January 5-12

Founded, Directed and Curated by Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor, American Realness returns January 5-12, 2017, for its eighth consecutive season. Now under the leadership of Gibney Dance with Pryor as its new Director of Performance & Residencies, American Realness will continue to work with founding partner Abrons Arts Center, as well as other institutions throughout the city. The festival’s PERFORMANCE program utilizes theaters at Abrons and Gibney Dance’s Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center to construct a constellation of dance and performance works featuring five world premieres, four U.S. premieres, and six encore engagements for a total of fifty-three performances of sixteen productions over eight days. The program additionally includes a PROCESS program featuring new works in development and a DISCOURSE program curated by Ali Rosa-Sales that features public conversations and commissioned essays for READING, the American Realness online journal.

American Realness calls attention to new artistic production from socially and aesthetically marginal and subversive artists tearing at the boundaries of form and wrestling with the realities of identity. Through visual, visceral and text-based explorations of perception, sensation, form and attention, the artists of American Realness propose ruptures in the fabric of contemporary thought. Exploring fugitivity, empathy, inscripture, erasure, the labor of being the other, the breakdown of white-supremacist hierarchies, the thumping bass of pop culture, and the economy of performance, American Realness celebrates the artistic practice and value of the other in an American-focused, globally minded context. This is realness as resistance.

American Realness 2017 Presents:
Five World Premieres:
• Big Dance Theater, Cage Shuffle
• Ni’Ja Whitson / The NWA Project, A meditation on tongues
• Mx. Oops / Wendell Cooper, Carrying Capacity
• AmeriSHOWZ, Circle of Champions 2017 Co-Presented with Mount Tremper Arts Ivo Dimchev, Songs and Book

Four US Premieres:
• Meg Stuart, An evening of solo works Co-Presented with Goethe-Institut and the Federal Foreign Office of Germany
• Dana Michel, Mercurial George
• Ligia Lewis, minor matter Co-Presented with Lumberyard, formerly American Dance Institute/ADI
• Karol Tyminski, This is a musical

Six Encore Engagements:
• Will Rawls, The Planet-Eaters: Seconds
• Jen Rosenblit, Clap Hands
• Kimberly Bartosik, Étroits sont les Vaisseaux
• Juliana May, ADULT DOCUMENTARY
• Tina Satter/Half Straddle, Ghost Rings
• Trajal Harrell, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (S)

INSTALLATION
• Franklin Evans, XLtime
• The Bureau for the Future of Choreography, US in the US

PROCESS
• Cynthia Oliver, Virago-Man Dem
• Big Dance Theater, 17c
• In the Works, Studio Showings from Gibney Dance’s Dance in Process resident artists and guests

DISCOURSE
• READING, Commissioned essays from Katie Brewer Ball, Maya Harakawa, Danielle Jackson, Ikechukwu Casmir Onyewuenyi, and Kieran Swann
• Artist/Admin 5: Marketing, Moderated by David Borgonjon
• Aesthetics live within the structure of whiteness just like we do, A Workshop with Jaime Shearn Coan
• shift/shape, Tara Willis with Ligia Lewis, Dana Michel and Ni’Ja Whitson
• The Incomprehensible Negro, M. Lamar in conversation with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

PARTY
• Trajal Harrell, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (XL) / The Publication