Dear Friends,

On behalf of the artists, staff, and crew of New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix Festival 2010, we want to thank you for your support and attendance!

Highlights of this year’s Festival included:

• The funny, conceptual and physical Frederick Gravel (Montreal)
• Controversial LaZampa (Marseille)
• The bizarre, intriguing and mysterious Yozmit (New York City)
• Heightened sensations of Dana Salisbury’s Dancing in The Dark (New York City)
• Exchange artists Mana Karamura and Cori Olinghouse (New York City) traveled to the Community Center in Philadelphia and Studio 303 in Montreal
• Collaboration of vocalist and composer Susan Oetgen (New York City) with composer Shyam (Chicago) brought together by a residency at E | MERGE at Earthdance in Plainfield, MA,
• Reincarnation of Michael Jackson by Dianna David (Vancouver)
• And the Breakfast Mix presenting the film La Chambre Blanche by legendary Ginette Laurin (Montreal) followed by a Q & A led by Deirdre Towers of Dance Films Association.

Through strong support of public agencies, foundations and individuals, we are able to continue to bring to you high-quality, affordable dance, music, video and interdisciplinary work  year after year. Before we close the books on the 2010 season, we invite you to make a donation to the Festival using the online donation form hosted by NYCharities.org.

Your gift is tax-deductible; moreover, you will help ensure that the Festival remains a vibrant part of the New York City fabric of experimental performance arts. Click here to make an on-line donation to New Dance Alliance.

WE NEED YOUR HELP
to make the 25th ANNIVERSARY of the
PERFORMANCE MIX FESTIVAL
the dance and performance event of 2011

“Karen Bernard, New York City-based Dance Soloist and Founder and Director of New Dance Alliance (NDA), a non-profit arts service organization that produces an annual performance festival, talks about her autobiographical work Ouette which borrows a cinematic construction from the movie Swimming Pool by Francois Ozon where imagined and real experiences are shown without distinction, as well as cliches of dance voacabulary to inform two levels of experience.” LISTEN HERE

Cynthia Berkshire … IRIS, GETS READY FOR HER DATE
Karen Bernard … OUETTE | (o’ et)
Jil Guyon … MYSTERIUM

otherworldly shamanistic intensity, dangerous sexual fantasies, surreal Kabuki visual intensity, and dreams caught in a pile of bras set the stage

Presented By:

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie St. (btw Delancy and Rivington)

Thursday May 20, 2010
8pm

General Admission $15
Seniors/Students $12

Tickets 212-219-0736
www.dixonplace.org

Cynthia Berkshire
In her darkened bedroom, the character IRIS questions herself and her purple bras as she prepares for her upcoming date. Moving with a raw and at times disturbing force, IRIS gets ready for her date is a movement theatre work with visual projection and original soundscape. The project, reflecting on whether women give up and/or gain something in appealing to men sexually, begins with the premise that an enigmatic inner world is in charge. Light and shadow merge in this mysterious realm, and the awkward, confused IRIS discovers something about herself.

Karen Bernard
Ouette | (o?’ et) is loosely based on the Franc?ois Ozon movie Swimming Pool. Bernard’s character parallels the film’s protagonist, an elderly English novelist who becomes involved in a dangerous sexual fantasy that is part her fiction and part her desire. Using a laptop and projector, different spaces evoking the imagined and real experiences are created. With video footage of floor tiles, patterned fabrics and human silhouettes, Bernard creates a heightened film noir that is quickly fractured by the non-performative technical tasks of manipulating the laptop and projector.

Jil Guyon
In Mysterium, a stage covered with red velvet is the setting for a performance-ritual that combines movement, voice, sound, music, light, ashes and fog. The performance features a young girl in a white dress lying at center stage. Around her a woman performs a series of gestures with shamanistic intensity. Her physical presence ranges from gracious to grotesque in contrast to the girl’s eerie stillness. Simultaneously primordial and apocalyptic in its otherworldliness, Mysterium  is a richly textured, gradually shifting visual landscape evocative of innocence, pain, sacrifice and hope.

