Dance Review: Complexions, 15 Never Looked So Good!

Complexions Contemporary Ballet is bringing in its 15^th anniversary with a bang!  This season at the Joyce Theater, Complexions has a variety of programs that covers the many shades of dance through the eyes of artistic directors, Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson.  What’s most exciting about this season, besides the dancers being more beautiful than ever, is seeing the work of company veterans such as Jae Man Joo and Juan Rodriguez on the line-up.

Program C opens with Mercy, a New York premiere choreographed by Rhoden and Richardson.  This piece shows no mercy on the audience or the dancers in this beautifully constructed thirty-five minute work that portrays personal strife and spiritual struggle.  The beauty of Complexions Contemporary Ballet is the impeccable technicality and artistry of every single one of its dancers.  Mercy is an awe-inspiring and heart felt performance that leaves the audience wanting more!

Mirror Me (2009 premiere), choreographed by company member Juan Rodriguez, is a pointe trio performed by Patricia Hachey, Natalia Alonso, and Simon Silva.  This carefully crafted work depicts the many aspects of the human self and the conflict between these varying aspects.  Rodriguez’s use of classical ballet vocabulary, in a way well-suited for this piece, creates a nice contrast with the subject matter.

Dirty Wire (2009 premiere), choreographed by Dwight Rhoden, is a fierce duet executed ever-so-flawless by Edgar Anindo and Christine Paretlow.  Anindo and Partelow are the perfect mix of sugar and spice as they weave through each other’s space and around each other in risky balances, sensual lifts, and captivating moments of being completely in tuned to each other.  Partelow’s picture perfect lines and command of the space gives her that extra edge that keeps your eyes fixed on her.

Atmosphere (2009 premiere) by company member, Jae Man Joo, is my personal favorite in this program.  In this piece, the audience gets to see Complexions in a whole new light, literally because of the light fixtures placed on stage, and artistically through Joo’s style.  As the piece unfolds, the dancers create an amazing ambience like wonderful illustrators on an open canvas. This piece is less about displaying extraordinary technique and more about showing each dancer as an individual artist with something very unique to offer.

The evening closes with Rise (2008), an audience favorite choreographed by Dwight Rhoden.  This piece, performed to a U2 medley, is a jazzy, high energy, clap along favorite!  The audience has just as much fun as the dancers as they close the evening with high spirits and fuzzy feelings on the inside.

After 15 years of taking the New York contemporary dance scene by storm, Complexions is looking better than ever! The breathtaking facility and ability of the dancers is still wowing the audience and leaving most people speechless.  I look forward to seeing the company take their success to new levels and venture into the unexpected during the next decade!

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Simone Sobers
Performance:  Complexions
Choreography:  Desmond Richardson, Dwight Rhoden, Jae man Joo, Juan Rodriguez
Venue:  The Joyce Theater
Show Date:  November 24, 2009
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Dance Review: Beautiful Sock Removal? -Anna Halprin at DTW

While entering the Dance Theater Workshop to see Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes, I know I have two choices: dare to speak to the person sitting next to me because after all, we are both drawn to the same show, or pretend to be wildly interested in my program, cell phone or dirty fingernails so as to never exchange a single word with said person.  Namely because I assume the person sitting next to be is a performer, I choose the former and have a lovely conversation with my seat neighbor.   I am right in my assumption and am fully enthused to hear Boaz K. Barkan tell me that he will be performing.  As the show begins (with a chorus of performers voices booming from the audience directed by longtime composer and collaborator Morton Subotnick), I have no idea that Barkan, who just endeared me with stories about his two children on the subway and his years spent struggling as a dancer in New York, would soon be stark naked in front of me not once, not twice, but thrice once he hit the marley.

Joined by the five other company members of Anna Halprin under the direction of performer, Anne Collod, I see six well-toned dancers stare at the audience with the looming intensity of a sunset in the desert and carefully unbutton their white oxfords and peel off their trouser socks, sport coats, slacks and undergarments until they wore nothing but a stare that made me feel more exposed than they looked.  As a dancer who has grown up watching dancers perform in various states of undress and nakedly prance about dressing rooms as though skin were an outfit donned on the red carpet, the nudity alone did not bother me nor seemingly anyone else in the audience.  It is their complete dedication to the task at hand, the undressing, and their subsequent focus that is making this accessible "dance move" strongly communicated to the audience.

Following this audience stare down, they undress a second time while gazing across the stage at one particular company member, and then undress a third time while staring with the same a partner creating three duets.  Even with my aforementioned proximity to nudity and with the focus taken away from my audience member role,, I feel quite vulnerable.  Why? 

