Tag Archives: Jason Collins

FOUR QUARTETS

Pam Tanowitz Dance’s Four Quartets makes its New York City debut February 10–12 at BAM (photo by Maria Baranova)

FOUR QUARTETS
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
February 10–12, $25-$95, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
pamtanowitzdance.org

T. S. Eliot’s 1936–42 epic Four Quartets poem begins with a two-part epigraph from Greek philosopher Heraclitus that warns, “Although logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own. . . . The way upward and the way downward are the same.” Those words sound particularly relevant today as America battles through a pandemic and socioeconomic and racial inequality and injustice that are threatening the stability of our democracy. Heraclitus also wrote, “It is better to conceal ignorance than to expose it.” Meanwhile, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed, “Heraclitus was an opponent of all democratic parties.”

In 2018, Bronx-born, Westchester-raised choreographer Pam Tanowitz debuted her take on Eliot’s poem, as Four Quartets made its world premiere at Bard SummerScape; it is now coming to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House for three performances, February 10–12. The seventy-five-minute piece features all-star collaborators, with music by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho played by NYC orchestral collective the Knights, images by American abstract minimalist Brice Marden, costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, sets and lighting by Clifton Taylor, sound by Jean-Baptiste Barriére, and text performed live by Tony nominee and multiple Obie winner Kathleen Chalfant. (Bard’s recording of the audio was the first authorized version by a woman and an American.) The dancers are Kara Chan, Jason Collins, Dylan Crossman, Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood.

“Making Four Quartets has changed me as an artist forever,” Tanowitz says in the above behind-the-scenes Bard documentary, There the Dance Is, which was filmed during the pandemic. “I’m not scared of failure. I’m not scared to imagine. And I’m not scared to take risks. I was before.”

“Burnt Norton,” the first section of Four Quarters, is an eerie reminder of what is happening in the United States and around the world today as we look toward a fraught future: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable. / What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation. / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present. / Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden. My words echo / Thus, in your mind. / But to what purpose / Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know. / Other echoes / Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?”

Tickets are going fast for the show, which is part of BAM’s “New York Season,” consisting of works by local creators, so act now if you want to see this widely praised production. Up next at BAM are Kyle Abraham’s An Untitled Love at BAM Strong’s Harvey Theater, running February 23–26, and longtime favorite SITI Company’s final physical theater presentation, The Medium, at BAM Fisher March 15–20. You can also catch Tanowitz’s Bartók Ballet, her first commission for New York City Ballet, at Lincoln Center’s David H Koch Theater on February 22 and 23, a work for eleven dancers set to Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5.

PAM TANOWITZ DANCE: FINALLY UNFINISHED PARTS 1 & 2

Pam Tanowitz Dance’s Finally Unfinished streams from the Joyce through December 26

JoyceStream
The Joyce Theater
December 12-26, $13
www.joyce.org
pamtanowitzdance.org

Pam Tanowitz Dance (PTD) continues its digital site-specific season with Finally Unfinished: Part I, streaming from the Joyce through December 26. During the pandemic, with theaters emptied by health restrictions, the Bronx-born Tanowitz, who was a 2013 Joyce Residency Artist, has created several outdoor works that take dance fans and performers outside. David, a solo for American Ballet Theater principal dancer David Hallberg as part of “ABT Today: The Future Starts Now,” is set at the Glass House in New Canaan, while Solo for Russell: Sites 1-5, a solo for New York City Ballet principal dancer Russell Janzen for NYCB’s New Works Festival, guided viewers around the Lincoln Center campus, from the Illumination Lawn to the Damrosch Park Bandshell. (In June 2019, Tanowitz’s Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures took place in several locations in Nelson A. Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City for the 2019 River to River Festival.)

Now Tanowitz has returned to the Joyce Theater, where she has presented such works as Passagen and Heaven on One’s Head in February 2014, Sequenzas in Quadrilles and the story progresses as if in a dream of glittering surfaces in September 2016, and New Work for Goldberg Variations in December 2019, with a multipart show created specifically for online viewing through JoyceStream. Made following Covid-19 protocols during a residency on Governors Island, the work, following an iteration livestreamed from the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia on October 15, is a “flexible dance piece” that is set in and around the Joyce, from the proscenium stage to the wings, from the aisles to the balcony.

“We finally finished Finally Unfinished, but it’s never really finished,” Tanowitz announces before the curtain literally rises on Jason Collins, Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, and Victor Lozano, who perform Gustave Le Gray, No. 2 on an empty stage. The four barefoot dancers, wearing tan shorts and T-shirts designed by Reid Barthelme and Harriet Jung, move gingerly in unison to a score by Caroline Shaw played by pianist Amy Yang; the camera shoots them from multiple angles, with closeups of their bare legs and long shots from the back of the theater.

