Performing Arts

To launch 2008’s National Dance Week, an email to many in Minnesota’s dance community went out to invite all members to participate in a group photo shoot. The turn out was great! We luckily had a beautiful sunshine-filled afternoon as 24 people made it out to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

First annual Twin Cities National Dance Week photo includes:
Patrick Scully (artist), Judith Brin Ingber (dancer), Alanna Morris (dancer), Sarah LaRose-Holland (dancer), Bryan Gerber (dancer, teacher, choreographer), Chris Holman (dance enthusiast), Laurie Van Wieren (dance maker), Sher Demeter (dancer, acupuncturist), Paula Mann (choreographer), Matthew S. Smith (composer), Karen Sherman (dance artist), Sarah Petersen (artist), Chris Schlichting (dance artist), Morgan Thorson (choreographer), April Sellers (choreographer), John Munger (choreographer, teacher, researcher), Lisa Conlin (choreographer, dancer), Cathy Wright (choreographer), Christopher Watson (choreographer), Dylan Skybrook (choreographer), Jennifer Johanneson (dance enthusiast), Rebecca Frost (artist), Michèle Steinwald (arts manager), Philip Bither (curator), and behind the camera, Cameron Wittig (photographer). Also present in paper form on the grass: Megan Mayer (dance artist), and Anna Marie Shogren (dance maker).

Next year, we hope to double the turn out and for even more the following years until EVERYONE is represented! Stay in touch with next year’s schedule and photo shoot date online at mnartists.org/danceweek.

As the 2008 NDW wraps up and after participating in a full week plus of activities, I find myself still running around the cities and seeing local dance performances almost every night. It is proof that we have a vibrant, lively, and rich dance community in Minnesota!

See you at the shows!

Join Marc Bamuthi Joseph and the cast of the break/s following the Friday show at this special event!

What:Afterparty with KRS ONE Live in Concert
When: Friday, April 11: 10 pm-1 am after the break/s at the Walker.
Where: Trocaderos Night Club Downtown Mpls. 107 3rd Ave No, Minneapolis

Tickets for the 18+ afterparty / concert available at 612.465.0440 and by clicking here

The event’s myspace page : click here for a listen.

Click here for tickets to the break/s at Walker

No one coughed, no candy wrappers were opened, and nary a cell phone disturbed Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Hey Girl! on the McGuire Stage at the Walker Art Center last night.

The nearly full house was engrossed in the many enigmatic images that passed before our eyes through the course of the performance; a female body slowly emerged from primordial goo; words flashed across a screen so swiftly they could just barely be perceived; a pack of men inflicted an aggressive beating on our anonymous heroine that could be seen only in strangely beautiful bursts of flashing florescent light; the white heroine whose story was on display sold the black heroine who joined her onstage into chains; the skin of the black heroine was painted silver as she stood brandishing a mirror and sword over a stage covered in broken glass.

4-D art is work created in any media that incorporates time. Hey Girl! is one of the loveliest works of post-modern performance art that I have ever seen and an exquisite example of a truly multi-dimensional work of art. In addition to playing through time Hey Girl! also plays with the notion that there are multiple 'truths' in history. Nothing felt fixed or absolute in this piece. Movements and images were presented and then repeated in new contexts where meanings were revised.

The piece quotes elements of classical and modern performance. For example, text from the balcony scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was projected above the parts of the performance and the white heroine looked like a re-invented Joan of Arc while draped in a flag and brandishing a sword. There were certainly strains of narrative, I watched a white woman be 'born' and make her way through this strange, surreal world. I watched black woman appear on the scene in this world, be stripped to her skin and chained. But this show was not like a tragedy of star-crossed lovers in which I could find catharsis or even a beginning, middle or end. Identities shifted, power was revealed and reassigned.

While watching the piece, I felt the 'girl' in the piece was not a universal representation of every human. As soon as I saw her be complicit in the oppression of a woman of another race, I realized she was a person with a class that was complex and sometimes changing. The two virtuosic female performers, Silvia Cost and Sonia Beltran Napoles, were more like modernist symbolic figures than characters. Castellucci took many familiar elements and ideas, like words, bodies, mirrors, swords, etc.out of familiar contexts and repositioned them in a new, brutally poetic combination.

Toward the end of the piece, a sharp, pencil thin point of light shone on the head one of the two women in the show like a laser beam. Hey Girl! hit my brain in a similar way. I was completely enthralled, I watched the piece with razor sharp focus while it played before me and thought of nothing else. And, since walking out of the theater, my brain has been wrestling and processing the content of the show and trying to figure out what it means to me. I've been thinking about men and women, history, slavery, loneliness, connection, violence and art. In short, the performance passed what a friend of mine calls 'the butt test' and 'the brain test' with flying colors; meaning I sat in rapt attention through the piece (my but was still) and after it finished my brain recalled the intriguing images clearly and I wanted to re/examine what I saw voraciously.