The development of these works are made possible through the 3 Femmes project, an on-going creative process workshop in cooperation with New Dance Alliance; NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; Digital Performance Institute; the Experimental Television Center; and residencies through The Field’s FAR space, Artward Bound Residency Program and New Dance Alliance/Exchange at White Oak with funding from the Howard Gilman Foundation and Earthdance; Silo; Wassard Elea; and the Bogliasco Fellowship.

Photo Credits, L to R:
Karen Bernard, Ella Veres; Jil Guyon, Jil Guyon;
Cynthia Berkshire, Jahmani Perry

Exchange/Échange in S303: criticism

Explosion of clowns by Marion Gerbier

DFdanse

“If one still crosses clowns with the daily newspaper, in the street or anywhere, their appearance on the boards and in the spectacles rarer, is limited to the world of the circus or the rigour diverted for large sanguinary productions of horror with psychopathes. With Studio 303, one hides some behind the curtains…

The annual event Exchange/Échange is programmed by Studio 303 in collaboration with New Dance Alliance of New York, on the mode of twinnings of cities and exchanges correspondents of when one had the age to go to the clowns. This year, Nathalie Claude threaded the pink costume flashy of the clown montréalais, in duet with Regina Rocke of Large apple, to animate a program of four numbers, two from over there two from here. The clowneries were rather with the honor in scene also, with white charlots and hens, cannibals of motorcyclists, the insane ones fixed on the moon as with the sun and some decentralized puppets all of the party.

For the clan of Montreal, one is been useful as pets since invited to find with pleasure The study of physics of Anne Thériault, always in building site and blood, and the Big-bang accelerated of Now I got worry , trio rebounding of Andrew Turner surrounded of Simon-Xavier Lefebvre and Shink handbook in gravitation.

In the first case, the study of Anne Thériault continues by revisiting the proverb of the scientist Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier: nothing is lost, all is created and changed. Matter presented at Tangente at the beginning of season indeed evolved/moved with regard to the episode of the motorcyclists. The paper screen is preserved, behind which a scenario of helmeted shades is woven which play the race-continuation until the tearing crash landing. Small change: one operates this time one 90 degrees to reveal one moment the lower parts of the pre-accident. An advisability of better appreciating the choreographic play and the costumes of the two roadhogs before they finish ensanglantés with ground, and puffed out by a rather famished trio of interpreters.

According to another saying: one does not change a team which gains, the number of Andrew Turner apparently did not move of a hair, and due, one would change nothing of it. And if with the first viewing the effect of surprise were irresistible, the second time one trépigne of impatience which arrives the following plan, which one accomodates with a burst of laughter quite as frank. In addition to the overflow of complicity, comic irresistible and natural, and choreographic as much sporting than it takes as a starting point the the parodies of servant boys band, the part questions a metaphysical matter intelligently: laws of improbability, and yet… Reality is what it is, and although our existence is due to an infinity of multiplication of weak fractions of probability, one IS, share of this reality, and in or in front of this choreography. Powerful setting in abyss and retrospective of the last 4,6 billion years, which make of an existential philosophical masturbation a quite pretty digest of dance, humour and humanity.

As regards our American neighbor now. Cori Olinghouse is not the last of the clowns, as it had shown previously, but on what a occasion already?! In any case she recalls good memories accomodated to the same place: The frying Side’ S too wide of Sarah Bild and Susanna Hood presented in February the year spent, or the invaluable poultries Amélie Rajotte and Marie-Adeline Choquet in In fact I’ m large. As much to say an unquestionable taste of the autodérision and a beautiful culture of comic to through the ages, without despizing of Charlots of the screen, uncles de Tati and pros of the stumbling clappers. In Laurel&Hardy (with Eva Schmidt) capped straw hats to ribbons and affublées of broad trousers with straps re-installed with the armpits, our two flocks begin a ballet of Dupont&Dupond stuck one to the other. Adjustment désaccorde rather quickly to leave room to awkward efforts to keep the rate/rhythm and to adapt to an unknown universe. They will finish out of a little lost poultries, having sexy only their behaviours of feathers to the balcony and the bottom. The animal series: Experiments in light comedy and metamorphoses is gloussante with wonder, and that that made of the good of replonger in the strings of the traditional visual gag.

