this week in dance

ILLINOISE

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.]

2024 MOVEMENT RESEARCH FESTIVAL

Salma AbdelSalam and Noura Seif Hassanein (nasa4nasa) are part of 2024 Movement Research Festival (photo by Rachel Keane)

MOVEMENT RESEARCH FESTIVAL: PRACTICES OF EMBODIED SOLIDARITY IN MOVEMENT(S)
122CC, 150 First Ave.
Judson Church, 55 Washington Square South
Danspace Project, 131 East Tenth St.
February 28 – March 9, free with advance RSVP
movementresearch.org

The theme of the 2024 Movement Research Festival is “Practices of Embodied Solidarity in Movement(s),” consisting of nine days of live performances, workshops, and talks at three downtown locations: 122CC, Judson Church, and Danspace Project. Curated by Marýa Wethers, director of the GPS/Global Practice Sharing Program at Movement Research, the program features dance artists who are part of GPS MENA, the Middle East and North Africa Exchange Program: Salma AbdelSalam and Noura Seif Hassanein (nasa4nasa) from Egypt, Sahar Damoni from Palestine, Lori Kharpoutlian and Charlie Prince from Lebanon, and F. M. Sayna from Iran; the festival will explore sociopolitical issues that reflect the state of the world today.

Below is the full schedule; all events are free with advance RSVP.

Wednesday, February 28, 6:30 pm
“GPS Chats: Solidarity, Displacement, and Inverted Process in Contemporary Practice,” with F. M. Sayna, Lori Kharpoutlian, and Charlie Prince, 122CC

Thursday, February 29, 10:00 am
“Workshop: back2back,” with nasa4nasa (Salma AbdelSalam and Noura Seif Hassanein), 122CC

Friday, March 1, 10:00 am
“Workshop: the body symphonic,” with Charlie Prince, 122CC

Saturday, March 2, 10:00 am
“Workshop: Lemon Water ma’a Nana (Moving in your own space, and out of it),” with Sahar Damoni, 122CC

Monday, March 4, 7:00 pm
“Performance: Movement Research at the Judson Church,” with solos and group improvisation by Lori Kharpoutlian, F. M. Sayna, Sahar Damoni, and Charlie Prince, Judson Church

Wednesday, March 6, 7:00 pm
“Studies Project: The Political Body in Solo and Collaborative Performance,” with Salma AbdelSalam, Sahar Damoni, and Noura Seif Hassanein, 122CC

Thursday, March 7, 7:30 pm
No Mercy, by nasa4nasa (Salma AbdelSalam and Noura Seif Hassanein), Danspace Project

Friday, March 8, 7:30 pm
Eat Banana and Drink Pills, by Sahar Damoni, Danspace Project

Saturday, March 9, 7:30 pm
Cosmic A*, by Charlie Prince, Danspace Project

ALONZO KING LINES BALLET: DEEP RIVER

Alonzo King LINES Ballet makes Lincoln Center debut with Deep River

Who: Alonzo King LINES Ballet
What: Lincoln Center debut
Where: Rose Theater, Broadway at West Sixtieth St., fifth floor
When: February 22-24, choose-what-you-pay (suggested admission $35), 7:30
Why: San Francisco–based Alonzo King LINES Ballet makes its Lincoln Center debut this week with Deep River, an evening-length piece that kicked off its fortieth anniversary season last year. The title is taken from the popular spiritual performed by such singers as Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Odetta, Johnny Mathis, Mahalia Jackson, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland. The sixty-five-minute work features an original score, incorporating Jewish, Indian, and Black traditions, by multidisciplinary artist and longtime King collaborator Jason Moran and is sung live onstage by vocalist Lisa Fischer, alongside music by Pharoah Sanders, Maurice Ravel, and James Weldon Johnson, who wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

The company consists of dancers Babatunji, Adji Cissoko, Madeline DeVries, Theo Duff-Grant, Lorris Eichinger, Shuaib Elhassan, Joshua Francique, James Gowan, Ilaria Guerra, Maya Harr, Marusya Madubuko, Michael Montgomery, and Tatum Quiñónez, with lighting by Jim French, costumes and sets by Robert Rosenwasser, and sound by Philip Perkins. King, who was born in Georgia to parents who were staunch civil rights activists, notes in a statement about Deep River, “Love is the ocean that we rose from, swim in, and will one day return to.”

