David Gordon and his Pick Up Performance Co(s) take over Joyce SoHo for the month of June with a world premiere work based on the writings of Nobel Prize-winner Luigi Pirandello and the music of Giacomo Puccini. In this interview with Time Out New York’s Gia Kourlas, the postmodern Judson dance pioneer talks about how the project developed, his approach to directing, and how he managed to divide Joyce SoHo into four distinct stages.

In recent years, choreographer and director David Gordon has tackled Brecht, Ionesco and Shakespeare in dance-theater productions that shift between illusion and reality. For the postmodern artist—an original member of the experimental Judson Dance Theater—the shift between theater and life is endlessly fascinating (and, in his work, purposefully hazy). Now he takes on the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello, whose work so closely mirrors his own that it’s sometimes difficult to figure out where one leaves off and the other begins. In Beginning of the End of the…, which is at the Joyce Soho for four weeks beginning June 1, Gordon has invented a choreographic world that melds three of Pirandello’s works (the play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the short story “A Character’s Tragedy” and the one-act The Man with the Flower in His Mouth) with his humorous, dictatorial directing style that puts his thoughts in everyone’s mouths—including that of his wife, Valda Setterfield. He spoke about the piece in his Soho loft.

How did this project develop?
The Pirandello has to do with all the stuff I’ve been doing lately—the Pirandello following the Brecht and the Brecht following the Ionesco.

It’s a logical progression?
It’s so logical, and it’s so connected. I realize that Pirandello is talking about illusion and reality. That’s what Ionesco is dealing with and, oh, wait a minute: Everybody I’m choosing to work with along the way seems to have either known about the other person, experienced the other person, is moving on from the other person.… I just seem to be on some historical trail that I didn’t know existed. I went online and looked up Pirandello, and there are a bunch of short videos made in London with an English cast doing parts of Six Characters while somebody talks about the relationship between Pirandello and Ionesco and Brecht. I never heard anybody say that before. I had nothing to compare what I was thinking to, but there it is. The [scene in Six Characters] about how two babies die—I turn them into Raggedy Ann and Andy, thinking how inventive I am—and then I look at this little bit of tape, and they bring in two dummies. I was thinking about all of this, and I realized that a long time ago, I made a piece called Wordsworth and the Motor [1977] and it happened here [at the loft]. I rented bleachers and put them at both ends of the space; Valda and I came in on the two sides, and we began to do the same concert. A wall was built in between, so the audience that first saw each other now could not only not see each other, they couldn’t see the other one of us. They could only hear us.

Read the full article here.

For tickets, click here.

Last Friday, twenty-some eager dancers gathered at DANY Studios to participate in a master class led by Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s Artistic Director Benoit-Swan Pouffer and Ballet Mistress Alexandra Damiani. As dancers stretched and warmed-up, Ms. Damiani meandered through the studio greeting some of her former students with hugs and smiles. Dressed in practice clothes, Ms. Damiani and Director Pouffer taught class from within and among – rather than in front of – the dancers present. One could hear their voices instructing the class while, at times, their bodies were lost in the crowd.

Ms. Damiani started the morning with some gentle rolling exercises to awaken the joints. Next, accompanied by lilting French pop music, she guided dancers through core-strengthening by testing their capacity for turn-out. The initial exercises alternated between concise phrases derived from a classical ballet vocabulary and fluid explorations of mobility and balance. Ms. Damiani reminded dancers that, “Cedar Lake relies on the precision of ballet technique as an entry point for risk-taking. The dancers must acknowledge their own bodies’ facility and determine their way to connect to that technique.”

Beads of sweat quickly began forming as the mid-morning sun shone through the windows. Director Pouffer joined in with his own warm-up, before tag-teaming with Ms. Damiani to teach a substantial movement phrase from the Cedar Lake repertoire. Mild-mannered in tone, both Damiani and Pouffer challenged these ambitious dancers with the content of movement – spiraling turns to the floor, suspended balances – and immediate reversals of phrases. It was a delightful offering in the middle of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s Joyce season

All in attendance worked quietly and generously, sharing the space, water, and praise for each others accomplishments throughout the rigorous movement phrases. In the five-minute rest, per Ms. Damiani’s suggestion, dancers stretched and reviewed the morning’s material. The final demonstrations from the recently learned repertory moved so fluidly, Director Pouffer said, “Let’s see it one more time,” a few times! The two hours disappeared so lightly, all seemed startled with the ending of the class. In thanking Pouffer and Damiani (and The Joyce) for the class, those in attendance breathlessly found that this class allowed them to relive and experience what they had just seen (or plan to see) on stage.

