GOVERNORS ISLAND. HARMATTAN THEATER, June 2010

Governors Island, June 11, 12, 13 2010. Harmattan Theater, Confluence, 2-4 pm every day.

New York City.

As part of the FIGMENT festival in 2010, the piece Confluence was staged by Harmattan Theater, an ensemble theater company, on Governors Island this weekend. The eight performers danced on the water's edge in slow movement beginning at Picnic Point and slowly meandering towards the historic Fort Williams. Drawing on German, Tagalog and English, the performance explores the centrality of water to modern life. Performers drew on Bharata Natyam, Kyogen and Kalaripayatti movements as techniques of moving through urban space. Using ekhtaras, cymbals,the accordian and indian tambourines, musical invocations of trance music accompanied physical gestures. Confluence explores the Hudson Raritan River estuary as an important site for rethinking the importance of water in contemporary life. The piece is an investigation into new ways of thinking about eco systems, water quality and human uses of water in our daily lives.

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.

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.