Wayne McGregor Employs AI In One Choreographic Work & Addresses The Climate Crisis In Another This Week @ Sadler's Wells In London

text by Lara Monro

This week, the multi-award-winning choreographer and director Wayne McGregor CBE will present Autobiography (v95 and v96) and UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey at Sadlers Wells, London. 

For over twenty five years, McGregor’s multi-dimensional choreographic work has radically redefined dance in the modern era, securing his position at the cutting edge of contemporary arts. Take, for example, his appointment as the first choreographer from a contemporary dance background to be Resident Choreographer at The Royal Ballet in 2006, where he has created over twenty productions that daringly reconfigure classical language. 

Alongside his multiple cross-sector collaborations and role at The Royal Ballet, Studio Wayne McGregor is the creative engine of his life-long enquiry into thinking through and with the body. The 30+ works created since being established in 1992 (as Random Dance) showcase the evolution of his distinctive visual style and reveal the movement possibilities of the body in ever more precise degrees of articulation. 

McGregor’s Autobiography (v95 and v96) is the latest iteration of Autobiography (1.0), a series of unique dance portraits inspired and determined by the sequencing of his own genetic code. The work upends the traditional nature of dance-making by using the new AI tool AISOMA to hijack his DNA data through its specially created algorithm, which overwrites the configurations of 100 hours+ of his choreographic learning to present fresh movement options to the performers. The meshing of artificial intelligence and instinct converge to create a totally unique dance sequence that complements the medium’s ephemeral quality. 

While v95 and v96 shines a light on the cutting edge innovation capabilities of dance and future facing technology, UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey is a moving meditation on the climate crisis. Inspired by the Jim Henson cult classic, The Dark Crystal, it depicts an Earth driven by extremes and urgently in need of healing; a modern eco-myth that asks how we can come together to be whole again. The combination of cutting-edge costumes paired with the digital landscapes creates a stunning blend of fantasy and documentary. 

Autobiography (v95 and v96) will be showcased this Tuesday and Wednesday (March 12th & 13th), while UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey will be showcased this Friday and Saturday (March 15 & 16th) at Sadlers Wells, London. 

scene from Autobiography (v95 and v96)

scene from UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey

Nike Women Celebrates Style, Self-Expression and Movement for Her in Los Angeles

Nike Women’s Stud Country Event. Image by Simone Niamani Thompson.

Nike Women hosted a weekend imbued with innovative movement and style as an homage to the power that can be derived from community-focused experiences.

On Friday, December 8, Nike Women hosted an intimate dance class with Stud Country at The Paramour Estate. Guests were encouraged to hit the dance floor wearing pieces from Nike’s holiday 2023 collection, selected by stylist Keyla Marquez, paired with favorite pieces from their closet. Stud Country was born from the legacy of queer dance spaces and honors the rich history of LGBTQ cowboy culture.

The next day, on Saturday, December 9, Nike hosted a day-long immersive experience called Nike Style Studios Neuehouse West Hollywood. Hosted by world renowned talent such as Honey Balenciaga, Sienna Lalau, Storm DeBarge and Courtni Poe, guests participated in a range of unique workshops that inspire different forms of self-expression through style, dance, creativity, and community. 

Nike Women celebrated the power of community in Los Angeles with this special weekend of programming that honors a new era of democratized fashion, prioritizing style, self-expression and movement.

 

Stud Country Portraits by Carlos Eric Lopez.

 

Cloud Gate's Lunar Halo Questions the Body's Purpose in Our Current Technological Age


text by Lara Monro


Cloud Gate was founded in 1973 by Lin Hwai-Min; one of the first Taiwanese choreographers to bring contemporary dance to the Chinese world. His language became emblematic of the country’s own national struggle in establishing an identity for themselves, perched between communist China and the wider world. 

Cheng Tsung-lung took over from Hwai-min in 2020. Big shoes to fill. Fortunately Tsung-Long’s undeniable determination and vision—from humble beginnings as a street hawker of slippers to internationally recognized choreographer—made it a manageable challenge.

The timing of his appointment as Artistic Director, on the other hand, not so much. No sooner had he decided to create Lunar Halo—a production inspired by the natural phenomenon of the same name exploring how our bodies inhabit a technologically-advanced world—Covid-19 forced the world to pause. 

Light refracts through layers of ice in the atmosphere to produce a lunar halo, which is ultimately a sparkling ring around the moon. Tsung-lung first witnessed the arresting event in Iceland. Soon after, he went on to choreograph the 70-minute piece that includes thirteen dancers (seven male, six female) and examines “the invisible hand of all-powerful big data.” The hauntingly etherial soundtrack created by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós both compliments and jars with the dancers versatile movements, which are indicative of Cloud Gate’s unique training; a fusion of tai chi, calligraphy, martial arts, and meditation. 

To signify the forever growing dependance of society’s reliance on technology, the performers interact with one another in a multitude of mesmerizing, abstract, and experimental ways. Take the opening scene, where a sea of male bodies converge as one; flowing and shape-shifting between what looks like a strand of DNA and a centipede. Tsung-lung further exaggerates the overarching theme of technology, by using multiple LED screens to present images and shapes that reiterate the insidious nature of technology and our ubiquitous, cult-like dependance on it. As the performance draws to an end, a thin screen appears from the ceiling, presenting a larger-than-life naked male; perhaps a digital god, or Satan? 

Either way, Lunar Halo presents one of the essential questions of our age: if we can satisfy our needs and desires with just a few taps of a screen, what is the purpose of the human body? A beautiful irony in this case given the physical nature of the performance; the strength and reliance of each dancer and their dependance on one another. 

group of dancers huddled with big hair movement

Park Nights Return @ Serpentine Galleries In London, Featuring Live Music, Performance, Dance, and Poetry

Serpentine was thrilled to announce it’s returned of Park Nights this August. Its experimental, interdisciplinary, live programme sited within the annual architectural commission, the 22nd Serpentine Pavilion designed by Lina Ghotmeh.

