WENDY OSSERMAN DANCE COMPANY 2022
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY Executive Director, Crystal Field Presents
LAMINARIA
Friday & Saturday, OCTOBER 21 & 22, 8pm @Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue
TICKETS https://ci.ovationtix.com/35441/production/1137465 or Box Office 212-254-1109
CHOREOGRAPHY: Wendy Osserman with Cori Kresge, Emily Vetsch, Vanessa Walters
MUSIC: Concetta Abbate with Concetta Ensemble
LAMINARIA is a Folk Horror Chamber Suite evoking images of an underwater shadow ghost emerging from the deep. Laminaria is the Latin word for kelp, which is used medicinally to induce labor in people seeking an abortion. This hauntingly provocative music and dance piece recalls cycles of birth and death, transformation and loss.
WENDY OSSERMAN DANCE COMPANY has been presented since 1976 in most NYC dance venues. For LAMINARIA, she is fortunate to collaborate with stellar dancers, composer/violinist/singer, Concetta Abbate, and 10 musicians in The Concetta Ensemble.
“Osserman may be inspired by current events, but she’s a timeless rather than topical artist, and perhaps that’s why she has lasted so long.”
–Leigh Witchel, dancelog.nyc
Fighting a pandemic with dance
Wendy has kept busy, spewing solos in her North Carolina studio since March 2020.
“Blessedly nonliteral” choreography
— The New York Times
Wendy Osserman and her dancers celebrate the strangeness of being alive. They relish a collaborative process that involves improvisation, writing, reacting to scientific articles, examples of contemporary poetry, and visual art through the ages. Osserman conveys her struggle to comprehend current events and history with drama and humor, confusing the personal with the political.
Combustion
Osserman’s work meets fire with fire
Presented in March 2020 by Theater for the New City, 155 1st Avenue, NYC; Crystal Field, Executive Director
Fire is a recurrent image embodied by the dancers in Combustion, a piece for five. As she attempts to digest inflammatory statements and actions by our President and his followers, Osserman — like many of us — has felt consumed with worry, shock, anger, and a need to make sense of current events. President Trump appears caught in his reality TV role as he fires his collaborators and fumes and lashes out at any opposition. At the same time we are witnessing the destructive power of wildfires in California and elsewhere in the world, self-combustion due to creeping climate change, deforestation, and poor working conditions in developing countries.
As in past works, Osserman identifies with what concerns her — war, the depleted earth, polarization in politics, fascist leaders — and physicalizes her response. As she performs her distress, humor emerges as a welcome side effect, surprising and palliative. In her collaboration with the dancers, fire is also recognized as a generator of life, an agent of transformation, purification, illumination, and enlightenment. The unusual contributions of composer, musician, and musical instrument creator, Skip La Plante again delights dancers and audience.
Udjat, a trio from 1985, concludes the program with “a darkness that is both powerful and compelling,” Attitude: The Dance Magazine. Udjat is the Egyptian hieroglyph of the Sacred Eye, a symbol of completeness, of things made more precious having been restored.