Jean Ann Douglass: Can you start off by telling us a little about the project you’re working on right now, Labyrinth Within?

Pontus Lidberg: It is a dance film project with the idea to make it into a stage piece too. This way, it will have two lives.

JAD: You’re probably most well-known for your piece The Rain, and from what I understand, this new work is going down a different path. How are the works different?

PL: One difference is that The Rain was completely made for the screen from the beginning. It cannot be performed on the stage in its current version. I am open to a stage adaptation in the future, but the work will have to be re-imagined.

Another difference is that there’s a continuous score for Labyrinth Within, as opposed to a music collage.

I am taking a very large step into narrative. There was a subtle narrative in The Rain, as there is in all of my works: there is always a grounding event or course of events. In this new work, the story is more detailed and the layout is important for how the story unfolds.

And this work is only for three dancers, so it’s more of a chamber piece.

JAD: Perhaps you could talk about the dancers that you’re working with.

PL: I met Wendy [Whelan] at the Vail International Dance Festival two years ago when I did a piece for Morphoses. She fits very well into the imagined part for the female dancer in this film: it is as if it was written for her. I’m a big fan of her dancing; she is a unique talent because she is a mature performer who still has no limit to what she can do.

Gabrielle Lamb was introduced to me through a mutual friend, who thought we would be a great match, and it turned out to be very true. I’ve been working with her for a year on various projects and our affinity keeps on growing.

I brought the dancer Giovanni Bucchieri from Sweden to work on this piece. He is a close friend that I’ve known for 22 years, and with whom I’ve worked on select occasions. He’s someone I pick up for special projects. He’s very enriching for the process, very talented and with a lot of imagination.

JAD: The Joyce SoHo Residency has artists work with an editing advisor. Your advisor is Jill Johnson [a close collaborator of William Forsythe]. Is this your first time working with her?

PL: Yes. I was advised to have a chat with Jill Johnson through various sources, all at the same time. They all told me, “You should meet this woman, you’ll have something special.” It is the first time working with her, and it is definitely not the last. We will meet again in other projects later in the year.

JAD: What can audiences expect when they come to your open rehearsal on Monday?

PL: It’s going to be very informal. We’re only three weeks into the process, so we’re not even halfway there. We will actually rehearse in front of the attendees, so they will see the process of choosing certain things over others, of trying to improve material. We have 10-12 minutes of work that we can perform at this time. We are also planning on showing some excerpts of The Rain, to show how the work could look when it’s finished, and has the full production value behind it. Then, for the last 30-40 minutes we’re going to have a dialogue, probably a Q&A.

On May 21, 2010, as the DANY Studios Master Class Series continues, contemporary choreographer Stephen Petronio and dancer Amanda Wells will lead a class that focuses on energetic flow, polyrhythmic initiations,and the fearlessness thorough phrase work that is exemplified in Stephen Petronio Company repertoire. After seeing a clear sense of these three elements in such high energy and vibrant work as MiddleSex Gorge (1990) and Ghostown (2010) at The Joyce in early May, I am certain that this class will be dynamic, expressive, and brimming with vitality.

Earlier in the series, Alberto del Saz, Artistic Director of the Nikolais-Louis Foundation for Dance, taught a Nikolais Technique class. Nikolais’ approach to building and executing movement was fully embodied through aspects of shape, space, time, and motion. To augment the movement being taught during the class, del Saz led interesting discussions about Nikolais’ philosophies and how they relate to a contemporary performer. Caine Keenan, a member of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, a Utah-based company that specializes in Nikolais repertoire, joined us in class.  With expert demonstration of Nikolais Technique from Keenan, the class engaged in a movement practice for body and mind.

The Nikolais floor-barre exercises were performed in silence, with the exception of a few rhythmic utterances and movement instructions being called out by del Saz. In this quiet space, students formed hollowed spaces with our torsos, arched our backs against the floor, and focused ourselves. Class continued with an excerpt called Sextet from Niklolais’ work Graph (1984). Mr. del Saz painted a clear picture for students to envision as he explained the rules of the dance. “The stage was literally graphed, and every step was different, each square was a different size. That really challenged the dancer. You had to be able to do the dance and pay attention to the space around you, being careful never to step on a line.”

RSVP for the Stephen Petronio Master Class by emailing Maggie Lockhart or calling 212-564-3808. Visit Joyce.org for more information on these and other upcoming DANY Studios master classes.

Performing this week at Joyce SoHo is a collaboration between video artist Patrick Lovejoy and dancer Kristina Bethel-Blunt. This team was recently featured in Encore Magazine.

