Life as a Modern Dancer

Circling Freedom with Risa Jaroslow & Dancers

From left: Erin Yen, Chelsea Reichert and Sharon Dalke in Talking Circle. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

 

Circling Freedom with Risa Jaroslow & Dancers

By Garth Grimball

 

Six dancers enter. They sit in a circle. Gestures are passed from one body to the next in acts of listening. There is no unison in the circle, no definitive conclusion. How could there be when exploring the idea of freedom?

So begins “Talking Circle,” Risa Jaroslow’s fourth evening-length work presented in the Bay Area, premiering May 12 at CounterPulse. The dance is driven by the question, What will we risk for freedom?

“You have to free yourself from something to have freedom to do something,” said Jaroslow. She was inspired by Miriam Toew’s book Women Talking. When I visited a recent rehearsal our conversation included the philosopher Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, questioning the freedom from—freedom to dialectic.

Jaroslow began the process at the end of 2019. In the ensuing three years, two collaborators moved from the Bay Area and the creative team went through every available rehearsal option: Zoom, outdoors, and finally, back to the studio. The limitations could be fruitful. Jaroslow turned the visual restrictions of the Zoom square into a choreographic task. “We could never see each other’s whole body,” she said. “So let’s use this.” The cast created a unison upper body phrase and paired it with individual lower body movement, and vice versa.

Dancers Anna Greenberg, Chelsea Reichert, Cauveri Suresh, and Erin Yen are joined by Pamela Wu Kochiyama, age 65, and Sharon Dalke, age 78, of The Elders Project. Jaroslow founded The Elders Project in 2016, and “Talking Circle” allows her to unite her professional passions. “Movement and age diversity makes a bigger picture.”

Much of the choreography is sourced from the dancers’ responses to prompts on freedom and the ideas in Toew’s book. For Yen, “I feel most free when I am understood through body language alone.” The opening circle expands out as solos and group dances weave through the space witnessed by fellow castmates. The circle’s perimeter serves as both a safety net and a container for the evolving movement phrases.

Jaroslow acknowledges a concept as charged and fraught as freedom is unlikely to reach consensus. “What is the freedom any individual wants, or the community wants?” she asked. “This show is trying to figure it out.”

Suresh shared the difficulty in defining and questioning the subject of freedom. “The word has such a multitude of, often conflicting, meanings — the freedom of, no one can tell me to wear a mask versus the freedom to control whether or not I seek an abortion, for example,” they said. “We might think one of these is really freedom and the other is a perversion of freedom, others see it differently, and we’re still all using the word ‘freedom.’”

The ambiguity of freedom informed the structure of the dance. “There are many circles inside ‘Talking Circle,’” said Jaroslow. “In a circle people can see each other.”

Risa Jaroslow & Dancers, “Talking Circle.” May 12-15, 19-22 at CounterPulse. More information: counterpulse.org/event/talking-circle

Cauveri Suresh (left) and Erin Yen in Talking Circle. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to Dance Media and SF Examiner.

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Related post:

Artist Profile: Risa Jaroslow

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Review/Response: "Are You There God? It's Me, Jules" with Julie Crothers

Julie Crothers. Photo by Hans Holtan.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Jules

NOHspace, San Francisco

April 15, 2022, 7pm

Choreographed and Performed by Julie Crothers

Original music by Ben Juodvalkis with contributions from Greta Hadley and Jeanne Hadley

Lighting design by Maxx Kurzunski

Review/response by Sima Belmar

I recently listened to a conversation between Wesley Morris and Dr. Daphne A. Brooks about the violence of lists like the Billboard Top 100, in which Brooks makes a strong case against canons in favor of care. In other words, it’s not about whether an artist or artwork deserves to be on a greatness or most popular list, but why a particular artist needed to make the work they made in a particular moment. In 2020, Julie Crothers was named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to watch.” And though I agree that Crothers is indeed someone to watch, I’d rather follow Brooks and talk about what makes her work a work of this moment. 

***

If you’ve ever identified as a teenage girl and grew up in the 1970s and 80s, you’re probably familiar with Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, a novel about searching for religion, shopping for bras, and having to use pads held in place by a belt in the pre-adhesive tape era of sanitary napkins. Growing up in an interfaith household with a Christian mom and a Jewish dad, Margaret was spiritually lost—Jesus or Hashem? Christmas tree or Hanukah candles? Ham or gefilte fish? Though I grew up with two Jewish parents, I could relate to Margaret’s struggle. I prayed to the Jewish God of the Old Testament (mostly for the continued survival of myself and my parents, sometimes for Jordache jeans) in a combination of English and Hebrew, always signing off, “Thank you, God. Thanks an awful lot”—just like Margaret.

Given my intimacy with Blume’s book, Crothers’ title set me off chuckling before I’d even entered the theater, which was packed to the gills on opening night. Chuckles morphed into guffaws and gasps; my face hurt from smiling for an hour straight. Are You There God? It’s Me, Jules mixes sketch comedy, physical comedy, the multiple embodiments of the work of folks like Anna Deveare Smith and Sarah Jones, and dancing, exquisite dancing. 

The performance begins with a land acknowledgment. Crothers’ took the form of a story, spoken in her own voice with a depth and care I rarely hear from white artists. She situates herself in San Francisco/Ramaytush Ohlone by way of Brentwood, TN, “a rich white suburb of Nashville, and ancestral home of the Cherokee, Shawnee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek peoples.” She talks about field trips to Andrew Jackson’s home and the way her American history education glided by slavery and the trail of tears, burial mounds and stolen land. In that way, her land acknowledgment is itself a performance of reckoning with erasure. She encourages us to find the QR code in the program that leads to  The Association of Ramaytush Ohlone so we can donate funds. She takes her time. It was the first time in my experience that a land acknowledgment felt like more than lip service.