“Hip hop music appeals to a wider audience than ever. Poet and dancer Marc Bamuthi Joseph says he hopes to teach people of all ages and races that hip hop is not monolithic, and not all negative.” - MPR

Click here to listen

Marc Bamuthi Joseph: Arts activist, dancer, hip hop and spoken word artist. The Walker Art Center recently was awarded a Joyce Foundation grant to support the world premiere of “the break/s” as well as Joseph’s artist-in-residency. Joseph will perform the work April 10 - 12 at the Walker in Minneapolis. Click here for tickets

“To most people a bus stop might seem a mundane place. For Romeo Castellucci, the experimental Italian stage director, the sight of listless teenagers waiting for their ride was mind-altering.

Mr. Castellucci, 47, sat in his car while braked at a traffic light in his native city, Cesena. Adolescent girls clustered a few feet away. Studying their body language and facial expressions, and noting how they were positioned in relation to the surrounding physical space, Mr. Castellucci was inspired to create an original theater production evoking their states of mind.

For this project Mr. Castellucci wanted to try something new. He built visual sequences for "Hey Girl!" around various symbols of femininity. Scenes reel through time and space, traversing the young woman's mind. One moment she appears in beatific bliss; the next she is deformed by eerily unreal acts of male aggression and violence.” -New York Times Click here to read more

Hey Girl is at Walker Art Center February 14 - 17. Click here to purchase tickets.

Okay, I’m back. Still waiting for the relief to kick in, but let’s just swim ahead and hope we hit shore before we drown.

The thing I’ve latched onto here is the thing I’ve latched onto elsewhere: the movement vocabulary. Or style. Or…something. (Not knowing what the proper terminology is can be fatal, but my arms are still doing the strokes…)

The solo that Mr Medlyn did that I mentioned last post is maybe the best way to get into this. It started from, I think, a baseball pitcher’s conventional rubbing of the ball in the mitt. It went from there into something like a fevered, panicked version of this — still attached to the reality of what we know (even those of us non-fans) but extended to parody or commentary. But then it went hogwild or apeshit…

(Briefly: how many times can we hear fuck and its relatives in an evening — and is that more than comedy?)

…and it, for me, exploded into a kind of movement that nearly approached trance-inducing. The way the movement became disconnected from the body as well as from any motivation, rationalization or impulse and sort of floated there in the light.

And I think to get there you have to get around the huge Wall of Art that goes up whenever there is a presentation of art. I don’t think this is a new thing, but I think that people have to find new ways of climbing, skirting, tunneling under that wall because even to see something twice or to know what you will be seeing is just another brick in the wall. The Wall that kills the life of the work.

It’s death, really. The way it is so inevitable, so unforgiving, so immediate and so final. It erases the life. The movement’s fascinating quality is in its surprise, its mobility of thought, its fragility, its ephemerality, its fleeting delicate presence that is so direct and beautiful (even heavy ugly art can have this fragile beauty).

And so to escape this Wall of Art that is Death someone has to continually reinvent the world (in dance, in movement, in performance…whatever). It is not easy, clearly. It is also not always recognized as a goal of art. But it also has nothing (or very little) to do with whether the work is enjoyable or not. But if it doesn’t escape the best it can be is entertaining or boring.

When I come back as God, I would make feedforward about 38% shorter and work for those moments of escape.

That said (’cause now it’s out of the way and can be seen for the useless, pointless and petty comment that those kinds of comments really are) there is a movement afoot that, in the best cases, skirts this Wall of Angry Implacable Death by skirting Art with pedestrian movement.

But not always that. There’s something more reality-based than that involved. True, sometimes the movement comes from everyday life, but sometimes everyday life itself takes part in the performance — not chance (or not only chance) but a version of reality that is brought into the performance that works sort of like a talisman or even a weapon against the Ancient and Evil Edifice of ArtDeath.

Which is kind of funny — but maybe that inversion of the relationship between art and life is why it has the potential to work.

Participate in a stunning and powerful performance at Walker Art Center this February!

