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Big Dance Theater
Cage Shuffle
WORLD PREMIERE
Saturday, January 7, 4:00pm – SOLD OUT* & 7:00pm – SOLD OUT*
Sunday, January 8, 4:00pm – SOLD OUT* & 7:00pm
* A waiting list will begin 30 minutes before each performance.
Run Time: 50 minutes
Abrons Arts Center, Studio G05
466 Grand Street / Tickets $20
In Cage Shuffle Paul Lazar speaks a series of one-minute stories by John Cage from his 1963 score Indeterminacy while simultaneously performing choreography by Annie-B Parson. The stories are spoken in a random order with no predetermined relationship to the dancing. Chance serves up its startling blend of inevitable and uncanny connections between text and movement. With live tape and digital collage scored and performed by composer Lea Bertucci.
“…Read all ninety stories in order or select a smaller number, using chance procedures or not.”
Indeterminacy performance instructions by John Cage
Cage Shuffle is a production of Big Dance Theater and made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Additionally, the production received funding from the Starry Night Fund; the W Trust; the McGue Millhiser Family Trust; Mertz Gilmore Foundation; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New York Theater Program; and was also funded, in part, by the Big Dance Theater Creation Circle, lead individual contributors committed to the development and support of the company’s newest works.
Video Still by Michael Almereyda
Created and performed – Paul Lazar
Music composed and performed – Lea Bertucci
Choreography – Annie-B Parson
Movement Coach – Elizabeth DeMent
Produced – Aaron Mattocks/Big Dance Theater
Production Manager – Brendan Regimbal
Paul Lazar is a founding member and co-artistic director, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Walker Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop, Classic Stage Company and Japan Society. Outside of Big Dance, Paul directed Howard Fishman’s A Star Has Burnt My Eye at BAM in 2016, Christina Masciotti’s Social Security at the Bushwick Starr in 2015, Elephant Room at St. Ann’s Warehouse for the company Rainpan 43 in 2012, and Young Jean Lee’s Obie Award winning, We’re Gonna Die in 2011. He directed a new version of We’re Gonna Die in 2015, featuring David Byrne, at the Meltdown Festival in London. He also directed Bodycast: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Frances McDormand for the 2014 BAM Next Wave Festival; and Major Bang for The Foundry Theatre at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Paul has performed with the Wooster Group in Brace Up!, Emperor Jones, North Atlantic and The Hairy Ape. Other stage acting credits include Tamburlaine at Theatre For A New Audience, Young Jean Lee’s Lear, The Three Sisters at Classic Stage Company, Richard Maxwell’s Cowboys and Indians at Soho Rep, Richard III at Classic Stage Company, Svejk at Theatre for a New Audience, Irene Fornes’ Mud at the Signature Theater, and Mac Wellman’s 1965 UU. He has acted in over 30 feature films, including Snowpiercer, The Host, Mickey Blue Eyes, Silence of the Lambs, Beloved, Lorenzo’s Oil and Philadelphia. His awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award in 2007, and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award in 2014, as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Paul currently teaches at New York University. He has also taught at Yale, Rutgers, The William Esper Studio and The Michael Howard Studio.
Lea Bertucci is an American sound artist, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. Her work often incorporates multi-channel speaker arrays, electroacoustic feedback, extended instrumental/vocal technique, and tape collage. As an instrumentalist, she takes an idiosyncratic approach to the amplification of woodwind instruments, creating organic yet electrified sonic interventions. Her debut solo LP, Resonance Shapes, was released in 2013 on the Obsolete Units label and has been praised by A Closer Listen as “A grand exploration of the possibilities inherent in sound”. She is a 2016 MacDowell Fellow in composition and a 2015 ISSUE Project Room Artist-in-Residence. Her discography includes a number of solo and collaborative releases on various underground independent labels in the US and Europe, most recently, Axis/Atlas, on Clandestine Compositions.