A phone rings in the audience. Jessi Barber answers so I know it’s a plant. (Later, my neighbor’s phone goes off—not a plant, grrrr.) Jessi says, “Hey Jules.” I can barely make out Crothers’ voice as she talks to Jessi from somewhere backstage. Jessi walks on stage, sets a clock for a 2-minute countdown. Crothers enters to an 80s sounding groove in her underwear and tank top, unfurls a long strip of tape on the floor diagonally in front of a clothes rack, and proceeds to set the stage:  she repositions the clothes rack, a music stand, some chairs, a backpack, a bowl, a stool, three blue balloons, a water bottle, and sneakers. She dons red pants and a red blazer, and with ten seconds left, backs up to turn toward the audience before the alarm rings.

“Welcome. You are here and you are welcome here…” This is Jules the preacher and she is here to tell us a “true story” about God. With a convincing warmth that nevertheless borders on a kind of creepy kindness, the preacher explains that God has a big tv made up of billions of screens, one for every person—God is always watching. As she moves to a chair behind the tape, the preacher morphs into God himself: a dude on a chair with his leg up, watching tv and eating snacks, sometimes laughing, sometimes sighing at a cacophony of voices. 

Crothers’ preacher returns to explain, “When you sin, God can’t see you. God can’t watch you sin.” She explains that the sinner’s screen becomes fuzzy. But then, “In comes JC with a wrench to save the day!” It’s hard to describe how convincing Crothers’ embodiments are, not because they aim for a sort of verisimilitude (there is no crown of thorns nor holy vestments), but because of the way her memory and imagination combine to create a kinesthetic expression. Jules as Jesus has her jacket tied around her waist and wears sneakers. Jules as Jesus who has come to fix everything is confident and smooth. Jules as Jesus makes imaginary nothing-but-net basketball shots and pumps her elbows, thrusts her pelvis. Jules’ Jesus is carnal.

This is the magic and mastery of Crothers’ performance, a layering of memory and imagination, of remembered and imagined embodiments, practiced and finely choreographed—even the improvised dance sections have a clear score and purpose: to embody character and affect, and to entertain. I believed every posture, gesture, vocal tone, and dance move. This would have been enough. But Crothers goes further by shaping a performance that also embodies the way Christian spirituality navigates, constructs, and claims transubstantiation. Crothers turns the teachings of her Christian upbringing into flesh. And she is clear that this is not entirely her own invention—her “Jesus dance camps” appear to have been centered around this very practice. 

Crothers reenacts an experience from “Jesus ballet camp,” where she also studies “Jesus modern” and “Jesus jazz.” She describes a workshop that involved a tunnel maze on a “very intense Tuesday.” With a backpack on her back, she crawls through a chair (the tunnel) and tells us that the tunnel was covered in papers with sins written on them: anger, bitterness, boasting, divorce, drinking, dishonesty, hatred, homosexuality—as she pronounces each word, she shrinks, cowers, falls back as if burned, reminding us that, “If you don’t say it (or see it) it doesn’t count.” Emerging from the tunnel there is a bright light, a cross, and a dancer named Colleen. Jules tries to describe the feeling of the dancing and singing that follows the harrowing journey through the tunnel of sin, but she can’t find the words. Instead, she writhes as a rainbow (flag) lights the upstage wall and the Christian rock praise song she wrote with Juodvalkis and Greta Hadley, which Hadley sings, plays. 

Because she always looks more or less like herself throughout the performance, it’s all the more extraordinary how Crothers transforms from preacher to God to Jesus to a painfully cheerful church mom to teenage Jules. As church mom, she recognizes faces in the audience, smiles, waves, and performs a shushing gesture. Like her play with transubstantiation, she uses verbal repetition to enact the ways dogma inscribes itself in the body but can also lose meaning. Church mom says, “I pray that you are moved. I pray that you want to be moved. I want you to want to be moved. I pray that you want to want to be moved.” To want, to move—the words change their meaning, lose their way. In this scene, JC returns like a boxer or bboy warming up to enter the cypher, sternum caved under the pressure of praying to want to want. I’m brought back to that Flashdance confession moment—” I want…I want so much!” 

Julie Crothers. Photo by Hans Holtan.

Crothers sets up her characters so the abstract dancing sticks to it; the dance sequences are coated in meanings established in the script, which allows her to maintain control of the character and the narrative even as it unspools, unravels. She appears always in command in part because she seems to be listening as she goes. It’s been said that acting is reacting and Crothers is right there, responding to (and delighting in) the unpredictable nature of live theater.

I could go on and on about the critique of Christianity Crothers performs in Are You There God? It's Me Jules. She certainly conveys the pain of shame around longing, particularly queer longing. But somehow critique feels beside the point. The point Crothers seems to be making is not a point at all but rather an ever-moving target of self-exploration. In the final scene, Jules is Jules. She calls God on a push button phone: “I’m sorry I ghosted you. You know. You don’t know? Ok.” Curled up in a chair, she wraps the phone cord around her toes, flanked by her props (what holds up our faith?). Ending on this earnest, teenaged Jules note is unexpected. It speaks to an evolving relationship with her faith and herself. Blume’s book is a coming-of-age story. Crothers’ performance is too but with the understanding (and promise) that she is forever a work in progress. I can’t wait to bear witness to the next phase.  

Julie Crothers. Photo by Hans Holtan.

Sima Belmar hosts the ODC podcast Dance Cast, teaches in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and loves writing for Life as a Modern Dancer.

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Related post:

5 Questions for Julie Crothers

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One Good Quote: "One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives II" with Peiling Kao Dances

In Fall 2017, Life as a Modern Dancer launched a new concept for post-performance discussion and writing. The goals are multi-fold:

• What are new ways to invite post-performance writing (since so few publications now print dance reviews, and there are fewer and fewer dance critics in the United States)?
• How can choreographers hear and read more from audience members about their impressions and experiences of dance events?
• Can we offer new mechanisms for choreographers to gather language about their work, to further their work and to promote their work? 

The premise is simple. If you experienced "One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives II" with Peiling Kao Dances May 6-8, 2022, please take a few minutes to leave a comment. Write down images, impressions, appreciations, and questions from the performance. These can be words, phrases, or a few sentences. 