Bringing together multi-disciplinary artists, and featuring rave music, performance installations, poetry and dance, the exciting live programme invites audiences to engage, reflect, and connect. Park Nights runs from August to October, featuring The Living and the Dead Ensemble; Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; Bambii and Christelle Oyiri.

Catch it’s final evening on October 8th, where Christelle Oyiri/CRYSTALLMESS will present a live iteration of her upcoming record with invited collaborators and musical guests.

The events will run through early October at Serpentine Galleries, Kensington Gardens, London.

The Missing Mountain Oozes and Shines With Choreography By Bobbi Jene Smith & Or Schraiber @ LA Dance Project

Photographs by Josh A. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023

Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber’s The Missing Mountain hits you first with the scent of foggy mist and then with the crimson sea of wall-to-wall carpet. It’s a one-two punch that has you drunk in its ambience before you’ve even found a place to sit. Two of the dancers are seated at a dining table, another on a couch, one stands by a ladder stage right and another upstage next to a piano carrying a large bouquet of gladioli that fully obscure her face. Hers is the first step. It’s small and fast, bringing her one foot closer to the audience. It will be nearly a minute before she takes another, although the music is woolly and dissonant, making it difficult to track time. Her movements slowly accumulate at a pace that feels nebulous while she expands into the space. It’s a spellbinding opening solo that winds us into a hypnogogic state before it transitions into a romantic pas de deux with a sinewy texture of movement, which suggests that the gravitational pull and atmospheric pressure has shifted in the room. 

This is a surreal space occupied by six distinct, archetypal characters who populate our collective unconscious with the specters of an undocumented halcyon era. Daphne Fernberger is a lithesome vessel of femininity whose clarity of movement is as crisp and smooth as her rose-colored silk midi slip. Hope Spears repels off walls, defying gravity one moment and grounding herself consummately the next like an arachnid. Courtney Conovan has limbs as long and fine as her flaxen locks and she is in full control from core to extremity with every small, isolated articulation and every sweeping, full-body conveyance. Lorrin Brubaker is the most understated. He commands without drawing attention to anything in particular and yet he is magnetic in his cool subdue. Jeremy Coachman is a powerhouse chameleon. He is supple and romantic, fierce and formidable, and when you least expect it, he’ll throw in a light, coy wiggle of the ass. A spotlight hits the downstage right corner illuminating an antique standup microphone. Shu Kinouchi in a tuxedo with coattails and thick, red socks reads the weather report in English, punctuating it with mysterious cries in Japanese. He is the master of ceremonies. Equally indignant as he is mischievous, he takes risks that allude to an internal metronomic gyroscope, which prevents him from ever losing balance or time. 

The work is filled with easter eggs that materialize in the form of props, backdrops, and humorous gestures. The dancers employ multiple dialects of movement simultaneously and with perfect fluency, each of them equally alien. However, they all keep their traditional balletic prowess handy in an invisible pocket. Our coat-tailed emcee withdraws a red button from his actual pocket, presses it and the entire stage is bathed in red light. Our medley of atonal dissonance and variations on Bach is abruptly interrupted by Tom Waits’s “Lie to Me” and we are peaking with dinner plates for pupils. Do I still like Tom Waits? I do right now. Just when we think this scene couldn’t be more unpredictable, Kinouchi whips up a series of fouettés à la seconde, and for some reason, I’m not rolling my eyes at this trope of virtuosity. He finishes with a quadruple pirouette in coupé, or maybe more, it was enough to lose count, and I’m as thrown by this choreographic choice as I am by my embarrassing, undeniable swoon. 

The stage goes quiet and a spotlight shines centerstage. A man and woman face one another seated in chairs. He tells her what to do and she obeys. It’s sadomasochistic full stop. But no one is touching, no one is playing, and no one is coming. They are working. 

Each of these six dancers brings something unique to the stage and yet when they meet at the dinner table it is as though they all belong to one body. Their harmony suggests they have belonged to one another for quite some time now. Their movements ooze and shine like the friction burns they bear from dancing barefoot on the carpet below. In that moment, we understand that the surreality of this hour we’ve spent together, watching a piece that harkens a Lynchean dreamscape, Sartre’s No Exit, a scene from Pina Bausch’s Cafe Müller, another from Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, and a few others that we can’t yet place is actually none of those disparate references. It is an uncanny amalgam of similar feelings that are culled to the surface to tickle your scalp with an elusive facility that leaves you wondering why you felt compelled to scratch. And just when we start to feel like we know this space, this wondrous missing mountain, we are pulled back into a standard time signature and the ground below us once again applies its Earthly gravitational pull. It’s the metaphysics of last call. it’s the house lights killing your melatonin. It’s your Uber arriving in five minutes. 

 
 

The Missing Mountain is on view for 3 more nights September 28, 29 & 30 @ 8pm. Reserve your tickets here.

GöteborgsOperans Danskompani Presents Choreography by Damien Jalet & Sharon Eyal @ Sadler Wells in London

text by Lara Monro

This weekend GöteborgsOperans Danskompani presented Skid and SAABA, the works of internationally acclaimed choreographers Damien Jalet and Sharon Eyal, at London’s Sadlers Wells. Both performances push the limits of contemporary dance through their daringly experimental approaches.  

Jalet’s Skid was first performed in 2017 at Gothenburg’s opera house. In 2019, it was named “Work of the Year” by the critical collective “Danse avec la Plume.” Its fitting title alludes to the relentless effort that the seventeen dancers endure to stay on the 34-degree tilted stage designed by New York artists Jim Hodges and Carlos Marques da Cruz. 