“Brilliantly entertaining.” – The New York Times
“Remarkably few artists who do it half as well.” – The New York Times
“No one can match Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar.” – The Village Voice
“It’s hard to do justice to the freewheeling brilliance of Big Dance Theater.” – The New York Times
“See the work of Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar whenever possible.” – The New York Times
Big Dance Theater
17c
Curated by Craig Peterson
Wednesday, January 11, 8:00pm
Thursday, January 12, 8:00pm
Run Time: 60 minutes
Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway Entrance at 53A Chambers Street / Free / RSVP GibneyDance.org
17c is the newest Big Dance Theater ensemble work, built around the problematic 17th century diaries of Samuel Pepys. Pepys danced, sang, strummed, shopped, strove, bullied and groped—and he recorded all of it in his diary, completely unfiltered. Using all the data to be found—the copiously prolific diaries themselves, Margaret Cavendish’s 17th century radical feminist play The Convent of Pleasure, three centuries of marginalia, and the ongoing annotations of the web-based devotees at www.pepysdiary.com – 17c dismantles an unchallenged historical figure and embodies the women’s voices omitted from Pepys’ intimate portrait of his life. Big Dance Theater continues its formal fascination with building systems of dance that challenge theater, while allowing the structure of the work itself to bring contemporary meaning to the making and un-making of our subjective past.
17c is produced by Big Dance Theater and co-commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts/UNC Chapel Hill, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Philadelphia FringeArts, the Old Vic/London, The Yard (Chilmark, MA), Diane and Adam E. Max, Virginia and Timothy Millhiser, the Starry Night Fund, and the Heimbinder Family Foundation. 17c is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 17c is also funded, in part, by the Big Dance Theater Creation Circle, individual contributors committed to the development and support of the company’s newest works.
Photo by Jeff Larson
Trajal Harrell
Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (XL) / The Publication
Publication Release Party
Friday, January 6, 11:00pm
Abrons Arts Center, Main Gallery
466 Grand Street / FREE
American Realness 2017 presents the digital publication release of Trajal Harrell’s Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (XL). (XL), co-edited in collaboration with Thibault Lac and Tom Engels, is the final work in Harrell’s epic Twenty Looks… series, all of which has been seen at American Realness between 2010 and 2017. The release is accompanied by an installation, entitled XLtime created by visual artist Franklin Evans made in collaboration with (XL).
Image courtesy of Trajal Harrell
Tina Satter/Half Straddle, Ghost Rings
January 8-10
The Incomprehensible Negro
M. Lamar & Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
in conversation
Tuesday January 10, 11:00am – 1:00pm
Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater
466 Grand Street / FREE / RSVP
“I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.”
—Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
Structured as a conversation collapsing strategies of performance as life practice, theory, and public discourse, The Incomprehensible Negro reveals the internal life worlds and creative practices of two artists whose creative work have been deeply inspired by the black radical tradition. Over the course of a 75 minute performance-discussion, artists M. Lamar and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko expand upon how Black theory, scholarship, literature and music have influenced them as performance makers and thinkers.
*The Incomprehensible Negro is a concept coined by M. Lamar
Photo by Scott Shaw
shift/shape
Tara Aisha Willis with Ligia Lewis, Dana Michel and Ni’Ja Whitson
Monday January 9, 11:00am – 1:00pm
Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater
466 Grand Street / FREE / RSVP
A conversation bringing together performance-makers Ligia Lewis, Dana Michel and Ni’Ja Whitson, who contend with the symbolic, corporeal and affective terms of blackness, each from distinct approaches to practice and performance. Bodies navigating through (and as) the emotional and historical landscapes of racial politics; shape-shifters activating and fragmenting recognizable identity signifiers and the stage’s familiar conventions. How do black bodily experiences arrive in the intimacy (and alienation) of the present moment in performance? Moderated by Tara Aisha Willis.
Photo by Camille McOuat
Aesthetics live within the structure of whiteness just like we do
Moderated by Jaime Shearn Coan, with Emily Berry, Moira Brennan, Cori Olinghouse, Craig Peterson, Jesse Phillips-Fein, and EmmaGrace Skove-Epes
Saturday January 7, 11:00am – 2:00pm
ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place / Free / RSVP
For this event, white dance artists, presenters, funders, and writers will reflect on how their practices are informed by and operate within white aesthetic supremacy, and how they have worked to visibilize and challenge the normalization of whiteness in their dance communities and within their particular positions in the field. With the intention of shifting the labor often placed on artists of color in discussions of racial equity to white artists, the remarks of the opening white-identified speakers will serve as starting points for the consequent conversation. This event will feature presentations/conversations on three topics: 1. How white aesthetic supremacy structures the evaluation and reception of contemporary concert dance and experimental performance. 2. Identifying white aesthetics and cultural appropriation in dance-making practices. 3. Equity vs. Inclusion in presenting, funding and casting dance.
