An Email Interview with Carrie Ahern about ‘Borrowed Prey’

March 29, 2012

April 26th – May 13th Carrie Ahern will perform Borrowed Prey at Dickson’s Farmstand Market in Chelsea.  The work is about the relationships between humans and their food, particularly our non-vegetarian food.  Ahern has experience in butchering.  For the piece she will butcher a lamb.  I asked the choreographer/performer a few questions about the work.

 

WD: How did you come to the concept for Borrowed Prey?

CA: I came to the concept for “Borrowed Prey” because I was hearing so many people talk about “sustainable food”. The more I heard people talk about it, the more it bothered me that I did not know what that phrase actually meant. I decided to explore that by researching firsthand. And I decided to focus on “sustainable food” in terms of animals we consume because I had never been a vegetarian and I wondered why. I wanted to look at all aspects of the process of animals as food from beginning to end (wild–hunting, farmed–slaughtering and butchering).

After those 3 strands of research had begun, and I was thinking about what it is like to embody an animal, I got introduced to the work of Temple Grandin by seeing her on the “Golden Globes” and by a friend who lent me her book “Thinking in Pictures”.

WD: So what is your definition of “sustainable food,” and does meat-eating have a place in it?

CA: I think ” sustainable” in terms of food has many layered meanings. Can the planet sustain our current eating habits especially with India and China eating more meat? Not likely. Most of the farms in this country are factory farms that are subsidized by the US government. So they are not even sustainable in terms of the marketplace. Small farms in this country that are not using GMO seeds and raising animals humanely ( which takes more time) struggle in a culture disconnected from
more basic ways of doing things– many question why food at the farmers markets are so much more expensive than factory farmed food. So many small farmers are barely making ends meet.

Sustainable has come to mean to me a sense of connection about the process of food and is directly connected to ethics. In terms of animals and meat it is understanding the life behind the piece of meat and how it gets to the plate. Which is recognizing that an animal had to be killed to sustain me. What was it’s life like before it was killed– and was it killed humanely? Could I kill an animal in good faith and if I couldn’t –shouldn’t I be a vegetarian?

I found through this project that I had a deep desire to eat meat. There are theories that mark a big jump in out brain development and evolution as humans to when we began eating meat. This is another level of how meat has sustained us as a race.

WD: So because of your research you’re empathizing with the animal and also thinking about your own human bodily needs.  This is an intellectual as well as physical approach to the topic.  How much dance is in this piece?

CA: The entire piece is a dance.

All the research–except for the Temple Grandin strand–is first hand, embodied research. The hunting, the butchering, the slaughtering. But the most essential part is going into the studio with that research in my body and seeing what comes out. Movement shows up a lot but also sound, image and language.

And the last strand that is not firsthand–one of Temple Grandin’s great gifts is being able to put herself inside the body of an animal and sense what it thinks and feels and how. An embodied knowledge.

It is a physical and intellectual approach, as well as aural and imagistic but I don’t see those things as separate.

WD: So tell me about your experiences hunting, butchering, and slaughtering.

CA: I have “mentors” for each part of the research.

