Tag Archives: New York Live Arts

EdgeCut: SANITY

Katelyn Halpern and Paul Pinto’s Living Room video is part of “EdgeCut: Sanity”

Who: Malena Dayen, Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat, Caitlin & Misha, Katelyn Halpern, Paul Pinto, divinebrick, Chris SooHoo
What: 3D live, interactive experience
Where: New York Live Arts
When: Saturday, December 5, $7-$15, 1:00 – 4:00
Why: On October 10, EdgeCut introduced us to the remarkable NowHere platform for the first part of its collaboration with New York Live Arts, “Captivity,” five hours of short performance works, discussions, and networking in which audience members navigated through different levels in order to watch livestreamed events in little pods and hang out with curators, creators, and other visitors in their pods. You could steer through fantastical landscapes, float in space, and pull up next to another pod and talk about where you’d been so far or where you were off to next, with cameras on so your face is visible on the front of your pod. I’ve tried just about every form of online entertainment while we’re all sheltering in place and arts venues are closed, and nothing else comes close to this one, even given various hiccups that require patience.

The second iteration, “Sanity,” takes place December 5 from 1:00 to 4:00, a more manageable three hours that will feature four unique rooms. In the Growth Room, you can catch director and singer Malena Dayen’s opera While You Are with Me and the bright and colorful Living Room music video of dancing television heads by multidisciplinary artists Katelyn Halpern and Paul Pinto; in the Worry Room, you can let out steam with Caitlin & Misha’s Infinite Worries Bash, a participatory installation of electroacoustic piñatas that inquires, “Can the destruction of these interactive worry vessels create space for clarity?”; in the Transformation Room, you can meditate to divinebrick and Chris Soohoo’s Performance Prayer; and in the Kissing Room, you can share private moments courtesy of intimacy agents Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat, who ask, “Can we measure a kiss and what kissers feel together?”

Intimacy agents Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat explore what online kissing is like at “EdgeCut: Sanity”

Curated by Heidi Boisvert and Kat Mustatea, the EdgeCut program, which originally convened at the New Museum’s NEW INC incubator for art, tech, and design for in-person presentations, is now seeking to expand and redefine the virtual 3D experience during the pandemic lockdown, exploring the question “How do we create collective experience and transformative gatherings in this moment of ‘a crisis within a crisis’ that speak to transition, change, healing, humanity?” The works were chosen through an open call; the finale of the trilogy, “Humanity,” is scheduled for February 13, 2021. Tickets range from $7 per room to $15 for the full experience, which has to be seen to be believed.

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.”

EDGECUT: CAPTIVITY

Kate Ladenheim + the RAD Lab’s Babyface is part of Edgecut: Captivity live 3D experience online at NYLA on Saturday

Who: Carrie Sijia Wang, Emily Twines, Theater in Quarantine, Kate Ladenheim + the RAD Lab, Rourou Ye, Sadi Oortmood, Sylvain Souklaye, XUE
What: 3D live experience
Where: New York Live Arts
When: Saturday, October 10, livestream free, interactive experience $7-$20, noon – 5:00
Why: The cutting-edge series EdgeCut is teaming up with New York Live Arts for Captivity, five hours of short performance works, talkbacks, and networking taking place online from noon to 5:00 on October 10. Curated by Heidi Boisvert and Kat Mustatea, the EdgeCut program, which originally convened at the New Museum’s NEW INC incubator for art, tech, and design for in-person presentations, is now seeking to expand and redefine the virtual 3D experience during the pandemic lockdown, exploring the question “How do we create collective experience and transformative gatherings in this moment of ‘a crisis within a crisis’ that speak to transition, change, healing, humanity?” The works, chosen through an open call focusing on captivity, sanity, and humanity, include Kate Ladenheim + the RAD Lab’s Babyface, Rourou Ye’s The Absent Umbra, Theater in Quarantine’s The Neighbor, Carrie Sijia Wang’s The System 2.0, Sadi Oortmood’s Invisible Creativity, Emily Twines’s lookingGlass, Sylvain Souklaye’s Black Breathing, and Xue’s Endless Return Rave. Virtual attendees can roam from room to room and engage with others, but be patient, as there’s a maximum of fifteen at any one time in the Nowhere platform. The full Captivity experience can be accessed with advance tickets of $7 to $20, but they are extremely limited, so act fast; it can also be watched for free via livestream but without the participatory elements.

