Gideon Obarzanek, Founder and Artistic Director of the Melbourne-based contemporary dance company Chunky Move, returns to Joyce SoHo this spring with Faker. The disarmingly personal solo work exposes the expectations and disappointments, creative aspirations and personal doubts of dance making.

Listen in and learn how this work came to be and why Obarzanek considers himself to be something of an “impostor.”

Dancer Michael Schumacher offers some advice to audiences who watch Last Touch First, the haunting hour-long work was created by himself and world-renowned choreographer Jiří Kylián for the 2008 Holland Dance Festival. Using Chekhov as a reference, the piece is performed in profoundly slow motion. “Just focus,” he advises, “you’ll see more than you think.” “It’s a paradox. It’s slow motion, but you cannot keep up with it, which is great.”

In the interview that appears in this week’s Time Out New York, Gia Kourlas asks Mr. Schumacher how the piece came to be and his experience performing the piece. An excerpt follows. Read the article in its entirety here.

What is an example of the way in which the production continues to grow?
I’ll give you a microscopic view: At one point, I sit in a chair and reach over and pick up a glass. For the rest of the day, every time you reach over to pick up a glass, think about how many times you do it exactly the same. If that’s your script, and your character has a certain way of handling a glass and drinking from it, then that’s a huge amount of information and a huge amount to deal with from performance to performance. It relates very much to my philosophy about life and improvisation. There are many sides of our daily lives that we incorporate into our improvisational behavior. Not everyone may see it that way, but I do, and that’s why I find it entertaining that in a dance-theater piece like this, it’s readable. You have to see it a few times to understand that, which is why a lot of people see it more than once. It’s hard to catch all of the elements the first time; you’re busy trying to put all the pieces together.

So do audience members get overly absorbed in certain sections and miss others?
From what I understand, you get the mise en scène. You understand, Okay, this is a parlor in a period roughly around the turn of the century, and the characters resemble people that may or may not have been in a Chekhov play. We use Chekhov as a reference, but it was never intended to be a telling of his work; it’s more an impression of Chekhov and that era, with characters who have a dissatisfaction with the banality of daily life. However, because our eyes work very much in different levels of focus, it’s easy to get distracted by certain details. You might start to focus on small gestures and objects. I find that may be the key. Not only is it a piece in which to observe the whole, but it is also a time to think about how you, as an audience member, observe.

For our next Dance Talks on Monday, April 2, The Joyce is thrilled to present a video-illustrated evening hosted by award winning dance writer Deborah Jowitt. The recipient of Dance USA’s Ernie Award for “unsung heroes” and a Bessie Award, Ms. Jowitt will examine Jiri Kylian’s Last Touch First and provide some context for the performances that will take place on the Joyce stage April 10-15.

Ms. Jowitt provided the following notes to enhance and expand your experience.

In July, 1979, at City Center, the Nederlands Dans Theater performed eight works by Jirí Kylián—a choreographer whose name was still unfamiliar to most New Yorkers. His pieces were instantly adored, as were the gorgeous dancers who performed them. At the time the Czech choreographer was 32 and had been the company’s artistic director for only two years.

What was it that those who saw Kylián’s dances back then instantly loved about them? The choreographer had come of age as a dancer and choreographer in the Stuttgart Ballet at a time when classicism was embarking on a muscular romance with modern dance through the aesthetic of choreographers such as Hans van Manen and Glen Tetley. Virtuosity untethered from the ballet vocabulary could serve as a vehicle for anguish, hope, passion, and exaltation; choreographers could mold dancers’ bodies to convey these inner states. Kylián too embraced intense feelings, physical prowess, glamour, dancers as living sculpture, but, as I wrote at the time, he didn’t “belabor his points or numb us with ornateness.” His style was juicy without the preening quality that sometimes goes hand in hand with sensuality onstage.

During the first part of Kylián’s career, creating an individual vocabulary of steps seemed less interesting to him than how to utilize those steps and adjust them in relation to music and theme.
He used important music, but didn’t make the rush and sweep of his movement adhere closely to its measure-by-measure patterning—instead following the overall shape of a passage and entering the music’s mood. He created Return to the Strange Land (1975), for instance, in response to the sudden death, two years earlier, of John Cranko, the director of the Stuttgart Ballet and Kylián’s mentor. The musical accompaniment that he chose was four elegiac piano pieces that the choreographer’s fellow countryman, Leos Janacék, had written as part of a song cycle mourning the death of his daughter.

