Barnes (is) one of the wittiest young choreographers around. Although she can stir your heart as well as make you laugh, Hollywood Endings is essentially a charmingly outlandish revue in which nothing is predictable.
-The Village Voice (Deborah Jowitt)
Barnes has made zippy and understated magic. When we were pretty specializes in comic gangliness ... but when Lydia Martin stands on a chair and, sings with absolute, childlike faith, as if she meant the words for her mother, it's hard to imagine anything prettier.
-The New Yorker (Apollinaire Scherr)
Inspired nuttiness with Up the Hanging Tree a funny, tender and knowing evocation of young female adolescence. It was performed to perfection by the wonderfully shameless Jennifer Ward and by Melanie Aceto, a touchingly solemn foil for Ms. Ward's exuberance.
-The New York Times (Jennifer Dunning)
Imagine an all-female, multigenerational, Elvis-crazed dance arena wherein hearts are broken but dreams come true and abiding love conquers all. Barnes' When we were pretty is such a place. Barnes' images have a David Lynch lucidity. Better than a bra burning, this is unapologetic, inclusive, baseline feminism.
-Dance Insider (Chris Dohse)
Potent theatrical nostalgia sets off dilemmas of contemporary life. Barnes constructs an Edwardian vaudeville of enormous charm: Three generations of performers decked out in spangles, tulle and tuxes parade through the space. A trio of raunchy showgirls strut their stuff, while a matched pair of early-adolescent angels swing from wires in a toy theater, blessing the sweet, pathetic bravado of the proceedings. The setting is sheer heaven.
-The Village Voice (Tobi Tobias)
With sharply synchronized movements performed in the circular fountain at Bowling Green Park, the performance of Monica Bill Barnes' dance was too much fun to miss.
-The New York Times (Jack Anderson)
Barnes suggests the blithe maiden of decades-ago dance, but with kinks ... where charm and discomfort duke it out.
-The Village Voice (Deborah Jowitt)
Once I was in a Beauty Contest, but my Strap Broke is comic delight. Barnes is an impudent flea of a dancer ...and the solo made perfect sense as a zany, purely physical response to the music.
-The New York Times (Jennifer Dunning)
Monica Bill Barnes (is) the downtown darling.
-The New Yorker
In a completely different flavor, Monica Bill Barnes performed her mesmerizingly wacky solo. Barnes excels at physical, comic dancing evoking silent film comedians with coy primping, dramatic pauses and cartoon running, moving supplely from silly to grand.
-Off Off Off.com
When We Were Pretty, an outdoor performance, is a charmer. With an occasional solemn smile, Barnes' character telegraphed her awareness that mastering the body language of flirtation is serious business.
-The Philadelphia Inquirer (Miriam Seidel)
Ms. Barnes was extraordinary - her masterful face adds a whole other level of theatricality and meaning to her performance.
-Gay City News (Brian McCormick)
There's a reason comedy and dance are rarely paired. But Barnes is the mistress of such mischief and has the technical dance ability to make it all work. She breaks all the rules, but also tempers the clowning around with enough darkness and pity to make us care.
-San Diego Arts (Kris Eitland)
She (Barnes) is a kind of conjuror, pulling movement out of her small strong body as if this were a rabbit-hat deal, but without fanfare. She's constantly startling. I can't take my eyes off her - not just because she's a beauty and her actions are compelling, but because, within the silky dancing and the curious gestures, I see her thinking, sense her feeling.
-The Village Voice (Deborah Jowitt)
Full Reviews
Dance in Review
Most choreographers make dance out of music, steps and thematic ideas. Monica Bill Barnes seems to create hers out of glances and stumbles. She works with dancers who look wonderfully unafraid to teeter on the edge of sudden, careless plummeting or, even more, of making endearing "wise fools" of themselves.
The two fools in Ms. Barnes%u2019s new "Suddenly Summer Somewhere," performed on Thursday night at the Danspace Project at St. Mark%u2019s Church, at first look like dollhouse inhabitants as they stand close, moving slightly together, on a small table at the back of the stage. One, and then the other, gradually makes her way down and into the stage space. Soon they are up and dancing to slyly soupy songs performed by Frank Sinatra and other members of the Rat Pack.