I have been hunting with Dale Rodefer on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It is a mosquito infested swampland. We hunted Sika deer–which are small deer that are part of the antelope family. I did target practice (with a rifle) before we went out. Shooting a gun for the first time was a strange feeling and challenging. It takes a great deal of skill, as did the rest of the preparation for the hunt. Most of the prep is all about not “spooking” the deer. You have to become one with the environment in order for anything to even come close enough for you to shoot. This means rubbing your boots (16 inch lace up boots because of the mud) with a salve that helps rid the leather of human scent; not using any shampoo or lotions or scents; full camo and most of all learning how to move through the woods and be as quiet and still as possible even though it is cold! But you also don’t want to get shot by other hunters which is why you wear the flurescent orange which is a color deer cannot see. You cannot wear anything blue–that color deer will recognize. And you are up before dawn as animals are most active right before sunrise and sunset. Dale and I climbed up into a 2 person tree stand in the dark and waited. And waited. Finally we saw some deer prancing around, but they were too far to shoot at. This continued through the morning with the two of us dozing in the tree stand (and always the fear of falling out of the stand) . Nothing ever came close enough, but we did see another hunter kill a deer, gut it in the field (which it makes it much lighter) and then go get a cart to drag the animal out of the swamp. This process took that hunter about an hour and a half to 2 hours. That afternoon I was alone in the tree stand, at dusk, without a weapon, my senses super attuned and I heard a thrashing about in the swamp–a doe came right up next to me. That was magical. Hunting surprised me–mostly a very meditative and sensory experience, and you are outside all day seeing every manifestation of the light shift from pre dawn to afetr dark. But then you have to be ready to pull the trigger on a vibrant fragile living thing.

Butchering–I have my original mentor in Seattle–Russell Flint at Rain Shadow Meats (I spent a month working in his shop) and then here in NY with Marlow and Daughters  and butcher Andrew Dorsey in Brooklyn. Butchering is really dissection–and I have always had a deep interest in human anatomy. It is also a highly developed skill–how to use a knife properly, carving with or around the joints and bones and knowing what customers will purchase as meat. The most powerful thing that struck me about butchering is how much these animals are like us–especially the larger animals–lamb, pig, cow. Their anatomy is basically the same except for just a few differences–extra vertebrae, different back muscles because of their relationship to gravity, a simpler structure to the forearm and hand. Each animal I worked on felt very different and I got a sense of the individual life behind the carcass. And how young the animals are. I also learned a lot about the retail portion of butchering–what is more flavorful, more tender, aged beef goes through a process of rotting, bone decomposes faster than flesh when cut.

Slaughtering–This was the most difficult part of the research to accomplish. Slaughtering is mostly secretive and highly protected. I was introduced to Janelle and Jerry Stokesberry of Stokesberry farm in Olympia, Washington at a Seattle Farmers Market. They raise cows and pigs, but the bulk of their farm business is chickens who they slaughter almost daily. After a vetting process–where Janelle wanted to be clear about my motives and intentions, and I agreed to take no photographs, they invited me to the farm to assist with the chicken slaughter.

We were slaughtering 33 birds that day–first you have to round them up and put them in the back of a pick up truck. You wear gloves to protect your hands and have to hold their wings in tight to their body so you don’t break a wing. Then the truck pulls up to the small outdoor slaughter shed which is connected to a highly sanitized room where the chickens are gutted and packaged. In the slaughter shed Jerry has me put on rubber boots, a big rubber apron and a rain coat. You have a thinner pair of gloves on and place the chickens upside down in cones. The chickens like the cones (the pressure is relaxing) so they are calm. Then you pull down the neck and cut the jugular with a swipe of a knife. Their blood mostly gets captured in buckets underneath them, but it also flies everywhere as does feces. The passing from life to death takes 30 seconds to a minute. Then you dip the chickens in scalding hot water, put the chickens in a de-featherer (which looks like a cotton candy machine with rubber spikes) and hand them over to Janelle who is in the sanitized room gutting, cleaning and packaging. I join Janelle in that room, dressed in white sanitary clothing–to learn that step of the process. She shows me which organs to save and points out the differences between male and female birds (you find the ovaries). Then they are cleaned with a hose and put in a plastic bag with a label.

After it was all done we toured the farm and I was exhausted.

WD: Last Questions: how did you get the space at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, and how many people will the space hold?

CA: Dickson’s came about because I was dreaming of the right place for the work to be shown, and I spent a lot of time in the Chelsea Market over the summer. So I started dreaming about Dickson’s. One day I just thought, What the hell!, and walked into the shop and asked to do my show there. I happened to talk to Sarah Levine (one of the butchers) and she got really excited about the idea and talked to Jake the owner about it. Later, when I met with Jake and Sarah, they pretty much agreed to my ideal scenario and they completely understood the ethics of my project firsthand. It was seamless.