In a normal situation, I would grant them the privacy of averting my eyes.  But, here they are, on a stage, performing, and as an audience member am I not supposed to fulfill my responsibilities and watch?  Life has taught me that when sitting in an audience at a show, you direct focus forward and dream of the moment when the enigmatic beings on stage may toss an accidental glance your way.  Performers often direct their focus outward and, while modern dance often jests at the concept of the fourth wall, pushing through the audience with their candor, at DTW these six performers obliterate even the most modern of these notions and invert my entire idea of performing.

Nothing about their disrobing causes me to think, “Man I wish I could take my sock off that luxuriously while articulating my left baby finger so eloquently. What charm, what finesse!”  The inversion lies in their ability to perform mundane tasks with a heightened sense of awareness – more Eastern than Western in its origins – no multitasking, no highlighting of seemingly impossible feats, just unabashed focus on what it is to do one thing.  Between my earlier struggle with wanting to seem like a normal person who could be social and converse with my seat mate and my desire to seem fully engaged by the inanimate objects in my lap, I become aware of how specific Halprin’s dancers must be.

So often, dance works to prove that the human body can do things far more extraordinary than perform the tasks necessary to get from morning until night.  Halprin, joined with desire to take these daily tasks and make them engaging by reducing them to their raw efforts and results, pushes the concept of "new work."  This particular aspect of Parades and Changes was initially highly controversial and often banned.  Its return to the stage speaks to its importance both in the 60’s and now when no one can dedicate their focus to rituals that link the universe.

The evening takes many other tasks – ripping butcher paper, stomping on small platforms, dressing each other in found objects, etc., and works to bestow upon each task the integrity of highly technical dance work (or what I’d gather a brain surgeon dedicates when operating on a premature baby).  Unwavering in their attention to each task or “cellblock,” they are augmented nightly by their pacing and staging.  No two shows are the same which breathes life into "choreography" that has been engrained in both company and audiences members for all of time.

Go to Dance Theater Workshop to check them out and if you’re lucky, you may just sit next to a man who will talk to you like a human and then perform a human task that makes him seem otherworldly.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Eileen Elizabeth
Performance:  Parades and Changes
Venue: Dance Theater Workshop
Show Date: November 18, 2009
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Dance Review: Wally Cardona/WC4+ at BAM

"The good parts are good," is the general agreement Tuesday night at the opening of Wally Cardona/WC4+ Really Real at the BAM Harvey Theater.

It begins on trodden ground.  People (including non-dancers) enter the stage, walk around, and pose in a pedestrian fashion.  Text overlays the action with clips like “he led a somewhat uneventful life” and he would sometimes attend the theater.  This un-engaging text is repeated in different ways throughout the opening.  Wally Cardona enters and performs a lovely solo. But the message is heavy-handed; we get it, he is everyone and anyone. Throughout the piece the theme is treated in ways that falls on a spectrum from uninteresting to magically brilliant. While the opening lacked artistic pizzazz, it is executed in a genuine and wholehearted manner.  (Another example of Cardona’s confluence of text is his website: http://www.wcvismorphing.org). 

Everyone leaves the stage, the WC4+ core company takes over, and a highlight of the evening begins. This beautiful and quirky duet is performed by Kana Kimura and Joanna Kotze to music sung by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.  It is simultaneously riveting, luscious, and cold; a subtle and complex choreographic gem.  This is refreshing, like going for a swim at Coney Island in the fall. :-)

Really Real continues in an AB pattern: dance to live choral music then dance to radio hit song (such as “Ring of Fire”).  A male trio is nicely executed but doesn’t come together choreographically.  Then
young people come on stage and interact (à la the opening section) with the core company.  I feel a moment of dread as the chorus makes their way onstage, but am happy to find my concern misplaced!  Everyone (but the core company) stands clad in black, facing upstage, and another highlight of the evening ensues as Kana Kimura and Stuart Singer engage in a violent duet.  In a deliciously dangerous and captivating way, they partner and dash across the stage while not
hitting any of those standing.

Wally Cardona's piece, Really Real, has many elements: some work, some don’t.  But it’s satisfying to wait for those moments of choreographic ingenuity that inevitably evolve with Cardona’s work.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Leah Sands
Performance:  Really Real
Choreographer(s):  Wally Cardona / WC4+
Venue: BAM Harvey Theater
Date:  November 20, 2009
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Broadway Dance Review: To All Fela-Fanatics... Don’t Just Go See FELA! Go See it Again and Again and Again!

