Spoke
the Hub’s “Holiday Salon” Showcases New Dance, Music & Performance Art
By Carl Blumenthal
If the Winter Follies has winners and losers (per its People’s Choice awards), the Holiday Salon is full of nothing but stars. That’s Spoke the Hub Dancing speak for performances that in a word are “exuberant.”
Now in her 35th year as founder and artistic director, Elise Long has imbued nearly two generations of Brooklyn’s finest with her brand of dance theater (or theatrical dance). Others may aspire to be the best of Broadway’s proscenium stages, but here in the borough of “broken land” (per the original Dutch meaning) Spoke is more down to earth. And you must be to repair the hurts of playing second fiddle to Manhattan for 125 years (as of 2023.)
Its venues are studio-like spaces where the audience sits on the same level as the performers, if not in bleachers to better cheer them on. For, as Long made clear in her remarks as emcee at the Holiday Salon on December 9 and 10 at the Gowanus Arts Annex, 298 Butler Street, she prefers to champion artists who are not just good but also good people. Compare that kind of genuine fellow feeling to the tinselly holiday displays along the Great White Way.
Another word for Spoke is the “spontaneity” that was once again apparent at the Annex in the face of Covid sidelining several of the performers. As a result, Stav German (stavgmusic.com), who was only supposed to perform on the 9th, pinch hit on the 10th, setting the tone for the evening with her resonant singing voice and improvisational lyrics, including audience suggestions.
Whether singing skat or beating her upper chest for accompaniment, she seemed to generate her music from her whole body rather than just her head, and one of her three pieces was ably interpreted by dancer Leila Gaudin, whose hand and arm gestures reminded me of those performed by (Asian) Indian folk dancers.
Interspersed with a video of intertwined hands and bodies and the music of the BROCKBEATS, St. Germain, and Tears for Fears, Emla and Sarazina, that is Emily La Rochelle and Sarazina Joy Stein (IG: @emlalarochelle and @sazzypants19) performed “Boomerang,” which, as the title implies, meant that however hard each tried to assert their individuality, the two looked (with similar hairdo’s and complementary outfits) and acted as if they were “fraternal twins.”
Whether posing like mannequins, stretching, sliding, or twirling in concert, at times using a shawl on the floor as a kind of magic carpet, even at their most frenetic they mirrored each other’s best moves.
The Freestyle Repertory Theatre (freestylerep.org) offered “Theatresports,” with Mike Durkin as the referee egging on respectively Laura Livingston and Berk Uzman, the Rudolph the Red Nose Team, and Laura Valpey with Andrew Del Vecchio as the Blue Christmas Team.
Based on audience suggestions and participation, they improvised in word and deed such scenes as “Acting Out in Macy’s Holiday Display Windows,” “Revealing the True-Life Journey of Elise Long and Spoke the Hub,” “A Romp Through Literary Forms,” and “The Candle that was Too Hot to Handle.” What emerged was so wacky and wonderful that, even though Mike interpreted the audience’s applause as giving the upper hand to the Blues over the Reds, no one would have been disappointed by a tie.
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After intermission, Leila Gaudlin/ NO MAN’S LAND (no-mans-land.com) wrote and choreographed “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Inviting anyone in the audience to be her paramour, “Mike” obliged, with the utterance of his name in myriad intonations and variations on that song, ranging from elation to outrage, thereby producing an orgy of movement. In other words, Gaudlin applied “I love you, Mike” or “I love you” like a whiplash to her lungs and limbs.
Beginning up close and personal to the audience, then dancing her way up to the rear wall of the studio that could barely contain her passion, and then returning to confront the “Mike” in all of us, she demonstrated an amazing ability to wring the last drop of significance out of her heated, if chance romance.
Whereas, the Holiday Salon consisted mainly of solos and duets, Rathi Varma & Friends (rathivarma.com) provided a brief interlude of a quartet, with Ashmita Biswas, Siddarth Putta, Lesly Vargas, and Ratha Varma providing “Purpose of Your Visit” to the electronica music, “Abyss,“ by Cristobal Tapia De Veer. And the purpose of their visit seemed to raise the question of whether there was safety in parts or wholes as the ensemble broke into duets and solos and reassembled itself again and again.
Even given everyone’s virtuosity, 80-year-old Claire Porter (claire@cportables.com) arguably stole the show, though I might be prejudiced at 71. One of her “Portables” series of comic routines is “Sexy Grammer” that trips the light fantastic linguistically. The sheer number of words and sounds she memorized puts the lie to the belief that we older folks might be cognitively compromised.
Posing as a librarian with a penchant for grammatical exhibitionism, Porter’s ability to spice up the Dewey Decimal system with such titles as “50 Shades of Grammar” and “The Joy of Grammar” was just the beginning of puns and other word play that enabled her to almost “take it all off” (her clothes, that is) while “baring the essentials” of narrative composition.
And If there was a dance number to match Porter’s wordy strip tease, it would have to be Hannah Klinkman’s and Sean Langford’s (slangford.net) “Rebirth,” to the music of Daft Punk. Alternating between partnering and mutual one-upmanship, they proved that while taking two to tango, the result was joyfully intimate choreography. Although there was nothing explicitly erotic about their movements, they were especially well tuned to each other while accomplishing some pretty gymnastic lifts, making them appear seamless and effortless. With Hannah suspended upside down in the air by Sean with her legs spread wide for so long at the end, this might even have been a LaMaze moment.
Finally, Victor V. (victorvgurbo.com) and Mark Caserta, on electrified acoustic and powder blue Fender guitars, respectively, musically bookended the evening with a selection of holiday songs. Somehow, they combined the “roots revivalist…Americana spirit” of Victor V. Gurbo’s band (according to the Brooklyn Academy of Music) with what Gurbo termed his own “butchering of the classics.” After a couple of standard tunes, they finished with Gurbo’s original about a snowman who comes to life like a ghost from Christmas past. While Caserta was decked out in a garland of lights like a Christmas tree, Gurbo played a harmonica on the chorus and attired like a cowboy, he seemed to be channeling a born-again Bob Dylan.
Such offhand idolatry was in keeping with the spirit of the Holiday Salon for what could be better than the Friends of Spoke the Hub riffing artistically off each other during two and a half hours of merriment.
Carl Blumenthal is a retired arts reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle who has been reviewing Spoke the Hub Dancing for 25 years. Full disclosure: He is a patron of the company.