We thank you for your time, support, and thoughtfulness. Here's to more dialogue, more reflection, and more writing on the dance performance experience. As choreographer Mariah Steele noted, we are "democratizing dance criticism."

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“Frolic”: Reflections on the 3rd Annual Queering Dance Festival

 

“Frolic”: Reflections on the 3rd Annual Queering Dance Festival
By Molly Rose-Williams

Last Saturday I attended “Frolic,” an evening of performances produced as a part of the annual Queering Dance Festival. I’ve shared some of my impressions of the evening below in “snapshot” style—a glimpse of each chapter of the night as I experienced it. At the end, I share a few overarching reflections. 

In this piece, I’m exploring the potential value of reflecting back what I saw with less interpretation or commentary than might be offered in a traditional review. I’ve found that the process of writing this way has meant my own experience of reflection and meaning-making has extended much longer than it often does. My impressions from the evening have continued to transform, taking on new edges and forms as they merge with my accumulating daily experiences since. I’m hoping that writing with less commentary may also offer you, as a reader, the opportunity to develop your own alive and second-hand impressions of the works. 

This form of writing has also been a way for me to explore one of the thoughts I’ve been mulling over since the event: what does it mean to queer dance? I’ll say more about this at the end. For now, here are a few snapshots from “Frolic”:   

• Arrival. 

Performer Zoe Huey quietly tends to a draping paper creature onstage while the audience take our seats. We burble away like hens at dusk as Zoe considers the hanging paper thing in front of them. They carefully tape another sheet of paper, patterned with cuts fine as a snow-filled sky, to the tented creation. 

• The Land Acknowledgement.

My name’s Aiano and I am a settler here on Ohlone Land.

QDF Steering Committee member Aiano Nakagawa offers the land acknowledgement like they mean it. Like history is with us still. Like the land holds our memories, and our bodies hold the power to create a different future than we were given.

Give the land back, they end. More than an acknowledgment—it sets the stage for everything that comes next to be read as an expression of justice in action, and of homecoming. 

Zoe Huey. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

 

• quietly you call me.

The draping paper creature onstage is also a heart with one chamber; a paper nest; a fort made of porous walls. Zoe adds two more pieces of paper, then enters the refuge and starts humming. 

Their hands wriggle out from gaps in the paper tent to lay small pink scraps of tissue paper on the stage and pour wooden blocks from a tall silver can. They move the scraps and blocks from place to place with minute intention, eventually adding a collection of tiny animal figurines to sit on top of the blocks in an ever-changing formation. At one point, Zoe sets two animals on top of yellow block chairs that face each other. After a moment's pause, Zoe scoots the chairs together as if to allow the animals an intimate moment. The entire audience chuckles. 

Zoe’s slow movements and meticulous attention to detail evokes for me a sense of childlike wonder. I see worldbuilding in the blocks, and the safety and sacredness of a space of one’s own in the paper tent. Zoe can barely be seen through the snowflake tent—but they share themselves generously through the dreamscape fantasy they materialize through paper, blocks and animals, and their constant stream of gentle humming and nonverbal commentary. 

After constructing, destroying, and reconstructing entire worlds with objects, Zoe scoots out from under the paper like a newborn. They reach their entire body along the floor, stretching tall, and then collect themselves back to a small ball with their hands. Over and over.

The piece ends with an upright dance to Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight”—Zoe making repeating staccato movements that glint with the edge of a razor sharp intention. Their breath offers a rhythmic counterpulse to the smooth flow of Clapton’s guitar. Then the piece is over. The lights dim and they leave the stage without warning or moral. I am left with the impression of having witnessed the entire arc of a lifetime in just a few short episodes.

Bernard Brown. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

• Anew.

Bernard Brown crouches onstage, his back to us, covered by a sheer sheet of fabric. His arms and hands emerge like tentacles or tendrils, back undulating. I see a plant, an insect, a shadow creature.

He stands to walk downstage, still shrouded by gray cloth. My country ‘tis of thee. He sings from his belly as he walks, arms outstretched, hands clenched in fists. Land where my fathers—his body catapults back, as if punched in the gut or shot in the chest. The image shatters into a new form of unsettling, his body bent and pained.

He stands to walk again. Over and over, until—I want a divorce! He gets flung to the floor, then leaps to his feet, throwing off the fabric. His eyes glow, chest heaving.

Music pours forth like a sonic flood of bass. Bernard dances like freedom personified—earth turned flesh. His face is radiant as he swings, scoops, rolls, twists and catapults into virtuosic turns that would leave the most elegant bird breathless. I see joy, transcendence and freedom through movement. I see the rejection of a shroud that no longer serves the celestial body in front of me.

Finally, Bernard begins to sing again. Nothing stops him. Land where my fathers died…Let freedom ring. I hear it like a prayer, like a vision, like a promise. Through his alchemical movement, Bernard redefines the meaning of “freedom.” He reframes, reclaims, renegotiates, and conjures a version of Freedom that he not only has a right to, but that his own luminous Black body radiates.

JanpiStar. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

• Liturgy.

JanpiStar enters like a celebrity or an embryo—magnetic, with an unmistakable potential for transformation. Their face is wrapped in a tight white cloth that trails behind them like a train. They move on a downstage diagonal, flourishing their arms until they reach the lower left corner of the stage and climb out of their wheelchair. On the ground, they roll over and over, wrapping themselves in the white fabric until they are fully encased.

Then comes the unveiling. They emerge from the cocoon like a star or baby moon, shining with glitter and intricate white makeup in geometric lines across their face. Like a ritual offering, they throw the white fabric back over their heads as the soundscore sends a flock of geese flying overhead. An offering to the spirits and element of air, I think.

A heavy drumline sets in, inviting us to enter a new space. Janpi begins a sequence of virtuosic, highly energetic floorwork that takes them around the space in a pattern like interlocking roses. As they move, they wear a pink and red tutu-like flower of fabric around their body, making me think of the burning power of fire. 