FELA!, the new Broadway musical that marries the biopic story of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti with his music, is a raw insightful adaptation of 37 Arts’ off Broadway version to the great white way.  This production is enhanced by the incredible spacial perspective and evocative powers of the design team.  The visionary choreography/direction from Bill T. Jones, changeable set which vibes-n-flows via video production, and costume design from Marina Draghici, as well as the innovative lighting design by Robert Weirzel, all place the audience at a brightly lit version of Fela’s beloved club, the Shrine.  The audience doesn’t miss a thing as this cozy theatre becomes a fringe Nigerian space, sweeping us all into the madness that becomes Fela’s MOP (Movement of the People).

Sahr Ngaujah is a quadruple threat playing Fela as he acts, sings, dances while playing both saxophone, drum and trumpet.  His ability to float between skills goes from strength to strength as he simultaneously takes on the persona of bandleader, disillusioned son, leader of a sociopolitical movement and lover to his many Queens (wives).  [The historical Fela was said to have married 24 women in an act of protest against Westernization and the Christianization of his beloved Nigeria.  He found protest in act like polygamy, smoking the peace pipe and even declaring his compound a sovereign nation].

So… here in the Kalakuta Republic, which basically translates to "rascally" from Swahili, the audience is drawn in by the uneven flow of the story and carefree style that, when combined, truly makes the production more accessible for Black audiences precisely because it is not formulaic.  Quite frankly, I like that it runs hot and loose with just about everything.  It is a casual, and at times, a crazed conversation between the audience and Fela.  The audience even gets the opportunity to stand up and get down with a free dance lesson!    A surefire recipe for a cult-like theater-in-the-making for "time-warped" FELA-Fanatics, this is a show that you will truly have to return to see time and time again in order to take it all in.

More like a rock concert vibe, the Highlife and AfroBeat band play powerful renditions of Fela’s most influential songs such at Upside Down, Zombie, MOP and more...  Arranged by the Brooklyn-based band, Antibalas, (a long time practitioner of the Afrobeat sound), the entire ensemble performs enmeshed in Fela’s flow and rhythmical structure infusing the story with emotion and electricity.

As the audience sits in their seats and the band warms up, very very slowly the dancers, "Fela’s Queens," begin to wind their waists off to the side, up on scaffolding, and out in the aisles until the whole theatre seems a "Shrine" to the beautiful black bottom.  Ain’t nothing wrong with it.  Besides, if by freeing your ass your mind follows, then the dancers in FELA! are all highly enlightened.  What I can’t stress enough is that they are all, all standouts in this cast and you get the feeling that this can of random parts has no filler.

A crowd pleaser and a Queen of the night with such versatility, Nicole Chantal de Weever all but breaks her back in several scenes where she flips between fierce African solo’s and beautiful snatched extensions.  While some of the male dancers like Corey Baker and Daniel Soto float between the African movement and the classical and contemporary dance vocabulary with grace and ease, the other women on stage, having familiar faces from the NYC African dance performance and class scene, look as if they have been dancing together for years.  (Actually, many of them have been doing just that, but not on Broadway).   Special kudos are in order to Rassaan Elijah “Talu” Green, who moves from being drummer to dancer with equal skill, and Gelan Lambert, an amazing tap technician who shows his improvisation skills well over that funky Afro Beat sound.  Who knew?  Before FELA!, Gelan has been known to be an awesome contemporary dancer in the "concert dance" world.  Werk!

Other standouts in the cast are Saycon Sengbloh as Fela’s African American Venus who brings him a "Black Power" mentality.  The stereotype of the Black American Queen, strong and angry, is not lost in the role and neither is the humor of this genre of blaxsploitation.  Sengbloh takes us back to the 60’s with her all out belting voice as she “turns [his] world upside down” with books!  Yes, they are dancing onstage doing their African while reading books.  The characters Sandra and Fela go back and forth over which side is more messed up:  African American or African.  Finally, Fela concedes that he had to go all the way to America to understand what his mother had been trying to teach him all along.

