HARMATTAN THEATER OCT. 2, 2009

Harmattan Theater performed Mannahatta Yatra at Christopher Street Pier on October 2, 2009, Mahatma Gandhi's birthday.  The performance consisted of a group of performers walking from Christopher Street Pier south past Pier 40 to Tribeca, ending the performance with a ritual at the Port Authority Wind Tunnel.

Sea Salt, Hudson River Water, jute rope and the single stringed Indian peasant instrument the Ekhtara were the props in a performance of ecstatic walking.  The performance emerged out of a need to respond to the celebrations of the Dutch East India Company and the celebrations of Dutch heritage that invoked the Dutch East India Company and the insignia of the VOC, the corporation's acronym.  For New Yorkers hailing from former colonies of the VOC including NYC, the uncritical celebrations of windmills and dutch clogs without the full accounting of the Dutch East India Company's colonial violence inflicted upon the Mannhatans of Mannahatta, demanded a symbolic transition from September 2009, a month of Dutch reclamations of Manhattan, towards a period of cultural healing, symbolised by the Gandhi march.

ROBERT LEPAGE: LIPSYNCH/BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC

Robert Lepage's eight and a half hour Lipsynch running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this Fall is searing and funny.  Drawing upon formal elements very resonant of Arianne Mnouchkine's piece earlier this year, Lepage deploys vignettes, frames of storytelling, multiple interlocking narrative structures, mobile sets, flashbacks, mother and child themes, and the return to childhood as an overarching preoccupation.  There is startling similarity to both Lepage and Mnouchkine's shows this year: both open with the death of the mother, and the search for her story.  In Lepage's epic journey, the audience is made to commit to a theater of endurance.  You have to stay with the text's intricate flows to comprehend the confluence of random lives connected by six degrees of seperation.  In Lipsynch, the exquisite investigation of the structure of voice, speech, intonation, pitch, timbre, scale, magnitude and silence is a thrill to watch.  One is drawn into the mechanics of speech experimentation, led into the neural workings of the brain, while also being drawn deeper into the unresolved death and violence of crossed lives.  Dream like sequences transport the audience to the galactical spheres of Lepage's genius, while the excessive irony about filmmaking and its workings, distracted from the intensity of the long immersion into the pathways of memory and forgetting.

CHRISTOPHER STREET PIER/HARMATTAN THEATER/OCT.2

Harmattan Theater performed Mannahatta Yatra today at Christopher Street Pier. Marking Gandhi's birthday, Harmattan Theater performed a walking journey from Christopher Street Pier to the South of Hudson River Park along the waterfront. Sea Salt, Hudson River water, the Ekhtara and Cymbals were the props of the nomadic theater piece. The philosophical imperative behind Mannahatta Yatra is the idea of walking as a means of reclaiming territory. Walking along the 2009 Manhattan waterline is a way of citing the 1609 waterline, which is now hidden by landfill. The use of salt is to both signify the importance of salt in anti-colonial struggles, of which Mannahatta is implicated, as well as the symbolic shift away from the colonial references of the Dutch in Manhattan. The Dutch East India Company, of which much celebration was invoked in September 2009, traded in salt along with other spices, in their colonial outposts. Salt is a metaphor for cleansing, transformation, symbolic rerouting. The principles of Tantric Trance performance as well as the physical practice of endurance in Marina Abramovic's work were inspirations for this environmental performance. The performers in this hour long performance comprised of: James Cascaito, Carole Nicoli-Smith, Victor Marshall, Ariel, Jose de Jesus, Dil and May Joseph. The piece was choreographed and directed by May Joseph.

HARMATTAN THEATER: DUTCH COLONIAL PAST

The month long celebration of Dutch Colonial New York has been a mixed bag for some Manhattanites. The historic implications of Dutch colonial incursions include the violent and terrible acts the Dutch inflicted on Lenape peoples as well as on their neighboring tribes. The journals of Robert Juet, Henry Hudson's First Mate, is most revealing. His expressive daily updates on the "savages" and the particularly violent exchanges that ensued between Hudson's men and the indigenous peoples, suggests that the encounter was nothing less than bloody, tense, nerve wracking, and filled with racist stereotypes of who these native people might be. There fore, the month long celebration of the Dutch presence without its more explicit accountability about entire histories that were altered and complete populations that were decimated, makes the whole occasion of celebrating the Dutch presence for a whole month somewhat confusing for anti-colonial sentiments. Harmattan Theater's Mannahatta Yatra explores this ambivalence of celebrating the discovery of Mannahatta while also acknowledging the violence and brutality that the encounter between the Dutch and the Lenape peoples entailed.

MANNAHATTA YATRA/GANDHI/ SALT MARCH/DUTCH

Harmattan Theater is preparing a performance for October 2, the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. The performance is going to involve a walking ritual from Christopher Street Pier on the Hudson River Park up the waterfront to Pier 54. The performance will include the poetry of Dante Alighieri, and the words of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's famous act of walking as anti-colonial resistance was the signal of the dissolution of British rule in India. This idea of symbolic cleansing is very powerful. After a month of festivities celebrating the Dutch presence in Manhattan through September 2009, Harmattan Theater think it is a historically pertinent move to perform the physical act of distancing from colonial narratives of heritage by walking the contemporary Manhattan waterfront. The Dutch were traders of salt and sugar among other commodities for which they used slave labor ruthlessly. Using salt as a performance tool to mark the shift from the Dutch colonial moment to the contemporary New York of ecological reclamation, Harmattan is performing a New York ritual of walking the waterfront at dusk to the edge of Pier 54, where the waters of the Hudson will cleanse performers and participants of older, violent colonial histories, while citing them as well.