BALLET HISPÁNICO AT THE 92nd ST. Y

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Línea Recta is part of special Ballet Hispánico program at 92Y (photo by Ben McKeown / courtesy of the American Dance Festival)

Who: Ballet Hispánico
What: Celebrating 150th anniversary of the 92nd Street Y
Where: The 92nd Street Y, Kaufmann Concert Hall, 1395 Lexington Ave. between Ninety-First & Ninety-Second Sts.
When: Wednesday, February 21, $10-$40 in person, $20 virtual, 7:30
Why: As part of the 92nd St. Y’s continuing celebration of its 150th anniversary, New York City–based Ballet Hispánico will present a special evening at Kaufmann Concert Hall that can be seen live in person February 21 or online February 22-24. The night features a restaging of Talley Beatty’s 1985 Recuerdo de Campo Amor, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s 2016 flamenco piece Línea Recta, and Pedro Ruiz’s 2000 Cuban-infused Club Havana. Ballet Hispánico celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of artistic director Eduardo Vilaro in its spring season, which arrives April 25-28 at City Center, consisting of the world premiere of Vilaro’s Buscando a Juan, a restaging of Ochoa’s 2010 House of Mad’moiselle, and Gustavo Ramírez Sansano’s 18+1.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING

Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet explore their relationship on- and offstage in The Following Evening (photo by Maria Baranova)

THE FOLLOWING EVENING
Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC)
251 Fulton St.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 18, $69
pacnyc.org

The Following Evening is a touching love letter to independent theater creators and New York City. It also goes much deeper than a proverbial passing of the torch.

The seventy-five-minute work, making its world premiere through February 18 at PAC NYC, was written and directed by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone specifically for Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet. Browde, forty-two, and Silverstone, forty-three, started the experimental company 600 Highwaymen in 2009, the same year they got married. Maddow, seventy-five, and Zimet, eighty-one, cofounded the experimental company Talking Band, with Tina Shepard, in 1974 and got married in 1986. (Zimet and Shepard had been wed previously as well.)

Browde and Silverstone have a young child and are considering leaving New York. Maddow and Zimet have three grandchildren and can’t imagine living anywhere other than the city, especially with two more shows coming up, Existentialism at La MaMa later this month and Shimmer and Herringbone at Mabou Mines @122CC in May as part of their troupe’s fiftieth anniversary season.

In the play, the two couples portray somewhat fictionalized versions of themselves as they explore their lives and creative process. The line between fact and fantasy is further blurred by Jian Jung’s set, which features a piano on one side, a few chairs in the middle, and a pile of large canvases collected at the right, except for one painting of a window, taunting us about the world outside. In the back, large white sheetrock panels cover only some of the wall, a constant reminder that we are not in Ellen and Paul’s downtown loft but in a theater. In addition, Eric Southern’s lighting often keeps it bright, as if the characters are not actors but just people sharing their time with the audience.

The show opens with Paul delivering a long prologue, moving his hands and body in sharp, heavily mannered ways as he discusses being raised on the Upper West Side, riding his bike, dropping out of medical school, and performing around the globe. He talks about his family history going back to his great-grandmother, who was born in New York City in 1863, and continuing through Ellen and their children and grandchildren, setting up the multigenerational aspect of the narrative.

“Does this all sound romantic? I really hope it doesn’t,” he says. “Nothing is going to happen in this play.” He then turns to Ellen, asks if she is ready, and welcomes the audience to The Following Evening.

Ellen brings up disappointment, memory, and variation as the couple dances, then sings a song for their neighbor, an ill painter named Katherine. “I imagine a play that takes place over a thousand years,” Ellen says, never wanting their life in the theater to end. Paul, ever hopeful, later adds, “I imagine a play about the end of the world. Where the world is crumbling. Civilization on fire. But it is a love story.”

