelder will be in historic Green-Wood Cemetery for the world premiere of And Then, Now, a unique guided hike through the cemetery, which boasts spectacular vistas, lush green hills and giant trees, monk parakeets, and remarkable headstones, mausoleums, gates, and catacombs. Among the famous and infamous buried there are Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, Charles Ebbets, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Lola Montez, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Horace Greeley. Comfortable footwear is strongly suggested; seating will not be available as everyone winds through the environs.
And Then, Now gives attendees the opportunity to slow down and contemplate as part of an intimate community. “Invite someone you’ve lost to walk with us,” one of the dancers offers.
“In this season of rebirth, amidst a challenging time for our collective humanity, we extend a heartfelt invitation to our neighbors to witness moments of exquisite artistry and profound reflection among the historic backdrop of Green-Wood Cemetery,” Oberfelder said in a statement. “Through dance, music, and dialogue, let us honor the enduring power of connection by bridging the gap between the echoes of the past and their tangible influence on our present lives.”
There will be four performances, including a special twilight show on May 6, for which flashlights are encouraged. The 105-minute immersive, performative walk will feature three dancers at a time (Maria Anton-Arters, Andi Farley Shimota, Michael Greenberg, Justin Lynch, and Oberfelder), with live music by the Glass Clouds Ensemble, consisting of violinist Raina Arnett, violist Noémie Chemali, and vocalist Marisa Karchin playing pieces by Henry Purcell, Missy Mazzoli, and others. The costumes are by Reid & Harriet, with sound by Sean Hagerty and dramaturgy by Rebekah Morin. Having seen many of Oberfelder’s works over the last twenty years, I can’t recommend And Then, Now highly enough, as she always delivers a special experience.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Who:MC Baba Israel,Hetep BarBoy,Squala Orphan,JSWISS,KUMBAYA,DJ Reborn What: Word. Sound. Power. 2024: SOUND — Rhythm Is Rhythm Where:BAM Fisher, Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl. When: Friday, April 19, and Saturday, April 20, $25, 7:30 Why: In past years, BAM’s annual “Word. Sound. Power.” showcase of hip-hop and spoken-word artists has featured such performers as Helixx C. Armageddon, Pri the Honey Dark, Silent Knight, Peggy Robles-Alvarado, Jade Charon, Nejma Nefertiti, Okai, Dizzy SenZe, and others. The 2024 iteration, “SOUND — Rhythm Is Rhythm,” is taking place at the Fishman Space April 19 and 20, with an impressive lineup that includes host, cocurator, and director MC Baba Israel, Hetep BarBoy with Squala Orphan, Kumbaya, JSWISS, and DJ Reborn, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary.
“Hip-hop embodies an ongoing dialogue between the beat and the community. Sometimes, it’s the rhyme that answers back, while other times, it’s the body that continues the discussion,” event cocurator and BAM education manager Mikal Amin Lee said in a statement. “This year, we aim to spotlight the dynamic conversation between beats and rhymes, in the spirit of the Last Poets, the block, and the Cipher. Whether expressed through the ones or the mic, the essence remains the same: rhythm is rhythm.” The seventy-minute live performance will be followed by a twenty-minute Q&A with the artists.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo is part of Martha Graham’s New York City Center season (photo by Carla Lope / Luque Photography)
Who:Martha Graham Dance Company What: GRAHAM100 Where:New York City Center, 131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves. When: April 17-20, $55-$155 Why: The Martha Graham Dance Company returns to City Center for the first part of its three-year centennial celebration, “GRAHAM100,” consisting of six works that explore the past, present, and future of the troupe. “American Legacies” takes place April 17-20, consisting of a new production of Agnes de Mille’s 1942 classic, Rodeo, with music by Aaron Copland, reorchestrated with bluegrass flair by Gabe Witcher, costumes by Oana Botez, and visual design by Beowulf Boritt; Graham’s 1990 Maple Leaf Rag, set to music by Scott Joplin, with costumes by Calvin Klein; Graham’s 1944 classic, Appalachian Spring, with music by Copland, scenic design by Ismau Noguchi, and costumes by Graham; Hofesh Shechter’s 2022 CAVE, with music by Shechter and Âme; Graham favorite The Rite of Spring (1984), with music by Igor Stravinsky, set by Edward T. Morris, costumes by Graham and Halston, projections by Paul Lieber, and a new production concept from artistic director Janet Eilber; and the world premiere of Jamar Roberts’s We the People, with music by Rhiannon Giddens. Music for the Graham classics will be performed live by the Mannes Orchestra.