20 people maximum in the shop for each show. Tickets are now on sale at carrieahern.com and selling fast…

 

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“New York has long been considered the cultural capital of America. Is it still? If not, where?” or “Why I decided to move to the country.”

March 23, 2012

Last year I moved out of New York City and into the country.  Not the suburbs.  The country.  I live in a small town at the foot of Putnam County.  The scenery is beautiful, the neighbors are nice, and the air is some of the freshest in New York State.

The decision to move was a long time coming for me.  I had lived in New York City since 1994.  As an arts supporter and as someone who has made an income writing about the arts, admitting to myself that I do not like living in New York City was no easy task.  The arts and New York are wound up in the public imagination like Detroit and the auto industry or Florida and Disney.  (Consider the rhetoric: If you make it in New York you can make it anywhere; with practice you get to Carnegie Hall.)  It’s hard to leave one without gaining distance from the other.  When the cons of New York began to outweigh the pros, I bought my house in Putnam.  The decision worried my friends.  Admitting I didn’t like living in New York City anymore was, to many people, tantamount to admitting I don’t like the culture New York City stands for.

But is ‘Culture’ what New York really stands for these days?  By that I mean: Is the socioeconomic vibe of New York still conducive to fostering the arts?  Yes and no.  New York, according to theorists like Elizabeth Currid and Richard Florida, has long been a center for the arts by the very nature of its artistic density.  There are more performances, more festivals, more gigs, and more opportunities for artists in New York City than anywhere else.  Nowhere else in the United States are creative people so crammed up against one another.  Bumping into a fellow artist, musician, dancer, or writer on the subway might sound insignificant.  But according to Currid this kind of casual exchange is the fuel of creative life.  It’s not networking.  It’s the cross-pollination that yields collaborative artistry.

This kind of serendipity is what New York City, with all its bottlenecks and watering holes, is very good at.  Of course the reality is that most of the people calling themselves ‘artists’ in New York will never ‘make it’.  They will never have solo shows, sing at Carnegie Hall, or be asked to choreograph for American Ballet Theatre.  Being a ‘successful’ artist in New York means being recognized by the city’s high culture gatekeepers.  Those gatekeepers are not infallible, but they get lots of tries at getting it right.  Artists are some of the only people in the world willing to work for only the opportunity to practice their craft.  Scores of them come to the city, year after year after year, for the chance.  Each must come to peace with his own definition of artistic success.  The New York City of 2012 is not the New York of 1971, the time when what was known as the avant garde was coming into its own.  Practicing ‘art for art’s sake’ has become a lot more expensive, a lot more competitive.  And so the question for the members of the artistic class becomes: How best to make use of the nonproductive time?  And the question most frequently put to them: How many years to waste living on the cusp of a career?

You’ll notice I have sidestepped the nitty gritty of defining ‘culture’.  This is too difficult.  I will say that I believe the sweet spot of longevity in American culture seems to lie with works that fall somewhere in between high and low.  New York City’s principal competitor in this regard is Los Angeles.  That the Los Angeles entertainment complex devotes significant energy to promoting New York City as the seat of high culture speaks volumes.  (Think of shows like Fame, Smash, and all the reality television performing contests that bring in experts from New York to lend their credentials.)  This despite the fact that L.A. now hosts Gustavo Dudamel and some of the best visual arts programs in the country.

Validation happens in New York, whether you are struggling, surviving, or thriving as an artist.  Culture isn’t just about money — not yet!  Unless that changes, validation counts.  It counts a lot.