Cloudburst of Mana Kawamura develop a style in shifted particular, where one suspect minus the laughter that the dramatic one which is woven in slides. The four interpreters evoke ripe women in their role of family, in any case badly faggoted arranged behaviours and slightly anti-seduction. Pleated skirt, right and full jacket, badly cut out dress with same flowers, of truths getups of austere teacher… Also one transposes oneself without effort in the context of a sober routine, which with unexpected of a memory replonge in the madnesses of its youth. However there are not all same childhoods, and personal wild imagining or not, those are flown over planes which mitraillent and which knows mushroom clouds or less destructive explosions. Thus each one their turn, they brutally take down their installations of vase badly engoncée to collapse with half-dead. If the caress machinale of a jewel can wake up the one night memory hot, the objects contain sometimes rawer and painful images. The part is however not black, being watered with the désarticulations of the quartet of dancers. The direction which definitively escapes leaves on its hunger, or rather makes curious about what there can be well in back of the gestural one. Apparently, the life and its daily bearing are due only to one wire, that of the memory.”

Marion Gerbier

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DFdanse

photo: Andrew Turner

New Dance Alliance presents a true mix

Karen Bernard curates one of the more interesting dance festivals presented in NYC in her Performance Mix Festival at Joyce Soho. The unifying theme, if there is one, seems to be quirky originality. MC/hosts Regina Rocke and Rosita Laval do a great job of keeping the interpiece transitions lightly comic, rock with her ’80s-dressed straight-outta-Bushwick persona and Laval (Nathalie Claude) as a cleverly rough-around-the-edges French Canadienne … Cloudburst is the latest mindburst from Mana Kawamura, a choreographer always pushing fierce dancing through weird contortions and scenarios into a dark and satisfying dance. Kawamura moves with silky speed and obvious chops in her own inimitable dancing, and the other three dancers here, Christiana Axelsen, Lize-Lotte Pitlo and Keelin Ryan, are beautifully matched movers capable of sharp physical exclamation points — dance cloudbursts, effectively. A haunting and powerful soundtrack of little kids singing Bach, various music by Loituma and real rain and thunder, all compiled by Kawamura, helps make Cloudburst another gem. The movement cycles through wildness and calm, ease and convulsion. The ending, with all four hovering on one leg and finally stomping in puddles, sums both the playful and darkly violent aspects of the piece well.”

Quinn Batson

Offoffoff.com

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Photo by Bill Hebert

Evan Namerow

Dancing Perfectly Free

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]]> http://newdancealliance.org/2010/05/08/performance-mix-review-in-dancing-perfectly-free/feed/ http://newdancealliance.org/2010/04/22/performance-mix-review-in-manhattan-dance-examiner-p1/ http://newdancealliance.org/2010/04/22/performance-mix-review-in-manhattan-dance-examiner-p1/#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:24:15 +0000 Karen http://newdancealliance.org/?p=1368 ShareThis

“This dance review is the second installment of three articles, examining the artists who were presented April 18th, 2010, at the Performance Mix Festival at Joyce Soho. In this chapter, the artists Brynne Billingsley and Josh Beamish were reviewed.

The third piece in the concert, Elbow Tow Blues, started out with a fan blowing. A woman, Brynne Billingsley, set herself up in the blackout wearing an enormous costume. When the lights went up her upper body was hidden, only exposing a giant skirt suspended up by the air produced by the fan, looking like a jellyfish. Soon after she rose up appearing as a woman. She did a virtuosic back bend before transitioning away from the fan and further out into space.”

Megan Boyd

Manhattan Dance Examiner

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]]> http://newdancealliance.org/2010/04/22/performance-mix-review-in-manhattan-dance-examiner-p2/feed/ http://newdancealliance.org/2010/04/22/performance-mix-review-in-manhattan-dance-examiner-p3/ http://newdancealliance.org/2010/04/22/performance-mix-review-in-manhattan-dance-examiner-p3/#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:14:27 +0000 Karen http://newdancealliance.org/?p=1363 ShareThis

By Lauren Morrow

New York Pudding

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

http://www.newyorkpudding.com/index.php/events/press-release/1390-performance-mix-festival