The Joyce’s Master Class series continues into the summer with Larry Keigwin (Artistic Director of KEIGWIN + COMPANY) teaching at DANY Studios on June 15^th. Material for Keigwin’s class is shaped by his distinctive vocabulary, which combines physicality and theatricality with a contemporary, pop perspective.

David Gordon’s Beginning of the end of the… premieres at Joyce SoHo in June. Read what dance historian Suzanne Carbonneau says about this intriguing artist in relation to his 2002 work Autobiography of a Liar.

by Suzanne Carbonneau
2002 Suzanne Carbonneau/ Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival

What do you call an artist who would title a work Autobiography of a Liar?
A postmodernist. (Ba dum.)

But seriously, folks… you would. And not a little to the vexation of the artist himself who declares the terms “postmodern choreography” to be “stakes driven into the heart of a work.”

Nevertheless, the artist in question, choreographer/writer/director David Gordon is identified in history books as a founder of what is now generally called postmodernism in dance. And whether or not you accept this description of his achievement, there is no question that Gordon’s presence in the field has irrevocably and permanently expanded what we conceive dance to be. A member of the Judson Dance Theater and Grand Union, the choreographic and improvisatory collectives that revolutionized modern dance by stripping it of the Romanticism and Expressionism of its founders, Gordon has remained in the succeeding forty years one of the most consistently experimental and original artists working with movement. For despite critical acclaim and an assured place in history, Gordon has yet to show any signs of resting on his laurels. Today, he remains as defiantly maverick—and important—as he was when he shared stages in Greenwich Village in the 1960s with Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Steve Paxton.

Gordon created Autobiography of a Liar in 1999, and, in addition to being a collection of personal and creative vignettes, the work is also a compendium of the concerns that he has been examining over the course of his career. The title is a joke, of course, but is, at the same time, immensely serious in its questioning of the idea of perception as unreliable, of memory as fallible, and of truth as ultimately unknowable. It is a theme he has returned to again and again. Yet, even as he is aware of his fool’s errand, Gordon will go ahead and make the attempt at finding truth – or rather, competing truths – all the while openly (eagerly!) exposing the rickety and ultimately illusionary nature of the enterprise. The glue that invariably holds all of these contradictions together is Gordon’s keen wit. Exhibit A: Gordon describes Autobiography of a Liar as “half remembered half truths about dances made another time in another life accommodating the talents of performers I was in love with and remade for the talents of performers I hope to be in love with now.” And many such passages of Gordon’s works have more in common with Abbott and Costello and their “Who’s on first?” routine than they do anything choreographed by Martha Graham.

Such verbal dexterity is matched by a physical language whose virtuosity is also concerned with punning, allusion, about-faces, and multiple meanings, and these twinned and twined disciplines are the hallmarks of his work. For Gordon, all language implies action. Interested in the ways that the interaction of words and movement increase the possibilities for complicating and layering meaning, he ricochets between the scrupulously literal and the fancifully symbolic meanings of both words and actions, and is most happy, it seems, when these things exist simultaneously.

This idea of revealing each work’s philosophical and structural scaffolding is endemic to Gordon. Most of the work he has made since the 1970s has dealt with the idea of performance as an illusion that is created by real people. And like Penn and Teller who purposefully betray the cardinal rule of professional magicians by revealing to their audiences how their tricks are done, Gordon also exposes how his work is constructed by mixing autobiography and fiction, by moving back and forth between performer-as-performer and performer-as-person, by acknowledging the false authority of the creator, by foregrounding the artificiality and manipulation of the theater, by revealing process, by breaking the theatrical “fourth wall,” and by inserting matter-of-factness into the most magical theatrical moments.
Carbonneau Essay-David Gordon
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In fact, his works are backstage musicals taken to their ultimate conclusion. The incorporation of his family (his wife, the luminous dancer and actor Valda Setterfield, and his son, playwright and director Ain Gordon) as performers and co-creators only makes things more devilishly tricky as what is real and what is not in the relationships we see on stage come to seem hopelessly entangled. The Gordons’s madcap and heartrending Obie-winning The Family Business (1994), for example, is about a plumbing concern but it’s also about this family business and this family’s business. (Gordon plays an old mustachioed woman who is really Gordon who is also his aunt, while Ain is a father and his son who aspires to be a playwright who will write the play that is actually being performed now, and Setterfield is the mother and…you get the picture.) Following who’s who and what’s what at any given moment of this work makes that infernally labyrinthine Abbott and Costello routine seem like a Dick and Jane reader.

