"...it showed a rich variety of intention and approach, from technically sophisticated to almost dance-free, intensely personal to determinedly neutral."
- Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times

Miguel Gutierrez

Miguel Gutierrez is a dance and music artist based in Brooklyn, NY since 1997. He creates group work as director of Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People and he also creates small scale and solo projects. Since 2001 he has made enter the seen, I succumb, Sabotage (in collaboration with Jaime Fennelly), dAMNATION rOAD, Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies, myendlesslove, and Everyone. He collaborates with a wide range of contemporary dance, music and visual artists. Gutierrez’s work is borne from basic questions regarding existence and the theatrical situation: Who are we and why are we here? What binds the performers and viewers in an attentive space of perception? How is a dance performance a practice for experiencing the intricacy of the mind/body system? These questions drive the work, and the urgent bodies inside of it. These bodies are full of desire: to be loved, to communicate, and to understand the complexity of identity. Gutierrez is interested in “hyper presence,” where the real becomes more real, while restlessly situated within the artifice of the stage. He is fascinated by how the transcendent can emerge out of the ordinary at any moment.

Ben Munisteri

Ben Munisteri was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and was a founding member of  the Doug Elkins Dance Company. He has created dances for the Pennsylvania Dance Theater, Danceworks Performance Company (Milwaukee), Circle of Dance (NY), and other regional dance companies.  He has received commissions and funding from Performance Space 122, the Kitchen, Central Park SummerStage, Danspace Project, the Joyce Theater Foundation, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the 92nd Street Y New Works in Dance Fund, the Celebrate Brooklyn festival, and the Whitney Museum.  He has received five major grant awards from the Jerome Foundation for the creation of new works (2000–05).  He has been an artist in residence at Dance Theater Workshop, Jacob’s Pillow, and the Joyce Theater.

Andrew Dinwiddle

Andrew Dinwiddie's choreography has been performed at Galapagos, P.S. 122, St. Anne's Warehouse, Ur, BAX, the Chocolate Factory, the Club at LaMama, Downstairs at the Ontological, the Red Humor Salon, Minneapolis' Bryant-Lake Bowl and WAX at University Settlement. He is a 2007-2008 Resident Artist at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, where he is making The Accursed Items, which will premiere at the Ontological Theater in September 2008. With Jeff Larson, he co-curates Catch, a bimonthly performance series that will destroy your mind with short works by emerging artists and downtown luminaries. Andrew is a performer with and the administrative director of David Neumann's advanced beginner group. He has also had the pleasure of performing for Big Dance Theater, Stacy Dawson, Nellie Tinder, Karinne Keithley, Sibyl Kempson, Jennie Marytai Liu, Ken Nintzel, Richard Maxwell, Linas Phillips, Kourtney Rutherford, Kate E. Ryan/13P, Jenny Seastone Stern and Chris Yon.

Choreographers Intensely Personal and Absolutely Not
Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times

As titles of dance programs go, “Male Bonding” is pretty catchy. But this two-part event presented by the La MaMa Moves! festival had little to do with any affinities between the impressive lineup of choreographers taking part. Instead it showed a rich variety of intention and approach, from technically sophisticated to almost dance-free, intensely personal to determinedly neutral.

“The Bowing Dance — a duet for me and you” by the Irish choreographer John Scott belonged to the neutral category. The burly, appealing Mr. Scott, who performed this work on the Saturday night and Sunday afternoon programs at the Club, enacted both the “me” and the “you” of the title as he issued directions and followed them with the requisite actions. (“Me, I bow. You, you bow too.”) Performed in two parts, the work can feel like a brilliant piece of absurdist theater, a meditation on identity, an entry-level primer on choreographic composition or nothing very much at all. Perhaps it’s all those things at once, which is to say, art.

Where Mr. Scott was resolutely impassive, even in the sudden flopping, writhing end of his first section, Miguel Gutierrez offered a solo, “Nothing, No thing,” full of raw, compressed emotion. The piece is long and difficult: the movement ungainly, a deeply personal monologue uncomfortable to hear, a bellowing song at the end both tuneless and bathetic. But Mr. Gutierrez is never less than a completely honest performer, and his self-revelation is never self-indulgent. He holds out the promise of uncharted territory with no guarantees of safety involved.

Sunday’s program offered two more solos. In Andrew Dinwiddie’s piece the lanky Benjamin Forster moved in silence with big, undancerly lunges, his arms swatting at the air. Nicholas Leichter, on the other hand, was all cool control and underlying panic in “Love Letter,” his body snapping through staccato club-dance moves to an Amy Winehouse song, even as his flicking fingers and sudden intakes of breath suggested the precariousness of his poise.

Larger-scale works came from Ben Munisteri and John Jasperse, both demonstrating just how good these choreographers are. Mr. Munisteri’s “Remix” showed his beautifully constructed ensemble work and acute eye for visual effect as six dancers moved in fluid counterpoint to songs by Jeff Buckley and Beck. And the lush complexity and detail of the work-in-progress excerpts from Mr. Jasperse’s new “Pure” were simply gorgeous. The premiere is next month at the American Dance Festival: attendance seems in order.