2017 Bessie Award Nominees and Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Announced

On Wednesday July 12, 2017, the nominations for this year's Bessie Awards and well as the award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer were announced at Gibney Dance.  La MaMa is happy to announce that Antony Hamilton's Meeting (presented with Performance Space 122 as part of COIL) was nominated for two awards: Outstanding Production and Alisdair Macindoe for Outstanding Music Composition/Sound Design. 


The Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award was presented to Will Rawls "for creating astute, genre-eluding work that explores the relationship between movement and language and delves deeply into ideas of transmission, translation, and authorship; and for his multifaceted artistry as choreographer, writer, editor, and curator, expanding the presence of dance and performance."


Abby Zbikowski was presented with the 2017 Juried Bessie Award. This year’s Bessies Jury—Kyle Abraham, Brenda Bufalino, and Beth Gill—recognized Zbikowski for her "rigorous and utterly unique development of an authentic movement vocabulary, employed in complex and demanding structures to create dances of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger."


The 2017 Bessie Awards Nominations 

Outstanding Production:
Vanessa Anspaugh
The End of Men; An Ode to Ocean
Joyce Unleashed at Abrons Art Center

Kader Attou of CCN de la Rochelle/Cie Accrorap
OPUS 14
Fall for Dance at New York City Center

Bridgman|Packer Dance
Voyeur
Sheen Center

Nora Chipaumire
portrait of myself as my father
BAM Fisher

Antony Hamilton
Meeting
La MaMa and Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

Jessica Lang
Thousand Yard Stare
The Joyce Theater

Ligia Lewis
minor matter
American Realness at Abrons Art Center

Taylor Mac
A 24-Decade History of Popular Music
St. Ann’s Warehouse/Pomegranate Arts
  
Crystal Pite
The Statement
Performed by Nederlands Dans Theater
New York City Center

Sébastien Ramirez and Honji Wang
Monchichi
BAM Fisher

Abdel Salaam
Healing Sevens
Featuring Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theatre, Ill Style & Peace Productions, and Dyane Harvey Salaam
DanceAfrica at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

Adrienne Truscott
THIS
New York Live Arts

Outstanding Revived Work:

Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd 
Conceived by Ishmael Houston-Jones. Co-directed by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Miguel Gutierrez. John Bernd’s music compositions arranged and re-mixed by Nick Hallett. Consultation by Jennifer Monson.
Danspace Project Platform 2016: Lost and Found

About Kazuo Ohno
By Takao Kawaguchi
Japan Society

Stephen Petronio Company
For Trio A (1966), Chair Pillow (1969), and Diagonal (1963) by Yvonne Rainer; Goldberg Variations (1986) by Steve Paxton; The Courtesan and the Crone (1999) by Anna Halprin
The Joyce Theater

Outstanding Performer:

Yeman Brown
In Citizen by Reggie Wilson
BAM Harvey

PeiJu Chien-Pott
In Virginie Mécène’s reimagining of Martha Graham’s 1933 solo, Ekstasis
The Joyce Theater

Sean Donovan
For his body of work with The Builders Association, Faye Driscoll, Witness Relocation, Jennie MaryTai Liu, and Jane Comfort

Jonathan Gonzalez
In minor matter by Ligia Lewis
American Realness at Abrons Art Center

Julie McMillan
In KO-BU by Benjamin Kimitch
Danspace Project

Cast of Riff this, Riff that
By Ephrat Asherie Dance
River to River Festival, Atrium Plaza

Anna Schön
In Citizen by Reggie Wilson
BAM Harvey

Nicholas Sciscione
In excerpts from Steve Paxton’s Goldberg Variations
Presented by the Stephen Petronio Company
The Joyce Theater

Ensemble of the skeleton architecture, or future of our worlds: Maria Bauman, Sidra Bell, Davalois Fearon, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Melanie Greene, Kayla Hamilton, Jasmine Hearn, Marguerite Hemmings, Nia Love, Paloma McGregor, Sydnie L. Mosley, Rakiya Orange, Grace Osborne, Leslie Parker, Angie Pittman, Samantha Speis, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Ni’Ja Whitson, and others*
Curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Danspace Project Platform 2016: Lost and Found
*Edisa Weeks and Tara Aisha Willis also appeared in the cast, but are ineligible to vote on or receive awards as current Bessie Awards Committee members.