This experimental choreography is inspired by the laws of gravity, which forces the dancers to both struggle against and surrender to its natural forces. One by one, the dancers emerge over the top of the stage, which they slip and slide down before falling into the dark void at the bottom. More often than not, it is unclear as to whether they are improvising, carrying out a choreographed movement, or in the midst of losing their grip. Jalet creates a landscape of endless possibilities that is both moving and slapstick. The dancers, adorned in playful and multi-functional costumes by fashion designer Jean-Paul Lespagnard, are in an exhausting dialogue with the inhospitable terrain. Split into three sections, the first is a gentle introduction to the dancers and their graceful attempts at navigating their descent. The second is more dramatic as they challenge gravity by ascending the stage; showing off their physical strength and agility in unified choreography. In the final piece, a solitary figure appears, suspended in a beige sack—alluding to an amniotic sack or a perhaps a big pair of tights—and breaks free from their clothes and the womb-like space. Spectacularly framed by the harsh white lighting, the naked body walks slowly to the top of the stage and jumps off into what we can interpret as the precipice of the universe.  

GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, SAABA by Sharon Eyal, image credit Tilo Stengel

GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, SAABA by Sharon Eyal, image credit Tilo Stengel

It’s safe to say the best performance was saved for last. Eyal’s distinct style is effortlessly carried off by the hypnotic dancers in SAABA who spend most of the performance on demi-pointe, pulsating power. Each contorted movement exaggerates Eyal’s uncomfortable, abstract, and totally unique language. The androgynous body suits, made by Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, leave little to the imagination. We are left in awe as we observe the capabilities of the human body when pushed to its physical limits. There is an alien-like quality in the way the dancers carry themselves; an unnerving beauty as each and every muscle throbs and protrudes. Their wild, jarring movements prompt a visceral reaction. You are in awe and repulsed all at once. Favoring unison, Eyal keeps her dancers connected, or at least in close proximity to one another for the duration of the performance. Yet, they manage to maintain their individual conviction and sass throughout.

GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, SAABA by Sharon Eyal, image credit Tilo Stengel

GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, SAABA by Sharon Eyal, image credit Tilo Stengel

Wayne McGregor's "Woolf Works" Premieres @ The Royal Opera House in London

shirtless man holding up a woman on a stage with dancers around.

Alessandra Ferri, William Bracewell in Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works ©2023 Asya Verzhbinsky

text by Lara Monro


“The book is not form that you see but emotion that you feel”

— Virginia Woolf 

Born in Stockport in 1970, Wayne McGregor CBE completed his dance studies at Breton Hall College at the University of Leeds and the Jose Limon School in New York. His signature experimental style is defined by accelerated speeds and sharply articulated detail paired with an intellectual quality that explores the theatrical possibilities of technology and science. In 1992, he established the dance company Random Dance and was also appointed choreographer in residence at The Place. Over the last decade he has created works for Paris Opera House, New York City Ballet and Teatro Alla Scarla, to name a few.

McGregor’s appointment as The Royal Ballet’s Resident Choreographer in 2006 was considered a radical break from tradition given that his reputation was strongly rooted in contemporary dance. His masterpiece, Woolf Works, is exemplary of his ability to transcend the confines of what ballet should or shouldn’t be. At its premiere in 2015, it was met with outstanding critical acclaim, winning McGregor the Critics’ Circle Award for Best Classical Choreography and the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production. 

This March, the Royal Opera House are bringing back the three act performance, which presents a physical manifestation of Virginia Woolf’s complex literary pieces; Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves. It is a Gesamtkunstwerk of movement, sound, design and light that are indissolubly linked. Max Richter's score takes us on a transcendental journey, delving into the three distinct universes of Woolf’s works while Lucy Carter’s lighting design and Morizt Jung’s costumes seamlessly complement and translate her rich inner narratives. All the while, McGregor’s choreography carries the musical fingerprint and enforces the fully authentic voice of the author. 

blurry fast moving dancers with one woman in focus, with her back to the camera.

Alessandra Ferri, artists of The Royal Ballet in Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works ©2023 Asya Verzhbinsky

Act one delves into Woolf’s famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway, which details a day in the life of the fictional upper-class woman, Clarissa Dalloway. Alessandra Ferri, the 59-year-old Royal Ballet principal, embodies both Woolf and Clarissa while the multi-layered, elusive web of music, I now, I then, begins with a recording of Woolf from 1937 reading her essay “On Craftmanship” before it develops into disparate and melodic strands. Movement and sound offer a stream of consciousness into the past choices and present realities of the book's three main characters: Septimus, Peter, and Sally. This includes a powerful representation of Septimus’s shellshock as a WWI veteran through contorted bodies and jarring movement. 

In act two, classical and contemporary styles clash and collide; bodies shape-shift, becoming one before they break apart. Fractured and flowing they represent the transformative qualities of Orlando; a journey into the main protagonist’s transformation from man to woman, and their ability to time travel over centuries. The stage becomes a sci-fi playground as the universe and dancers continually evolve. Adorned in golden Elizabethan ruffs and androgynous garments, laser beams capture the dancers’ pointe shoes like comets streaking through the air. The musical score, Becomings, mixes the classical with contemporary as Richter meshes La Folia from the 17th century with electronic, analogue modular synthesis, sequencing and digital processing. 

 
woman in sheer clothing being lifted above another performer, surrounded by blurry figures.

Alessandra Ferri, artists of The Royal Ballet in Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works ©2023 Asya Verzhbinsky

 

In act three, we move away from the intense and high energy performance of Orlando into the most consciously poetic of Woolf’s works, The Waves. Regarded as her most experimental piece, the novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood with a strong focus on the individual consciousness. Pounding waves occupy a large screen while Gillian Anderson’s voice introduces the act by reading Woolf’s last note to her husband before taking her life in 1941. The poignancy and emotional depths of the final scene are complemented by Richter’s score, Tuesday. The melodic contours build over twenty minutes with a beautifully haunting solo soprano carrying the dancers until they gradually evaporate into darkness. Fassi is left alone. Like a gentle wave meeting the shore, she folds out motionless onto the stage; a subtle yet profound symbol of Woolf’s tragic end and that of the performance. 

Woolf’s words dissolve in McGregor’s gesuntkunstwerk yet still manage to possess their literary wonder. Thanks to the collaborative mastery; the dancers’ unfathomable skill and dramatic performances, the music, lighting, and design — we are able to comprehend the beautifully complex world of Woolf and her works.   

