Category: Dance

As the choreographer and dancer Wendy Osserman, 81, began to contort her body at a recent performance in Queens, her hands shook. Her fingers flapped back and forth. She threw one arm away from the other — tossing and releasing, flailing and returning — and hopped into one-leg kicks before sticking her tongue out and coiling it into a tunnel.

She was trying to shake something off, it seemed. But what?

Animals, according to somatic therapists, tremble and quiver to discharge stress. The shudder is a trauma response, a kind of biological palate cleanser that allows a return to a sense of normalcy after duress. Human bodies, on the other hand, tend to store up rage and grief and panic like a pressure cooker. As a dancer, Osserman lets her intuition guide her movements to release some of that pressure.

Osserman’s daughter, the video and performance artist Liz Magic Laser, has been fascinated by how the body expresses psychological distress. For centuries, medicine viewed shaking as a symptom of hysteria; spasms and fits as evidence of delirium. Today, shaking has become a therapy for a range of ailments, physical and mental.

Can you convulse your way to insanity? To spiritual restoration? In her exhibition “Convulsive States,” on view through Sunday at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Laser examines the shaking body as both a symptom of trauma and a possible antidote to it.

“I think it is probably my mom that has stimulated my interest in emotional expression” and its physical manifestation, Laser said. “And I have a really intense push-pull with that.”

The exhibition opens in a dimly lit hall of mirrors, where eight reflective “exorcise” monitors — a play on home fitness smart mirrors and on the quaking of spirit possession — present shaking practitioners, one of them Osserman, demonstrating therapeutic movement like gyrokinesis, qigong and holotropic breath work, with its quickening inhalations and exhalations.

In her video, Osserman — stomping, swaying and swiveling — teaches an improvisational practice known as Authentic Movement in which dancers, often with eyes closed, become attuned to thoughts, emotions and memories and follow the body’s instincts to move. Laser grew up observing it at home.

“She told me, ‘Mom, I was trying to grow up and you were crawling like an animal,’” Osserman, who used to host rehearsals in their Manhattan loft, said in a joint interview with Laser.

“It was horrendous to hit puberty and to have people, like, writhing on the ground in your living space,” Laser said, laughing.

One image sticks out in her memory: her mother fighting with her own foot, a motif Laser had Osserman include in her video to capture “struggling with another part of yourself as if it’s your counterpart that you’re in a relational angst with.”

Toward the end of the hall of mirrors, the sounds of breath and grunts from the shaking healers gradually fade into the cries of asylum patients. Viewers proceed from the hall to a den-like space with oblong bean bags for Part 2 of the exhibition: a 53-minute documentary created by Laser with the French journalist Laura Geisswiller.

The film, “Convulsive States,” which Laser describes as “an investigative report that goes off the rails and becomes hallucinatory,” features interviews with psychologists, neurologists, priests and dance therapists at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. It was there that the 19th-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot became famous for his research on hypnosis and hysteria, including weekly theatrical presentations of female patients twitching in fits to gawking audiences. (Charcot’s work influenced Freud, who spent six months studying at Salpêtrière.)

Laser became interested in Charcot not in a history or health class, but in a photography class — one that she was teaching. In 2008, she found a book with an image that would obsess her for years. The French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s “Invention of Hysteria” features pages of black-and-white photographs of young girls at Salpêtrière seizing and spasming. In a photograph that Charcot commissioned called “Beginning of the Attack: Cry,” a woman strapped to a bed convulses, her mouth agape. It stuck with Laser.

“It kept cropping up,” she said. “I couldn’t get away from it.”

She envisioned creating a lexicon of hysteria — “Convulsive States” reminds us that the word comes from the Greek for uterus — with her friend, the poet Ariana Reines, before landing on film as the best medium to do justice to the eerie, often disturbing archival footage of Salpêtrière and soundscapes of psychosomatic disorders and healers.

“They’re two very different visual languages, the news and a fitness training video,” Laser said of the two parts of her exhibition. “However, they both kind of have this faux claim to neutrality.”

The two-part format clicked for Gabriel Florenz, the founding artistic director of Pioneer Works, who curated the show and appreciated that it didn’t “fit into the art box exactly.”

“I really am into people who blur the idea of what being an artist is — and Liz really blurs those lines,” he said. “She’s a performer, she’s a choreographer, she’s an artist, she’s kind of an educator, she’s a researcher, she’s a journalist in this project.”

The documentary begins as a talking head-style news telecast, with the reporter and historian Virginie Girod at the helm, but it quickly pivots. Laser becomes the host — and then the subject: practicing tai chi; learning bodily configurations to regulate the nervous system (“You are in the cave, you’re a bear, you’re solid”); shuffling her feet and creating a tremor in her legs to learn how to role play the symptoms of a patient with Parkinson’s disease.

