this week in dance

UNDER THE RADAR — DOROTHÉE MUNYANEZA / COMPAGNIE KADIDI: SAMEDI DÉTENTE

Dorothée Munyaneza recalls personal horrors of the Rwandan genocide in SAMEDI DÉTENTE (photo by Laura Fouqueré)

LuEsther Hall at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 14-17, $25
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com
anahi-spectacle-vivant.fr

Rwandan-born, French-based singer, actress, writer, and dancer Dorothée Munyaneza is mesmerizing in Samedi Détente, as she recalls the fateful month of April 1994 in her native country, when she was twelve years old and genocide was about to be unleashed as Hutu sought to eradicate Tutsi. Munyaneza, barefoot and dressed in multiple colorful layers, speaks starkly to the audience, sings, dances atop a table that she later balances on her head, and holds a knife that drips blood through a hospital tube. With a haunted yet determined look in her eyes, she remembers the death of President Habyarimana, of men with guns arriving at their home and separating her family, of how the rest of the world turned their backs on Rwanda. “They all left us in deep shit and blood,” she says. Her harsh, compelling narrative is accompanied by Ivory Coast dancer Nadia Beugré, who at first stands to Munyaneza’s right, covered in a hood as if she is being held hostage, while on the other side French musician Alain Mahé adds music and sound effects and sharpens knives. But the show, running at the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall through January 17 as part of the Under the Radar Festival, takes a baffling turn in a vignette in which Beugré performs zouglou, a popular dance style from the Ivory Coast celebrating the joy of life while commenting on current affairs.

Munyaneza, who wrote and directed Samedi Détente for her troupe, Compagnie Kadidi, might be using Beugré’s interlude to contrast the horrors of genocide with the feel-good partying that went on around the globe, and particularly in France and Africa, during those harsh months, but instead it disappointingly dilutes what was a compelling narrative. Munyaneza is able to right things before the finale, but one can’t help but wonder how much more powerful Samedi Détente, which was named after a Rwandan radio show that translates as “Saturday Relief,” would have been if it just focused on its central raison d’être. “How to tell the unspeakable? How to speak about leaving a beloved place? About the circumstances in which you had to flee the cradle of childhood, one day, hiding, on roads scattered with bodies, blood, and silence?” Munyaneza, who had a song on the Hotel Rwanda soundtrack and released her debut solo album in 2010, asks in her artist statement, continuing, “I want to speak though the eyes of those who have seen. I want to share the words of those who were there.” For much of Samedi Détente, she accomplishes just that, not needing the additional artifice. (The January 17 performance will be followed by a discussion with members of the cast and crew.)

AMERICAN REALNESS / MAKING SPACE — JACK FERVER: MON, MA, MES (REVISITÉ)

Jack Ferver brings an updated version of MON, MA, MES to American Realness and Gibney Dance’s Making Space (photo by Scott Shaw)

MAKING SPACE
Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway between Chambers & Reade Sts.
January 13-16, $20, 9:30
646-837-6809
americanrealness.com
www.gibneydance.org

If Jack Ferver is an acquired taste, then he’s a taste you need to acquire. The Wisconsin-born, New York City–based dancer, actor, choreographer, and performance artist returns to American Realness with Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité), a revised and updated version of a work he originally presented at FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival in 2012 and American Realness the next year. It’s an hour-long confessional in which you never quite know whether anything Ferver says is actually true, as he performs as “Jack Ferver,” talking about his childhood, his parents, his career, his husband, and his kids while wearing a black shirt, tight black shorts, and high black socks. He sings, dances to Schubert and Chopin, gets sexy, and discusses loneliness, fame, control, love, and collaboration; he skewers various people he’s worked with, including Liz Santoro and composer Roarke Menzies, who was part of the previous iteration of Mon, Ma, Mes, and costumer and occasional coperformer Reid Bartelme. Bartelme had an onstage role in the original production but on opening night at Gibney Dance he was in the audience — where Ferver reminded him again and again that he had been cut from this new edition. Collaboration and its unease, both in private life and the professional world, is perhaps the primary theme of Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité). Ferver repeatedly reveals his ambivalence about and fear of collaborators as he performs a piece that is impossible without them: Even the audience plays a crucial role in his unique storytelling, beginning with the packed house participating in a riotous Q&A; audience members are seated on three sides of the small room while the fourth side is the long rehearsal room mirror where they can see themselves and everyone else — and where Ferver can revel in reflections of himself, since this is all about self-reflection anyway. Part of the fun is being able to watch other people’s reactions as Ferver, often sitting on a chair, talking into a microphone in the fully lit room, goes about his business of melding personal success and failure with hysterical pop-culture references, making direct eye contact every step of the way. As fresh and exciting as it was four years ago, Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité) was well worth bringing back, in this case for both American Realness and Gibney Dance’s Making Space program. Ferver (Rumble Ghost, Chambre) can next be seen this summer at the Kitchen with I Want You to Want Me, a piece for ADI about which Ferver says, “I consider myself a populist, but some people really hate my work. They even hate me they hate my work so much. . . . Oh, I also just wanted to say that not everyone is going to make it. I don’t mean make it to the show. I mean make it out of the show alive.”