The choreography that Kylián showed in that first major New York visit bore out a statement he made around that time: for him, the pas de deux was the essence of dance. Although he is expert at deploying large groups of dancers, he has continued to express through duets many facets of the forces that pull human beings this way and that. He has ways of tangling a man and a woman together that speak eloquently of unappeasable longings, passing harmony, knotty problems, dissonant liaisons, ecstasy, grief.

In 1991, there were two Nederlands Dans Theater companies—NDT 1 being the original group and NDT 2 an ensemble of dancers between 17 and 21 years old. In that year, Kylián founded NDT 3, a shifting cadre of greatly gifted, mature performers, and commissioned works from a variety of choreographers in addition to himself. In November of 1994, all three companies performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where NDT 3 consisted of Gary Chryst, former member of the Joffrey Ballet; Martine Van Hamel, ex American Ballet Theatre principal dancer; and Sabine Kupferberg and Gérard Lemaitre onetime formidable NDT performers. All were over 40 (Lemaitre was 58).

It was for NDT 3 that Kylián, a prolific choreographer whose works grace the repertories of many companies in many countries, created Last Touch in 2003. With it, he entered a mesmerizing domain that both refers to and breaks away from the body of work he had established. He is no longer in charge of Nederlands Dans Theater, and NDT 3 no longer exists. But Last Touch First, the 2008 work receiving its U.S. premiere at the Joyce (April 10 through 15) is an expansion of the earlier piece. All but one of the dancers who perform it are former NDT 1 and/or NDT 3 members.

That one is Michael Schumacher, a choreographer and master of improvisation, who danced for such choreographers as William Forsythe and Twyla Tharp. The extraordinary dance-drama Last Touch First is a collaboration between Kylián and Schumacher. In it, Kylian’s fascination with the struggles between one man and one woman assumes a different guise. Scenery and props become not only charged with significance (like the rapiers so meaningfully manipulated by six men in his 1991 Petite Mort), but subject to constantly shifting interpretations. Last Touch First takes place in what might be the drawing room of a fin-de-siécle mansion, except that unbleached muslin covers the floor and most of the furniture—as if the owners had gone away, or were in the process of leaving. The rumpled sea of fabric acquires its own storms as it yields to the manipulations of the six people who seem marooned in this place. Kylián has acknowledged the influence of Chekhov’s plays on his work, and indeed, the woman reading, the men playing cards, the woman lighting a candle could be the idle, stalled characters of The Cherry Orchard or Three Sisters. Although their silent debates don’t pose large questions about life and death, there is a momentous weight to everything they do.

What they do is not the juicy, full-out dancing associated with Kylián, but a distillation of its impulses. The key to the work’s hypnotic power is its manipulation of time. Almost throughout Last Touch First, people move so slowly that when one of them makes a gesture, you can imagine many ways in which it might conclude. A man advances from upstage toward the woman with the book, his hands very gradually reaching out to her. Could he be planning to take the book from her? To strangle her? Or. . .? Only at the end of what seems a very long time do you discover the answer. In Last Touch First, desires and rages bloom like flowers in time-lapse nature films—except that the blossoms’ motion has been speeded up and these people’s normal pace has been decelerated. The gestures of the characters call to mind the discrepancies that can occur between the actual passage of time and perceived time, like those described by Oliver Sacks in his essay, “Speed” (published in The New Yorker, August 23, 2004). Sacks wrote of dream time, hallucinogenic drugs, and neurological disorders in which patients’ snail’s-pace or speeded-up motions feel normal to them.

