Access Provision: Live ASL interpretation will be provided during the conversation.
Organized by S.J Norman (Wiradjuri) and Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation Citizen) Knowledge of Wounds (KoW) is an autonomous gathering space, a ceremony, a fire, a calling to vibrate in good relations across Indigenous time and space. In this iteration of ongoing programming at Performance Space New York, KoW presents a solo, improvisational noise performance by composer Raven Chacon (Diné), followed by a conversation with scholar and sound artist Hayden Ryan (Yuin).
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.
Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP).
Chacon is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass, and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.
Hayden Ryan is a Yuin sound artist and scholar from the South East Coast of New South Wales, Australia. He is currently studying a Master of Music in Music Technology at New York University, focusing on the integration of immersive and generative audio technologies with Indigenous sonic and spatial relationships. His research explores both the indigenisation and decolonisation of audio technologies, and normative listening frameworks that are present within settler listening settings.
Hayden describes his research through these immersive and generative techniques, while confronting First Nations Australian socio-cultural and political issues through signal processing, algorithmic and data composition, and spatialisation. He is currently completing his Master’s thesis, and writing an article proposal on Decolonizing Indigenous Sound Archiving Through Higher Order Ambisonics, for the Audio Engineering Society convention in Madrid, Spain.
Show Category: Festival
I wanna be with you everywhere
Tickets | Day Passes ($0 – $25 sliding scale)
Tickets | Johanna Hedva ($0 – $25 sliding scale)
Access Info
Organized by Arika, Amalle Dublon, Jerron Herman, Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Alice Sheppard and Constantina Zavitsanos.
Featuring performances and readings by: Eli Clare, John Lee Clark, Kayla Hamilton, Johanna Hedva, Jerron Herman, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Camisha L. Jones, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jordan Lord, NEVE, and Alice Sheppard.
“People misunderstand… I was talking survival, and they were talking rights, independence, more abstract concepts. Community is survival.” – Nick Dupree
“A Deaf Blind poet will not stop if police order him to.” – John Lee Clark
I wanna be with you everywhere is a gathering of, by, and for disabled artists and writers and anyone who wants to get with us for a series of crip meet-ups, performances, readings and other social spaces of surplus, abundance and joy. It refuses policies of individuation and inclusion in favor of (and in the flavor of) whatever disability aesthetics has in bodymind. We won’t know what this is ‘til it shows us, but we do know that disability communities don’t only make art about disability. 😉 (winky face emoticon).
We’re operating from the point of view of access intimacy. Access isn’t an individual’s need, but a common capacity shared between us all.
Programs and events will unfold across each evening, but there’s also going to be a major sense of ease. There’s time in between events for hanging out – both in and of itself, and in resistance to the inaccessible infrastructure that so often keeps us physically separated. Our Travel Fund can help you get with us, if the cost of local transport is an issue.
Our General Access page has info on ASL, Real-Time Captioning, Audio Description, Assisted Listening, SUBPAC physical music wearable technology, quiet space, local travel fund, and how to make general access inquires. Each event listing has more details on access provision specific to each performance.
Image Description:
Performance Space frames all their images within their graphic logo – a heart shape with the top right corner cut off. Within this shape, six different perspectives taken from a GIF and tiled together show a silver and black tabby cat just chilling in a glass bowl on a sunny window ledge, head cocked to one side. There’s a green cactus in a pot in the background. A fluffy paw drapes over the side of the bowl, which is way too small for the cat.
Schedule
Click each event to find out more information.
Information desk and Quiet Space will be open from 7pm – 11pm.
Performance
Accessibility Provisions: ASL, Real-Time Captioning, and SUBPAC (limited supply)
April 11 | 7:00 – 7:45pm
April 14 | 5:00 – 5:45pm
Sliding Scale | Individually ticketed. Performance not included in Day Pass ticket.
A performance of guitar and voice by Johanna Hedva.
A keening. Animal droning. Hag blues. Minimal metal. Moon hymns. A dirge. O Death. For my mother, who was a Pisces (March 2, 1955 – April 30, 2018). This is a wake, so there will be whiskey, herbal tea and flowers. It’s 45 minutes long with no intermission.