A GLIMPSE INTO THE WORLD OF NARCISSUS

Andrew Jordan’s rotoscoped animations are part of sneak preview of Christopher Williams work at New York Live Arts

Who: Christopher Williams Dance
What: Live performance and virtual presentation
Where: New York Live Arts lobby, 219 West Nineteenth St., and online
When: Tuesday, October 6, free in person, $5, $15, or $25 online, 7:00 and 7:30
Why: Choreographer Christopher Williams’s evening-length dance, Narcissus, was scheduled to make its world premiere at New York Live Arts, but that has been postponed indefinitely because of the pandemic lockdown. However, Williams will be offering a taste of the work both live in person and online with “A Glimpse into the World of Narcissus,” a pair of ten-minute activations taking place in NYLA’s glassed-in lobby on October 6 at 7:00 and 7:30. Set to Nikolai Tcherepnin’s 1911 score “Narcisse et Echo” for the Ballets Russes, the piece explores the classical myth through a contemporary queer perspective. The sneak peek features projected rotoscoped animations by longtime Williams collaborator Andrew Jordan, hand-painted drawings, and what Williams calls a “live, socially distanced tableau vivant” performed by Cemiyon Barber and Logan Pedon. If you want to experience the activation from the sidewalk outside NYLA, it is free and first-come, first-served, with masks and social distancing required; you can also watch it live online for $5, $15, or $25, depending on what you can afford.

PARAMODERNITIES LIVE (with Q&As)

Who: Netta Yerushalmy
What: Dance series with performance and live discussion
Where: Netta Yerushalmy website
When: May 4-9, free, 3:00 (videos with Q&As will remain online through May 24)
Why: Last year, New York City-based choreographer and dancer Netta Yerushalmy presented her full six-part, four-hour series, Paramodernities, at New York Live Arts. Each work, which had been previously individually staged at such locations as Judson Church, the National Museum of the American Indian, Live Artery at New York Live Arts, the 92nd St. Y, and Madison Square Park, deconstructs and re-creates a classic dance piece through performance, text, and discussion, with dancers and scholars participating. I was fortunate to catch several iterations (#s 2&3, rehearsals for #5), which all proved to be captivating and involving; the choreographers who get the Yerushalmy treatment are Vaslav Nijinsky, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Bob Fosse, and George Balanchine. Every day from May 4 to 9 at 3:00, Yerushalmy will stream one work, followed by a live discussion and Q&A with special guests.

The wide-ranging, diverse cast consists of dancers Michael Blake, Gerald Casel, Marc Crousillat, Brittany Engel-Adams, Joyce Edwards, Stanley Gambucci, Taryn Griggs, Magdalena Jarkowiec, Nicholas Leichter, Jeremy Jae Neal, Hsiao-Jou Tang, Megan Williams, and Yerushalmy, with scholars and writers Thomas F. DeFrantz, Julia Foulkes, Georgina Kleege, David Kishik, Carol Ockman, Mara Mills, and Claudia La Rocco. “This project requires people to really care about different kinds of knowledge and to want to implicate their bodies in this very different kind of space and to be vulnerable,” Yerushalmy says about Paramodernities, which will be a new experience when viewed from our homes, where we are sheltering in place, unable to be physically together. I can’t recommend Paramodernities Live highly enough; it is an innovative platform that explores the past, present, and future of dance through a sophisticated and experimental historical context that will leave you in awe.