In the leisurely, yet highly erotic and theatrically pressured environment of Last Touch First, you become a detective. Who are these two men playing cards? Why is this woman drinking? Who is married to whom? Is this all a dream? Kylián’s abiding interest in the tensions between men and women produces hyper-charged images—not through conventional devices (beautifully sculpted ecstasy or anguished tangles) but because of the way a woman slides her long skirt up to bare her leg or a man lowers himself into a woman’s lap. The smallest motion acquires immense drama. Your eye can roam around this domain of suspended time—watching now one pair, now another, now the gradual shift of partners, now a gathering. Dirk Haubrich’s piano music is pitted with sudden, sharp pings, as if a glass has been broken; whispers and disorienting sounds gradually invade the dreamlike atmosphere and push it into nightmare terrain, where acts usually done in privacy or in imagination impinge on publically acceptable behavior.

Eerily, Kylián and Schumacher tamper with our own perceptions. In the stretched-out time to which the two creators of Last Touch First have accustomed us, a sudden change from extreme slow motion to hyper-fast speed becomes unusually shocking, and a lapse into the tempo we call “normal” seems both unfamiliar and heart-breaking.

This summer, The Joyce Theater and the River To River Festival will present the U.S. premiere of Le Grand Continental by Montréal-based choreographer Sylvain Émard at the South Street Seaport. This exciting performance brings together 200+ participants of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds – dancers and non-dancers alike – to perform a contemporary re-imagining of a traditional festive line dance.

We look forward to bringing together a diverse and dynamic group of New Yorkers from all five boroughs to show off what makes our city so special and we need your help!! If you are a dancer – professional or amateur – or just want to be one, WE WANT YOU!

Rehearsals will be held two nights a week from April 25 – June 21, 2012.

Performances are June 22 at 7PM, June 23 at 7PM and June 24 at 2PM.

Participants must be available for ALL of these dates.

Sign up here.

What are some of your experiences that led to the foundation of New Dance Alliance?
I began studying dance at age three with my father, Steven Bernard, a company member with the 20th century pioneer Charles Weidman. I grew up in a household that incorporated my father’s dance school on a day-to-day level, with students crossing through the family space. My sense of performance and performance art stems from this familiar blend of living and presenting. In my living loft and studio in Tribeca, I began showing work with other artists including Yvonne Meyer and Jennifer Monson. But I quickly outgrew presenting in a residential dwelling and in 1987 I discovered DIA Center for the Arts. Encouraged by Joan Duddy, I formalized the Performance Mix Festival.

The Breakfast Mix (Thu 3/15) series stimulates discussion on the challenges artists face in their professional careers. Could you elaborate on present challenges in the performing arts you feel are critical?
It is a great challenge to make a living as an experimental performance artist. Most artists have alternative jobs that hopefully relate to the field, i.e., teaching and body work. But some work in restaurants, babysit, office temp — the list goes on. Funding is scarce and you may not fit the mold — you may be not emerging, emerged or just not fitting in to the current political aesthetics.

You have used media tools such as projectors in your solo pieces. How do you perceive this integration as embodied through your movement? Do you have any specific media influences?
I move and alter the projector and laptop, which adds a “present” and behind-the-scenes reality to the fluid movement between fantasy and reality that is integral to dance. White surfaces form asymmetrical images that blend photographs, movie footage, sound, and text into an enveloping and continually changing environment. The laptop and projector are both a physical partner and virtual vehicle through, which I attempt to control her world. Through projections the work expands from a solo to a duet (with the computer) to a group work (through video). I travel beyond the space I occupy, generating an emotional, if not a physical freedom.

Ouette is loosely based on the François Ozon movie Swimming Pool. Bernard’s character parallels the film’s protagonist, an elderly English novelist who becomes involved in a dangerous sexual fantasy that is part her fiction and part her desire.

Is there a specific process in deciding what artists and works get presented by the Performance Mix Festival?
I have a gut response and get excited about work that challenges the definition of dance. I seek work coming from different approaches, so that the audience can have a dialogue about the differences and sameness. Works on the same program can actually begin to look like one piece as they inevitably seem to speak about each other. I love when connections are made.

