Wild, wild West

The ingredients of a new show at P.S. 122 are relatively simple: Take an album (Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak), add a singular group of choreographers to interpret each song (including downtown icons like Jennifer Monson and Ann Liv Young) and call it a night (WHY WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!!). “When the album came out, it seemed destined to have a show attached to it,” says Neal Medlyn, one of the show’s organizers. “That album just felt so important and so theatrical.”

For the group performance, inspired by West’s 2008 album and conceived by Brendan Kennedy, another point of departure is the Joffrey Ballet’s 1993 Billboards; the production featured four choreographers and the music of Prince. (A bit like the musical version of Carrie, it remains infamous.) Kennedy learned of Billboards through his partner, Kenny Mellman, who will perform a number to West’s “Street Lights” in the program. “As a tradition on Thanksgiving, Kenny had been watching the Prince ballet, and that was passed on to me,” Kennedy explains. “I was fascinated that this whole huge thing came out of pop music and with the idea that I could do that again but with an artist that was relevant to me. I picked Kanye.”

Copresented by Medlyn and Catch, a series that showcases emerging and experimental dance and performance, the concept behind WHY WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!! is that it will flow along like the album. As Medlyn sees it, “The work of all these people using one important album might be a way of looking at downtown dance similarly to the Joffrey folks using those Prince songs. I think we were all pretty uninterested in making a variety show or a showcase of one act after another. We wanted it to be a show. It’s a very hard album to imagine: how a high-energy person performs this cold, internal material, and how dance—somehow being so nonverbal and abstract—makes something weird and special happen.”

Medlyn is performing “Welcome to Heartbreak” and “Pinocchio Story”—he appreciates the first for its explicit sadness and the latter for its bizarre journal-entry approach. “It seems like a song where you’d ask everyone to turn off their cameras and that you’d want to just do to a live audience and then kind of forget happened,” he says of “Pinocchio Story.” “So its strange in-between-ness kind of makes me feel weird. In a good way.”

Kennedy, who works at MTV News—he hopes, through his contacts there, to entice West to attend—regards 808s & Heartbreak as a seminal album. It was written shortly after West’s mother died from complications following surgery and after he broke up with his girlfriend.

“He was branching off to more singing,” Kennedy explains. “I know he had done it in the past, but he’s really trying to be a full-blown artist as opposed to a rap star. Because of the solid beats I thought the music was really about movement. This album in particular doesn’t lend itself to booty-shaking girls in a music video. It’s more soundscapes, and I thought it would be really cool to watch performers live it. As far as dance goes, that album makes me want to dance in a way that’s not fit for a club.”

Monson, who will perform “Amazing,” is a revered downtown improviser and choreographer—she has long made dance that, in Kennedy’s words, is not fit for a club. “The whole project is so intriguing to me,” she says. “I go back and forth between wanting to do a delicate, monster improvisational dance to wanting to dress up and have back-up dancers like Jennifer Miller and Carmelita. As someone who is from another planet when it comes to pop culture, I was interested in the challenge of engaging with this song. It’s hard for me to dance with the music.”

She chose her song a bit randomly. “There were only a few songs left and I think it was the first song I listened to,” Monson adds. “I relate to him being a monster and being a problem that will never be solved. There is something about being misunderstood or not fitting in with a kind of magnificent power that I relate to. It’s odd to find these empathetic connections across such different cultural backgrounds, and it’s interesting that the video is shot in the jungle. There seems to be a way he relates to being wild that I resonate with. It’s all a mystery to me at the moment. It makes me really uncomfortable—so that’s a good sign.”

Choreographer’s playlist
Overture (new material) Justin Jones and Elliott Durko Lynch

1. “Say You Will” Karinne Keithley
2. “Welcome to Heartbreak” Neal Medlyn
3. “Heartless” Christine Elmo
4. “Amazing” Jennifer Monson
5. “Love Lockdown” Ann Liv Young
6. “Paranoid” Myles Kane
7. “RoboCop” Varsity Interpretive Dance Squad
8. “Street Lights” Kenny Mellman
9. “Bad News” Dance Gang
10. “See You In My Nightmares” Asubtout (Katy Pyle and Eleanor Hullihan)
11. “Coldest Winter” Juliana F. May/May Dance
12. “Pinocchio Story” Neal Medlyn

WHY WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!! will be performed at P.S. 122 July 30–Aug 1.

See more in Dance