For the role play, she consulted with Dr. Emmanuel Flamand-Roze, a professor of neurology at Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital, who teaches medical students how to act out the symptoms of neurological conditions in a theatrical tournament called “The Move,” based on the TV singing competition show “The Voice.”

Using mime, his students learn to embody the suffering of patients with multiple sclerosis, dementia, seizures, aphasia and other disorders, a process that helps build long-term recall as well as empathy.

In an interview, Flamand-Roze said that Laser would “never forget” the symptoms of Parkinson’s after mirroring its physical expressions.

“It’s immersion,” he said. “You live it and you know it.”

Charcot used theater to teach neurology. “So in a way it’s a modern version,” Flamand-Roze said, adding, “but this time without the patient, only with the students and teachers.”

Laser’s mirrors are also a kind of theater, displaying how the mind manifests in the body in sometimes dance-like movements.

She directed her shaking practitioners to lean into uncomfortable experiences and then “patch them to a positive memory or a positive experience,” with improvisational movement.

As a teenager, Laser said she had “that classic rejection” of exploring the anguished mind, finding it “freaky,” she said, “Freaky deaky.”

“But not anymore,” her mother replied.

“Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.

When Chelsie Hill dances in her wheelchair, her face tells you everything. She is absorbed in the moment beyond the stage, in the emotions she’s conveying, in her power to hold the audience. Her wheelchair is an intrinsic part of her silhouette, one she manipulates with power.

Ms. Hill, 27, is the founder of the Rollettes, a dance team for women who use wheelchairs that formed in 2012. They perform all over the country and host an annual empowerment weekend in Los Angeles for women with disabilities called the Rollettes Experience. In late July, the event attracted 250 women and children from 14 countries to Sheraton Gateway Los Angeles Hotel for dance classes, showcases and seminars.

More than a decade after she started the Rollettes, Ms. Hill’s story has spread far beyond the group to include mentorship and education for anyone with a disability who is seeking community.

“She changed my life,” said Ali Stroker, the actress who made Broadway history in 2019 when she became the first performer who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony Award. One of Ms. Hill’s close friends, Ms. Stroker won the Tony, for best featured actress, for her role as Ado Annie in the Broadway revival of the musical “Oklahoma!”

Ms. Stroker, who was paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident when she was 2 years old, said that, growing up, she never had friends who also used chairs. Ms. Hill, she said, is changing lives by extending an invitation to wheelchair users that goes beyond dance.

“Because of her, so many young girls who are recently injured, their lives are changed,” Ms. Stroker said. “It’s more than dancing. You’re part of this sisterhood, this family. How she can bring people together is out of this world.”

Nearly 14 years ago, Ms. Hill was a 17-year-old champion dancer. But on a night in February 2010, her life changed in ways she could never have imagined when a serious car accident left her with severe spinal injuries and unable to move her lower body.

Ms. Hill has always felt compelled to share her story, framing it as a warning. As a teenager intent on becoming a professional dancer, she was haunted by the decisions made on the evening she stepped into the car with a drunken driver. She told her parents from a hospital bed a few weeks after the accident that she wanted to organize an event to discuss it with her classmates.

“I was passionate about having teenagers understand that someone could go from walking to not after making a wrong decision,” Ms. Hill said.

Growing up in Northern California’s Monterey County, Ms. Hill’s early life was defined by a sense of security and belonging that she said made her feel invincible. She began competing in dance competitions when she was 5.

“It’s hard to tell how good a 5-year-old is, but every year I would always win a trophy and make my family proud,” she said.

As a hands-on, physical learner, she found concentrating on academics more difficult. Dance, she said, was her world and priority.

As a freshman, she had a ready-made group of friends on her popular high school dance team, The Breaker Girls. “There’s just something about dance when you’re on a team, you’re just so in sync with people,” she said.

After Ms. Hill’s accident, it was with The Breaker Girls that she danced again for the first time. Her father, she said, gathered wheelchairs from around Northern California and brought them to a studio with her able-bodied dance team.

“They all sat in the chairs, and I got to perform with them,” she said.

Carina Bernier, one of Ms. Hill’s close friends who was also part of the Breaker Girls, recalls it being “really challenging to figure out but so cool and so fun.” Ms. Hill, she added, helped the group choreograph the routine that day.

But for a long time after the accident, Ms. Hill was in denial about her injury.

“I always thought that I would be that miracle that gets up and walks again, like you see in the movies,” she said.

Even so, in the years after the accident, she threw herself back into dance and eventually came to accept the realities of her injuries. She came to understand that she had gone from being someone who didn’t struggle to fit in to someone who now had a visible difference.

