BLACK BUTOH and Y

Nicky Paraiso juxtaposed an unlikely pair as part of the 19th edition of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Nuu K’nynez presented a salad bowl of hip-hop forms before Ilaria Passeri’s prop-heavy performance installation. While aesthetically divergent, both grappled with achieving positive futures through adversarial presents.

Nuu K’nynez’s work is entitled Black Butoh, after their studies with André Zachary. Rather than painting themselves white and slowly contorting, the trio takes the ethos of Butoh, Japan’s cultural response to World War II, drawing similarly from the Black American experience to shape their vocabularies.

Two swag-adorned chairs are populated by Tyrell “Rocka” Jamez and David “Twice Light” Adelaja. Somewhere between a pas de deux and an urban dance battle, they trade solos. While Krumping is their primary language, personal style specializes the movement. Jamez gestures fluidly and lyrically over slithering feet; Adelaja is bound, sharp, and syncopated. The third, Brian “Hallow Dreamz” Henry does not perform, but is present in a video projection that sets the performers against a mélange of New York City sites, their influences, and the full trio.

The soundtrack intersperses original music with voiceovers of Jamez and Adelaja. They dance to their own words on practicing dance moves instead of homework, nostalgic characterizations of past decades, and the tension between their journey out of the hood and being ambassadors for the rich culture that originated there. After several rounds, Jamez and Adelaja speak directly, checking in on and encouraging each other before compromising their individuality to dance in unison until a final blackout, from which we still
hear the vigor of their breath.

Returning from intermission, the stage is covered in industrial props and some organic material through which Evelyna Dann lurks in an eerie mask by Roberta Scotton. To a soundscore by Stefano Zazzera of metallic clanging and jackhammering, Dann seems intent on constructing an environment for herself out of the detritus of some former civilization.

Between two posts, Dann strings caution tape along the fourth wall, breaking through it
maskless upon completing her tasks to reveal a cryptic diagram of the human body which is
hard to read from the audience. In stepping closer, we inherit the mess Dann leaves behind,
just as she had to contend with what was left for her. Like the shabby nests of pigeons, Y sees
humanity as craving reunion with nature, even if our generation’s attempts are clumsy at best.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Jonathan Matthews-Guzman