The Brooklyn Rail

Early on a Saturday afternoon at the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument plaza in Fort Greene Park, adults and children enjoying their weekends were treated to an extraordinary sight. Four young women in dark blue mesh over crop tops and shorts suddenly appeared at the top of the plaza’s stairs, walked in perfect unison to the monument, and delivered an intense, almost militaristic percussive dance that transformed a familiar image of New York City summer—girls jumping rope—into a profound assertion of feminine strength and autonomy.

Intriguingly, this dance troupe is not from the city, or even the United States. Parini Secondo rather hails from Emilia-Romagna, a small town in central Italy near Bologna. Over the last week, they’ve performed Hit Out in a number of public spaces as part of New York’s new international public arts festival, the Down to Earth Festival. Spearheaded and run by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center and working with city parks and local community organizations, Down to Earth offered a wide range of free performances in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan parks, from tightrope walking and opera installations to a documentary theater piece about New York nannies.

Along with Hit Out, Brooklyn played host to many other thrilling dance performances. Québécois circus troupe Cirque Kikasse rolled up to Brooklyn Commons Park in a food truck at lunch time, then launched into an aerial dance show in, around, and on top of the truck, after which they sold food and drink out of it. And on Sunday, the Brooklyn dancing collective FLEXX spent an hour at the Navy Yard’s Agger Fish Building offering flexing street-dance performances and instruction about the art form.

Where Hit Out was somehow both confronting and enigmatic, like a glimpse into an alien world, Cirque Kikasse’s SANTÉ! was broadly comedic, with each of the five troupe members bringing their own delightful character to the mix. To watch these talented acrobats fly around their truck was immensely satisfying. The incongruity of them soaring and spinning in the air in the midst of this otherwise ordinary scene, lunchtime at the park, brought a giddy, almost childlike feeling of wonder and release.

At the same time, every choice, from the smallest hand gesture or facial expression to the silliness they sprinkled on different scenes—the earnest aide dancing as the others passed juggling pins around the entire surface of the truck; two characters playing Jenga while their boss did handstands on chairs balanced thirty-five feet in the air—added layers of craft and entertainment to each moment.

The five members of FLEXX, too, delivered performances of incredible physical precision, each muscle and bone seemingly able to move independent of every other. The result was a series of visceral, often contorted snapshots, bodies twisted and turned like something out of a horror movie, and yet offered to us as a kind of revelation, a reconsideration of the weird and monstrous as surprisingly human. Somehow those moments also flowed together into highly emotional stories reminiscent of the graceful scene painting of sword play in Chinese wuxia. Flexn as an art form draws heavily from movies and television for inspiration and motif, leaders Quamaine Daniels and Reggie Gray explained. And, indeed, each performance burst with pop culture references, like hypertext reconceived as embodied poetry.

For as different as the performances were, what they shared—and what makes Down to Earth such an exciting innovation for an arts festival—was an interest in bolstering and transforming the environments in which they were presented. Says Sissj Bassani of Parini Secondo, “We like how performance can activate the space, the characteristics that it has aesthetically. You take a piece of art and put it there and immediately the space becomes something new.” So at Fort Greene, the broad staircase by which the monument is accessed became the vehicle for dramatic entrance, and its plaza an impromptu theater in the round.

Similarly, FLEXX took the cavernous Agger Fish Building, with its feeling of something long abandoned, and recast it as opportunity. In their hands, it became stage, classroom, and something more, a setting in which a group of strangers could become a community. Though no politics of any kind were ever mentioned, there still seemed to be something political about the way Daniels and Gray’s free-flowing narrative, and the artistry of their dancers, brought everyone together in the space.

For Cirque Kikasse, being embedded in the local extends even beyond the performance space. “We partner with local farmers, food providers, and brewers everywhere we go,” says Cirque Kikasse co-founder William Poliquin-Simms. On every level, he explains, “It’s about connection.”

Frank Hentschker, who co-founded and runs Down to Earth with Elena Siyanko, agreed:

Theater is for everybody. And it also has to be a form of resistance, of protest. At a time when some theaters are closing because of the changes in funding from the current administration, the insecurities of the financial climate, and big foundations moving away from the arts, and everybody else is tripling their prices, we say, “We’ll do something big and it’s all for free.” And if we can do it, as a very tiny not-for-profit, look what can be possible.