“I felt a sense of being so alone in a way that I never, never had before,” she said.

Becoming a person with a disability, and understanding herself as such, radicalized Ms. Hill, she said. Until her accident, as a white, middle-class, able-bodied young woman, she had not really understood or recognized the fights for equality and disability rights.

“A lot of people don’t realize what’s going on in the world until it affects you,” she said, adding, “It’s made me a stronger person. It’s made me a critical thinker. It’s made me an innovator. But it’s still hard, you know?”

Reclaiming her story as both a dancer and a wheelchair user meant finding others like her. The first step was when she joined the cast of “Push Girls,” an unscripted reality TV program about a group of ambitious women who use wheelchairs in 2011, a year after her accident. The show broadcast for two seasons, from 2012 to 2013, on the Sundance channel.

“They became my role models,” she said of the women on the show. “They became the girls who I’d be like, ‘How do I wear heels? How do I date? How do I get my chair in the car? How do I live a normal life as a young girl with a disability?’ They all taught me how to do that.”

In some corners, though, the show was criticized for its shallow treatment of people with disabilities. A critic for The New York Times wrote that the premiere episode lapsed into “You go, girl” mode, and that it used “a tone that subtly demeans.”

But on a personal level, for Ms. Hill, the show taught her to have a “thick skin at a very young age.” She loved every moment of it, she said — “even the hard times.”

In 2014, four years after her accident, Ms. Hill moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming a professional dancer.

“It was very, very hard breaking into the industry here in Los Angeles as a person with a disability,” she said. “People looked at me like I didn’t belong. Choreographers didn’t give me the time of day.”

But she kept going to classes, she said, “because I was like, ‘My passion for dance is so much stronger than what your opinion of me is.’”

As a performer, Ms. Hill makes extensive use of social media, recording her dancing, making concept videos and vlogging. Many of the women who are now Rollettes initially reached out to her after having seen her online, writing letters and recording videos of themselves dancing, too.

She has achieved what she set out to do, creating an unrepentantly girlie sisterhood that supports others. Through the Rollettes, she has made a tight circle of friends, performed around the country, and highlighted support spaces for women with disabilities while building her own. In January, she and her husband, Jason Bloomfield, a financial adviser, became new parents, naming their daughter, Jaelyn Jean Bloomfield.

Ms. Hill is aware that people view businesses like hers as charities, unable to acknowledge the Rollettes through the lens of success. “I have these older men that I have to convince that my company is worth something,” she said.

But still, she perseveres. She has ambitious plans for the future of the Rollettes and is keen to continue sharing her personal story. She has even been asked to be a consultant on a new dance drama film being developed by Disney, “Grace,” which is set to feature a dancer who becomes paralyzed.

The film could bring more visibility to the estimated 3.3 million wheelchair users in the United States, a community that often feels invisible. It almost sounds like yet another retelling of Ms. Hill’s story.

Kyle Marshall’s dance “Onyx” has a historical subject: the Black roots of rock ‘n’ roll. But don’t expect the work — one of the three New York premieres that make up his company’s debut program at the Joyce Theater this week — to be a straightforward parade of Black artists and their jukebox hits. Marshall’s approach is exploratory and questioning.

The work features music from the likes of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but it comes largely in fragments, as from a radio signal barely in range. We first hear bits of James Brown (“The Payback,” nice choice), and then as part of that track plays like a radio fully tuned in, Marshall and his terrific dancers slip into some deliciously funky grooving. Not for long, though. Soon, the music cuts out, setting up a pattern of pleasure flashed and denied.

We hear static and the sound of trains. There’s a physical motif of hands quivering with the spirit. The charismatic dancer Nik Owens, wearing one long glove, samples dances like the Twist and the Mashed Potato before taking a Black Power stance. Then he seems to become Little Richard, whose voice we hear testifying about what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones took from him.

That’s about as direct as “Onyx” gets. Marshall rubs his fingers together in a “pay me” gesture, but that’s just an understated moment during a solo to fragments of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” that channels Michael Jackson as much as it does Elvis (who took that song from her). After thrashing to death metal, everyone collapses. But then they rise and the dance carries on, with too many more sections, culminating in a Tina Turner-like turn by Bree Breeden to “I Can’t Stand the Rain.”

The whole program seems to have history on its mind. “Alice,” a stand-alone piece for Breeden set to three spiritual compositions by Alice Coltrane, looks like a descendant of Alvin Ailey’s “Cry,” a classic one-woman work that also uses Coltrane’s music. “Alice” is an old-fashioned modern-dance solo, complete with penitent kneeling and diagonal walks into the light, but it’s a less dramatic affair than “Cry,” more gently self-accepting. Breeden is excellent in it, undulant and calmly strong, making blooming jumps land softly and melt into the floor.

