Because this important group of artists is largely unknown in the United States, MAPP wanted to explore intimate opportunities for the community to meet the artists off-stage. Much more potent than the “see and be seen” cocktail party, MAPP held an informal welcome gathering at Pangea Restaurant, and in partnership with New York Live Arts, organized thematically-relevant discussions pre and post-performance, and hosted an Artists Exchange Luncheon with New York City based dance-makers. At these events, participants were able to have one-on-one interactions, which sparked rich dialogue and enhanced viewings of the performances. For example, attendees at the welcome gathering gained insights into the conceptual underpinnings of the props. Maria Helena Pinto shared that the work “Sombra” emerged from her decision to use a common household item, a bucket, literally and figuratively to render her as faceless and anonymous.  Kettly Noël and Nelisiwe Xaba also shared anecdotes about how their blossoming friendship, and the challenges of shifting from oral or written conversations to movement conversations, fomented the critical layers of collaboration necessary to build the work “Correspondances”. Not only were the artists generous about sharing that information, but their individual passions about making work became extremely pronounced. These conversations rendered a more profound authenticity to the (already powerful) experience of their voices on-stage.

Perhaps indicative of a zeitgeist, the premier of these works fell concurrently with performances by Nora Chipaumire and Faustin Linyekula (also contemporary artists utilizing complex personal narratives to confront one-dimensional stereotypes of Africa). As a result, many provocative questions and insights arose throughout the week. Audience members were challenged to recognize their own assumptions about “African dance”, and then break those assumptions down in order to embrace the multi-dimensionalities of these women and their unique perspectives. Several recent reviews took on all of these works as if they were in conversation including:  “Lessons Learned: Transcribing the African Reality through Dance” by Azza Satti and “Out of Africa” by Deborah Jowitt.

As scholar Joan Frosch articulated so succinctly, “The encounters across American cities and towns will have been brief but all the more precious for that. These artists will not only sharpen our capacity to perceive, but to imagine anew. Indeed, the decolonization of perceptions, practices, institutions, and histories is a pedagogy far from finished.” Certainly, New York has been left with their voices ringing in our ears.

The tour continues to Washington D.C. (October 4-5), Minneapolis (October 10-13), and San Francisco (October 19-20). You don’t want to miss it!

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Here’s a short audio recording to introduce her beautiful voice: ERI, a vocal piece composed and arranged by Samita based on a  traditional “thumri” (semi-classical Hindustani love song):

Samita Sinha ERI by mappinternational

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On June 22, MAPP hosted a Show & Tell with artist Lars Jan about his new project HOLOSCENES. In the studio in which Lars held a three-week design atelier with his collaborators, a small group gathered to hear about the results of the group’s first concentrated work time.  During this “design atlelier” Jan and his collaborators experimented and drafted ideas for the size and structure of the project’s jumbo aquariums and also identified the 52 global locations from which they will draw rituals.

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We started out looking through a whole host of images provided by Okwui to get us thinking about different definitions of beauty and discussing perhaps the most obvious definition: surface beauty, defined by others and pop culture, fashion, men. But inspired by the Rilke, another definition quickly emerged: a beauty that is awe-inspiring and terrible, that comes from being fully open to intensity of experience, both despair and love.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to
endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us.

One question that arose is do these things always exist at the same time? Is one a hint at the other? In everyday experience when people experience something beautiful are they also touching a greater experience?

And how does context change the understanding of beauty? Where can beauty come from? Can you see beauty in ugliness? And when is it not okay to call something beautiful, when in another context (our out of context) the same combination of materials may be perceived as beautiful?

In Miriam, Nora begins the piece in darkness, among a pile of trash bags and rocks—a crime scene. Is there beauty in the scene? And if it is in her own body, how is it complicated by the fact that hers is a black, African body among the refuse? And that it is twinned with and provoked by another in Okwui Okpokwasili’s character?

Again from the Rilke:

Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him
in his constellation and puts the measuring-rod
of distance in his hand? Who makes his death
out of gray bread, which hardens — or leaves it there
inside his round mouth, jagged as the core
of a sweet apple?. . . .  Murderers are easy
to understand. But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart
gently, and not to refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.

Beautiful.