Labor Day and NYC Parking

People live in Manhattan so they can avoid having a car.  It costs 400.00$ a month roughly, to park your car in a garage in my neighborhod.  Your carbon footprint expands, and the whole point of living in dense urban areas is compromised by the usage of a car per individual on any scale, and certainly, on a downtown New York City scale.  Still, after schlepping for twenty years, the rituals of foraging for one's needs leads to the lure of the sort of clunkers that even CASH for CLUNKERS wouldn't trade in for.  This is the subculture of New York City car ownership: the peculiar rituals of moving your car from parking slot to parking slot, reading, dozing, eating, smoking, catching up on your reading, your phone calls,  your bills, all in the confined sphere of your downwardly mobile clunker that runs well enough to get you out of the city and back with surity.  The whole art of dodging the street cleaners, the traffic cops, and your more aggressive car parker, leads to a whole culture of life lived around a cheap car on New York's  streets, that are peculiar and unimaginable to most people in the United States.  More touching are the tales of hardened Greenwich Village car owners exchanging news, "Parking Joe on Bank Street passed away last week".  A car that doesnt serve you unless you are getting out of town- is a very particular concept to New York's Manhattan culture.  One doesnt use one's car even if one needs it, especially if you have a great Tuesday/Friday slot, or a Monday/Thursday slot.  It could mean untold hours looking for a parking spot later.

Hence, the sight of open, empty parking spots on a weekend like Labor Day weekend produces a lightness to the city's streets.  The cobblestone streets seem broader and more noir-ish.  The sky seems bluer on such days.  The streets feel quieter and calmer because they are quieter and less frenetic.  The air is sweeter for sure.  The Car People devour such a scene with a kind of desire thats hard to fathom if you havent sat for hours hovering by a potential parking spot, waiting for a street cleaning vehicle to do its job and speed by.  Labor Day weekend signals a break from parking as a survival mechanism.

69th Street Transfer Bridge, Manhattan

The bike path on the westside of Manhattan allows little known landscapes of the city to loom into view.  These aspects of the city startle, seduce and calm you.  A spectacular section of the bikeway along Manhattan's westside going uptown is the 69th Street Bridge.  Visually dramatic, bulky and charismatic, this bridge and its neigboring metallic structures sunken in the Hudson River, draw a scenario fitting an operatic staging.  It could be Faust's abode, or the grand temple of forgotten Native American spirits.  Harmattan Theater Company wrote to the Riverside Park South Trust for permission to perform in front of this extraordinary outdoor landscape.  The park's people were very uncomfortable about giving us permission to perform against the fantastical backdrop of the 69th Street Transfer Bridge.  But- the setting deserves a spectacular theatrical event that has the spiritual breadth of Christo's Gates, while also transforming the surreal landscape into a dream scape of a defunct industrial past, whose logics still haunt our understanding of modernity and its progressions.  Harmattan Theater company continues to dream a theatrical event that would put performers on the rusting, dilapitated bridge, with projected voices and buskins used in the Greek theater to raise the heights of actors standing on the buckled up railway lines.  

MANNAHATTA 400 years later

This is a big week for New York City.  400 years ago this week, Henry Hudson made a fateful journey up the Hudson river, floating past a rocky land mass lush with hills, forests, rivers and extraordinary bio diversity enjoyed by a diverse range of indigenous communities.  New York's future must learn from its pasts.  Viewing Eric W. Sanderson's Mannahatta cartographic rendering of Manhattan in 1609, helps us to reimagine a different approach to overbuilt sites.  What grew here in 1609 can influence how we develop in 2009.  This is not a nostalgic return to some pre-modern past, but rather an iterative ecological rethinking of built environments and their future potential. The meatpacking district is however an example of what should be avoided at any cost for future neigborhoods.  In September 2009, this neighborhood is a travesty of trashy high end commercialism and the erosion of a historic district's neighborhood identity.  The once sleepy Gansevoort Street, with its unusual historic origins in Native American village life, and later the site of one of New Amsterdam's Dutch forts, Fort Gansevoort, is now an unsustainable circus of human and vehicular traffic.  The area is not built to contain the large influx of people flooding its streets.  Furthermore, neighborhood residents  do not benefit from the exponential influx of foot traffic on its narrow cobblestreet lanes.  The demise of neighborhood restaurants, one of a kind small businesses and the ghostly hulls of former commercial spaces bear witness to the conflicting cultures of high end consumption and emptied out neighborhood spaces. 

SUMMER STREETS AUGUST 15, 2009

August has been glorious for New Yorkers who've had a rough summer.  It hasnt been warm enough to head for Coney Island a couple of times a week by now.  Finally the heat is heating the macadam and it is nearing the end of summer.  But Summer Streets has lightened the city's spirits.  New York is on its feet: with new reasons to invent imaginative bicycles and pedicabs.  This weekend saw a variety of creative and arresting bicycle designs on Park Avenue.  People have planned on this event as a special experience, staying back in the city just to bike up Park Avenue and down to the Brooklyn Bridge without car traffic.

The Department of Transportation is proving that policy can be creative and transformative.  The symbiotic relationships between different bicycle organizations, local transportation organizations and the DOT is producing a new New York City, one that is finally taking Jane Jacob's invitation to explore a human scale development on a scale never realised before in New York City.  The reclamation of Broadway and Grand Street along with 9th Avenue, 8th Avenue and Bleeker Street is changing the logic of commuting in a critical way- it is impacting a new conversation about how people traverse distances in New York, and what we need to do to make this happen more.

PLANES ON THE HUDSON RIVER

Watching yet another plane crash on the Hudson River this year is a nerve wracking experience.  On August 8, as the Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Tugboats and NYPD helicopters cordonned off the West Side Highway south of Fourteenth Street, many of us watching yet another disaster scenario of salvage efforts were disconcerted by the frequency of planes falling around us.  Planes falling out of the sky seems to be one ecological hazard of living in New York City.  However, this time, there is no happy story with a Hollywood ending and a physical aircraft docked at Battery Park.  Instead: it is a grim call to radically revamp Federal Aviation requirements for aircraft flying below 1, 100 feet.

The 2006 plane crash on the East Side of Manhattan alerted the FAA to the dangers of low flying small aircraft over the East River.  It is time New York and New Jersey took a closer look at the heavily trafficked and unmonitored flight corridor over the Hudson River that is shared by both states.  According to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, over 25, 000 helicopter trips are made a year without oversight of air space regulations.  For a resident of Manhattan and the Jersey shoreline, this should be a chilling piece of information.  We are in a shared air space and waterway system that requires rigorous overhauling as air traffic increases, the airline industry is deregulated, air traffic controllers are scaled back even further, and more leisure flyers take to the skies.

