Lynn and I have been back in the studio… Just “jamming” right now. Doing a bit of barre together, then she teaches me some new class excercises and combinations she has been creating…which feels great to be told what to do a bit! This week we did a pretty long imrov together to some Brahams mostly (Sonatos for Cello and piano Opp. 38, 99 and 108… and some work by James Newton Howard). Felt AWESOME to just move that BIG and free! Can’t believe we will be in studio with new company members in a few weeks re-staging “Pelleas” and getting “Abravanel” back up and running (we just booked a gig at Ethel Walker School in CT for November) and “Dig” excerpts ready for DanceNow Festival at DTW. Oh and somewhere in that I am starting a new piece for the company that we are trying to have the Artemis Chamber Ensemble play live for!!! So so excited.
And, I have yet to see a copy, but I hear there is a little mention of us in Dance Spirit Magazine for September. Page 150 to be exact!
Lots of really great stuff… But for the 3 hours in the studio, it sure did feel good to forget about running a company and remember where this whole thing started… Just dancing in a studio with Lynn…
SYREN held its first open call last month at City Center. It was alot of fun, we taught phrasework from “Abravanel” and “Dig” as well leading some improvisation. Lynn and I met a TON of really talented dancers. We were blown away by ther talent and joked about how we need to start making work for 100 people!
As it stands, we only needed five! After quite the week of auditions and callbacks, we hired the lovely and talented Aleyse Bradford, Heidi D’Alessandro, Chanelle Lagacé, Brigitte Mitchell, and the very handsome Quincy Junor.
We are really excited to get back into the studio! The first thing on the calendar is the Dancenow NYC festival. We are performing excerpts of “Dig” at DTW, so the company will be back in the studio beginning in September. That gives Lynn and I some more time to keep going with these grant deadlines and foundation proposals. Its a tough nut to crack… funding from the city and state. But with the help of some outstanding feedback from a few different sources, we are hoping that this is the year we break though a bit more from a grant perspective.
We are thrilled to begin our residency next month awarded by DTW. The Outer Space Grant allows us to rehearse in Long Island City’s beautiful Greenspace studio for a generous number of hours for free. WAHOO!!!
Pentacle also approached us recently about representation in their Gallery, which is really great for the company. More visibility and more possibility…
One step at a time.. For the moment we are just thrilled with the new talented dancers on board for the journey!
Singular Sensation, Yasmeen’s latest work, is premiering this week in Tel Aviv. Photo by Tamar Lamm.
A video clip of Yasmeen Godder’s Sudden Birds.
If you’re part of the New York dance scene, you’ve probably stepped through some of the same doors as Yasmeen Godder. Born in Israel and raised in Jerusalem until age 11, Yasmeen moved to the U.S. with her family, attended the High School of the Performing Arts in New York City, studied at Movement Research and the Klein School, and received her undergraduate degree from NYU’s Tisch School. The Kitchen, DTW, and Dancing in the Streets have all commissioned work from her, and she was awarded a Bessie in 2001 for I Feel Funny Today.
If you’re part of the Israeli dance scene, you’ve undoubtedly felt Yasmeen’s influence and quite possibly crossed paths with her. I had heard of Yasmeen prior to arriving in Israel because of her activities in the U.S. and the acclaim which has greeted her works both in the states and Europe, and as soon as I arrived in Israel, I began to realize the impact she has made in her home country. Her name frequently came up in conversations about both choreographers and teachers, and many people urged me to see her work and take her class. So it was that I ventured down to Yafo to take technique at her studio, attended a performance there of Sudden Birds (see the video above), and went to a performance of I’m Mean, I Am at the Suzanne Dellal Center.
Months later, I’m not surprised that I heard so much buzz about Yasmeen. I found Yasmeen’s classes to be quite challenging and enormously helpful in their specificity, especially as I attempt to widen my body’s range and move with less muscular effort. She welcomes students’ reflections in class and presents her own ideas with clarity and details that enable me to adjust my mindset and body to a more unfamiliar technical framework. I also found Yasmeen’s choreography to be as challenging as her classes, and refreshingly so. Since my earliest research on the socially conscious New Dance Group, I have always been attracted to choreographers who examine social issues, but while many choreographers try to touch such subject matter, it is all too easy for their investigations to remain superficial and cursory. Not so with Yasmeen. She doesn’t shy away from difficult topics, and regardless of the subject at hand, she isn’t afraid to display even the most disturbing findings from her creative process onstage. It’s a tribute to her artistic integrity that at the second performance of Singular Sensation at Suzanne Dellal on Friday, the packed audience was peppered with dancers, choreographers, artists in other disciplines, and committed dance enthusiasts who were eager to see her latest work. The five dancers’ exploration of sensation was surreal at times - with green slime oozing down dancers’ bodies and a nightmarish section in which four dancers covered the fifth performer’s head in pantyhose and saran wrap, shoved oranges into his hands for squeezing, and pulled him into splits over a jello mold - but the applause filling the theater at the work’s conclusion was very, very real.