Woolf Works is playing at the Royal Opera House until March 23. Click here to reserve tickets

dancer in mid-air with legs kicking out in a gold costume.

Joseph Sissens in Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works ©2023 Asya Verzhbinsky

Lara Monro Interviews Choreographer Holly Blakey In Anticipation of the Premiere of Cowpuncher My Ass →

Photo of four dancers dancing in unison in front of large windows

Photograph by Max Barnett

Born in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, Holly Blakey found contemporary dance as a teenager. After she was rejected by a number of well-known dance schools, she attended University of Roehampton where teaching dance was the only option. What was initially a devastating and painful life transition turned out to be a profound moment for Blakey, leading to a fruitful career as a choreographer. Free from the confines of institutional models and languages of dance, she created her own — one that advocates drama and our lived experiences. 

Honesty, intimacy, and a sense of community feed into her work, as does her fascination with music, film, and TV. Her ability to emulate pop culture has led Blakey to traverse multiple creative industries such as directing music videos for musicians who include Florence Welch and Coldplay. She also had a longstanding collaboration with the late fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, whose widower Andreas Kronthaler, has designed the costumes for the return of her performance of Cowpuncher My Ass. This Wild West dance show, scored by Mica Levi, takes the notion of the hyper masculine, yet camp cowboy, as a starting point to explore the archetypes of masculinity through non-linear perspectives.  

Cowpuncher My Ass will be playing at Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, Wednesday 15 February at 7:30 pm. 

Autre’s London editor at large, Lara Monro, spoke with Blakey in between rehearsals to discuss how the performance challenges what might be deemed acceptable in choreography and much more. Read more.

Notes of Tragedy: A Review of Volta Collective's "MILK" @ the Institute for Art and Olfaction


text by Summer Bowie

A smell of youth, sensuality, and otherness welcomes the audience into Volta Collective’s MILK, a multisensorial dance performance staged in collaboration with the Institute for Art and Olfaction. This is the scent of young Medea as defined by Saskia Wilson-Brown, the institute’s founder and executive director. Dominated by notes of winter spices, citrus, light florals, grape and fig, this inviting fragrance distributed through the audience on tester strips carries the sweet and piquant promise of juvenescence that our protagonist takes with her as she falls passionately in love with Man. No longer Jason, as his character is known in the classic Euripidean tragedy, but simply Man, as modernized by Alexis Okeowo, a staff writer at the New Yorker, essayist, and PEN/Open Book award-winning writer. In Okeowo’s reprisal, Medea and Man meet “kind of on the internet, kind of in person,” the way most of us meet our lovers. Man is described by notes of fresh sweat, muscled body, leather, ship’s wood, and ocean. He is the unsympathetic son of a political family defined by its proclivity toward nepotism, yet his reluctantly dutiful approach toward carrying the torch makes him a keen object of affection for Medea, the ambitious daughter of a garbageman.

The dancers embody these characters almost as vessels being fluidly possessed by multiple individuals over time, exchanging personages with one another in the same fashion that a zoomer might perform opposing subcultures from one day to the next. Their movement is scored by the nostalgic harmonies of harpist Melissa Achten made timeless by the timpani, organ flutes, and vocal synth employed by sound architect Nicolas Snyder. They preen itchily, embrace indulgently, and shrink obsequiously at times, followed by displays of proud exhibitionism that sublimate into moments of performative submission. These anxious, amoebic qualities feel familiar in their contemporariness; an uncanny valley of gesture and sonic sensation.

In their early stage of courtship, Medea finds herself struggling to step into a feminine identity that she can both perform successfully and connect to authentically. She has grown accustomed to “competing for the love of men, using her weapons of not-too-intimidating intelligence and charm to win their devotion,” which leads her to feeling like she is “wearing FEMininity like a kind of drag.” The dancers wear their characters in kind. They become all-consumed by the fullness of feeling so many emotions simultaneously, falling into states of frenetic mania that are tempered by brief, unexpected periods of static calm. These mercurial waves bely Medea’s occupational transition from upwardly mobile wife to doting mother in the shadows. She accedes her attempts at manifesting Man’s agency internally and settles for the proxy of power incarnate via the rearing of his two sons. He is inclined to take on his mayoral campaign independently while Medea stands high on a wooden table, emptying a pitcher of milk into her son’s open, waiting mouth. It’s in this moment when my acquaintance with feeling makes me uneasy in its perpetual, abiding nature.

A street with lamps criss-crossed above the dancers in movement. Two peoplew stand up in front while two other carry a dancer on their heads.

Photograph by Volta Collective

Man loses his election and seeks comfort in the arms of another woman who comes to bear another of his children. Medea unravels the way so many of her generation do, dissolving into the doom scroll of his social media, subsisting on Hot Pockets, and watching the Real Housewives while contemplating all the ways that she was “prettier and smarter than all of those embarrassing women,” and how “they all had more power.” Her ire is characterized by a perfume of winter spices, citrus, unwashed body, earth, blood, and burning fire. The dancers perform duets that feel like the competing psyche of a dual personality. They push each other’s heads and bite each other’s hands. They carry each other twisted and inverted, memetically gesture toward an invisible bow pulled taught with potential, fall into splits, and weave themselves into surprising systems of support. They orbit chaotically like an electron cloud around a still nucleus where what appears to be a central ego played by Okeowo is carried front and center. Our narrator recites their final verse wherein Medea ultimately decides to burn down the house where Man, his pregnant mistress, and her two sons are sleeping. As in the original tragedy, Medea flees and decides to start a new life elsewhere, “she was going to BE Man in her next story, she was going to rebrand.” And there we are, left with a parting bouquet that conjures the scent of the innocents: sweet bread, warm skin, blood, and of course, milk.

