The most vivid element of anthropologist Mick Taussig’s multi-media happening Berlin Sun Theater, performed at the Whitney Museum last month, were the dances by Kyle Bukhari. Taussig’s goal was "the re-enchantment of nature in the age of global meltdown.“ Specifically, he examined ways our diminished experience of the sun has ruptured elemental physical and mythological connections. The piece unfolded around a personal, poetic text that Taussig read out loud on stage. Enriching the narrative were musical passages, film clips, project images from Taussig’s notebooks, and Bukhari’s dances. Cutting through the shadowy, ground-floor atrium of the Museum, Bukhari enacted routes, rotations and repetitions that recalled planetary motion. At certain moments, moments explosive with feeling, the dancer illustrated specific details from Taussig’s stories. He became, fleetingly, a tree wrestling upwards from the ground, a cloud of fireflies interrupting the darkness, and, in a big bubble-headed mask, the moon.

I had always thought that dance was inevitably tied to human stories because of its dependence on the body, that it was, essentially, about a person moving through the world. But Bukhari’s remarkable transformations showed otherwise. The ease with which he made himself a moon, spooking and enchanting audience members as he emerged among them, got at the majesty of that celestial body. It made clear that a dancer isn’t limited to human actions – he can be anything he imagines.

March 25, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The funniest dance I’ve ever seen has got to be the one in Bring it On when former high school cheerleader-princess Campbell performs as the basketball team mascot – a leprechaun – at the inner city high school she’s been abruptly transferred to. She does so winningly, shaking her rump around in a furry green jacket, high-waisted plaid trousers, and a gigantic grinning leprechaun mask. The dance is great fun because you can, right through the costume, sense the good will of the character (and also the actress, Taylor Lauderman), and because it begins to reclaim the tiresome ethnic stereotype of the leprechaun.

In our sophisticated, post-racial age, there are still a lot of these little green fellows running around. There’s the one on the Lucky Charms box, the ones that preside over the Notre Dame sports teams and the Boston Celtics, and the whole lot of them that comes out of hiding just before St. Patrick’s Day. Perhaps, because people of Irish descent don’t see to be too vocal about it, it’s all good fun. But the little boxing leprechaun that the law firm Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald (F&F) use in their logo is something particularly awful. It’s meant to suggest that F&F lawyers are, like all Irish people, pugnacious and relentless. One reason it bothers me so much is because it rubs up against my own just-as-dumb belief that Irish people are dreamy and literary. F&F are a major New York City subway car advertiser, so on a slow, crowded, commute, I often end up face to face with one of their ads, tinted green and adorned with leprechauns. Who would want to retain a lawyer from a firm with a mascot, especially one like this?

October 08, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At a discussion before the premiere of two new works by Jodi Melnick, fellow dancer and choreographer Kyle Bukhari proposed that Melnick’s dance was a form “between writing and speaking,” which blew my mind and also made perfect sense. The two dances she presented, Solo, Delux Version (choreographed in collaboration with Trisha Brown) and One of Sixty-five Thousand Gestures, reflect her unique style, which some of her colleagues there characterized, with admiration, as one that combines precision and force. These qualities, when coupled with her lithe, almost spectral physicality, make her a remarkable presence.

The postures Melnick captures have the specificity of letters in an alphabet, and her movements have the mesmeric, fluttering quality of an old-fashioned train station destination board. But I can’t help understanding these two dances, and dance in general, as a form of theater, and the movements of the body as drama. The image I’ll take from me is one from early in Gestures, when Melnick, dressed in khaki cargo pants and a silver foil hoodie, lies on the stage and drags herself across it, from front to back, lit by acid-yellow footlights. I imagine she’s somewhere very remote – on the cratered surface of the moon or deep in the desert. There’s heroism in each inch she creeps forward and fear in the solitude. Suddenly Melnick stops, lifts her torso off the ground and reaches far forward with one arm, for something or someone she will never reach. At this moment the dance doesn’t seem like a form of language but like something wilder and greater, something that can’t be fit into language. If Melnick’s choreography lies between writing and speech, her performance exceeds them.

March 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The dancers at Das Tanztheater Wuppertal, unlike those in many ballet companies, are crazily diverse in age, height, shape and color. We meet each one close-up in Pina, the acclaimed documentary about the late choreographer Pina Bausch and her work at Tanztheater. The dancers have surprisingly expressive, eccentric faces; they reminded me of characters in Maira Kalman’s drawings. My favorites were Andre Berezin, a tall Russian who takes stoic, heroic male roles, and Ditta Miranda Jasjfi, a young woman with a tempestuous, kinetic energy. The dancers perform on stage at the Tanztheater, and also at locations (on a traffic island, inside a tram, along the edge of a cliff) in and around Wuppertal. These outdoor segments dispel pretension and bring a special poignancy to the choreography, much of which mimics and elaborates gestures from daily life (walking, embracing, kissing).

But the best part of the movie was seeing Bausch herself dance a part in Cafe Muller, one of her best known works from 1978. (It was also performed, with Bausch dancing the same part, in the opening of Pedro Almodovar’s film Talk to Her.) In a white gown that looks like it’s been lifted from Martha Graham’s closet, and with her long hair loose, Bausch walks into walls, hurls herself across the stage, and turns her arms in huge, looping gestures. Bausch’s body is fine and sinewy, and her movements conjure anguish. Contorted, roiling, she offers a classical image of grief that doesn’t need to be tarted up with 3D.

February 24, 2012 by Nalina Moses