Performance | Performance Space New York Spring Gala

Palabre/s en mode marron & Rite de passage || solo 2

Symposium: Palabre/s en mode marron

The Neilma Sidney Theatre
December 6 – 7 | 12pm
Free with RSVP

Performance: Rite de passage || solo 2

The Keith Haring Theatre
December 6 – 7 | 7:30pm
Tickets

Artist Bintou Dembélé presents Palabre/s en mode marron, a gathering of artists, academics, activists, and more with connections to Paris and the French West Indies. This program will feature a day of exchanges and encounters with conversations, film screenings, readings, DJ sets, and workshops, culminating in a dance performance by Dembélé, performed by Michel “Meech” Onomo. Palabre offers a dedicated space for artists’ voices, conflict resolution and community engagement while cultivating diasporic exchange among scholars, stakeholders, and activists. Working collaboratively with Performance Space and L’Alliance New York to bring communities together, Dembélé demonstrates the multifaceted nature of performance.

Dembélé’s work explores ritual and corporeal memories, interrogates gender dynamics, and addresses both individual and collective wounds of the past. Palabre/s is an iteration of a series she has presented several times in the past, which, with the blessing of the Bushnengue elders of French Guiana, allowing her to invent a ‘Maroon Dance,’ a memory of marronnage – of descendants of Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean who created new, free societies on the margins of slavery and colonization.

As part of the invitation, Bintou Dembélé also presents a movement-based work, Rite de passage || solo 2, that ends each day and blends together this ritual practice of palabre with the essence of Hip Hop. They assume the role of MC and orchestrate the flow of speech within the space, inviting vulnerability and fragility and enabling participants to find common ground and collectively reimagine new narratives. As an artist, Dembélé unearths the memories buried in bodies, souls and minds, as a living archive of another point of view on histories of French enslaved people and colonial histories more generally.

Friday, December 6

Arrivals and Welcome
12:30 – 1pm, Open Room; Keith Haring Theater

Palabre 1: With Mawongany, Audrey Célestine, and Bintou Dembélé
1 – 4pm, Keith Haring Theater

Film Screening and Conversation: Here Ends the World We’ve Known with Anne-Sophie Nanki
4:30-5:30pm, Keith Haring Theater

Dinner and Discussion with BEM Books
5:30-7pm, Open Room / Neilma Sidney Theater

Performance: Rite de passage || solo 2
7:30 -8:30pm, Keith Haring Theater

Saturday, December 7

Arrivals and Welcome
12-12:30pm, Open Room; Keith Haring Theater

Palabre 2: With Stefanie Batten Bland, nora chipaumire, and Bintou Dembélé
12:30 – 2:30pm, Keith Haring Theater

We The Youth – Keith Haring Lecture with mayfield brooks
2-3pm, The Neilma Sidney Theater

Palabre 3: With Mame-Fatou Niang and Bintou Dembélé
3-4pm, Keith Haring Theater

Film Screening: Vanille
3:30-4pm, The Neilma Sidney Theater

Palabre 4: With C Riley Snorton and Bintou Dembélé
4-6pm, Keith Haring Theater

Performance: Rite de passage || solo 2
7:30 -8:30pm, Keith Haring Theater

DJ set and dance party with UBABU
8:30-10:30pm, Keith Haring Theater

This project is co-presented by L’Alliance New York, as part of Crossing The Line Festival.

About L’Alliance New York

L’Alliance New York is an independent, not-for-profit organization committed to providing its audience and students with engaging French language classes and audacious multi-disciplinary programming that celebrates the diversity of francophone cultures and creativity around the world. A welcoming and inclusive community for all ages and all backgrounds, L’Alliance New York is a place where people can meet, learn, and explore the richness of our heritages and share discoveries. L’Alliance New York strives to amplify voices and build bridges from the entire francophone world to New York and beyond.

About Crossing The Line Festival

Crossing The Line is a citywide festival that engages international artists and New York City audiences in artistic discovery and critical dialogue to re-imagine the world around us. Crossing The Line is produced by L’Alliance New York in partnership with leading cultural institutions.

LIBRARY

LIBRARY is a four act performance program that celebrates the library as a space for communal gathering in an expansive reconception of a traditional reading that includes poetry, dialogues, and live performance. Whitney Mallett is the curator and organizer of LIBRARY and the founding editor of The Whitney Review—a new publication that features reviews and criticism of new writing and interviews with writers.