My lasting reflections are multifold and complicated. The scope of this experience felt so much bigger than what could be encompassed by a 30-minute performance on the pedestrian pavement of Chung King Road. It felt like something that exacted the attention of a full-length work on a proscenium stage. A duration and location worthy of the masterful choreography directed by Mamie Green and Megan Paradowski could breathe more life into the exigence of the tragedy. Performed and choreographed in collaboration with the accompanying dancers: Keilan Stafford, Marirosa Crawford, Claire You, and Madi Tanguay, I left feeling like each one of them packed their talent into a container that begged to be expanded. 

It also gave rise to thoughts on social systems scientist, futurist, and cultural historian, Riane Eisler’s cultural transformation theory. Among its many claims, this theory proposes that patriarchy, or dominator society, is not so enduring a form of social organization as it seems; that humans lived in partnership societies for millennia that weren’t defined by the rule of one gender class over another. She suggests that the role of many Greek tragedies was to redefine traditions of matrilineage (the idea that children belong first to their mothers and are named respectively) into a new era of patrilineage. Although, many treat Euripides’ Medea with a more feminist reading than other Greek tragedies due to her “getting away with the crime,” I would venture to guess those are the same people who saw a feminist bent in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, a film where, Cassandra (another tragic Greek heroine) played by Carey Mulligan, exacts revenge on all men who cross her path. In her book Anxiety veiled: Euripides and the traffic in women, Nancy S. Rabinowitz states that the reason why Medea “turns her anger at her husband into violence against her children” is because “we are the heirs of mythology handed down not by the Medeas of the past but by the Jasons.” We are wont to sympathize with her over Jason in the first act only to be punished for our naivety in the last. The underlying thesis in all of these tragedies almost invariably serves us with the warning that women are not to be trusted with the full agency that is rightfully entitled to men. As a play that was initially received tepidly by Greek audiences, it’s intriguing that it has received more modern adaptations than almost any other. My sincere hope for Medea, as she will likely live on in the current and future zeitgeists, is that she might one day abscond with her two sons that she suckled with her two breasts and ensure that they are known by her last name, whatever it may be.

A bunch of models laying close or on top of each other with blood dripping from the leg of a woman standing above everyone. Others drinking and spilling around a bunch of fruit and flowers.

Photograph by Anna Tse

Watch Both Teasers Of "MIASMA", A Live Installation By Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine @ Trauma Bar und Kino In Berlin

Drawing from Ligottian horror, MIASMA takes place in an unnamed seaside town in the artists’ home region of Northern England where a blackened volcanic hole opens below an abandoned car park. The work incorporates 3D design, neo-noir film, and the Japanese dance theatre of Butoh to unearth sensations of dread, mourning, and alienation.

MIASMA autopsies the corpse of post-industrial urbanity, carving out its wounds in unparalleled catharsis: an encounter with darkness that oscillates between the solemn and abrasive.

In Thomas Ligotti’s The Shadow at The Bottom of The World, a strange profusion surfaces and exhausts itself into the atmosphere, afflicting the air, vegetation, and people in a nearby town—ultimately turning a familiar place into an estranged version of itself. This duality becomes the subject of Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine’s (Tom Heyes) debut audio-visual installation, MIASMA.

These uncanny dispositions frequently appear throughout MIASMA, within crowds of twisted and curled faces, as characters and dancers stagger past illegible signs of defunct businesses—a gesture to Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: “You suppose that you could be in familiar territory … few landmarks. The tracks have numbers, not names. You can listen to them in any order. The point is to get lost.”

Live and recorded Butoh alchemize MIASMA’s provocations into a visceral, unnatural domain, forcing viewers to take part in the mutative rift that opens, not only across the towns, but also within the minds of its inhabitants and visitors.

Through the virtual and choreographic, MIASMA conducts its autopsy on the town’s post-industrial corpse, carving out its wounds in the act of unparalleled catharsis: an embrace and respondent transformation to darkness characterised by its balance of the intimate and abrasive.

Text by Matt Dell

MIASMA will be on view this Saturday, October 22 at 21:00 @ Trauma Bar und Kino Heidestraße 50, 10557 Berlin

Video by Hannah Rose Stewart
Graphic design by Jordi Theler
Ue5 development by Filip Setmanuk Soundtrack by Blackhaine, Croww, Rainy Miller

Video Block
Double-click here to add a video by URL or embed code. Learn more

Jay Carlon's Novena Is A 9-Step Devotional Ritual For Grief


text by Summer Bowie
photographs by Angel Origgi


James Baldwin once wrote, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” For rising choreographer and dancer Jay Carlon, the history and the colonial turmoils of the Filipinx experience is as heavy as a gunny sack of rice. As part of the REDCAT NOW Festival, Carlon presented his tender and prescient performance, Novena, at the CalArts Theater in Downtown Los Angeles with singer and sound artist Micaela Tobin. Historically, Novena—from the Latin word for nine—is a multi-day devotional ritual for grieving and healing, a transmutational practice of turning suffering into acceptance. Over the course of Carlon’s performance, this metamorphosis is slow, quiet and beautiful, like a lepidoptera emerging from a cocoon, body first, then legs, then wings, then flying into the unknown. Novena starts with the backstage wide open, lights on, fluorescent, exposed, the theater as a naked object. The first thing you recognize is someone riding an industrial floor polisher, the hooks, the ladders, the wires behind the stage symbolically exposed. A nod to the invisible workers, the culturally vanished. Carlon, in just a pair of boxing shorts, emerges with a sack of rice as Tobin gives her somber soprano chorus.

