18 Jun

luciana achugar’s OTRO TEATRO

luciana achugar’s OTRO TEATRO began with an act of devotion. Each audience member was asked to remove his or her shoes before entering New York Live Arts’ third floor studio, bathed in cool early evening light. As we stepped one by one into the space, a kneeling figure, enshrouded in a glimmering sheet of black metallic burlap that looked at once ancient and futuristic–think early Star Wars trilogy–was positioned in the doorway like a sentry. As we crossed the threshold, the figure bowed and kissed each audience member’s feet, first one, then the other. It was a tender initiation that prepared us for the performance to come: part rite and incantation, part rhythmic exploration of the body as a route through which we might transcend its limits, to touch something larger than ourselves.

achugar’s face remains covered in the black fabric for most of the piece, lending her a quality not entirely human; in a literal sense, she looks like a small black specter, cloth draped over her head and pooling around her like a child’s Halloween costume, until you get to the white flesh of her lower legs poking out from underneath. Red lines have been drawn onto her skin, tracing lines down the center of each calf and out to her middle toe. The same pattern repeats on her arms and hands, which we sometimes see clutching the fabric.

One early section is the exception to this rule. Here her face features prominently, painted with the same red streaks highlighting eyes and cheekbones, with an iridescent lavender underneath. The word shaman comes to mind, as much from her comportment as her appearance. She makes eye contact with members of the audience, her gaze at once insistent and otherworldly, as if part of her is present in the room with us, and part of her is somewhere else entirely, unreachable. She engages in a series of movements almost like a bird or small animal cleaning itself, as if to pry something nestled inside her out into the open.

Another dark shape comes to life behind her, and they move together, shifting quickly from one leg to another to create a mesmerizing auditory patter, four feet creating a sudden storm of sound and vibration. At one point the two bodies, both faces and torsos still hidden in black, shift from side to side, one behind the other, in a wide-legged squat. It’s a seemingly simple back-and-forth movement. Underlined by the chanting vocalizations of Michael Kiley’s score, it has a hypnotic power that takes us by surprise.

achugar began working on the piece in January, improvising by herself and then gradually adding on. (The current incarnation involves two other dancers and several singers who are heard but not seen onstage.) “I think of it almost as an accumulation,” she said in a post-performance discussion led by Marya Warshaw, artistic and executive director of BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange).

Warshaw remarked on the piece’s ability to pull us into a different temporal space. achugar and her collaborators sustain things–an image, a movement, a vocal pattern–beyond the comfortable moment where our short attention spans would expect a shift. “I don’t know where you get the bravery, to take the time,” Warshaw tells her. “It’s something that attracts me to your work,” she added, as well as something she has come to associate with achugar’s pieces–an “identifier.”

“We make work according to who we are . . . your relationship to space and time necessarily comes through,” achugar said. She acknowledged that ever since she was a child, her sense of the latter has been especially elastic, something she now observes in her son. “I like to indulge in the experience of the moment. I have very bad time management problems,” she said, smiling, “but you find ways to use those problems.”

One audience member spoke of the piece evoking a “heightened physical experience, that has some kind of magic, or sorcery.” Another spoke of performers and audience in turn seeming “possessed”: “It got into me,” he said.

If the performance calls to mind the ancient Greek mysteries or other primal rites, it may be because achugar is attuned to the through-line that connects performance today with “this thing that comes from ancient culture, when dance and music were about nature.” She strives to create work “out of that basic need.”

The fully realized production of OTRO TEATRO will premiere at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, this August, and will make its New York debut next April at New York Live Arts.  

Olivia Jane Smith

To listen to an excerpt of achugar’s In-Process Talk with Marya Warshaw, click here.

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18 Jun

Studio Availability for 6/19 – 6/26

Wednesday, June 19th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 6pm-7pm
Wednesday, June 19th: David R. White Studio from 1pm-2pm & 6pm-7pm
Thursday, June 20th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 6pm-7pm & 8pm-10pm
Thursday, June 20th: David R. White Studio from 1pm-5pm
Friday, June 21st: Jerome Robbins Studio from 3pm-7pm
Sunday, June 23rd: David R. White Studio from 8pm-10pm
Monday, June 24th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 5pm-7pm
Wednesday, June 26th: Jerome Robins Studio from 4pm-5pm & 8pm-10pm
Wednesday, June 26th: David R. White Studio from 5pm-6pm & 8pm-10pm

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14 Jun

Studio Availability 6/14- 6/21

Friday, June 14th: David R. White Studio from 8pm- 10pm
Saturday, June 15th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 5pm- 6pm
Saturday, June 15th: David R. White Studio from 3pm- 4pm
Sunday, June 16th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 1pm- 2pm & 3pm- 5pm
Monday, June 17th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 1pm- 2pm & 5pm-7pm
Monday, June 17th: David R. White Studio from 6pm- 7pm
Tuesday, June 18th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 8pm- 10pm
Tuesday, June 18th: David R. White Studio from 10am- 2pm
Wednesday, June 19th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 6pm- 7pm
Wednesday, June 19th: David R. White Studio from 1pm- 2pm & 6pm- 7pm
Thursday, June 20th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 6pm-7pm & 8pm-10pm
Thursday, June 20th: David R. White Studio from 3pm- 5pm
Friday, June 21st: Jerome Robbins Studio from 3pm- 7pm
Friday, June 21st: David R. White Studio from 8pm- 10pm