 

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Tiffany Mills Company in ‘Berries and Bulls’ at BAC

March 20, 2012

Choreographer Tiffany Mills presented her company in a premiere dance theater work called Berries and Bulls at BAC’s Howard Gilman Performance Space on March 1 -3.  The piece has moments of clear choreography and succinct direction.  It is rigorously constructed, with movement, speaking, and music balanced well.  Unfortunately, the concept holds the piece back.  Instead of showing us the possibilities of dance theater, Berries and Bulls reveals its limitations.

Mills worked with a solid group of performers: Jeffrey Duval, Kevin Ho, Emily Pope-Blackman, and Petra van Noort.  The hour long performance piece begins with Jeffrey Duval seated upstage, folding paper airplanes.  Petra van Noort enters and the two begin the piece’s exposition — a duet about touching.  Van Noort teasingly brushes her body up against Duval, knowing he isn’t into it.  “Do you want me to touch you emotionally?” she asks.

Berries and Bulls is a piece about the anxieties of interpersonal relationships.  The piece charts the axes of the performers’ relationships (physical to emotional; intimate to distant) with one another through time.  That the occasion is a dance performance, and that the performers are dancers, is remarked on by the performers.  The self-referencing is a crucial piece of the puzzle.  Without it the piece would lose some critical distance from itself — not quite irony, but perhaps an acknowledgement that its material isn’t original.

The idea that relationships are power dynamics has become something of a trope in dance and performance work.  In these shows, relationships (especially heterosexual relationships) are all antagonistic.  Physical aggression and verbal confusion are used to describe the assumed politics of interpersonal experience.  Berries and Bulls follows this pattern.  When they weren’t dancing against one another its performers spoke through each other, delivering randomized bits of dialogue aimed at making explicit the miscommunication between partners.  This is unsatisfying; the audience gets it after the first exchange and becomes less and less interested the longer it goes on.  The text strategy did pay off, however, in a clever moment before the midpoint of the piece, when the dialogues between the two couples (Duval and van Noort; Ho and Pope-Blackman) intersected to create a more complete conversation.  This exchange was interesting because it was coherent, and that brings me to my point: Berries and Bulls does not mine new territory.  But it is the first piece of its kind that made me want to get to know the performers better as characters.  These accomplished performers, who are so individual physically, deserve real story and dialogue, not limp text.

Berries and Bulls was created by Tiffany Mills with input from the company.  Peter Petralia acted as dramaturge.  Kay Cummings was the editing advisor.  The piece will be performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance “Isadora” in Russia this summer.

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Spring Cleaning

March 7, 2012

Sixty degrees and sunny in New York today — It’s time to come out of hibernation.  For a few months now I’ve been rethinking what I should do with this site.  The answer is still not apparent, certainly not given my evolving professional circumstances.  So, I write to warn readers that the coming weeks might bring changes to the site.

I also write to give short notes on two performances.

There were two shows I saw at the end of last year that I did not get to cover.  Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre [(DT)2] at Tribeca Arts Center and Ajkun Ballet Theatre at the Ailey Citigroup Theater.  These two troupes are only nominally comparable.  Both of the troupes are founded by Europeans.  Dusan Tynek is from the Czeck Republic.  Chiara Ajkun is Italian, and Leonard Ajkun was born in Albania.

Tynek’s dances were a precise blend of accumulations and fugues.  What Mr. Tynek does he does very well.  It’s not a wide range, but it runs especially deep when set to minimalist music.  Two of the works on the program, Widow’s Walk and Portals, were accompanied by the postclassical string quartet ETHEL.  (DT)^2 will perform at the end of this month in San Francisco.  The performances, in collaboration with Hope Mohr Dance, will mark the company’s West Coast debut.

(DT)2 was founded in 2002.  Ajkun Ballet Theatre was founded in 2000.  Although two years older, the Ajkun troupe has some catching up to do in terms of technique, choreography, and marketing.  At the Ailey Citigroup Theater the ballet company performed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, choreographed by Leonard Ajkun, and Grace, by dancer/choreographer Royce Zachary.  Both were innocuous in the tradition of community theater.  Both were deaf to the current concerns of dance theater.