Johanna Hedva knows deep grief and the incessant joys of wild hair and soothsaying sound. They will leave you reeling and bring you to your feels as they come to their knees, guitar in hand on a stripped down stage. This performance is specifically for the faint of heart, but it will be loud AF with dropped down droned out chironic, khoratic rupture and riffs. Come ready to release and bring your dis-ease. Hedva will bring serious dark crip love that offers an aural compendium to their sick theory and sci-fi written work. Think Diamanda Galás come Frida Kahlo in bed with Keiji Haino at a wake in Ktown.
The performances are for a small audience, so if you would like to attend we advise that you book your ticket in advance.
Event Specific Access Notes:
Earplugs for all and a handful of ear defenders will be provided. The lyrics to the songs will be interpreted into ASL and there will be real-time captioning too. A few SUBPAC units will be available to use. SUBPAC is a wearable technology that pulses sound through your body. There will be flowers in the space – but not lilies. Please arrive on time, as there is no late seating for this event. You are welcome, if you need to, to come and go during the performance. It will be quite a gloomy space, but there will be attendants on hand with torches. Remember we will have a Quiet Space available at the event, which you can use after the performance to decompress and recompose if required.
If you have any questions, needs that you would like to share with us, or would like to reserve a particular type of seat, or would like to reserve a SUBPAC unit, please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Performance
Accessibility Provisions: ASL and Real-Time Captioning
April 11 | 8:15 – 8:30pm, 9:45 – 10:00pm
Leah will perform two sets of different pieces during the evening at 8:15 – 8:30pm and 9:45 – 10:00pm.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s speech and poetry somehow cut straight to the bone while still taking the longgg way around a giant, baroquely beautiful elaborate loop of the sweetest salty flavor. She’ll bring baby crips and seasoned born in the caul disabled for life old heads to the same cul-de-sac at least for the length of a poem—and maybe into next lifetime. Come for the crip ingenuity; stay for the smooth feels of what it is to be each other’s everything. Piepzna-Samarasinha knows care in worlds beyond words and always finds just the right thing to say in serving the already ongoing end of the world as we know it.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Performance
Accessibility Provisions: ASL, Real-Time Captioning and Audio Description
April 11 | 9:00 – 9:30pm
NEVE flows bads so good you don’t even know. This invisible theorist sings language-motion-healing as far as the Nile is close. Together, we’ll get heavy to float on water older than our ancestors–who are here too. NEVE’s art is an invitation to pray this sway and here, drawn open, comes a solo cabaret.
Lover of Low Creatures is a new take on musical and dance theatre, a solo cabaret, and a spiritual ritual take on coming of age and sexual healing. Snow is a mixed race (Sudanese Nubian and Scottish American), physically disabled girl growing up in a forest on a river near a town. Snow and her mother are scientists, artists, and witches in tune with each other and the natural world. But underneath the flow of their routine, is an entity, or entities, very ancient, and very much alive, following Snow, that she is afraid to face, most of all because she has reason to believe her fate is intricately tied to it, in a way her mother’s is not. A dramatic lens on elementary school revelations, a darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it, Lover of Low Creatures is much like the Nile it references – an ocean posing as a river, a river that feels like the sea.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@
Performance
Accessibility Provisions: ASL and Real-Time Captioning
April 11 | 9:45 – 10:00pm
Leah will perform two sets of different pieces during the evening at 8:15 – 8:30pm and 9:45 – 10:00pm.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s speech and poetry somehow cut straight to the bone while still taking the longgg way around a giant, baroquely beautiful elaborate loop of the sweetest salty flavor. She’ll bring baby crips and seasoned born in the caul disabled for life old heads to the same cul-de-sac at least for the length of a poem—and maybe into next lifetime. Come for the crip ingenuity; stay for the smooth feels of what it is to be each other’s everything. Piepzna-Samarasinha knows care in worlds beyond words and always finds just the right thing to say in serving the already ongoing end of the world as we know it.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Information desk and Quiet Space will be open from 6:30pm – 11pm.