Memorable lines from Ngaujah are in his description of colonialism as being metaphorically like "having guests in the house."  In a scene about “Hotel Africa,” he describes how at first “it’s quite nice” and then “things start to go missing.”  As the audience has a chuckle, Ngaujah begins to lists “Ashtrays, towels […] petroleum, diamonds, people!”  At this point, we realize that the fun jesting and joking around has quickly turned political, but not before he asked, “…and what do they leave in return?  Gonorrhea and Jesus!”  ...OMFG

So yeah, this show is going to get real, real fast.  So, bring it fast and loose.  It’s about time for new blood on Broadway.  As Fela lights up a fatty and begins to describe his rise to fame and political ambitions, someone in the audience shouts “Puff puff pass.”  The work is irreverent, powerfully moving and one of the most insightful productions I have seen in a long time.  I hope that, as it gains in popularity, some of the funnier, raw, offensive, countercultural shit stays in!  For example, his monologue about taking a shit while imprisoned is funny, familiar, yet still foreign to the conservative American’s Puritan ethic.  So, the work quite wittily shakes cobwebs from ways of thinking to try to get something new to stick—a new "education."  Perhaps, it will be the countercultural revolution that stirs Fela’s soul and inflames his lyrics.

The most important question that is explored throughout the night is not colonialism, Christianity, police brutality, or government corruption, but rather, why Fela?  Why does he do all those crazy things?  How can Nguajah pull you in so completely that by the end you see him as saint and not sinner, revolutionary and not rascal, musical genius and not near-do-well, etc., etc.  Although the work often romanticizes and glorifies a lifestyle that causes so much pain to those closest to Fela (especially the women in his life), you can’t help but love Fela.

Using concepts from the Yoruba religion, the second act is spiritually unlike anything I’ve ever seen on Broadway.  The most amazing sections come toward the end in a sweeping all white ballet as Fela goes into a dream sequence in search of his beloved mother Funmilayo who has become an orisha (departed spirit who leads us from above) of the rain.  Played by Lillias White, the role is haunting and evocative and biographically balances Fela’s male chauvinism with his mother’s real feminist activism.  White’s singing sends chills down my spine and there are only a few dry eyes in the cast and audience as she takes her son under protection throughout as a watchful-eyed photo peers down on the audience in a three dimensional holograph.

Nguajah throws himself so completely into the role with his embodied talent that I often believe Fela is walking around in his skin.  He physicalizes his performance without making it a Broadway musical.  Instead, I feel like I am getting my hair braided and watching one of those African movies where I don’t understand why the two ladies in the film are going after each other with shoes, but I appreciate the fully committed way all the action takes place.  I feel that this work is a "watershed event' on Broadway where something new brings a chance at real adventures for the audience.

Keeping it fast and loose, the work ends quite as it began, unexpectedly powerful and poignantly political.  After the immense applause, Bill T. Jones leaps on stage and treats us with an African solo across the floor dropping to his knees mid-stage to shake and undulate his body into the wing and out the door...  I want to cry.  This is it!  This is contemporary African dance fusion where all are swept up in the spirit of the music that calls the body to move in new and exciting ways.

Go see FELA!  Bring friends and keep this on Broadway long enough to truly celebrate the legacy he left behind in his music, activism and larger than life persona.  Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (1938-1997) R.I.P. brother… you deserve it.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Sasha Deveaux
Performance:  FELA!
Choreographer: Bill T. Jones
Venue: Eugene O’Neill Theatre
Show Date: November 23, 2009 @ 8:00pm
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Dance Review: Carrie Ahern at the Brooklyn Lyceum

Theories about creation tend to take one of two routes, either there was always something, or, before there was, there was not. Sensate, Carrie Ahern's new work at the Brooklyn Lyceum, speaks strongly for the first of these ideas.

Walking into Ahern's version of the Brooklyn Lyceum is stepping into a world that has always been.  Ahern structures Sensate like an installation; audience members arrive and leave at any point during a three hour period. One walks into the performance space with no program, only the instructions to move around the space at any point, to sit anywhere, and to get as close to the dancers as one would like.

There being no discernible beginning or end to this dance, one is struck by various impressions which overlap and overwhelm one another.  First, two women in rags, one in very short shorts and the other in a long skirt. They run at one another, pushing each other to the ground, the skirted one gains the upper hand and folds her partner into a ball, then kneads her like dough as she climbs to kneel on top.  On a catwalk in the back of the space, a woman in a long dress, her face to the corner, a man, opposite her with hands curled like fiddleheads, walking very slowly, a woman's bloody knees as she hangs, upside down, against the wall...

Then, one notices the audience members. Stage lights glint off glasses, footsteps add to the atmospheric score as people shift. There aren't very many people there, but this creates an interesting dynamic in itself.  You hear something, you turn, and you don't know whether to expect an audience member or another dancer, appearing out of the woodwork.

