Not in any particular order:
TINO SEHGAL: This Situation
Where I saw it: Sammlung Beggruen, Berlin
Sum: A curious happening involving synchronized walking and posing bodies, quotes from the best and worst of the 20th century, and the occasional unison phrase: "Welcome...to this situation".
SASA ASENTIC: My Private Biopolitics
Where I saw it: Podewil, Berlin
Sum: A brave, hyperintelligent, and endearing (if not seductive) young man delivers a lecture-demonstration problematizing the definitions of contemporary dance. Set includes laptop, academic research, vases, stick-on body fur, a shrine, audience participation, a couple dance sequences, and a significant amount of the performer's conviction and sweat.
SARAH MICHAELSON: Dogs
Where I saw it: Haus 1, Berlin
Sum: The most traditionally avant-garde thing I have seen since the documentary Ballet Russes. More balls-in-hand (and silken-night-gown-on-dagger) than tongue-in-cheek, this London/New York doyenne of dance-theatre delivers an evening's hallucination of razor sharp, repetitive movement sequences, subtle yet bizarre light projections, and fills the auditorium with pink-lit stage smoke to the point where theatre and audience sublimate.
CHRIS HARING & LIQUID LOFT: Art of Seduction Posing Project B
Where I saw it: Semper Depot, Vienna
Sum: Operatic lip-syncing, pristine white breasts, shag carpets and whirring fans, all in the most beautiful old stable (?) space imaginable, this fabulous site-specific experience sashayed away with the Venice Golden Lion Award earlier in the season. Superbly talented cast. Entertaining and engaging scores so well executed you can't complain it's too sexy to be art.
JILL SIGMAN/THINKDANCE: Rupture
Where I saw it: Danspace Project, New York
Sum: No personal bias (I was close to being in this piece), Rupture is an almost transcendent totalizing and ritualized space full of eggshells, video screens, ladders, and smart, smart thoughts. Sigman's red-frocked solos coexist in parallel but colliding worlds with the group movement scenarios of her extreme-bodied cast. The text is as lulling as the movement is jarring, although once the conceit unfolds and audience is invited to participate in the space my sense of philosophical provocation is over and I want to be alone so I can rewind to the beginning again.
ALAIN PLATEL with BENJAMIN VERDONCK+FUMIYO IKEDA: Nine Finger
Where I saw it: Vienna
Sum: So unique is the experience to say "I've never seen anything like it before" that it is possible for an enjoyment of new alienation to twitter alongside one's rage at the injustice of the scenarios presented. Based upon the semi-fictionalized narratives of child soldiers in Uganda, outstanding performers Verdonck and Ikeda embody characters that I would name A Child Dehumanizing, and A Woman: Lost Mother of the Imagination, respectively. One cannot forget the opening image of a childish Verdonck yelling, "FUTUUUURRRE!" before leaping headfirst into a cardboard box, or his later discombobulations and violations of himself and of the Ikeda girl figure in his midst. The feeling if raw, the feeling is forgiving, the feeling is lamenting, the image is of a tragic Caliban who is so deformed at just six years old. I walk outside and sign a petition.
LUCIANA ACHUGAR: Franny and Zooey in the Nothing Festival
Where I saw it: Dance Theater Workshop, New York
Sum: A pure disco show where only lights move (all the guns in DTW's array) begins this celebratory collage of formalized female bodies, cats on a screen, a vagina that crawls to recede into the horizon, and a glorious mass of nakedness dancing to a YouTube clip of Dora performing Chicken Noodle Soup. If Achugar's previous work philosophy has been seen as "dance is labor" then hand me the overalls because labor, it seems, is liberation.
SUSAN RETHORST in the Nothing Festival
Where I saw it: Dance Theatre Workshop, New York
Sum: What at first glance may seem like a Dogma 96 domestic drama (multiple generations of women peppered amidst Rethorst's home furniture with stern and contemplative gazes) becomes an idiosyncratic display of gesture and action/reaction dance-ping-pong between bodies. One performer traces the outline of another, posing, with her hand, while another assaults a friend with a pillow and then herself replaces the couch. The work is a lacing of unique character threads; a polysymphonic harmony of unique body voices; each dancer is dressed with such detailed dignity and determination that Rethorst's piece is both comic and empowering.
JOSH FOX & INTERNATIONAL WOW: You Belong To Me & Death of Nations Installment 5
Where I saw it: Performance Space 122, New York
JANEZ JANSA nee EMIL HRVATIL interviewing MEG STUART
Where I saw it: Podewil, Berlin
Ok, ok, #11:
JEN ROSENBLIT/BOTTOMHEAVY PRODUCTIONS with ADDYS GONZALEZ: That Sick Sound
Where I saw it: Judson Memorial Church, New York
Sum: Rosenblit is a fierce heart on the stage, and she and her dance partner Gonzalez develop a fierce vocabulary of gestures that speak of frustration, insistence, surrender, and the journey. Their relationship in the duet is not at first romantic or filial but somehow connected in resistance to the foreboding space around them. What comes as a natural result of having the dance and the fantastic live music (performed by Jules Gimbrone and band) be of equal emotional weight and resonance is that, to the dance-focused viewer, the power of the physical seems to concede to sonorous, but dramaturgically this balance of elements leaves an airiness that gives room for the viewer to feel too ... and for Rosenblit to emerge (we hope) with more dancing to come. A well-deserved standing ovation from the Judson crowd.
::EXTRAS::
I liked, but lots of people liked better:
IVANA MUELLER: While we were holding it together
Where I saw it: Vienna
Raved about, and I missed it:
JEREMY WADE
Where it was that I missed it: Joyce Soho, New York
It was good, very very good:
LUIS LARA MALVACIAS: There is no such thing
Where I saw it: Dance Theater Workshop, New York
JONATHAN BURROWS & MATTEO FARGION: Speaking Dance
Where I saw it: Vienna
CLARE BYRNE DANCE & HOT YOUNG PRIEST: Rounds / The First Last Dance, or, The Last First Dance, or, An Ordination
Where I saw it: Dance New Amsterdam, New York
CRISTINA MOURA: like an idiot
Where I saw it: Danspace Project, New York
THE FORSYTHE COMPANY: Three Atmospheric Studies
Where I saw it: Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York
BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY: Three
Where I saw it: Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York
Sorry, I hated it, and I'm pretty good about appreciating most things for something:
CHRISTIAN RIZZO/L'ASSOCIATION FRAGILE: comme crane, comme culte
Where I saw it: Vienna
SIDI LARBI CHERKAOUI & TONEELHUIS: Myth
Where I saw it: Opera House, Vienna
MORGAN THORSON: Faker
Where I saw it: Performance Space 122
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