Acclaimed Italian theater director Romeo Castellucci is looking for male volunteers of any age to perform in a short section of Hey Girl!, which is being presented next month in the McGuire Theater. No experience is necessary, all are welcome. Click here to see the trailer

40 Male Extras Needed (Hurry, spaces are filling quickly)

• Where: Walker Art Center, McGuire Theater
• Please bring you own regular street cloths ( without logos or writing ) for the performance
• The volunteer performance time is no more than 15 minutes per show
• A great resume addition
• Small stipend given to cover parking/gas
• Must be available on all of the following dates:

o Rehearsal: Meet in McGuire theater lobby on the 3rd floor of the new building. Rehearsal times are: Wednesday, February 13 from 8pm-11pm
o Performances: February 14 - 17, 2008. Meet one hour before curtain each night. Performances begin at 8pm ( 7pm on Sunday) and last 90 mins.

For additional information or to volunteer contact Natalie Bowers at Natalie.bowers@walkerart.org or at 612.375.7695

Hypnotically beautiful [with] a visual resonance that you find all too rarely on stage. . . . Exquisite intensity flows through much of what Castellucci calls his drama of movement. - Financial Times, London

Become enveloped in a stunning tour-de-force by Italy's acclaimed director Romeo Castellucci. This unforgettable theater of the subconscious unfolds fascinating and frightening visual landscapes equally profound, enigmatic, and dreamlike that provoke the imagination and make the senses swirl. With raw architectural sets, surreal costuming, film projections, exploding glass, and riveting performances by two actresses (and 40 male performers), Hey Girl! constructs a world that alternates between the beautiful and the horrific. Note: Contains nudity and simulated violence. Copresented with the University of Minnesota Department of Theatre Arts.

Still can’t get past the spam filter, so here goes:

I, on the other hand, found the text exciting, moving and interesting. Couldn’t tell you if I am a text person or not, though.

I felt that one thing that putting the audience on the stage did achieve, and quite well, was to make the auditorium into an object. This wasn’t about audience roles vs performers, or mixing up the boundaries, or any version of inclusiveness — it was about objectifying the position of the audience, the seats themselves, and most highly and significantly, the space of the McGuire.

It’s even more apparent when you see the promo photo of that auditorium in New York with the gorgeous green seats. It makes the beauty of the house apparent (the prettiest part of the McGuire) and, to me at least, functions in part as commentary on who’s got the money.

Unintentionally perhaps it also shows up the inherently more interesting space in (this) theater: the place that does not try to erase itself.

While searching for links to go along with last week’s Behind the 8-Ball Q&A with Emily Johnson, curator of this weekend’s successful Choreographers’ Evening, I noticed that her Walker/Jerome-commissioned work Heat & Life is on a 50-state tour. And given the performance’s theme — climate change and its implications on how we live — the company is buying carbon offsets to help reduce its carbon footprint.

I emailed Johnson to hear what it means to be “carbon neutral.” In her reply she said that oft-used buzzword is too forgiving. “To be truly carbon neutral” — that is to add no carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in the course of touring — “we’d be walking to our performance cities and venues and performing in the dark,” she wrote.

Still, from paying for tree planting to doing roadside theater to raise awareness of the issue, Johson’s company Catalyst is truly putting its money where its moves are.

More from her email:

(more…)

Sincere congratulations to puppetmaker and artist Michael Sommers who was named this week as a 2007 United States Artists Fellow. The $50,000 no-strings-attached gift recognizes 50 artists who’ve achieved “master status.” Sommers and his wife and business partner Sue Haas received news of the fellowship the day they opened their new Open Eye Figure Theatre in South Minneapolis. The theater’s inaugural show was a remounting a Walker commission, Sommers’ A Prelude to Faust, which was performed in the same venue in 1998 when it was Patrick’s Cabaret. (Sommers and Haas also had a visual arts exhibition of their work at the Walker in the early ’90s.)

Sommers is in good company. Walker artists-in-residence Bill T. Jones, Rennie Harris, Joanna Haigood, Ann Hamilton, and Jason Moran were also named. The 2007 fellows will meet for a party at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles this weekend.

I went to the Cedar Cultural Center Monday to shoot video of a rehearsal for Festival of Lies, from Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and his ensemble, Les Studios Kabako. Instead of rehearsing, Linyekula talked to several local guest artists, performing in his work Saturday, about the history and process leading to this piece. Performances are November 1-3 at the Cedar.

And here’s a piece of video of the company in performance.

In December 2007 Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula will be presented with the 2007 Principal Prince Claus Award. The Prince Claus Fund has selected Culture and Conflict as an area of special interest and as the theme for their 2007 awards.

Culture, for the Prince Claus Fund, is a basic human need. Culture has the power either to provoke or diminish conflict. This year the Prince Claus Awards honour artists and organisations that have worked to counteract the destructive power of conflict by opposing beauty to devastation, opening spaces and forms of dialogue, restoring respect for others and enhancing dignity and self-esteem.

