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I’m writing this just after returning from Tess Dworman’s marvelous Everything Must Go at Pageant. Sometimes my “picks” don’t quite align with my expectations, and other times I’m glad to have nudged people in a certain direction. This was a case of the latter. A neat thing about Pageant is that they post videos of all their events on Patreon, and access to the full archive costs a mere $4/month. So, if you missed this one, you should be able to catch it there soon. Some other past shows I recommend are Julia Antinozzi’s What Light and But, Soft, and Things in the World by Jade Manns.
The fall abundance continues after a Thanksgiving week lull. For personal reasons, I may not be out and about too much over the next few weeks, but here’s what I aspire to see if I’m able. For new subscribers (welcome!) I’m also re-listing an upcoming event at the Park Avenue Armory, which I shared in my post a couple of weeks ago.
The short version (read on for more):
Coming up:
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, adaku, part 1: the road opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM Fisher), Nov. 28-Dec. 2
“Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes” at the Joyce Theater, Nov. 28-Dec. 10
Leslie Cuyjet, With Marion at the Kitchen at Westbeth, Nov. 29-Dec. 2
Pina Bausch, The Rite of Spring + Germaine Acogny & Malou Airaudo, common ground[s] at the Park Avenue Armory, Nov. 29-Dec. 14
Big Dance Theater, The March (choreography by Tendayi Kuumba, Annie-B Parson, and Donna Uchizono) at Perelman Performing Arts Center, Dec. 10-16
Watch from anywhere:
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Filling Station (choreography by Niall Jones), currently streaming at thekitchen.org
Coming up
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, adaku, part 1: the road opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM Fisher). Nov. 28-Dec. 2. I just saw Okpokwasili perform in Samita Sinha’s Tremor at Danspace, in which the two sat across from each other and, for one cathartic hour, wailed: the most beautiful, layered, piercing call-and-response. I am never not awed by the power of Okpokwasili’s voice and the forcefield of her pure presence. In this new genre-blurring work at BAM, set in a precolonial African village grappling with its future and past, she is joined by the wonderful cast of Sinha, mayfield brooks, McKenzie Frye, Audrey Hailes, Stacey Lynn Smith and AJ Wilmore.
“Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes” at the Joyce Theater. Nov. 28-Dec. 10. Philip Glass’s piano etudes are having a moment. As part of the Dance Reflections festival, six choreographers from varied backgrounds respond to The Etudes, as played live by the celebrated Glass interpreter Maki Namekawa: Lucinda Childs, Chanon Judson, Justin Peck, Leonardo Sandoval, and the duo Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber. Their roles in the dance world range from artistic director of Urban Bush Women (Judson) to resident choreographer of New York City Ballet (Peck), and each brings a distinctive relationship to Glass’s music. Childs, whose collaborations with Glass stretch back to Einstein on the Beach (1976), is the most closely associated with his oeuvre, while others, like Sandoval, who infuses tap with Brazilian influences, promise surprising new takes on Glassian rhythm and repetition.
Leslie Cuyjet, With Marion at the Kitchen at Westbeth. Nov. 29-Dec. 2. One of the last shows I saw before the pandemic was Cuyjet’s Talented at CPR in January 2020. When theaters shut down, I kept returning in my mind to that performance as an example of what I missed most: gathering in an intimate space to share in someone’s deeply considered thinking-through-movement. There’s a quiet assurance to Cuyjet’s work, rooted in what feels like a commitment to searching, to questioning, and to better knowing the self. Placing new and archival video footage in dialogue, her latest project draws from memories and research about her great aunt, Marion Cuyjet, a dance educator known for opening doors for students of color in 1950s Philadelphia.
Pina Bausch, The Rite of Spring + Germaine Acogny & Malou Airaudo, common gound[s] at the Park Avenue Armory. Nov. 29-Dec. 14. If you haven’t already, I recommend getting tickets now for this much-anticipated program, the culmination of the eight-week Dance Reflections festival. (In my experience, all things Pina Bausch tend to sell out.) A cast of 36 dancers from 14 African countries, brought together for this project, will perform Bausch’s electrifying Rite of Spring (1975) in the Armory’s vast drill hall. Of all the responses over the decades to Stravinsky’s bracing 1913 score, Bausch’s, danced on a stage covered in soil, is perhaps the most unsparing in its confrontation with death. Offsetting its scale and intensity is the more intimate common ground[s], a new duet created and performed by Acogny, the esteemed founder of Senegal’s École des Sable, and Airaudo, a performer in Bausch’s early works.
Big Dance Theater, The March (choreography by Tendayi Kuumba, Annie-B Parson, and Donna Uchizono) at Perelman Performing Arts Center. Dec. 10-16. One of the first dance events at the World Trade Center’s new performing arts venue (PACNYC), this production offers a trio of perspectives on unison or, per the press materials, “our very human compulsion to move together in time” — its aesthetic, social, and political dimensions. The artists ask: “What happens when we dance together? And what happens when we don’t?” I’ve admired the work of Parson, Kuumba and Uchizono individually, and I have a good feeling about what will happen when they join forces.
Watch from anywhere
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Filling Station, with choreography by Niall Jones, streaming at thekitchen.org. If you missed this back in September at the Mobil station on Horatio Street, or the indoor version at Dia Beacon, not to worry: documentation of the full work, a reimagining of the 1938 American ballet of the same name, is now streaming on the Kitchen’s website. The video cuts together footage from all three performances, two at the gas station and one at the museum, and the view is better than the one I had in person. (One thing it doesn’t capture is the line of cars that accumulated on 8th Avenue the night I attended, with at least one angry driver demanding to be let in.)
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