Each viewer has a different experience of this work but, from my perspective, the strongest section of this dance is Donna Costello's arresting solo, performed in a smaller space adjacent to, and above the main room, separated from it by a plane of glass.  Sitting on the catwalk, I can watch Costello shake and fall, punctuating her destructive movement with moments of "dance" moves.  She hops backward repeatedly, waving her arms in front of her face then steps forward and completes three attitude leg raises, front, side, back, bending her torso towards her raised knee.  From my viewpoint, Costello is seen through the plane of glass and the criss-crossed strips of marley, lain onto the bare plywood floor in the main room, are reflected over her body.  As the dance continues in the room where I am sitting, the dancers seem to move over her, worlds colliding, but taking no notice.

Finally, I shift to watch the dance from this smaller room and am involved more than expected.  I am actually hit by the dancer performing here as she rushes by. Her dance is violent, with swinging, jabbing arms, and even before she slams into my legs, I am afraid she is going to punch me.  Yikes!  Luckily she doesn't.

In this room, I am also illuminated as to the construction of the sparse, apocalyptic score we have been hearing all night.  Anne Hege is singing, live, into a contraption that seems to be made of balsa wood, tape players and a Mac computer.  As she sings she manipulates the tape players and several feet of the actual tape, with the help of an assistant, to distort and loop her voice.  It is quite impressive.

At some point during this last solo, I realize the dance is about to repeat and this knowledge urges me to step out and end my experience.  I realize, on the walk home that I am slightly disappointed now that I know it just starts all over.  I realize, rather than watching the creation of the universe, we are watching what is left after the world has ended.  Sensate is disturbing.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance:  Sensate
Choreography:  Carrie Ahern
Venue:  Brooklyn Lyceum
Show Date:  November 21, 2009
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Dance Review: International and Full of Angst; Naganuma's New American

Darcy Naganuma's company, Naganuma Dance, is a collection of beautifully muscled bodies that know how to move.  In their latest show, Nouveau Americain, this weekend at Joyce SoHo, Naganuma brings out all her tricks, b-girling, pas-de-chat-ing, and high-kicking through dissertations on our nation's troubled state.

The first and strongest piece of the evening, Ameriwho?, opens with a string of spoken and visual responses from the international community to the question, "What is the first thing you think of when you think of America?".  Not many of the answers are positive and Naganuma takes these disconcerting impressions as the jumping off point for her choreography.  Her "New America" is fashionable- dancers are punk-ishly clad in zebra stripes, red, and cut-off jeans, but dysfunctional- they stagger and shake like hot-wired robots between jazzy jumps and turns.  As structure builds and unwinds the dancers are torn apart and glare at one another and the audience.  They take turns mouthing along with the Brazilian girls, "It's not my fault."  Naganuma's America, then, is post-Bush.  Struggling to move past the lingering troubles of the last 8 years, but getting sidelined, perhaps, in angst that does more harm than good.

Naganuma's Box Suite relies on collapsible Ikea storage units for it's movement invention, and does a great job riffing off comments that America is "A bunch of kinds" with it's slapstick bumbling (heads inside the boxes) to Rachmaninoff's very recognizable, "Flight of the Bumblebee."  Naganuma utilizes her dancers' varied backgrounds by choreographing a hip-hop section starring Sarah Ahn from Hawaii who pulls off some great b- girl moves.  These are translated onto some of the more ballet-bodies in the cast, and morphed into petite allegro steps.  The dancer's vibe off one another, tossing the boxes, sharing the limelight, and looking like powerful, versatile women.

Throughout the rest of the evening Naganuma expounds on this idea of the New American, finding strong material in her cast's international background.  America, as we know, is a melting pot and it is great to hear Naganuma's dancers all speaking in their native tongues.  Whether using a thick Trinidadian accent, German, Japanese, or Jersey slang, Naganuma's dancers command their voices well, and let us know that they are intelligent people, bringing personal and varied backgrounds to an American dance company.

Finally, Naganuma takes an unexpected turn in the last piece of the evening, Tower. Her dancers are clad in translucent earth tones with the ladies in black bra tops. They speak in a language unidentifiable to me, and seem to be worshipping, murmuring to one another, perhaps cautioning, perhaps urging each other on.  I'm not sure what this work has to do with the rest of the program, although it is, again, great to see these beautiful bodies.

Naganuma finds a gorgeous image to end the evening when Charly Wenzel, a small blonde woman, cradles the much larger Dwayne Brown in her arms.  He almost covers her with his body, but looks into her face for comfort which she gives, in small movements, as the lights fade.  Bravo!

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance: Naganuma Dance Company
Choreography: Darcy Naganuma
Venue: Joyce SoHo, New York City
Show Date:  November 19, 2009
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