The Following Evening brings together two theater couples at different stages of life (photo by Maria Baranova)

In the second section, Abby and Michael enter, directing Ellen and Paul. When Ellen is having trouble with a scene, she says resignedly, “I had it yesterday. This is the thing about getting older.” Paul immediately counters, “You don’t have any harder of a time than any other actor.” When Abby suggests they improvise, Ellen quickly points out, “No, I like the way you wrote it,” praising the ideas of the next theatrical standard-bearers even though the older couple is more confident about the future than the younger pair.

“Hmm. I just had this, uh. I just got incredibly jealous. You guys have so much life ahead of you,” Paul says, to which Abby replies, “Oh. Isn’t that funny? I don’t feel any of that.” Michael later opines, “I can see the two of you so clearly. I can sort of see you. But I can’t see myself. . . . You were pioneers and we are just — jerks.”

The third and final part focuses more on Abby and Michael as they examine the state of their existence, sometimes speaking in the third person, describing their actions to each other. “I feel like I could run / Like I could run really fast if I wanted to / That you would keep pace with me,” Michael says. “It wouldn’t be that hard / We could go on forever. We could do it.” Abby explains, “Here, hold this, you tell me as if we are the last people on earth.”

They are eventually joined by Ellen and Paul, and the last moments grow even more abstract than what came before.

The Following Evening is like a visual tone poem, a brutally honest look at aging and artistic creation. Things occur slowly, in movement and speech; the dialogue is spoken plainly, unadorned, carefully modulated but not dispassionate. Ellen and Paul are marvelous together; watching them slowly take off their shoes, sit on the floor, or dance together is aspirational.

Abby and Michael are compelling as the younger couple who fear they will never be like Ellen and Paul, either as a married couple, parents, grandparents, or theater makers. All four of them have their fair share of doubt and questions, but the play puts a defining emphasis on experience in a country where the elderly are not given the respect they deserve, something 600 Highwaymen (A Thousand Ways, The Fever) is rectifying, without being overly congratulatory or sentimental about Talking Band (Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless, Painted Snake in a Painted Chair), which collectively has won fifteen Obie Awards.

The title promises that life goes on; I can’t wait to see what each couple has in store for us next evening.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

QUEER NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

Bruno Isaković and Nataša Rajković’s Yira, yira (Cruising, cruising) is part of QNYIAF (photo by Silvija Dogan)

QUEER NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl. between Third & Fourth Sts.
February 7 – 17, $25
212-945-2600
nyuskirball.org

After a six-year break, the Queer New York International Arts Festival returns to the city, taking place February 7-17 at NYU Skirball. Started by Queer Zagreb founder Zvonimir Dobrović in 2012 at Abrons Arts Center, the fest consists of works that address queerness in today’s society, this year with presentations from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, and Germany, including live performances, installations, and public talks.

The 2024 QNYIAF kicks off February 7 with Croatian artist Arijana Lekić Fridrih’s From5to95, a hybrid video installation and online project in which Croatian women from the ages of five to ninety-five share their personal stories about gender inequality. On February 7 and 8, Croatian artists Bruno Isaković and Nataša Rajković’s Yira, yira (Cruising, cruising), which premiered in Argentina in 2019, is performed by sex workers Juan Ejemplo, Leandra Atenea Levine Hidalgo, Pichón Reyna, and Sofía Tramazaygues, exploring the relationship between client and sex worker.

Bruno Isaković and Mia Zalukar’s Kill B. reimagines the Bride from Quentin Tarantino films (photo by Hrvoje Zalukar)

Isaković collaborates with fellow choreographer and dancer Mia Zalukar on Kill B., inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Playing February 9 and 10, the piece focuses on the character of the Bride as well as artistic hierarchical structures and their own professional partnership. On February 13, Toronto-based performance artist Clayton Lee goes through his sexual history in The Goldberg Variations, which mashes up Johann Sebastian Bach with WCW and WWE wrestler and actor Bill Goldberg, host of the 2018-19 competition series Forged in Fire: Knife or Death and a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice. Some iterations have included smells and live snakes, so be ready.