What New York City has learned from this terrible tragedy is that the shores of New Jersey facing Manhattan is our sixth borough.  We need to think about the other side of our beloved Hudson River as part of our lifeline, a critical aspect of our ecosystem and our imagined future.  To that effect, a more engaged conversation with the other side of the Hudson River's magisterial shoreline needs to be incorporated into a more sustained and local conversation regarding air and water safety measures, water rights, pollution and industrial run off.  The January 15, 2009 U.S. Airways forced landing highlighted this interdependency when early reports about the extraordinary landing mentioned survivors possibly landing on either the Jersey side or the Manhattan side of the shoreline.  Saturday's catastrophe was a literal collision between the Manhattan and New Jersey air spaces.  Both Manhattan and Hoboken transportation, waterway and commuter networks were disrupted by this travesty.  We must take away important lessons to be implemented immediately with an eye to the safety of neighborhoods and cities, and remedy the unconscionable laxity geared towards the interests of big business and the after effects of de-regulation in the aviation and helicopter industries.

SUMMER STREETS, TRANSPORTATION ALTERNATIVES

Today was the first weekend of the three consecutive August 2009 weekends when Summer Streets is in effect in Manhattan.  This is the second year of the Department of Transportation initiative to experiment with different ways of managing density and traffic.  The experiment last year was a surprise- it felt strange,  a memorable gift.  Cycling up Park Avenue South towards Grand Central Station amidst a million cyclists, pedestrians, strollers, skaters, wheelchairs, runners, segueways and human scale movement, the idea seems like a natural right, a logical way to enjoy the city as part of a city wide mandate.  The city cannot take this away now that it has made New Yorkers taste the pleasures of the upper concourse at Grand Central Station terminal vehicular bridge.  New York City has opened up its arteries in new ways.  Even if New York hasnt found the right calibration for congestion pricing, the suspension of traffic all the way up to Central Park presents arguements for continuing certain healthful habits created as a result of the suspension of vehicular traffic.  If New York is growing to swell beyond its 8 million people within the near future, it is going to have to look to other ways of transportation and commuting.  Along with serious considerations of energy consumption and health management.  Cycling as a means of moving around cities opens up that possibility in a serious way and New York City is cautiously experimenting with that alternative opportunity.

FRANCIS BACON RETROSPECTIVE, MET, PART I

Flayed torsos.  Crouching forms.  Screaming Popes.  These are some of the searing images that impact the viewer of the Centenary Retrospective of Francis Bacon's difficult work at the MET.  This exhibit is rivetting for its breadth of materials brought under one roof- torn photographs, faded newspaper clippings, images that Bacon drew on again and again to create the deeply interrogative interface between physiological sensations and the visual field.  One sees the impact of the Soviet Revolution, Nazism and the Algerian Revolution in the formation of Bacon's aesthetic of violence. Bacon 's chilling excursions into the underside of animality is disconcerting and ravishing to behold.  A disemboweled inverted torso in a triptych on the theme of crucification demands the viewer pause to contemplate its luscious vibrancy of color and bleeding organs.  Bacon's work forces one to have a theory to continue viewing as one becomes complicitous with his immersion in the darker side of human consciousness.  The grimacing mouths, bared teeth, eyeless heads, and defined contours of flesh open up that which one dares not acknowledge, sensations beyond the visual frames of rational knowing, of enlightenment discourse.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: NEW YORK ICON

The passing of Merce Cunningham within a month of the demise of Pina Bausch is a great blow for dance. Around Westbeth, straightbacked in his wheelchair with a green blanket draped around him in a grundgy elevator, the great choreographer seemed lighter than those who have two feet, yet slouch. Cunningham broke open the bounds of movement not only for those in dance, but for all who work in theater, movement and dance. What Cunningham innovated was a radical break with the very idea of narrative and characterization in dance. His choreography demanded a new way of seeing bodies move in space, a kinetic vernacular for the Twentieth century. Through Cunningham's work, dance became a barometer for our times, a proposal for what is to become, not a citation of the past. Cunningham opened up the spaces of New York City as a tool for breaking up the expectations of movement, and brought the everyday movement of the street, and Judson Church, into the dance studio in ways that were startling, disconcerting, even heretical to traditions of classical form. In his collaborations with John Cage, and the Black Mountain College group, Cunningham offered a model for creating new work, fresh modalities, across disciplines and art forms that forever changed the way we produce work now. Merce Cunningham was the quintessential New Yorker, irreverent, passionate, and till the end, immersed in a creative life.

WATER ECOLOGY at 125th Street

A strange white metal construct of a geodesic dome out on the pier of 125th St. in Harlem accosts the biker. The object is on a wooden boat filled with strange looking objects: tall wooden structures that look like Pacific Island carvings. At first glance, one is reminded of both chinese junks and futuristic seafaring contraptions. On closer investigation, the boat is an experimental environment called the Waterpod Project. It is a utopian collaborative undertaking by a group of artists exploring the future and edges of viable sustainable water survival. The boat has its own eco system, vegetable garden, power source and research manifesto. It takes James Joyce's Ulysses as its departure point for its investigation into the junctures between technology, water science, climate change, enviromental sustainability and art. Outfitted as an self sustaining environment, the Waterpod Projects moors at each of the five boroughs of New York City, collecting information about the local water ecology along its path. The boat is open to the public on designated days.

PETER STUYVESCENT and ADRIAEN VAN DER DONCK

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art this week are rare gems of New York history. A document signed by Peter Stuyvescent in an impressive flourish hangs on the second floor in a non-descript corridor near the elevators.  In the same exhibit is a beautiful Dutch manuscript by Adriaen Van der Donck with one of the earliest known representations of this fair island of Mannahatta. The tiny line drawing is spectacular in its simplicity. A small clump of settlement at the edge of a rock mass. Other jewels include a nineteenth century painting of Trinity Church, a drawing of Federal Hall, a sweeping birds eye view of Manhattan, and a pastoral view from a Breucklyn hilltop. Views up Broadway from the eighteenth century and a spectacular drawing looking downtown towards Trinity Church with farmland all the way down toward the distant steeple of the church make this little corridor a feast for a historian's eyes.