Daaimah Taalib-Din
In Eclipse: Visions of the Crescent and the Cross by Abdel Salaam
Aaron Davis Hall

Diana Vishneva
For Sustained Achievement with American Ballet Theatre

Cast of we free: DJ BLKWYNTR, Arielle Rosales, and Solo Woods, as well as Courtney Cook, Marguerite Hemmings, Jessica Phoenix and Italy Welton
By Marguerite Hemmings
Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

Outstanding Emerging Choreographer (* indicates award recipient):

Lela Aisha Jones

Niall Jones

Will Rawls*

Katarzyna Skarpetowska

Outstanding Music Composition/Sound Design:

ICTUS ensemble/ROSAS
For Vortex Temporum
By Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker
BAM Next Wave Festival, Howard Gilman Opera House

Chris Kuklis and Will Rawls
For The Planet-Eaters: Seconds
By Will Rawls
River to River Festival, National Museum of the American Indian

Ryan MacDonald
For The End of Men, Again
By Vanessa Anspaugh
Danspace Project

Alisdair Macindoe
For Meeting
By Antony Hamilton
La MaMa and Performance Space 122, COIL 2017

Outstanding Visual Design (costume, set, light, projection, or overall visual design):

Nora Chipaumire
For Set Design of portrait of myself as my father
By Nora Chipaumire
BAM Fisher

Taylor Mac (creator), Niegel Smith (director), Machine Dazzle (costume), Mimi Lien (set), John Torres (lights), Eric Avery (puppetry), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (choreography)
For A 24-Decade History of Popular Music
By Taylor Mac
St. Ann’s Warehouse/Pomegranate Arts

Paulina Olowska
For Costume Design of Slavic Goddesses–A Wreath of Ceremonies
By Paulina Olowska
The Kitchen

Mark Ryden (set and costume) and Brad Fields (lighting)
For Visual Design of Whipped Cream
By Alexei Ratmansky
Performed by American Ballet Theatre

Metropolitan Opera House

The Bessie Awards will be presented on Monday, October 9, 2017, at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.  Tickets go on sale on August 1, 2017.

For more information about the Bessie Awards, go to: www.bessies.org

COIL 2017 @ La MaMa

Once again, La MaMa is pleased to be co-presenting several of the 2017 COIL shows with Performance Space 122 at La MaMa.  The following are the 2017 COIL productions that will be at The Ellen Stewart Theatre and The Downstairs @ La MaMa.

Tickets are now on sale for these shows to La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club members, and for all COIL shows for COIL PASS HOLDERS.

Tickets will go on sale to everyone on November 16, 2016.

MEETING

Antony Hamilton and Alisdair Macindoe (Australia)

Dance | US Premiere

Co-presented with Performance Space 122

La MaMa, Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street in Manhattan
Jan 4 & 6 at 9pm, Jan 7 at 1pm and 4pm, Jan 7 at 5pm
60 minutes
$20

“MEETING is a quietly rich encounter between man, machine, motion and sound that rewards your attention with mesmeric human feats and meditative sonic patterns.” - Ian Abbott, Writing about Dance

Two performers share space with 64 robotic instruments. A relentless stream of activity unfolds, where the bodies enter states of heightened physical and mental agency, with all actions carried by the meditative pulse of the machine beat. MEETING reveals a fascination with the articulation of the body and mind in motion. A choreographic study stripped to the bare essentials, the work pairs Hamilton’s compulsive choreography and unique physical grammar with Macindoe’s obsessive machine-making practice. MEETING composes the body, space and robots into a riveting choreographic soundscape flooding your eyes and ears with technical mastery at its finest.

Antony Hamilton is an independent choreographer. His award winning creations involve a sophisticated melding of movement, sound and visual design. His major works include the seminal Black Project 1 (2012), for which he won the prestigious Helpmann Award, critically acclaimed MEETING (2015) and NYX, a commission for the 2015 Melbourne Festival. He has created numerous national and international commissions including for The Lyon Opera Ballet (Black Project 3) and most recently for Skanes Dansteater (Sentinel). Antony was the inaugural recipient of the Russell Page Fellowship in 2004, Tanja Liedtke Fellowship in 2009, Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship in 2012, and Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship in 2014. He was guest dance curator at The National Gallery of Victoria in 2013-14, honorary Resident Director at Lucy Guerin Inc. in 2014 and inaugural Resident Artist at Arts House in 2015. He is currently a resident artist with Canada’s Dancemakers. In 2008 Antony formed Antony Hamilton Projects to create contemporary dance work informed by an interest in multi-disciplinary practices. Combining experimental movement, visual, sound and video art, his original and unpredictable choreographic voice is a driving catalyst for bold experimentation. www.antonyhamiltonprojects.com

Alisdair Macindoe is a New York based Australian dancer, choreographer and sound artist who trained in dance at the Victorian College of the Arts. He has performed with Lucy Guerin Inc, Chunky Move, Antony Hamilton Projects, Stephanie Lake Company, and Leigh Warren and Dancers. Other performance highlights include his own works, Bromance (2010), 525600LOVE (2009), and Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain (2008). Alisdair was the recipient of the 2013 Helpmann award for best male dancer in a dance or physical theater work for Stephanie Lake’s DUAL, the recipient of the 2012 Green Room's best male dancer award for his year’s work, and was nominated for the 2008 and 2013 Green Room award for best male dancer. Alisdair is a self-taught sound designer, composer, and instrument builder and has created sound design for some of Australia’s leading dance companies and choreographers. He has won 3 consecutive Green Room Awards for Dance Composition for Black Project 2 (Antony Hamilton, 2014), Princess (Benjamin Hancock, 2015) and MEETING (Antony Hamilton, 2016).

