Archives
Keith Hennessy
Almost
THURS JAN 12 . 10:00 PM
FRI JAN 13 . 7:00 PM
Run time: 45 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street
Almost is spontaneous performance action. Keith Hennessy comes to American Realness to improvise; to invent a performance from almost nothing, accessing almost everything. Curious about histories of moving bodies and social movement, Hennessy’s improvisations are a dynamic mash-up of Judson, body art, stand-up, Ridiculous, site-specific, lecture, and ritual (where Ridiculous means, among other things, queer subversive camp, and ritual is about how a group of people experience magic and/or death together). He might go off on a political rant, he might take questions from the audience; he’ll probably change costumes and struggle to be still.
A body accumulates information and makes choices. Tactics and images from the historical body of Hennessy’s work appear like habits, crutches, old friends. Almost is simultaneously research and the distillation of research into composition. Improvisation is sometimes like fishing, a practical effort that might become thrilling or it might be boring and then it’s ok to space out and dream of other worlds… Remix, spectacle, ritual, action, dancing, not-dancing, speaking, playing, ridiculous, activist, visceral, performance.
“Hennessy is that rare artist who succeeds in translating fierce social concerns into artistically satisfying creations that enlighten and entertain.“ – Rita Felciano, SF Bay Guardian
Ann Liv Young
Sleeping Beauty Part I
New York Premiere
WED JAN 11 . 9:30 PM
THURS JAN 12 . 7:00 PM
Run time: 60 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
There was once a sleeping woman. She was betrothed at birth, unknowingly. She hid in the forest until she was a true woman. At first glance she fell in love with a noble man. Her heart was taken. A witch tried to kill her and her love. A spell was put on her family and her castle. They all slept for over a hundred years. At last, the noble prince understood and at true love’s kiss she awoke.
“And there’s nothing quite like Young.” – Claudia La Rocco, ArtForum
Holcombe Waller
Visions of a song man
New York Premiere
TUES JAN 10 . 9:30 PM
SAT JAN 14 . 10:00 PM
Run time: 60 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE THEATER
466 Grand Street
Visions of a song man presents singer, composer and performing artist Holcombe Waller in an evening of songs and musical excerpts from his recent interdisciplinary performances Surfacing (2011) and Into the Dark Unknown: The Hope Chest (2008). Holcombe and musical collaborator Ben Landsverk perform simplified arrangements that employ whittled-down vocals, small guitars, viola and piano to evoke ghostly renditions of folk, liturgical, ceremonial and popular music forms.
“Waller’s new album, Into the Dark Unknown, is a come-to-Jesus moment come to life, a clear-eyed look at confusion that’s as arresting as it is intimate.” – Barbara Mitchell, National Public Radio
Daniel Linehan
Montage for Three
Not About Everything
U.S. Premiere
TUE JAN 10 . 6:30 PM
WEDS JAN 11 . 7:00 PM
Run time: 60 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street
Montage for Three is a choreography-of-images that takes its source material entirely from found photographs, both famous and obscure. The two dancers embody the photographs with the absurd and impossible aim of giving presence to something, which is absent. They strive to erase the inherent sentimentality of the photographs in order to see what lies beneath the nostalgia. The living/moving/present bodies confront the mechanical/static/reproduced bodies until the two forms begin to exchange roles. The still images begin to take on a life of their own, as the dancers begin to serve as a trigger for the viewer’s memory.
Co-production support for Montage for Three was provided by Rencontres Choréographiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (Paris, FR)
Daniel Linehan’s solo, Not About Everything, reflects on the basic elements that constitute art works as well as daily experiences – rhythm and change, language and meaning, energy and the human body. The performance re-imagines these familiar concepts through a multi-layered system of intense physical effort and a constant cyclical use of language. Beginning from an apparent simplicity, the performer introduces a series of variations, accelerations and subtle shifts, creating a funny and complex dance. As his obsessive circular motion inevitably produces feelings of disorientation and vertigo, Linehan struggles to remain lucid and strives to create a space for thoughtful reflection.