Do you have anything to say to those interested in performing in the Performance Mix Festival?
Yes, come to the festival and see the work we promote. The application for [next year’s] festival will be available on our website April 1 and is due June 1. newdancealliance.org

On Monday, March 5, Joyce SoHo Program Manager Cathy Eilers chatted with Stefanie Nelson (choreographer), Karolien Soete (stop motion animator), and Alexander Berne (composer) about Prolegomena II performances at Joyce SoHo this weekend. Below are some miscellaneous facts about the performances:

The work was created based on responses gathered from the public (via the web) and performers to this question: What happens when you are in a small space, in absolute darkness, no sounds, or sensory references? What do you bring in this space with you? What comes to you? The choreographic material was created through a series of improvisations based on collected responses to these questions and developed according to the characterization of the dancers within the piece based on themes of isolation and elevation. Most of the choreography in the final piece is set with some improvised moments.

“Prolegomena” means an introduction or a preliminary discussion.

This work was originally envisioned as an installation (a life-sized camera obscura) that the creative team still hopes will be realized. Finding a space to do this has proven challenging. Ideally, they would build a live size camera obscura (a big box with a hole in it, like a camera) so that you’d be able to watch images of what is outside inside in and vice versa, offering two entry points into the work, from the inside out and the outside in. This performance will instead be an iteration of the idea, the outside in version.

This team has been working together for nearly two years and has had, like many creative teams, many ideas that never made it into the work. This is not surprising to the interviewer since they’re all speaking on top of one another during our interview!

About the music… Ben Carey, an artist in Australia, has worked on a system called “_derivations” that Alex will attempt to use to play the music live – for the first time – with about 12 different instruments. Apparently, listening to the music doesn’t make sense because you can’t figure out how it is happening – it is acoustic. There are additional violin compositions played live by Regina Sadowski in the show and pre-recorded music by Alex. (Alex has a band called Alexander Berne & the Abandoned Orchestra.)

Portraitist/painter Karolien has created mural-sized stop-motion animation also based directly on the collected responses to the question of being enclosed in a dark space. At the start of each performance, during the 30 minute pre-show, Karolien paints a mural to which Alex will score live. The stop motion appears at the end and helps the audience see the team’s concept fully realized.

Performances of Prolegomena II are dedicated to Jaik Miller, a friend and colleague of the creation team. Jaik sadly passed away on February 24. Vocal tracks of his poetry are featured in the performance in which he was expected to perform live.

Next steps? Find a way to realize the original idea of the installation. If you happen to know of a space, do tell…!

Click here to read an interview with Stefanie Nelson and The Dance Enthusiast!

An encounter with Karolien Soete

Based on an interview between Malcolm Low and Joyce SoHo Program Manager Cathy Eilers on February 29, with support from intern Elmes Gomez

How were you introduced to dance?
From a young age, my mother saw that I had lots of energy – I would perform the whole church service in the living room – and she had to dispel this energy! I attended Curie Performing Arts High School in Chicago. Most of my training is classically based with lots of Graham and the influence of Joseph Holmes; I even received scholarships to Hubbard Street.

How did you come up with the name of your company, Formal Structure?
I was reading a Tony Morrison book one day and a sentence said something like ‘his feelings were tucked in the corners of a highly formal structure’. For the first time when reading this, I saw that words can have a very visual and textural kind of element – and it stuck.

The piece you are premiering – Collapsing Giant – is about love and loss. Is this based on personal experience and are there specific moments of these experiences that we will see in the piece?
There is a section of the work that I call the ‘slow motion section’ where the movement is very slow, there is a fight scene, performers are embracing and searching for their true love, and grabbing for each other. This section allows the audience to take in the idea of love and losing love. I wanted to make it similar to a story ballet so that it was really clear when we were loving and, alternatively, when fighting in this scene.

Tell us a little about your collaborations with Gregory Bain and Gautam Kansara.
As I’m telling stories about my first memory and my first love in the work, the video has been largely added for ambiance. The video captures me telling the stories but is not an exact link to the work; this element came after the movement aspects were created. I typically gather all of the elements (visual, sets, dancers) and puzzle them together but keep changing the relationship of these items to one another so that the work stays new and fresh for me. Two days before the work’s premiere, I’m is still moving puzzle pieces around.

In the video clip online, it appears that you are visually disconnected from your partner and everything around you. Is this what you’re trying to convey?
The show is about trust and how one is continually on his pathway in life and falls and can always count on their partner even if not directly related. If you step into the shoes you’re supposed to be in, the things around you will fall into place. Playing Bitter Earth says that life is hard – things will work themselves out.

