“Mysterious” and “cataclysmic” were the words I used to describe Lemi Ponifasio’s Tempest: Without a Body four years ago. I remember strange ceremonial scuttling in front of floating, blood-stained walls. I remember an apocalyptic ending of thrashing and crashing. (Click here and scroll down for my review.)

Birds With Skymirrors, photo by Sebastian Bolesch

Now, with his New Zealand–based group MAU, Ponifasio brings Birds With Skymirrors to BAM for its U. S. premiere Nov 19–22. This is a rare chance to see an artist who transports us far beyond our everyday concerns. Or….maybe the end of the earth as we know it is an everyday concern. Many of the MAU dancers are from low-lying atolls where it’s said that the effects of climate change are felt before other parts of the world. The title is based on something he witnessed while working in the Micronesian Islands. He saw birds soaring through the sky carrying strips of videotape in their beaks. Struck by the beauty of this image, he also felt it as a kind of omen for the end of nature.

Photo by Sebastian Bolesch

A multi-disciplinary artist, Ponifasio has designed the set as well as the choreography. The dancing is gestural and interspersed with chanting. Expect a dark vision, highly theatrical and at times emotionally shattering.

For tickets, click here. http://www.bam.org/theater/2014/birds-with-skymirrors

I was fascinated and appalled by Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof when I saw it in 1983. As I wrote at the time, “The work was amazing in its craft, its looniness, its integration of movement, text, acting and film—and its brutality.” The topic was heterosexual attraction, but each budding romance came up against a wall of stubbornness—bullying, actually—but with that special Bauschian obsessiveness that somehow turns it into art.

Kontakthof, photo by Oliver Look

The review is in my book of collected writings, page 69. In describing the piece further, I had written in the New York Native: “It consists basically of ten straight couples going through a cycle of seduction, molestation and separation with a few ghastly pleasures in between.”

So, am I recommending that you see Kontakthof when it comes to BAM Oct. 23 to Nov. 2? Yes, for two reasons. First, because Bausch’s work in the last decade of her life was so full of sensuality and delight—I’m thinking of pieces like Nelken and Bamboo Blues (which graces the cover of my book)—that we sometimes forget what an unflinching vision of male-female mayhem she could project. Second, because after Bausch’s death in 2009, the company can still fill the stage with many stories at once.

And maybe, just maybe, that edge of brutality has softened a bit. After all, Bausch chose this piece as a lens through which to look at two other age groups. A beautiful documentary (Dancing Dreams) was made about teenagers learning Kontakthof—with the brazen Josephine Ann Endicott as coach. (Click here for an amazing clip of that film.) And in England, Bausch made a version for people over 65.

Photos by Oliver Look

So, how did it happen that I reviewed Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch a year before it first came to BAM in 1984? I had been invited to perform a solo at a gallery in Basel, Switzerland, and it turned out to be the same week her company appeared at the city’s Kunsthalle. I had a kind of love-hate reaction to it, but of course ambivalence is a time-honored position from which to write. Now I feel fortunate that my Bausch viewing stretches back that far, and I hope it stretches into the future too.

Talking about stories, when she received the Dance Magazine Award in 2008, Pina told a beautiful story about coming to New York as a Juilliard student. This was just a few months before she died, and we caught it on video. 

To get tickets to Kontakthof, click here. 

The coziest, coolest way to start the fall season is the four-day run at Dancenow Joe’s Pub Festival. Part of the fun is that you get to vote for your favorite, and then all four winners re-appear in an Encore on Sept 13. There is bound to be something delightful, something dark, something borrowed and something blue.

Chelsea Murphy and Magda San Milan in SInger/Songwriter

I saw the opening program last night and it was hard to pick just one fave. All the performers were engaging—and I found both old and new “crushes.” The five-minute time limit is heaven sent. If you go on Sept 13, you might see one of these from the first night.

• Sydney Skybetter got things off to a nifty start. Dancers Kristen Bell and Jordan Isadore embodied a strong beat with sharp moves in It’s Not Nepotism If You Do It to Yourself;  they were sexy in a nicely androgynous way. They could have, but didn’t replicate the “swagger” that’s so valued on So You Think You Can Dance; instead they wore slightly rumpled business suits that were refreshingly non-gender-defining (costumes by the performers).

Mark Dendy, all photos by Yi-Chun Wu

• Mark Dendy, in an excerpt from his Dystopian Distractions! Part 1, enacted a ridiculous speech by Donald Rumsfield about meeting Elvis Presley in Las Vegas. Dendy’s precise gestures were chillingly ludicrous. Wearing a gas mask (costume by Stephen Donovan), he was fascinatingly unmoored. Dendy’s a master and this was a riveting performance.

