Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable create entangled political- aesthetic projects distributed across multiple vectors of activity. Their work is united through an uncompromising interrogation of aesthetic and political communication. In 2017 the two artist-writers collaborated on a jointly written novel titled Life. Performance Space invites them to continue this collaboration in a new commission in development in concert with the No Series.
Commissioned by Performance Space New York.
Choir of the Slain (part X) is a capsule version of the eponymous evening-length Black opera created by niv Acosta and Fannie Sosa. A two night activation of Black Power Naps’ many surfaces, the performance plays with multiplicitous states of being idle. Protesting the necropolitics of the night, which deprive people of color rest, Sosa and Acosta soothe and still waters, animating lace front units, bedroom negligé and other gender and sound technologies. Playing the structures of the installation as instruments the artists create a choir from the beds of Black Power Naps.
Follow niv Acosta and Fannie Sosa on Instagram – @zombiecocolo @funniesosa.
Black Power Naps and Choir of the Slain (part X) has been commissioned by Performance Space New York with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Corporate sponsorship for Black Power Naps and Choir of the Slain (part X) provided by Broadly, Buffy, and Red Bull Music Academy.
Photo: Xeno Rafaél (cropped into heart)
Technical Crew:
Lighting Designer: Betsy Chester
Electricians: Curtis Marxen and Aaliyah Stewart
Sound Engineers: Michael Hernandez and Aaron Rockers
Audio Mixing: St. John McKay
Rigging: Janet Clancy
Fabrication: Matt Carrington, Andy Dickerson, Cody
Henson, Michael Hernandez, Matt Mauer, St. John
McKay, Andy Sowers, Aaliyah Stewart
Melodrama is a point of departure for Ligia Lewis’s latest choreographic work, Water Will (in Melody). A gothic tale set in a cavernous landscape becomes host to a dystopian fantasy, enacted by four performers. Creative (im)possibility becomes the engine by which a state of hopelessness, darkness, and unexamined emotions are explored. This is the last part of Lewis’s trilogy, which began with Sorrow Swag in blue, succeeded by minor matter in red.
Through her use of color, embodiment, and dramaturgical unruliness, Lewis twists ingrained symbols of the body and the theater with playful abandon. She seeks out the edges, frictions, and ruptures of these sites, paving way for an “othered” experience of time and space. Resisting the tyranny of transparency and representationalism, she hopes to carve out a space for opacity and the state of not knowing.
*Post-show talk with Shiv Kotecha on Wednesday, May 29.
Production: Ligia Lewis / HAU Hebbel am Ufer.
Co-production: Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 / Centre D’Art Contemporain (Geneva), tanzhaus nrw (Düsseldorf), Arsenic Centre d’art scénique contemporain (Lausanne), donaufestival (Krems), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Münchner Kammerspiele.
Funded by: Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Supported by: Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC).
Thanks to: Jarrett Gregory.
Water Will (in Melody) is supported in part by the Goethe Institut.
Concept & Choreography: Ligia Lewis
In creation with Performers: Susanne Sachsse, Dani Brown, Titilayo Adebayo
Replacement: Jolie Ngemi
Dramaturgy: Maja Zimmermann
Light design: Ariel Efraim Ashbel
Sound design: S. McKenna
Stage design: Eike Böttcher
Technical direction & light technician: Catalina Fernandez
Costume: sowrong studio
Assistance: Gilad Bendavid, Carina Zox
Production management: HAU Artist Office / Sabine Seifert
Touring & distribution: HAU Artist Office / Nicole Schuchardt.
Photo: Julien Barbès and Moritz Freudenberg (cropped into heart)
With Mariaa Randall, Genevieve Grieves, Paola Balla, Emily Johnson, Muriel Miguel, Joshua Pether, and S.J Norman.
KIN is part of First Nations Dialogues, a series of Indigenous-led performances, discussions, workshops, meetings, and ceremony taking place across New York City in January 2019. Kicking off the No Series, KIN features three performances, one workshop, and three conversations by five First Nations artists from Australia and local NYC-based elder Muriel Miguel from the Kuna and Rappahannock Nations. These artists are in dialogue with one another and share specific Indigenous experiences through their work such as kinship, care, and the transmutation of grief through movement, process, ceremony, and language.