How do you feel about your debut?
[Insert screams!] I’m really excited. I’ve wanted to perform here for a very long time and am enamored with the long history of the space and with many of the major artists whose work has been supported here. It is a great privilege. There is a poster of Ralph Lemon hanging in the SoHo conference room and now I’m working with Ralph for the PLATFORM 2012: Parallels at Danspace. To have Ralph in my regular thoughts and in my inbox is really a great experience. My experience of working with Joyce SoHo has been amazing and I hope to build an ongoing relationship with Joyce SoHo.

For three nights only, The Joyce Theater Foundation presents 6000 miles away, featuring internationally acclaimed Sylvie Guillem. “The most brilliant ballerina of her generation” (The Guardian), Guillem makes a rare American visit for the U.S. premiere of this evening of works by three of today’s most important choreographers. William Forsythe’s Rearray, created especially for Guillem, is a duet performed with Teatro alla Scala Ballet’s Massimo Murru. Mats Ek’s new solo for her, Bye, is set to Beethoven’s final piano sonata. Also on the program–a duet from Jiří Kylián’s work, 27′52″, performed by dancers handpicked by him.

Listen in as Mats Ek talks about Bye, his solo for Ms. Guillem:

The Joyce invites you to dnhance and expand your experience of the performances with “Dance Talks Notes,” impressions by experts in the field. You’ll find these informative text here at Joyce.org and in our theater lobby. This week we bring you Mindy Aloff’s impressions on Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo.

Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, which will be making its debut at The Joyce Theater February 15 through 19, is a company based in the principality of Monaco, which, along with the port of Genoa, has been associated with the rule of the Grimaldi family going back to the early 1300s. (In recent times, a diplomatic agreement was struck that, should the reigning member of the Grimaldis not produce an heir to the throne, the principality will revert to France.)

Les Ballets isn’t quite that old, however. Although Monaco, with its historic buildings, beautiful views of the Mediterranean (captured in the ballet movie The Red Shoes), and glittering casino, is famous as a center of hi-hat nightlife and served as a hot spot for ballet for much of the 20th century, this particular company was founded in 1985 by H.R.H. The Princess of Hanover, Princess Caroline. In founding Les Ballets (and serving as its first president), she was following the wishes of her late mother, Princess Grace, a devotee of the arts, who, in the 1970s, wanted to establish a classical ballet company in Monaco and requested that George Balanchine serve as her consultant—a dream that was brought to an end by the princess’s untimely death in a car accident in 1982.

The original co-directors of Les Ballets in 1985 were the husband-and-wife team Ghislaine Thesmar and Pierre Lacotte, formerly star dancers of the Paris Opéra Ballet, where Lacotte also served as a choreographer and reconstructor of 19th-century classics. This first company of 50 dancers performed in the tiny jewel of a venue the Salle Garnier of the Monte Carlo Opera; however, from the beginning, this was primarily a touring company—and continues to be. Thesmar and Lacotte left in 1988, and Jean Yves Esquerre—a veteran dancer with companies headed by Maurice Béjart, Jíri Kylián, and William Forsythe, who was then teaching at Les Ballets—took over as artistic director.

He expanded the repertory to include ballets by Balanchine, Antony Tudor, Roland Petit, and other choreographers of significance and brought in new young choreographers to make ballets. Esquerre left in 1992, the year that dancer and choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot (b. 1960) joined the company as an artistic advisor. In the fall of 1993, Maillot was royally appointed as Les Ballets’s director-choreographer. In 1997, he oversaw the removal of the company from its home in the tiny Salle Garnier to its own dance center, L’Atelier. In 2000, Les Ballets gave its first performance on the big stage of the Salle des Princes, in the new Monaco congress center, the Grimaldi Forum, where, when the company isn’t touring internationally, it performs today.

Maillot, who has choreographed over two dozen ballets for Les Ballets, continued to expand the repertory with historic works and reconstructions (such as the reconstruction, by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, of Balanchine’s ballet of 1925 for Diaghilev Le Rossignol) and with works by other contemporary choreographers, such as Forsythe, Kevin O’Day, and Carolyn Carlson, whose company collaborated with the horse whisperer-choreographer Bartabas and 32 steeds from the Académie de Versailles on a spectacle entitled We Were Horses.

