Tag Archives: Yasmine Lee

SOCIAL DISTANCE HALL: AFTERWARDSNESS

Performers move throughout Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall in Afterwardsness (photo by Stephanie Berger)

AFTERWARDSNESS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
May 19-26, $45
www.armoryonpark.org

Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong have given us the first great indoor, in-person, live dance presentation of and about the pandemic and the social justice movement. Running May 19-26 at Park Avenue Armory, Afterwardsness takes place in the building’s massive fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where one hundred audience members are marched in formation to their seats, arranged six feet apart from one another throughout the space. In the center is a large rectangle bordered by yellow tape, evoking caution, while a twisting path in blue (representing police and authority?) is situated on the floor around the chairs, ensuring the performers keep a safe distance from the viewers. (Part of the armory’s Social Distance Hall programming, the production itself was postponed last month when several cast and crew members tested positive for Covid.)

The sixty-five minute show, named for Sigmund Freud’s concept of “a mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events,” is a complex web of physical and emotional pain and fear, performed by eight masked and barefoot dancers wearing sweatpants and T-shirts or tank tops — Barrington Hinds, Chanel Howard, Dean Husted, Shane Larson, s. lumbert, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Nayaa Opong, and Huiwang Zhang — along with Vinson Fraley Jr., who is dressed all in white from head to ankle, as if he were a kind of spiritual leader or ghostly apparition; all are members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. They run, roll, jump, walk, tumble, squirm, wriggle, grasp their hands behind their backs, and raise their arms above their heads like they’re under arrest, never touching each other nor making eye contact with the audience. There’s so much happening at any one moment that it’s impossible to take it all in, as if you’re at a protest rally, not knowing where to look.

Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong’s Afterwardsnesstakes an emotional, powerful look at the last fourteen months in America (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The soundtrack is dazzling, featuring avant-garde jazz, snippets of familiar tunes (for example, “Dixie” and “Yankee Doodle,” which both deal with class and race issues), abstract sounds, brief quotes from Jones and members of the company that can’t always be understood, excerpts from Olivier Messaien’s 1941 chamber piece Quartet for the End of Time, written while he was a POW in a German prison, and occasional grunts and noises (and a nursery rhyme). Standing alone in the yellow rectangle, music director Pauline Kim Harris plays the gorgeous, elegiac 8:46 violin solo “Homage,” a tribute to George Floyd; clarinetist Paul Wonjin Cho and others perform from wooden lifeguard chairs; composer Holland Andrews contributes a new song and vocals, including stating the date, beginning with March 13 and continuing through May 19, in one corner with Cho, pianist Vicky Chow, and cellist Caleb van der Swaagh; and the score includes original compositions from Fraley Jr. and Howard, repeating powerful phrases about suppression and murder that echo through the hall. The immersive sound design is by Mark Grey.

Brian H. Scott’s lighting design is a marvel, shifting from bright and airy to dark and ominous. At times he lights only the straight and curved pathways followed by the dancers, tracing the blue lines. He uses spotlights to elicit giant shadows and creates small boxes that trap the dancers, capturing Jones’s strong choreographic language, which ranges from confinement and isolation to freedom and hope. In the grand finale, the performers grab chairs but are hesitant to merely sit in them and watch; their jittery energy makes the audience uncomfortable but fascinated. Afterwardsness is not a dire, depressing fugue for these past fourteen months; it is both a compelling reminder of what has unfolded across America as well as a beautiful yet urgent call to action.

SOCIAL! THE SOCIAL DISTANCE DANCE CLUB

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
April 9-22, $45 ($35 standby tickets available)
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Twister is the most physical of board games. The more people come into contact with one another on the plastic mat — which contains colored circles that participants must touch with one of their hands or feet depending on what the spinner tells them to do — the more fun it is to play and to watch. The same can be said for dancing, a social activity that brings people together in numerous ways. In a 2015 study, Bronwyn Tarr, Jacques Launay, Emma Cohen, and Robin Dunbar explained, “All human cultures perform and enjoy forms of music and dance in a group setting. Dancing involves people synchronizing their movements to a predictable, rhythmic beat (usually provided by music) and to each other. In this manner, dance is fundamentally cooperative in nature, and may have served the evolutionary function of encouraging social bonds, cooperation, and prosocial behaviors between group members. To date, empirical support for this social bonding hypothesis is based mainly on a link between synchrony (i.e. performing the same movement at the same time) and bonding.” In a twist on both Twister and dancing, the Park Ave. Armory commission Social! the social distance dance club incorporates people, colorful circles on the floor, and synchronous bonding in an immensely boisterous evening of interaction that features no touching whatsoever.