• In her swoopy, grounded dancing, Gibney Dance’s Natsuki Arai managed to be strong yet vulnerable—not unlike the poignant Patsy Cline song used for this excerpt of Gina Gibney’s Always.

Sean Donovan and Javier Perez in Jane Comfort’s Excuse Me, But…

•Jane Comfort’s Excuse Me, But… for two very fussy characters (Sean Donovan and Javier Perez) who kept asking for their food to be perfect. The skit got funnier as it progressed, ultimately equating food attachments with all-out sexual desire, sending the audience into cascades of giggles and guffaws.

• Completely new to me was the duo Chelsea Murphy and Magda San Millan. What a couple of nutty women—in the best sense. After opening their act with mock sincerity, they swerved from apologetic to raunchy in Singer/Songwriter, surprising us with their bawdiness at every turn.

• David Parker and Jeffrey Kazin, downtown’s resident vaudevillians, ended the evening with a scintillating tap rendition of the Jackson Five classic “I Want You Back.”

For info on tix for the next three nights and Dancenow NYC’s final blowout Encore, click here.

For a festival that started modestly 33 years ago, the Downtown Dance Festival is bursting at its seams. The fare ranges from established companies like Jennifer Muller/The Works (see Muller’s delightful “Choreography in Focus”) and Lori Belilove’s Isadora Duncan Dance Company, to  new groups like the colorful (and rhythm-ful) Dorrance Dance.

Isadora Duncan Dance Company; homepage photo of Sanjukta Sinha of Erasing Borders by Madhu Photograph

The international fare is also adventurous. Wednesday is devoted to the Erasing Borders dance festival, which includes six dance artists from India, and Thursday brings a premiere by South African choreographer Theo Ndindwa for Battery Dance Company, which hosts the festival.

Entomo

Add to this a rare U.S. appearance by the new Madrid-based duo Entomo EA & AE. These two crazy guys poke and shudder and tangle in such insect-like ways that you could swear their arms are antennae and their legs are wings. They seem to have caught the rhythms of preying mantises; they could just as easily be mating or fighting to kill—shades of Jerome Robbins’ The Cage. (I was so impressed by them at the Havana festival in 2010 that I wrote them in this post.)

This year the festival takes place Aug. 17 to 21 in Battery Park City’s Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park. Click here for full schedule.

For those of us who actually enjoy summers in the city, Lincoln Center Out of Doors is icing (ice cream?) on the cake. Because the concerts are free, audiences tend to be huge and wildly enthusiastic. So I advise you to get there early if you want a seat up front. But it’s also pleasant to meander toward Damrosch Park Bandshell later on and observe the crowd from the back.

Rennie Harris Puremovement, Courtesy RHPM. Photo on homepage @ Christopher Duggan

Pam Tanowitz Dance, photo © Christopher Duggan

This year, you can soak up the power of hip-hop culture on July 24, when Rennie Harris Puremovement—with three NYC premieres—shares a program with a Brazilian hip-hop group called A Batalha do Passinho. On July 25 you can see the clean ballet/Cunningham blend of Pam Tanowitz, who is paired with the music group Eight Blackbird.

Mr. TOL E. RAncE, photo © Christopher Duggan

Next week brings Camille A. Brown with her dance-theater work on race, Mr.  TOL E. RAncE, which was just nominated for a Bessie. A highly theatrical performer herself, Brown is both fearless and charming (see her Choreography in Focus). She is passionate about her chosen themes. On August 2, she shares the evening with another daring artist, the singer/songwriter Stew, who calls his current group The Negro Problem. So get ready for a smart, irony-drenched challenge to racism from two artists who have something to say.

For complete info on this series, click here.

Orbo Novo. Homepage photo: Grace Engine. Photos by Julieta Cervantes

If you want to see work by the latest European choreographers performed by awesomely technical dancers, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet is for you. In its 10th-anniversary season, the company brings Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Orbo Novo, with its tender encounters and intricate oozing through a large trellis, and Hofesh Shechter’s Violet Kid, which is so fiercely herd-like that one might call it contemporary tribal. Also on the season are works by Norway’s Jo Strømgren and Sweden’s Alexander Ekman. I would just advise that you bring your night-time spectacles because much of the lighting is dim.

Good news: Cedar Lake recently named Crystal Pite associate choreographer. We don’t see enough of her work in New York. Her circuitous chains of energy can be mesmerizing. The apocalyptic Grace Engine, which she made for Cedar Lake in 2012, is part of this season. (See my “Choreography in Focus” with her.) June 11–14 at Brooklyn Academy of Music and American Dance Festival. Click here for more info.