PS 21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, N.Y., presents L’Etang (The Pond), the final movement-influenced work of the season on Friday and Saturday. The Open-Air Pavilion Theater, tucked into the 100-acre landscape, is covered but open on three sides. Meadows and trees are glimpsed through the building; cadences of birds, animals and insects are heard while watching a production. Curated by the performing arts explorer and PS21 Artistic Director, Elena Siyanko, performances run until the end of December in the main theater and in the Black Box Theater.
L’Etang, created by Gisèle Vienne, Franco-Austrian artist, choreographer and director, features Julie Shanahan, the legendary Australian dancer and rehearsal director of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. Says Siyanko, “no one who saw the iconic works by Pina can forget her.” Joining Shanahan is Adèle Haenel, the leading French actor and movie star, who has twice won the César Award, the French equivalent of the Academy Award.
Vienne adapts Swiss author Robert Walser’s drama, Der Teich, that tells the story of a boy who fakes his drowning to test his mother’s love. (Walser lived from 1878-1956.) Haenel plays the son while Shanahan plays roles that include mother, siblings, friends and other adults. The story questions the traditional conventions of family. This polyphonic hybrid form “of installation, visual arts, music, life sized dolls, puppets, radically slow dance and theatre,” says Siyanko, pinballs between an interior emotional landscape and external existence of fantasy and reality. Continues Siyanko, “Vienne combines favorite themes, going to the edges, and exploring questions of what we can accept to get to brightness, tenderness, abandon, humor, primal energies, and sensuality, along with darkness and violence.” A must-see production for the serious theatergoer.
October 27 in the Black Box Theater Internationally celebrated musicians, Miranda Cuckson (violin) and Blair McMillen (piano) play compositions by Leoš Janáček, Ludwig van Beethoven, Sergei Prokofiev, and Ross Lee Finney. Influenced by American and Moravian folk music, among other influences, each work expresses a reaction to war.
November 3-4 in the Black Box. Two companion productions are performed in one evening. The pioneering electronic composer, Pauline Oliveros’ Intensity 20.15: Grace Chase, written for MacArthur Award and Avery Fisher prizewinning flutist Claire Chase, is based on texts by Chase’s grandmother. Winsome Brown directs.
This is Mary Brown, Winsome Brown’s funny and affecting monodrama, explores family, addiction, life, and death. Friends for 15 years, Chase and Brown mine their family dynamics for material that inspires and delights. The performances are followed by a discussion with the artists.
December 21 in the Black Box: PS21 Holiday Concert
Talea Ensemble performs the Austrian composer, George Friedrich Haas’s Solstices (2017) in complete darkness. The listener is challenged to perceive sound with heightened awareness. Beginning at sunset, 4:26 p.m., the shortest day of the year, the 75-minute composition for 10 musicians celebrates the passage of fall to wintertime. Talea Ensemble, based in New York City, is comprised of an all-star cast of musicians who “champion toothy modern works and play them with compelling lucidity,” according to The New York Times.
Looking back -
September 27, Never Twenty One, choreographed by French-Malian Smaïl Kanouté, expresses the pointless deaths of young Black men by gun violence in New York City, Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro. The Black Lives Matter #Never21 movement, impetus for the dance, exposes the inequities of racism, poverty, the school-to-prison pipeline (in the US), police killings, and inequitable laws that affect the marginalized.
Eye-catching, rippling words of protest, such as “racist”, “I can’t breathe”, “GUNS”, “PTSD”, “B.O.P.E”, “nègre”, “DEATH” in English, French, Xhosa, and Portuguese, are cinematically painted in white on the three muscular torsos and arms of the performers. Aston Bonaparte (Guyanese), Salomon Mpondo-Dicka (French-Cameroonian) and Kanouté, developed this work in Paris.
Beautifully danced phrases, intense and controlled, illustrate the fraught messages. “When another child is killed by gun violence, I almost feel it’s happening all over again. 25 years this year and it’s still going on,” laments a mother. The performers, well-versed in numerous dance genres, including krumping, popping, house, Brazilian baile, contemporary dance, improvisation, jazz, and ballet, bring their artistry to bear.
In attendance were students and their teachers from Kite’s Nest, a social justice liberatory organization for youth, located in Hudson, N.Y., and a PS21 associate. Kite’s Nest addresses the grueling effects of poverty and violence to engender healing and transformation. Students responded to Never Twenty One, saying they have experienced racism and have studied the school-to-prison pipeline that leads to gun violence, and found the dance, “emotionally impactful.”
Siyanko concludes, “In our programming I have been interested in how artistic forms respond to the complex realities we’re living in, so invention of new forms, new modes of presentation, the poetics of the theatrical image. This was a lens through which I look for projects to program.”
Catherine Tharin danced with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. She teaches dance studies and technique, is an independent dance and performance curator, choreographs, writes about dance for Side of Culture, and is a reviewer and editor for The Dance Enthusiast. She also writes for The Boston Globe. Catherine lives in Pine Plains, New York and New York City.
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