Not About Everything was created in part through the Bessie Schönberg/First Light Commissioning Program and Creative Residency Program of Dance Theater Workshop with support from the Jerome Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a US federal agency), the New York State Council of the Arts, and the Jerome Robbins Foundation. This work was also made possible in part through the Movement Research Artist Residency Project, funded in part by the Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund.
Jack Ferver with Michelle Mola
Me, Michelle
MON JAN 9 . 9:30 PM
TUES JAN 10 . 8:00 PM
Run time: 60 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
Me, Michelle is a duet between Jack Ferver and Michelle Mola, which takes on the forever-mysterious Queen Cleopatra as a vehicle for two performers to uncover the truths about iconography, monarchy and themselves. Ferver offers a manic meta-characterization of Cleopatra during the infamous icon’s final days. Attended by Mola’s portrayal of his/her servant, the two engage in funny, vicious and tragic psychosexual games that vacillate between the childish to the sociopathic. Through coiling layers of performance ranging from the histrionically grand to the restlessly personal, Me, Michelle illustrates how ego fueled by total power can turn into annihilation and the sadomasochism that can exist between gay men and heterosexual women.
“While he constructs and subverts identity, presenting and manipulating images of sexuality, abuse, and self love, those of us watching are implicated in his physically raw, violent works.”- Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times
Me, Michelle was commissioned as part of the Museum of Art and Design’s series Risk + Reward and Performa 11.
Jeremy Wade
Fountain
SUN JAN 8 . 10:30 PM
MON JAN 9 . 2:30 PM
WEDS JAN 11 . 8:30 PM
Run time: 70 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE THEATER
466 Grand Street
Fountain, a new solo from Jeremy Wade, proposes a generative sphere of uncertainty. Wade circumvents traditional audience-performer dynamics and facilitates a generous group experience that evolves into a sensual engine. Wade assumes the role of preacher, shaman, and fool, by offering himself as a medium to receive and transform the energy of the theater space taking the audience on an emotional and alchemical journey.
Wade’s choreographic technique is a unique encounter of aesthetic, sociological and neurological dimensions. He derives movement from intense attention to the multiplicity of impulses in the body that are drawn from neurological processes, social constructions of norm and aesthetic decisions. The stage becomes an engine where the intersubjective actions/reactions are propelled into space enveloping the audience for maximal sensation and association.
“By turns frightening and pitiful, the process was fascinating to behold, and strangely affecting. The space was charged..”
– Brian Seibert, The New York Times
A production by Jeremy Wade in co-production with HAU Berlin and Gaîté Lyrique Paris. Sponsored with funds from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and by the Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs. With support by Tanzfabrik Berlin and Uferstudios.
Cynthia Hopkins
This Clement World
Work In Progress
SUN JAN 8 . 7:30 PM
SAT JAN 10 . 5:00 PM
Run time: 45 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
This Clement World is a new musical performance work by Cynthia Hopkins that poetically but urgently addresses our global climate crisis. The work is a live documentary film infused with three fictional characters that serve as tour guides for an imaginary exhibit conveying the wonders of our currently clement world. These guides in the form of the ghost of a Native American woman of the Cheyenne, a neutral alien observer visiting from the far reaches of outer space and a child from the not-so-distant future who has traveled back in time to visit the present, interpret this imaginary exhibit according to their own uniquely informed perspective. This Clement World uses original avant-folk orchestral songs, fantasy, imagination and storytelling to convey vital information regarding the climate crisis through a deeply personal and idiosyncratic lens.
This Clement World is scheduled to premiere at Les Subsistances in November 2012, followed by presentations at Walker Art Center and St. Ann’s Warehouse during the 2012-13 season. In May 2012, a work in progress concert version of the piece will be presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.