Mallett found inspiration in Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 story The Library of Babel, which conceives of the universe as an infinite library, reimagining its “labyrinthine…hexagonal galleries, corridors, staircases, mirrors, and reflections” as a strip club, casino, and convention center. The program features a performance by Kellian Delice engaging choreographies of processing; a conversation between Esmé Naumes-Givens, contributing writer to The Whitney Review, and their father David Givens, writer and librarian; a demonstration of poet and painter Whitney Claflin’s language-based card game, its hyper-mediated presentation inspired by televised poker tournaments; and a performance by poet and performer, Maya Martinez, and writer and deputy editor of The Whitney Review, Mani Mekala, combining dance and spoken word.

The Whitney Review creates community around the printed word and LIBRARY embodies the communal function of the library, inspired by the many contributors to The Whitney Review. As the program unfolds, audience members are invited to participate in the ongoing narrative, the infinite act, where the spirit of the library lives on.

¡Cuidado!

Installation

The Neilma Sidney Theatre

Exhibition Hours
November 8 – 24 | Tuesday – Sunday | 12 – 6pm
Free

Opening Performance
Friday, November 8, 2024
7:00pm

Closing Performance
Thursday, November 21, 2024
7:00pm

Tickets

Adán Vallecillo has been at the forefront of Central American creative and political praxis for decades working in sculpture, installation, and video, with roots in performance and sociology. Vallecillo’s installation and performance, ¡Cuidado!, marks his debut performance in New York. This title holds dual meaning in Spanish: both caution and care. Vallecillo explores this duality through performance and video installation, showcasing the honest experiences of Honduran migrants working as home care aides in New York City. Inspired by and dedicated to Vallecillo’s sister, Mabel Vallecillo, an immigrant who has worked for over two decades caring for the elderly in the United States, this project illuminates the essential but undervalued nature of care work. Vallecillo emphasizes the beauty of caregiving in the midst of a culture that considers mortality to be taboo and generates panic and shame around aging. This framework highlights the political and social relationships between the United States and Honduras. Care also frames Vallecillo’s interpersonal relationships with his community and forms the foundation of his methodologies of working with home care aids who often face issues such as racism, xenophobia, and labor exploitation.

Central to Vallecillo’s approach is extensive on-the-ground research, engaging intimately with communities to create site-specific and locally relevant exhibitions. ¡Cuidado! is informed by a series of interviews with home care aides of different backgrounds, ages, and experiences in Central American neighborhoods such as the South Bronx and Bushwick, as well as conversations with unions that center health care workers’ rights. This research forms the foundation of ¡Cuidado!, conveying the nuances and poetics of care work and giving the audience an intimate yet abstracted view of migrants’ daily lives. The installation will include video work that documents private performances that have taken place in various locations throughout the city. These video works will be displayed in the installation alongside other sculptural, visual, and audio works exploring different modalities of care work. The opening of the exhibition will feature live performances.

¡Cuidado! is the culmination of the inaugural Keith Haring Curatorial Fellowship, curated and co-produced by X Arriaga Cuellar.

Edición en Español

Adán Vallecillo ha estado a la vanguardia en la praxis creativa y política centroamericana durante décadas a través de su trabajo en escultura, instalación, con raíces en performance y sociología. La instalación y performance de Vallecillo, ¡Cuidado!, marca su debut de performance en Nueva York. El título carga doble significado: tanto precaución como cuidado. Vallecillo nos muestra esta dualidad a través de las experiencias vividas por los migrantes hondureños que trabajan como cuidadores de personas de la tercera edad en la ciudad de Nueva York. Inspirado por su hermana Mabel Vallecillo, una inmigrante que ha dedicado más de veinte años al cuidado de ancianos en Estados Unidos, este proyecto ilustra la naturaleza esencial y a su vez subestimada del trabajo de cuidado. Vallecillo destaca la belleza del cuidado dentro de una cultura que considera tabú la mortalidad y genera temor y vergüenza en torno al envejecimiento. A la vez este cuadro resalta las relaciones políticas y sociales entre Estados Unidos y Honduras. El concepto del cuidado también enmarca las relaciones interpersonales de Vallecillo con su comunidad y forma la base para sus metodologías de trabajo con cuidadores de personas envejecidas, quienes a menudo enfrentan problemas tales como el racismo, la xenofobia y la explotación laboral.

La práctica de Vallecillo está centrada en una investigación contínua sobre el terreno, interactuando íntimamente con las comunidades para crear exhibiciones específicas al lugar y localmente relevantes. ¡Cuidado! consiste de una serie de entrevistas con cuidadores de diferentes orígenes, edades y trasfondos, en barrios con grandes poblaciones centroamericanas como el Sur del Bronx y Bushwick, así como en conversaciones con sindicatos que defienden los derechos de los trabajadores de la salud. Esta investigación constituye la base de ¡Cuidado!, transmitiendo los matices y la poesía del trabajo de cuidado y ofreciendo al público una perspectiva íntima y abstracta de la vida diaria de los migrantes. La instalación incluirá obras de video dirigidas por Vallecillo que documentan acciones privadas realizadas en varios lugares de la ciudad. Estas obras de video se exhibirán junto con otras obras escultóricas, visuales y auditivas que exploran diferentes modalidades del trabajo de cuidado. La inauguración de la exposición incluirá performances en vivo.