The tone of the piece has been set before it begins, with karaoke microphones at the front for audience members to sing along with projected lyrics %u2014 a novel approach to dance. But Ms. Barnes specializes in the nuttily unexpected. "Suddenly Summer Somewhere" barrels along once it hits the floor, a thing of manic, mugging grins; lumbering embraces; and big, juicy syncopated sprints through space that seems to have just opened out.
The balance shifts very slowly between the characters danced by Ms. Barnes and the delectably innocent-looking Anna Bass, who begins, very subtly, to take the lead. Sadness momentarily pools in Ms. Bass%u2019s eyes. Ms. Barnes bends slightly into the support of her arms. Ms. Bass moves behind her, removes her coat and lays it on the floor, like a gallant partner laying a path across a puddle or rocky ground. Ms. Barnes arches over Ms. Bass%u2019s bending body, and then they stand and move forward slowly, arms lowering peacefully in lowering stage light. Suddenly love has pushed through zany, witty pratfalls for the body and the soul. Ms. Barnes has pulled a fast one on her audience.
Small Magic
Turn up the footlights, we're puttin' on a show
Waiting for Monica Bill Barnes's Hollywood Endings to begin, I redefine footlights. We who share a front-row, four-person couch at Dixon Place must move our feet with care, if at all, since lighting designer Jane Cox has duct-taped a row of little aluminum lamps to the floor an inch or so from our toes.
Cramped, funky Dixon Place, the make-do gaudiness of Kelly Hanson's set and costumes, and Cox's intrepid lighting are a perfect fit for this small scale piece by Barnes, one of the wittiest young choreographers around. Although she can stir your heart as well as make you laugh, Hollywood Endings is essentially a charmingly outlandish revue in which nothing is predictable. I think particularly of the moment when a short, fringed silk curtain in one corner lifts to reveal a very young-looking high school girl (Lydia F. Martin) in a sparkly dress, sitting on a piano in front of a mirror ball. In an earnest, pretty little voice, with absolutely no flirtatious manner, she sings the 1926 hit made famous by Elvis, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" Then the curtain rolls down, leaving, for a second or two, her skinny legs sticking out from under it.
Rather more histrionics come from the gawky would-be ballerina (Beth Bradford), whose tutu is held up by suspenders. She gets all swoony over her staggery dancing, which also includes sticking an index finger in her mouth and popping her cheek, Later she wanders tipsily through, spilling a champagne glass of fake snow. But when she falls with a thud, she drops all staginess: "Ouch!!" she says, and moans a bit. A little lamp descends to within a foot above her head; she coughs and wanders out disconsolately. The evening's pomo vaudevillian comics are Deborah Lohse and Anna Smith, and they are a wonder. Tall Lohse has a rubber face and large, expressive eyes (Carol Burnett comes to mind), but she uses these with restraint and excellent timing. The smaller Smith pursues the role of a vinegary underdog whose dander is easily raised. Repetition plays a large part in skewing the routines Barnes has devised for them. In their first appearance, they jog (well, Smith sort of racewalks) around the perimeter of the small, three-sided performing area. Many times. Getting tireder. Occasionally resting on a piano bench. Getting faster and much tireder. When they stop, they pantomime at length terrible stitches in their sides and check their bodies for other ailments. "Why am I doing this?" is the gist of their reactions. Then, adding a movement or so at a time-approving, discarding-they build a little dance number. It hurts too. Whether wrangling over a bouquets of carnations, tangoing (sort of), or courting, their encounters are for the most part edgily courteous. Smith, wearing a red satin dress made for a much bigger woman, sticks her face close to an embarrassed Lohse and belts a Patsy Cline song. No matter where Lohse turns, Smith is in front of her. Eventually they sing the song together, and as strings of colored bulbs glow overhead and tiny points of light glitter on the fringed-drape backdrop and red light suffuses the scene, everyone joins in a finale.