The drums end and Janpi removes the pink fabric. They move upstage and dip their fingers in a small vessel of blue paint. The paint pours from their fingertips down their face and neck like holy water—soothing and cleansing. The soundscore changes to a flowing and spacious environment evocative of water. Janpi finishes the dance with an impassioned duet with a blue pile of fabric. Their movements contain all the power and presence of a body made of universal dust. Glitter sprays from their face as they fly around the space.

By the end, the entire audience is cheering and breathless. The unspoken agreement seems to resound: we have just witnessed something holy.

• Reflections 

What does it mean to queer dance? Is it an action? An attitude, or way of making or witnessing dance that intentionally visibilizes alternate perspectives and experiences from those traditionally privileged in the field and society at large? An acknowledgment of something that’s already happening when a program is comprised entirely of queer-identifying artists? Something constructed—a product of discourse and group agreement? Something unavoidable—a product of the innate immeasurability of bodies?

Probably all of the above and much more, changing and shifting depending on the context and circumstances. One of the ways I started thinking about the idea of queering dance while writing this reflection was through the lens of acknowledgment and citation. I think Aiano Nakagawa’s land acknowledgment planted the seed for this branch of thought, and then my memory of a few definitions of how sound waves travel layered on top. In short, one aspect of queering dance that came alive for me through seeing this show was the idea that everything in these works was a reflection or “refraction” of an infinite well of source material. In watching each piece, I was witnessing a many-layered process of sources of inspiration and information being filtered through the artistic choices and in-the-moment embodiments of each performer.

This could be said of any dance or art, so for me, the idea of queering comes into play by explicitly acknowledging the existence of this source material and the process of translation. The act of acknowledgement queers certain assumptions or narratives around art-making by redefining the power structure inherent in the narrative of the “originator” artist (who is the sole creator of their work). Instead, we see artists as interpreters of source material (to which we all have access by virtue of being members of a shared world), who create something unique through translating that source material through their own lens of experience and perspective. 

Though this read on queering dance didn’t come explicitly from the pieces themselves, by starting the evening with the land acknowledgement, I felt invited to witness each piece as an expression of a shared world in which we all hold stake and agency, and in which we all experience unique positionality. The fact that each of the performers identify as queer also allowed these “refractions” to reflect a slice of experience unique to the experience of being queer. But for me, the “queerest” part of my experience was the invitation to imagine the massive cycle of information and impressions of which these dances were a part, and that this reflection now also joins.

I am grateful to the artists for sharing their work, and to the producers and organizers of QDF for offering the opportunity to reflect on queerness in dance in a new way. I’m already looking forward to next year!

Molly Rose-Williams is a performer, writer, producer, and maker based in the SF Bay Area. In her writing about dance, she’s interested in exploring language as a tool for amplifying and challenging the unique perspectives that body-based art can offer. When she’s not dancing or writing, she also works as a Creative Producer for The Nocturnists podcast, teaches cooking, and science, and organizes community arts events. www.mollyrosewilliams.com

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Related posts:

Gestures and Dreams at Queer Date Night

 

5 Questions for Julie Crothers

Julie Crothers. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Last week, I got to connect with Bay Area artist Julie Crothers. Julie is an incredible performer, choreographer, and teaching artist. Her solo show - Are You There God? It's me, Jules - premieres at Noh Space in San Francisco this Friday and Saturday, April 15 and 16, at 7pm. Tickets here.

Today on the blog, Julie shares a bit about her latest project.

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Can you offer the elevator pitch about your show?

Are You There God? It’s me, Jules is a rambunctious, cheeky, and sweetly irreverent one-woman show incorporating dance, theater, story-telling, and song. Inspired by my experience growing up in a conservative Church of Christ church Tennessee and the many summers spent at "Jesus Ballet Camp," Are You There God? It’s me, Jules is a coming-out story of sorts and a grand celebration of all things bright, bold, and gay. 

Who are solo artists who have inspired and impressed you over the years with the solo format (dancers or other artists)?

Oooh fun! I love solos so much. It’s easy to find things I appreciate and admire within them. I’m a sucker for personal narrative and have been moved and inspired by Lida Winfield, Nora Sharp, and Hannah Gadsby (watch “Nanette” on Netflix), among others. I admire the intentionality and conviction of movement in solos by Randee Paufve and Bobbi Jene Smith. Also April Joy, aka @aprilajoy, one of many brilliant ex-vangelicals I follow on TikTok, is a big inspiration for this piece and source of endless laughs. 

Can you share a little window into the dancing? Set material? Improvised?

This show is pretty much equal parts dancing and speaking. There’s a script and there are some “set” dance phrases. How well I stick to that script and those phrases? We will see! So it’s both set and improvised, or responsive. I’ll introduce a couple different characters and each has a distinct movement style and story they want to tell you. Within each of these characters’ worlds, there’s a lot of wiggle room about exactly what they say and what they dance, but there are limits as I want to stay true to who they are and the prompts that drive their scenes. Since it’s just me on stage, I get to make a lot of spur of the moment choices about how I move and what I say, and that’s one of the many reasons why I love doing solo work. 

Was there a seed of an idea for the show, or did you see several of your projects start to look and feel like a set/a grouping?

There was a seed! I didn’t even know I had planted it, but it suddenly sprouted and I was like, “OKAY! Don’t know where that came from but I’ll take it!” I spent the beginning of 2021 in residence at Earthdance in MA, and after two weeks of spending many aimless hours in the studio not sure what I was working on, I was hit hard by a brand new idea that I couldn’t ignore. It was so clear! So I ran with it, and here we are. When I look back on it, I can see how the seed had been growing for many months prior. A lot of things I had been processing in the year or so prior were finally finding their home in me and were ready and wanting to show up a little more boldly. This work is definitely new and is pushing me as a performer in exciting and challenging ways. 