The armory was supposed to kick off its Social Distance Hall series with Bill T. Jones’s Afterwardsness, but several positive Covid tests in the company led to its postponement until May, after Party in the Bardo, a collaboration between Laurie Anderson and Jason Moran running May 5-9. Conceived by choreographer Steven Hoggett (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), Tony-winning set designer and solo show specialist Christine Jones (American Idiot, Here We Are: Theatre for One), and multidisciplinary artist David Byrne (Talking Heads, American Utopia), Social! takes place in the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill, where nearly one hundred ticket holders spend fifty-five minutes moving and grooving in their own private circle.

Audience members must arrive about an hour before showtime to have a Covid-19 shallow-swab rapid response test. While waiting for the results — anyone who comes up positive will need to immediately leave the building with the rest of their party (and will be refunded the $45 ticket price) — groups of about twenty-four waited in different locations in the historic armory, where monitors displayed quotes about dancing from a March 2021 Financial Times article, “Covid will not squash our deep-seated need to dance,” by Will Coldwell, who references the above study in his piece, along with YouTube videos of men, women, and children from around the world dancing with joy. (For example, “Dance provides us with a universal language — one deeper and more emotional than words — that helps us to bond with other, often unfamiliar, people.”) Eventually we audience members were marched into the drill hall in formation, and each was sent to an assigned spotlight, spaced at twelve-to-fifteen-foot intervals. (The lighting design, which includes the projection of abstract shapes and a disco ball, is by Kevin Adams; the above videos are © DBOX.) In the center, on a slowly revolving raised platform, is DJ Mad Love (Tony nominee Karine Plantadit), who spins tunes on two computers (mixed by DJ Natasha Diggs) while Byrne’s disembodied voice guides us, suggesting specific movements and encouraging self-expression. (His instructions were done in conjunction with choreographer Yasmine Lee.)

To songs by D-Train, Daft Punk, James Brown, Benny Goodman, Olivia Newton-John, Fatback, Byrne, and others, the former Talking Heads leader prompts us through various scenarios (hands waving in the air, weaving through a subway car, balancing at the edge of your circle, swaying slowly, etc., although some of it is hard to hear amid the thumping beats) before leading up to the grand finale, a unified dance that we were advised to rehearse in advance via a video in which Byrne demonstrates the moves.

The drill hall is a judgment-free space; no one is going to laugh at your dancing, and you’re not going to laugh at anyone else’s. It’s a time to kick loose and let it all go, immerse yourself in a worry-free hour of nonstop exhilaration. It’s not always easy — several people in my vicinity had to take rests, and one woman spent much of the show sitting in her circle — but the more you are able to put into it, the more you will get out of it. (Coldwell explains, “As we now know so well, it’s far easier to start dancing than it is to stop.”) And when you are taken back to your seat, a small, relevant little gift is waiting for you, one last reminder that even if we can’t be together in a physical way — Twister might not be on the menu for a bit longer — we can now gather safely and bond, as long as we’re tested, masked, socially distanced, and ready to have a blast.

