In Elvia Wilk’s “Death by Landscape,” she describes writing as a practice in biodiversity. She quotes Wai Chee Dimock’s idea that literature provides explosive contagions, turning “shared vulnerabilities into shared plenitudes.”¹  As Wilk explains it, Dimock considers the comingling of texts essential to the biodiversity of the field. For Wilk, these plenitudes – in the shape of books – might allow for a “type of labor in service of change, for better or for worse”² that while not always clearly causal in an explicit way, explodes into us and seeds immediate or eventual shifts in the landscape. For Hunter College’s MFA in Dance, a program I direct, I annually introduce returning professionals to the academic concept that performances and choreographic works (and music videos and dance parties and parades and protests and the entire world of phenomena) are “texts” to consider, analyze, theorize, and discuss, and, of course, generate. This is where we build a dialogue into a discourse – out of a 1-to-1 and into the many. This is where we seed change, building in critical connections if not (yet) in critical mass.

So, while trying to strictly manage the pervasive NYC version of Arts Presenters-infected “festival fomo,” I still accumulated enough exposure to the spores of a range of performances in the January flurry to wander into a compost pile of considerations on what is doggedly sprouting among us in the age of extinction. Granted, I started this while in high production mode, opening a show after the meet market, so, the brevity of the response is a signifier of my own temporal pressures and not from any lack of nutrients or scarcity in the wind.

Fri, Jan 5 – Yasuko Yokoshi showed Kyoganoko Musume Dojoji (“A Maiden and a Bell at Dojoji Temple”) at Douglas Dunn’s Studio. 京鹿子娘道成寺 Kyoganoko Musume Dojoji (DOJOJI) is a Japanese classical dance masterwork first presented in 1753. One of the most celebrated dances in Kabuki and Nihon-buyo (Japanese classical dance), it is passed down the generations through classical dance families. In a post-show conversation, Yasuko reflected on how her dancing of it has changed over decades of practice. I’ve written of Yasuko’s work over the years in academic press regarding her contribution to Asian American dance through a diasporic (come on, spores) lens, as well as for Culturebot and elsewhere. So, observing and reflecting on the maturing of the form fed my delight for this recent presentation. The work is exact and exacting, it is highly vigorous with deep knee bends and jumps that terrify my kinesthetically empathic joints. Yauko’s execution is compelling, delightful, and ripe with a kind of humanistic element I cannot fully articulate. Having marveled at a version of this work in her production of “Bell” at New York Live Arts over 10 years ago, this rendition proved a feast of enduring grace and devotion. Where “Bell” (pictured above) was as spectacular as a yamabushitake (lion’s mane mushroom), this time, the intimacy of Dunn’s studio, the decade in between, and the pared-down presentation allowed many details of focus and clarity to fan out like a delicate reishi. The afternoon share was part of an extended presentation of a collaborative research project between Yasuko and choreographer Benjamin Akio Kimitch. I was not able to see a December open rehearsal with them, but the “relational experiment” they have embarked on is sure to produce a bounty of discoveries around “the multitudes of a cultural body” across generation, lands and legacy.

Fri, Jan 12 – Back in July 2011, Yasuko was appointed the inaugural Resident Commissioned Artist of New York Live Arts. A decade later in 2021, Mina Nishimura and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd were a part of the inaugural Danspace Project Renewal Residency artist cohort (along with Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez, and Gillian Walsh). Danspace’s Renewal Residency Program offered the artists space to make without the pressure of public presentation. They were, in fact, then both invited to return the following year for the best of both possible worlds, relief from pressure and somewhere to eventually land. While introducing their shared evening of new iterations on excerpts from those commissions, Program Director/Associate Curator Seta Morton mentioned that both artists had asserted St. Mark’s Church as the site of ambiguity, noting Mina’s “invisible inhabitants” and Jordan’s “haunting” in a self-described, “spin-off.”

Mina’s newly expanded (空 kuu) version of her duet with Glenn Potter-Takata from Mapping a Forest While Searching for an Opposite Term of Exorcist follows her inquiry into Buddhism-based concepts of ‘emptiness (or 空 kuu)’ and ‘no-mind (or Mushin無心). With an original sound score by Kenta Nagai, that was executed live, Mina and Glen fill out interstitial realms with sonic passages. While passing a microphone back and forth, the dancers speak statements that expand the architecture into the realm of the fantastic: “leave all doors open” – “deconstruct a doorway and build a reptile” – “rub your head on a chair” – “carve a tattoo on the ceiling.”  As Mina moves through the space in a solo, I ponder how many alternate planes of existence she is traversing as she collapses and flows through each joint. When Glen reappears above us, on the balcony, chanting in an amplified tone, projections appear on the upper wall, as well. I feel the pleasure of submitting to the driving security of an ongoing chant. The rhythm and persistence are a place of sublime comfort while Mina seems to be tossed by invisible hands, moving through angles and articulations with delicious clarity.

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd‘s Bessie-nominated Blackbare in the Basement had also included ghostly figures, while the new iteration of the duet was a “dramaturgical spin-off” titled The Basement. In the new version, Jordan and co-performer Owen Prum loved up on a variety of aspects of St. Mark’s Church while shifting through various types of relationships. In the basement, there are mysterious corners and exposed materials. In denim shorts and hoodies, Jordan and Owen heighten a sense of familiarity and play, skating across the capture of a limb, the drape of a torso, and the press of a body upon a body. The work resonates with echoes and alignments while the dancers come into a field of magnetic dynamism – attach, rebound, snap to grid. They’re satellites that interlock and dock, they’re creatures stranding into the eastern risers, they’re corporeal and they’re concept.

For there to be a Cassandra, there must be a catastrophe.

what sorrow is being prepared…and who will be able to bear it.

Jan 10-15, La MaMa/Under the Radar Festival. A tight pin spot of light, a femme figure with large, pink fluttering eyelashes, a bird head-shaped hand, then a breathy whistle that strips across the scales from chirps to screech. We are in the presence of a post-humaning. We are in a xenofeminist, latexed, feathered, bloody, sweat-opia. We are beyond… we have left theater behind and moved back and forward in ancient futures. In a ritual of gathering, attending, and witnessing the archetypes, inculcating in hybridity, steeping in proximity, and sensing the pleasure of intimacy and exhaustion. In the Italian company Motus‘ production Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate, Stefania Tansini takes on a reckoning with the myth of Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess cursed never to be believed, and doomed to enslavement and violent death. The work challenges the bigotry she faces once brought by Agamemnon as a war-trophy back to Greece where to be foreign is to be animal, and to be animal is seen as less-than-human. But, within the work we can enjoy a xenofeminist politics of alienation, a posthuman rejection of the supremacy of a species, and a being who becomes both the prophetic canary in the coalmine and the phoenix who rises from the ashes. Who among us doesn’t feel themselves to be screaming the coming catastrophe, to feel exiled from hope? But, alongside this work, watching Tansini burrow under the set, terraforming in a metaphoric underworld, and emerging to Audre Lorde’s “Litany for Survival,” I carry Elvia Wilk’s invitation to “find new names for what we are experiencing – not to reduce the narrative to a singular descent into hell that we can emerge or move on from, but to acknowledge this transformation as it occurs, and to acknowledge the various versions of life on Earth that have existed for decades, centuries, and millennia.”

¹ Dimock, Wai Chee. Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival. Chicago: U Chicago Press, 2020.

² Wilk, Elvia. Death by Landscape. NY: Soft Skull, 2022.