Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer get together at Saint Mark's Church. “It is better to have loved and lost than to have put linoleum on your living room floor.” Yvonne Rainer read that aloud during her 2016 The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project— Altered Annually. And she read it again from one of the sheets of paper taped to the pillars in Saint Mark’s Church during Danspace … [Read more...]
Apollo Meets the Higgs Boson
Emily Coates' Incarnations premieres at St. Marks' Church, March 16 through 18. I know how to re-wire a lamp. I aced high school physics (eventually). While researching Merce Cunningham and John Cage, I read Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, which fit the zeitgeist of the 1970s. But my brain has to struggle to keep its head above water, so to speak (a lousy metaphor) during Danspace … [Read more...]
Meetings Across Space and Time
Douglas Dunn + Dancers' Antipodes comes to roost in Danspace St. Mark's. If Douglas Dunn could see himself from behind, would his mind flip as well? This is not the kind of question most choreographers ask themselves. He does. Nor might many be tempted to name a dance of theirs Antipodes and then consider the many ways in which that term can be defined—say, as opposites, congenial or in … [Read more...]
Remembering and Re-imagining an Era
Danspace Project's Platform 16: Lost & Found revisits and examines the decades when HIV/AIDS felled so many. I look around St. Mark’s Church. It’s really filling up; people are sitting on risers well beyond the usual cut-off place. Friday, November 4th is the second night of this three-night performance: Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and Other Works by … [Read more...]
City Flock
Jennifer Monson/iLAND performs in tow in St. Mark's Church. Improvised dance performances, however they are structured, have something in common. Performers keep a sharp eye out for one another, whether they’re moved to join a comrade, pursue a solitary investigation, instigate a change, or draw on some prearranged material. Sitting in St. Mark’s Church watching Danspace Project’s … [Read more...]
Nothing To Be Ashamed Of
Douglas Dunn + Dancers premiere Aidos at BAM Fisher. Aidos seems to have been a goddess slightly confused about her own identity. No wonder she is said to be the last of the Greek gods to leave earth after the Golden Age. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language calls her “the personification of conscience,” but she is also seen as representing shame and modesty. I see a … [Read more...]
Embedding a Life
Netta Yerushalmy presents Helga and The Three Sailors at Danspace St. Mark's Here are some thoughtful words that dancer Neal Beasley wrote about choreographic logic, especially as it pertains to Netta Yerushalmy’s new Helga and The Three Sailors: “There is a perverse solace in the inability to hold on to anything or make oneself understood. Such is the sweet white lie of dancing: Its beauty … [Read more...]
Printed on the Space
Beth Gill and New York Live Arts and Lance Gries at Danspace St. Marks make a virtue of economy. In the deserts of the American Southwest, everything counts: the immense sky, that butte over there, those spiky plants, the track in the red earth (lizard? Maybe). Beth Gill’s beautiful New Work for the Desert has that kind of clarity. Watching it, you sense open space and the trails that … [Read more...]
Both Sides Now
Vicky Shick’s Everything You See. Presented by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, April 18 through 20. Imagine a richly busy world in which everyone is mostly at peace with everyone else, and all are serious about their work. Then think about that work. It’s unusual. The inhabitants swing their bodies and limbs into big, sweeping movements, but their patterns also incorporate small, … [Read more...]