AFTERWARDSNESS

AFTERWARDSNESS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
May 19-26, $45 (limited tickets go on sale April 1)
www.armoryonpark.org

I’ve been tentative about the return of live, indoor music, dance, and theater, wondering how comfortable I would feel in an enclosed area with other audience members and onstage performers. Many of my colleagues who cover the arts are steadfastly against going to shows right now as things open up, while others have been having a ball going to the movies and eating inside. But when I received my invitation to see Afterwardsness at the Park Avenue Armory on March 24, I surprised myself with how much immediate glee I felt, how instantly exhilarated I was to finally, at last, see a show, in the same space with actual human beings. But my excitement was broken when it was announced that several members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company had tested positive for Covid-19 and the show, which had sold out quickly, had to be postponed. But now it’s back as part of the Armory’s Social Distance Hall season, running May 19 to 26; original ticket holders will get first dibs, with remaining tickets going on sale to the general public April 1. “Creating new, body-based work at a time when physical proximity is discouraged is no small feat,” Jones said in a statement. “However, as is often the case when artists are forced to push through limitations, this is when things get really good. Having the drill hall, this grand and glorious space to create and dance in, was quite liberating. The armory is a space like no other in New York City—and if it’s like no other in New York City, then it’s pretty unique in the world.”

The sixty-five minute show, named for Freud’s concept of “a mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events,” will take place in the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where one hundred audience members will be seated in chairs nine to twelve feet apart in all directions as the action unfolds around them. The hall has been updated with air-refreshing methods that exceed CDC and ASHRAE standards; there will be onsite testing and strict masking and social distancing policies. The work explores the isolation felt during the pandemic as well as the impact of the George Floyd protests and BLM movement. The choreography is by Tony winner Jones, with a new vocal composition by Holland Andrews, whose Museum of Calm recently streamed through the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Musical director Pauline Kim Harris will perform the violin solo “8:46” in tribute to Floyd, and there will also be new compositions by company members Vinson Fraley Jr. and Chanel Howard as well as excerpts from Olivier Messaien’s 1941 chamber piece Quartet for the End of Time, written while he was a POW in a German prison. The lighting is by Brian H. Scott, with sound by Mark Grey. The inaugural program at the armory is now Social! The Social Distance Dance Club, a collaboration between Steven Hoggett, Christine Jones, and David Byrne that runs April 9-22 and gives each audience member their own spotlight in which to move to choreography by Yasmine Lee.

TENDER NAPALM

Blake Ellis and Amelia Workman give dazzling performances in the surreal TENDER NAPALM at 59E59 (photo by Carol Rosegg)

59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St, between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 9, $18
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

British writer Philip Ridley’s exhilarating Tender Napalm has made a magnificent transition to 59E59, where it is dazzling audiences in a tiny black box of a theater. It doesn’t get much more intimate than this oxymoronically titled show, as an unnamed man (Blake Ellis in his New York City debut) and woman (Amelia Workman) perform on a narrow strip of floor between two rows of people (approximately fifty in all), squeezing the performers into a ridiculously small space where they build on one another’s tales in a kind of exquisite corpse. They share their dreams and fantasies as if they’re shipwrecked on a desert island, talking about monkey kingdoms, bullets and grenades, genitals, serpents, a tsunami, and more in a mysterious and heated battle of the sexes. Whenever one of them asks, “Have you seen the view?” the narrative shifts, leading to another adventure. In short back-and-forth bursts and long soliloquies, the man and the woman play verbal games with each other, the audience never quite clear on what is real, what is imagined, and what is something in between, reminiscent of David Ives’s recent hit, Venus in Fur. The actors don’t make eye contact with the audience as they deliver their lines, instead looking out across their memory and into the future, coming together and running from one another in Yasmine Lee’s subtle but powerful choreography. Skillfully directed by Paul Takacs to maintain a breathtaking pace that avoids feeling the least bit claustrophobic during its intermissionless one hundred minutes, Tender Napalm features beautifully poetic moments that get interrupted by explosive bursts of passion, every new twist a thrilling surprise. “Have you seen the view?” the woman asks. The man responds, “I see auroras shimmering.” Woman: “I see trees with magical lights.” Man: “Asteroids near the sirens of Titan.” Woman: “Oh, smell of flowers!” Man: “Andromeda.” Woman: “Hyacinths.” Man: “‘You must be wondering why you’re here,’” leading to a long discourse on DNA, bombs, and unicorns. Ellis and Workman both deliver complex, inspiring performances, bringing to life Ridley’s (Vincent River, Shivered) razor-sharp, surreal dialogue in a rousing production that is not to be missed, especially with tickets costing a mere eighteen dollars.