Among Maillot’s own choreographies for his company are his 1996 evening-length Roméo et Juliette, featuring a prominent role for Friar Laurence (who enjoys duets with Juliette in both her bedroom and the crypt), and Maillot’s personal reconsiderations of The Sleeping Beauty (“La Belle”) and Cinderella, in which metaphors such as Aurora having been reared in a protective bubble are literally realized. (Roméo et Juliette was danced by Les Ballets at City Center in 1999 and has been acquired for the repertory of Pacific Northwest Ballet, in Seattle.)

Maillot has also choreographed many works without a stated narrative, such as his version of Hindemith’s score The Four Temperaments, which Les Ballets performed at City Center in 1996 during its first visit to New York, on a program that also provocatively included the company dancing its own production of Balanchine’s masterpiece, whose staging for Les Ballets had been overseen by Patricia Neary.

This appearance by Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo at The Joyce is the company’s forth visit to New York. Previously, it appeared here in 1996, 1999, and 2003. Maillot’s choreography might also be familiar to New York dance-goers from In Vole (“In Flight”), the 1997 duet he made for ABT’s Alessandra Ferri and Ethan Stiefel, and from his Casse Noisette Circus for Les Ballets, televised by Ovation TV in 2009 as part of the “Battle of the Nutcrackers.” And, if you attend programs by the New York International Ballet Competition, which takes place every three years, you may have glimpsed Maillot himself, who has served as one of the judges for it.

The Joyce program comprises two story-less ballets, both by Maillot. Altro Canto I, with a set by Rolf Sachs and costumes by the couturier Karl Lagerfeld, is choreographed to musical selections by three 17th-century Baroque composers—Claudio Monteverdi (excerpts from his Magnificat, vespro della Beata Vergine of 1610), Biagio Marini (a virtuoso violinist who greatly expanded the instrument’s technical armamentarium and whose compositions—fewer than 20 of which survive—also were experimental, such as his sonata constructed without a cadence), and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger, a German composer for the lute and the chitarrone (an instrument closely related to the Baroque theorbo).

Maillot’s second ballet, Opus 40—his fortieth work and made to mark his fortieth birthday—has sets and costumes by the New Hampshire native and practitioner of “Artificial Realism” the painter, sculptor, and print-maker George Condo and is choreographed to selections by Meredith Monk from her vocal works Turtle Dreams, Dolmen Music, Do You Be, and Volcano Songs and from her film Book of Days.

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Mindy Aloff is an editor, journalist, essayist, and dance critic. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, The Jewish Daily Forward, The Threepenny Review, and many other periodicals. Since 2000, she has taught as an adjunct member of the dance faculty at Barnard College. She is a Fellow of the Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson foundations and received the Whiting Writers Award in 1987.

On Tuesday, February 14th Education Assistant Melissa Croushorn visited Joyce Partnering Teacher Margaret Bary and her Fourth Grade Class at Brooklyn Friends School. Bary and her students participate in The Joyce’s Dance Education Program for Schools which presents performances by dance companies from around the world as a focal point for study in the classroom. The program is collaboratively designed to bring students, teachers, dance specialists, and artists together by learning in and through the art of dance.

With Joyce Teaching Artist Paul Thompson, Bary’s students explored the movement ideas they viewed in a recent performance by Dance Theatre of Harlem II in Donald Byrd’s Contested Space. A flurry of arms and legs (and a lot giggles), Bary’s fourth graders recreated their impressions of the opening floor solo in Byrd’s work. The session emphasized partnering with Thompson and Bary asking students to respond to each other’s movement expressions. Bary’s students were so mesmerized by the ballet vocabulary of Balanchine’s Glinka pas de Trois and David Fernandez’s Six Piano Pieces (Harlem Style) – which DTH II also performed at The Joyce – that Thompson offered them a brief ballet warm-up. These ambitious children eagerly stretched their feet into First and Second Position as they stretched down into plies, then struggled for their balance in releve. Students bravely tackled basic partnering work, leading their partner in a simple promenade and subsequently a supported jump!