Archives
Trajal Harrell
Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M)
SUN JAN 13 . 3:00 PM
Run time: 55 minutes
MoMA PS1*
22-25 Jackson Ave / $10 / momaps1.org
*Presented as a part of MoMA PS1 Sunday Sessions
Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M) is the custom-made size in the Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church project. Only, in this made-to-measure size, the proposition is inverted and the central question of the work becomes “What would have happened if one of the early postmoderns from Judson Church had gone uptown to perform in the voguing ballroom scene in Harlem.”
In Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem…(M2M), Harrell makes a full-evening work for three dancers which engages the formalism and minimalism of postmodern dance with the flamboyancy and performativity of voguing. Combining these contrasting styles, Harrell repositions the influence of jazz, funk, and rhythm-and-blues on improvisation in early postmodern dance. Likewise, aesthetic and social discourses are transformed when the postmodern dance pedestrian vocabulary of sitting and standing are re-imagined in the context of a Judson Church gathering in Harlem.
Co-Production: Danspace Project for Platform 2012: Judson@50, MoMA PS1. Residency support provided by Impulstanz Vienna International Dance Festival The commission for Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M) is made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation and by Danspace Project’s 2012-2013 Commissioning Initiative, which receives major support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Jeanine Durning
inging
New York Premiere
FRI JAN 11 . 4:00 PM
SAT JAN 12 . 4:00 PM
SUN JAN 13 . 4:30 PM
FRI JAN 18 . 5:30 PM
SAT JAN 19 . 4:00 PM & 7:30 PM
SUN JAN 20 . 2:30 PM & 7:30 PM
Run time: 50 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street
inging refers to the suffix “ing” in the English language. “ing” is used to express actions that are still in progress and haven’t yet ended. inging is a dance of the mind, moving in the continuous present. It tracks the velocity of thought through a non-linear cascade of non-stop speaking. inging does not give time to consider the rational or the consequent. inging proposes the insistent practice of unscripted languaging as performance, where speaker is in direct relation with listener at the moment of articulation. Both performer and audience are confronted with the limits of language as a means of communication and understanding. The body and its gestures emerge as the inevitable bridge between thought and language.
Moving thought through speech, and speechifying thought through movement, brings the speaker and listener to the edges of intelligibility where the paradoxical body and the eclectic mind are possible. All at once inside and outside, past and present, present and future. Memory and fantasy. Body and voice. Physical and metaphysical. Each performance simultaneously produces, accumulates and archives itself. It repeats itself, stutters, and multiplies itself. inging is a being doing and a doing being and becoming.
Keith Hennessy
Turbulence (a dance about the economy)
FRI JAN 11 . 8:30 PM
SAT JAN 12 . 2:30 PM
SUN JAN 13 . 8:30 PM
Run time: 40 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
Turbulence (a dance about the economy) plays with normative disruptions and calculated disregard for generally accepted rules of engagement. A collaborative creation, the work is a bodily response to economic crisis; an experimental hybrid of contemporary dance, improvised happening and political theater. Instigated before Occupy, and engaging questions of debt, value and exchange, Turbulence is intended as both provocation and affirmation of the current global movement.
Turbulence was created and will be performed by Julie Phelps, Emily Leap, Laura Arrington, Jesse Hewit, Jorge Rodolfo De Hoyos, Hana Erdman, Gabriel Todd, Ruairí O’Donovan, Empress Jupiter, Jassem Hindi, and Keith Hennessy. Guest performers for American Realness include Ishmael Houston-Jones (NY), Anna Martine Whitehead (LA), and Keyon Gaskin (Portland).
Co-production: CounterPULSE, Regards et Mouvements (France), Circo Zero. Turbulence was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MetLife Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding includes Zellerbach Family Foundation, the New Stages in Dance grant, and the SF Arts Commission OPG.
Neal Medlyn
Wicked Clown Love
THURS JAN 10 . 10:30 PM
FRI JAN 11 . 10:30 PM
SAT JAN 12 . 10:30 PM
Run time: 1 hour 15 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street
Neal Medlyn’s latest “bomb ass music based extravaganza” to quote the artist, is built around the music of the Insane Clown Posse (ICP) and the worldwide opaque brother and sisterhood of the Juggalos. The show revolves around Medlyn’s dark specter versions of ICP songs, male bonding activities, flashlight wrestling, terror and horror, face paint, underground Midwestern horror rap, Faygo showers, clown love, and much more. “Fuckin’ all out buck wild behavior is to be expected,” Medlyn says. “This will be the freshest presentation of all time. This will be the Wicked Shit. Wicked Clown Love. The most chaotic fucking phenomenon of the year.”
This program is made possible with support from the Jerome Foundation, the Amphion Foundation, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
Jack Ferver
Mon Ma Mes
THURS JAN 10 . 7:30 PM *Performance at Le Skyroom – French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)
FRI JAN 11 . 5:30 PM *Performance at Abrons Arts Center
SUN JAN 13 . 3:00 PM *Performance at Abrons Arts Center
Run time: 45 minutes
FRENCH INSTITUTE ALLIANCE FRANCAISE (FIAF) LE SKYROOM
22 East 60th Street / 8th FL / fiaf.org/apap
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
In Mon Ma Mes, Ferver scrutinizes his life as an artist through an impersonal and stylized question-and-answer format. He then performs excerpts of an earlier work while simultaneously deconstructing it. The combination of humorous and dark self-analysis and performance creates an intimacy with the audience that reveals as much as it presents.