AERNOUT MIK, MOMA, JULY 2009

Aernout Mik's gripping installations at the MOMA pull apart the fascia of social anxiety. Figures run frantically within violent scenarios as well as from installation to installation. Relationships between crowded bodies, contorted, spasmodic movements, and intensified activity are investigated. Mik is brilliant at pulling disparate real life events into a performative space of interaction through editing. The viewer is made complicit with the action unfolding:we are part of the violence, part of the detritus of a catastrophe, part of a war in which we are privileged viewers in a human scale projection. Mik uses performance and cinema, media and physicality to tear away at actions and events that are chaotic. His instinctive ability to capture what is raw in societal dysfunction threads through his large performance installations. The scale of Mik's work is gigantic- monumental. There is nothing timid about his investigation of random human actions impacting human life without accountability. Mik's world is brutal: here people are animal like, scavengering modern life without narrative continuity. To that extent, Mik's "events" do not have a continuous narrative flow, but rather, are staged as ruptures of perception. Fragments of a life caught digitally and edited into meaning. 

POP UP ART GALLERIES on 14th STREET

Could 14th Street be a new Meatpacking District, where art, commerce, trash and the transient merge? The current show of works by Alexandra Pacula and JMR at the Dapper Dan Imperial Gallery, 139 West 14th. Street, Manhattan, suggest a new energy of possibility on an otherwise nondescript stretch of 14th St. between 7th and 8th Avenues. Street artist and visionary curator Alex Emmart has brought two vibrant talents to this innocuous stretch: the bold graffiti artist JMR, and the heady, intense ferocity of Alexandra Pacula. Pacula's furious brush work is rivetting. A glass of Scotch holds one's gait. Streetscenes of Manhattan are caught in their relentless passion. The colors are unapologetic, sweeping the viewer into the maelstrom of drama. Pacula's graphite on paper are magnetic images of delirious traffic. The strokes draw the eye along the lines of speed. The passerby is left thinking: we need more of this. Emmart's tenacity has brought two gems to 14th Street, and we can do with more of such surprises along forgotten storefronts and forelorn drapery stores.

CONEY ISLAND REDEVELOPMENT FUTURE

The New York City Council under Mayor Michael Bloomberg approved plans for the redevelopment of Coney Island this week. Many New Yorkers are dismayed at the progress of the aggressive Thor Equities plan for highrises that will force out existing businesses. This decision accelerates a broad set of concerns around the Coney Island neighborhood. One primary concern is the question of how much shadow the new highrises planned to tower over the area will cast on the historically bright and open amusement park where visitors could always see the sky. The image of a Coney Island amusement park dwarfed by towering glass boxes of rich occupants and privatised services is hard to envision. And, if the projected big development has its way, the area designated for what has historically been the place of entertainment and public delight will be shrunk to a fraction of its original area.

"MARITIME SKY of MANHATTAN"

New York City is in a dramatic relationship with its waterfront. A fundamental shift is a drift.  The lower East Side gardens were a catalyst to thinking of Ebenezer Howard's garden city within urban hardscape.  Liz Chrystie, Adam Purple, Chico Mendez, and the visionary community gardeners of the East Village opened up a new way of inhabiting urban detritus. The extraordinary lower East Side gardens are truly remarkable testaments to how people can harness the most intimidating of urban landscapes to produce sustainable relationships to air, water and the earth. Make beauty where the city forgets people.  Open the sky through greenery where people have forgotten how to live.  When Corbusier visited Manhattan in 1930's, he was impressed by the "maritime sky of manhattan" yet this maritime sky was not a romance that Robert Moses shared with Corbu as an intimate relationship between neighborhoods and water. The energy crisis is forcing a remapping about how people perceive their cities.  Instead of following Gideon's call to "kill the streets" the people of New York City are actively building on what Jane Jacobs and the movements that followed her inspiration came to identify as the walking city. The post-9/11 New York City is a mobile new york- people want to run, jump, catapult, fly through the air on a trapeze, snooze, kayak, swim around manhattan or across the East River to Brooklyn, bike across the five boroughs or just sit and drum by the water on the Upper West Side. It is a new changing conversation between urban citizens and their public spaces.  

NYC WATERFRONT FUTURES

Governors Island, July 18, 2009 is a very thrilling place.  A critical shift in ways of thinking about cities in general and New York City in particular, is adrift.  The island is filled with pragmatic proposals by the New York City Waterfront Alliance on how to shift thinking about energy and resources in New York City to a different register that focuses on the city's natural resources: water, river estuaries, currents, Hudson River ecology.  The proposals include expanding water commuting in the future planning of New York City, emphasize the waterfront in children's education and growth, bring waterfront thinking to inland communities who have access to water but do not think of it as an option, stop sludging the rivers, dynamize community investment in contaminated sites for reclamation projects.  New York City finally has the single biggest vision since the heavy hand of Robert Moses and his car defined modernity. Finally, New York City is reclaiming its waterfront as a critical aspect of its everyday future- not just a place for trade, work, industrial labor and illicit social exchanges.  The waterfront is slowly transforming New York City into its uncharted identity as an archipelago of islands in conversation across distinctive local ecologies of waterfronts.

WASHINGTON SQUARE FOUNTAIN

Washington Square Park is a cleaner, brighter, more easily surveilled park.  I miss the old fountain with its reassuring air that iconic monuments never move.  The fountain's new old abode (its current alignment with the Stanford White Washington Square arch citing an earlier era of its location)  is cleverly designed to seduce and prevent public performances.  Powerful sprays of water delight everyone and prevent anyone from lingering to rabble rouse or hypnotise a passerby.  As one of my students said to me: the park has a strange "open" feel to it.  Reminds me of what Paul Virilio says in his book on Speed and Politics about the scale of Haussman's boulevards in the heart of Paris designed to prevent another revolution.  The park's pedestrian pathways signal crowd control and armed vehicular manoeverability.  As a prominent destination for major protests, parades, demonstrations and vigils in the city of New York, the park's geography has always been a growth towards greater crowd control over the decades. Despite its history of military parades and its current heavily security determined design of large vehicular entry with its sweeping egresses and pathways, Washington Square Park remains charming if less mysterious.  It is a destination shorn of magic.  Perhaps time will reclaim the park's aura to weave new mystique onto its flattened landscape. 