¡Cuidado! es la culminación del becario curatorial inaugural Keith Haring de Performance Space New York, curada y coproducida por X Arriaga Cuellar.

Nasty & Full

Exhibition

The Keith Haring Theatre
Opening Reception: October 5 | 6:30pm
October 5 – 31 | Tuesday – Sunday | 12 – 6pm
Free

Performance

The Keith Haring Theatre
October 31 | 8pm
Tickets

Materials + Checklist

Keioui Keijaun Thomas: Nasty & Full presents the New York debut of a body of work four years in the making, site-specifically installed for the Keith Haring Theater at Performance Space New York. Through a fusion of voice, video installation, sculpture, and performance, Thomas seeks new pathways to understand and express the foundationally transient nature of being and becoming a doll—a trans femme so flawless and unbound she is no longer considered real.

Thomas’s artwork emerges from an iterative process informed by her writing and performance; her practice is linguistic as much as it is bodily. With latex, paper bags, pillars and bricks of repurposed materials, Thomas thoughtfully builds a fluid space, black and blue, all imbued with elements signifying care that build upon and depart from past bodies of work throughout her career.

A series of sculptures aptly titled Waterbodies mark the gallery floor in two portal-like ripples of blue nitrile gloves that surround the blackened, resilient figures of tree stumps; carbonized fuel for the new world. Although stationary, each Waterbody holds movement, caught between buoyancy and wading.

Stationed throughout the perimeter of Nasty & Full are a selection of twelve Paper Bag Soldiers, made by Thomas between 2022-2024. Some shown for the first time, these sculptures are vessels of compact time, loosely packed with material such as fast food baskets, used latex glove packaging, and other remnants from Thomas’s past exhibitions, installations, and performances that now become elements of the artist’s archive.

Contained within the world of Nasty & Full is the video trilogy Come Hell or High Femmes made between 2020-2023. The videos are projected to life size proportions on three custom-made screens, and suspended from the ceiling with manila rope typically used on large ships and in the boating industry. The video trilogy is presented in three “Acts” which appear and disappear in three sequences of moving image and audio. This process of layering and overlapping image and sound—that also appears in Thomas’s live performances—is central to Thomas’s practice. It is one way her work continues to build upon itself and create new worlds and experience–ever expanding.

This timeless world is for us, offering moments to acknowledge, reflect on, and move through realities that can feel oppressive and untenable, with self-fulfillment always in sight. Transfiguration for the artist is not a destination, but a tool that can act as a shield and life force, allowing dolls to move through worlds and show up wholeheartedly in our truth. Unique and unified, she will meet you there.

Keioui Keijaun Thomas: Nasty & Full culminates with the one and only New York premiere of the live performance from which this body of work originated, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise, on Halloween night (October 31).

Keioui Keijaun Thomas: Nasty & Full is curated by Isis Awad as Executive Care*.

*Please Note: This production contains strobe lighting and haze effects which may be disruptive to people who are sensitive.

+ Credits:

Funding: Keioui Keijaun Thomas: Nasty & Full is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Photo: Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Era of the Dolls, Abrons Art Center, 2023. Photo by Christopher Sonny Martinez. Come Hell or High Femmes was made possible with funding from The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and Mellon Foundation.

Production Credits:
Lighting Designer: Beaudau Karel Banks
Video Engineer: Matthew Deinhart
Audio Engineer: Jonah Rosenberg
Production Manager: Andy Sowers
Screen Stretcher: Žilvinas Jonuśas

Install / Fabrication Crew:

Adrienne Swan

Noah Mourra

Kali Van Horn

Ansel Combs

Robin Ediger-Seto

Joe Pegorsch

Sergey Sutt

Rodney Perez

Collina’s Horse Girl Season

Aligning with her presentation for New York Fashion Week, Hillary Taymour, designer and founder of cult-favorite fashion label, Collina Strada, offers a glimpse into her childhood as a self-proclaimed “horse girl.” Reimagining the all-American state fair as a night-long, multi-room performance program and party, models gallop on hobby horses and leap over hurdles, guests are invited to play games, eat carnival food, as country music plays from the speakers all night amongst stacked bales of hay. Encapsulating the essence of horse girl culture, our theaters transform into Collina Land for one night only, where chaos and absurdity reign.