Back in April, Yasmeen sat down with me after a rehearsal so that we could chat a bit about her work. As in most of these conversations, we started at the beginning, talking about Yasmeen’s pathway from ballet and Graham technique through to her investigations of Klein technique, more broadly labeled release classes, improvisation, and yoga. Yasmeen had prefaced some of her classes with a disclaimer that she did not teach a particular technique, and so we talked at length about the various influences on her approach to movement. Klein features prominently in this array of influences, with its emphasis on releasing the exterior muscles and finding the bones; from Yasmeen’s exposure to this and other classes in the release spectrum, she also developed her strong connection to the floor, deep trust in space, and ability to use less effort. Yet Yasmeen also incorporates approaches that are, in some ways, at odds with the typical release practice and aesthetic. She can be shape-based at times, and through both her own process of questioning and her collaboration with a dramaturge, she ventures into a world which is more emotional and (for lack of a better word - this is admittedly inexact) theatrical. Yasmeen also discussed yoga’s impact on her training, which is evident in her use of particular sequences and stretches in the classes she teaches, and she further noted that the combination of physical, mental, and emotional aspects within yoga meshes with her own creative process and development of movement for choreographic works.
Speaking of choreographic works, we spent some time discussing one of Yasmeen’s dances which had a particularly powerful impact on me. Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder was made during the second intifada, and when I screened it on DVD in the autumn, it kept me up all night thinking and writing. I had wondered if I would see any dances here which tackled the Israeli-Arab conflict head-on, and I have found remarkably few either on stage this season or on video from previous years. Thus Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder stood out for me not only because of the strength of the choreography and its performance but also because of the subject matter. Surrounded by images in the news media in 2004, Yasmeen felt that she simply had to deal with what was happening in her country, and she assembled a series of photographs - a “catalog” of images - as a starting point. Dancers were instructed to “be” the photograph, without political or emotional comment, and each artist worked with a few photographs so that they switched roles: male, female, young, old, wounded, able, civilian, soldier. In this way, the boundaries between “victim” and “perpetrator” become blurred, just as these roles aren’t always clear or constant in the actual events of the situation here. I had recognized this particular blurring upon watching the piece, but listening to Yasmeen recount the choreographic process, my mind reached beyond the dancers’ appearances - their genders and ages - and I realized even more how complex and intense this exploration must have been.
Yasmeen continued to talk about images of war and images of heroes, raising questions both about how these subjects are photographed and how people look at and identify with these pictures; Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, she said, delved into many of the issues which were at the heart of Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder. We also discussed the response of audiences, which varied based on geographical location (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and cities abroad) as well as performance space (more intimate settings versus traditional proscenium stages which create a stronger division between the action onstage and the spectators in the house). Some Israelis didn’t perceive Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder as being about the situation here, whereas outside of the country - of course billed as a work by an Israeli choreographer - the dance was almost uniformly viewed as a piece concerning the Israeli-Palestinian situation. While audience members in any country are subject to the flood of war images these days, though, the Israeli crowds contained people who were directly connected to the dance’s source material including survivors of suicide bombings. As Yasmeen recounted one Israeli woman’s emotional response to the work, I couldn’t help thinking of how a woman mourning her young son tearfully approached Martha Graham after a performance of her signature solo, Lamentation. Like Graham before her, Yasmeen Godder knows that she may move members of the audience with her dances - and in my experience, she moves many viewers with her honest, probing work.
Read my initial response, Dancing through the Intifada, to Strawberry Cream and Gunpowderhere at my own blog.
Tonight I am going to see Ashley Byler’s Champions of Dance: Make Millions! at Dance Theater Workshop. Since last fall Ashley has been in creative residency at DTW as part of their STUDIO SERIES. The residency consists of a 100 studio hours culminating in a final showing.
Tickets for tonight and tomorrow are sold out though I have one extra ticket if someone would like to accompany me this evening. dance_plan at yahoo dot com. The showing starts at DTW’s rehearsal studio at 7:30. Act now, this dance is a hot commodity.
I have had the ongoing pleasure of visiting rehearsals during the process of making this dance. I have learned much from these visits about directing dancers and the elusive art of how one actually makes a dance. This is something that confuses me to no end and to which the Bylerian science provides many answers.
The Science
Start with dancers. Caitlin Koch, Jeremy Pheifer, Sarah A. O. Rosner, Elizabeth Schafer, Lynne Schlesinger-Rudeman and Enrico Wey. These are your subjects. Love them and rule them.
Understand that a dance consists of real human beings. Step back motion capture, we cannot extract the dance from the dancer. This is a social science. Cultivate interactions between subjects.
Communicate by any means necessary. Use sound. Stron Softi. Use video. Give descriptions or rules for improvisatory trials. As in cybernetics, communication is control so be expressive to your subjects.
Curate, harvest and distill movements and qualities. Take what you like and burn the rest. Be the master of your dance. You are caesar so fill out every cranny in your aesthetic universe.
Make their organs move. This means being funny and sexy. Dont be afraid to show a little skin or body hair (respectively).
I cant wait for tonight when everybody turns up and the dancers turn on. I have lots of favorite parts in this dance and I don’t care if thats oxymoronic. Caity’s solo, Lynne’s monologue and when Sarah goons on Jeremy are tops. Other jewels are when Enrico gets kicked in the stomach and when Elizabeth lifts her leg.
You too may be a champion of dance if you act now for the only ticket left on the entire planet.
