A quick greeting from the Kennedy Center's Pathways to Performance/Dance Writers Convening
Recent reviews of gizeh muñiz vengel at CounterPulse, PNB's "Coppelia"
Hello from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.! I’m here for three days to attend the Dance Writers Convening conference organized by Theresa Ruth Howard. (If you haven’t read Theresa Ruth Howard’s 2017 op-ed “Why We Need to Confront Bias in Dance Criticism,” you should, and can access it here.) On Tuesday, as the culmination of this conference, I’ll be seeing the Kennedy Center’s Pathways to Performance program featuring a commissioned work by Jennifer Archibald, Kiyon Ross, and Meredith Rainey. Expect a review of that late next week.
In the meantime, though June has been deliciously slow (necessary for putting time aside to write a craft talk for the 55th annual Community of Writers conference at Olympic Valley, where I’ll be leading fiction and nonfiction workshops in a few weeks), summer started off with a riveting show: gizeh muñiz vengel’s ARC Edge Residency finale at San Francisco’s CounterPulse. I wrote on it for Fjord Review:
Sometimes there’s not much you’re able to say analytically about a dance work, and yet you know you’ve just witnessed a blood-guts-and-soul offering from an artist of the keenest kinaesthetic intelligence. Such was the case with gizeh muñiz vengel’s “auiga,” second on a double bill finale for the ARC Edge residency at San Francisco’s CounterPulse.
Self-identifying as Mexicana, residing in Oakland, vengel’s name pops up everywhere on the Bay Area experimental dance scene: She is a resident artist at Push Dance Company and the aerial group Bandaloop, in addition to curating and producing the annual KH Fresh Festival, which carries on the legacy of the unforgettable dancer and curator Kathleen Hermesdorf in a most wonderfully unpredictable fashion. For “auiga,” vengel offers this director’s note: “Our sound and movement research is a practice that centers the body as a channeler, a sacred fluid object that surrenders identity.” Few performances can live up to such promises, but “auiga” surpassed them.
The full review is here.
gizeh muñiz vengel with Ernesto Peart Falcón in “auiga.” Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
I also carried on an enriching four-year streak of following Pacific Northwest Ballet’s digital season offerings by reviewing the company’s production of Balanchine’s “Coppélia”:
Watching Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Coppélia,” which the Seattle company generously released as a digital stream for distant fans, you could easily fall down two historically rewarding rabbit holes.
The first would take you to Paris circa 1870, when “Coppélia” premiered with music by Léo Delibes and choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon (and with almost no partnering because all the male roles were played by women en travesti!), in the decadent last hurrah before the Franco-Prussian War. The second historical rabbit hole would take you to New York City Ballet in 1974, when critical adulation for George Balanchine was at peak frenzy, and generationally definitive dancers including Patricia McBride, Helgi Tomasson, and Merrill Ashley gave landmark performances in his new staging of “Coppélia,” created in close collaboration with Alexandra Danilova, one of the ballet’s great interpreters.
The full review for Fjord is here.
On the Radar
Looking beyond Washington D.C. and back to dance in the Bay Area, ODC/Dance’s Summer Sampler program is offering not only a revival of Brenda Way’s delightful “A Brief History of Up and Down,” but also a premiere by guest choreographer Catherine Galasso. I’ll be reviewing the show, which runs July 18 to 21 at ODC Theater in the Mission, for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Then, San Francisco Ballet returns to Stanford’s pastoral Frost Amphitheater July 26-27 for a fourth annual run of summer picnic shows. This year the rep is especially interesting, with the company premiere of Hans van Manen’s “5 Tangos” and also the company premiere of Ben Stevenson’s “Three Preludes.” My Datebook Pick on this will be in the Chronicle soon and I will also be reviewing.
More from D.C. next week!
Thanks for the review of “augia” it was a fascinating piece. I would love to have watched it several times. I enjoyed revisiting it as I wrote about it here https://www.jen-norris-dance-rev.com/post/review-counterpulse-arc-edge-presents-diana-lara-s-savia~sap-flow-auiga-by-gizeh-muñiz-vengel-wi
It was rich in the intangible thing that makes something captivating. It isn’t the first time gizeh has left me fully engaged and wanting more. I will definitely make sure to see their future work.
Thanks also for the link to the articles about the micro and macro-aggressions in dance criticism. I found an African American Dance History class at College of Marin taught synchronously this Fall. Described as:
Summary: (No prerequisite.) This course examines the historical contributions of African Americans to social as well as theatrical dance, from slavery to the present, emphasizing the social and cultural context of individual contributors and their influence on the theatrical dance world, as well as dance crazes and fads. The course focuses on how these dance creators, birthed from the African American experience, found footing in cultural fusion and individual expression. (CSU/UC) AA/AS Areas C and G, CSU Area C-1, IGETC Area 3A
I’m planning on enrolling.
With appreciation Jen