Before they became household names, Martha Graham, José Limón and Alvin Ailey, among others, found a home at the 92nd Street Y, a power player in New York City’s cultural landscape. Today, a recent initiative born in pandemic, the dance incubator known as the Future Dance Festival, just wrapped its fourth iteration at 92NY with two days of live dance and an hour of short dance films.
I have mixed feelings about the proliferation of dance on film, mainly dismay at being tethered to devices. That said, there were some works of blazing ingenuity on offer. Like The Bridge, in which director Marcos Lutyens takes the viewer on a hypnotic journey through the portal of his eyes. We seem to dive right through his iris onto a gaily painted bridge peopled by dancers, their capers choreographed by Mamie Green of LA-based Volta Collective. Singaporean Juilliard grad Joan Dwiartanto produced an eight-minute report on the demise of the aristocracy. Crying On The Island They Own, a party of petulant nepo babies, glammed up to dine outdoors, start throwing china and cutlery at each other. They embroil a distrustful waiter in their brutish antics, filmed and edited in a dreamy style that counterpoints the disturbing narrative.
Two other short films capitalize on a distinctive location as the backdrop for artful storytelling: in the moody At First Sight Kate Harpootlian drags us into a parallel dimension in which two lovers find momentary respite from a tragic accident. We know something bad is going to happen from the early shot of a cruel barn that looms forbiddingly behind dancer Chantelle Good, its small windows like eyes and sliding doors like a ravenous maw.
Separately, an illusive encounter in the traditional Taiwanese JIA-MEI Barber Shop (owned by choreographer Tsai-Hsi Hung’s mother) is handsomely captured by dp’s Jay Cheng and Charles Liu. A Bach Brandenburg concerto provides a caffeinated soundtrack for the tender sparring between the barber (Hung) and her customer (Sam Yang) spiked with martial arts, street, voguing and line dance, the pair hilariously maintaining deadpan faces throughout. In the most sensuous moment of the Festival, the camera traces the dancers’ hands as they caress towels hanging on a drying rack.
We are never alone, suggests Hong Kong choreographer Blue Ka Wing in Peak Hour in the House. She was not referring to the crowded living conditions in her home city, but to our intrusive thoughts which appear in the film as a heaving, writhing ensemble of nine dancers in their undies; they jam themselves into our hapless leading lady’s kitchen cabinets, hoist her mattress into the air while she sleeps, and party in her bathroom. Highly saturated colors, inventive framing, and a magnificent costume that rivals Lady Gaga’s meat dress, trace a fine line between comedy and horror.
Without the sophisticated tools of cinema, the artists who delivered Future Dance live had only bodies and music to work with. Sometimes those bodies were imbued with the weight of history, as in Seyong Kim’s The Moon Reflected in East Sea – a solo for a female dancer that alludes to a statue erected in Korea for the women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military in World War II. As if wading in water, the dancer cautiously pulled up her voluminous skirt, her deliberate steps launching into bolder movement. Tiffany Mangulabnan danced with a muted fierceness that conveyed a hard-fought serenity.
Sometimes bodies seemed more like forces of nature: Emily Aslin made an intriguing duet (Dint) for herself and Maya Lam, full of fluid push-pull partnering and curling around each other’s bodies. Against a lush, modern score with sounds of the ocean and lots of cellos, their grappling evoked the destructive power of weather. To the otherworldly vocalizing of Julee Cruise in “Mysteries of Love,” Omri Drumlevich’s elegantly twitchy duet (Far) for himself and Zina Zinchenko seemed to strain against the limitations of the human body, to make sense of the deeply human need for intimacy. Under the influence of Clara Rockmore’s recording of Saint-Saëns’ The Swan on the theremin, Julian Sanchez (Monologue) adopted a distinctly creaturely vocabulary which he drew from intermittently while pacing the floor, as if he were trying to solve a geometry problem while also trying to be a swan.
Watching young choreographers show us what they’ve got in this bare-bones setting was a reminder of the precarity of the world, of the fragility of this infrastructure underpinned by a handful of generous institutions and individuals who believe in the future of ephemeral things like dance, while hellfire rains down on the arts and civil society. Cristina Camacho and a crew of nine brought some hellfire of their own in Good Grief, fueled by the mordant truth-telling of Gorillaz and Kendrick Lamar. Cutting angular street moves told of a power struggle within the clan but the smouldering Zoe Anderson kept anarchy at bay. Ekko Greenbaum warned that behind us, there may be Fire, maneuvering her trio of dancers into spatial patterns reminiscent of the abstract work of Lucinda Childs but with a fine emotional resolution. And choreographer Ja’Moon reminded us, in a sculpturally expressive solo danced by Quaba Ernest, that I Will Be Better Than OK. Ernest mapped the strange new terrain of composer Nana Sinephro’s ambient strings, plucking invisible bounty from the ground and the air around him as a mercurial saxophone buzzed about. A model of calm, vigilance and control.