The gala on April 18 comprises Maple Leaf Rag,The Rite of Spring, and Graham’s 1932 Satyric Festival Song, which was reconstructed in 1994 by Diane Gray and Eilber to music by Fernando Palacios and will feature special guest FKA twigs, who is one of the gala honorees, along with Adrienne Holder and Dr. Donna E. Shalala. “As part of ‘GRAHAM100,’ we are interested in reframing iconic works of the twentieth century in ways that expand our views of that time and offer a more inclusive history,” Eilber notes in the program. “We hope our new production of Rodeo, which also features the most diverse cast to have ever performed the work, will resonate with today’s conversations about gender and inclusion while celebrating Agnes’s timeless and timely story about a young person who feels unable to fit in finding community on their own terms through dance.”
In a statement, Eilber added, “We’re thrilled to be working with Rhiannon Giddens, whose work often celebrates Black and immigrant artists who are foundational to American folk music. Pairing her with choreographer Jamar Roberts on programs with our new bluegrass production of Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo puts twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americana side by side and offers audiences a more expansive and inclusive way to understand our past. And our remarkable dancers somehow move seamlessly and brilliantly between styles and techniques that span decades.” Those dancers are Lloyd Knight, Xin Ying, Lorenzo Pagano, Leslie Andrea Williams, Anne Souder, Laurel Dalley Smith, So Young An, Marzia Memoli, Jacob Larsen, Alessio Crognale-Roberts, Richard Villaverde, Devin Loh, Antonio Leone, Meagan King, Ane Arrieta, Zachary Jeppsen, Matthew Spangler, Justin Valentine, Jai Perez, and Amanda Moreira.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Winner of the Los Angeles Immersive Invitational Grand Prize, Koryn Wicks’s Casting is making its New York City debut March 15-17 at Gymnopedie in Bushwick. Most performers dread the audition process, but in this case up to twelve audience members at a time will participate, trying to land a big role. The thirty-minute work was created by Wicks (I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH; To Die in the Valley I’ve Loved) and a team of collaborators that includes writer Sam Alper, singer-songwriter Hanah Davenport, lighting and video designer and dancer Morgan Embry, sound designer and composer Alex Lough, and actors Audrey Rachelle and Jonathan Gordon. Tickets are $23.18 for your chance to be the star of the show.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Who:Martha Graham Dance Company What: Graham Studio Series: “GrahamDeconstructed” Where: Martha Graham Studio Theater, 55 Bethune St., eleventh floor When: Wednesday, March 13, and Thursday, March 14, $20-$30, 7:00 Why: Martha Graham’s ongoing Studio Series “GrahamDeconstructed” continues March 13 and 14 with a behind-the-scenes look at The Rite of Spring, which the company debuted in 1984. Graham had performed in the first American production of the work, by choreographer Léonide Massine and composer Igor Stravinsky, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, in 1930. More than fifty years later, she revisited the thirty-five-minute piece, and, for its fortieth anniversary, it will be part of the troupe’s upcoming season at City Center next month, along with Graham’s Appalachian Spring, Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, and a world premiere by Jamar Roberts and Rhiannon Giddens. For “GrahamDeconstructed,” there will be a full rehearsal run-through of The Rite of Spring, which features two soloists (the Chosen One and the Shaman) and an ensemble of eighteen, with commentary from Graham experts and original cast members.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Illinoise reimagines Sufjan Stevens album as a dance-theater piece (photo by Stephanie Berger)
ILLINOISE
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Monday – Saturday through March 26, standby only
212-933-5812 www.armoryonpark.org
Justin Peck and Sufjan Stevens’s eighth collaboration is a poignant and exhilarating exploration of young love, grief, and the search for personal identity, with its fingers firmly on the pulse of today’s youth culture.
The DC-born Peck, thirty-six, is a Tony-winning dancer, choreographer, director, and filmmaker and the resident choreographer of New York City Ballet. The Detroit-born Stevens, forty-eight, is a Grammy- and Oscar-nominated singer-songwriter and soundtrack composer. The longtime friends have previously worked together on pieces for NYCB, Houston Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and Pacific Northwest Ballet, including Year of the Rabbit,Everywhere We Go, and Reflections.
Their latest, the dazzling Illinoise, opened Wednesday night for a sold-out run continuing in Park Ave. Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall through March 26. [ed. note: The production is moving to Broadway, running April 24 to August 10 at the St. James.]