Image courtesty of Lakela Brown
Artist/Admin 5: Marketing
Moderated by David Borgonjon and Shama Rahman
Friday January 6, 11:00am – 1:00pm
Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, Studio H
280 Broadway Entrance at 53A Chambers Street / FREE / RSVP
Culture is as mediated as ever. Social media has amplified the documentation and reception of cultural production, while also providing more and more granular ways of quantifying the success of a work. What are ways that artists and administrators think about marketing as a cultural practice? How can differing versions of work be presented to different audiences (or, say, markets) and to what extent does this liberate or hamper artistry? This session is co-facilitated with J. Soto and Alex Rodabaugh.
Artist/Admin is a space for artists and administrators to discuss + create new forms of the cultural institution. Readings and/or viewings will be circulated beforehand.
Image courtesy of David Borgonjon
Tina Satter / Half Straddle
Ghost Rings
Sunday, January 8, 10:00pm
Monday, January 9, 2:30pm & 8:30pm
Tuesday, January 10, 2:30pm
Run Time: 60 minutes
Abrons Arts Center, Playhouse
466 Grand Street / Tickets $20
In Ghost Rings a narrative of friendship and family-making unfurls through a pop song cycle that burrows and soars with a mix of deadpan magical realism and a thoroughly feminist worldview. Playwright and performer Tina Satter, songwriters and performers Chris Giarmo and Erin Markey and performer Kristen Sieh form a family band of yesteryear as they offer a tender and harrowingly funny, visual and sonic experience that traverses unexpected layers of romance.
“This is the sky for you.”
Ghost Rings was commissioned by New York Live Arts for its 50 & Change Commission series with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional support provided by the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Ghost Rings was created through residencies at the Performing Garage, the Orchard Project, and Pataphysics Playwriting Workshop.
Photo by Maria Baranova
Written and Directed – Tina Satter
Performed – Chris Giarmo, Erin Markey, Tina Satter, Kristen Sieh
Music Composed – Chris Giarmo and Erin Markey
Arrangements, Music Direction and Sound Design – Chris Giarmo
Set Design – Parker Lutz
Light Design – Chris Kuhl
Costume Design – Enver Chakartash
Costume Assistants – Michaela Murphy, Carter Kidd
Make-Up Design – Naomi Raddatz
Production and Stage Management – Randi Rivera
Producer – Nina Segal
Tina Satter is an American writer, director, and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn-based, Obie-winning theater company Half Straddle. She is a recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award; a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Award, and was named an Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York. She has written and directed 9 full-length shows and a number of smaller performance and video pieces with Half Straddle that have premiered in New York City. Tina’s work has been presented at theaters and festivals in Europe, Asia, Australia, and other U.S. cities.
Tina has had residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, LMCC, The Performing Garage, Kitchen L.A.B., MASS MoCA, and New Museum for Contemporary Art. She’s been a visiting artist at Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Reed College, and Fordham University—and a visiting playwriting professor at the University of Michigan. Drawing on her recent teaching work, Tina has been developing and leading generative writing and directing workshops to participants from a range of backgrounds and experience. Tina attended Mac Wellman’s graduate playwriting program at Brooklyn College and received an M.A. from Reed College and a B.A. from Bowdoin College. Her first collection of plays, Seagull (Thinking of you), was published by 53rd State Press in 2014.
Half Straddle is an Obie-winning, Brooklyn-based ensemble of performers and designers that makes plays, performances, videos, and music led by Artistic Director Tina Satter. This critically acclaimed company began in 2008, and has toured shows and work throughout the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Asia. In New York City, the company’s work has been presented at The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, New Museum, Danspace, PS122, Bushwick Starr, Dixon Place, and PRELUDE Festival.