On the topic of performance as a shared experience: 

A couple weeks ago I was watching a friend improvise during a performance. It was an emotional solo about love n’ stuff but as I watched her move, I saw release and I saw trust and I saw heart and I smiled the whole time. The whole time. Like so cheesy. I couldn’t help it. My cheeks were literally sore afterward. She did that, she gave me sore cheeks. And that’s what I want to do too. I want to move audiences, even just a little, even for just a moment, whether it's their heart strings or their facial muscles. I want to open my doors, to show my true self, and to offer limbs and ledges for anyone witnessing to latch on to, to rest on, to settle into. Come into my world. We can be together in this world. You witnessing me, me responding to you, perhaps us both walking away from the experience a little different, a little more soft, a little more here. 

Graphic design by Abigail Hosein.

One Good Quote: "Things I Don't Tell You" with Peiling Kao Dances

In Fall 2017, Life as a Modern Dancer launched a new concept for post-performance discussion and writing. The goals are multi-fold:

• What are new ways to invite post-performance writing (since so few publications now print dance reviews, and there are fewer and fewer dance critics in the United States)?
• How can choreographers hear and read more from audience members about their impressions and experiences of dance events?
• Can we offer new mechanisms for choreographers to gather language about their work, to further their work and to promote their work? 

The premise is simple. If you experienced "Things I Don't Tell You" with Peiling Kao Dances February 25-27, 2022, please take a few minutes to leave a comment. Write down images, impressions, appreciations, and questions from the performance. These can be words, phrases, or a few sentences. 

We thank you for your time, support, and thoughtfulness. Here's to more dialogue, more reflection, and more writing on the dance performance experience. As choreographer Mariah Steele noted, we are "democratizing dance criticism."

-----------

One Good Quote: "Things I Don't Tell You" with Peiling Kao Dances

In Fall 2017, Life as a Modern Dancer launched a new concept for post-performance discussion and writing. The goals are multi-fold:

• What are new ways to invite post-performance writing (since so few publications now print dance reviews, and there are fewer and fewer dance critics in the United States)?
• How can choreographers hear and read more from audience members about their impressions and experiences of dance events?
• Can we offer new mechanisms for choreographers to gather language about their work, to further their work and to promote their work? 

The premise is simple. If you experienced "Things I Don't Tell You" with Peiling Kao Dances February 25-27, 2022, please take a few minutes to leave a comment. Write down images, impressions, appreciations, and questions from the performance. These can be words, phrases, or a few sentences. 

We thank you for your time, support, and thoughtfulness. Here's to more dialogue, more reflection, and more writing on the dance performance experience. As choreographer Mariah Steele noted, we are "democratizing dance criticism."

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Modern Dance Fan Club: RAWdance’s CONCEPT series: 28

 

Modern Dance Fan Club: RAWdance’s CONCEPT series: 28

By Jill Randall

I had the opportunity to interview RAWdance co-directors Katerina Wong, Wendy Rein, and Ryan T. Smith a few weeks ago, so I was primed, prepped, and excited to see the CONCEPT series in person on Saturday, March 26th. I am highly impressed and appreciative of RAWdance’s longevity with the series - 15 years strong - and the key idea behind it all - a regular platform for works in progress. Fun, playful, unapologetic sharing of new ideas and first sketches. The CONCEPT series brings “the dream of the audience” into the artmaking process and has organized nearly 30 iterations bringing together dancemakers and dance enthusiasts alike.

Paralleling the CONCEPT series premise - of a space with breathing room for new ideas and experimentation - I also will offer some initial ideas and first drafts as my written response to seeing and feeling CONCEPT series: 28.

Photograph/Poem/Paragraph

Here, I will share 3 ideas around each of the 7 dances on the bill:

• First, photographer Hillary Goidell captured the entire show. I am grateful to share an image for each dance. 
• Second, inspired by the haiku form (3 lines, with 5-7-5 syllables…), I would like to offer tiny notes about each dance in poetic form. I love this format (i.e. poetry), as it is a cousin to modern dance in its abstraction and phrasing.
• Last, I will share a paragraph or two of ideas percolating post-performance.

 

Corey Michael Brady. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

From Here (Corey Michael Brady)

Draws us in, calm
Multi-sided, sculptural 
Strong embodiment

Corey Michael Brady started off the evening with a solo. The choreography worked well with the two-sided audience seating. Brady’s movements - whether seen from the front or back - are sculptural and 3-dimensional. He is calm and so strongly present. The offering of a solo - created by an artist and performed by the artist themself - is always a humble and vulnerable offering. Brady stirs the energy of the room as the evening begins and invites us to watch, settle in, and delight in the whole body in motion before us in real time.

 

Alex Carrington (l) and Chelsea Reichert (r).
Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Four by Four (Emily Hansel)

Still dancing with masks
Yet coming back together
Improvised or set?

Next up - Emily Hansel offers a quartet. The dancers keep their masks on, so I settle back into this reality - presence but preservation. The two duet sections are quite stunning in their intricacy and how they move together. I wonder if the choreography is set or is this section improvised? I look forward to seeing Hansel’s full length work in a few months. CONCEPT series fulfills its mission here - offering a platform for a work in progress, and connecting with the audience so they are excited to see the full idea in a few months’ time.

 

Molly Rose-Williams. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

This Might Be Hard to Believe (Molly Rose-Williams)

A letter, story
Then sorrow cracking open
Feeling weight, weighted

Molly Rose-Williams, a compelling solo artist, invites us into her latest exploration of movement and text. The recorded words quickly take us down a path of sorrow - a story of a lost sibling (miscarriage?) and souls, memories, and daydreams. Rose-Williams frequently uses humor as a key component of her work, so it takes me a few minutes to shift expectations and open my heart to a darker piece in front of me. I feel, hear, and see a story of wondering. And at the same time, I embrace the real-time experience of this live performance and the focused attention of the crowd of dance lovers. A generative tension with past and present.

