Lady talk

RED LIGHT DISTRICT White-McGuire finds her inner Cicciolnia.

Photograph: Imogen Brown

Richard Move has a way with glamorous women. In his most famous role, he even plays one himself—a grand, no-bullshit version of Martha Graham. So one thing’s for sure: The six lower-Manhattan locations of his latest endeavor, Hostile Takeover, presented as part of the ongoing Sitelines series, will be decked out with an unadulterated dose of pretty.

“I’ve become really obsessed with Butoh, and so much of Butoh is associated with old men, right?” Move says in his cozy West Side apartment. “I thought it would be fun and interesting to bring it into the 21st century, at least from a gender perspective—to use the vocabulary and the ideas of Butoh, but performed by young, beautiful women.”

The “dance installations,” as Move calls them, begin on Monday 18 at South Street Seaport with Hesperornis Regalis (Latin for “seabird”), performed by Celeste Hastings. “She will become an aquatic seabird with the Waterfalls as backdrop,” Move explains, adding with a laugh: “She has a big job, creating a nest and incubating eggs, which she’s going to do on the Seaport atrium.”

Hostile Takeover culminates on August 25 with Dances at a Gathering, in which all the performers congregate for a grand finale, also at South Street Seaport. Move’s plan is to make it as much of a party as a performance, inspired by his work as a director of large-scale special events. “I’ve been doing these installation performances for a dozen years now at places like the Cannes Film Festival and the VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards,” he says. “So I started to explore Butoh in the context of these big social events. [This kind of work] has become a live-art-installation-meets-dance-performance-meets-live-mannequin-meets-showroom-model.”

Each piece in Hostile Takeover is roughly a 60-minute solo (Move is intrigued by endurance). Dawn Dunning performs Mariko Mori Musings, inspired by Japanese anime, on Tuesday 19; Blakeley White-McGuire transforms herself into Red Cicciolina, an homage to Jeff Koons’s ex-wife, the porn star and former Italian parliament member Cicciolina, on Wednesday 20; Katherine Crockett, the statuesque Graham star, appears in the Hermès window in La Danse du Hermès on August 21; and Catherine Cabeen will metamorphose into a white horse in Cavalla Bianca, at the Fulton Fish Market on August 22.

For Cabeen, a former member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company who trained extensively in the Graham technique, working with Move has given her a new appreciation for beauty. “At Graham, I was really frustrated by the artifice that was on top of the actual physicality of the art form,” she says. “My relationship to femininity is just not that iconic, glamorous woman thing. I’m much more of the butch-aesthetic kind of woman. But Richard made me realize that switching into a glamorous character is actually an incredible gift; it’s a real opportunity to transcend my own sense of self.”

Move creates his dance installations from a visual and visceral place, but in the case of Hostile Takeover, the ramifications of the downtown locations also intrigued him. “The financial world is still such a boys’ club, period, end of story,” he says. “The image of these strong female creatures placed in the midst of all of this also became an intriguing and inspirational concept for this project. How does a beautiful woman fit into the world of hostile takeovers? I guess my answer is: She doesn’t.”

Move has long been captivated by female artists. “There’s an expression and a depth and a profundity that I think women have that a lot of male artists lack,” he says. “These are all huge generalizations, but I think women are more impassioned and articulate. I’m like Gloria Steinem.” He roars with laughter. “Clearly I’m interested in this idea of the outsider or the underdog. That’s one of the big themes in the Martha show. And from a design standpoint, I have so many more options with women. What would I do with a man in the Hermès window? ”

Hostile Takeover will be performed Mon 18–Aug 25 at various sites in lower Manhattan.