TRISKELION ARTS
118 N. 11 ST. • 3RD FL. • BROOKLYN, NY 11211 • 718.599.3577
HOME OF ABBY BENDER SCHMANTZE THEATRE AND ANDREW DICKERSON'S CIRQUE THIS!
PRESSFrom The Brooklyn Record, May 2007 Gutterball (a wilderness) More often than not, experimental theater conjures up painful images of unflattering unitards and droning monologues. At its finest, however, it can be more than just existentialism in spandex. Take “Gutterball,” a show conceived and choreographed by Abby Bender playing this weekend at Triskelion Arts. This Samuel-Beckett-meets-Twyla-Tharp creation blends theater, dance and video into a perfectly engaging and hilarious performance. A cast of twenty-two—all dressed in Dorothy (yep, as in The Wizard of Oz) braids and gingham pinafores—enacts an absurdist journey that explores love and mortality; namely, the “wilderness” of death and re-birth that follows the end of a long-term relationship. Bender incorporates motifs from traditional fairytales and current pop culture to a delightfully engineered soundtrack (Animal Collective, Britney Spears, and Danny Elfman appear together for the first time, as well as a “shameful number of other surprise pop artists,” according to the program). The result is something entirely accessible to audiences who would otherwise shy away from the "experimental" label. If you are in the mood for an edgy, provocative evening that will give you plenty to talk about over drinks afterwards, this is the show to catch. After all, this is what makes the New York arts scene extraordinary: we have more (and better, and weirder) options than just Spiderman III. The Brooklyn Record caught up with Bender (over email) to ask a few questions about the show. What themes in The Wizard of Oz/ "All the scenes and characters I’ve plucked and manipulated from the original stories have very specific meaning for me (even Toto). More brazenly used however are Dorothy, Alice, and Snow White. Their three stories are essentially the same: Girl gets lost. Girl has adventures. Girl encounters some pretty bizarre characters. Maybe she finds love, maybe she doesn't--but she inevitably returns home and is changed somehow because of it. These narratives and their protagonists are used in the show as metaphors for myself. (Eek! Did I say that?) The fact that the protagonist in these stories is a young girl speaks to the rekindled sense of rebirth or even naivete that a grown woman can experience when she comes out of a lifelong relationship. This newfound “wilderness” can be terrifying, irritating, exciting, and sometimes totally nonsensical. The other overarching theme is that of an individual’s duplicitous nature, ergo her conflicting desires and her struggle to maintain a successful relationship. For this reason, the cast of 22 are all Dorothy, and Dorothy "plays" the other characters she encounters. They are reflections of parts of her, and until she can take the time to know them and ultimately accept them, she may never find a place she feels comfortable enough in her own skin to call home." In bowling, a gutterball is a ball that rolls off the lane and doesn't score any points. What does "gutterball" refer to in the context of the performance? "This is the big secret! When we began developing the show, I wasn't clear where the piece was taking us. I wasn’t yet sold on addressing something so private as my own relationship onstage, but when I came upon the idea of using these three universally beloved stories as a means to explore my own story, I began to locate all the possibilities and connections between them and myself. Then I started to see Magic 8 balls everywhere--quite literally--in graffiti, in restaurants, in advertisements, in stores. The Magic 8 ball represents the all-knowing and it alleviates the responsibility of gauging our own decisions. There are very important talking heads like this in all three stories. The great and powerful “Oz ,” the “Cheshire Cat” and the “Mirror on the Wall,” provide some very convoluted information to those that seek answers from them. They give direction that is respectively selfish, absurd, or malicious but we still pay attention because we long for someone or something to tell us the truth. I knew the Magic 8 ball was to play a key role in the work precisely because I so badly wanted to be told in which direction to take the show and where to invest the matters of my heart. So, I merged the idea of the Magic 8 ball with the idea of a bowling gutterball: it perfectly suited the potentially disastrous results of the choices I was making in my personal life and even in my work. So to be perfectly honest, initially, titling the show “Gutterball” was sort of an inside joke, a disclaimer, that I might very well fail on my new journey and that the piece might fail too. However, process always informs product, and it turns out that even if you throw a gutterball, stray completely off-course, or choose to follow the risky advice of a magic ball or phony wizard or talking cat/ What would you hope audiences take away from the show? "I hope that the show is able to speak universally about love, that it is able to transcend the confines of my individual experience. I want them to identify with it where they can. I hope they leave the theater thinking about