ARIANNE MNOUCHKINE: SMALL LIVES, EPIC SCALE

Viewing Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres after her big themes of greek tragedy, the shakepearean history plays and the journeys of Odysseus, is a surprise.  It requires relearning what to look for in Mnouchkine.  The epic scale of a performance in seven hours is packed with the details of modern dispersal.  War, history and forgetting are some of the mechanisms through which the narrative fragmentation takes place in Les Ephermers.  One is in the world of a young woman and her dead mother, whose poignant story is the Ariadne thread to multiple lives and periods.  Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres investigates loss and melancholia as virtuosic vignettes in epic time.  The little details of a look or a piece of cake becomes a hook into the past.  History is ephemeral but memory lives to haunt.  Unlike the Mnouchkine of big gestures drawn from Yakshagana, Flamenco, Kabuki, Kathakali and Sufi movement that one was immersed in Les Atrides, this feast of detail is an introspectic Mnouchkine, looking melancholia in its depths and searching for its meanings.  Death is at the door of this piece, and fear is not far behind.  Rotating discs carrying half a dozen actors at a time float into the dream worlds of the daily.  In Ephemeres, one is in the field of the cinematic Mnouchkine: seamless gliding mise en scenes, theatricality of a slice of life, fade ins and fade outs of reality and memory.  Jean Jacques Lemaitres' haunting music calibrates the pacing and development of the piece, grounding the openings scenes in his distinctive bass cello invocations.  One is left desiring the punch that always distinguishes Mnouchkine's storytelling from other great directors of our time.

ERIC W. SANDERSON: THE MANNAHATTA PROJECT

July 9, 2009

At the Museum of the City of New York is an extraordinary constellation of maps and ideas.  In one exhibition titlted: MANNAHATTA/MANHATTAN is located 4 key maps of New York City's emergence: the British Headquarters' Map, the Viele Map, the Commisioner's Map and finally, Randal's extraordinary drawings of lot by lot in his series of maps of New York City, known as the Randall's Map.  A reproduction of the Costello Map of New Amsterdam is also on show at the exhibit.  What makes this collection of cartographic renderings significant is their symbiotic importance in the understanding of New York City's landscape, materiality and topography.  The projected future in each one of these maps is vastly different.   Cumulatively, these different interpretations of information produce layered conceptions of what New York is and can become.  

ARIANNE MNOUCHKINE: EPHEMERAL GESTURES

July 11, 2009

Park Avenue Armory,

New York City.

The audience walks into a cavernous space of parallel steeply racked seats.  In the center is a large but compact open arena spacious to carry to large rotating wheels of actors.  On either side of this empty space is a raised platform.  On one side of the raised platform sits the Sound and Light Operator.  On the other sits Jean -Jacques Lemaitre, Arianne Mnouchkine's composer of many years, surrounded by an entourage of wooden instruments of unusual shapes and heights.

Arianne Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres is an expedition into the deepest recesses of the human psyche.  Watching Les Ephemeres the week following Pina Bausch's death cannot but influence the viewing a seven hour performance on loss, aging, death, memory, childhood, melancholia and birth.  Les Ephemeres is about little gestures and thick memories: a slice of pie, chocolate cake, a goldfish, are conduits to former lives, forgotten pasts.

Les Ephemeres is a gigantic memory box of stories, vignettes, snapshots, fading photographs.  We are drawn to the peripheries of daily lives, and sucked into the vortex of incomplete stories.  The threads of all these myriad tales interlock into a web like network of narratives, of histories, and ultimately of interdependent fates.  We are all connected and need each other.  This is the simple message borne out of war and dispersal, fear and alienation.  What connects humanity is the myriad spheres of social interaction- miniscules of gestures that bear the baggage of contact.

PINA BAUSCH: The City in a Village

Pina Bausch's passing away marks the passage of an era.  Bausch brought to a synthesis the formal divides between theater and dance, beween village and the world.  Bausch's grounding in the village of Wuppertal, Germany for her movement work became an artistic practice unique and critical to the world of performance and movement.  Bausch's model of producing dance theater is a powerful model of alternative living.  Her example is extreme but inspiring: move to an unknown site and start your own theater company that centralizes the life of performance and artistic practice at its core.   Bausch's dance practice based on communal living in a small village echoes earlier aesthetic practices of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and prior to that, the more esoteric investigations of Francois Delsarte and Emile Dalcroze, who respectively investigated the associations between movement, emotions, dance and theatricality.  In Bausch's work, the distillation of movement as a kinetic medium whose compositional formality incorporates the daily gestures of life, comes to a head.  The dancer in Bausch's work became a conduit of the contemporary gesture, a walk, a casual squat, a slide of the feet that cites both Buster Keaton and the Judson Church movement.

In Pina Bausch's dance pieces, theatricality acquired a clarification- movement heightened dramatic action, action became the event, and choreography replaced Stanislavskian fidelity to produce fresh new images on slices of life.  The detailed gesture in Pina Bausch's dance work becomes an investigation into the science of movement-  it brings Delsarte's interest in the "science of movement" into conversation with the quotidien life of the expendable present.  

The passing of the great movement theorist and practitioner is the passing of an era of investigation of big gestures through little things, where the world is unpacked within the confines of a utopian village.