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11 Jun

Come Early Conversation
Souleymane Badolo and Cynthia Oliver

On April 26, 2013 New York Live Arts had the pleasure of welcoming back curator and scholar Adrienne Edwards (Associate Curator, Performa Institute) to speak with our Come Early audience. The program was entitled Continuing the Discourse: The Africanist Aesthetic in Performance and Visual Art which was, in fact, a continuation of a dialogue that Live Arts began last fall with Adrienne Edwards and Thomas Lax (Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem) during our season opener Voices of Strength which celebrated female performing artists from the continent of Africa.

In Continuing the Discourse, Edwards situates Cynthia Oliver and Souleymane Badolo’s work within a larger lexicon of African and African American creators. She also discusses themes of flux and flow, the importance of discovering one’s own creative definitions, as well as the unstable role of “the trickster” throughout history.

View the 30-minute conversation here.

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07 Jun

Studio Availability 6/08- 6/15

Saturday, June 8th: David R. White Studio from 8pm- 10pm
Monday, June 10th: David R. White Studio from 12pm- 2pm and 6pm- 7pm
Tuesday, June 11th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 12pm- 2pm and 7pm- 8pm
Friday June 14th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 2pm- 4pm
Friday, June 14th: David R. White Studio from 6pm- 8pm
Saturday, June 15th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 5pm- 6pm
Saturday, June 15th: David R. White Studio from 12pm- 10pm

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07 Jun

BELL: Merging Traditional and Innovative Practices

Yasuko Yokoshi in Conversation with Bill T. Jones

What if you took the steps to Giselle and divorced them from their story? No Prince Albrecht, no Wilis, no dancing until dawn’s first light. 

In the case of traditional ballet, some of the form—ie, the steps—is dictated by the function; in this case, to convey the tragic story of a young woman who loves no less for having been deceived. Steps not strictly necessary for storytelling might be chosen by an even more subjective measure: beauty.

In BELL, the new work commissioned by New York Live Arts from Yasuko Yakoshi, Giselle is mashed up with Kyoganoko Museme Dojoji, a Japanese story that dates to the tenth century, along with Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” sung a cappella with disarming candor by three modern dancers (with help from a trained singer). 

The Japanese tale Kyoganoko Museme Dojoji makes Giselle look tepid by comparison. Its spurned heroine transforms herself into a snake and destroys the temple of the young monk who rejected her love. Years later, she returns to the scene of the crime, just as the bell around which she coiled herself in order to reap destruction has been rebuilt.

To convey strands of these two dances, juxtaposed and overlaid with one another, Yakoshi enlisted the three modern dancers mentioned, along with two Kabuki performers from Japan, and a group of traditional Japanese musicians who provide the work’s standard accompaniment, much as it’s been performed for hundreds of years (the first Kabuki interpretation dates to 1753). 

No one would fault New York Live Arts artistic director Bill T. Jones, in his post-show discussion with Yakoshi on the evening of the first day of spring, for his impulse to view the performance with a post-feminist spin, with a bit of antagonism toward both traditional forms and Western audiences’ desire to understand them thrown in. He told Yakoshi early on in their conversation, ”I thought there was something about the deconstruction of these time honored dances . . . you don’t really accompany them with a text, so we [the audience] are left to figure it out and to see it naked. . . . Because the text and the dancing is all part of a tradition, [a text would] help us, the audience, understand it. I felt [the dance] was actually in some ways saying ‘Take That!’ It could be interpreted as a very angry work.” 

“That’s kind of sad,” Yakoshi responded. “I wanted this piece to make people happy.” 

While there’s nothing wrong, of course, with audiences taking away something entirely different from what an artist intended, here it seems the disconnect had to do with something I’ll venture Western audiences are especially prone to: a tendency to get fixated on any hint of a story. Here, Yakoshi explained, the stories—dramatic as they are—were for her almost incidental. 

“It’s not the stories I’m interested in, I’m interested in the dance. The dance is so beautiful, so that comes first. Stories come . . . I’m not particularly a huge fan of Giselle,” she said, putting the emphasis on the second syllable in what sounded like an expression of particular distaste. But, Yakoshi said again, “The dance is beautiful.” 

She pointed out that in warlike feudal Japan, temples like the one in Dojoji were meant to soothe human passions, and this carries over into traditional Japanese performance. “When you dance, the chanting and the singing has a lot of Buddhist philosophy included. To calm the spirit actually. That’s what I was going for.”

Rather than being a “Take That” to the audience, her inclusion of only the bare minimum of narrative (slide projections introduce the basics of the Dojoji story to begin the piece) is calculated to allow the audience to immerse ourselves in the dancing. Yakoshi explained, “Without me lecturing, this is what’s going on . . . they get the feeling, this story is about a tragic girl, but they enjoy the journey of this beautiful dance, the forms, the classical forms.” 