Barnes herself has two numbers, first in a too big tailcoat, looking like the resident magician, and then in a longer, more fashionable black coat over pants. She is a kind of conjuror, pulling movement out of her small strong body as if this were a rabbit-hat deal, but without fanfare. Her idiosyncratic style juxtaposes small, sudden tics of movement to lavish ones. She hesitates, jitters; she has moments of composure in which she seems to take stock of what she's done or is about to do. In the second solo, performed to Schubert, she's constantly startling, whether sawing doggedly at the floor with the side of her hand, shaking her head over and over, or leaping low and wide in a circle, one hand on the floor, sweeping the fallen "snow" as she goes. Suddenly there's a handkerchief in her hand (Where did that come from??). And another. I can't take my eyes off her-not just because she's a beauty and her actions are compelling, but because, within the silky dancing and the curious gestures, I see her thinking, sense her feeling.
Barnes has used her considerable skill as a choreographer to make a piece that looks charmingly rickety, beautifully tawdry, and profoundly good-hearted. Hollywood Endings may have been a stop-gap work. When construction on Dixon Place's new downtown building as is completed, her new full-length Limelight will inaugurate its first season. Can you wait?
Kicking Up a Storm Where Water Is a Given
"Coins aren't tossed into this fountain, but women are."
Ten women made quite a splash when they danced Monica Bill Barnes's "Limelight" at lunchtime on Monday in Bowling Green Park. Their performance took place in the circular fountain that stands in front of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian.
Not around or beside that fountain. In it.
The women, in sneakers and light-colored costumes, ran into the park shouting: "Hello New York City! We've got something special for you!" then they jumped into the fountain, where, for about 15 minutes, they enthusiastically performed chorus-line routines to recorded songs by Diana Ross and the Supremes.
The fountain sent jets of water into the cloudy sky. The heavens, in return, sent a bit of drizzle down to the earth. But spectators didn't seem to mind the little shower. The dance was too much fun to miss.
Keeping their movements sharply synchronized, the dancers often kicked like aquatic Rockettes in this attraction, part of the site-specific events presented by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Holding sunglasses in their hands, they also stood still in the water like glamorous movie stars languidly posing for portraits at beach resorts. And they paraded in the fountain's basin while twirling umbrellas.
After dancers lifted other dancers to the fountain's rim, the entire cast suddenly lost its footing and toppled into the water. It looked like a collective accident. But the apparent mistake was so precisely timed that you knew it was all part of Ms. Barnes's witty choreography.
Binational balancing
A continent and an international border lie between the styles of New Yorker Monica Bill Barnes and Tijuana's Lux Boreal Danza Contemporá Yet the bicoastal, binational artists, who jump-started Sushi's East/West Performance Festival at UCSD's Molli & Arthur Wagner Dance Studio last weekend, share some vital common ground.
Both Barnes and Lux Boreal engage in serious clowning, silliness given depth and texture by darker undertones. Barnes' "Thank You and Good Night" conveys the poignancy of Charlie Chaplin, while Lux Boreal's "Flower of Seven Leaves," a response to Tijuana's drug culture, has both the comedy and the surreal menace of a Fellini carnival. Both dances also ironically reference ballet. Barnes and Deborah Lohse don the full, knee-length net skirts favored in French Romantic ballet, along with T-shirts and goofy white-blond pageboy wigs. Lux Boreal's Azalea López, as the Fairy of Drugs, flits about in a tutu, but she, too, recalls a French Romantic ballet - "Giselle," in which female spirits dance a man to death.
And, in these extended works ("Thank You and Good Night" at 30 minutes, "Flower of Seven Leaves" at 40), Barnes and Lux Boreal display artistic visions so complex and original that both seem poised to move to larger stages. Barnes, a darling of New York's downtown dance scene, refined "Thank You and Good Night" during a weeklong UCSD residency that was part of the East/West Festival. Shown for the first time here, the piece will have its New York premiere at Dance New Amsterdam later this month. Lux Boreal has performed at major Mexican festivals, and the 4-year-old company makes its East Coast debut (in New York and New Haven) in June.
As intriguing as the similarities between these artists, however, are their unique aesthetics. Sushi launched the East/West Festival last year out of then-artistic director Allyson Green's desire to pose the question, "Does geography affect choreography?" Last weekend's program suggests that the geographic influence is profound. Bouncy cafe-concert tunes by Edith Piaf and Paolo Conte set the mood of "Thank You and Good Night." Just as the music's surface gaiety masks seen-it-all sadness, Barnes' choreography is marked by deceptive ease and underlying pathos. Superficially a comedy that focuses on two duos (Barnes and Lohse, Beth Bradford and Anna Smith) vying for the audience's attention, the dance makes Barnes and Lohse the life-of-the-party show-offs, zany as Lucille Ball, in their net ballet skirts and blond wigs. Barnes even stands on a soapbox and gestures to the Piaf song "Bravo!"