SPECTACLE, NOISE POLLUTION and SECURITY

It is July 4th and the fireworks on the Hudson River are spectacularly exploding.  Earlier today, the bike path on the Hudson River Park Greenway was closed and the entire bikepath downtown filled with police activity cordoning off the area in anticipation of the MACY's fireworks.  New Yorkers love a good firework display.  The sound of fireworks in New York City however have a very different impact on many residents.  Since September 11, 2001, the sound of fireworks has conflated with the sound of war in a tactile way.  Despite the rationale of festivity and celebration, a sense of ominous foreboding creeps into the home at the sound and ricochetting of explosions.  This ongoing issue of sound anxiety triggered by fireworks for downtown Manhattan residents really surfaced when Rupert Murdoch's wedding bash on the New York waterfront right after September 11, 2001 concluded with a riotous firework display on the river that shook buildings, triggered off alarms and woke up sleeping babies.  For many of us, the implications of the United States's strategy of "shock and awe" and perpetual state of orange alert in New York City left no room for humor at the hideous display of uncivic insensitivity by Murdoch's crew.  Since then, fireworks invoke security anxieties- downtown New York is viscerally affected by the sound of fireworks.  Buildings shake.  The walls quake.  The sensation evokes the impact of buildings falling down.  It disrupts our quality of life outside special events like July 4 and Gay Pride celebrations, which are annual city rituals. Private firework displays of greed and wealth should not be permitted to disrupt the shared public air spaces of dense cities like New York City after September 11.

GOVERNORS ISLAND

The archaeological details raised by Diana di Zerega Wall and Anne-Marie Cantwell about the historic timeline of human habitation on Governor's Island is noteworthy.  It is a point of interest that seems to be somewhat hidden in the literature on the founding of Mannahatta.  The detail that Governor's Island was the first settlement of the first small group of Dutch settlers to arrive in New Amsterdam is little noted.  The first Dutch settlers built their settlements on Governor's Island over the settlements of Woodland Indian habitants of the island.  According to de Zerega Wall and Cantwell, archaeological debris from Governor's Island indicate that indigenous habitation existed on the island for 4000 years.  This alters the import of the tiny piece of land south of Manhattan as a point of interest.  Governor's Island is a dense conglomeration of New York history, anthropological, archaeological, historical, military, maritime, penitentiary, and now, leisure.  It must have been a powerful place for peoples more in tune with nature: an island facing the ocean at the confluence of two rivers covered with oysters and blessed with extraordinary access to natural food supplies.

CIVIC MANAGEMENT and CROWD CONTROL

New York City is a dynamic instance of how large groups of people circulate in efficient networks of flows without feeling entirely managed. On a given weekend, crowds swell and receede in neighborhoods for a variety of public events. This is a city of parades, demonstrations, carnivals, unrests, protests, festivals and fairs. What is remarkable is the strategic shift in flux and flows of people from borough to borough and from district to district within boroughs, despite local strangle holds of crowds and densities.  The infrastructural contractions and expansions of the city's crowd management and surveillance personnel is large and remarkable to watch. On the one hand, one objects to the excessive policing and heavy handed presence of the police that is so customary to New Yorkers, but still very disconcerting. This heavy militarized presence around protests for Amadou Diallo at Dag Skarmahold Plaza a few years ago was shocking in its over reaching presence.  The more recent scaling back of the heavy militarized presence around public events and a visible easing of attitudes between civilians and the police in large public events is tangible.  The NYPD have a tough job on their hands, but their more recent restraint in volatile public situations has eased the register of anxiety between the police and the public a little, since the overt confrontation during the Diallo protests and the more recent Sean Bell non violent protests by Sharpton and other activists.

UTOPIA on HUDSON STREET, NYC

It is June 28, 2009 and Hudson Street below me is packed with vendors marketing gay paraphernelia.  The air is thick with anticipation celebrating 40 years of Stonewall.  It is the biggest carnival day for this part of town, and this is a big anniversary.  The whole West Village is in hyper active mode the entire weekend every end of June for this utopian festival. The pulse of energy is infectious.  Sometimes, the utopia gets buried under the commercialism, the crowds, the anxiety and excessive production of identities.  It is a time of extraordinary costuming, magnificent adornment and cliches. The carnivalesque state of the inversion of power and the playfulness of sexual identities is momentarily relieving. The hyperbole of the weekend contrasts with the discretion of daily life in New York City. New Yorkers are less inclined to be limited by race, gender or sexuality as defining markers.  Self fashioning in the metropolis is more toned down in its daily identifications- more negotiated and cosmopolitan. People have to work across heterogeneities, differences, geographies, religious beliefs.  So the mass influx of more provincially attired social identities is both visually interesting, and somewhat predictable.  It foregrounds the play of urban and suburban styles of self production.  This is a big year: Gay Marriage is the big agenda this carnival season, and the determination to make the next big jump to normalize Gay Rights is tangible. It is shocking that New York State has not achieved this goal in the 21st century.  This undermines our claims to being the metropolitan center of the world, whose radical ideas of urban life and social living have impacted how other cities imagine their futures.  We cannot move forward without resolving this untenable contradiction: legalizing gay rights is a neccessary part of American's urban futures.

DREAMING ON THE HIGHLINE

Yesterday, Harmattan Theater's proposal to the Highline to stage Henry Hudson's Forgotten Maps was rejected.  It is only the second week since the Highline opened its elevated thoroughfares to the world, and the rejection is an invitation to keep dreaming of projects on the Highline.  I began to dream images of what I would like to stage on the Highline after I saw the spectacular exhibit on the 750 designs that were submitted for the competition to design the Highline in early 2003.  The Highline invites people to dream.  It is a place of dreaming- surrounded by the light of the river and the refracted light of buildings-  the Highline allows people to float beyond the city for a moment.  The 750 dreams of that landmark competition was revealing- as they opened out the possibility of New York City's potential for adaptive reuse on a scale never imagined before.  Instead of soaring wings that continue to have to be scaled back as has been the case of Santiago Calatrava's design for the Ground Zero terminal, the people of New York literally float above the city, dreaming new dreams about impossible theater on the Highline.

GLOBAL POLIS

The AIA New York Chapter had a panel session titled Global Polis, with closing remarks by Ron Schiffman.  The session raised some of the concerns about human activity that Harmattan Theater is very interested in.  Place still matters in the age of virtual space.  How do people occupy space in their daily lives.  The panel took the metaphor of 311 as an overarching set of networks linking communities A, B, and C over a broad cross section of concerns that intersect between individuals and the locality.  What emerged in the discussion is the realisation that biopower is still the most powerful antidote to apathy.  People still matter and space still evokes tactile responses that are physical and communal, in an age of dispersal and fragmentation.  The question is what are some of the linkages drawing disparate heterogenous constituencies to dialogue about issues that they would otherwise not connect on any grounds about.  The level of the neighborhood is one level.  The level of the integrated block with the eyes on the street continues to mean distinct things in ways that other ideas of community have long moved away from. In the junctures between habitation and dailiness lie the sparks of dramatic action.  What moves people to act, to care about cities?  This remains an unpredictable arrangement that alters from city to city. 