On February 15, Argentinian interdisciplinary artist Tiziano Cruz will deliver the autobiographical performance lecture Conference, followed by a discussion. His piece Soliloquy — I woke up and hit my head against the wall was about his mother; in Conference he turns his attention to his ancestors and his late sister. On February 16, Brazilian artist Wagner Schwartz’s performance lecture La Bête is an interactive solo in which he activates a plastic replica of one of Lygia Clark’s rearrangeable hinged metal sculptures known as bichos, or “beasts,” and then the audience does the same, except with Schwartz’s naked body.

QNYIAF concludes February 17 with Raimund Hoghe Company members Emmanuel Eggermont and Luca Giacomo Schulte’s An Evening with Raimund, a tribute to German choreographer, dancer, and journalist Raimund Hoghe, who died in 2021 at the age of seventy-two; excerpts from his works will be performed by seven dancers. “To see bodies on stage that do not comply with the norm is important — not only with regard to history but also with regard to present developments, which are leading humans to the status of design objects,” Hoghe said. “On the question of success: It is important to be able to work and to go your own way — with or without success. I simply do what I have to do.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

COMPAGNIE HERVÉ KOUBI: SOL INVICTUS

Compagnie Hervé KOUBI worships the sun in Sol Invictus (photo by Nathalie Sternalski)

DANCE REFLECTIONS: SOL INVICTUS
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 23-28, $10-$71
212-645-2904
www.joyce.org

French choreographer Hervé Koubi studied dance and biology at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and he combines the two elements gorgeously in Sol Invictus as his company of eighteen performers pushes the limits of what the human body can do.

In a program note, Koubi calls the seventy-five-minute piece “a manifesto for life,” and he fills it with sections that explore ritual, worship, faith in a higher power — in this case, the sun — and life, death, and rebirth.

Continuing at the Joyce through January 28, Sol Invictus, which means “invincible sun,” is named for the Roman Sun God, a deity that inspired cult followings. It begins in silence with Allan Sobral Dos Santos running around in a circle, faster and faster, moving lower and lower until his hand touches the reflective floor. The other dancers watch him from either side.

Soon the soundtrack starts — the score features music and soundscapes by Mikael Karlsson, Maxime Bodson, Beethoven (the funeral procession from the Seventh Symphony), and Steve Reich — and a friendly street dance battle breaks out. Koubi’s movement language melds hip-hop, capoeira, ballet, and contemporary dance, heavily influenced by his discovery in 2009 of his Algerian heritage; his troupe comes primarily from North Africa.

They twirl, jump, slide, shake, lift, toss, and dash around the stage, doing flips, cartwheels, head- and handstands, and dazzling twists and spins in musical arranger Guilaume Gabriel’s muted-palette culottes, loose-fitting skirts or shorts, several of the men going bare-chested, revealing impressive, heavily tattooed bodies. For the first time, Compagnie Hervé KOUBI includes women (Francesca Bazzucchi, Joy Isabella Brown, Hsuan-Hung Hsu), toning down a bit of the beefy masculinity on display.

Lionel Buzonie’s lighting ranges from heavenly glows to ominous fog; the eight spots at the top back bounce off the floor, casting ululating shadows on the Joyce’s ceiling. At one point a handful of dancers, each with a light behind them, approaches the stage slowly, like zombies. The narrative shifts from dance-off to postapocalyptic survival to West Side Story jubilance.

A long stretch of fabric in the back becomes a glittering gold translucent parachute enveloping first Bazzucchi, then later the one-legged Samuel Da Silveira Lima.

The dancers spend most of the show closely observing one another, but occasionally a single performer comes to the front and looks out at the audience, both warning us and beckoning us to join in the group worship of the sun as a way to rise out of the hazy darkness.

Koubi, who previously presented The Barbarian Nights, or The First Dawns of the World in 2020 and What the Day Owes to the Night in 2018 at the Joyce, can get a bit lost in all the razzle-dazzle, as impressive as it is, but he finds hope and love in the gathering itself, and it’s hard not to find the joy on his journey.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]