Mon Ma Mes was commissioned by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) and first presented at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival in October 2012.
Trajal Harrell
Antigone Sr. / Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (L)
THURS JAN 10 . 8:30 PM
FRI JAN 11 . 8:30 PM
SAT JAN 12 . 8:30 PM
SUN JAN 13 . 8:30 PM
Run time: 2 hours 15 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE
466 Grand Street
Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church comes in fives sizes: Extra Small (XS) to Extra Large (XL). Following the sublime (S), the rare beauty of (XS), and the spectacular (M)imosa, Antigone Sr./(L) presents an all-male contemporary dance version of Sophocles’s Greek tragic drama, Antigone. All five sizes share the proposition: What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the Voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmodernists at Judson Church? Rather than illustrating a historical fiction, these new works transplant this proposition into a contemporary context. What we experience was neither possible at the Balls nor at Judson, but, here and now, a third possibility is created.
Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (L) is commissioned by New York Live Arts’ “DTW Commissioning Fund” and is made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts. Generous funding has also been provided by the Jerome Foundation, the Alfred Meyer Foundation, and the MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, with additional support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Co-Production: New York Live Arts, CNDC Angers, and CCN Belfort. Residency Support provided by WpZimmer – Antwerp, Workspace Brussels, Pact Zollverein – Essen, and Dansen Hus – Stockholm.
Maria Hassabi
SHOW
THURS JAN 10 . 7:00 PM
FRI JAN 11 . 7:00 PM
SAT JAN 12 . 4:30 PM
SUN JAN 13 . 7:00 PM
Run time: 60 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street
SHOW casts a focus on the elements of live performance in a bid to make them plastic and palpable. At the core of its exploration is the attempt to be present in a moment of expression, while existing in an awareness caught by a set of definitive frames. The relationship between performers and audience and their mutually assigned spaces, movement and roles, are implicated in the work as they share the changing sequence of what unfolds.
SHOW premiered at The Kitchen in November 2011. Funded by Dance programs at The Kitchen, The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, the Jerome Foundation, and The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital. SHOW was made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. SHOW was developed in part through a residency at Impulstanz Vienna, Austria and Mount Tremper Arts, NY.
Ishmael Houston-Jones & Yvonne Meier
Knife, Tape, Rope & Mad Heidi
SUN JAN 15 . 7:30 PM
Run time: 60 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE THEATER
466 Grand Street
Mad Heidi is a portrait of a Swiss woman, battling against her Swiss expectations. Lifelong traumas like, “how many times must I hike up the mountain?” surface. A sexy witch-like broom dance becomes unavoidable. Consumed by equal parts madness, rage, and sadness, “Heidi” descends into the netherworld of the collective unconscious in order to ferociously and boisterously destroy Swiss stereotypes and clichés. The work evokes a sense of homesickness and longing as the performer appears alone before her audience — naked, both inside and out.
“A true east village renegade with a special talent for creating havoc…” Gia Kourlas, The New York Times
Eleanor Bauer
(Big Girls Do Big Things)
SAT JAN 14 . 8:30 PM
SUN JAN 15 . 4:00 PM
Run time: 60 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
An empty promise, a preemptive lament, a flirtation with expectations, a wrestling match with potential, whispering what should be shouted and singing what should be whispered, (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS) is a solo on scale, volume, extreme limits and the grey areas between them; on grandeur and vulnerability, hubris and humility, visibility and subtlety; on the fragile braggadocio of living large when less is more but more is also unmistakably more.
Eleanor Bauer invites the audience into the depths of the surface-oriented world of the performer, where the personal and the material are mutually imminent, where style is content, the ‘how’ is inseparable from the ‘what,’ and the difference between fiction and reality is irrelevant. Navigating the folds, surfaces, and transformative possibilities of a too-large bear suit, Bauer performs a series of metamorphoses that challenge, obscure, and exploit her diverse capacities as a performer, to exercise and exorcise questions about the use of self onstage.
Through surrender to the theater and its discontents, in (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS), self-expression drops the self and expression takes over.
“Ms. Bauer is a shape-shifter…lunging for her desperate pleasures as if her life depended on securing them, and earning our hearts in the process.” – Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times
Co-production support was provided by Workspace Brussels (BE) and Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Gent, BE). Funding was provided the Flemish Community Commission of the Brussels Capital Region.
Jennifer Lacey
Gattica
U.S. Premiere
FRI JAN 13 . 7:00 PM
SAT JAN 14 . 5:30 PM
SUN JAN 15 . 5:30 PM
Run time: 45 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street
This piece was made especially for the Tanzquartier in Vienna under the stewardship of Sigrid Gareis in 2008. The event bore this unlikely title: A Precise Woodstock of thinking. I was asked to consider the future of performance. Hmmm… What to do? My own future was more-than-unusually uncertain at that moment, which created a lovely calm about the whole business as projections seemed un-urgent, unnecessary, inappropriate . I made the only thing I could which I still enjoy doing. The very pretty irony is that performance has no legitimate concern with the future. And also, this version of the future is a bit dated. Lovely. Please Come.
“a fearless, whip-smart artist” – Brian Seibert, The New York Times