New York Notebook, January 2025

Justin Faircloth, Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez, Wendell Gray II, Jay Carlon. Courtesy New York Live Arts. Photo: Maria Baranova

Super Nothing

Miguel Gutierrez
New York Live Arts, Jan 12-18, 2025

Miguel Gutierrez has, over decades, been predictably unpredictable. He has woven into performances sections of spoken text, multimedia, performance, and dance. In Super Nothing, at New York Live Arts, perhaps what’s most surprising is that nearly the entire 70-minute piece comprises abstract and gestural movement. Also, that movement is set to music (by Rosana Cabán), wide-ranging in style and dynamic, thoughout the work. As Gutierrez says in his program note, his main emotion of late is grief, primarily about the state of politics here and abroad.

And so in the face of what feels like shouting into the wind and being blown backward, he turns to the dancer’s tool kit, the body. He has set the work on four remarkable performers: Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez, Wendell Gray II, Justin Faircloth, and Jay Carlon. For about an hour, with little apparent repetition, each one moves continuously — thousands of small movements strung together, some gestural and deeply evocative, others freeform, expressing a palette of emotions, or simply conveying joy or sorrow. Carolina Ortiz designed the gorgeous variegated lighting, including a costume change interlude when the lights came to life and took over as the focus.

From my notes on the movement: free, expressive, playful, twitching, arm paddling, staggering around perimeter, spasming, bracelet shaking while ascending stairs, seal flippers pushing forward, whipping attitude turns, self-conscious voguing, fake phone call, tending to an ailing friend. Dancers exit, and the lighting takes over as fog rolls in—the omnipresent kite above, lit hues of white from warm to cool, red/yellow projected discs, flat rectangles, banks of warm sidelights brightening and dimming, with the temperature rising and falling on our eager faces. It almost felt as if the building had come alive irrespective of our presence.

Jay Carlon, Wendell Gray II, Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez, Justin Faircloth. Courtesy New York Live Arts. Photo: Maria Baranova

The performers return, having changed from black & white slashed pieces to neon yellow and black garments. After another spell of dashed off gestures and freeform moves, they unite centerstage in a square, and begin a multi-measure section that feels much more purposeful and structured. They repeat it facing different directions, snapping into a line, and reclustering. Toward the end, they move as close to us as possible, intensely repeating individual phrases manically, then retreat upstage and trickle off. They’ve left it all on the stage, moving us with their stamina, dedication, and intellect. Lunatics might be running the asylum, but these artists are in full control of their bodies.

Ronald K. Brown / Evidence

Joyce Theater, Jan 14-19, 2025

Ronald K. Brown / Evidence celebrates 40 years this season, believe it or not. There is still nothing like Brown’s work—so ecstatic, full of faith, incorporating challenging techniques and rhythms, and largely presented in proscenium dance venues, with impressive production elements. But it’s mainly the ecstasy and elation, generated through an explosive vocabulary unspooled effortlessly by his dancers and mixed with pensive moments.

Demetrius Burns and
Shaylin D. Watson.
Photo by Whitney Brown

Grace (1999/2003), commissioned by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, remains Brown’s most resonant work, and among the great modern dances. The music, by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis, Jr., and Fela Kuti, with guest singer Gordon Chambers, undergirds and propels the many movements—a harmonious artistic creation that feels like the kinetic manifestation of the title. And while it’s difficult to match the athletic prowess of the Ailey company’s dancers, Evidence delivers a more humanistic interpretation, while having the advantage of being closer to us in a smaller house.

Ailey also commissioned Serving Nia (2001); the Joyce performance was Evidence’s company premiere. On the shorter side at about 15 minutes, the piece is set in front of a striking backdrop depicting—depending on your mood—either a cliff face or a wall at a sharp angle, tucked into a corner and evocative of Ed Ruscha’s geometric compositions. Brown’s dancers often face to the side, signifying a private communication with an unseen being, and also favors a diagonal movement path. Sadly, when the lighting shifted to a deep red, I could only think of the LA fires.

In Order My Steps (2005), Kevin Boseman guests as a dancer and speaker. The work began as a collaboration between Brown and Kevin’s late brother, actor Chadwick. Themes of war and addiction emerge in the music and long monologue delivered by Boseman. This piece felt different than Brown’s usual music-driven style, including the more relaxed jazz music (Terry Riley, Bob Marley, David Ivey) and partitioning the stage area with the dancers at left in two lines, and Boseman at right. There was less of the joyful unleashing of energy so prominent in much of his other work, in particular Grace, but it did showcase Boseman’s breadth of talent and Brown’s willingness to experiment.

