Dance
Dancing on the Rail: Body Politics
Photograph from Urban Bush Women’s 20th Anniversary. Photograph of Neta Pulvermacher.Bill T. Jones is insistent that he not be labeled an African American choreographer. Conversely, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, with her company Urban Bush Women, creates work out of her experience as an African American woman. Both are performing works this month that complicate dominant ideals and ask larger questions about the politics of both the body and the mind.
Donna Uchizono Company, June 9–12. Donna Uchizono’s latest work, Approaching Green, is all in pink. There is a connection here between the colors. According to the promotional materials, if the human eye is exposed to a lot of pink when in natural light, a person will see green. But the real crux of this work lies in its focus on aging.
June 9–12, Thurs.–Sun., 8:30 pm. Tickets: $15.
Danspace Project St. Mark’s,
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue)
Tel: 212-674-8194,
www.danspaceproject.org
Bill T. Jones, June 16–18. It’s no secret that Jones’s works deal with complicated political, social, and cultural issues. Jones’s latest project takes him to Aaron Davis Hall in Harlem, where he will be for a two-week artist residency. Here he’ll work with audiences in open rehearsals and discussions while creating Blind Date. Like several of Jones’s works, Blind Date is multidisciplinary, using movement, theater, and text. For this work, the short story “Patriotism,” by Yukio Mishima, will be explored, and Jones will use text and dance to ask larger questions about the nature of patriotism. Leave it to Jones to use dance to question larger cultural issues that cannot always be addressed through words alone.
June 16–18, 7:30 pm. Tickets: $35, $30, $25.
Aaron Davis Hall, City College of New York, between West 133rd and 135th Streets on Convent Avenue.
Convent Avenue is one block east of Amsterdam Avenue.
Urban Bush Women, June 21–26. Brooklyn-based Urban Bush Women, dedicated to dance that mines African American ancestry, body politics, and feminism, celebrates its 20th-anniversary season with a spring season at the Joyce Theater, which promises to look back, take stock of the present, and move forward. Works include artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s 1986 Girlfriends, an examination and celebration of female friendships, and the 1995 Batty Moves, which questions dominant ideals of beauty with its focus on the buttocks (in the Caribbean, “batty” means buttocks). Zollar was influenced by Pearl Primus, a trail-blazing African American dancer, choreographer, and activist and the subject of Zollar’s new work, Walking With Pearl–Africa Diaries, a New York premiere. UBW has a commitment to community and to nurturing new choreographers like Bridget L. Moore, whose Sacred Vessel is also part of the program.
June 21–26, Tues. 7:30, Wed.–Sat., 8:00, Sun., 7:30. Tickets: $36. Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue at 19th Street www.joyce.org
Eiko & Koma, June 23–26. Eiko and Koma, known for meditative, site-specific works, will bring Death Poem (2004) to Danspace Project for the City/Dans series. The husband-and-wife team derives their movement vocabulary and style from Japanese Noh plays; stillness and slowness are a constant presence. In Death Poem, fine netting is draped over a bed as Koma writhes and moves. Eiko stands as a ghostly, hovering figure in the background.
June 23–26, 8:30 pm. Tickets: $15.
Danspace Project St. Mark’s
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue)
Tel: 212-674-8194
www.danspaceproject.org
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Bill T. Jones Dancing Through Disease in Can You Bring It and Afterwardsness
By Hallie ChametzkyJUNE 2021 | Dance
Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters is a new documentary about Bill T. Jones’s seminal, AIDS-era work. Afterwardsness, his newest production, reflects on the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing assaults on Black lives. Viewed together, they offer seemingly contradictory but ultimately profound lessons on dance’s role in moving through personal and societal grief.
Jennie C. Jones with Ann C. Collins
APRIL 2022 | Art
Perception comes gradually, when the mind is quieted enough for awareness to seep in, and even then, it is never fixed. Mingling visual and aural work, lineage and legacy, Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics infuses the Guggenheim Museum with minimalist abstractions and tonal callings. The first Black woman to have a solo exhibition in Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic rotunda, Jones throws open long-held narratives of art history, expanding the tracings of inspiration and influence to include both Black and female histories. Mining a vein of work in which paintings stand as sculptures, music is rendered in graphic statements, and color becomes a source of light, Jones’s work throws us off balance, requires us to shift and reposition ourselves in response to her slow reveals. As her gentle harmonics roll down from the oculus, the space itself seems to sway and expand.
Mary Jones:
Les Problémes du Confort
By Tom McGlynn
APRIL 2023 | ArtSeen
Mary Jones’s newest paintings perpetuate the pas de deux she has previously choreographed between collaged and readymade photographic sources and bravura painterly passages. Her process typically integrates the two via a wide array of technical interventions, activating these elements into a series of staccato movements that refer to the aleatory nature of the “cut-up” but also to genealogies of expressionist painting.
Bill Jensen: Stillness/Flowing
By Amanda Millet-SorsaMARCH 2022 | ArtSeen
Bill Jensen’s new body of work, largely made in the last three years, is displayed in all four rooms of Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea. These paintings embody both the wisdom and maturity of a sage, while maintaining the energy and vulnerability of new life.