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The drive from the airport to my guest house in Melville is about an hour and I query Lawrence about his life in Johannesburg. Has it improved since I was here last? Because the first impressions I have is that this city is alive, and I don’t feel the same tension in the air that I remembered during my last visit. He tells me that things are much improved for him. He says the government is beginning to take better care of its people. They are giving out more loans so people can get apartments or homes facilities for the elderly are being provided; and people are also getting better healthcare. Lawrence tells me that there are many, many new roads and stadiums which were built for the Olympics and that there remains a great sense of pride that Johannesburg was able to host the Olympics and to do so successfully.

Of course there are still many, many problems and in the ensuing days, we see performances that articulate some of them: the reclaiming of a personal history long suppressed is the subject of Gregory Maqoma’s Exit/Exist; the struggles women and girls face related to reproductive health are the grist in Neli Xaba’s deceptively cunning performance and video installation Uncles & Angels; and corruption, power and greed and the resultant collapse that follows in Jay Pather’s massive work, Beware Caesar, set in the bowels of the Stock Exchange.

Of course we are managing to eat very well and testing South Africa’s great wines in Melville’s many varied and low key restaurants. Today being Sunday, it’s market day and I managed to get some beautiful woven tapestries and other items at the African Craft Market.

Marj Neset, Laura Faure, Cathy Zimmerman and Joan Frosch in Joburg

Over the next four days we’ll see more work, attend a star-studded fundraiser at the Dance Umbrella Festival, and meet with theater and dance artists at a breakfast hosted by the Market Theatre. Our Consortium will conduct two planning meetings with South African artists and colleagues to share ideas and future projects and to devise a system of artist to artist exchange between our two continents.  Stay tuned…

And! Consortium colleague Laura Faure is blogging as well. For her perspective check out The Bates Dance Festival blog!

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On February 1^st, MAPP gathered a group of diverse, creative, really smart women to join a Read & Reflect group to follow and support Nora Chipaumire’s creative process toward her upcoming dance-theater work, MIRIAM.

Ten women, many strangers to each other at the beginning of the evening, gathered at the home of MAPP’s Executive Director Ann Rosenthal for the first in a series of gatherings which will investigate the ideas behind MIRIAM, provide feedback and information to Nora as she develops the project, and provide an opportunity for the women to get to know each other as well as Nora and her collaborators.

Nora introduced herself and talked about where she is with MIRIAM—trying to make a piece with a simple, beautiful name, taking on questions of public and private responsibility inspired by the lives of Miriam Makeba, the Virgin Mary and herself. What kind of choice did these women have in their iconographic roles? What did they gain, and maybe more importantly, what did they give up or lose in the process? What are their demons? And how can this struggle be named, embodied and placed within the performative environment, confronted by the gaze of the audience?

Looking back on it, it was a deep and provocative beginning to a conversation that we thankfully have months to continue. We placed a lot of issues on the table and dug into the first layer of a few of them:

On the gaze:

There is also the gaze of the fan base, which keeps you in this limited view. Miriam Makeba can’t do an album where she is picking her nose and saying “the ANC is complicated, the ANC is sexist… and I’m just gonna sing these songs where I’m in short skirts and are cute and have nothing of substance because I’m done being political for a bit.” She doesn’t get that option. Even though they are adoring, they are adoring of safety, they are adoring of what they know of you so if you switch paths suddenly, you risk losing them. Which makes me think of what you said at the beginning… that you bring people in, but you’re trying to challenge them: I am going to take that risk, I’m willing to upset the fan base and give you what you don’t expect. – Chitra Aiyar

On the exhilaration of invisibility or anonymity:

Possibly, the biggest positive about being immigrant, foreign, expat, outsider—whatever way you transform from one border into another—people don’t have a sense of you, so you have a slightly better chance of coming up with who you might actually be if you were not on the backdrop of that thing that you are always against, which is home. Home has this amazing way of defining you and redefining you and constricting you, and at the same time that is what is wonderful about home, that it is such a definitive space. – Wangechi Mutu

On being an individual:

Some of the exhilaration that I find is having separated myself from family, to Nora the individual, I’m not trying to represent Africa orZimbabwe… and when I use that language I’m hoping for a reaction. The joy comes from people understanding that that doesn’t exist…. The exhilaration comes from trying to find the singularity, this character, who is a complete human being and not just Mama Africa…. I am an individual. And this is a very profound idea coming from where I come from, a tradition that thinks of the collective. – Nora

Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the agency that women have, and the challenges to the expression of that agency we all face to greater and lesser degrees. What quality is it that makes a person willing to take on those challenges? And does it feel like a choice or does it feel more like survival?