Faustin Linyekula and Studios Kabako / Photo by Joachim Montessuis

Faustin Linyekula (1974, Democratic Republic of Congo) Describing himself as a storyteller, Faustin Linyekula uses movements, text, sound and images to communicate the complex experience of living in the violent conflict that has gripped his country for decades, and to help people examine and reconstruct their lives. The Prince Claus Fund honours Faustin Linyekula for his outstanding choreography, his bold return to Congo, his innovative stimulation of culture despite instability and turbulence, and his commitment to the development of his country. Read more

Join celebrated Congo-based choreographer Faustin Linyekula as he turns the Cedar Cultural Center into a Kinshasa social club and combines a spirited soukous party with an intensive performance installation.

Date: November 1 - 2
Time: 8:00 pm
Place: Cedar Cultural Center

and

Date: Saturday, November 3
Time: 8:00 pm to 2:00 am
Place: Cedar Cultural Center
Click here for tickets and more show information

I know ugly. It’s something that I've lived, worn, adored, tasted, smelled and danced. I’ve tried to make it Gorgeous and trendy even. In my 20’s I intentionally chose not to bathe for as long as possible to embody a form of greasy smelly junky ugly. It’s something that I love to talk about especially in live performance. So naturally, I’m excited about M. J.’s Ugly at the Walker Art Center this weekend. But… as I bump into my colleagues that have already seen Ugly this week, no one will talk about it. I’m persistent for a remark, I push, and still, they avert their eyes, raise their hand, or shake their head and say “no, not until you’ve seen it and then we’ll talk." This kind of silence from nearly ten people is unprecedented in a community that fearlessly trades critical and complimentary remarks like baseball cards. (I love this about this community, by the way.) So, I'm off to the Walker tonight, to have a hand in Ugly, as a perplexed yet intrigued audience member.
Be warned, I will not shower.

-Morgan

Alicia Anstead(for Inside Arts magazine): Let’s say you can’t use the word dance, how would you describe what you do for a living?
Bill T. Jones: I am a scientist in the area of that place where feeling, thought and action meet. My primary computer, my primary instrument is the body, mine and other people’s.
(in interview after accepting a Tony award for his choreography in Spring Awakening)

There has been so much activity in the local dance community lately so here are some quick highlights and upcoming events:

- Congratulations to Bessie Award Recipients: On September 17, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, and The Joyce Theater with the 2007 Bessies Committee, presented the Twenty-Third Annual New York Dance and Performance Awards (a.k.a. THE BESSIES) for exceptional achievements of the 2006-2007 season. Award were given to two Walker-commissioned and premiered productions for:
- Minneapolis dancer, Karen Sherman, for her performance in Morgan Thorson’s Faker at P.S. 122
- Designers, Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg, for Cynthia Hopkins’ Must Don’t Whip ‘Um at St. Ann’s Warehouse
Awards were also given to artists previously commissioned by the Walker such as Bill T. Jones and Sarah Michelson for their latest works.

- Most Ambitious Work to Date: Two years ago local choreographer, Mathew Janczewski embarked on a great and ambitious project commissioned by the Walker Art Center. An amazing round-table of artists came together to help him conceive and develop his new work, UGLY. As a dancer, Mathew has long been obsessed with the notion of body image and as a choreographer he has looked at society and the various façades we put on. You are invited to come and peek behind-the-scenes at how he breaks down those façades, strips down the ego and gets to the essence of who we are as individuals and who we are as a people.

- Choreographers’ Evening All Lined Up: This year’s CE showcase curated by Emily Johnson, runs November 24 at 7 and 9:30 pm and features short works by Olive Bieringa, Jaime Carrera, Joanna Furnans, Cara Krippner, Mad King Thomas, Kaleena Miller and Ricci Milan, Pam Plagge, Sally Rousse, Kenna Sarge, Susan Scalf and Dylan Skybrook, Chris Schlichting, Anna Marie Shogren, Terri Yellowhammer, and The Greater Twin Cities Tableau Society.

- Momentum 08: New Dance Works: Just announced!
Four new commissions, by local promising artists Eddie Oroyan, Chris Schlichting, Maia Maiden with Ellena Schoop, and Anna Marie Shogren, are germinating and will be co-presented by the Walker Art Center and the Southern Theater, with generous support from the Jerome Foundation, July 17-19 & 24-26, 2008. Save the dates!

Click the link below for a local fan’s video response to the Gob Squad’s September show at the Walker Art Center…

http://betteronme.blogspot.com/2007/09/gob-squad.html