The ninety-minute dance-theater work is based on Stevens’s 2005 concept album, Illinois, aka Sufjan Stevens Invites You to: Come on Feel the Illinoise. “I feel like specifically Illinois and Chicago are sort of the center of gravity for the American Midwest,” Stevens told Dusted about the genesis of the record.
Henry (Ricky Ubeda) and Carl (Ben Cook) go on a road trip in Illinoise (photo by Stephanie Berger)
The original story, by Peck and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview,Marys Seacole), introduces us to a young man named Henry (Ricky Ubeda) as he ventures from a small town in the middle of nowhere, Illinois, to Chicago and then New York City. He joins up with a group of eleven free-living young people who are like a modern-day version of the hippies from Hair. Sitting around a campfire (consisting of lanterns), they take journals out of their backpacks and share stories from their lives.
The dancers never speak or sing; Adam Rigg’s multilevel wooden set features three small platforms for a trio of vocalists: keyboardist Elijah Lyons and guitarists Shara Nova and Tasha Viets-VanLear. They wear wasp sings, which refer to the song “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!,” in which they sing, “Oh, I am not quite sleeping / Oh, I am fast in bed / There on the wall in the bedroom creeping / I see a wasp with her wings outstretched.” Eleven other instrumentalists, from drums, strings, woodwinds, and horns to bass, banjo, percussion, and mandolin, are scattered across the top level.
Morgan (Rachel Lockhart) looks for signs from the ancestors underneath a billboard of a canceled Andrew Jackson (“Jacksonville”). Jo Daviess (dance captain Jeanette Delgado) is surrounded by evil-masked figures in black robes representing the Founding Fathers (“They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!”). Wayne (Alejandro Vargas) encounters serial killer John Wayne Gacy in a clown outfit, realizing that we all have secrets to hide (“John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”). And the aptly named Clark (Robbie Fairchild) removes his glasses and shirt and becomes Superman, one of many, believing, “Only a steel man came to recover / If he had run from gold, carry over / We celebrate our sense of each other / We have a lot to give one another” (“The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”). The costumes are by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, with masks by Julian Crouch and props by Andrew Diaz.
Clark (Robbie Fairchild) turns into Superman at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)
Those tales serve as a prologue to the main narrative, which Henry reluctantly conveys, involving a Jules and Jim–like relationship between him and his childhood friends Carl (Ben Cook) and Shelby (Gaby Diaz) and, later, his first adult love, Douglas (Ahmad Simmons). Jealousy, illness, and loyalty bring them together and tear them apart as they try to find their place in a difficult world — from politics to family to religion — that often doesn’t even try to understand them. “Tuesday night at the Bible study / We lift our hands and pray over your body / But nothing ever happens,” they sing in “Casimir Pulaski Day,” named for the Polish freedom fighter who was a general in the Continental Army and became known as the Father of American Cavalry.
Ultimately, in the finale, “The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders,” they declare, “What have we become, America?”
Illinoise explodes with energy but is anchored by an underlying tenderness. Have no fear if you’re not a fan of Stevens; Nathan Koci’s music direction and supervision and Timo Andres’s arrangements and orchestrations lift the score, and some of Stevens’s more twee lyrics disappear into the overall thrilling zeitgeist.
Innate hope and charm emanate from the dancers, highlighted by Lockhart, Delgado, Vargas, Fairchild, and Byron Tittle, who portrays Estrella and adds tap to a movement language that blends contemporary and ballet. The four leads — Ubeda, Cook, Diaz, and Simmons — imbue their characters with deep emotional conflicts that can be as stirring as they are heartbreaking; several scenes play out like a twenty-first-century silent movie in color. The cast also features Christine Flores as Anikova, dance captain Craig Salstein as I-94 East Bound, and Kara Chan as Star, with Jada German, Zachary Gonder, Dario Natarelli, and Tyrone Reese making up the swing.
Not everything works, and the timeline can get confusing, but Peck and Sibblies Drury pull no punches. Garth MacAleavey’s sound design reverberates throughout the hall, while Brandon Stirling Baker’s lighting bursts forth in multiple palettes and cleverly informs us of the location, accompanied by projections on a billboard above the band.
Each attendee receives a program modeled on the journals used by the performers, in red, blue, orange, or green and with a different wasp wing image on it. Inside are several handwritten entries by Henry, complete with illustrations and even a blotch that Henry explains is a “tear mark b/c I made myself cry in my new journal like a dork.” He also writes, “I couldn’t feel anything. Maybe I couldn’t feel it because I am too obsessed with my own past.”
Illinoise will make you feel. And if you are so inclined, there are several blank pages at the back of the program where you can share and reflect.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