what they just experienced, looking for the threads that I found that turned me on so immensely and helped me realize the piece and myself. I hope it makes them laugh but also inspires them to face their own demons. But most of all, I want to translate to my audience that it is absolutely okay to suck at bowling." --Kathryn Ansite From The Martha's Vineyard Times, August, 2007 Inventive comedy sparks dances A fascinating artistic contrast took place at the Yard during its "Comedy and Classics" evening July 24. From the dramatic force of Jose Limon's masterworks to the surrealist creations of choreographer Abby Bender, the evening provided a stunning blend of drama and whimsy in equal parts. Ms. Bender, the driving force behind the Triskelion Arts cooperative and the popular annual Built on Stilts festival, opened the show with "Septic Crisis," a clever blend of dance and urban theater. The piece began with classical music that dissolves into urban clatter as the lights reveal toppled garbage cans and black trash bags strewn across the stage. The bags began to stir, then roll and move to music. Appearing like a blend between a blind grub and a lurching mummy, the bags stepped, crouched, and spun to the gypsy music before hands and legs began to emerge from them. As the strains of "Born Free" flood the room, the dancers (Alexis Cohn, Sara K. Edwards, Jeong-min Michelle Lee, Danielle Loustau-Williams, Elizabeth Merida, and Zoe Schieber) engaged in quirky, angular steps. Imagine wind-up toys with slightly defective parts and you can approximate the image. Ms. Bender's work suggests Salvador Dali fused with Jaques Tati, with dancers arm wrestling each other or pouring water over each other's heads. Her work wears surrealism well. Lauren Naslund in "The End?" The piece was choreographed by Anna Sokolow. The work of Jose Limon, the late Mexican dancer, continues to resonate today with its accent on drama and power in movement. Choreographer Carla Maxwell paid homage to the dance legend with "Etude," featuring the dancer Ryoko Kudo in a solo piece. Ms. Kudo was resplendent in a crimson dress as she made graceful swirls around the stage. She brought a poised athleticism to the moves and she unveiled reaching, swirling motions. Her precise, passionate performance awed the audience. Featuring dancer Lauren Naslund, Anna Sokolow's "The End?" challenged the audience with its sharp, jarring tone. As a jagged jazz score prodded the audience's ears, Ms. Naslund made lurching motions in a chair as her fingers waved with electric motion. She emerged from the chair stiff and splay-legged, only to collapse repeatedly on the floor. The rest of the piece featured stiff, angular motions that created a harsh, demanding texture. Jose Limon's "Chaconne," based on the Spanish dance form, featured dancer Roxane D'Orleans Juste dressed in gallant Spanish garb with black slacks and a black shirt. Her motions seemed to blend tai chi and ballet as she engaged in a series of swift, precise spins and kicks. Her flamenco-style movements were all poised points and graceful leaps. The audience responded with sustained applause at the end. "The Moor's Pavanne" is the masterwork of famed dancer Jose Limon. "Piqued" returned Ms. Bender's dancers to the stage, this time trading garbage bags for garish tutus around their heads. The dancers suggested candy-colored ballerinas as their feet twitched like malfunctioning androids. Together they engaged in a series of synchronized motions, swimming across the floor and linking arms to make a disjointed chain. The visually arresting spectacle suggested a bizarre variation of Paris' fin de siecle Moulin Rouge cabarets, now updated to incorporate space age lounge and techno music. Jose Limon's "The Moor's Pavanne," subtitled "Variations on the theme of Othello," captures the passion and force of classic theater. The four dancers (Francisco Ruvalcaba, Kurt Douglas, Ryoko Kudo, Roxane D'Orleans Juste) were dressed in red, white, orange, and crimson in the classic garb of medieval Spain as they enacted a tale of passion and betrayal. The men were graceful yet masculine while the female dancers were poised and powerful. As baroque string music swelled, the dancers whispered, seduced, plotted, and wove webs of deceit. The pathos and passion the dancers evoked earned them an extended standing ovation from the audience. The evening concluded with "Sleeping Giants," in which Ms. Bender's dancers slept under sheets on the stage floor. They slowly stirred awake in a stupor, making a dreamlike amble around the stage before returning to sleep. Then, the blue lighting turned red as the "Jaws" theme played and the dancers engaged in nightmare motions as a shark mask terrorized them. The light switched to stark white as an alarm sound went off. Rather than return to the normalcy of waking consciousness, the nightgown-clad dances were joined by sharks and monkeys as they all moved together to The Monkees' "Daydream Believer." The joy of Ms. Bender's work is in allowing oneself to surrender left-brain thinking and enter into the bizarre yet cohesive internal logic of her pieces. In doing so, one joins in celebrating the untrammeled spark of creativity coursing through her work. --Julian Wise  From The Brooklyn Rail, June 