Downtown Manhattan at DTW and Downtown Brooklyn at BAM, there are collaborations afoot in the dance world. Bebe Miller Company premieres “Necessary Beauty” at DTW November 11-15 with her new-fashioned “virtual dance company.” In brief, six women (Miller, plus Angie Hauser, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Kristina Isabelle, Cynthia Oliver and Yen-Fang Yu) and six collaborators (video artist Maya Ciarrocchi, animator Vita Berezina-Blackburn, dramaturg Talvin Wilks, composer Albert Mathias, writer Ain Gordon and lighting designer Michael Mazzola), who live all over the U.S., gather a few times a year for two or three weeks at a time and work intensely. Says Miller, “What else can we do….We need to recognize the fact that our working lives are different these days….We also get to go away and come back fresh.” Now two years later, Miller and collaborators bring a convergence of dance, theater and the latest in digital technology in “Necessary Beauty,” a modern dance work melding a series of short dances contained by space. “‘Necessary Beauty,’” says Miller, is “still life in a visual sense. But also from a personal level, it is like being struck by the alignment or collision of something you are seeing, feeling and thinking–those moments of beauty/epiphany in our own lives that bring us forward….Those are necessary parts of our lives. “Miller hopes that each viewer sees the work through “the diversity of individual thought and experience where we find common ground.” This is a must-see event. For more information, call (212) 924-0077 or visit wwww.dtw.org.
The other must-see event this month, November 19, 21 and 22 in Downtown Brooklyn at BAM, is the collaboration of the women of Brooklyn’s Urban Bush Women, under artistic direction of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, with the men of Senegal’s Compagnie Jant-Bi, under the artistic direction of Germaine Acogny, in “Les ecailles de la memoire” (“The scales of memory”). This evening-length New York premiere for 14 performers, notes the choreographers, “blends personal identity, cultural memory, and self-discovery marked by the history of the African Diaspora.” The Washington Post adds,” ‘Les ecailles’ is an extraordinary view of history’s footprint on the present, and an invitation to those ghosts that haunt us all.” For more information, call (718) 636-4100 or go to www.BAM.org.
ALSO THIS MONTH
November 1–BAAD! (The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance) presents capoeira, burlesque and much more in “Motions of Bodies & Souls.” For more information, call (718) 842-5223 or visit www.BronxAcademyofArtsandDance.org. November 4-9–Garth Fagan Dance returns to the Joyce Theater with the world premiere of “Phone Tag, Thanks & Things,” plus favorite repertory. For more information, call (212) 242-0800 or visit www.joyce.org. November 15–Ten dancers and even more musicians from Quatrotango, Argentina, in Tango Fire. For more information, call (718) 951-4500 or visit www.BrooklynCenterOnline.org. November 21-22–Charles Moore Dance Theatre presents “Ancestral Images,”plus a program of revivals and other works in Brooklyn at The Kumble Theater. For more information, call (718) 488-1624 or visit www.kumbletheater.org. November 21-23–DNA (Dance New Amsterdam) presents GERALDCASELDANCE in “Save The Robots!” For more information, call (212) 279-4200 or visit www.dna.org. To be listed, send press releases to Amnewsdancecalendar@comcast.net.