 

Sawako Gannon (kneeling) and Kelly Del Rosario (standing). Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Bibo no Aozora (Sawako Gannon)

With two energies
One person - two personas?
One cool, one vibrant

Sawako Gannon and Kelly Del Rosario offer one of the duets on the bill. Again maskless, I am poised and eager to see this duo relationship unfold for us in the work. I am most curious about the energetic choices for the two dancers. Del Rosario moves with vibrancy and animation. Gannon moves with a cooler tone. The story in my head explores a solo figure who has two different personas at play. Are these personas at odds with one another?

 

The Major S (Saharla Vetsch). Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Reverberation (The Major S)

With music splices
There are changing qualities
Solo confidence

The title "Reverberation" aptly expresses the nature of The Major S's playful, short solo with a mashup of music selections. I delight with each change of music and how Vetsch transitions into a variety of ways of moving. She is agile and a stunning mover to experience. Like Brady’s first solo of the night, I harken back to the simplicity and power of the solo performance form. To have a soloist share their current musings, fully present, in a room full of folks…I am grateful for the offering and vulnerable act of performing your own solo to be witnessed and taken in.

 

Katerina Wong (foreground) and Angela Wu (far right).
Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Begin Again (Katerina Wong)

Make paper airplanes
An invitation to throw
Finding your footing

As an interactive audience experience, we are invited to write on a piece of paper (the prompt I no longer remember), make a paper airplane, and launch it towards Wong as she dances. Maybe our gesture of the airplanes towards Katerina is the symbolic act for dodging so much, and at the same time, standing on one leg, traveling through space, and moving onward. In addition to the paper airplanes, "Begin Again" had numerous elements at play, including live music and storytelling. I look forward to seeing "Begin Again" settle into its life in the coming months.

 

Wendy Rein (in air) and Ryan T. Smith (standing). Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Point of Connection (Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith)

Duet in orange
Touch, familiarity
Bodies soar with lifts

The evening concluded with a duet with RAWdance co-directors Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein, two longtime collaborators. They wear outfits of bright orange, though not identical outfits. Maskless, you immediately see and feel two bodies so familiar with each other moving in close proximity, touching, lifting, and moving with great ease, comfort, and trust. 

This piece stirs up emotions for me, and I get a bit choked up. The act of this dance symbolizes so much for me. The orange attire speaks to me and affirms, “Yes to dancing. Yes to artmaking. Yes to touch and trust and physicality. Yes to exhaling and feeling our feet on this dance floor. Yes to what movement shows us and teaches us and crystallizes for us, movers and viewers alike.”

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Gratitude to the producers of this event, to the choreographers and performers, and to my fellow audience members. March 26th at the CONCEPT series was a delightful shared time together about the body in motion in real time, utilizing vulnerability, bravery, and tenacity to share seedlings of ideas. Thank you.

Jill Randall is the founder of Life as a Modern Dancer and the artistic director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, CA. www.jillrandalldance.com

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Related posts:

An Enduring Idea: 15 Years of RAWdance’s CONCEPT series

Modern Dance Fan Club: Funsch Dance Experience in "EPOCH"

 

David Herrera Performance Company Ignites Language in “The Tip of My Tongue”

Photo by Lara Kaur. Dancers pictured (L to R) - Katie Florez, Nicole Maimon, Olivia Caldeira Holston, Erik Debono, and Sawako Gannon.

David Herrera Performance Company Ignites Language in “The Tip of My Tongue”

By Garth Grimball

Language shapes reality. Living across languages intensifies the power of the spoken word. For David Herrera, artistic director of David Herrera Performance Company, language was formative in his experience growing up as a child of immigrants.

The Tip of My Tongue, premiering this weekend at Z Space, opens with Herrera sharing a story of his past. He and his sister would “argue and fight. Who would translate for my parents? I was an adult as the same time I was a child.” This anecdote foretells the movement language and structure of the dance. Choreographed in collaboration with Antoine Hunter (Director of Urban Jazz Dance Company) and the six dancers, Herrera wants the work to render the non-linear bilingual experience of immigrants. “Everything is chopped up. You get pieces of things,” said Herrera.

The dancers, representing “multi-lingual, bi-lingual, minority, and immigrant communities,” contributed their own stories of language and identity. Their recorded stories weave into Riley Nicholson’s sound score. The score evolves from non-verbal to verbal. Choral harmonies, chants, and vowel sounds spoken in multiple idioms create a polyphony of the human voice.

At a recent rehearsal Nicole Maimon questioned “where to find listening in your body” while performing in The Tip of My Tongue. The choreography shows how language changes but isn’t fragile. Dancers shift weight, see each other, listen with limbs, but are rarely off-balance. 

As a guest choreographer Hunter brings his professional expertise and personal experience to the project. Hunter's own experience being a member of the Deaf community adds another vital layer to the themes of the work. American Sign Language is expressed within The Tip of My Tongue; incorporating ASL opened up dancer Erik Debono to a greater “aspect of clarity in the body that translates well into all communication.”

Viral videos of people of color being attacked for speaking their native languages inspired Herrera to think about how the body records moments of aggression. “Where does that live in your body? Where is the fire? How does it cool?” he asked. In The Tip of My Tongue Herrera and collaborators dance answers as complex as translation and as straightforward as a slogan.

The Tip of My Tongue at Z Space, March 31 - April 2. Tickets here.

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the Reference Desk podcast and is the co-director of Wax Poet(s) performance collective.

 

An Enduring Idea: 15 Years of RAWdance’s CONCEPT series

CONCEPT Series 28 artists. Photo credits: (L to R) by Margo Moritz, Yasmina Mattison, RJ Muna, Robbie Sweeny, Emily Hansel, and Chani Bockwinkel.

An Enduring Idea: 15 Years of RAWdance’s CONCEPT series

By Jill Randall

The other day, I had the pleasure of checking in with RAWdance co-directors Katerina (Katie) Wong, Wendy Rein, and Ryan Smith over Zoom. In addition, co-curator Megan Kurashige has also added ideas here about the series. Congrats to this artistic team for the longevity of the CONCEPT series and for relaunching it post-pandemic. 

Please join in this coming weekend (March 26 and 27) in person at the Green Room in San Francisco to experience seven works by RAWdance, The Major S, Corey Michael Brady, Emily Hansel, Sawako Gannon, and Molly Rose-Williams. 