After ten minutes, they are joined by Brittany Engel-Adams, Lindsey Jones, and Melissa Toogood for the explosion that is Finally Unfinished: Part 1. Amid piped-in crowd noises (“Field Recordings” by Dan Siegler) and recordings of cues from PTD’s 2014 appearance at the Joyce (“Cueing Sound Score,” with the disembodied voices of Laurie Benoit and Jeff Segal), Toogood takes over the stage, dressed in a full-length space-age onesie with a hood, followed by a masked cameraman in the same outfit. Soon everyone has changed costumes (including some garb that incorporates the design and color of the seats in the audience, the curtain, and the carpeting) as they dance to “Furtive Movements,” an electronic score by Ted Hearne, performed by cellist Ashley Bathgate and percussionist Ron Wiltrout. It all builds to an exhilarating crescendo until a peaceful and quiet finale with, of course, no applause.

But it’s not quite over; Finally Unfinished: Part II continues online with what PTD calls “a Digital Curio Case.” Designed by Jeremy Jacob and beginning with old footage of a clapping crowd, Part II reveals some of Tanowitz’s inspirations and creative process, including text (“Nowhere is a dead end”), cutouts of the dancers, a collection of clips from films in which characters perform playful dances using their fingers on a table (The Gold Rush, A Band Apart, Benny & Joon), a behind-the-scenes look at costumes by Barthelme and Jung and scenery by Suzanne Bocanegra, recommended reading, and more.

From the dances to the multimedia scrapbook, it’s a judicious and entertaining tribute to the Joyce using the internet as medium during a health crisis that has left us all in front of our screens, unable to experience dance and other live entertainment in person. As Tanowitz says, “It’s a different format now. / What format should it be? / We finished it for you. / It’s never finished for me.”

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL 2019

Ernesto Pujol’s The Listeners invites attendees to speak for as long as they want to an artist at Federal Hall (photo by Nisa Ojalvo)

R2R
Multiple downtown locations
June 18-29, free
lmcc.net

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s eighteenth annual River to River Festival comprises a host of exciting downtown events, from dance and immersive art to film and interactive performance. Running June 18-29, the festival is free, but many events require advance RSVP. “Our contemporary reality is rushed, and nowhere is this more apparent than in New York—the city that keeps moving,” curator and LMCC executive director of artistic programs Lili Chopra said in a statement. “There is always somewhere to go, something to see and more to achieve, creating a frenetic energy that makes this city fabulous and exhausting in equal parts. Increasingly, external stimulation seems to be stifling internal introspection as we anxiously charge forward blinkered to our surroundings and, in this digital age, hardened towards the very people that make up our physical community. In response to this, the River to River Festival addresses the experience of the individual within the urban setting by making space for balance.”

Among the artists participating in this year’s iteration are Yoko Ono, Sarah Michelson, Ernesto Pujol, Pam Tanowitz, Kamau Ware, Jennifer Monson, Carol Becker & Mark Epstein, and NIC Kay, at such locations as the Oculus, Federal Hall, Rockefeller Park, the Seaport District, the African Burial Ground National Monument, and the East River Esplanade. You can take a walking tour through the black experience, reveal your innermost desires to a stranger, meet with emerging artists in a studio setting, and add your thoughts to a refugee boat.

Tuesday, June 18
through
Saturday, June 29
Yoko Ono: Add Color (Refugee Boat) (1960/2019), interactive installation, 203 Front St., Seaport District, noon –8:00

Yoko Ono: The Reflection Project, instructional text works by Yoko Ono at such locations as 28 Liberty, the Fulton Transit Center, the Oculus at the WTC Transportation Hub, and the Seaport District

Elia Alba: The Supper Club, NYC DOT Art Display Cases on Water St. and Maiden Ln. and Gouverneur Ln. between Water & Front Sts.

Ezra Wube: Fulton Flow, Fulton Transit Center

Tuesday, June 18
Pam Tanowitz: Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures, with live music by composer and vocalist Ted Hearne, guitarist Taylor Levine, and Rachel Drehmann, Daniel Salera, Kate Sheeran, and Colin Weyman on French horns, costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, and sound design by Garth MacAleavey, performed by Sara Mearns, Taylor Stanley, Reid Bartelme, Jason Collins, Zachary Gonder, Victor Lozano and Melissa Toogood, Nelson A. Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City, 7:45

Wednesday, June 19
Pam Tanowitz: Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures, with live music by composer and vocalist Ted Hearne, guitarist Taylor Levine, and Rachel Drehmann, Daniel Salera, Kate Sheeran, and Colin Weyman on French horns, costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, and sound design by Garth MacAleavey, performed by Sara Mearns, Taylor Stanley, Reid Bartelme, Jason Collins, Zachary Gonder, Victor Lozano and Melissa Toogood, Nelson A. Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City, 7:45

NIC Kay’s pushit!! is a site-responsive meditation walk through Lower Manhattan (photo by Sarah-ji Rhee)

