Current Season
YOU TOOK A PART OF ME
Megumi Eda Photo Julieta Cervantes
Back by Popular Demand
YOU TOOK A PART OF ME returns following its acclaimed, sold out season at Japan Society.
You Took a Part of Me is a mysterious and hypnotic display of erotic entanglement and unresolved attachment. Modeled after Noh, an ancient, ritualized Japanese form of dance theater, You Took a Part of Me depicts a woman’s ghost as she revisits her past to reckon with life’s complexities finding peace at last, through a liberated mind. The lead role, by Armitage’s longtime collaborator, Megumi Eda, highlights sinuous, erotic movement executed with ferocious intensity in a dream-like state to commissioned music by Reiko Yamada.
Choreography: Karole Armitage
Composer: Reiko Yamada
Costume Design: Peter Speliopoulos
Hair Design: Danilo
Lighting Design: Clifton Taylor
Dancers: Megumi Eda, Sierra French, Alonso Guzman, Cristian Laverde-Koenig
NEW YORK LIVE ARTS – NY, NY
You Took a Part of Me
October 23, 25-26, 2019 7:30
219 W. 19 St, New York, NY 10011
Box office 212-924-0077 Tickets
Megumi Eda Photo Julieta Cervantes
MORE INFORMATION
Noh, the oldest continuingly performed theatrical form on the planet, is a rigorous, ritualistic form of dance theater. Like many American artists including Bob Wilson and Bill Viola, Noh’s dreamlike exploration of time, memory, and the gaps that give the audience room to invest their own imagination, has played an important role in Armitage’s practice.
You Took A Part of Me, is performed by three dancers, a transformer known as a koken and a musician. Using various dance vocabularies that adhere to the austerity and minimalism of Noh, the dancers conjure up the past using calligraphic, sinuous movement based on the curvilinear paths of classical Japanese calligraphy. The dance gradually becomes thorny, ugly, as limbs are locked into contorted entanglements; knots from which there is no escape and no definition of individuality, but which remain erotically charged. In a puppet-like sequence, every gesture is initiated and controlled without physical contact. Though it all feels like a dream, the rhythm accelerates and the haunting ceases. The journey concludes in a liberated mind, true to Noh form.
The performance area consists of 3 locations - two of which are in the midst of the audience. The first is the “Mirror Room”, or kagami-no-ma, traditionally a room where the performers look into a mirror, put on their mask and, through intense concentration, transform. This room is never seen by Noh audiences, however in You Took A Part of Me, it will be used as a place of visible transformation. Connecting the Mirror Room to the stage is the hashigakari, or runway. Most of the action takes place on a wooden stage rising a few inches above the larger proscenium area.
You Took a Part of Me is made in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and is supported by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Howard Gilman Foundation, Helen F. Whitaker Fund & Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Additional funding provided by The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation and The Armitage Foundation New Works Fund.
Calendar of Armitage Choreography, Exhibitions and Performances by Armitage Gone! Dance.
PHILIP GLASS - THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Crested Butte, CO
July 5, 2019 7:30 Center for the Arts
Glass's epic multimedia work - part opera, part theatre, part ballet - tells the story of pioineering photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Fingernoise [a chamber orchestra]
Erik Christian Peterson, conductor
Karole Armitage, choreographer
Featuring dancers Joshua Eguia, Chanmee Jeong and Isaac Kerr.
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