The evening was most memorable for the performance of dancer Marcello Bernard in the role of Tom Sawyer.  How did I know this young dancer’s name?  The program notes contained minimal information regarding the music, casting, and other credits.  I had to email the director after the show to determine who exactly was dancing the role of Tom.  Ditto the music for both pieces.  (René Aubrey and other composers for Tom Sawyer; Johan Sebastian Bach for Grace.  No further details.)  This oversight undermines the company’s legitimacy.

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All That Glitters

November 28, 2011

Yes, I wrote about Jewels for a luxury magazine.  Why not?

 

Dance has never been an easy life. Even the success stories bear the birthmarks of penury, if not suffering. When George Balanchine made his international choreographic debut he was a young man in the south of France, part of an international troupe of glamorous paupers. Money came with hard work; it left more easily. The young Balanchine was a man who enjoyed fast cars, good food, and beautiful women, and not in order. To him these things were not luxuries, but part of a well-lived life. They were also, like ballet, manners of appreciating beauty, the subject of his art.

As with the artist, so is the enterprise. Creating a luxurious production on a dance company’s budget is a challenge. Jewels, Balanchine’s three act plotless masterpiece, premiered in 1967, when the New York City Ballet, Balanchine’s artistic home in the United States, was expanding. The company had spent its formative years at the City Center for Music and Drama on West 55th Street. In 1964 it moved to a much bigger theater on Lincoln Center. In 1947 Balanchine had played with the idea of a ballet in chromatic partitions in his Palais de Crystal. There were sections in the colors of gemstones. Balanchine, who reworked his ideas and ballets as he saw necessary, must have liked the idea enough to reprise it. A three part rumination on the many aspects of ballet dancing, Jewels is a modern classic, and an audience favorite. As Lincoln Kirstein, the company’s executive once remarked, “It sounds expensive before the first step.” Rumor has it the idea of a jeweled-themed was a gimmick. Balanchine thought the jeweler Van Cleef and Arpels might foot the bill. Alas, that didn’t happen.

 

Get the full text here.

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Profiles in Pointe Shoes

November 1, 2011

There was a nice piece by Lena Smirnova in the Moscow Times last week about two leading Russian pointe shoe makers, Nikolai Grishko and Roman Kukushkin.  It ran on October 27th.  Here is a snippet:

The company he [Grishko] founded that bears his name, andRussian Class, the other Moscow-based pointe maker, have taken center stage in the production of ballet shoes around the world. The companies’ exports have become so large they are challenging international competitors that boast decades of experience in the industry.

The global association of Russia with great ballet — as exemplified by the excitement over this Friday’s reopening of the Bolshoi Theater — is also an asset for marketing Russian-made ballet shoes.

Shoemaker Capezio, based in the United States and created by an Italian master, had celebrated its 100th anniversary when Grishko was just filling out registration papers for his company. Now the venerable firm is feeling the pressure on its own turf from the Russian enterprise.

“Have you ever seen a Russian company that pushed an Italian one out of the market for shoes?” Grishko asked rhetorically.

The two companies’ competition in the U.S. is less from Capezio and more from Gaynor Minden, the high tech shoe company that came on the scene a little more than ten years ago.  Gaynor Mindens are a polarizing issue in the dance world.  Kevin Conley wrote a nice piece about them for the New Yorker in 2002.

Pointe shoes are a personal choice.  It’s good that the market is growing larger.  That means there’s room for more specialized shoes.