Chris Giarmo is an artist, performer and designer living in New Orleans. He’s composed music for/sound designed all of Half Straddle’s shows since 2008 including Ancient Lives, House of Dance and Seagull (Thinking of you). He has also sound designed works by Young Jean Lee, Faye Driscoll, Jackie Sibblies Drury and other NY-based performance-makers. Recently, he sang backup for Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music and was the Associate Producer of David Byrne’s Contemporary Color. He’s performed with Big Dance Theater since 2005 and is the creator of YouTube creator, beauty guru and drag queen, Kimberly Clark. chrisgiarmo.com
Kristen Sieh is a founding member of The TEAM, with whom she co-wrote and performed RoosevElvis (The Royal Court, Walker Arts Center, The A.R.T., The Vineyard, etc.) and 4 other plays. Other credits include: Atlantic Theater Company (The Band’s Visit), The Public Theater (Fortress of Solitude, February House), Classic Stage Company (Iphigenia in Anne Washburn’s Iphigenia in Aulis), Playwrights Horizons/Clubbed Thumb (Men on Boats), The Foundry (O, Earth), Pig Iron (Viola in Twelfth Night), Ripe Time (The World is Round at BAM), Elevator Repair Service (Gatz, The Sound and the Fury, etc.), Banana, Bag & Bodice (Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage), The Builders Association, The New Group, The O’Neill Center, The 52nd St. Project, and others. Regional credits include Syracuse Stage, Denver Center Theater, Long Wharf, and Baltimore CenterStage. TV: “House of Cards,” “Orange is the New Black,” “The Blacklist,” “Boardwalk Empire,” and “Law & Order.”
“Ms. Satter is a genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist who has developed an ardent following among downtown aesthetes with a taste for acidic eye candy and erotic enigmas.”
– Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“Satter’s Half Straddle company is launching a particularly coordinated goal-line drive to a new feminist form.” – Helen Shaw, Time Out New York
“In a way, those two worlds—that of women’s sports and Henry James’s universe— inform Satter’s visually ascetic, physical, and feminist work.” – Hilton Als, The New Yorker
Mx. Oops / Wendell Cooper
Carrying Capacity
WORLD PREMIERE
Sunday, January 8, 7:00pm – SOLD OUT*
Monday, January 9, 5:30pm
Tuesday, January 10, 8:30pm
*A waiting list will begin 30 minutes before each performance.
Run Time: 60 minutes
Abrons Arts Center, Playhouse
466 Grand Street / Tickets $20
Beyond identity is the plasma of oneness; a dream space, both physical and energetic, that can hold the fullness of we. Carrying Capacity is a speculative journey mixing the sacred and profane. It asks—what is the connection between our capacity to love ourselves as simultaneously sexual, spiritual, and social beings with our collective future on this dusty rock? Mx. Oops / Wendell Cooper performs a multimedia ritual using sound meditation, urban dance, video projection, and rap, within an installation by sculptor Jasmine Murrell; featuring guest choreography and performance by Slim Ninja. The soul is invoked, gender is rendered ephemeral, and together we contemplate, in celebration, the sometimes unfortunate profundity of embodiment. For a preparatory guided meditation, visit mxoops.com.
Photo by Stan Pierson, bodypaint by Charly Joaquin Dominguez
Choreography, Video, Costume, Music / Lyrics – Wendell Cooper / Mx. Oops
Music – Christopher Edmondson / Omen Phaze
Sculpture – Jasmine Murrell
Costume (Singlets) – Yozmit
Jewelry – Renee Alberts
Choreography, Performance – Jason Anthony Rodriguez / Slim Ninja
Performance – Timothy Edwards
Performance – Shekoya Gordon
Performance – Graziella Murdocca
Performance – Phe-Be Smith
Wendell Cooper/Mx. Oops is a multimedia performance artist focused on the intersection of urban arts and consciousness studies; rapping and dancing within video installations. A certified yoga instructor (500hr RYT) and practitioner of Thai Yoga Massage, he is also trained in various forms of energy healing. His work has toured Kenya, China, Russia, the Netherlands, and has been presented in NYC venues such as HERE Arts Center, Santos Party House, The Box, Dixon Place, Joyce Soho, and Harlem Stage. His work has been supported by the Jerome Foundation Travel Study Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York Live Arts Suitcase Fund, and as a Cultural Enjoy of the U.S. State Department in Kenya. Cooper studied dance and religion at the George Washington University and completed an Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College. He currently teaches in Lehman College’s Dance (BA) and Multimedia Performing Arts (BFA) Programs.