Refusing imposed colonial structures, the artists in KIN celebrate a radical Indigenous sociality which has allowed for both survival and futurity over centuries. Practicing care and kinship within wide networks of human and more-than-human beings (e.g. water and land) is fundamental to this sociality and celebrated in KIN.
Schedule:
Performance
January 5 | 7pm
January 6 | 3pm
U.S. Premiere
$15
The work of the Joshua Pether, who is of Kalkadoon heritage but lives on Noongar country in Western Australia, is influenced by his two cultural histories, indigeneity and disability. His latest work, Jupiter Orbiting, involves an immersive sci-fi narrative which invites the viewer into a powerful encounter with dissociation and trauma.
Conversations
January 6 | 5pm
January 8, 10 | 4pm
Free
KIN Conversations 1: Center of Center of Center
KIN Conversations 2: Uqamaltaciq, the weight of something
KIN Conversations 3: Qailluqtarr, to act, change or deal with things in various ways – some ways in which are hard to explain
Guided by First Nations artists and scholars—Paola Balla, a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman based in Melbourne; Genevieve Grieves, a Worimi woman from Southeast Australia based in Melbourne; and Emily Johnson, a Yup’ik woman from Alaska based in New York City—this series of conversations threads through KIN and like KIN, it weaves through trauma, violence, and history with a generous resolve for the present and future—a commitment to generosity, positive motion, and the kind of deep love that moves forward like the undercurrent of the East River, the Birrarung, the Mnisose. Please come to all three conversations if you can, as they are accumulative.
Workshop
January 7 | 3 – 9pm
Free
Led by Muriel Miguel—one of the founders of the legendary Indigenous women’s theater company Spiderwoman Theater—the Pulling Threads Fabric Workshop invites participants to share stories and listen, to stitch together that which has been ripped apart, through storytelling and quilting, and to engage with personal and community stories of violence, healing, and ultimately, renewal. The workshop is open to female identified people only.
Performance
January 8 | 7:30pm
World Premiere
$15
Please read the artist’s Invitation Letter before making your reservation.
Norman is a non-binary Koori live artist and writer. Cicatrix 1 (that which is taken/that which remains), specially made for KIN, is a chain of actions, woven from the syncretic tissues of buried rites for mourning and remembrance. In particular, Cicatrix 1 considers the collision of Indigenous, queer, and trans bodies with state power, specifically the abuse and obliteration of those bodies by the carceral state. A long-durational ritual unfolding over approximately four hours, Cicatrix 1 begins with the lighting of a medicinal fire and concludes with an outdoor, midnight procession.
Credits
Lead artist: S.J Norman
Performers: Carly Sheppard, Emily Johnson, Mykaela Saunders, and Muriel Miguel.
Live tattooing: Holly Mititquq Nordlum
Sound: Naretha Williams
Video: Sam Icklow
Data-mapping/back piece design: Kiesia Carmine
Performance
January 10 | 2pm, 6pm, 8pm
U.S. Premiere
$15
Mariaa Randall belongs to the Bundjalung and Yaegl people of the Far North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. Footwork/Technique is a movement piece of contemporary Australian Aboriginal footworks and dance legacies. It is presented as an art in motion, as a form of Land Acknowledgment, as a reference to time and a comment on colonization.
Produced in partnership with First Nations Dialogues, BlakDance, Global First Nations Performance Network, and American Realness.
Supported by the Barragga Bay Fund with additional support by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
Photo: Adele Wilkes (cropped into heart).
Organized by American Artist.
With American Artist, NIC Kay, Raúl De Nieves, Jackie Wang, NUNATS NEN-TUK NUTAKS DIPA (THE WRONG VOICE IS COMING OUT OF YOU)
In conjunction with the installation A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN, American Artist invites writers and performers whose works embody radical imagination. As the exhibition speculates on survival strategies of the people who have always been surviving, in the face of an apocalypse, Artist is drawn to music for its legacy within liberation struggles as well as a means of meaning-making in another (non)world. Rather than being purely musical, the performances are often interdisciplinary in nature, and share a genesis in writing and radical pedagogy.
Co-presented with Eyebeam.
This event is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.