Dance
Accessibility Provisions: ASL, Real-Time Captioning and Audio Description
April 13 | 7:30 – 8:00pm
Kayla Hamilton practices what she preaches. A fulcrum between disabled and non-disabled dance, a fiercely thoughtful artist, and a generous soul: these are those qualities that endear Kayla to the world. By enlarging and enlivening our awareness of sightedness, she offers us vastly fresh pathways to liberation in our own bodies. In her work is an undercurrent of freedom and that freedom is palpable and intoxicating as she dances. Ultimately, Kayla establishes a world where our body is celebratory. With resonate humor and precise pauses, her work cuts to our core.
This movement exploration is a multi-sensory experience for the audience that delves deep into questions of what it means to see and be seen—as well as from whose lens we are doing the viewing. How does hearing and the idea of listening contrast with what is actually being heard; how is taste felt, while exploring the legacies we leave behind.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Dance
Accessibility Provisions: Audio Description and SUBPAC (in limited supply)
April 13 | 8:30 – 9:00pm
Even when performing solo Alice Sheppard arrives as an ensemble (and the ensemble comes for her too). An occasion for commotion, this piece’s chorus of motions is intended to be felt as much as anything else. Sheppard is here to stage scenes in excess of joy or equilibrium so that we may follow her into a crip love so deep it doubles down on the very notion of dance. Her choreography will overtake you there on your way to Where Good Souls Fear by rotating your revolutions and then some.
Where Good Souls Fear is an investigation of excess and minimalism, provoking questions about who or what is too much. Ranging through lyrical floorwork to an explosion of furious movement, Good Souls challenges what we think we know of propriety for black women. Sheppard’s choreography is a rigorous excavation of body, disability and various mobility technologies.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Dance
Accessibility Provisions: Audio Description and SUBPAC (in limited supply)
April 13 | 9:30 – 10:00pm
Jerron Herman is taking us to the accessible club of our underground dreams with his choreography that ushers in that teenage feeling and gives columns something to lean on in this performance called life. Come unprepared to join Herman’s communal love letter about finesse and all the rest.
A dance party love letter to our community. Here, we’ll express the joy of relation in the abstract and through actual physical proximity. Choreographing the audience into his dance floor, Jerron will reference the sociality of a club environment and explore with and without the people around him.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Information Desk and Quiet Space will be open from 6pm-11pm.
Performance
Accessibility Provisions: ASL, Real-Time Captioning, and SUBPAC (limited supply)
April 11 | 7:00 – 7:45pm
April 14 | 5:00 – 5:45pm
Sliding Scale | Individually ticketed. Performance not included in Day Pass ticket.
A performance of guitar and voice by Johanna Hedva.
A keening. Animal droning. Hag blues. Minimal metal. Moon hymns. A dirge. O Death. For my mother, who was a Pisces (March 2, 1955 – April 30, 2018). This is a wake, so there will be whiskey, herbal tea and flowers. It’s 45 minutes long with no intermission.
Johanna Hedva knows deep grief and the incessant joys of wild hair and soothsaying sound. They will leave you reeling and bring you to your feels as they come to their knees, guitar in hand on a stripped down stage. This performance is specifically for the faint of heart, but it will be loud AF with dropped down droned out chironic, khoratic rupture and riffs. Come ready to release and bring your dis-ease. Hedva will bring serious dark crip love that offers an aural compendium to their sick theory and sci-fi written work. Think Diamanda Galás come Frida Kahlo in bed with Keiji Haino at a wake in Ktown.
The performances are for a small audience, so if you would like to attend we advise that you book your ticket in advance.
Event Specific Access Notes:
Earplugs for all and a handful of ear defenders will be provided. The lyrics to the songs will be interpreted into ASL and there will be real-time captioning too. A few SUBPAC units will be available to use. SUBPAC is a wearable technology that pulses sound through your body. There will be flowers in the space – but not lilies. Please arrive on time, as there is no late seating for this event. You are welcome, if you need to, to come and go during the performance. It will be quite a gloomy space, but there will be attendants on hand with torches. Remember we will have a Quiet Space available at the event, which you can use after the performance to decompress and recompose if required.
