Danspace Project's Platform 16: Lost & Found revisits and examines the decades when HIV/AIDS felled so many. I look around St. Mark’s Church. It’s really filling up; people are sitting on risers well beyond the usual cut-off place. Friday, November 4th is the second night of this three-night performance: Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and Other Works by … [Read more...]
What Do You See? Look Again
The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher Space in its compact new building is proving to be dazzlingly adaptable. The seating has been configured differently for all four works that I’ve seen there as part of BAM’s 30th Next Wave Festival, and that design, in turn, influences scenic possibilities and alters the audience’s angle of vision and relationship with the performers. Lucy Guerin’s Untrained … [Read more...]
Two Black Women, Two Dark Journeys
In 1982, Ishmael Houston-Jones asked himself some questions about Black Dance (a term embraced at the time by those who considered themselves part of it) and how that aesthetic related to the work that he and some of his African American colleagues on the downtown New York scene were interested in creating. The result: two weekends of performances produced that year by Danspace Project at Saint … [Read more...]