IN THE WORKS

Emily Johnson is among those presenting works-in-progress at Gibney Dance on January 17

Who: Fifteen choreographers
What: In the Works at 890 Broadway
Where: Gibney Dance, 890 Broadway between 19th & 20th Sts., free with advance RSVP, 212-677-8560
When: Sunday, January 17, free with advance RSVP, 9:30 am – 3:30 pm
Why: Gibney Dance will be offering sneak peeks at works-in-progress by some of the dance world’s most exciting and innovative choreographers on Sunday, January 17, from 10:00 am to 3:30 pm. “In the Works” consists of fifteen-to-forty-minute showcases by Dance in Process Resident Artists Beth Gill, Amanda Loulaki, Juliana May, Pavel Zustiak, and Tere O’Connor, Meredith Boggia Artists K. J. Holmes, Ivy Baldwin Dance, Katie Workum, Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith, and Emily Johnson, and American Dance Institute Artists Joanna Kotze, Steven Reker, John Jasperse, and Chris Schlichting. Admission is free, but advance RSVP is strongly suggested; we particularly recommend checking out May, Jasperse, Johnson, and Lieber and Smith, all of whom have been featured in twi-ny in recent years.

COIL — HELEN HERBERTSON + BEN COBHAM: MORPHIA SERIES

Helen Herbertson immerses herself and the audience into a dreamlike state in MORPHIA SERIES

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Howard Gilman Performance Space
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
January 12-16, $20
866-811-4111
bacnyc.org

Eighteen minutes. Twelve audience members in custom-created bleacher seating. An artisanal amuse bouche with a shot of sweet Muscat. Pitch blackness. Slowly, dozens and dozens of yards away, at the other side of the room, a cube becomes illuminated, and a figure can be seen silhouetted against swirling smoke. She moves ever so slightly, primarily shifting her hands and arms, as the sounds of nature seep in. After a few minutes, a sudden shock and back to utter darkness, not even an Exit sign glowing. The lights gently fade in and the cube now feels as if it’s underwater, where the woman is moving her full body elegantly and fluidly to the sounds of the sea. In the third section — well, for the third section, you’ll need to buckle your seat belt, because you’re in for a very different kind of ride. One of Australia’s most important and influential choreographers over the past four decades, Melbourne-based Helen Herbertson pushes creative boundaries once again with Morphia Series, a stark, startling work, both tender and tense, dream and nightmare, made with lighting designer and longtime collaborator Ben Cobham. The 2002 piece, inspired by Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, is making its New York premiere at the Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of PS122’s COIL festival. “My work has focused on the dynamic flow between people and place — the interaction of body and landscape or situation — interior life with light, form, place — person and place,” Herbertson, who essentially bares her soul in performing Morphia Series, told Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance in October 2010. “The approach fuses an expressive, physical language with a detailed exploration of the performance site, emphasizing the integration of lighting and design while working collaboratively, from inception with performers and creative teams.” You can add the audience to that collaborative summation, twelve people who are very much part of this unusual experience.

AMERICAN REALNESS / COIL — JILLIAN PEÑA: PANOPTICON

Alexandra Albrecht and Andrew Champlin mirror each other in Jillian Peña’s PANOPTICON (photo by Ian Douglas)

Abrons Arts Center, Experimental Theater
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 9-17, $20
Festival continues through January 17
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org
www.ps122.org/panopticon

If the title of Jillian Peña’s Panopticon recalls nineteenth-century optical instruments, you’re on the wrong track. It’s French philosopher Michel Foucault who’s the real reference for the Brooklyn-based choreographer’s latest evening-length piece, making its world premiere as a dual presentation of the COIL and American Realness festivals at Abrons Arts Center. In the “Pantopticism” chapter of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault wrote, in reference to the arrival of plague in a town, “First, a strict spatial partitioning. . . . It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment. Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere.” Foucault goes on to discuss such concepts as observation, surveillance, quarantine, and purification, elements that Peña refers to directly and indirectly in Panopticon, a duet performed by Alexandra Albrecht and Andrew Champlin that can be seen as an extension of their collaboration on Peña’s Polly Pocket, which was part of American Realness in 2014. The Experimental Theater has been arranged so that there is one row of chairs on all four sides of the room. However, on the two short sides, there are an additional ten chairs, organized like bowling pins, with one chair pointing toward the center of the space, followed by rows of two, three, and four seats, creating confining gaps in all four corners. High on the wall in the middle of the two longer sides are slightly tilted boards covered in silver Mylar, offering distorted reflections of what is occurring down below. For nearly an hour, Albrecht and Champlin move in parallel spaces delineated by tape on the floor, as if mirror images of each other, though occasionally touching and breaking that plane, disrupting the effect in disturbing yet beautiful ways. In dry, monotone voices, they discuss happiness, separation, time, and isolation as they perform balletic moves. They get so close to audience members that tiny rips in their slightly different op-art-inspired costumes, designed by Christian Joy, are visible, although the dancers rarely make eye contact with the crowd.

