Chatham, NY-Nigeria choreographer Qudus Onikeku said on Wednesday that “there is nothing outside.” He didn’t mention his surroundings: PS21 open-air theaterLocated in the middle of 100 acres of orchards, meadows and woodlands in this Hudson Valley town. The inner / outer division he meant was His company, QDance, And the masses who came to see them. “You are a show,” he said.
On Friday and Saturday, QDance will announce the US premiere of “Re: INCARNATION” at PS21, beginning the season with other international theater companies and celebrities like Paul Taylor Dance Company and Mark Morris Dance Group. Summer programming, featuring modern chamber operas, apocalyptic scarecrows, human-sized mole parades, and participatory installations made of strings, makes the PS21 a high-end, often avant-garde outpost in the countryside. It shows that it has become.
But what QDance was doing on Wednesday was even more representative of what makes the PS21 stand out. Called the “Middle Ground,” this event was part of the Pathways series aimed at attracting the local community.
The audience was invited to the circulant with the performers on stage, followed by an open discussion interrupted by the improvisational dance of company members. Waiting for the people to speak, Onikek made them sit in awkward silence. Over time, as the guitar and muted trumpet intensified with swells and drums, he shared the meaning of “us” and his thoughts on accomplices to injustice for everyone. “I’m not your entertainment,” he said in a challenging and engaging tone at the same time, like the entire event.
Balancing or combining these two qualities was a daunting task that set himself up when Elena Syanko became the artistic and executive of PS21. Director, 2019. Much of the excitement for her: new music, experimental dance, genre-blurring performances, she said, “very poorly sold.” “It may confuse or upset you,” she added. “It’s not your typical bourgeois experience at the Berkshire Summer Theater.” Still, she wants to attract the locals of Chatham from all backgrounds.
Founded and largely funded by local philanthropist and conservationist Judy Grunberg, the facility is a tent from 2006 to 2018 until the completion of a state-of-the-art indoor and outdoor theater. We had a show at. The following year, Grunberg hired Siyanko. Two months after Siyanko started working, Grunberg died of cancer.
“What do we do?” Syanko remembered thinking. PS21 was debt-free, but its maintenance costs rose significantly and there wasn’t much donor base. With experience in funding at Bard College and programming and audience development at the Clark Art Institute, Siyanko came up with a way to keep what Grunberg had built. Then a pandemic occurred.
“Interestingly, the pandemic helped us,” she said. With ample grounds and a flexible outdoor theater, PS21 was able to perform as early as July 2020 (for a small audience). “The more dogs we saw, the more friendly the owners were,” said Syanko.
And much of what Siyanko wanted to present was “very niche” in her words, so limiting the size of the audience wasn’t too handicap. Pandemics have also accelerated the trend. Audiences who were already attracted to this kind of work, and the artists who made it, were moving to the area. (Chatam is a 20-minute drive from the towns of Hudson and Catskill.) The number of donors has increased and we have made more donations. Siyanko said the budget for PS21 increased by about 50% and became a significant surplus in 2021.
This may sound like cultural gentrification, but Siyanko is also committed to low ticket prices and unmanageable accessibility. In particular, the Pathways event is designed as a gateway to the PS21 campus and its more adventurous programming.
Pathways began in 2020 with unconventional dance classes and the alarm will sound of an indoor orchestra playing John Luther Adams’ “10,000 Birds” scattered throughout the premises. “Children loved it,” Siyanko said. This was also true for Montreal acrobats devouring trees in the nearby Clerin Park in 2021.Others took local students to PS21, rehearsing and playing with an experimental flute player in one example. Claire ChaseAnd to join another theater camp Worcester Group..
Onikek is perfect for the Pathways project (up to the theater camp trust exercises that pushed into the “middle ground”. In a previous interview with the “middle ground”, he was drawn to contemporary dance when he grew up in Nigeria. I explained how to do it. In “Come on your own ideas” mode, while dancing in France, go to the Ecole National Superior de Arts du Cirque for a contemporary circus reminiscent of the entire traditional theater of Jorba. I learned.
From the beginning of his career, he modeled Nigerian musician Fela Kuti as a raising artist. In a series of solos, Oniike explored philosophical ideas: the isolation of asylum, the difference between history and the past, the body as a reservoir of generational memories. He was successful in Europe and appeared at the famous Avignon Theater Festival when he was still in his twenties, but “I was stunned by the dictatorship of the art market,” he said.
“I was interested in being more useful in society,” he said. So he returned to Nigeria and founded Q Dance in Lagos. He was fascinated by the youth creativity of Instagram and TikTok, some of which he hired. With the goal of “future rehearsals,” they said they focused more on practice than on products. Artmaking, community engagement and talent development all bleeded together.
Inspired by the Yoruba travel theater of the 1960s, QDance began creating works based on Yoruba philosophy and aesthetics and presenting them at the tour circuit. “I left the world of art not because I didn’t agree at all, but because I thought I could do more,” Onikek said.
“Re: INCARNATION” grew partially from his observation that TikTok’s young Africans used traditional African aesthetics without their direct knowledge. “Reincarnation must be responsible for the way the body remembers,” he said.
This work makes use of Yoruba’s idea of cyclical time and the interpenetration of living, dead, and unborn. He devised the work in three parts: birth, death, and rebirth, and he said that death caused him the most problems. That is, until one of his dancers, Love Divine (also known as Picture Kodak), suddenly died of electric shock.
“It was in the middle of a pandemic, so we couldn’t even get out to mourn,” he said. When the group began rehearsing again, he decided to leave the role of God in his work as absent or invisible. “When we tour, we carry her her with us,” he said. “We feel her presence every night.”
The Chatham audience may or may not feel its presence. “As Covid showed us, the world is one,” Onikek said. “What I do here affects somewhere else. We live in the same world, but we look at it from different angles. My role as an artist is It’s not about entertaining you, it’s about sharing that way of seeing and feeling the world. That’s the point of coming here from Lagos. “
On Wednesday, the share expanded to a mini-lecture on his research as a resident at the University of Florida. This is a proposal to use artificial intelligence to solve the problem of protecting the intellectual property of dancers.
“I have to assume that my audience is smart,” said Oniike, and judging from the questions and comments, the PS21 audience seemed to appreciate that assumption.