Hudson River Water Level Rising

Walking along the Hudson River Park and further up along Riverside Park South, the Hudson River's water levels look alarmingly high. The piers are almost entirely submerged under the swell of the river.
Nowadays, the talk is off selling before people realize that waterfront property is an endangered investment.

David Blaine, Electrified, Pier 54, Oct. 5-8, New York City

dazzling, unsettling, daring
David Blaine, ELECTRIFIED, Pier 54, Oct. 5-8, 2012, NYC

Violent sparks of electric light brighten Pier 54 against the Jersey skyline on a cold October saturday night. Wrapped in the sounds of the Hudson River's steady lapping waters against old pier stonework, a bizarre figure stands suspended high up on a platform-shrouded in lightening. A human form moves slowly in a Faraday suit, surrounded by relentless bolts of electric shock. Sonic rhythms played live

on electronic keyboards trigger a synchronous lightening dance of electricity around the spaceman. It is wild, hypnotic, trance like.  David Blaine's notorious extreme performance defying mortality, gravity and human bodily rhythms, finds its most ambitious mise en scene yet, a theater of million volts bombarding his body for 72 hours. While the mere sight of something so visually disconcerting is in itself a destination performance, what Blaine is investigating is the outer limits of human endurance. The sound and light show is impressive, though for my taste, not in itself a reason to remember ELECTRIFIED. What makes this a remarkable performance of endurance is the extraordinary stretch of physicality and kinetic minimalism that Blaine subjects himself to - involving sleep deprivation, restricted mobility, and total denial of bodily needs for a period of 3 days.  Surrounded by the utterly modern experience of electric immersion, Blaine asks his audiences at the edge of the Hudson River on a cold Fall night to consider the limits of human potential, the outer boundaries of kinetic performativity. The piece is at once block buster entertainment and zen meditation, high octane performance and magical journey into technological wizardry.

www.youtube.com/ultrabookexperience

MANHATTAN 1811 GRID /FOURTEENTH STREET

Manhattan's Grid plan has been both celebrated and critiqued. The relentless mercantile repetition of predictable blocks to enable commerce, real estate efficiency, and utilitarian urban planning has had its adherents and detractors. The idea of the Grid has been a space of both avant garde experimentation as Rosalind Krauss has observed in her writings, and a place of limitation in its rigid spatialization. The grid, Krauss points out, is a space of immeasurable experimentation within its codified vectors. This space of delirium, Rem Koolhaas demonstrates, is the space of an infinite possibility of verticalities.

On 1811, a group of city planners laid forth a utopian project, an artificial environment mapped onto an undulating terrain of forests, streams, farmland- a dream scape of wood, brick, and eventually steel and concrete. In 2011, Harmattan Theater probes the originary site of Manhattan's Grid space, 14th Street, as a conflicted space of both utopian efficiency and discontinuous sensations. Fourteenth Street is a place of perpetual interruptions - a theater of deferred arrivals. Harmattan's GRID SCENES captures an hour of this spatial improvisation in its stylistically slowed down state- a somnambulist's Fourteenth Street where a large group of people barely move at all, traverse a diagonal trajectory. For Harmattan, this space of the urban grid is a performance space of repetitions, of duration, of daily detours. It is a place of return and reinvention, as people commute day in and day out on the same routes, stopping at the same points of encounter, reenacting familiar rituals of transit. This repetition is the space of the grid's improvisations with its infinitely varied gestures.

1811 GRID, GRID SCENES and FOURTEENTH STREET

Harmattan Theater's Grid Scenes emerged from an interest in the peculiar ecology of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. Fourteenth Street is the first crosstown artery where the 1811 Grid began. It is also a cross street that connects the Hudson River to the East River downtown. Fourteenth Street is a changing barometer of New York City's mercantile and transportation landscapes. Depending on the time of day or night, the street has a distinctive sensation from block to block. The flaneur, the stranger and the immigrant all find their way to Fourteenth Street in their discovery of New York. What Fourteenth Street does not invite is a moment of quietitude from which to view the street. Fourteenth Street is a place of perpetual movement, of transit and transitoriness.

The performance GRID SCENES experiments with stillness on Fourteenth Street drawing on Architects Brian McGrath and Jean Gardner's idea of Cinematrics and Jean Luc Godard's notion of a city in motion viewed through panning, tracking and hand held camera shots. GRID SCENES is a choreography of transit - at once slowed down movement and frenetic activity.

HARMATTAN THEATER, 1811 GRID PERFORMANCE

A city has a biological life, Le Corbusier once noted. What is the future of the Grid in Manhattan's imagination? The grid as organizing logic of New York's street flows has influenced how urban movement has been imagined in the modern city. People walk swiftly up Avenues and purposefully across Streets in Manhattan, driven by the linearity of the Grid. Simple lines of transit have opened up dense networks of communicative possibilities. North/South vectors of speed in New York City have replaced older East/West networks of transportation connecting the Hudson River to the East River during the Nineteenth century maritime boom.

Corbusier's "maritime sky of Manhattan" is a reminder of the verticality of the Grid's visual impact. Corbu was moved by the soaring vistas of skyline that arrested the visual plane as one looked uptown towards the modernist horizon of disappearing sky- an impressive man made tableau. Drawing upon Corbu's observation that people traversing a Cartesian city plan may still look up and dream beautiful images, Harmattan Theater investigates what makes dense cities like New York distinctive biological environments.

Through the performance GRID SCENES, a network of sixty people traversing through Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue at Twilight on April 3, holding lamps made from recycled fruit boxes fitted with miniature flashlights, and Nepalese Singing Bowls, Harmattan Theater marks the slowing down of time and the expanding of space as a sensuous experience of the Manhattan Grid. The city drifts by as bodies slow down to imperceptible gestures, a flow of sensation.

GRID SCENES, 14th Street, Manhattan, April 3, 2011, 7-8pm

This year marks the 200 year anniversary of the creation of Manhattan as a rationalist space organized along a Grid of Avenues and Streets. The New York City Commissioners Map of 1811 projected a new kind of city locatable along a modernist axis both familiar in its classical orientation of the Grid and entirely new in its ruthless submission to taming nature in the interest of urban planning.

The Grid is a pragmatic yet trance inducing idea, at once mathematically beautiful and confounding. Harmattan Theater takes this dual principle of the Grid as a departure for an investigation into corporeality and spatiality through movement. Using the North/South Axis along the site of the Manhattan Grid's originating site, Fourteenth Street, Harmattan Theater is staging a performance about the slowing of time and the expansion of space within the limit of the foot stride, the block, the street, and the grid's horizontal and vertical coordinates.

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.

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.