“a triumph of disciplined thinking, narrative fluidity and musical accomplishment.” – Ginia Bellafante, The New York Times
This Clement World is inspired in part by a December 2009 Tipping Point Conference at Columbia’s Earth Institute, and a September 2010 Arctic Expedition with Cape Farewell. This Clement World has been commissioned by Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN; St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn NY; and Les Subsistances in Lyon, France. The creation of This Clement World is made possible by the generous support of the Jerome Foundation, the MAP Fund; individual donors including Eleanor Alper, Warren Habib, Adam and Diane Max and Jony Perez; and residencies provided by Acadia Summer Arts Program, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony.
Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey with Jonathan Bepler
Tool is Loot
SUN JAN 8 . 2:30 PM
MON JAN 9 . 8:00 PM
Run time: 70 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE THEATER
466 Grand Street
For one year, choreographers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey worked apart, holding tandem projects, in the U.S. and France, respectively. Each artist solicited weeklong encounters with non-dance experts, voluntarily subjecting their aesthetic position to a barrage of assessment, opinions and desires from the “outsiders”, including an astrophysicist, sommelier, architect, film editor, medical supply salesman, kinetic sculptor, baroque opera singer, art critic, acoustician and social activist. Now, as the two choreographers come together in TOOL IS LOOT, the identity of each artist is simultaneously undone and strengthened in a duet that carries the ghosts of aesthetic propositions that are not their own. The opinions and interpretations of composer Jonathan Bepler and lighting designer Thomas Dunn function as yet another clarification and reinterpretation of TOOL IS LOOT.
“…utterly original, deeply comic and deviously beautiful. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that both Ms. Lacey and Mr. Cardona are effortlessly charismatic performers.” – Brian Seibert, The New York Times
A production of WCV, Inc., TOOL IS LOOT is co-commissioned by The Kitchen and EMPAC, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Creation of the work was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust; a 2010-2011 Joyce SoHo Creative Residency, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; CNDC Angers and FUSED; Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers with the Département de la Seine-Saint-Denis; Baryshnikov Arts Center; Dance Place (D.C.); Atlantic Center for the Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; and Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation. TOOL IS LOOT was commissioned through the Meet The Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program.
Trajal Harrell
Antigone Jr.
SAT JAN 7 . 11:00 PM
SUN JAN 8 . 1:00 PM
Run time: 30 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street
In American and English naming tradition, a junior (jr.) is the son of a father with the same name. Thus, with Antigone Jr., the New York choreographer Trajal Harrell takes on a study of the role of Antigone from Sophocles’s tragedy alongside performer Thibault Lac as Ismene, Antigone’s sister. This work is part of an ongoing series entitled Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at The Judson Church, that comes in five regular sizes – Extra Small (XS), Small (S), Medium known as (M)imosa, and the upcoming Large (L) and Extra Large (XL) – plus this junior size. They all take on the proposition: “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing dance tradition in Harlem had come downtown to Judson Church in Greenwich Village to perform alongside the early postmoderns?” Thus, what new relations would have been produced by voguing a Greek tragedy, a concept against the aesthetic trends of 1963 Judson? Rather than illustrating a historical fiction, Harrell uses this proposition to rethink our contemporary context. What we see was possible neither at the voguing balls nor at Judson Church, but a third possibility is created, here and now. This jr. represents a potential uni-size in the series, both unique and unisex.
“I love watching Harrell indicate styles—now with down-and-dirty swiveling hips, now with weaving, undulating arms and soft stroking-the-air hands, now with high-stepping feet. Every pose resonates.” – Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice
Antigone Jr. is a co-production of Menagerie de Verre. Residency support has been provided by Menagerie de Verre, Workspace Brussels, and Pact Zollverein.
Elastic City
Salve
FRI JAN 6 . 10:30 PM
SAT JAN 7 . 4:00 PM & 7:30 PM
SUN JAN 8 . 7:30 PM
Run time: 75 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER
466 Grand Street
Winter chills:
stuck in cold American
brick hallways and leftover props.
Todd Shalom and Niegel Smith walk you home
to putty floors, player-paintings and back-
stage Realness.
Take off your snowsuits, baby. This is not a walking tour.
“it’s refreshing to find a deliberately constructed experience—a performance—that exists just for itself, or just for you.” – Patricia Milder, The Brooklyn Rail