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2011 NYLA Dancer Crush Follow Up

October 24, 2011

Last week, in response to a review of the Dancer Crush concert at New York Live Arts, I received a nasty comment on this blog.  The commenter began by comparing me to a gerbil, and ended with telling me I’m a bad writer.  I’m all for freedom of speech and ventilating one’s rage on the internet (god knows I’ve done it myself), but this crossed a line.  I asked some of my fellows at the CUNY Writers’ Institute what they would do.  Most agreed I should ignore it.  “Why let someone abuse you on your own blog?” was one question.  “Post it to prove your detractors are raving idiots,” was a suggestion.  I thought about posting it with a note about comment policy, to say I would allow one flame per post.  Blogging, I have been told, is about creating community – “it’s like hosting a dinner party,” someone who doesn’t blog once told me – and if my community needs to exorcise some demons, so be it.  A good dinner party always includes one person who drinks too much and makes an inappropriate comment.  The host shouldn’t take it personally.

In an age when paid dance writing is disappearing, it’s somewhat reassuring to know that writing is still important to the people who care about dance.  After all, dance makers and audiences could just watch it and forget about it.  Or watch it and record a video response.  Or post a dance on YouTube and let it speak for itself.  This isn’t happening.  Dance still needs verbal or written validation.  A review, some more than others, can launch or stall a career.  It also explains, justifies, and translates action.

This dance/language connection was certainly on display at the Dancer Crush concert.  As I wrote, many of the more performance or dance theater pieces on the program involved verbal narration.  About 70%, by my calculation, included talking while dancing, talking before dancing, narration, and voiceovers.  It was a lot of words.

Back to my commenter.  To paraphrase the most cogent part of his or her comment: “The body doesn’t think dance, the body does.”  This is the idea of giving authorship to the mind/body connection, mirror neurons, corporeality, etc.  It certainly works in an academic setting (it is a way of intellectualizing anti-intellectualism, which only works in the academe), but it usually fails theatrically.  This is probably the reason so much performance, based on the idea of the body simply doing, falls back on verbalization.  Not many people are going to pay to see someone just letting the body do its body thing, the things that any body can do, without another layer of meaning.  This isn’t a value judgment.  It’s an observation.

Non-cognitive movement exploration is the anti-thesis of what traditional dance audiences think of as dancing, which requires years of training and lots of cognitive processing.  Dance is a physicalization of language.  It requires no translation.  Can you imagine a dancer narrating Swan Lake as she dances it?  The dancers of Mark Morris’s Gloria singing along with the libretto?  A tapper counting aloud the rhythm he’s dancing?

The handy thing about professing to explore the mind/body connection in your work is that you position yourself beyond criticism.  Herein the body just does what it does.  The artist can back away from responsibility, yet retain control.  Only the artist has the key, in his body, to explaining just what the work means.  It is a deeply personal experience.  So personal, in some cases it seems to exclude the audience.  When you position your work beyond criticism you’re always right.  When you posit the work in your own body you’re always the authority.  It’s a closed system, a one person loop.

In eschewing criticism, the artist is eschewing an outside verbal translation of his work.  The descriptions are always wrong; words lose their meaning.  This brings us back to language.  And definitions.

Professional dancers, by which I mean dancers who appear in dance concerts but do not necessarily who make a living at it, are performers.  Not all performers, however, are professional dancers.  If you call yourself one you may or may not be able to call yourself the other.  This might seem like a technicality, but it’s a distinction with real importance for audiences, critics, and historians.  To this I would add that if you are a choreographer who composes work in collaboration with your dancers and you do not disclose this fact, you are misleading your audience about the authorship of your work.

In the end I decided not to post the comment, which was written anonymously.  (Another way to retain control, I might add.)  As a colleague explained, the comment had nothing to say about the Dancer Crush program.  It was all about me and my writing and my ignorance.  So, I deleted the comment.  I wish I hadn’t, because it was of obvious benefit to me in composing this piece.  So, thank you, commenter, whoever you are.  This gerbil is in your debt.

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Above and Beyond Dance in ‘Raw’

October 20, 2011

 

Above and Beyond Dance, an aerial performance troupe founded by former gymnast Chriselle Tidrick, performed Raw the weekend of October 13th at the Manhattan Movement and Arts Center.  Part circus art, part experimental movement aerial takes a lot of strength and a lot of creativity.  Creating a theatrical presentation means dramatizing fairly cumbersome props, including the bolts of silk and trapeze swings the performers use to dance en l’air.  Raw succeeds in doing this, partly because of the technical capabilities of its performers.  Still, to succeed as a dance piece the work needs less climbing and more horizontal motion.