Get your tickets here.

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Jill Randall: I wanted to start off with - off the cuff and off the heart - what are three words or phrases to describe the CONCEPT series?

Wendy Rein: I think all of us would say welcoming.

Katie Wong: Celebratory was one of the words that came to mind. Thinking about both our 15th anniversary and being back in the space after not gathering for so long.

Then, familiar, yet different. A familiar space together. Like putting on those cozy pajamas. The things that I know and feel comfortable in. And yet, we have been through so much since we last gathered in the Green Room together. 

Ryan Smith: My words were: laid back, close, and community. Laid back - trying to make a space for dance that turned away from some of the formality of proscenium theaters. Close - literally close, in physical proximity. And community - we play host. We engage, we make sure people have what they need, we schmooze. We get to know the people. I like that side of community building. 

Jill: What was the seed or initial inspiration 15 years ago to start the CONCEPT series?

Wendy: We had a bunch of pieces we had only been able to perform once. Like one night, at a festival, or one weekend. 

We wanted to create an outlet to revisit them, and rework them. And if we were in this boat, there had to be others in this same boat. So we thought we would create a low stakes platform to revisit work or to generate new material, and to get to feel connected to an audience. 

Ryan: The name CONCEPT series was more rooted in the desire to free ourselves from having to make a work of a certain caliber. “Have a concept…run with it. That is enough.” A simple idea. Even if you only have two minutes. Something to test in front of an audience. We were trying to find a way to bring live audience into our process more. 

To experience being in performance mode, sooner. 

Wendy: It was a one off, and went well. So we thought we would do it again. 

Jill: What are the venues you have used over the years?

Ryan: It started at the James Howell Studio, which was then sold and renamed 66 Sanchez. At that point, it was a yoga studio. The bonus was, it was a half block from our house. Two dancers lived there and managed the space. It had a dance vibe to it. Back in the day, the owner was affiliated with the Joffrey. It had an amazing dance history many did not know about. It was an intimate space. 

Wendy: In the original series, the audience moved their chairs based on each piece. I miss that element. It made it participatory in that way. 

Ryan: We then did a handful at the Joe Goode Annex. But we wanted to find a place where dance is not usually found. Creating a way for dancers to have access to a space that usually is associated with weddings and galas and not informal, casual dance shows. So we then started using the Green Room at the SF War Memorial.

It is a bit of a high/low mix. We like doing things like serve cookies and coffee in a fancy, elegant ballroom.

Jill: Can you talk a bit about the curation of it? One - you want to show your own work, and that's a very clear choice. But how are you finding people and giving people a chance? Plus, also considering this call now to make as much as possible a public, open process. Thoughts on the curation of it?

Ryan: I also want to acknowledge that Megan Kurashige is a co-curator and has been the CONCEPT series Coordinator for a few years now too.

Katie: Yes, that's perfect, because that was my first thought in talking about this. Our most recent iteration of how we are going about our curatorial practices, which are ever evolving, is with the lenses and perspectives that you shared, Jill. It's definitely top of mind for us.

This is in conjunction with how we've been managing our fellowship process. Those have felt parallel in many ways, at least from our conversations together as a co-leadership team. It's sort of walking that line between maintaining relationships, relationship-building, and making it feel like the opportunity is not just purely transactional. So, in getting to know one another, how can we help you in this moment, and what can we do moving forward?

We’ve been thinking and reflecting about what alternative models look like. We appreciate the benefits of open application-based opportunities while acknowledging that there is unpaid labor in that general expectation. Personally it’s an ongoing conversation about balancing those different elements, trying, getting feedback, and making improvements for the future. Our primary aim is to maintain the energy and intention of the CONCEPT series and make sure it serves the artists the most and the best it can. Allowing them to focus their energy on the artmaking, and not just on all of the extras. At this moment that might look like a concentric circle design, with RAWdance’s staff (including Megan and our wonderful new Production/Program Manager Twyla Malchow-Hay), company artists, past CONCEPT series guests, and so on. A ripple effect idea. 

Wendy: We have always been open to people who just approach us too. Because, we are still finite in number, even with those concentric circles, so just having that chance to be introduced to new folks or some folks that we know but didn’t know were making work. That is always super exciting. 

Ryan: We do have a list. But the list is quite long, and that is the biggest challenge. Sometimes it takes a few rounds to ask someone and that it works out. 

There are two curatorial viewpoints. One - wanting to make sure we are broadening people’s perspectives of what contemporary dance is and who is participating and making it. There is a desire to broaden a diversity of viewpoints, backgrounds, and styles.

We very explicitly believe in asking an artist and not asking for a work. What feels relevant at that time. And sometimes you don’t get the work you are expecting! That’s the best. 

Katie: That’s the point.

Ryan: CONCEPT works best when an artist is in process.

Megan: The thing that stands out to me about the curation of CONCEPT is the deep care that the entire team has for the community. When I first started working on CONCEPT, I was really struck by how Ryan, Wendy, and Katie are all so familiar with so many artists and their work. And they are all curious about artists who they don’t know, especially those who are younger or at earlier stages in their choreographic trajectory. That continual interest and engagement is inspiring to me. Sometimes familiarity can breed jadedness and harden or diminish the circles of people you engage with. The care and curiosity with which the team approaches curation feels like a big statement of belief in dance as an artform and the people—both artists and audience—who are part of it.

Jill: I had one more question. Why live art now, in 2022?

Katie: I love this question. A return to our personhood, our full 3-D selves. I feel that desire intensely. Returning to this basic way of gathering, and remembering the value, truth, and connection that comes from something we’ve been doing for so long as a species. And again, returning to that familiar sense of togetherness, while still acknowledging how different we are.

Wendy: I love that answer, at the crux of it all. 

Ryan: The two things for me, returning to the series, are very personal. My connection to community, and the why, are becoming more and more distant with time. I am looking forward to engaging in dialogue and seeing faces instead of little faces on a screen. I am very sensitive to the energy in the room with the CONCEPT series. It is a magical thing. I miss that, and I know that I feed off of that.