Thursday, June 20
Tribeca Art + Culture Night, with AIM—Bronx Museum of the Arts, Anita Rogers Gallery, apexart, Barney Savage Gallery, BM Franklin, Cheryl Hazan, Church Street School for Music and Art, Double Knot, Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York Academy of Art, Pearl River Mart, Postmasters Gallery, R & Company, SAPAR Contemporary, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, Soho Photo Gallery, the Drawing Center, the Untitled Space, Twenty First Gallery / White Space, White Street Studio, and Y2K group, 6:00 – 9:00

NIC Kay: pushit!!, site-responsive moving performance from Albert Capsouto Park at Varick & Laight Sts. to the African Burial Ground National Monument, 7:00

Friday, June 21
Workspace Artists-in-Residence: Open Studios, with Golnar Adili, Jennifer Bartlett, Eliza Bent, Keisha Bush, André Daughtry, Jonathan González, Zac Hacmon, Terrance James Jr., NIC Kay, Ying Liu, Asif Mian, Kenneth Pietrobono, Orlando Tirado, and Zhiyuan Yang, LMCC’s Workspace Studios, 101 Greenwich St., fifteenth floor, 6:00 – 9:00

Saturday, June 22
Workspace Artists-in-Residence: Open Studios, with Golnar Adili, Jennifer Bartlett, Eliza Bent, Keisha Bush, André Daughtry, Jonathan González, Zac Hacmon, Terrance James Jr., NIC Kay, Ying Liu, Asif Mian, Kenneth Pietrobono, Orlando Tirado, and Zhiyuan Yang, LMCC’s Workspace Studios, 101 Greenwich St., fifteenth floor, 1:00 – 8:00

Sunday, June 23
Jennifer Monson: ditch, with music and sound by Jeff Kolar, costumes by Susan Becker, and dancers Evie Allison, Madeline Mellinger, and Kaitlin Fox, Pier 35, East River Esplanade by Rutgers Slip, sunrise

iLANDing: Researching Urban Ecologies with Movement Based Scores, workshop with Jennifer Monson, Pier 35, East River Esplanade by Rutgers Slip, 11:00

Monday, June 24
Ernesto Pujol: The Listening School, Anderson Contemporary in the Atrium at 180 Maiden Ln. and the Plaza at 88 Pine St., 11:30 am – 2:30 pm

Sarah Michelson: june2019:/\, location revealed with RSVP, 1:30, 4:00, 7:00

Tuesday, June 25
Ernesto Pujol: The Listening School, Liberty Park, 155 Cedar St., and South Oculus Plaza, Church & Greenwich Sts. at Dey St., 11:30 am – 2:30 pm

Night at the Museums, free admission to the African Burial Ground National Monument, China Institute, Federal Hall National Memorial, Fraunces Tavern Museum, Lower Manhattan Tours, Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, National Archives at New York City, National Museum of the American Indian—Smithsonian Institution, National September 11 Memorial Museum, NYC Municipal Archives Visitor Center, 9/11 Tribute Museum, Poets House, the Skyscraper Museum, and the South Street Seaport Museum, 4:00 – 8:00

Black Gotham Experience: Sarah’s Fire, walking tour and story about black rebellion of 1712, 192 Front St., 4:00, 5:00, 6:00

Black Gotham Experience: Talk with BGX Creator and Artist Kamau Ware, 192 Front St., 8:00

Yoko Ono, Add Color (Refugee Boat), 1960/2016, installation view: Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2016

Wednesday, June 26
Ernesto Pujol: The Listening School, 28 Liberty: Fosun Plaza, 11:30 am – 2:30 pm

Sarah Michelson: june2019:/\, location revealed with RSVP, 1:30, 4:00

Jennifer Monson: ditch, with music and sound by Jeff Kolar, costumes by Susan Becker, and dancers Evie Allison, Madeline Mellinger, and Kaitlin Fox, Melville Gallery, South Street Seaport Museum, 7:00

Thursday, June 27
The Agitated Now: A Lecture Performance by Mark Epstein + Carol Becker, Federal Hall, 26 Wall St., 7:00

Ernesto Pujol: The Listeners, Federal Hall, 26 Wall St., 9:00

Friday, June 28
Jennifer Monson: ditch, with music and sound by Jeff Kolar, costumes by Susan Becker, and dancers Evie Allison, Madeline Mellinger, and Kaitlin Fox, Melville Gallery, South Street Seaport Museum, 7:00

Rooftop Films: The Sound of Silence (Michael Tyburski, 2019), preceded by live music and followed by a Q&A, New Design High School, 350 Grand St., 8:00

Saturday, June 29
WorldPride NYC: Drag Queen Story Hour, for families and kids, Seward Park Library, 192 East Broadway, 11:00 am & 3:30 pm

WorldPride NYC: Workshop on the Street, with Amy, Jennifer, & Noah Khoshbin, for families and kids, Oculus Plaza, 1:30