"Juliette Mapp Mashes Up Day Care and Gertrude Stein"

If you're in NY next week, be sure to get a ticket now to see my lovely girlfriend Aretha Aoki perform in Juliette Mapp's dance piece, The Making of Americans

Brian Seibert of the Village Voice writes:

"Stein’s prose benefits from being read aloud (and excerpted), and as text for dance, its repetitiousness is an asset: You can give it only half your attention. Instead of taking that repetition as a model for minimalism, Mapp sees an analogy with unison. Just as Stein’s relentless reiterations make subtle variations stand out, when dancers all go through the same motions, individuality rises to the surface. Those motions run from shaking on all fours to the most careful adjustments in how shoulders are set. What Mapp admires in Stein—soft subjects told hard—she plays with kinetically.

Watching a rehearsal in post-industrial Bushwick, I remarked to Mapp that the setting seemed more apt than Dance Theater Workshop. She reminded me that DTW is currently a site of uncertainty and some sadness, as the organization merges with Bill T. Jones to become New York Live Arts. Mapp’s will be the last dance presented by “DTW” in its theater. A work of family memories speaks to the moment, as does Stein at the end of her death-haunted book (I skipped ahead): “Any one coming to be an old enough one comes to be a dead one.”

‘The Making of Ameicans,’ April 13–16, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, dancetheaterworkshop.org"

Check out this stunning review in the New York Times!

and equally remarkable in CULTUREBOT