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At Los Muñequitos final show in NYC, Robert Browning brought MAPP’s Ann Rosenthal onstage during his opening remarks to hail MAPP’s leadership in bringing Los Muñequitos to the U.S.  Ann’s eloquent remarks about MAPP’s decision to seize the moment after the 2008 presidential election, and to open the door to renewed cultural exchange with Cuba, were greeted with enthusiastic applause.

For MAPP, the evening grew even sweeter when, during the second half of the show, Los Muñequitos stopped playing and their manager Caridad Diez came onto the stage to read a statement of appreciation.  She expressed their deep gratitude to all the people they’d met on the tour, but especially to MAPP, not only for bringing them to the U.S., but for doing so, as Cari said, in a way that allowed them to perform with dignity.  She called Ann up to the stage and presented her with beautiful flowers from the group.

Then they went back to playing–and brought down the house!

Let us just say, the pleasure and gratitude was ours too, to the Muñequitos for sharing their music and culture so openly with all of us.

Barbaro Ramos leading a dance workshop with Max Pollak at the Cornerstone Center for the Arts

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Josh Lubin-Levy: Before we talk about Nameless forest, I wanted to ask you a little about the process of choreographing this work.  There seems to be a contradiction between the often violent content of your work, and the affectionate and caring way I’ve seen you interact with your performers in the rehearsal room.  What is the relationship of this caring nature to bringing such a visceral choreography to your dancers?

Dean Moss: Well, you know in American society violence is so much a substitute for sex.  And so I think it’s an incredibly intimate thing to be violent, especially to be violent on stage.  And part of the use of violence on stage is approaching metaphor in a very particular way – in a very direct way.  To get a performer to go with you, you have to be intimate with that performer.  And you have to have a kind of trust with that performer.  Developing a mode in which you can work with the performer to bring out an activity they might not be comfortable with.  Developing that process is really important to me because I want the use of violence to be specific and I need the performer’s understanding. I need this to be read as behavior in the performer, so that it’s generated by the performer and not that I am directing them.  Part of the interest in my work and part of the reason my work has moved into audience participation is because I am interested in behavior and what happens when you have a kind of behavior-as-form presented on stage. 

JLL: Now I’m feeling self conscious, because I imagine everyone starts their interviews by asking about the use of violence in your work?

DM: I’ve been getting violence and transgressive – which can bring certain visceral things up in people minds so it can be useful for that.  But it can be a little gray or fuzzy.  As I get more articulate in my work, I move away from those terms. And I’m not sure where I’m going yet, but I think it’s more specific than those words are.

JLL: Well it also seems to be a term that is often brought up in discussions of masculinity – which you’ve mentioned is a theme of yours in Nameless forest.  So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about male-male relationships in the non-sexualized way you are using them.

DM: I think Nameless forest is partially about breaking down identity and thinking about masculinity as a part of that identity.  But also it’s about having strong attractions to other men and masculinity at the same time of being quite straight.  I don’t have a lot of male friends, but the ones I do have, they like space around them.  We like space.  So there’s a kind of wistfulness, a bond that you maybe would like to have more of and yet part of its definition is that there is less of it than there is desire for it.  And so I’m interested in that.  I’m interested in this desire.  So the closeness is very interesting, especially the way my violence and my masculinity are some how combined.  Part of it is a kind of resentment and a rejection of that Alan Alda, soft-male identity.  Which is something I tried and couldn’t do.  I tried to be soft.  I’m not, I can’t do that.

JLL: Creating space is an interesting idea, particularly because the men in Nameless forest get very close to one another.  They’re playing, they’re jumping on top of one another, their movement mirrors and mimics each other – so they collapse in a myriad of ways.

DM: Well I think the space is a psychic space of isolation.  In Sungmyung’s work that isolation exists in physical space.  In my work that isolation has to be formed and it has to be formed in relationship to something.  So in the work there’s isolation presented by the Aaron character, and then there’s community presented by the group.  But the group is also partially inside Aaron, and so the exploding of that single character into these characters is part of this isolation-in-togetherness.  It’s a rite of passage that is also a separation for these men.  Then the women are tokens of that separation and their role in this male rite of passage is to identify what is lost within it, the responsibilities of it – to identify and give value to loss and isolation in the work as represented by the men.  And through this we initiate the audience into our world, we engage directly with the audience.  Bringing in the audience members is about initiating them to this sense of loss and isolation, exposing them to the pain (which accompanies any rite of passage into adulthood or into knowledge) which is often about being able to endure the pain of being isolated from the community.  And in many societies, many post-industrialized societies in particular, we have moved away from that sense of what it is to be a man, from that passage.  Unless you go to war or go into the military, there are not so many rites of passage, unless you do something to force this sort of isolation.