It’s easy to get caught up in stories. We’re trained to use them to help us make sense of the world. In BELL, Yakoshi asks us to cast them aside. As she told Jones, ”For me, to feel, or to receive the resonance of beauty without understanding is the beauty of live dance performance.” After all, “understanding” is itself slippery. Even after hearing the same exact story—or seeing the same dance—one person will “understand” it in a completely different way from another. As Yakoshi wrote in her director’s note, “Words are ambiguous, and dance is more ambiguous than words.”

-Olivia Jane Smith


Olivia Jane Smith is a New York-based writer and editor with a focus on the performing arts. She hopes her work will make people want to know more, and hopefully see for themselves, the artists and performances she writes about. She is thrilled to be part of the Context Notes program at New York Live Arts. You can read more of her writing on the blog New York Theatre Review, where she is a frequent contributor. You can also follow her on Tumblr and Twitter.

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06 Jun

Composing for The Spectators

On May 16, 2013, William Petroni, former dancer with Pam Tanowitz Dance, led an in depth Come Early Conversation with Dan Siegler, one of the composers of “The Spectators”, the newest work by classical experimentalist choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Petroni and Siegler discuss compositional process and collaborative methods of creation among other topics.

View the 30-minute conversation here.

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06 Jun

Lance Gries’ Immanent Field

Lance Gries’ Immanent Field
Studio Series: June 1, 2023

The sound score by Symphony of the Planets—recordings made in outer space by the first Voyager mission—began long before the three dancers appeared. When they did, breaking into a circle of chairs in the wide-open third floor studio, they all wore sheer black tunics of varying lengths.

The lighting was simple: room light seeping in windows north and south, and one large instrument on the north edge of the circle that brightened and paled. Juliette Mapp began alone, rising onto half-toe, repeating over and over a gesture like a modified sun salutation. The recorded sound waxed and waned as the piece unfolded.

After a while Lance Gries joined Mapp, still, quiet, observant. The pair, plus Diane Madden, walked around the outside of the circle of chairs, entered and crossed the space; Madden lay on the floor in a cruciform shape. Each dancer appeared to be in a private space; Gries and Mapp also took cruciform positions on the floor. When they rose, they made incredibly precise gestures, carving pathways through space, repeating and echoing the same gestural patterns, moving very close together. They began a series of plies, over which they did what looked like breast strokes, in the air. They reached and relaxed their arms, testing the air like weathervanes. Gries pushed his head to the ground; I thought he’d rise into a headstand, but he didn’t. All three left the circle.

All this took about 45 minutes. I found it peaceful but opaque. These dancers, all of whom are on the cusp of middle age, are centered and still, lovely to look at.  It will be interesting to see how the piece develops. ‘

-Elizabeth Zimmer

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05 Jun

Studio Series Artist Profile: luciana achugar

luciana achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay whose work explores the relationship between aesthetics and ideology. She makes dances to be felt as they are seen and as an occasion for community. achugar began making work collaboratively with Levi Gonzalez in 1999 and started working independently in 2002. Since then, achugar has created works in numerous venues in New York, the United States and in Uruguay, including: The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, the River to River Festival, the Walker Art Center and ShowBoxLA. achugar is a two-time New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award recipient and has received support from a variety of foundations, including: Creative Capital, The Field Dance Fund, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Multi-Arts Production Fund and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow. OTRO TEATRO will premiere at the Walker Art Center in February, 2014; in New York at New York Live Arts in April, 2014 and at the River to River Festival in July, 2014.

Placed metaphorically in the ruins of a collapsed theater, OTRO TEATRO is achugar’s current search for another kind of theater; a ritual of becoming; an occasion for communion. OTRO TEATRO, which translates both to “another theater” and “other theater” in achugar’s native Spanish, is a dark rite of passage from destruction to rebuilding. It is a dance that is meant to be felt as it is seen, giving voice to the arcane spirit and desire of our uncivilized bodies.

Studio Series: luciana achugar
Jun 7 & 8 at 6pm
Tickets

Sign up for luciana’s Shared Practice,  May 11, 1:30-3:30pm, $15.

Photo: Peggy Kaplan

 

 

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05 Jun

Studio Availability 6/5 – 6/12

Wednesday, June 5th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 4pm- 5pm
Thursday, June 6th: David R. White Studio from 1pm- 2pm
Saturday, June 8th: David R. White Studio from 8pm- 10pm
Monday, June 10th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 6pm- 7pm
Monday, June 10th: David R. White Studio from 12pm- 2pm & 6pm- 7pm
Tuesday, June 11th: Jerome Robbins Studio from 12pm- 2pm & 5pm- 8pm

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  • The Live Arts Blog has the latest information on New York Live Arts events, artists, and issues affecting the body based performing arts field. Current contributors include New York Live Arts Staff, Cassie Peterson, Elizabeth Zimmer, and Olivia Jane Smith.

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