 
 

Shapes are shifting constantly before our eyes while our hero navigates the theater from stage, to catwalk, through the audience and back. His sack of rice at times resembles the ashes of an ancestor, exacting its weight on his shoulders with the entitlement of an exhausted elder. We are in the first stage of grief, penitent with the carriage of both our shame and pleasure simultaneously. In this state of self-flagellation one can imagine the superimposition of the stigmata and the ease of its colonial transmutation. He crawls on hands and knees, his lower back arched and buckling from the onus of inherited trauma. Transitioning into the second stage of grief, we dispose of Rudyard Kipling and his White Man’s Burden. A form of deliverance is attained in the realization that the savior we were awaiting is itself a false idol. The sack rolls effortlessly into his arms, held gingerly like an infant as he presses his cheek to it in a low squat. For a moment the putrefactive qualities of ash are indiscernible from the potential energy of harvested grain. He approaches a punching bag that has been sitting solitary at the center of the stage, waiting patiently to be filled. In our third stage, we discover that we are not empty vessels, and so begins the process of transference. The punching bag is at first filled one cup measure at a time like a loved one initially interred by a single fistfull of dirt. In an act of total unburdening, the remaining content of our sack is hoisted on one shoulder and emptied into the punching bag. The sack itself folded triangular like the folded American flag that drapes a soldier’s casket and is bequeathed to the next of kin after burial. 

Once filled, our punching bag is lifted off the ground, suspended by a heavy metal chain that our boxer hoists link-by-link, a repetition of prayer with a unique gesture of devotion committed to each and every bead of the rosary. This first prayer is one for the preparation of battle that is to come in stage V. The hands are ceremoniously wrapped and the bag spins like a pendulum. In a cycle of seductive Stockholm Syndrome dispelled by unforeseen acts of triumph, our warrior battles the true replacement theory behind white supremacy. It’s the one that bred the mestizos as a genocidal act against the indigenous populations of the islands. It’s the one that motivated US Army Officer “Howling Jake” Smith to order his soldiers to “kill everyone over the age of ten" and make the island of Samar "a howling wilderness." It’s the one that replaced 70% of the archipelago’s rainforests with a denuded wasteland in service and literal support of the American and Japanese architecture of the 20th century. This is also the 1521 Battle of Mactan, where Ferdinand Magellan was felled by a poisoned arrow to his unarmed thigh and an eventual stabbing to his other thigh with a kampilan. This is the battle that delayed Spanish colonialism by 44 years. This is 500 years of fighting for sovereignty and forgiving those who conformed as an act of survival. Punches are thrown, the bag is tossed, dodged, and left alone to submit itself to the forces of gravity. A prayer marks the sixth stage of grief and it is extended to family and institution alike. They are the sacrifices that are the subject of this seance. 

The chain is pulled tighter and the bag is lifted higher. Carlon hangs from a wrist leash attached to his sacrificial urn, tips of toes dragging along the floor beneath. The crucifixion of stage VII pulls our hero into a transcendent flight, spinning like a centrifuge of cultural distillation. Finally ready to be atoned, he returns to earth with feet firmly planted below the bag. He tears open a hole in the bottom of his vessel and stands, head back and chest lifted high in acceptance of his baptism. The punching bag becomes like an hourglass keeping the time of history’s ravages, the rice like infinity spilling onto the stage, another metamorphosis. He renews his sense of faith, trust, and love in his eighth stage of grief so that he can form a bridge to his ancestors in the ninth. A shower of rice pours down on Carlon as he kneels in solemn submission. His cleansing is scored by Micaela Tobin’s deconstructed reprise of “Sa Ugoy ng Duyan”, a Filipino lullaby sung in Tagalog that is as familiar as the national anthem. Lying supine in his growing mound of rice, Carlon offers his own song, this one a contemporary Visayan ballad called “Nalimot Ka Ba” about betrayal and loss of faith in the one that you love. It is a clarion call to his elders. Perhaps if we can share our grief in voice and gesture, we might enrich the detritus of a battle-scarred terrain with the nutrients necessary to support future generations. It is a prayer that they might one day be unburdened by the bondage of this shared history.

Benjamin Millepied's Be Here Now Is A Rose By Many Other Names


text & stills by Summer Bowie


“And if my life is like the dust
that hides the glow of a rose
What good am I?”

 – Max Richter featuring Dinah Washington, “This Bitter Earth / On the Nature of Daylight”

 

On Wednesday June 22, the audience for L.A. Dance Project’s closing week of Be Here Now was graced with a rare opening solo performance by choreographer Benjamin Millepied. Dancing to Max Richter’s “This Bitter Earth / On the Nature of Daylight,” he walked onto the stage in street clothes making a large circle that slowly spiraled in on itself before sweetly erupting into a vulnerable serenade of sorrow and deliverance. He jumps and spins, arms outstretched, a motif we will see later in the piece, but otherwise, there is no indication as to whether we are watching choreography or improvisation. Why he chose this night or this song is a mystery that isn’t asking to be solved, much like the meaning behind the myriad movement compositions that comprise his oeuvre. His latest work is no different in its narrative-defying abstraction. It is a work that calls you to let go of linear time and tune into the everlasting moment, to be present with how all of it feels, and to have the clarity and confidence of knowing that this is all you need.

Be Here Now is inspired by critically-acclaimed composer Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars, an 80-minute, chamber music work that was nominated for two Grammy’s earlier this year. Created over the course of eight years and performed by Sandbox Percussion, the work was composed very personally for its masterful quartet of percussionists. Akiho has said that he composes for people, not instruments and Millepied choreographs in kind. When his dancers are coupled, each pairing takes on its own distinct chemistry. Dressed in a neutral uniform of sheer, cream-colored tank tops and slate-grey sateen briefs, they dance with a synchronicity that is uncanny, yet they bring out different sides of one another. They take on new attitudes, rhythms and textures based on their varying social compositions from one piece to the next. One doesn’t have to question the degree of intimacy that the work requires of these movers as colleagues. Their multitudinous selves are expressed earnestly and their compatibility is unmistakable. 

The first piece begins with four women who materialize one at a time from each corner of the stage. We’re in a sexy, dark alley, and we’re just scared enough. They slowly walk to meet in the center making coy eye contact with one another in preparation of their task. Caroline Shaw’s “Entr’acte” performed by Attacca Quartet acts as an unlikely and fierce accompaniment for our prologue. Its rhythmically exigent string arrangements drive the dancers through a combination of sequences that oscillate between classical allegro and modern floorwork, returning periodically to a long, outstretched arm motif that rises upwards to the side as if pulled by some magnetic force, or perhaps it serves as an invitation. They keep count under their breath while the meter changes frenetically from one time signature to the next. They clap hands, slap thighs, hop and skip with the natural consonance of children on a playground. At times they are sylph-like. They hold hands, weaving in and out of one another with an amiable sorority reminiscent of Leonid Yakobson’s Pas de Quatre (1971). 

