Oberon's Glade

Tag: Alexis Convento

  • The Current Sessions Volume V, Issue II

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    Sunday August 23rd, 2015 – I like everything about the CURRENT SESSIONS: I like the idea, I like the venue, I like like the relaxed yet attentive audience…and I’ve liked just about every work and dancer I’ve ever seen there. Alexis Convento and Allison Jones continue to put together strong programs and to offer their audience a chance to experience the work of new and mid-career choreographers in an intimate setting, with first-class lighting and sound.

    In their presentations, the CURRENT SESSIONS particularly like to welcome mixed-media danceworks, and he first half of tonight’s program featured three such pieces, if one includes the lighting effects of the Niall Jones work. After the interval, pure dance took over. It was an evening of contrasting moods, with some very impressive individual performances.

    In the opening work, Ashley Robicheaux & Artists offered Spaces Part II: “We, two”. My fascination with this piece began even before the dancing started, as Kane Mathis appeared and began to play his 21-string Mandinka harp. Mr. Mathis was within arm’s reach of me as he played, producing other-worldly sounds. A film commences, showing closeups of the hands and eyes of the two dancers – Ashley Robicheaux and Holly Sass. The two women emerge from the shadows, wary and seeking. They perform a mirror-image duet which evolves into intense partnering. One lifts and twirls the other; an emotional spasm is quietened. They rush about; an eventual embrace leads to the renewal of intense struggle. Passions ebb and flow, and in the end one girl pulls the other offstage as the music fades. 

    Joe Monteleone//Monteleone Dance‘s MK Ultra Sound derives its inspiration from Project MK Ultra, a covert CIA project involving mind control using psychotropic drugs which ran from 1953 til 1973. In the dancework, Mr. Monteleone and Shelley White dance a stylized duet against visual projections, including a woman’s face upside down. The soundscape ranges from static with a heavy beat, thru spoken ‘instructions’, fragments of song, the story of the IIlluminati. Complacency settles on the dancers: in a trance, they seem lulled into security. The movement then becomes more agile and expressive, finally calming to the sound of breathing. At last the woman seems to break down. In flickering light and shadows, the couple watch the ultrasound images of a fetus. Fleeting tenderness, then a fade to black. 

    Dancer Noel Genet sets the stage for his solo Solitude and Excess Features, choreographed by guest artist Niall Jones. Wearing trousers and a lace shirt, Mr. Genet first performs a spastic solo in place to the sound of silence. In a mélange of movement, the dancer reclines, rises, collapses, is weighted down, dances in the dark, writhes on the floor, jogs in place, crawls and shimmies, dances with his shadow, and concludes with an oddly graceful solo. Mr. Genet, utterly self-absorbed, gave a compelling performance; his sense of deadly earnest was soon evoking laughter from the audience. This quirky piece seemed at times like improv, but clearly it had all been thoroughly mapped out. The low-key levity of Mr. Genet’s performance sent the audience forth for intermission drinks in a congenial mood.

    A deep throbbing hum heralds the arrival of Jeff Docimo//Isodoc Dance Group for an excerpt from Mr. Docimo’s Cut Crawlers. Clad in black, the five dancers crawl furtively into the space, which they explore with wary curiosity. The piece seems wrapped in shadow, with ominous thunder underscoring the mystery of this lost tribe. Amara Barner’s solo is outstanding, as is Mr. Docimo’s – which has breakdance elements impressively woven in. These two later have a duet, showing off the choreographer’s athleticism. Throughout this work, a sense of structure was amply evident: both in movement and emotional resonance, Cut Crawlers was impressive.

    For her solo Bonjour Tristesse, Marissa Brown//Lone King turns with compelling rightness to the poignant music of Frédéric Chopin. Ms. Brown is seated in a folding chair, her eyes gazing intently at an unoccupied antique armchair across the diagonal from her. As the comely Ms. Brown rises from her reverie, her dancing is contemplatively physical, making excellent use of the space as movement and stillness alternate. At last, overcome by the music, she returns to her seat and to her obsession with the armchair: who had sat there? Where has that person gone? What has the dancer lost in losing that person? A beautiful and resonant work, expressively danced.  

    LoudHoundMovement (guest artist) closed the program with Brendan Duggan’s trio A Rib Where Her Voice Had Been, performed by Matthew Ortner, Holly Sass, and Shelby Terrell. First one woman and then the other vocalize softly. One woman dances a solo whilst the second dances a slow, almost imperceptible waltz with the man. The stage brightens, and to the sound of a big heartbeat motif, the dancers engage in a brisk trio, grasping and eluding one another and sometime lapsing into stand-still plastique. There’s a passage of 2-female partnering, with lifts and carryings; then they speak to each other in sign language as the man reclines. After he awakens, with a breakish solo, the women revert to their soft singing and then all evaporates into silence.

