Katherine Profeta takes Elevator Repair Service’s eloquently understated tactics deeper into dance with 131, which at 45 minutes lasts just about as long as its score, Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131.
Category: Performance
WYSIWYG: The Ides of March
The WYSIWYG Talent Show is a monthly showcase for the oft-overlooked genius of bloggers in or visiting New York City. Although our events are comprised mostly of readings, any sort of performance is welcome, be it an original song, a dramatic scene, sketch comedy, burlesque, or whatever your twisted little minds can come up with. If you have a great idea for a performance, just let us know. If it sucks, we won’t tell anyone, promise.
with
Mike Daisey, Blaise K, Micheal Barrish, Chris Glazier, Lindsay Robertson, Jose Ralat Maldonado
Cold Comfort
Populating an Antarctic snowscape, penguins cavorted playfully in Karen Sherman’s Cold Comfort, by turns zoo exhibit, cabaret, and erotic dream. To portray the birds, five dancers wore ingenious hooded unitards and furry arm-warmers. Their behavior breathed convincing life into the critters—curious, often affectionate, yet mostly heedless toward one another. They tottered about, cocked their heads, flapped their winglets, and rolled over one another like little blubber-balls. Sherman, an explorer wielding a pickax, began moving at a glacial pace, as if thawing.
Homecoming
“Homecoming (Celebrating 20 Years of Dance at P.S. 122 – 1980-2000)” (2004) is a dance, documentary film by Charles Dennis. “Homecoming” chronicles the origins and evolution of Performance Space 122 in New York City, one of this country’s most active presenters of new dance and performance art and profiles ten leading choreographers, Ron Brown, Ann Carlson, Yoshiko Chuma, Dancenoise, Mark Dendy, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson, Charles Moulton, Sally Silvers and Doug Varone, whose careers were launched at P.S. 122. The film was shot in 2000 on the occasion of P.S. 122’s 20th season. To honor that achievement Charles Dennis, one of the co-founders of the space, invited the ten choreographers to return for a special taping of selected dances from their repertories. Combining new and archival performance clips, interviews with the artists, commentary by Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice, Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times, Joseph Melillo the Executive Producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, former P.S 122 Artistic Director Mark Russell and P.S. 122 co-founders Charles Moulton, Tim Miller and Charles Dennis the film illuminates a portrait of a fertile dance scene that was instrumental in expanding the boundaries of contemporary dance and performance. Performance photography by Dona Ann McAdams and original music by John Zorn are also featured in the film. This project was made possible with funds received from the National Initiative to Preserve America’s Dance (NIPAD), a grant program under the umbrella, SAVE AS DANCE underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trust and administered at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, by the Presentation Funds Program of the Experimental Television Center, Ltd. which is funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, a public agency and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Cultural Challenge Program. The running time of “Homecoming” is 56 minutes.
Iceland
The Obie Award-winning duo of writer, director and actor Roger Guenveur Smith and composer Marc Anthony Thompson are joined by former Urban Bush Woman Treva Offutt to “navigate the bloodstream” of two lovers — a painter and a dancer — whose saga volcano-hops from the Arctic to the tropics and back home to Brooklyn. Featuring soundscapes by Thompson, this erotically-charged journey begins as “nothing special/just love as usual” but soon negotiates fire and ice and “bombs bursting in air/red white black and blue.”
Smith’s widely celebrated works for the stage include A Huey P. Newton Story, Frederick Douglass Now, Inside the Creole Mafia and The Watts Towers Project. Among his extensive range of screen credits are numerous collaborations with Spike Lee in films such as Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, He Got Game, Summer of Sam, and the telefilm version of A Huey P. Newton Story