Christopher Edmondson (aka Omen Phaze) is an electronic music producer, writer, visual and performing artist. With a specialization in large scale electronic music production, he has toured extensively across the United States and composed music for several artists including: Conspirator, The Disco Biscuits, and Untamed.
Jasmine Murrell is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist. She has a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from Hunter College. Her works has been exhibited nationally and internationally for the past decade, in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art and Bronx Museum, Witte de With Contemporary Art, Art Basel and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Amsterdam News, NY1 News and The Detroit News.
Yozmit is a Los Angeles based singer song writer, visual performance artist. Through the ritualistic performance art, Yozmit combines theater, dance, pop culture, fashion, gender identity, mythology and shamanism onto a single canvas. She sees her art as a form of research that helps define the unknown mysteries of her universe. She is currently working on ‘Do You’ – music/fashion/performance art campaign which uses the imagery and a ‘Pop Star’ iconography of contemporary stardom as a vehicle for engagement towards our own path of self-discovery with the intention of reminding everyone that we all are ‘Star Seeds’. Yozmit utilizes her art that is presented to a mainstream audience as a medium of healing of the human consciousness.
Renee Alberts‘ poetry, music, and visual art have appeared in print, dance performances, live radio shows, and at least one tattoo. She is author of the poetry collections No Water and As They Fall and editor of Natural Language. As Animoon Workshop, she and co-founder Cathie Coleman create jewelry and collage art. animoonworkshop.com
Jason Anthony Rodriguez, native of New York City, quietly grew up within a niche of the vogue community. He studied at Brockport College and furthered his training at Purchase College to excel his technique by training with the Conservatory of Dance as an Arts Management major. He has been recently seen on the Netflix series “The Get Down” directed by Baz Luhrmann as a featured voguer. He has performed with Abraham.In.Motion, Camille A Brown and Dancers, and Buglisi Dance Theatre. Now, he is personal/rehearsal assistant for Kevin Wynn. He is a voguer/choreographer for the Iconic House of Ninja and has recently premiered his work “Immersion in Vogue” at Summerstage 2016. Gia Kourlas of The NY Times has recently mentioned his work “a vibrant performance…promising…“Immersion in Vogue,” by Jason Rodriguez or Slim Ninja.”
Dancer, choreographer and teacher Timothy Edwards, a Hawai1i native, began his journey into dance at the age of fourteen when he stepped in his first dance class, African dance. From that day on his teacher, Desiree Kramer, would give him the tools and inspiration to pursue his new found dance dream. After receiving his B.A. in Dance at Hunter College, Timothy now works with David Dorfman Dance Company, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, Eva Dean Dance as well as other NYC companies and choreographers. He has had the honor of teaching nationally and internationally Hip Hop, Breaking and other street styles.
Shekoya Gordon grew up in Bronx, New York and graduated Cum Laude from Lehman College
with her Dance B.A. She has trained with Ni’Ja Whitson, Michael Manswell, Amy Larimer, Wendell Cooper, Vangeline and Eddie Taketa. In the last two years she has been apart of sixteen works from various artists and also produced five of her own. She has performed works by Ephrat Asherie, Michael Manswell, Ni’Ja Whitson, Stephen Hill, Emylice Landestoy, Brittany Wilson and Vangeline. This would be her second time working with Wendell Cooper. Her work has been presented at the Lovinger Theater and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance.
Graziella Murdocca is a native New Yorker who began her dance training at age 3. She graduated from Hunter College with a BA in Mathematics and Dance. Currently, she dances for In Mixed Company, The Next Stage Project, Shawnbibledanceco, Bare Dance Company and Dante Brown|Warehouse Dance. She is excited to share the stage with Mx. Oops/Wendell Cooper and the entire Carrying Capacity cast!
Phe-be Smith is a Dance major, Middle/High School Education minor currently attending Lehman College. Smith has studied at Bronx Dance Theatre, Mind Builder’s Creative Arts Center, and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams School for the Performing Arts, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the Ailey School with a focus in Ballet, Modern, Contemporary Modern, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Salsa and Liturgical Dance. She has performed throughout the tri- state area with Young Dancemakers Company, CityKids Repertory Company, Hip-Hop Theory, and The Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory, The Herbert H. Dance Company and The Bronx Repertory Company.