Because Gordon has used language in performance virtually from the beginning of his career, to call the work “choreography” misses what is essential to its nature. (Hence, Gordon’s annoyance with the term. Up until recently, he preferred to call his work “work,” and to say that he “constructed” it.) In fact, most of the standard categories for differentiating performance cannot begin to suggest what it is that Gordon does. These characterizations exist only for the intellectual convenience of those who need familiar archetypes with which to try to come to terms with artistic achievement—even experimental achievement. But these constructs are inadequate, if not outright dishonest, as descriptions of his work. Gordon is not interested in conforming to ideas about what he should be doing, or to fit in with what other artists have done or are doing; rather, his interests lie in expanding ideas about what performance can be. And, after all these years, his impatience with the whole business is understandable.

During the last decade, Gordon’s work has been most often categorized as theater – although his original work is not any closer to the traditional notion of drama than it was dance. For if these works are “plays,” they would have to be described as profoundly choreographed. In these works, everything moves—sets, props, performers. In fact, they are so thoroughly conceived from the standpoint of movement that, even with their fully fleshed-out texts, every moment is dancerly. You’d be hard-pressed to pick out “dance” sections as they exist as interludes in traditional plays; rather, it’s all dance, even if there’s not a recognizable dance “step” in sight. Even the text, which is conceived from a rhythmic as well as a narrative standpoint, contributes to the sense of propulsive action. This is a singular achievement: no other movement artist has achieved this level of integration in the theater as writer, director, and choreographer.

With this theatrical work, Gordon has finally embraced the use of the term “choreography” to describe his movement contribution to these integrated performances. For the term is no longer a limitation, but a more apt description than “blocking” or “staging” of how it is that Gordon conceives these works, alongside his writing and directing. Gordon has also been in the spotlight recently as the director and writer of “PAST Forward” (2000), White Oak’s hugely successful Judson Dance Theater revival program that was instigated by Mikhail Baryshnikov. And if this canonization of an American avant-garde revolutionary by a Russian ballet dancer conjures visions of the Disneyfication of the Impressionists, rest assured. Somehow, one knows that Gordon’s work is undoubtedly too uncompromising, too witty, too prickly, too analytic, too complex—in other words, too damn smart—to succumb to mass marketing. And that, of course, has always been the mark of genius.

Introdans makes its U.S. premiere at The Joyce this week with Heavenly, a retrospective journey that includes three works showcasing the Dutch-based modern ballet company’s eclectic and exciting repertory.

The New York Times‘ Rebecca Milzoff interviewed Artistic Director Roel Voorintholt and founder Ton Wiggers for this article about the company’s history and journey to The Joyce. And excerpt follows:

“In the last three decades the two, and Introdans itself, have gone through enormous changes, public and private, and Mr. Wiggers and Mr. Voorintholt have been uncommonly open about both.

Now, 40 years after Introdans’s founding and after extensive international touring, it will make its first United States appearance at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, the start of a six-day run.

As Mr. Wiggers explained recently in a telephone interview from the company’s offices in Arnhem, he created Introdans to address an absence of dance in his part of the country. “We had the Dutch National Ballet, and they came to Arnhem once, maybe twice a year,” he said. “Of course there was an audience for those performances, so I thought, ‘Well, if there’s an audience for it, why aren’t we seeking for more dance here?’ ”

He started Introdans with a handful of friends who met in his living room. Though a small city, Arnhem was already on the cultural map because of the renowned Kröller-Müller Museum, with its sculpture garden and collection of van Gogh and modern masters.”

Read the full article here. Introdans will be at The Joyce May 1-6. Purchase tickets now.