If you have any questions, needs that you would like to share with us, or would like to reserve a particular type of seat, or would like to reserve a SUBPAC unit, please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Poetry
Accessibility Provisions: ASL and Real-Time Captioning
April 14 | 7:00 – 7:35pm
John’s poetry has a palpable, insurgent kind of feel, loosening tactile freeze and hearing-sighted visual bias. It reminds us of language’s capacity to help us feel through others, for others to feel through you, for the empathetic connection of being in feeling to help us remember that distinctions like ‘others’ and ‘you’ don’t really feel right. This feeling of words–a kind of skin talk, hand laugh and tactile feedback loop–reminds us that language is a contact no individual can stand. John’s readings are an invitation into languages field of touch; to speak in feeling together.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Film with Live Reading
Accessibility Provisions: ASL, Audio Description and Open Captioning
April 14 | 7:40 – 7:55pm
Jordan Lord makes expanded film that saturates and sutures every Virgo’s need for precision without belying the misprision necessary to feel through and beyond image. What’s promised in this live reading alongside a fully transcribed, described, and open-captioned film screening is nothing short of their actual open heart.
After…After…(Access) is an essay film that confronts questions of accessibility through an attempt to record the filmmaker’s recent open-heart surgery. The film follows the filmmaker, as they prepare for the surgery: watching medical imaging of their body with friends, revisiting a former lover, preparing for their mother to come to New York, documenting their family’s arrival, and ultimately being admitted to the hospital. Alongside this footage, the film’s narration considers the relationship between showing and telling; various dimensions of access; and how access is frequently considered only after the threat of liability, in the context of both filmmaking and disability. The film prioritizes access as a precondition of the film itself; audio description and open captioning are inseparable aspects of the film.
Event Specific Access Notes:
There is a stroboscopic effect that lasts for around 1 minute about 8 minutes into the video.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Poetry
Accessibility Provisions: ASL and Real-Time Captioning
April 14 | 8:30 – 8:50pm
Camisha writes “dispatches from the intersection of hurting and joy,” says poet Sarah Browning. Her poetry explores the wonder, resilience, and betrayal of the body, and, in the words of Jennifer Bartlett, reminds us that “the body and mind are not static.” Born from the author’s experience with recurrent and escalating hearing loss and chronic pain, her writing breaks silence around unapparent disability as it grapples with what it truly means to be capable and to make peace with one’s limitations in a society that equates disability with brokenness. It shows us, even in struggle, there is light to be let in.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Poetry
Accessibility Provisions: ASL and Real-Time Captioning
April 14 | 8:50 – 9:10pm
Cyrée Jarelle Johnson always brings raw fearless truth and the realest crip insight fully embedded in absolute lyrical lounge. This is exactly who you want on every talk show and who you wish would write, read, and touch tour your biography, your bedtime story of revolution and preservation, or your grandmother’s dance party. This Jersey cyborg makes Siri seem so early aughts while reminding us all that intelligence is artificial. You ought not sleep on this poetry.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
Poetry
Accessibility Provisions: ASL and Real-Time Captioning
April 14 | 9:30 – 10:00pm
Eli Clare makes new worlds. Raw truths, powerful honesty and painful, transcendent beauty. Eli’s unflinching personal and intellectual rigor are invitations. To self-examination, to societal critique. With delicacy and nuance. With rapier edge and with a warm embrace, Eli invites us to imagine the best possible world and to feel hope for our places within it.
“Poems are Chinook salmon swimming upstream to their spawning beds, old growth Douglas fir dappling the ground in shadow. They are mountainsides clear cut for lumber and paper, pale green of new growth already returning. They limp and stammer, tremor and drool, hallucinate and have panic attacks. Poems are cracks, crevices, faultlines. They wait in line at the welfare office; collect food stamps, Medicaid, SSI. They gossip, laugh, pass the word, “Don’t let ‘em get you down.” Poems are kisses, fists, and underground rivers. For all these reasons and many more, I am a poet.” – Eli Clare
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org
A collaboration between Arika, Performance Space New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Arika are supported by Creative Scotland.
For additional information about the general festival, the artists taking part and venue access, please visit Arika.org.uk.