Real Magic
Forced Entertainment (UK)
Theater | US Premiere
Commissioned by and Co-presented with Performance Space 122

La MaMa, Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street in Manhattan

Jan 5 at 6pm, Jan 6 at 3pm, Jan 7 at 9pm, Jan 8 at 12pm
80 minutes
$20

“Beckett meets trash TV” – Sascha Westphal, Nachtkritik (DE)

Caught in a world of second-chances and second-guesses, variations and changes, distortions and transformations, Real Magic takes you on a hallucinatory journey, creating a compelling performance about optimism, individual agency and the desire for change. In Real Magic, Forced Entertainment create a world of absurd disconnection, struggle and comical repetition. To the sound of looped applause and canned laughter, a group of performers take part in an impossible illusion – part mind-reading feat, part cabaret act, part chaotic game show – in which they are endlessly replaying the moment of defeat and the moment of hope.

Forced Entertainment are a group of 6 artists who have been making performance since 1984 – questioning, pushing and breaking theatre to see what can be built from the wreckage. Based in Sheffield, UK, their work has been seen all over the world and was recently honored with the 2016 International Ibsen Award. Known for being a fearless innovator of theatrical form, Artistic Director Tim Etchells is the current recipient of the Spalding Gray Award from the commissioning consortium of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; Performance Space 122 in New York; On the Boards in Seattle; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Custodians of Beauty
Pavel Zuštiak / Palissimo (NYC)
Dance, Performance
Co-presented with Performance Space 122
La MaMa, The Downstairs, 66 East 4th Street in Manhattan
Jan 5 at 8pm, Jan 6 at 5pm, Jan 7 at 5:30pm, Jan 8 at 2pm
85 minutes
$20

“Plunges headlong into questions about what is ‘beautiful’ by interrogating sources like Plato, Pope Benedict XVI, and of course, the dancing body.” – Time Out New York

For decades in the humanities, various arguments have been put forward against beauty. Where do we find beauty today and does it need our defense? Bessie Award–winning choreographer/director Pavel Zuštiak and his Palissimo Company examine beauty and its intrinsic relationship with art through minimalist movement, sensuous abstraction and potent stage imagery. Drawn from a dark Eastern European dance-theater aesthetic, this richly postmodern dance/live music event casts the human body as a sculptural form, an emotional trigger, or a political symbol. In an age when humanity, disenchanted with itself, seems to have rejected the necessity of beauty, Custodians of Beauty asks us to look again, beyond the surface, to see differently.

Pavel Zuštiak is a NYC-based director, choreographer and performer, born in the communist Czechoslovakia and trained at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. His works for stage and public spaces merge the abstract aspects of dance with nonlinear qualities of “theatre of images” into multidisciplinary pieces rich in evocative imagery and piercing emotional resonance. Zuštiak is the 2015 Bessie Juried Award winner for his “poetic layering of movement and visual imagery, conceiving the stage space as a decentralized world in which the corporeal body is the focus and canvas for a wide range of human expression,” a 2015-17 Princeton Arts Fellow, the recipient of 2013 LMCC President's Award for Excellence in Artistic Practice and 2012 NEFA/NDP Production and Residency Grants, 2010 Guggenheim Fellow and 2014, 2009, and 2007 Princess Grace Awards Winner. His 5-hour trilogy The Painted Bird received a 2013 Bessie Award nomination for Outstanding Production.

Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster

Nicola Gunn (Australia)

Theater, Dance | US Premiere
Co-presented with Performance Space 122

La MaMa, Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street in Manhattan
Jan 11 & 12 at 8:30pm, Jan 13 at 7:30pm, Jan 14 at 5pm
70 minutes
$20

“Gunn’s text is intricate and often brilliant, full of unpredictable digressions and curious factoids. It’s the verbal equivalent of skimming stones over water.” - Cameron Woodhead, The Age (AU)
Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster is the story of a man, a woman and a duck. The work is disarmingly simple – exploring in depth the moral conundrum of what one should do if one comes across a person throwing rocks at a sitting duck – but gradually becomes mind-bendingly complex.  Accompanying the text is a rhythmic electronic soundscape and intense physical choreography shifting from the unnecessary and incongruous to the comic and strangely affecting. Gunn brings into question your own intervention ethics with a confrontational muse on peace and conflict, moral relativism, and the very function of art.

Nicola Gunn is a Melbourne-based performer, writer, director and dramaturge. Since 2002, she has been making works that blend performance, art and anthropology to explore the fragility of the human condition with subversive humor. Her artistic practice is committed to institutional critique, social engagement and generating works that activate the public sphere by questioning old ways of being or proposing new ones. She uses performance to reflect critically on its place in theatres, to examine power relations in existing organizations and to consider the relevance and social function of art itself. The starting process is often a written text or idea imagined responding to a self-generated impulse to tell a story or explore a form. She draws mainly from her experience to create autobiographical fiction.  Nicola’s work has been presented widely in Australia and has toured to Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United States. 

See the full COIL line-up, including shows outside La MaMa go to: ps122.org/coil