In the next piece, four men take the stage and we are officially in the first of Akiho’s Seven Pillars. Their feet keep the beat with its clamorous, polyrhythmic percussion, while their upper bodies undulate and their arms elongate sumptuously, adopting the arm motif as though they are collectively conjuring something of a mystical variety. They bring the virtuosic bravado of any classical male group combination, most notably seen in works like The Nutcracker’s “Russian Dance” and combine it with something that is both more earthy and contemporary. Raw in its masculinity, the piece reveals the mystique of male sexuality in a way that defies the limitations of classical dance while remaining grounded in its outward rotation.

The women join the men, pairing themselves respectively and we realize that this is a courtship dance. Each pair performs the same choreography in rippling canons before breaking off into their own distinctive duets. These duets are punctuated by highly idiosyncratic solos, one of which, danced by Daphne Fernberger to Akiho’s “Pillar II” is a haunting change of pace bathed in the cold, shadowy glow of a moonlit séance. She gradually binds us into a spell of arms that whip, toes that sweep and developpés that lean backward as they travel forward. She gives us the sense that there’s some elasticity to the now. A following duet by David Adrian Freeland, Jr. and Sierra Herrera to “Pillar III” is an awe-inspiring feat of ever-intensifying prowess. One imagines they could be a celebrity couple whose first names have been inextricably bound by a catchy portmanteau. They remain poised even as they catch their breath, subtly hinting at the labor behind the shiny veneer. Peter Mazurowsk defies gravity with a heart-pounding solo of leaps that spin on axes of every angle. He is Apollo painting every inch of the space with his body in perfect balance and measure like a Pollock tableau in its natural aplomb.

These characters reveal themselves to us not as archetypes, but as individuals endowed with unbridled talent and intrinsic drive. They are roses by many other names reflecting the morning moonlight in their sweet, dewy petals. We are reminded by their unrivaled beauty to pause and return to our sense of olfaction. We are present and in a state of admiration. 

Be Here Now was performed throughout the month of June at L.A. Dance Project with a portion of the proceeds going towards the company's partnership with Ghetto Classics Dance, a dance company in Nairobi, Kenya. This will provide the funding for the dancers to travel to Los Angeles for a two-week summer dance workshop in collaboration with Everbody Dance LA.

Watch The Premiere Of "The Performance" By Avery Wheless

shot & directed by Avery Wheless
art direction & styling by Kari Fry
choreography & movement by Cami Árboles
music "I Left My Juul in Monterey" by Niia Bertino
clothing by SUBSURFACE

What does it mean to be a performer? The Performance explores the connection between fabric and figure, self and body, perception and performance. As humans, we are always in a kinetic state; always moving, shapeshifting, and grappling with the impermanence of the human experience. To be human is to be the sculpture and the sculptor—we are being passed around to, for, and from each other, molding and being molded along the way. This piece is an embodiment of these sentiments through an intentional synthesis of garment, body, movement, and form. It represents a return to self—a self that embraces the beauty in evolving, sculpting, and shedding. We are forever performers on our own stage.

Sharon Eyal's Rambert2 Slays The Stage With Killer Pig @ Sadlers Wells In London

Rambert2 Dancers in Sharon Eyal's Killer Pig © Deborah Jaffe

text by Lara Monro
photographs by Deborah Jaffe

In February 2020, 650 early career dancers auditioned to join Rambert2: a new and exciting programme founded to develop the artistic practices of a diverse cast of daring performers. Eleven practitioners were selected for their unique talent. Starting in May this year, the ensemble toured the UK to perform Sharon Eyal’s Killer Pig. Designed to extend the Rambert company’s traditional reach, the Rambert2 collective takes distinctive, world-class dance to more people in more places.

Born in Jerusalem, Eyal established the contemporary dance company L-E-V (meaning heart) with her long-standing collaborator Gai Behar in 2013. Prior to this, Eyal danced with the Batsheva Dance Company from 1990 - 2008. From 2009, she began to form her own choreographies including Killer Pig (2009) and Corps de Walk (2011). Since 2013, L-E-V has had more than 200 performances in some of the most exclusive venues and festivals around the world: The Joyce Theatre – NYC; Jacob's Pillow – Berkshires; The Montpellier Danse Festival – France; Julidans – Amsterdam.

Last weekend, Sadlers Wells welcomed Rambert2 to its stage. Eight of the eleven performers executed Killer Pig with unwavering raw passion. The minimalist expression, intense honesty, and uncompromising physicality of the piece is provocative, carnal, and adrenaline-inducing. L-E-V uniquely combines ballet with hip hop: a head-bop seamlessly morphs into a pirouette. At forty minutes in length, the performance is the epitome of artistic endurance. The audience witnesses fearless determination and dedication as the performers bodies are pushed to extremes. The dance explores a spectrum of emotion: dark, obsessive, and beautiful. 

Instantly submerged within what feels like a club room dedicated to pounding industrial techno, the bodies move mainly in unison — part of a whole organism that ebbs and flows across the stage — until one, or a few break off and offer up an independent performance before dissolving back into the collective. It's tribal, at times trance-like, with a sassy aggression. 

Tight, beige leotards leave little to the imagination, allowing every part of the anatomy to be celebrated for its athletic achievement: muscles bursting, ribs protruding. The harsh, white lights designed by Kevin A. Jones draw attention to their facial expressions: passioned, pained, sometimes crazed. 

Home was also performed by Rambert2: a new commission created by the American choreographer Micaela Taylor. The first dance of the evening is recognized for its numerous influences that encompass classical ballet, hip hop and Gaga. 