  • CURRENT SESSIONS Volume IV, Issue II

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    Sunday August 24th, 2014 – This was the only performance of the ‘current sessions’ of the CURRENT SESSIONS that I could attend. I dearly wanted to see Colby Damon’s work but that will have to wait for another opportunity. Meanwhile, tonight’s line-up had the range and flair we’ve come to expect from these unique dance programmes. A big round of applause for the SESSIONS‘ co-Artistic Directors Allison Jones (photo at the top) and Alexis Convento for making it happen yet again.

    Housed in a comfortable, intimate venue The Wild Project down on the Lower East Side, the CURRENT SESSIONS bring together works by established and emerging choreographers in mix-and-match programming, getting dance and dancers seen in smoothly-produced and finely-lit (by Mike Inwood) repertory evenings. 

    This particular programme offered three fascinating works for solo female dancers, an entracing film based on the legend of Narcissus, an extended selfie of imaginative wit and energy, and ensemble pieces of visual variety, all served up by inspired and inspiring dancers.

    Jenna Pollack, a hypnotic mover, opened the evening in Nicole van Arx’s solo Wasserflut. Eerie and feral at first, Ms. Pollack expands thru the dance into a compelling presence; her backless black shirt reveals her expressive dorsal musculature. As the piece evolves, Jenna’s shadow becomes an element of the choreography. Fleetingly glimpsed through a sonic haze are fragments of the Schubert song from which the solo draws its title. 

    Enza DePalma // E|N|Z|A offered some bloom in darkness; this work for four dancers employs white chairs outlined in flourescent light. In this abstracted domestic drama revolving around our sense of security in our accustomed living space, the chairs are re-arranged as the dance moves forward. A distorted version of the Barcarolle from CONTES D’HOFFMANN is danced in-sync by the two girls; then the boys dance to a heavy beat. As the dancers re-claim their seats, we expect another vignette but instead a sudden blackout leaves us pondering what we’ve just seen.

    Jay Carlon’s Dance Film Selfie showed this engaging dancer/choreographer in a variety of public settings (starting on an escalator at Sochi) all caught on his own camera. Charmingly mixed, the scene of Jay dancing to “The Man I Love” while waiting for a bus was especially poignant; later he’s ticketed by the police: it’s a misdemeanor to dance in Brooklyn? As the film ends, Jay appears live onstage, sets his camera in the corner, and records another selfie solo to add to his repertoire. When the soundtrack, for solo violin, starts skipping like a broken record, it’s over. Jay’s timely and wonderfully whimsical work was a direct hit with the Wild Project crowd. Check him out here.

    Playback, a duet choreographed by Bryan Arias, was performed by Roya Carreras and Elise Ritzel to music played on an old cassette deck. Evoking both memory and expectation, the duet becomes intimate as the girls move to a collage of Mozart, a mostly incoherent spoken-word passage, and Max Reger. Bryan Arias’ choreography brought out a dark side in his two beautiful dancers.

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    Above: Nico Archambault in the film Stagnant Pool

    Stagnant Pool, a film by Kevin Calero co-choreographed by Wynn Holmes and Nico Archambault, transports us to a mythic land’s end where – inspired by the legend of Narcissus – Mr. Archambault moves like a demi-god across the seascape from which rise other-worldly rock formations. Shards of a broken mirror allure the dancer to his own image as fantastical music of the spheres becomes transportive: the cumulative effect is breath-taking. And then the vision evaporates into a nightmarish coda.

    Allison Jones presented the evening’s second solo work, SUBCYCLE, in which she performed to a Sam Silver composition. Deep sonics anchor the work in which Allison, bathed at first in golden light, moves with an intense sense of plastique gesture, pausing briefly to rest on the floor before brighness floods the space and she revives: an absorbing and definitive performance.

    Choreographer Kat Rhodes has tirned to Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing as inspiration for LOBO (Wolf), an excerpt of whch was shown tonight. A young girl in a homespun dress is roused from her sleep by three other women in prairie denim garb appear in this ritualistic and evocative work: the three women may variously represent men, or wolves. Music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, as well as Mike Inwood’s lighting, enhanced the committed work of the four dancers.

    Andrea Murillo, a dancer I first saw work while she was working with the Martha Graham Dance Company, danced gorgeously in a Troy Ogilvie-choreographed solo Legacy Part One. The power and control of movement which Ms. Murillo developed while working at Graham were amply evident in her inspired peformance tonight. Spoken narrative and a kozmic big beat set the atmosphere as the radiant dancer held sway over the crowd, the lights coming up to a huge brightness as the solo progressed. Andrea’s perfomance was a knockout: I can’t wait to see Part Two!