Nick Cave at Shainman Gallery. Photo: Susan Yung

Nick Cave, Amalgams and Graphts

Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette St, to Mar 15

The New York gallery scene surely reflects the real estate market in the city. The mass has shifted innumerable times, mostly involving varying gallery densities in Manhattan’s East Village, UES, Soho, Noho, Chelsea, LES, Tribeca, and Lower Manhattan, among others. It seems that the latest notable shift is onto Broadway below Canal (and a handful of blocks south, east, and west), where huge storefronts that not long ago housed cheap clothing and shoe stores are now galleries.

Marian Goodman now has an entire building at 385 Broadway near Walker. But the other big headline is another satellite of Jack Shainman Gallery in the Clocktower Building designed by McKim, Mead & White, from 1898, and originally the home of New York Life Insurance. It has nearly 30-foot high ceilings, with original marble columns and a massive bank vault door; stand-alone office cubicles dot the mezzanine. 

The space’s inaugural show, work by Nick Cave, seems to have demanded the new outpost’s acquisition; it includes Amalgam (Origin), a 26-foot high bronze casting that echoes his Soundsuit series. Related Amalgam sculptures created on a human scale are also on view, as well as an extensive series of Graphts—wall pieces composed of floral and souvenir map serving tray fragments, needlepoint portraits (including of Cave), and floral elements intricately collaged together by screws. Cave’s work is charged with many levels of meaning and symbolism, and the craftsmanship nears perfection. These latter-day treasures have found a proper temporary home in an architectural manifestation of capitalism. Shainman adds this to a portfolio of reclaimed spaces, which includes The School in Kinderhook, NY.

Miguel Gutierrez—Messing with Time, 9/18/09

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Miguel Gutierrez's Last Meadow at DTW

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/film/miguel-gutierrez%E2%80%94messing-with-time/754/

I want to say that words fail to describe Miguel Gutierrez’s latest work at DTW, Last Meadow, because it is humbling to think about its sheer scope, even more so to reduce it to a bunch of words after watching one performance. And yet, even though it is foremost experiential, there is a generous amount of structure to deliberate as well. It meanders, barrels ahead, stops for breaks, flows lyrically, evolves, and devolves over the duration of its packed 90 minutes.

Gutierrez somehow creates work that you feel in your gut and your heart, and at the same time your brain works feverishly to process the layers of text, subtext, examination of the performance form itself, and endless experimentation with the powerful, often overlooked areas of sound and lighting. The loose pretexts for this show involve James Dean’s films, the father figure in America, as America, and confusion as “a potentially transformative, sensory-enlivened state,” per the program. Gutierrez has never lacked for ambition, and at first glance, these topics would seem far too large and disconnected to allow for any cohesion whatsoever.

And yet Gutierrez links the opening scene ramblings of a depressed Cal, Dean’s character inEast of Eden (the amazing Michelle Boulé in a tour de force performance), with his own straight-laced father character by means of his own long, rambling monologue whispered into a mic. At first, I thought it was a recording because Gutierrez was hidden in the dark, and the enunciation was so clear that we could understand every whispered word, but he was doing it live. The primal, and yet singular act of speech and the power of language and its cognition is one of Gutierrez’s secret weapons, with which he ferrets out nightmares and subconscious suspicions, or simply pins our ears back with massive volume. In a later scene, Boulé and Tarek Halaby (who plays a woman) read lines from a script as Gutierrez somehow parrots them with the mic jammed in his mouth, to terrifying effect. We can understand none of the performers in this scene where content loses out to mutated, mediated form. Maybe it’s better that way.

Boulé begins to bark out minute stage directions that all three follow obediently. Lying on their faces, they begin to sing a lovely song in harmony, but it eventually segues seamlessly into a recording. Or was it live? Moments like this crop up with regularity in the work, where you have to press a mental rewind button, and  question your skills of perception. “Cut!” is called, and the trio relaxes into their natural states, or so it seems. They banter, clean up the strewn clothes, stretch. Halaby sings My Country ‘Tis of Thee in a lovely voice. They revert into their film characters, repeating an emotional scene when Cal returns home. Jerky poses accompany each line; this devolves into Boulé now shouting choreographic phrases to hilarious effect, with opera blaring as well. (Those who’ve done modern dance guffawed at the moves’ nicknames, which ranged from descriptive to things like the “Frank Gehry,” which involved waving fingers wildly through ones’ legs, bent over backward.) Clothes come off down to underwear; club music begins, and they dance and romp for sheer pleasure, seemingly in a trance. Gutierrez makes a loop through the audience, pausing a few times to give some lucky viewers lap dances (ahem), and then does a series of full-out grand jetés around the stage. They veritably burst with joy.

But the costumes go back on, and the piece retraces some of the scenes we’ve already seen. A shadow cast enters, replaying some of the earlier action as the first cast takes its bows, and it isn’t until I’m nearly out of the theater that I realize it’s the same dialogue that we heard looping endlessly, pre-curtain. Gutierrez can’t manipulate time, but he sure can mess with our perceptions of it.

Photo by Yi Chun Wu.