Monday, May 4
Paramodernities #1: The Work of Dance in the Age of Sacred Lives
A response to Vaslav Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (1913)
with special guest Jack Halberstam

Tuesday, May 5
Paramodernities #2: Trauma, Interdiction, and Agency in “The House of Pelvic Truth”
A response to Martha Graham’s Night Journey (1947)
with special guest Pam Tanowitz

Wednesday, May 6
Paramodernities #3: Revelations: The Afterlives of Slavery
A response to Alvin Ailey’s Revelations (1960)
with special guest Tracy K. Smith

Thursday, May 7
Paramodernities #4: An Inter-Body Event
with material from Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest, Sounddance, Points in Space, Beach Birds, and Ocean (1968-90)
with special guest Fred Moten

Friday, May 8
Paramodernities #5: All That Spectacle: Dance on Stage and Screens
A response to Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity (1969 film)
with special guest Jeremy O. Harris

Saturday, May 9
Paramodernities #6: The Choreography of Rehabilitation: Disability and Race in Balanchine’s Agon
A response to George Balanchine’s Agon (1957)
with special guest Peter N. Miller

THANK YOU FOR COMING: SPACE

Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming: Space is making its NYC premiere at Live Artery festival (photo by Maria Baranova)

LIVE ARTERY
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St.
January 8-11, $15-$30
Festival continues through January 15
newyorklivearts.org
fayedriscoll.com

Faye Driscoll concludes her seven-year “Thank You for Coming” trilogy with Space, a bold and courageous solo work making its New York City debut at New York Live Arts’ Live Artery winter performance festival this week. In March 2014’s Thank You for Coming: Attendance at Danspace, audience members could be as involved as they wanted to be as five dancers merged into one and Driscoll deconstructed and reconstructed the set as well as the relationship between performer and viewer. In November 2016’s Thank You for Coming: Play at BAM, Driscoll channeled passion, rage, intimacy, and an exhilarating frolicsomeness with five dancers and surprise appearances.

Inspired by the death of her mother, Space is about the physical and metaphysical weight we all carry every day as we attempt to shape our lives in a world that is whirling out of our control. The audience enters a blaringly white space on the stage, sitting in two rows of folding chairs; Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin’s set evokes a waiting room between life and rebirth, a kind of bardo.

Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming: Space concludes seven-year artistic journey between audience and performer (photo by Maria Baranova)

In each corner is a small platform, and various objects lie on the floor or hanging from the rafters, including small, triangular black sandbags, numerous microphones, boots, cinder blocks, and a lemon. Driscoll, a California native based in Brooklyn, enters the room on a warm, unpretentious note, thanking us for taking time out of our busy schedules to get out of bed, put on clothes, and come to the theater to see her. She moves to the center and sends a rusty, soundless bell into motion, circling around us but not quite hitting anyone, then slowing down like a pendulum, as if we are all running out of time. Over the next seventy-five minutes, Driscoll, barefoot, wearing black jeans and a gray T-shirt, records gasps, sighs, and roars into microphones, stomps around in boots connected to speakers, and lifts cinder blocks. She makes specific requests of the audience to perform an array of critical tasks, from raising and lowering objects via a pulley system to holding her hands to maintain her balance; each interaction with animate or inanimate objects results in Driscoll experimenting with new dance movements, merging reality and performance with relentlessly building intensity.

When she throws clumps of clay, it is as if she is demonstrating that we have only so much control over our life and our bodies and might just have to abandon ourselves to chaos. In fact, elements of the piece itself are unpredictable; the night I went, one of the objects got caught in the lighting above, forcing Driscoll (There Is So Much Mad in Me, You’re Me) to improvise, although there is a looseness as well that allowed her to discuss the situation briefly with one of the tech people. (Kudos must go out to sound engineer Zachary Crumrine, sound designer Andrew Gilbert, and text adviser Amanda K. Davidson, who keep us fully immersed and on our toes in the participatory piece.)

“Space confronts what is simultaneously the most certain and uncertain of human states, our undoing and our final flourishing,” Driscoll explains in the program, which also notes that the work was in process during the death of her mother. “It is a reckoning with the fact that one being’s transition from the state of the living calls forth a concurrent transition in those not dead.” Space ultimately transforms into a darkly funny meditation on death in a strange monologue by Driscoll, who is dripping wet with sweat. Her performance is fierce and ferocious, intimate and heart-rending; she holds nothing back, leaving the audience exhilarated and uncomfortable, frightful and concerned, yet oddly victorious. By the time it’s over, she has engaged four of our five senses (only Driscoll gets to taste) while referring not only to the end of life but of the show we’ve just experienced, as well as the trilogy itself. But rebirth awaits; the audience gets up and goes on with their lives, and Driscoll will go on with hers, including bringing Space to the Walker Art Center in March and the Wexner Center in April.