Bradford and Smith (whom I nicknamed "the glums") draw the eye by shrinking from it. Huddled side to side, shoulders hunched, they creep along the side of the stage toward floor spots (in Jeff Fightmaster's artful lighting design), and inch toward the lights but recoil in what feels like a small poem about our conflicting yearning and fear to be seen.
In a simultaneous poem, "snow" flutters onto Barnes, to a tinkling music-box air in Karinne Keithley's sound score that perfectly matches the dance's changing moods. "Thank You and Good Night," in fact, is a choreographic poem, a swim through images-of vulnerability, toughness, playfulness, mutual support that, although non-linear, ultimately makes one feel as if one's taken an important journey. Barnes also fills this piece with delightful references to other dance styles - the ballet skirts, Charleston steps, a manic tarantella, a soft shoe. In a vaudeville-flavored section, she and Smith wear shapeless overcoats like a couple of hobos, the virtuosity of their split-second unison nonchalantly hidden by their loose-limbed, jokey ease.
Monica Bill Barnes ended the 2001-2002 dance season at Dancesepace Project with a thoughtful, truly delightful work that deserves to be seen again. A multi-generational look at the role of women - and a tribute to girl/woman/sister/mother/daughterhood - When We Were Pretty had a cumulative effect, tracing inter-relations with a loving, laughing freedom from convention, and laced with sweet nuance. Simple phrases, even single gestures repeated at various stages stitched everything together into a seamless wonder.
The work is set to Elvis Presley songs ("You're so young and Beautiful", "Love Me Tender", "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You", and "Hound Dog") repeated several times each. While this might sound impossible to bear, the changing contexts into which the choreographer so intelligently and imaginatively weaved them complicated their meaning.
The piece began with a solo by a wonderful young performer, Lydia Martin, a precocious yet unassuming sixth grader, whose stage presence and control were remarkable. In front of a line of other little girls dressed "like little girls" in pink with big pink adornments in their hair, she danced a solo to "You're so Young and Beautiful", cutting the image of an Isadora at Ziegfeld's Follies. Ms. Barnes and an older woman, Ursula Caspary Frankel, wearing overcoats and dresses, make their first appearance here, representing later stages of womanhood. Pink dresses, white briefs, sweat socks, and big bouncy blue balls with handles figures in the celebration of tomboyhood that followed - an energetic, humorous, and touching romp that also featured a superheroine (Hilary Easton) with cape, star-shaped light, and all.
A nervous bride, Lindsey Dietz-Marchant, with an impossibly long veil appeared intermittently, always flustered, sometimes frozen. The bride and the girl shared a duet in which they got tangled in the veil. Later the bride danced while the line-up of little girls, in pumps and acting like Jon Benet Ramsey, joined in a rousing rendition of "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You", knowingly reminiscent of Annie's "Hard Knock Life". This segment ended with a couple clapping on the sidelines that transitioned into a lovely mother-daughter of "Love Me Tender". The choreography here was particularly intimate, as each took a solo turn. The Mother held onto her daughter by the belt as her daughter's energy burst into action; she moved ahead, directly, to meet her daughter at the next place where her movement phrases would end.
A solo by Ms. Barnes highlighted her approach to movement. Her combination of quick snaps of movement, shifts, kicks, turns, and gestures all laden with meaning was a distillation for pure dance consumption. Ms. Barnes, like her other lead characters, has a magic to her presence, an energy that beams from every look, every motion.
Following Ms. Barnes, the bride danced a slow solo while the girl, in a long red flamenco dress that hung down below the pedestal she stood on, sang "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You", a capella, blowing bubbles in between long pauses. Rice rained down abruptly from above at the end. Later, single roses wrapped in plastic came down during another solo by Ms. Barnes, hitting the stage with unromantic thwacks. Ms. Barnes and Ms. Caspary, left alone, removed her coat, then repeated the opening solo to " You're so Young and Beautiful", bringing the evening to a nostalgic, heartfelt, full circle.