The first half of the program was comprised by four short works.  And Yet So Far Away, a duet for Fernando Francisco and Chriselle Tidrick, was a danse apache to music by Carlos Libedinsky.  That and the third piece, Embrace II to Arvo Part, were the only traditional dance numbers on the program.  Of the two, Embrace II was the more successful.  Dancer Tomomi Imai, in a short brown dress, has a strong stage presence and the best dance line of the troupe.

The two aerial pieces on the first half of the program were Absentia, a solo for Tidrick, and Duo de Amor, a reprise of the Francisco-Tidrick partnership.  Absentia, with new music by Lauren Buchter, begins with Tidrick on the floor.  (She has just been abandoned by Francisco in And Yet So Far Away.)  She climbs the red silk.  Absentia works because it has so much visual potential.  The image of Tidrick suspended in mid-air and surrounded by waves of red silk brings to mind the dance pioneer Loie Fuller.  When these moments happened they were stunning, and they could have gone longer.  In comparison, Duo de Amor, which begins as a tango and continues with Tidrick performing for Francisco on a swing, was more circus than dance.

The second half of the program is Raw, possibly one of the most conventional and yet most unusual pieces I have seen.  Francisco, dressed as a butcher in white clothes and apron, carries in three women, one at a time, and places them on loops that hang like unstructured swings.  The women are dressed as cuts of meat, and the swings therefore look like meat hooks.  In case there was any question of this association, photographs of the dancers hanging from hooks outside butcheries and meatpacking plants are projected in a slideshow against the back wall.  In the photos the dancers wear leotards and short shorts, not their meat costumes.  Those were the women outside the butchery.  These are the women inside.  This implies something has happened to get them from one place to the other.  The music by Reinaldo Moya implies it was something sinister.

Are you with me so far?  Here’s how Raw plays out:  the butcher puts up the meat, which writhes like worms on a fishing hook.  The butcher kills (or subdues; it isn’t clear) the meat.  He lovingly caresses the haunch of the rightmost piece, then picks it (her?) up.  He takes the meat, slab by slab, off the hooks and places it (them?) in a pile downstage right.  The pieces roll in a clump across the stage.  One piece is separated.  She stands, and her meat suit is peeled back by the butcher to reveal a black bustier and leggings.  The butcher, who has also stripped down to his black underclothes, places the woman on the center hook, which, with its occupant now dressed like a magician’s assistant, looks more like a swing than a meat hook.

I won’t spoil the ending.  At one point I thought Raw might be a very clever fable of urban renewal.  Where once on West 12th Street there were butchers and meat, now there are Alpha guys and dolls.  Indeed, the first half is titled Abbatoir; the second, Market.  But maybe I’m overdetermining.  In any case, Raw is an entertaining number, performed with conviction by its cast – Fernando, Tidrick, Imai, and Lisa Natoli.  I would happily see it again.

 

Top Photo: Chriselle Tidrick in Absentia

Bottom Photo: Tidrick, Fernando Francisco, Tomomi Imai, and Lisa Natoli in Raw

Photos by Julie Lumberger

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Review: NYLA Dancer Crush

October 10, 2011

Jodi Melnick in Suedehead. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

October 5th – 8th New York Live Arts presented its first Dancer Crush program.  The two hour concert of (mostly) solo performance was overlong and surprisingly dull.  It is interesting that a program devoted to celebrating the gifted dancer would expose itself as a mission heavily reliant upon choreography.  Good dancing is good dancing.  Poor choreography is a reflection of the choreographer, never the dancer.  But little of the dancing on the Dancer Crush program was virtuosic in the traditional sense.  There were almost no high legs, few jumps, and little of the controlled extreme physicality audiences have come to expect from post-postmodern dance.  Thus Holley Farmer, Brandi Norton, and Jodi Melnick stood out as the only technical dancers on a program full of ‘hammy’ performance.