LIQUIDITY, HISTORY, EPHEMERAL ART

Creating art in the public spaces of metropolitan centers raises peculiar challenges.  In the context of Harmattan Theater's Governor's Island project involving Hudson River water and the waterline of the island, the question of liquidity posed itself as a tool of history.  The text of the piece titled Henry Hudson's Forgotten Maps takes the 16th century maritime economies as the moment of departure.  Liquidity forged a new idea of the world in the sixteenth century.  Oceans opened up avenues of flows, geographies were no longer terrestrially bound- the imagination wandered beyond the open sea's curve.  Using this idea of liquidity as a historic linkage, the performance opened up the question of new york's water traces: the rivers, lakes, ponds, rivulets that have been buried over.  The beaches that were built over.  The question we asked was how do contemporary landscapes evoke older cartographies of knowing and world making.  The company chose to work with edible materials: milk, hudson river water, sugar mixed with water to add texture and glaze, egg whites mixed with water and milk to add viscosity- on the bitumen of the former military outpost.  The challenge of trying to inscribe on bitumen with biodegradable materials that are sucked into the harsh elements of the bitumen alone was mesmerizing.  The impact of human contact making lyrical and beautiful images on hard and unused landscapes, was one objective of the performance.  This tradition of inscribing on the public faces of transit is not new.  It is a venerable new york tradition made popular by the Graffiti artists of NYC.  What the performance achieves is a certain relationality between toxicity and biodegradable logics, between the permanence of military architectures and the fluidity of artistic improvisations that foreground otherwise dead sites of habitation.  Fulfilling the Governors Island debate about what to do with Governors Island, the Harmattan Theater project opened up the island's potential to make livable and stimulating what has for too long been viewed as largely a penitentiary and abandoned military outpost.  Through the performance of Henry Hudson's Forgotten Maps, the notion of a liquid history and the island's ephemerality is underscored.  The interdependency of this island city to the global economy, as well as its image as a tenuous place in its own imaginary is solidified. 

EVAPORATION

The interdiscplinary group of artists spearheading the Harmattan Theater company's investigation into the relationship between New York City's rivers and estuaries and its land mass are intrinsically preoccupied with the present ecology of New York City and its historic pasts embedded in the landfills, macadam, slants and slopes of the city.  Evaporation is a key concept we have been working with in relating the impact of the Hudson River water to its rocky surroundings.  In the Soho project of Living Lines, we started with the topography of the area presented by the Viele Map of the 1800's.  The question of how to relate the historicity of the area to its current usage influenced our choice of materials, visual metaphors and aesthetic categories of scaling.  SoHo's industrial past and italian american cultural roots accentuated the visual signals of the final shape the Living Lines installation took, of factory lines, clotheslines, exposed materiality, layered perceptions of how things are seen.  Here the idea of evaporation became a visual cue layered through the mylar and acetate drawings, so the images of human movement achieved a certain translucency, a spectral quality of multiple realities unfolding, the past and the present, through the lens of embodied time.

The Henry Hudson Project on Governors Island in June 2009 worked expressly with evaporation as a physical principle of marking, reclamation, healing, contamination, forgetting, and trace.  The site chosen was at a forceful point of water contact- waves spraying onto the pavement at high tide and exposing a splendid stretch of beach at low tide.  This stretch of beach became a focal point of our show as we used the Hudson River water as a key element of imprinting images on the landscape.  The residual outlines of human movement, flowers, feet, leaves, milk and sugar, left by the Hudson River's overflow, raised tactile questions about the relationship of human activity to waterfronts, the cleanliness of the river's water for human consumption, and its continuing abundance and generosity as an energey resource.  Evaporation in this performance became a mnemonic marker as well as a visual metaphor for the future of thinking about human demands on water resources.  And the river's power to impact our life.

HENRY HUDSON'S FORGOTTEN MAPS June 12/14, 2009

The Henry Hudsons Forgotten Maps project performed by Harmattan Theater June 12 and 14, 2009 is a site specific installation/performance performed on the Eastern shore of Governor's Island.  The dramatic panoramic backdrop of a spectacular stretch of beach, the Brooklyn Bridge, the cityscape of Brooklyn dockyards, and the crescendo of pounding waves provided the mise en scene for this piece about history, maps, ghosts and indigenous rights.  Using the historic archives of the Dutch East India Company and the ethnographic implications of the sale of Governors Island for the price of 2 axeheads, a handful of nails and some white beads, the piece explores the connections between the historic past and our urban future.  Drawing upon traditions of Odissi dancing and Tango concertina, as well as the ecstatic carnatic vocal traditions of bhakti music, the performance opened up the striations of time and space through the poetry of Dante Aligheri's Fifth Canto from The Divine Comedy.  The ghost of Henry Hudson threads through the performance as a mournful presence in search of arrival, haunting the shores of New York City with his ghostly travels.  Grounding the movements of long duration strung across the long boundaries of the island, were the drawings on the ground in milk, sugar, and egg whites, done by Victoria Marshall and Jose De Jesus.  The performance involved 10 cast members including Adam Lelyveld, Carol Mathews-Nicoli, Lisabeth During, Martine Gak, James Cascaito, Puma Perl, Latha Ramprasad, Nandini Sikand.  Directed by May Joseph.

LIVING LINES by Harmattan Theater, SoHo, june 6, 09

The Living Lines Project is an experimental project in documenting human movement against the built environments in different scales of urban mapping.  Taking three principles of distance as a working logic: the close up, the long shot and the hand held camera, three illustrators mapped the DeSalvio Playground in real time.  Drawing the outlines of animate and inanimate landscapes across different fields: horizontal, vertical and perpendicular, as well as in states of stasis and motion, the installation captures an intrinsic moment in time.  The drawings were executed with black in on Mylar and Acetate.  They were hung across the park as a clothesline, citing NoLiTa's history of italian immigrant life and its domestic visuality of hanging clotheslines.