Alexandra Albrecht and Andrew Champlin mirror each other in Jillian Peña’s PANOPTICON (photo by Ian Douglas)

Alexandra Albrecht and Andrew Champlin explore happiness, separation, time, and isolation in Jillian Peña’s PANOPTICON (photo by Ian Douglas)

Even though they are moving in and around some of the viewers, it is as if Albrecht and Champlin are in a world of their own, reciting text by Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard as well as original dialogue written by the two dancers and Peña, while subtle, ambient music by Atticus Ros, Brian Eno & Harold Budd, Max Richter, David Bowie, Wendy Carlos, and Rachel Elkind floats in the background. Meanwhile, a man in one corner is filming everything. The show was being promoted as “a solo and a work for 100 dancers,” a “kaleidoscopic” piece with video elements, but instead it’s an intimate, decidedly low-tech exploration of twinning and the relationship between performer and audience. As Foucault explained, “This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead — all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.” There is a distinct architecture that pervades Panopticon, one that both frees you and holds you captive.

AMERICAN REALNESS — HEATHER KRAVAS: DEAD, DISAPPEARS

Heather Kravas battles a pillow and more in angry, provocative DEAD, DISAPPEARS

Abrons Arts Center, Studio 1
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 7-11, $20
Festival continues through January 17
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org

In a 2011 Movement Research conversation with Jodi Bender, choreographer and performer Heather Kravas said, “I’ll work on a solo because I feel like I need to ask a pretty intimate question. Not even one that is necessarily something I can articulate. But, I need to go to a pretty internal place or I need to investigate something that is not as defined.” It does not get a whole lot more intimate and undefined than dead, disappears, a solo work making its New York premiere at the American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center. The sixty-minute piece takes place in Studio 1, a rehearsal room for dancers that includes barres at two levels along one wall and mirrors of varying size on the other walls. Using Richard Serra’s “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself” as a jumping-off point, Kravas, a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Artist, incorporates spoken word, dance, music, technology, and performance art to create often uncomfortable, sometimes very funny situations in which she covers herself with a plastic garbage bag and walks on her tiptoes shouting out such words as “bimbo” and “peephole”; rolls around the floor attacking a pillow; asks an audience member for help when trying to pull off a particularly difficult body position; and puts a small bucket near the center of the room, hovers over it, and — well, we’ll let you experience that yourself. It’s an angry, emotional, provocative work with a lot of loud, violent acts resulting in nervous laughter, a little fear, and plenty of unexpected twists. Sitting in folding chairs on three sides of the room, the crowd of forty — including many dance professionals at the 5:30 show on January 9 — ate it all up, celebrating the bold, raw nature of the work and Kravas’s brave performance, putting herself out there as both subject and object. Perhaps what was most impressive is that Kravas was scheduled to do it all over again at 8:30.

DONNA UCHIZONO AND THE PROFESSIONALS: STICKY MAJESTY

Donna Uchizono and the Professionals will present STICKY MAJESTY at Gibney Dance (photo by Donna Uchizono)

MAKING SPACE
Gibney Dance Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway between Chambers & Reade Sts.
January 6-9, 13-16, $20, 8:00 (7:00 on Family Night, 1/7)
646-837-6809
www.gibneydance.org
www.donnauchizono.org

New York City-based dancer and choreographer Donna Uchizono enjoys making pieces that challenge both performer and audience while also incorporating deeply personal elements and unique stagecraft. In 1999’s State of Heads, three dancers start off atop ladders, moving only their heads. In 2004’s Butterflies from My Hand, dancer Hristoula Harakas is lifted skyward by a long red sash. In 2010’s longing two, the first part took place at BAC, where the dancers performed between two horizontal partitions, giving each audience member a different siteline, while the second part moved to the old DTW. Both longing two and 2014’s Fire Underground were inspired by the difficulties Uchizono experienced adopting a child; in the latter piece, the audience sat onstage as Uchizono and Becky Serrell-Cyr ran around the floor, Serrell-Cyr dangerously swinging a long, chained object as she removed her clothing. For Uchizono’s latest work, Sticky Majesty, taking place January 6-9 and 13-16 at Gibney Dance, the seating arrangement and choreography have been set up so that every audience member will get a different view of the performance and no single angle is considered optimum. The work, part of Gibney’s Making Space program geared toward midcareer artists — Uchizono just celebrated her company’s twenty-fifth anniversary — evolved from individual tea-time conversations Uchizono had with invited guests from around the sociopolitical spectrum. “Sticky Majesty delves into the unsettling paradoxes of defining truth through distorted perspectives,” she says about the piece, which is being credited to Donna Uchizono and the Professionals. The work — whose title could be a clever wording based on the Rolling Stones albums Sticky Fingers and Their Satanic Majesties Request — will be performed by Hadar Ahuvia, Sarah Iguchi, Molly Lieber, Heather Olson, and Meg Weeks, with lighting by Natalie Robin, music by David Shively, and set design by Michael Grimaldi. The January 7 show will be held at 7:00 (instead of 8:00) and will provide onsite childcare ($10) for kids ages four and up. Tickets for Sticky Majesty are $20, but the price goes down to $14 if you go to at least one other Making Space show, Jack Ferver’s Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité) and/or luciana achugar’s An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love.