BARYSHNIKOV ARTS JOURNAL
denisa musilova
BAC Story by Jacquelyn Claire
“I think they’re creepy,” said Vivienne Pankratova (aged 11), “I never played with Barbies – I had a baby doll called Sestra (sister in Russian) and a soft toy dog.” She’s standing in her David Bowie T-shirt, contemplating my question, “What do you think is the collective noun for Barbies?” She answered immediately, “an army of Barbie.”
binbinFactory
BAC Story by Nicholas Visseli
The Dance
Two moving as one.Connection through each other.The dance has begun.
It is difficult to express the wonder and indescribable joy one experiences when sitting in on new work that is being created by the two artists who comprise binbinFactory: Satoshi Haga and Rie Fukuzawa. At first glance, their rehearsal process appears paradoxical, combining extreme focus, repetitive movement and discipline with improvisation and wild abandon. But ultimately, as their collaboration of ideas and forms begin to settle and phrases of movement start to emerge, a deeper, richer swirl of emotion and meaning reveals itself to us. It is almost as if the dance evolves accidentally on purpose, or – more precisely – it arrives effortlessly through the artists all on its own.
daniel evan kersh
BAC Story by Elena Hecht
It starts in movement, in struggle. Weighted, the forces pull, downward, backward, into the ground, tugging, they groan, inaudibly they strain, pulling. JM grapples, he is contained, he attempts to break free.
Quietly.
Zbigniew Bzymek + Kuba Falk
BAC Story by Domenick Ammirati
Zbigniew Bzymek and Kuba Falk’s Gombrowicz: Interhuman + Interform starts with a critique of the inflexibility of science and ends with an attack on the pomposity of humanism. Its ratty intelligence and roving quality is fitting for the peripatetic, scathing intellect of Witold Gombrowicz, whose definition of being a person seems to have been to recognize that one is absurd.
Claude Johnson
BAC Story by Elanor Bock
It was 3pm in late March. Inside a window-wrapped dance studio at Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), a performance was about to begin. Except for faint slivers of light peeking through drawn shades, and the glow from an amorphous pile of white fabric placed in the middle of the space, the studio was dark. As people found their seats, a piano player in the corner played a soft duet with a recorded track—the sound bouncing off the high ceilings.
Degenerate Art Ensemble
BAC Story by Shin Yu Pai
I wrote the poem “Vernix” in response to Degenerate Art Ensemble’s (DAE) work-in-progress Anima Mundi, which they developed in part while in residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center. I’d observed the idea of reincarnation and intergenerational memory as a concern in DAE’s earlier work, including most recently their performance Skeleton Flower. With Anima Mundi, I felt the centering of somatic memories around the birth experience coming forward in this performance.
Welcome to Campfire
BAC Story by Leah Ableson
Tony Bordonaro and Ingrid Kapteyn have always made work by themselves, serving as both the sole choreographers and performers of their sci-fi danceplays, crafted together under the name Welcome to Campfire. Their collaborations teem with an intimacy forged only through a deep knowing of each other, and the organic nature of choreographing for oneself. Since the beginning, their bodies have been the only keepers of their stories.
Until now.
monica bill barnes + Company
BAC Story by Robbie Saenz de Viteri
We started the same way every day, at the barre. Not for stretches, not for squats, not for rond de jambes, and not to offend, but that's not who we are. The ballet barre is where we hung our coats, stared out the window, and caught up on one of the things that took up some constant corner of our minds every day in the Rudolf Nureyev studio at the Baryshnikov Arts Center–the progress of the water towers.