2003 Monsters & Mirrors: Heavy at Play Welcome to Abby Bender’s world. It is a world where lion tamers and tight rope walkers engage in a pas de deux; where sideshow callers, candy stripers, and trash men find treasures in rubbish heaps; where flash-dancers and video coupages strike a stunning tableaux; and where grand, strutting acrobatics result in luminous effects. Bender is a founding member of Kick|Stand|Dance, an all-female, five-choreographer collective whose home is Triskelion Arts, a performing arts venue in Williamsburg (118 N. 11th Street). The women— Bender, along with Cary Baker, Layla Childs, Anna Luckey, Sonya Robbins— acquired the Triskelion Arts space in the summer of 2000. A renovation was completed shortly thereafter and since then the studio has been in full operation as a rehearsal and performance space, complete with wood-sprung floors, mirrors, lighting, and curtains [see Swarm at Wax, July/ Triskelion Arts is certainly managing to make its way as a thriving new performing arts venue. This year, Triskelion Arts obtained its 501(C)(3), not-for-profit status, which made it easier for the organization to solicit donations during its fourth annual fund-raiser and auction, held in December. The venue also won its second Outer/ In the past, Kick|Stand|Dance has presented an annual group show, featuring each choreographer’s work. But this year the troupe is taking full advantage of their Triskelion Arts venue by offering both individual and split-bill programs. Bender’s Monsters and Mirrors: Heavy at Play, opening June 6, will mark the first of this series. Bender, whose first love was painting, works from a broad palette and presents works that are energetic, highly theatrical, and somehow, life-affirming. Bender’s ambitious pieces employ a full cast of 30 volunteer dancers— some are veterans of Bender’s work, while others are novices to the field of dance. A quick perusal of the dancers’ program bios reflects a broad range of experiences, from hipster and hippy, to teacher, student, waiter, and globetrotter. Yet, watching them in rehearsal, and recalling past performances, it is clear that something unique is going on to make such an unlikely group of people come together under one roof and, credibly, form a dance troupe. And, given the ecumenicity of the enterprise, the way it all comes together is almost uncanny. On the topic of working with such a mix of dancers and nondancers— Bender states: "We prepare many hours during a long rehearsal season, so even if one of the performers has never danced a day in his life, we work hard until he inevitably becomes comfortable enough with the material and, more importantly, becomes perfectly comfortable being himself. It’s impossible that someone’s not going to look ‘right’ because the moves are so goofy and the discrepancies between dancers’ techniques lend themselves to what the dance is talking about." First-time Bender dancer Kate Kaminski agrees. "Nobody is ever too slow, too big, too awkward because it all just becomes part of the dance," she explains. Another first-time dancer, Josie Carbone, who is also a teacher with the Teach for America program, describes Bender as a "light spirit" and one who has a "focused energy" in rehearsal. Carbone also points out that the veteran dancers often end up teaching the new conscripts a great deal. The resulting work is candid and disorderly, and incorporates the willful autobiographies of the dancers. Yet the chaos and clowning, along with the crazy individualism of the work, reflects a vision that is distinctly Bender’s. Her dances carry a heft of personal reflection and the bearing does not slouch under the weight. Through reenactment, Bender graciously shares her deeply personal experiences. After nine months of co-running a performing arts venue, rehearsing a full show, and holding down a day job, Bender heads to Martha’s Vineyard this summer in order to conduct her seventh year of Built on Stilts, a tribal celebration of dance that takes place in a historic chapel in Oak Bluffs. Begun in 1997 with co-founder, and Kick|Stand|Dance member, Luckey, the annual festival— which, at last count, gathered 14 choreographers under its auspices— includes ballet, hip-hop, belly-dancing, tai chi, jazz, modern, and tap dance. "That’s really my vacation," explains Bender. "We rehearse in parks. I work at a movie theater. That’s simplicity." --John Merchant From The Brooklyn Rail, July/ SWARM at WAX: KICK STAND DANCE Maybe you had a crew back in college or in high school that made a pact to reconvene after some requisite years of furtune seeking. Maybe it was to start a rock band or a macrobiotic restaurant or an experimental school. Part anxiety talk and even half-believed, those collective daydreams you entertained before setting out into the world would just serve as fodder for reunion chitchat. That is, unless you are one of the founders of the KICK STAND DANCE Company. Abby Bender, Layla Childs, Anna Luckey, Cary Baker and Sonya Robbins might have made such a pact a decade ago when they were students in the dance department of Bard College. Although they split up to pursue different dreams following their graduation, they reconvened in Williamsburg back in 1997 to establish the KICK STAND DANCE