JLL: So you’re engaging the audience in this really active way of really putting them through it, so to speak.

DM: Putting them through it and then seeing it.  Seeing somebody going through and also being involved in it.  So the work becomes a kind of mirror of this initiation process so that you see the performance of it and are also involved in it almost simultaneously.

JLL: There seems to be an interesting parallel between this passage through isolation into community with your own progress as an artist. You described a turn in your work from the do-it-yourself model to a more collaborative method.  Nameless forest seems to be your largest collaboration yet, so I’m wondering if you could talk more about this shift.

DM: Being a curator, looking at work from a distance, doing the dance-in-progress program at The Kitchen, developing a composition workshop with Levi Gonzalez – all of this fueled this turn in that the idea of art doing things became more interesting to me.  And once I did Figures on a Field and saw the effects of this docent led group through the work and saw the dimension it added to it – I think I was kind of floored.  They bring something for real, it messes with reality in a way – which is something only the very best work does.  I had started to explore this in a very small way through the Board Dance which was part of American deluxe, but seeing it that way made we want to do something that was even more radical, which was to try to replace the performers in an essential way, not in a peripheral way, but in the essential focus of the work, which would be that the audience would perform the core of the work.  This became Kisaeng Becomes You, a work in which the audience is brought down and they recite the poem, they become the actual performance, and the dancers are reduced to framing devices for those performances – how to setup your audience to watch an audience member do something, to see that thing that they’re doing as the focus of the entire work.  So the replacement of the performer became an interesting idea.  In Nameless forest, by adding more artists to the work, I feel like I’m moving myself in a way, that I’m taking a back seat, I’m curating a work in the process of creating it.  And I think I will continue in this process of exploring the absence of the artist, or the frame for the artist with the artist kind of removed – but the outline of the artists is still there and the work is the outline.

JLL: I don’t know of many dancers who are actively pursuing that kind of absence.  Just as an open-ended question, what drew you to dance or the use of the body in the first place?

DM: For me, there is something really essential about the body and how you filter information through the body.  I have a body.  I like to move around.  I feel my greatest freedom in motion.  And in fact freedom is defined in my mind as motion.  And so the body seems like a natural place to begin.  I think then, I want to move out from it.  And the set design for Nameless forest is this fragmented body, or the monument of the body exploding.  And the work itself presents the body as an act, an active and creative community or communal body. Dance, for me, has the most open, abstract and yet narrative form.  Or at least it has that possibility.  And it has an infinite relationship to the world, the universe.  I can see my whole existence as body, as an organism.  I am part of and I am this organism. It’s very expansive.  It’s not about an object, or rather the objectness of it is optional even in the sense of performance-as-object.  Even that is optional.  And I like that it’s not text based.  I so love that it is experience based.

JLL: Along the lines of this constant expansion – you’ve worked as a teacher, an artist, and a curator – is there one lesson you always try to impart to your students and one lesson you’d say you have yet to learn?

DM: Well, I think ultimately I’m giving and learning the same thing.  In dealing with emerging artists I’m interested in opening their eyes to possibilities and I’m interested in putting myself in circumstance that open my eyes to possibilities as well.  And if we tied it all up, it’s about opening my eyes and the kinds of things that force me to do that which brings us back to identity, violence, masculinity, community and isolation…all these things come out of trying to find a more open place.

JLL: Breaking apart that singular view, to find something new, only to break it apart again.

DM: Yes.

JLL: Is there anything I should ask you that I haven’t?

DM: Well you didn’t ask me what I get out of collaboration.  And probably because it’s obvious what I get out of collaboration.  But also the collaboration forces discipline, and a discipline that is not your own.  In all the pieces I make, I setup the framework, I assembled my collaborators out of a practical need or a desire to work together.  And then, once I have them, I’m interested in their mind, in the discipline they have around their own practice and how to integrate that discipline.  And also the aesthetic problem that presents itself when their aesthetic comes into conflict with my own and my own understandings.  So, that’s really important.  It’s akin to having to come to, or why we come to, a place like New York, rather than making work in isolation, in an isolated place, somewhere else.  Because the community around us forces some kind of reaction.  Not only does it feed you with other people doing creative things, but it forces a kind of reaction.  The more I know about the things that are going on, the more I react to it and I’m changed by that.