The liaison between light, sound and movement holds the gaze of the viewer almost hypnotically and this is chiefly through the way Lovejoy has “cut and paste” the film frames onto a wider black screen. This technique gives the audience the impression that we are looking through a peephole. It is as if this fragmented story is a secret.

Read more at encoremag.com

We’re pleased to bring Joyce audiences the New York premiere of John Jasperse Company’s Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies this June. The work has already received positive reviews following showings in Los Angeles and Chicago and overseas in Dresden.

While in the early stages of developing Truth, John Jasperse Company invited audience members to provide feedback to help steer the direction the work. Several open rehearsals at locations around the city have already taken place. One open rehearsal remains, and we’re lucky enough to have been invited to capture the event on video.

Please stay tuned to sneak a peek at the work as it continues to progress. Then, share you thoughts with us here or on the John Jasperse Company blog.

The following is a re-posting of the company’s invitation for audience feedback for its own blog:

With our new work in development, Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies, John Jasperse Company has decided to try out something different. We are inviting you to play a key role in our development process. Hopefully we’ll both learn something along the way about art and how it gets made.

Here’s how it works. We have a series of open rehearsals in New York throughout the development of this work. Locations include BAX - Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BAAD! - The Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, Staten Island University, Topaz Arts in Queens and CPR - The Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn.

We were very happy to have had a two-week residency at Jacob’s Pillow in early October. Since then we’re back in New York and we’ll soon have the first of a series of open rehearsals where we’ll show segments of what we’re working on to get your take on what we’re doing.

This is as much about us learning something from your feedback as it is “educational outreach” in the traditional sense. So please feel free to be bold and really tell it as you see it. Diversity of opinion is what we’re looking for.

The piece will be presented in its final form as an evening-length work with a commissioned score by composer Hahn Rowe for live string quartet and electronics. Scenic and visual design is by John Jasperse, with lighting design by Jasperse in collaboration with Joe Levasseur. Truth will premiere in September 2009 in Dresden with the New York premiere at The Joyce Theater in the 2009-10 season.

Truth addresses both the properties and results of beliefs and belief systems and the processes involved in their construction, re-evaluation and development. In the first case, the work will examine the relative nature of truth, the powerful (and potentially dangerous) solace to be found in certainty in possessing concrete plans and plausible explanations, the rarity of such certainty occurring through the trajectory of life and the tools which one employs to deal with this lack. In the second case, the work will explore persuasion, how we make others believe in order that we might believe ourselves, pretending or the power of imagination in creating reality, the formation of myth, and the potential values and liabilities of skepticism. The work will consider both the potentially uncomfortable and often disconcerting inconsistencies that abound in the real that can at times catalyze one to reject it versus the relative neatness, clarity, and comfort that the false can sometimes afford us. The work will explore heresy, radical ideas, perceived delusional thoughts & behavior, and just plain nonsense as powerful tools, which can paradoxically hold us back and alternately incite transformational growth.

Two particularly relevant quotes by two American luminary humorists come to mind in relationship to these concerns: “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.” - Mark Twain and “As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.” - Josh Billings

This week, The Joyce celebrates what would have been Alwin Nikolais’ 100th birthday. A true dance luminary whose repertoire spanned over sixty years, Alwin Nikolais created inventive and innovative works that have had a lasting effect on the history of modern dance. In the weeks proceeding the Nikolais Centennial engagement, MOMIX takes The Joyce stage demonstrating its own unique twists on some of the classic techniques that Nikolas made famous.

Nikolais was particularly interested in a theory he called “decentralization,” which proposed that by depersonalizing dancers they could be liberated from their own forms. Through the use of costumes sound collage and projected images–onto both the stage and the dancers–Nikolais shifted the focus away from any one individual dancer, and concentrated instead on the overall effect of the production. In an episode of PBS’ “American Masters” series focusing on Nikolais, it was said that the artist would often present his dancers in constrictive spaces and costumes with complicated sound and sets, “designed to confuse the process of dance.”

MOMIX, under the direction of Moses Pendleton, has been celebrated for its ability to conjure up a world of surrealistic images using props, light, shadow, humor and the human body. The spell-binding company has used elements of Nikolas’s work as a jumping off point to create its own unpredictable and otherworldly works for a new generation.

As an example of one of the stunning techniques that Nikolais pioneered that are still used today to great effect, consider this video containing footage of Nikolas’ Crucible (1985) and the picture below of MOMIX’s Botanica: