Created by Antonio Ramos in collaboration with the performers
Performed by Luke Miller, Rebecca Wender, Darrin Wright, Alvaro Gonzalez, Adele Loux-Turner, Rennie Lachlan McDougall and Antonio Ramos

www.antoniodance.com

Created and Performed by Yvonne Meier
Costumes, Props and Installation by Yvonne Meier
Lighting by Michael Stiller
Production Assistance by Lorene Bouboushian

Originally from Zurich, Switzerland, Yvonne Meier has lived and worked in New York City since 1979, where she became a member of the original group around Performance Space 122, regularly collaborating with Ishmael Houston-Jones and many others in the US and Europe. Her work, spanning anywhere from big spectacles to quiet solos, has been supported by three Fellowships in Choreography from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, NEA Inter Arts, Franklin Furnace and Pro Helvetia. The American Master Piece program of the NEA has supported the reconstruction of her performance-instillation work, The Shining. She has received three “Bessie” Awards for her works The Shining (1993 and 2011) and Stolen (2009). She has twice been supported through the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence program. Meier has been teaching Releasing Technique and Authentic Movement nationally and internationally for the last 30 years. After a life-long commitment to improvisation she has developed her own improvisation technique known as Scores. Meier also teaches children’s dance classes in NY Public Schools through Movement Research’s Dance Makers program.

Michael Stiller’s introduction to improvisational dance and performance came in 1984, when Yvonne Meier asked him to design her new piece and then promptly taped him to the floor. Ever since, Michael has been lighting shows by performing artists here and abroad, including Neil Greenberg, Dancenoise, and Ishmael Houston-Jones. In recent decades Michael’s lighting practice has expanded to encompass just about anything that moves, as well as buildings and architecture, which he particularly likes to light because they do not.

Lorene Bouboushian is a performance artist and educator. She has shown work in Zagreb, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and has taught in Beirut, Puebla, and Athens. Recent works have involved hysterical sink baths, skewering diversity narratives, asking the audience to run errands, and attempting to reach sensory thresholds in complete blindness. Influential collaborators include punk singer Whitney Allen, performance artist Kaia Gilje, and musicians Valerie Kuehne and Matthew Gantt. She is grateful to know Yvonne, and to have the opportunity to help make this work happen. It’s been a wild time, y’all. www.lorenebouboushian.wordpress.com

Choreographer by Keith Hennessy
Performed by Sara Shelton Mann
Original Music and Sound Design by Norman Rutherford
Production Management by Alec White
Lighting Design by Grisel Torres

Sara Shelton Mann is a legendary dance artist who has played a significant role in shaping
contemporary dance performance and choreography. She is a protégé of Nikolais and Louis in NYC in the 60s, Sara is also deeply influenced by Contact Improvisation. From 1979-96 Sara directed Contraband, a ground-breaking troupe of artists working at the leading edges of contemporary dance, ritual, and music. She has received five Isadora Duncan Awards, a SFBG Goldie for Lifetime Achievement, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow. Integrating chi cultivation and improvisation, Sara has taught dance in the Bay Area and internationally for over four decades. Sara has many years of study in various spiritual traditions, shamanic practices, and healing trainings. Her healing practice is deeply woven or embodied in her approaches to dancing, choreography, teaching, activism, writing, and community building.

Norman Rutherford has been creating music for works by Sara Shelton Mann for nearly 30-years. His first collaboration was in 1986 when he co-created the musical score for the first version of Contraband’s ground breaking piece Religare with Rinde Ekert, Gwen Jones, and Richard Klein. He then joined Contraband full time in 1989 to compose and direct the music for, and perform in, the 2nd version of Religare (also with Gwen Jones and Richard Klein), and all 3 pieces from the Mira Cycles. After Contraband disbanded in 1996, Norman worked with Anna Halprin, Bob Ernst, Keith Hennessy, and others, while continuing to create scores for Sara Shelton Mann and record with the instrumental group Closer To Carbon. Works by Sara that Norman has scored since the late 90’s include: Extravaganza, Monk at the Met, Monk, Lotus 695, Red Gold Sky, Tribes, and three of her recent solo works in the Eye of Leo series – The Love of Emptyness, C, and Future Life.

Keith Hennessy was born in northern Ontario, lives in San Francisco and tours internationally. His interdisciplinary research engages improvisation, ritual and public action as tools for investigating political realities. Hennessy directs CIRCO ZERO, and was a member of the collaborative performance companies: Contraband, CORE, and Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard. His recent solo Bear/Skin premiered at American Realness in NYC in Jan 2015 and toured the west coast and was shown at the zurichmoves! Festival in March 2015. 2013-14 teaching includes Ponderosa (Germany), Impulstanz (Vienna), AEx-Corps (Dakar), UBC (Kelowna), UC Davis, Texas Women’s University, HZT/Berlin, University of Performing Arts/Copenhagen, and La Alternativa (SF).

Hennessy directs Circo Zero, a laboratory for live performance that plays with genre and expectation. Rooted in dance, Hennessy’s work embodies a unique hybrid of performance art, music, visual and conceptual art, circus, and ritual. Keith has an MFA in Choreography and is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis. Despite narrowly surviving the last two waves of violent eviction and gentrification, and the forced

If dance lives in the bodies of the artists who perform it, then volumes of fascinating history reside in the limbs of Sara Shelton Mann… The title is a sly reference to the dance collective Contraband, which Mann founded in the 1980s and which disbanded in 1996. It’s not overstatement to say that Contraband, with its heady brew of art, politics, mysticism and activism, changed the landscape of modern dance theater, and Mann’s vision and energy were at the heart of it. “Sara (the Smuggler)” harnesses that same spirit.”
- Mary Ellen Hunt, SF Gate

Directed and conceived by Larissa Velez-Jackson.
Choreography, performance and live sound design in collaboration with Tyler Ashley and Talya Epstein.
Lighting Design by Kathy Kaufmann.
Performance and production coordination by Lillie De.
Visual Design by Ashleigh Wilkinson.

Larissa Velez-Jackson is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and hybrid artist who uses improvisation as a main tool for research and creation, focusing on personhood and the dancing/sound-making body. She employs a deep humor to grant audiences universal access to contemporary art’s critical discourse. She has presented work at numerous NYC venues such as: Museum of Art and Design, Roulette, PS 122, New Museum of Contemporary Art, (former) Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Fall Platform ’10, American Realness Festival ‘11 at Abrons Arts Center and Chocolate Factory Theater ’14. In 2011, she launched a song-and-dance collaboration with her husband Jon Velez-Jackson called Yackez, “The World’s Most Loveable Art-Pop Duo.” Velez-Jackson was a Movement Research Artist in Residence ’12-’13, a SPARC resident ’13 with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and most recently an El Museo Del Barrio Artist in Residence ‘14. In 2012 she attended the danceWEB scholarship program of Impulstanz Int’l Dance Festival by way of the ’12 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. She will premiere a full-length commission at New York Live Arts in 2016 that incorporates her multimedia collaborative, Yackez with her senior aerobics students onstage.
www.larissavelez.com

“The Bessie nominators singled out Talya Epstein for her gonzo performance in Larissa Velez-Jackson’s Star Crap Method, an anarchic show that was improvised on the spot every night. In an 80s-inspired, Warhol-meets-Punky-Brewster wonderland, dancers Velez-Jackson, Epstein and Tyler Ashley collectively created a deliberately “amateur” spectacle by making up movement and even songs; in that mayhem, Epstein was a bizarre tornado of movement who seemed to be trying to embody Cher and Richard Simmons and Andy Kaufman…at the same time.”
- Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

“What if you threw it all out? The pretense, the fourth wall, the virtuosity (technical and/or conceptual), the things that make a show a show. No, this isn’t a Judson Dance Theater redux; this is Larissa Velez-Jackson’s infectious Star-Crap Method, which received its premiere at The Chocolate Factory. Velez-Jackson abandons the artifice of traditional performance and, with co-creators and dancers Tyler Ashley and Talya Epstein, constructs a piece in the moment.”
- Erin Bomboy, The Dance Enthusiast

Created and Performed by Keith Hennessy and Jassem Hindi
Lighting Design by Dennis Doescher

Keith Hennessy was born in a mining town in Northern Ontario, Canada, lives in San Francisco, and works regularly in Europe. He is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer. Hennessy directs Circo Zero, a laboratory for live performance that plays with genre and expectation. Rooted in dance, Hennessy’s work embodies a unique hybrid of performance art, music, visual and conceptual art, circus, and ritual.

Hennessy was a member of Sara Shelton Mann’s legendary Contraband (85-94), as well as the collaborative performance companies CORE (95-98) and the France-based Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard (98-02). His work is featured in several books and documentaries, including Composing While Dancing (Melinda Buckwalter, U of Wisconsin: 2010), How To Make Dances in an Epidemic (David Gere, Univ of Wisconsin: 2004), Gay Ideas (Richard Mohr, Beacon: 1992), and Dancers in Exile (RAPT Productions, 2000). Hennessy is a co-founder of 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE a thriving performance and culture space in San Francisco.

Awards include the United States Artist Kjenner Fellowship (2012), a Bilinski Fellowship (2011), a NY Bessie (2009) for Crotch, two Isadora Duncan Awards (2009) for Sol niger, a Goldie (2007) and the Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship in Dance (2005). In 2009-10, Keith was awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Djerassi. Commissions include National Dance Project (Turbulence 2012), Arsenic, Lausanne (Crotch, 2008), Centre ChorÈgraphique National, Belfort (Sol niger, 2007), Les Subsistances, Lyon (Sol niger 2007, Homeless USA, 2005), Les Laboratoires, Paris (American Tweaker, 2006), FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), and Lower Left Performance Co, San Diego (Gather, 2005). Hennessy teaches internationally at festivals, universities and independent studios. Teaching since 2009 includes UC Davis, imPulsTanz/Vienna, TSEH/Moscow, Circuit Est/Montreal, Hub 14/Toronto, AEx-Corps/Dakar, Stary Bowar/Poland, Movement Research/NY, Tanzfabrik/Berlin, University of Dance & Circus/Stockholm.

Jassem Hindi (Palestine/France) was born in Saudi Arabia and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. He works in the fields of sound, performance and temporary objects / installations. As a musician, he uses mainly broken objects, diverted machines, lo-fi field recordings, feedbacks, in the spirit of experimental music influenced by noise, hardcore, image editing techniques, and older masters including Alvin Lucier and Bellini.

Jassem’s working method extends to the fields of visual and performative arts. He regularly collaborates with choreographers and performers, as a musician, an advisor or as a performer. He has flirted with research around the themes of public displays of violence, intimacy and differentiation, political ritual, and the art of hospitality.

In 2014-15, among others, he collaborated with Keith Hennessy, Ida Larsen, Marie-Louise Stentebjerg, Ruairi Donovan, Hana Erdman, Rani Nair, Jeremy Wade and Mia Habib. He is the recipient of several grants and residency programs in Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, and USA. Additionally, Jassem collaborates with Sweet and Tender , an experimental dance-performance collaborative experimenting with alternative economies and modes of production.

Jassem teaches philosophy and sound improvisation for dance artists, as guest faculty at HZT in Berlin and annually at Impulstanz in Vienna.

Panopticon
by Jillian Peña

Created in collaboration with and performed by Alexandra Albrecht + Andrew Champlin

Costumes by Christian Joy
Lighting by Kathy Kaufmann

Jillian Peña (creator) is a dance and video artist whose work seeks to make visible the confusion and desire of the self in relationship to itself and others. Her work is in dialogue with psychoanalysis, queer theory, pop media, and spirituality. Jillian was recently awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe 2014 at ImpulsTanz Dance Festival in Vienna. She has been presented internationally, including at Danspace Project, American Realness, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop and The Kitchen in New York, and American Dance Institute, and ImPulsTanz Festival Vienna, Akademie der KunsteSophiensaele Berlin, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Modern Art Oxford, and the International Festival of Contemporary Art Slovenia. She was a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholar during which she was awarded an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a fellowship recipient, and a Practice-based MPhil in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center (LMCC), Performance Space 122, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Movement Research, the National Dance Center of Bucharest, Romania, and Archauz in Århus, Denmark. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Dance and the College of Art, Media, and Design at University of the Arts, Philadelphia. www.jilllianpena.com

Alexandra Albrecht (performer) is a freelance performer based in New York City. Her most notable collaborations and performances have been with Hilary Easton, Liz Glynn, Natalie Green, Ryan McNamara, Jillian Peña (Bessie nominated for Outstanding Performer) and Ani Taj/The Dance Cartel. She was a dancer for the Bessie Schoenberg Choreographic Residency at The Yard in the Summer of 2007 and curated Dance at The Tank from 2009-12. Her television appearances include Conan and The Late Late Show with Reggie Watts/The Dance Cartel and MTV2’s Guy Code. Additionally, Albrecht moonlights as a personal chef. She has a BFA in Dance and BA in Journalism from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and College of Arts and Science, respectively.

Andrew Champlin (performer) started dancing at the age of four in Portland, Oregon. After dancing professionally with Oregon Ballet Theatre he studied on scholarship at The School of American Ballet before matriculating at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, where he earned a BA in sociology and dance. Andrew has performed with a wide range of dance artists including Pam Tanowitz, Ryan McNamara, Madeline Hollander, Macklin Kowal, Christopher Williams, Miguel Gutierrez, David Gordon, and Xavier le Roy among others. He teaches ballet for contemporary dancers and assists the internationally renowned ballet instructor Janet Panetta in New York City and abroad. Andrew was nominated for a Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer in Jillian Peña’s Polly Pocket: Expansion Pack in 2015.

Christian Joy (costume design) is an American costume designer and artist best known for her stage costume designs for Yeah Yeah Yeahs lead singer, Karen O. Using found articles and occasionally eschewing thread and print for glue and marker pens, she has influenced contemporary fashion with punk and DIY stylings. She has dressed Santigold, the UK band Klaxons, and Danish singer/songwriter Oh Land. Her costumes have been featured in exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Diesel Art Gallery in Tokyo, Picture Farm Gallery in Brooklyn, AVA gallery in NYC, and Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn. She collaborated with TopShop on three limited-edition collections, and released her first personal ready-to-wear garments. http://www.christianjoy.us.com/

Kathy Kaufmann- A New York City native, her work has been seen throughout the US, Canada, Europe and Japan. Ms. Kaufmann has been a resident designer at The Danspace Project at St. Marks Church for over 15 years. She regularly designs for many wonderful companies including Michelle Dorrance, Eiko and Koma, Joanna Kotze, David Parker and the Bang Group, Ben Munisteri, Keely Garfield, Hilary Easton, Gina Gibney, Cherylyn Lavagnino and Sally Silvers. She is the recipient of 2 Bessie awards, teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lights special events for The Food Network.

Choreography and Performance by Fernando Belfiore
Dramaturgy by Katarina Bakatsaki and Bruno Listopad
Sound Design by Steve Martin Snider
Light Design by Tomas Vondracek
Set Design by Nikola Knezevic
Costume HandCraft by Jivika Biervliet
Artistic Coaching by Suzy Blok
Production by Sanne Wichman / Dansmakers Amsterdam
Writing support by Lisa Reinheimer

Special Thanks to Renee Copraij, Ria Higler and Eleanor Bauer

In collaboration with ICK Amsterdam, Z Zentrum für Proben und Forschung Frankfurt,Work Space Brussels, and Fabrica de Movimentos Porto.

Supported by Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, AFK, Jonge Makers Fonds.

Fernando Belfiore [1983 – Sao Paolo, Brazil] is a choreographer, performer and teacher based in Amsterdam. He graduated in 2011 at the SNDO (School for New Dance Development – Amsterdam School of The Arts). Before moving to Europe he studied Theater at Sao Paolo University. He performed in projects by Deborah Hay, Jeremy Wade, Ann Liv Young, Ibrahim Quraishi and Miet Warlop. As a choreographer, Belfiore has presented his work in festivals and venues in many European countries, Brazil and China. His graduation work, The miserable thing, was nominated for the ITS Festival Choreography Award and received the “best direction” award at ACT Festival in Spain in 2012. He was invited to be part of Europe in Motion in 2012 and received the Impulstanz Danceweb scholarship in 2013.

He is Artist In Residence at the production house Dansmakers Amsterdam since 2011, where he made his solo You Must with dramaturgic collaboration of Ivo Dimchev and .whatdofinallyshare. that was selected for Aerowaves as priority company 2013. In 2013, he started to develop the performance Supernatural together with Florentina Holzinger, which was performed at Nuit Blanche/SSBA-Salon Stadschouwnburg.

Currently, he showcasing his solo called AL13FB<3 that was selected for Priority Company Aerowaves 2016 and touring his new group performance D3US/X\M4CHIN4. He is regular teacher of movement research at SNDO. He is guest artist at International Choreographic Art Centre (ICK) and has being supported by Work Space Brussels.

His works are intense, energetic, and strongly visceral and visual. He searches for challenging new forms of engagement within the audience’s bodily experience and choice making. Therefore, the performer’s presence and how he affects the audience’s perception, are a strong characteristic of his work. He is intrigued by exploring the politics of the contemporary body and by questioning our social relations. All his works present a body that is primitive and vulnerable, which is contrasted with a mix of pop and mass culture elements.

belfioreword.wordpress.com

“Creating after Joseph Beuys, we see the felt blanket of Beuys’ grey and brown world thrown into the neon future universe of Belfiore where he is wrapped tightly in crackling tin foil. The substance is important. The transubstantiation is important. Fernando mechanically glitches, stutters and repeats, an abstraction that disrupts the communication into form itself. There’s a sensuality and equality between the forms and energies of objects and Fernando’s body.”
- Phoebe Patey-Ferguson

keyon gaskin: its not a thing from Marin Media Lab on Vimeo.

Created and Performed by keyon gaskin

keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize their performances with their credentials.

“Gaskin holds together a deliriously bizarre persona, swinging wildly from demanding action on the part of the audience to desperately pleading for it, from posturing bravado to shaking vulnerability, and from slapstick to self-harm.”
- Thomas Ross, The Portland Mercury

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko: #negrophobia from Marin Media Lab on Vimeo.

#negrophobia by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Model, performance artist, and night-life personality IMMA/MESS.
anonymous bodies Support/Staff
Kate Watson-Wallace, Co-Director of anonymous bodies, Decor/Set Consultant, Outside Eye
Eli Tamondong, Administrative Assistant, Projects Manager
Hillary Richardson – Artist’s Assistant, Liaison
Andre Lumpkin – Lighting & Technical Support
Mersiha Mersihovic – Dramaturg/Lighting Assistant
Ricarrdo Valentine – Stage Manager
Jonathan Gonzalez – Assistant Stage Manager
James Doolittle – Video Design
Emily Reilly – Publicist, Blake Zidell and Associates

Originally from Detroit, MI, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American independent performance and humanities curator, producer, cultural strategist, poet, and performance artist currently based between Brooklyn, New York and Philadelphia. With his creative partner Kate Watson-Wallace, he co-directs anonymous bodies || art collective, a visual performance company focusing on innovative approaches to curation, performance, and education. He is an inaugural APAP Leadership Fellow, a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a 2014 American Express Leadership Academy alum, a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 Fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University. Kosoko is a Founding Advisory Board Member of the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving and was most recently elected to the Executive Committee on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA. He has sat on numerous funding and curatorial panels including The Map Fund, Baker Memorial Prize, the National Endowment for the Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.

Kosoko’s work in live performance has received support from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through Dance Advance, The Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, The Joyce Theater Foundation, and The Philadelphia Cultural Fund. His solo performance work entitled other.explicit.body. premiered at Harlem Stage in April 2012.. As a performer, Kosoko has created original roles in the performance works of Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, Headlong Dance Theater among others. Kosoko’s poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, and Silo, among other publications. In 2011, Kosoko published Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). He is a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC). He has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Baker Artists Awards, among others. Visit www.anonymousbodies.org for more info.

IMMAMESS (performer) Born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama Kentrell started his formal dance training at The Montgomery Ballet with teacher Oskar Antunez. Shortly after he received his high school diploma from Pebblebrook High School within the Cobb County Center For Excellence in The Performing Arts. On scholarship, Kentrell moved to New York City to train at The Ailey School under teachers Helen Pickett, Miton Meyers, Denis Jefferson, and Troy Powell. As an Ailey School student, Kentrell had the opportunity to perform with the first company of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on the stage of New York City Center as an ensemble dancer for the choreography of Memoria. Later moving to Torrington, CT, Kentrell began his training at The Nutmeg Conservatory For The Arts for two years under the direction of Sharon E. Dante. At the conservatory for the arts Victoria Mazzarelli, Eleanor DeAntuono, and Joan Kunsch taught Kentrell. Placing third at the Youth America Grand Prix with a selected pas de duex from William Forsyth’s “In The Middle Somewhat Elevated”, Kentrell went on to join The Atlanta Ballet under artistic direction of John McFall. Atlanta Ballet gave Kentrell the opportunity to work with choreographer in resident Lauri Stallings during her collaboration with Antwan “Big Boi” Patton for BIG. After dancing in ballets such as Swan Lake, Firebird, and Dracula, Kentrell left to pursue his BFA. Attending Parsons New School for Design, Kentrell continued his interested in movement outside of the formal structures. Within the fine arts department, Kentrell studied the trajectories of dance makers such as Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Kazuo Ohno. As a Parsons graduate, Kentrell has performed at MoMA PS1, RARE Gallery Chelsea, Art Basel Miami, Fowler Arts Collective, and many others. Hoping to further his relationship with movement, Kentrell continues to train in New York City. He’s currently living in London studying his MA in Art at Central Saint Martins.

Kate Watson-Wallace is a choreographer, director, visual artist and music curator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is in the inaugural class of the Low Residency MFA in studio art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her performance work has been funded by the Map Fund, Doris Duke Foundation through Creative Capital, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, among others. She is a 2007 Pew Fellow in the Arts in choreography. She has choreographed music videos for Animal Collective, Black Dice, and Dead Skeletons, and created collaborative performance work with Chris Powell (ManMan), HPrizm (Anti-pop Consortium) and most recently RYAT.  Watson-Wallace has toured internationally as a performer, choreographer, and guest lecturer,most recently premiering new work at Summerstage Central Park. She co-directs anonymous bodies with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. Upcoming projects include a new performance in collaboration with Xenia Rubinos that will premiere at JACK space in Brooklyn in May and tour throughout 2016. www.anonymousbodies.org

Mersiha Mesihoivc (dramaturg/lighting assistant), founder & artistic director of CircuitDebris – a space for interdisciplinarity, radical dance & community engagement is a Bosnian/Swedish, NYC- based dance artist, curator, cultural organizer and teaching artist whose work is primarily interested in human behavior, movement invention and pushing boundaries of what dance should address. With an ongoing collaboration with saxophonist/composer James Brandon Lewis, Mesihovic initiated CircuitDebris in 2011 to formally conceptualize her collaboration with artists across disciplines and passion for community engagement. Most recently Mesihovic was hailed as ”Rising NYC Choreographer” by TheWorldDances.com and CircuitDebris referred to as a vibrant, eclectic and fresh NYC Dance Company to watch. Mesihovic has taught her unique Movement Invention/Composition workshop at Universities, Dance Centers and for Dance Companies in US and abroad including Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg & Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria in South Africa, Gibney Dance -NY and Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s #negrophobia has many forms. It is an art installation, a practiced, choreographed performance, and a poetry reading. It is a personal story and a history lesson, told through the lens of internet culture. It might be consciousness-raising and Afrofuturist, but it might also be the negation of both.”
– Katherine Bergstrom, Point Of Contact

Ligia Lewis: Sorrow Swag from Marin Media Lab on Vimeo.

Concept and Choreography by Ligia Lewis
Performed by Brian Getnick
Musical Accompaniment by George Lewis Jr. (Twin Shadow)

Ligia Lewis (DO/US) is a choreographer based in Berlin. Lewis weaves together critical and literary texts with dance and theater as she interrogates the metaphors and social inscriptions of the body. She engages with the choreographic through embodied, sensorial, and immersive performances, with a predilection towards interiority and abstraction. Her choreographies can be described as experientially rich and complex. Lewis has been presented in multiple contexts including visual arts and theater.

Lewis was awarded the Prix Jardin d’ Europe for her work Sorrow Swag at Impulstanz 2015. Minor Matter for the theater is her latest creation in development.

www.ligiamanuela.com

Brian Getnick is a performance maker and sculptor living in Los Angeles. Reconfiguring the physical materials and procedures of theatrical fantasy, Getnick creates performances that engage memory, history, and the absurd in both solo and ensemble works He directs PAM; a residency program and theater for performance makers and co-directs the performance art journal Native Strategies with Tanya Rubbak.

www.briangetnick.com

George Lewis Jr. aka Twin Shadow (born 1983), is a Dominican-American singer, producer and writer, based out of Los Angeles, California. He has released one novel and three albums: Forget(2010), Confess (2012) and Eclipse(2015). His latest album is released with major record Warner Music. His music has been met with positive acclaim by the likes of Rolling Stones magazine, Pitchfork, BBC music, NPR music and more.

www.twinshadow.net

“…Lewis’s work is most successful in its insistence that the spare can be made spectacular.

Lewis, a Dominican-born and Berlin and LA-based performer and choreographer, has been working on sadness. Minor Matter follows her Sorrow Swag, shown at HRLA last October, which fuses Jean Anouilh’s translation of Antigone with Billie Whitelaw’s performance of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. Brian Getnick played the amalgam of tragic figures: one buried alive for civil disobedience, the other a lone, hysterical mouth.”

- Catherine Damman, Artforum