The Living Lines project opens up the scales of interaction as distinctive threads of movement that collide, overlay, superimpose and eventually, melt away against the throbbing urban bustle.  The installation was created by Victoria Marshall, Jose De Jesus and May Joseph, for HarmattanTheater.

MARIONETTES and MAGIC

June 13, 2009

The Penny Jones Puppet Company performed The Sorcerer's Apprentice today at Governors Island for the Figment Festival.  The puppet show is a lyrical journey into the nature of subjectification and the darker side of magic as a social practice.  I play the magic book in the show.  In the world of puppets, magic is a diabolical tool because it can indeed grip the apprentice and undermine his reality.  I was introduced to this tale of The Sorcerer's Apprentice by the anthropologist Michael Taussig, whose on work on magic and shamanism influences thinking on puppetry, ritual and movement.  The extraordinary nineteenth century German writer Heinrich Von Kleist writes that a wooden marionette has the agility and poetry of movement that often escapes the live performer.   This idea is forever intriguing, and it is absolutely the magic about this The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

FORGOTTEN MAPS: From Penitentiary to Park

June 12, 2009 NYC

Governor's Island is an interesting performance space.  Today's performance by Harmattan Theater on the west side of Governor's Island on Kimmel Road foregrounds the temporal and historical frameworks undercutting the island's geography.  Battlements, military outpost, penitentiary, the island's reworkings demand a new iteration of space and scale.  Harmattan Theater's Henry Hudson's Forgotten Maps embarks on precisely this expansion of the boundary between water and the built environment.  Using a brass pot, the performance literally draws upon the Hudson Bay's water to forgive the island's history of violence and ritually move beyond its history of bloodshed and deception.  At the heart of the piece are 2 early american axes, nails and some white beads: the price the Dutch paid the native peoples for Governor's Island.

The peculiar military geography of Governors Island demands a flexible and mobile choreography and blocking to fit the contours of the island's curvature.  The 1800 map of Colonel Viele was influential in the approach to the contours and topography of the locale of performance at Governors Island.  Searching for sandy beaches in the historic part of the island was an exercise that led to the emergence of the site of the piece.  

The piece ends with the Ghost of Henry Hudson wandering through the island's periphery, singing a dirge in Cape Verdean melancholia.

DUTCH EAST INDIA CARTOGRAPHY

June 10

Henry Hudsons Forgotten Maps is a production by Harmattan Theater, New York City, June 12 and 14, 2009 at Governor's Island, New York City.  We are embarking on this performance event on Friday from 1-3pm on Governor's Island.  The performance is an investigation of historical maritime routes with contemporary ecology of the Hudson Bay watershed.  Drawing upon the maps of the Dutch East Indian company's colonial empire, the project explores the relationship to sixteenth century globalization and contemporary migrancy.  The project uses perceptual and micro ecological maps drawn by Victoria Marshall and Jose DeJesus who work with layered urban topographical mapping.  Using this extensive series of site specific maps, a performance exploring the sale of Governor's Island, and the Ghost of Henry Hudson against the backdrop of Castle Clinton's history as a port of New World emigrants unfolds.  

To produce this event, the artistic director of Harmattan Theater May Joseph, Designer Victoria Marshall, and Odissi dancer Nandini Sikand worked with the site of Governor's Island over a period of a few visits, scouting out the shoreline in search of a beach on the historic part of the island.  Starting off with the built landscape and the originary landmass, we began a series of inquiries into what sort of maps the site recalls: historical maps, cartographic maps of Mercator and Tycho Brach, perceptual maps of knowledge production in the Situationists tradition, and the simultaneous and multiple scaled maps of urban knowing that a body moving through space experiences in flashes of sensation.  Having spotted our ideal beach replete with lush sandy banks, we proceeded to create the physical, visual and sound environment that emerges from the site: indigenous, military, colonial, contemporary park, festival destination.  Using these interlocking throughlines Joseph built a script layering the sound of the waves and wind with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante Aligheri, Bakhti devotional poetry, Puma Perl's Coney Island poems and Nandini Sikand's choreographic movements.  The performance ends with the plaintive complaint of the ghost of Henry Hudson wandering through the waterways of the Hudson Bay trying to get ashore.  At the heart of the performance is the citing of the gift of 2 axe heads, a handful of nails and some white beads, the price the Dutch paid the Native Americans for Governor's Island in 1635.

SOHO, URBAN SCALING and LIVING LINES PROJECT

Today's Fragment Festival in Desalvio Playground is an interesting experiment in the creation of alternative spheres of urban intimacy outside the corporate and governmental sector.  Generated by a group of artists working through the organization of Action Arts League, the event is an investigation of small scale urbanism.  Informal, provisional, low key in impact, the occasion allowed for different kinds of social encounters across different demographics to emerge in ways that otherwise do not occur within dense movement in places like NoLiTa and SoHo.

What I find really hopeful and exciting about this event is how people are coming together at a time when there is very little money in the arts and generating a lot of spirit, possibility and creative energy that is infectious and producing interesting aesthetic responses.  

Harmattan Theater put up an installation today, June 6, 2009 at Desalvio Playground in SoHo exploring micro scale urbanism.  The project began with a study of the fragment of Viele's map covering the SoHo region.  We started by thinking about the ecology of the area before 2009.  The installation emerged through the idea of architect Brian McGrath to trace the visual lines of NoLiTa's everyday history of hanging clotheslines as a cultural throughline.  The installation comprises of drawings on acetate paper of urban movement in three different scales: close up, medium shot and hand held camera following the action around, a theory proposed by Brian McGrath and Jean Gardiner as the theory of cinemetrics, a theory of visual scales.  The three registers of figurative scaling of human mobility opens up the kinds of social mapping otherwise lost in the intensity of urban intimacies.  Using twine, clips, and mylar, the installtion was hung across the Desalvio Playground, simulating hanging laundry as a visual trace.  The installation was performed by Jose DeJesus, Victoria Marshall and May Joseph.