Highlights: American Realness January 10-20, 2013 (NYC)

Over the past three years American Realness has established itself as “a stronghold of forward-thinking, category-defying performance”. (The New York Times). tbspMGMT is thrilled to announce that the 2013 edition of this “spunky, smart” program will return to the Abrons Arts Center for its fourth consecutive year January 10-20, 2013 (The New York Times).

The 2013 program features New York Premieres from BodyCartography Project with Zeena Parkins (co-presented with PS 122’s COIL Festival), Frankfurt based American dancer/choreographer Tony Rizzi, and New York’s own Jeanine Durning. In addition AR welcomes encore engagements from Trajal Harrell, Maria Hassabi, Keith Hennessy, Jack Ferver and Faye Driscoll.

AR 2013 takes a closer look at the immediate relationship between music and dance with a series of collaborative presentations from choreographers and musicians/composers. Performances will include AR Favorite Miguel Gutierrez with the ecstatic sounds of Mind Over Mirrors aka Jaime Fennelly and a collaboration between musicians Chris Cochrane and Jassem Hindi with dancer/choreographers Jen Rosenblit and Enrico D. Wey made specially for the festival.

contemporaryperformance.com’s Highlights are below

TRAJAL HARRELL
Antigone Sr. / Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (L)
ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE
466 Grand Street. NYC

Image from an earlier section called Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M) also known as (M)imosa

Thursday, January 10, 8:30PM
Friday, January 11, 8:30PM
Saturday, January 12, 8:30PM
Sunday, January 13, 8:30PM 

Run time: 2 hours 15 minutes

Tickets $20 / AbronsArtsCenter.org

Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church comes in fives sizes:Extra Small (XS) to Extra Large (XL). Following the sublime (S), the rare beauty of (XS), and the spectacular (M)imosa, Antigone Sr./(L) presents an all-male contemporary dance version of Sophocles’s Greek tragic drama, Antigone. All five sizes share the proposition: What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the Voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmodernists at Judson Church? Rather than illustrating a historical fiction, these new works transplant this proposition into a contemporary context. What we experience was neither possible at The Balls nor at Judson, but, here and now, a third possibility is created.

TONY RIZZI 
An Attempt to fail at groundbreaking theater by Pina Arcade Smith 
NEW YORK PREMIERE
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street

Photo by Thomas Brucher

Friday, January 18, 8:30PM
Saturday, January 19, 5:30PM
Sunday, January 20, 5:30PM 

Run time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Tickets $20 / AbronsArtsCenter.org

An Attempt to Fail at Groundbreaking Theater finds its main protagonists from pop culture and the dance world and places them in the underground New York performance art scene of the 80s. Performer Tony Rizzi takes on the triple roles of German dance icon Pina Bausch, performance art legend Penny Arcade and queer filmmaker Jack Smith, to take the audience on a roller coaster ride of catholic nuns, wisdom through dance, pornographic sex and our success-obsessed world. The work teeters on the brink of complete failure but with the help of the public, lights will work, costumes will be changed, texts understood and dance seen. Jack Smith said it best, “You have to be willing to be bad for 20 years in order to be great and even then, there is no guarantee.”

FAYE DRISCOLL 
You’re Me
ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE
466 Grand Street, NYC

Photo by Steven Schreiber

Friday, January 18, 7:00PM
Saturday, January 19, 9:00PM
Sunday, January 20, 4:00PM 

Run time: 1 hour 15 minutes

Tickets $20 / AbronsArtsCenter.org

Faye Driscoll’s You’re Me considers how we are constantly made-up and un-done by each other. In this evening-length duet Driscoll probes and obfuscates the inescapable nature of relationship as the contemporary, archetypal, fantastical and personal crash into each other, bending and warping in one shrug, quarrel, or reframing of a scene. Imbued with the adrenaline of potentially dire consequences, You’re Me is a moving portrait of the impossible struggle to unhinge the palindromic loop of self and other. With the constraint of just two performers on stage the whole time, Driscoll and performer Aaron Mattocks fight a sweaty, evocative, disturbing and deeply funny battle with the dualism they face; male/female, director/performer and performer/audience. They ask: What do you see when you see us on stage? How does our very desire to be more than we are transform us? How do our fantasies of ourselves and of each other create new possibilities for being, and yet give birth to friction, failure, and loss? You’re Me is a kind of tango with chaos and recurrence in which the performers attempt to simultaneously control and destroy the frame through which they are seen – all the while asking, “Am I getting it right?”

 See the full schedule on American Realness’s Website