The three-week Kaatsbaan Cultural Park 2024 Annual Festival in Tivoli, NY, opens this Friday with the September 13 screening of Merce/Misha/More directed by Daniel Madoff. The film features choreographer Merce Cunningham, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Mikhail Baryshnikov, the ballet star and impresario, in conversation and in dancing. The Merce/Misha decades-long collaboration is viewed in rigorous rehearsal footage from 1967 and 1994, and in clips of films of Cunningham’s dances highlighting Baryshnikov, including the centerpiece film, Event at REDCAT, directed by former Cunningham company member, Madoff. An excerpt of Cunningham’s Landrover, danced by Alvin Ailey dancers, is also part of the film. Baryshnikov, this year, celebrates his 50th anniversary arriving in the west. Cunningham’s first Event, defined as overlayed fragments of repertory to create new dance, was first performed 60 years ago.
Other dance works on this robust and intriguing festival of music, prose, art and dance are a New Works Bill performance with the Limón Dance Company, Boca Tuya and Music from the Sole on September 28 and 29, and Autobiography V100 and V101 by the internationally renowned Company Wayne McGregor from London that concludes the festival on October 5 and 6.
Curator Adam Weinert when asked how each event fits with other, responds, “In a nutshell, the festival interrogates personal storytelling from different mediums. Author Francine Prose, Hudson Valley inhabitant, in her new memoir, 1974, a Personal History, unpacks a brief relationship with the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. New music ensemble Contemporaneous in History of Life – Act I imagines Homer’s Odyssey as if the poem had evolved continuously over the 2700 years since it was composed. What would that sound like, feel like, what stories would be included? Twelve musicians take the Mountain Stage and create stunning sound during the vernal equinox. Wayne McGregor maps his chromosomes in 23 parts (each human cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes) and imparts his autobiography through memoir and technology. Each time the dance is performed it’s different. In this company we will see, on the Mountain Stage, some of the most talented and spectacular dancers in the world. Choreographer Kayla Farrish reimagines two lost works from 1951 and 1952 by José Limón. She brings her perspective to the works as an outsider, a Black woman from the south. The nexus for all these events places the self alongside history.”
Also, on the docket is a free guided tour with curator Hilary Greene and the artists from the 2024 Visual Arts Exhibition. Joe Hagan, with his devoted following and guests including WNYC’s Spinning on Air host, David Garland, will direct a round robin style DJ set, in the spirit of Japanese listening cafes called kissa. Gaia Music Collective, a young group based in Brooklyn, leads a fun and free Community Sing accompanied by a live band and vocalists, rooted in the American folk song canon, made popular by Hudson Valley legend, Pete Seeger. The power of song brings people together. Music from the Sole, a tap dance and live music company, drawing from Afro-Brazilian, jazz, soul, house, rock, and Afro-Cuban styles returns to Kaatsbaan. “The audience loves them,” remarks Weinert.
Weinert, whose title is Artistic Associate, with Trisha Reed, Co-Managing Director, and Kevin McKenzie, a Kaatsbaan founder and now Artistic Advisor and Board Chair speaks about their collaborative effort in programming this festival. “Included,” says Weinert, “are new works built at Kaatsbaan by artists that the staff got to know by virtue of being in residence. This underscores our role as incubator, as well as presenter. There are many more weekend retreats so many more companies are coming through. This is a great way to know artists in various stages in their careers, rather than just scheduling the big companies. We’re figuring out how to layer groups. It creates a nice synergy with groups working at the same time. Not just dance but visual artists and writers, too. The feedback is that it creates community.” An example of a residency artist included in the festival is Omar Román De Jesús, a queer Puertorriqueño choreographer, who directs Boca Tuya (translation “your mouth”). Román De Jesús, who brings the splendidly choreographed Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight, was the inaugural Baryshnikov Arts Fellow.
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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