JLL: So you come to a project with a practice that is behind you, maybe a method or a process, but then collaborating is about rewriting that method?

DM: Rewriting it!  Yes, thank you.  Yes, it forces me to rewrite it.  And because it forces me to rewrite it and it forces me into places that I don’t or could not predict, that I could not foresee, it keeps a kind of freshness about the work.  I mean it changes, reworks, the idea.  And reworking the idea is always more interesting than the thing I would have done myself.  It expands my own practice.  It opens up what I can see because I’ve brought in somebody else and forced, forced, violently forced, sometimes really violently forced myself to look at something that I hadn’t looked at, or was obscuring in some way.

JLL: So this kind of collaboration – which is not about building a safety net of other people or filling in the gaps – is really about bringing these minds together and saying the more people who are in this room the harder it is for me to stand up here, so I have to be really disciplined and really clear about what I’m doing.  Like you were saying, it forces a discipline.

DM: It forces a discipline but also it forces me to look at what they want, and what they are doing.  And how do I incorporate that?  How do I stay true to my own idea but at the same time try to graft my mind onto theirs?  They’re fulfilling something I would like, that I’ve designed, but then part of that design changes because of their input, because of my understanding of their input, because of my need to understand their input.  In relationship to Laylah I couldn’t just look at the painting and make up something.  That’s not what I want.  I want to know what her idea is when she looks at performers in a space, what happens to her idea of her work.  Then she says to me, “This has to be cleaner, this has to be more perfect, that has to be looked at in a certain way.”  Things that I wouldn’t necessarily do but that I’m open to.  Ok, let me do this from your standpoint.  Let me try to fulfill your needs.  By fulfilling somebody else’s needs I come even closer to my own, which is a very interesting paradox and something I would say in ensemble work.  Make your partner look good and you look good.  Frame them and you will look better, you will be better on stage, you will perform better.  Everything is about somebody else.  And so the work, for me, if I make it about my collaborator I can more easily see myself, I can more easily understand what I want.  But it’s also about leaving bits of myself with others because they have to struggle with me. And the struggles seem to be the medium in which we work.  And that activity is what keeps the space for us to define ourselves as separate but also closer than we might have thought.

Joshua Lubin-Levy is a writer, performer and scholar. He is also a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies.

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Hi – First, this not so personal letter is being sent to let you know, if you did not already, that the greatest rumba ensemble in the world Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, direct from Matanzas, Cuba, will be here in New Mexico this coming Monday, April 18 in Albuquerque, and Tuesday, April 19 in Santa Fe.

But then also I want to remind all of you receiving this that you played a significant role in making this happen by joining thousands of artists, arts presenters, writers, cultural entrepreneurs and cultural workers throughout the country in demanding – first of Bush, and then in no less compromising terms of Obama – that Cuban cultural workers, artists, intellectuals and others be allowed to enter the United States to share with their counterparts and the public here. It was an effort far ahead of the curve of the Obama Administration, and it worked. The first Cuban artists since 2003 were allowed into the U.S. during the summer of 2009. Negotiating the terrain necessary to procure visas remains onerous, but this and related efforts have also resulted in the return to the policies of the Clinton Administration to allow some travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba.

Maybe it is cliché to quote Frederick Douglass that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” Perhaps though, given everything we have witnessed since January 2009 – and also as we approach the 150th Anniversary of the abolition of chattel slavery, to which Douglass dedicated his life – it is apt to reflect on that thought. We should also realize that, opportunities to simply see such talent from Cuba can be taken away in the blink of an eye again, as happened in 2003 under the previous administration. Let’s not lose sight of this.

I meanwhile hope that everyone can make it to one of the appearances, or to the Wednesday evening workshop in Albuquerque, as we welcome Los Muñequitos de Matanzas to New Mexico for the first time.

We should thank those presenters in New Mexico that have taken on the still risky venture of presenting works by Cuban artists and cultural workers during the past year. Let’s all support them.

I especially want to thank Outpost Productions, the National Hispanic Cultural Center and the Lensic Performing Arts Center, along with our good friends at MAPP International Productions in New York, for bringing Los Muñequitos to us next week.

Louis Head
Albuquerque

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We had fun sharing these videos with you over the last couple weeks and hope you enjoyed them too!  A BIG thank you to all of the people who joined the MAPP Artist Challenge and helped us not only meet, but exceed, our goal!

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