collective and nobody's doubting them. SWARM, their most recent effort ran through six performances earlier this June at WAX and demonstrated the unique gifts of these five choreographers through five dances (one in two parts). Sonya Robbins'"Flicker" began the evening with Robbins and Childs, two waking figures in country dresses, lulling and lusty in a half-dream behind a white picket fence and underneath the circular flapping of mechanical doves hovering. Anna Luckey followed with "Interstice", an alert and stark voguing of the considered technical competence of the entire company. Cary Baker's two-part "I am Twice," first pit two self-winding automatons against the whiles of ceiling-hung weighted balloon pendulums swinging around them. Then, after intermission the pair return as dis-embodied legs and torsos in search of each other in the eye-tricking black light. "Highly Inflammible, Perfectly Unnatural" came to Layla Childs "in the quiet calm of Baratpur, a bird sanctuary in northern India," according to the program notes. Two matched pairs dance - one backgrounded, collecting rags and meticulously stowing them in pockets, the other foregrounded, lily clean, unvexed, disrobes and wanders off while the poor gatherers pocket or adorn the discarded tops. Both return for a brief but stunning pas de quatre. The hands down crowd-pleasingest grand finale was Abby Bender's "3 Piece Suit/ In October of 2000, the KICK STAND DANCE Company opened the doors of Triskelion Arts, a full service studio on Williamsburg's north side, which serves as the company's headquarters and which also serves as an affordable rehearsal and performance space for other working artists. With this new development, KICK STAND hopes to contribute to the performing arts community while solidifying the reality of a decade-old collective daydream in brick and mortar. --John Merchant  Animating Sculpture: Cary Baker’s Mimesis at Triskelion Arts Cary Baker’s "Mimesis." Photo by Gamble Staempfli. Cary Baker, one of the five choreographers in the all-female choreography collective, Kick|Stand|Dance, presented a new work combining dance and sculpture in December at Triskelion Arts. Fittingly titled Mimesis, the piece explores the relationship between the two arts with the dance passages extending and mimicking the sculpture. My viewing of Mimesis began by entering the rear entrance of the performance space proceeded by a dramatic ride up a freight elevator lined with candles. As I reached the top, somewhat breathlessly, I received a program and ticket and was then ushered across a threshold— a curtain behind which lay the first part of Baker’s dancescape. Here, in a gallery-like setting, several waist-high, freestanding plaster-cast figurines, as silent and expectant as Easter Island monuments, were dispersed across the room. Two miniature boxes lined with grass held smaller figurines that resembled the larger sculptures. Here, among the sculpture, the audience congregated and was offered a foreshadowing of the dance to come. As Mimesis opens, three women, elongated by lengthy skirts, enter concealing three other women who eventually emerge from under the folds of fabric. Now six figures take up the space— each resembling the sculptures in the foyer. And, similar to the small boxes, the stage is also lined with grass. As expected, and hence the title, the movement here mirrors or mimics the sculpture in the foyer. The dancers’ gestures are contained rather than free and flowing. It’s as if the sculptures had just sprung to life. Yet, the contained movement is punctuated by moments of release. In a repeated movement that becomes a kind of motif, a dancer will suddenly push her chest forward, neck and arms thrust back as if she had just been shot. There are also moments of flight in Mimesis, with dancers in harnesses soaring through the air in sweeping arcs. In Mimesis, Baker works with a form she calls "kinetic sculpture" and she achieves stunning visual effects which, with the help of Gamble Staepfli, make it possible to transform the performance space into an otherworldly environment. --John Merchant From The New Yorker, June 9, 2003 Monsters and Mirrors: heavy at play. For an evening of accessible pandemonium, Abby Bender has coordinated a large crew of dance enthuisiasts, some trained, some untained, to execute five exuberant, intentionally amatuerish dances. In "Joyous, a Circus, " the crew, dressed in read-and-white striped outfits, perform imitation circus acts. Other dances include "Bedtime Poems," which uses projected images and score by Ryan McFaul and Jeremy Wilson, "Septic Crisis" (about a garbage heap that comes to life), and "Flash Dance," a jokey tribute to the music and trends of the eighties.  