Another part of that, is that we have been lucky to continue an artistic practice. But making is weird still, right now. I am hoping that the series will give us some more freedom and fine tune some muscles as we dig in deeper, again.

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Related posts:

RAWdance’s Portal into (Un)familiar Space

Virtual Healing with RAWdance

“Still Dancing”: The Dancers of RAWdance on Working on “The Healer” in the Age of Quarantine

One Good Quote: "The Healer" with RAWdance

With Appreciation and Admiration: A Few Musings on "Utopia"

 

 

Zaccho Dance Theatre’s "Love, a state of grace": aerial, ethereal, magical

Zaccho Dance Theatre aerialist Ciarra D’Onofrio  at Grace Cathedral. Photo courtesy of Zaccho Dance Theatre.

 

Zaccho Dance Theatre’s Love, a state of grace: aerial, ethereal, magical

By Sima Belmar

I couldn’t get the word “empanada” out of my head. I was lying on Mary Armentrout’s Feldenkrais table in Berkeley and the word kept circling round and round as she gently adjusted my whacked out nervous system. When I mentioned this strange fixation on empanadas, Mary asked if I’d ever been to the empanada place in the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I hadn’t but I took it as a sign.

I picked up my plus-one in Downtown Oakland and we made it over the Bay Bridge in record time, enough time to warrant a stop at El Porteño for empanadas. An easy double-park and an indecisive group of people in line meant two hot empanadas—one mushroom, one swiss chard—delivered to my car in a mere moment. A moment of grace.

From the Ferry Building, we drove to the cathedral. We parked in the garage across from a Rolls Royce occupying a bishop’s spot. Vescovo is the beautiful word for bishop in Italian and we chanted it as we tripped up ramps and steps to the cathedral doors where we were met by kind folks who checked our vaccination cards and who couldn’t find the press list but trusted us that we were legit. After a brief subterranean labyrinthine escapade to find the bathrooms, we emerged, just in time for the start of Zaccho Dance Theatre’s Love, a state of grace.

The space is enormous, so although there was a nice crowd (I can’t say exactly how many people were there; I’m terrible with those sorts of estimates), there was ample room to maintain social distance and everyone was masked. I’ve been to a few live performances since March 2020, but this one, thanks to French Gothic spaciousness, felt by far the safest.

Three dancers in Joan Raymond’s jewel-toned costumes that echoed the cathedral’s stained-glass windows moved through the spectators to meet in the nave, emptied of its pews. The meeting was brief; slowly (but not Butoh slowly), Suzanne Gallo walked toward a bench swing; Ciarra D’Onofrio toward a ladder bent at odd angles (designed by Wayne Campbell), positioned at the center of the labyrinth, and rising over 90 feet, disappearing as if to heaven itself; and Nina Sawant to the North Transept, an arm of the cruciform, where a sculpture in the shape of an hourglass (designed by Sean Riley) stands.

Zaccho’s artistic director Joanna Haigood chose to work with the affordances of the space, physical and spiritual. Gallo, seated on the swing, rises 70 feet at the speed of a death march before the rigging lets go, catapulting her toward the altar. I knew this would happen (what else can a pendulum do but swing?) but, still, my breath caught in my throat. What I didn’t expect, because I was still marveling at the speed and height of Gallo’s soaring, was the moment when she released herself from the swing and flew-floated alone. And this is just what I needed: a sense of soaring, of quietude, of holy ecstasy.

Because the audience is invited to explore the space at any point during the performance, and because you can’t look at two places at once, I didn’t see D’Onofrio make quiet progress up the ladder. Meandering alone toward the altar, I snuck peeks: I would look and she’d be a third of the way up, then three-quarters until, suddenly, she was gone. A choreographic assumption.

My gaze had been pulled away in the direction of Sawant revolving around the hourglass “seated” in lotus position, a circling meditation. When Sawant’s feet would connect with the rim of the sculpture, her body leaning impossibly far from the edge, I felt that despite the supernatural, goddess-like, gravity-defying feel of the work, the message was that we are tethered—to the ground, to ideas and identities, and most importantly, to each other. Walter Kitundu’s score, which incorporated recorded and live elements (the cathedral’s mammoth pipe organ was played by Christopher Keady), had been unobtrusively supporting the ethereal proceedings until it climaxed with a single bone-rattling chord. The sound, familiar to church-goers and early-horror-film-watchers alike, brought the dancers down to earth and gave the rest of us mere mortals wings.

After a quick pass around the space, and a moment to linger in front of a chapel lit in the colors of the rainbow flag, my plus-one and I stood on the cathedral steps and talked about that moment of release when Gallo soared. We ran into a friend who was with her mom on their way into the cathedral. We were all so happy to be together on a beautiful, unseasonably warm day, with live performance back in all its glory, in all its grace.

I’m not a religious person but I’m a sucker for majesty, for over-the-top glory. We’ve been living in a treacherous mundanity. I felt blessed to be among bodies aiming higher.  

Love, a state of grace, like the labyrinth on which it begins, invites meditation. The program includes “Rooted in Love,” a series of rituals and meditations written by artist-theologians Yohana Junker and Cláudio Carvalhaes. Had I been able to stay for all three performance cycles, I may have accepted this invitation to participate more actively. You can still catch Love, a state of grace on Thursday, February 17, 1-4pm, and Friday, February 18, 7-10pm, and if you do, try to carve out some time to engage with Junker’s and Carvalhaes’ invocations and ruminations. Ponder Haigood’s questions about how to cultivate love as a state of grace. Read through the dozens of reflections on love offered by members of Haigood’s community. Or just bear witness to the dancers as they call forth love. Get your tickets here.

Zaccho Dance Theatre aerialist Helen Wicks at Grace Cathedral. Photo courtesy of Zaccho Dance Theatre.

Sima Belmar is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, and the host of the ODC podcast Dance Cast.