Long-term L-E-V collaborator, Ori Lichtik, is the genius behind the multifaceted industrial soundscape, which arguably seals the deal for making the performance an all-around superlative piece of contemporary dance. The standing ovation, and emotional reaction this provoked in the audience, was a poignant nod to the long-overdue return of live performance post COVID. 

Watch BAGGAGE: A Dance Film By Choreographer Jay Carlon @ Los Angeles' Historic Union Station

BAGGAGE is a theatrical dance work for film by acclaimed dancer and choreographer Jay Carlon with a live-score and sound design by musician Alex Wand. Developed on site in Union Station’s historic Ticketing Hall during a two-week residency by Carlon and Wand—the work celebrates origin stories and embodies the many histories of arrivals and departures at the station and in our lives. It is a personal family narrative of migration told in three chapters unpacked through music, dance, and memory inside the landmark historic space that has served as a gateway to the many individual and collective California arrival stories over the past eight decades.

Opening with the Phillipine proverb “A person who does not remember where they came from will never reach their destination” in Tagalog to provoke the question “How did you get here?”,  Carlon channels the stories of the space through his personal family story. The film concludes with an emotional and physical release as Carlon lets go of family traumas handed down from previous generations. 


Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic Is A Virtual Performance Space Of Embodied Liberation

In 2016, choreographer and educator, Suchi Branfman, began a five-year choreographic residency inside the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security state men’s prison in Norco, California. The project, dubbed “Dancing Through Prison Walls,” developed into a critical dialogue about freedom, confinement, and ways for surviving restriction, limitations, and denial of liberty through the act of dancing. The dancing abruptly ended in March 2020, when the California state prison system shut down programming and visitation due to Covid-19. The work was rapidly revised, and the incarcerated dancers began sending out written choreographies from their bunks to the outside world. The resulting collection of deeply imagined choreographic pieces, written between March and May of 2020, became Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic.

Guided by the written and choreographic direction from inside the prison walls, the performers effectively dance these works into the “free” world. Highlighting six of the dances written/choreographed inside the prison by Brandon Alexander, Richie Martinez, Landon Reynolds and Terry Sakamoto Jr., this event includes a film of the written work transformed into embodied dances in sites throughout the Santa Monica civic center area, drawing focus to the nation’s school to prison nexus (Meiners, 2007), followed by a conversation with the eleven artists involved.

With artistic direction by Suchi Branfman and cinematography by Tom Tsai, the dances are powerfully narrated by Marc Antoni Charcas, Ernst Fenelon Jr., Richie Martinez and Romarilyn Ralston (formerly incarcerated movers and organizers) and choreographically interpreted by a group of brilliant choreographers: Bernard Brown, Jay Carlon, Irvin Gonzalez, Kenji Igus, Brianna Mims and Tom Tsai (all of whom have joined Branfman dancing inside the Norco prison). Each team was entrusted with bringing one of the written dances to action. Between them, they are steeped in hip hop, tap, breaking, performance art, quebradita, spoken word, Butoh and contemporary dance forms. Released from prison during the summer of 2020, Richie Martinez joins the cast as he narrates and performs in “Richie’s Disappearing Acts” which he wrote while incarcerated at the Norco prison during the pandemic.

In December 2020, Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic was published by the inimitable Sming Sming Books. Benefiting the authors, Critical Resistance and California Coalition for Women Prisoners, the 2nd edition of the sold out book is forthcoming. This project was made possible by Art of Recovery, an initiative of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs.

Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic is a free virtual event produced by 18th Street Arts Center that can be joined via Zoom April 16, 2021 6:30pm PDT (Spanish translation available)

Watch Rashid Johnson's The New Black Yoga (2011)

Representing the performative aspect of Johnson’s practice,The New Black Yoga (2011) is a short film depicting an enigmatic scenario in which five African-American men perform choreographed movements on a deserted beach. Their gestures alternately appear balletic, athletic, and martial, conjuring a range of potential narratives that ultimately remain elusive. Johnson’s 2016 installation Antoine’s Organ is included in the New Museum’s current exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.

Appalachian Spring: Rare Performance of Martha Graham's Iconic Masterwork Available Via Planet Classroom

Premiering in 1944 with an original score by Aaron Copland, set design by Isamu Noguchi, and costuming by Martha Graham.

Cast and Credits
DIRECTOR: Peter Glushanok
PRODUCER: Nathan Kroll
EDITOR: Eleanor Hamerow
CAST: Martha Graham as The Bride, Stuart Hodes as The Husbandman, Bertram Ross as The Preacher, Matt Turney as The Pioneering Woman, and Miriam Cole, Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, and Yuriko as The Followers.

Multidisciplinary Artist Chris Emile Presents AMEND @ MAK Center In Los Angeles

An exhibition and series of four performances by multi-disciplinary artist Chris Emile, AMEND explores Black male identity through movement, cinema, sculpture and sound. Emile employs archival & contemporary found footage with artifactual set design to re-render the modern architectural marvel that is the Schindler House into a sacred, private place: a home amenable for Black dealing and healing. An intergenerational cast of three dancers acting as one man, move the audience through the house and through time working their way through the question: who, if not me, decides what a Black man is? This performance series took place on September 26 at the Schindler House of the MAK Center in Los Angeles. continues from its original dates in March 2020, which were postponed due to the coronavirus. photographs by Lani Trock

Valerj Pobega Presents "Kabuki in Berlin" Fall/Winter 2019 collection

Avant-garde fashion designer and artist Valerj Pobega presented her “Kabuki in Berlin” -Fall/Winter 2019 collection with a site-specific performance in collaboration with dancers, acrobats and a music performance by Lawrence Rothman. Dressed in the designer’s hand-painted silk creations from “Kabuki in Berlin” her collection was inspired by the hybrid identities and androgynous stylings as seen in the Liza Minnelli’s turn as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and the epicene performances of Lindsey Kemp and David Bowie in their 1970 mimed numbers which had hints of Kabuki theatre. photographs by Mekael Dawson