DANCE TROOPERS The members of the modern dance collective KICK STAND DANCE have arms cut like diamonds and brains full of innovative movement. Forced out of Manhattan studios, Layla Childs, Anna Luckey Cary Baker, Abby Bender, and Sonya Robbins (clockwise from the top) joined the artistic exodus across the river to Williamsburg where they create and present modern dance pieces. Their recent show SWARM, included works employing up to 25 dancers at a time as well as a healthy dose of theatrics. The scenes evoked a range of experiences - from the frenzy of the business day to a suburban fantasy complete with a white picket fence on stage. The members of the company met in the dance department of Bard College almost 10 years ago and reunited in 1997 as choreographers with a wide range of influences. They occasionally participate in showcases but their focus is producing their own work. Last fall the group opened Triskelion Arts, a beautiful space in Williamsburg that their fellow artists instantly began clamoring to rent. The collective keeps doing whatever it wants - which sometimes includes putting non-dancers on stage. ’(They are) regular people who want to get on stage and bust a move,’ Childs says. ‘I think there’s a real hunger for this sort of freedom in the dance world right now’.” --Meghan Sutherland From The Bardian, Summer 2000 Gaining a Foothold They were demonstrating their mission long before they had a name, an objective, or a space of their own. They would dance on the grass in front of the Ravine Houses in the sultry days of late August, and immediately an enthusiastic audience would appear. We might have guessed that 10 years later they would be sharing stages in New York City and still teaching us, making us laugh and catch our breath in wonder, as they did in those early days at Bard. Cary Baker '95, Abby Bender '95, Layla Childs '94, Anna Luckey '95, and Sonya Robbins '96, known collectively as KICK STAND DANCE, first met in the Drama/ KICK STAND's work has appeared in curated showcase programs presenting the work of several dance companies, including New Steps at the Mulberry Street Theater and Food for Thought, presented by Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. The group has received choreography commissions from the Leah Beckwith Dance Company, the Built on Stilts Dance Festival, and Bard College. while KICK STAND continues to be involved in New York's showcase circuit, the company now focuses much of its energy on creating, producing, and publicizing its own dance programs. Bard alumni/ The year 1999 saw a breakthrough for KICK STAND, as its first full-length concert, LumpSum, garnered accolades and packed houses for the duratin of its run at Context Studios. In May 2000 the group premiered five finger discount, a collection of six works, to sold-out audiences at Dance Theater Workshop's Bessie Schonberg Theater. After the success of this second major production, KICK STAND began to explore the possibility of obtaining a permanent space. The company embarked on a vigorous fund-raising campaign that generated close to $40,000, which was applied to the rental, renovation, and development of a studio in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. In December 2000 KICK STAND opened Triskelion Arts, the company's residence, which also serves as an affordable rehearsal space for other performing artists and a center for classes and workshops. A triskelion is a figure composed of three branches radiating rom a center. KICK STAND was offered the name after the company participated in the one-time-only Triskelion Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1999. "The five of us have many interests outside dance that we'd like to see represented in our center," says Abby Bender, "so the name seems appropriate." Current plans call for a photography exhibition and literary readings in the new space, with a craft sale and a staged play reading planned for the future. In addition to running Triskelion, the collective's five members work at full-time jobs, choreograph and rehearse nightly, and still find time to teach and study dance. They spend countless hours in administrative meetings, where they write grant proposals and develop the company's promotions, funding drives, and auctions. Does this sound exhilarating? Exhausting? It is both--but willingly done, so that the group can continue to explore its world through movement. Individually, each of these women is a remarkable artist. Together, they form a beacon of creativity, talent, patience, and humor, shining out from the stage of modern movement and into the greater community. "KICK STAND is very special," says Zafra Whitcomb '93, general manager of American Palace Theater, who has seen scores of dance companies and hundreds of performances in New York and elsewhere. "As artists, they reinforce their nascent choreographic skills with powerful doses of the visual arts and infectious humor. As fund-raisers, they present an annual auction that leaves me considerably lighter in the wallet and with a big grin on my face." Sarah Heller '95, a longtime KICK STAND fan, says the group's performances "transcend the confines of traditional modern dance. They're funny, sexy, and wise--they appeal both to dance aficionados and to people who wouldn't normally frequent modern dance concerts." I, too, have been a zealous KICK STAND fan since the company's inception. The work is sophisticated and complex, yet miraculously accessible. I am a "visual" person who knows very little about dance. KICK STAND performances have opened my mind to movement. Each one is an education and an unforgettable experience--not so different from those first August evenings at Bard, but with a much larger audience, and one that I will continue to grow. --Michelle Dunn, '95 |
|