By ‘hammy’ I mean goofball and undignified and, in many cases, tedious.  Arturo Vidich danced an “improvisational score” of Yvonne Meier’s that went ten minutes too long.  Heather Olson performed excerpts from four (four!) works by Tere O’Connor.  Leah Cox danced the “signature solo structured improvisational piece,” Floating the Tongue by (who else?) Bill T. Jones, which repeated its structure three times.  In addition to being too long, many of the works on the program suffered from being excerpted.  Whoever had done the editing was careful to include the “funny” bits from each piece, even when they had no dramatic context.  In the worst cases we had Heather Olson poking fun at herself for no reason and David Neumann performing essentially a standup comedy routine.

Several of the dances told us what they were about in words.  Cox and Neumann vocalized their movements and/or motivations.  Vidich’s movement in his eponymous solo was narrated before the fact by Yvonne Meier, who sat on a stool upstage left.  Houston-Jones’s movement and stream of consciousness speaking in Eyes, Mouth, and All the Rest: Surrendering to the Desire of Others was left in the control of others, who sat onstage and cued him with orders like “mouth,” “eyes,” and “body”.  A recorded Voice of God narrates David Neumann’s Tough, the Tough (Redux), which closed the program.  Steve Reker and People Get Ready opened it with a dance for a microphone.  Both Vidich and Jodi Melnick indicated vomiting.  There’s some kind of reflexive narration happening in those three cases, although I’d rather not think too hard about it.

Perhaps all this narration is a nod to the question of theatrical authority.  Maybe it’s an indicator of the identity crisis NYLA is experiencing as it shifts from a dance venue to . . . something more broad.  A performance venue presenting a dance concert – it’s not as comfortable as it might seem.  Ishmael Houston-Jones’ work was what it was, but the 60 year old Jones is not many people’s idea of a dancer crush.  Why was he included?  I’m not being ageist; there are plenty of mature dancers I would have liked to see on the program.  Houston-Jones is not a good dancer.  He may be, however, a good performer.

Thank goodness for Brandi Norton, who danced Trisha Brown’s Accumulation after the intermission.  Set to “Uncle John’s Band” by the Grateful Dead, Accumulation threaded the link between Farmer’s Cunningham modeled solo work, Solo Event with Loops, and Melnick’s excerpt from Suedehead.  These three women showed us what good dancing in good choreography can do, no jokes, puns, gags, or storylines added.

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Elliot Carter and George Balanchine

October 6, 2011

Last Sunday I attended Work & Process at the Guggenheim’s Elliot Carter/Emery LeCrone/Avi Scher evening.  I’m writing a long piece about it.  In the meantime I want to mention a few things the about composer, who was in attendance Sunday night.

The evening began with Emery LeCrone’s With Thoughtful Lightness.  During the discussion that followed Mr. Carter took the microphone to say a few words.  He thanked the dancers and dancemakers, and then went on to explain that one of the biggest influences on his music was the work of George Balanchine.  Carter was studying in Paris while Balanchine was working there with Les Ballets 1933.  Carter said of Balanchine’s ballets, “I followed them intensely.”  He added that Balanchine’s arrangement of dancers’ exits and entrances gave him ideas about how to structure his music, particularly the stops and silences within it.  Carter went on to praise the musicians working that night — Rolf Schulte (violin), Fred Sherry (cello), and Charles Neidich (clarinet).  The three men are longtime associates of Carter, who said they reminded him of Balanchine’s insistence on first training dancers in the U.S. in order to get them to perform ballet as he wanted it done.  These musicians will be performing at Carter’s 103rd birthday celebration on December 8th at the 92nd Street Y.

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