“Ruin,” which opens the program, is weakest, showing the downsides of Marshall’s take-your-time approach. The dancers are attired (by Edo Tastic, the company’s creative director) as Greek statues with heavy eyeliner and mini hair buns. They move like Greek statues, too, on a stage littered with electronic equipment and urns.

The electronics and urns have something to do with a Dynamic Listening system, designed by Cal Fish, who controls it from in front of the stage. But the stage sounds that Fish loops and manipulates — the clapping, snapping and stepping of the dancers — are too rhythmically rudimentary. As in “Onyx,” the grooves keep being interrupted, like an avoidance of rhythm. Late in the dance, more contemporary looseness and attitude seep into the movement, and I imagined that the statues were waking up and acquiring color. This notion faded, though, as the crackling of fire became the white noise of rain.

“Onyx,” in its way, is also about ruin, or ruins. The static that interrupts the music is the sound of erasure. But “Onyx” is more hopeful and touching in its attitude toward the past. Some of its movement phrases look like those of Trisha Brown, in whose company Marshall danced. At the end, we hear the voice of Thornton reminding us that “old-timers” still have something to say, and the dancers look back respectfully at an empty patch of light. As they exit, Breeden’s gaze lingers on a shadow on the wall.

Kyle Marshall Choreography

Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan; joyce.org.

In 1975, the American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett played a solo concert in Cologne, Germany, improvising without a preset structure. The recording of that performance, “The Köln Concert,” became one of the best-selling solo jazz albums ever, its one-man-jam-band free exploration of sounds that you might associate with Rachmaninoff, gospel and country-folk proving as popular with fans of the Grateful Dead as with jazz aficionados.

One can imagine the album’s appeal for Trajal Harrell, an American choreographer who has found his greatest success in Europe. Since 2019, Harrell has been the in-house director of Schauspielhaus Zürich, leading his own dance ensemble. The sound of an adoring European audience, as can be heard on Jarrett’s recording, must be familiar to him.

But Harrell’s “The Köln Concert,” which had its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, doesn’t start with Jarrett. It starts with Harrell, already onstage as the audience is filing in. Over a shirt and slacks, he wears a dress like a smock. He stands and gazes at his audience as if he were a modern-day royal, trying to look casual while holding court.

And when the music kicks in, it isn’t Jarrett but Joni Mitchell. To “My Old Man,” Harrell starts swaying, swooping, swatting the air, his fingers quivering when Mitchell sings of the lonesome blues. It resembles dance karaoke, or someone dancing alone in a bedroom, except for Harrell’s trademark facial expressions, like Joan Crawford in pain. The vulnerability is armored in affectation.

As more Mitchell songs play, mostly from the album “Blue,” other dancers join Harrell. Sitting on piano benches, they pick up the swaying motion, their arms scooping back and forth as if through water to Mitchell’s “River.” This culminates in “Both Sides Now” — the 2000 version, with a gravelly-voiced Mitchell over strings — and another Harrell trademark: a fashion show, with the dancers taking turns doing runway walks in various outré outfits. They do this very well.

Finally, the Jarrett recording begins (we never hear the whole thing), and everyone comes back in black sleeveless dresses for a succession of solos. These also have an alone-in-the-bedroom feel, as if an elegant woman, a little tipsy and self-pitying, had put the Jarrett on for some sashaying with stumbles. It’s a dance-like-nobody’s-watching style, except that these performers are intensely aware of being watched.

Some of the trouble here is structural. Made in 2021, Harrell’s dance is clearly a pandemic product, with its carefully spaced benches and solo after solo. The solos have a little variation to distinguish them: Titilayo Adebayo swings her long braids like helicopter blades; the statuesque Thibault Lac, a longtime Harrell collaborator, responds to Jarrett’s rapid runs with jerky instability. But they’re all too close to Harrell copies, and the repetition is deadening.

The deeper problem, though, is the near total lack of spontaneity. Much of the joy in the Jarrett recording arises from not knowing where he’s going next and being surprised at how he gets there. In Harrell’s “Köln Concert,” there is no surprise.

Where Jarrett sometimes sits in a groove, his left hand repeating a simple figure as his right hand roams freely, the combination building momentum, Harrell just seems stuck in his routine. He is good at conceptual pairings — his breakout pieces combined vogueing with 1960s postmodern dance — and his coupling of Mitchell and Jarrett helps us hear an affinity between them, a 1970s sound. But Harrell’s “Köln Concert” isn’t really about those artists or the music of its title. It’s about his identification with both. Mostly, it’s about himself.

Trajal Harrell

Through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org.