In conjunction with Slipping Into Darkness by Julie Tolentino.
bury.me.fiercely. is a meditation on sex and the aging body. Tracing the weight of touch and blood, Tolentino and Fila evoke an empathetic landscape, a fractured web, and a reflection of a vexed yet vital archive of tethered lives.
Photo by Hillary Goidell.
Gutierrez invites you to enter into a secret holding laboratory for what can only be assumed is a dangerous creature. Held captive in a secret cryogenic facility, Eve—named by her creator, Dr. Red—is the first humanoid to be bioengineered with reanimated alien DNA discovered in the Mayan cave Xibalba, or “place of fear,” believed to be the mouth of the underworld. Will Eve be the key to humanity’s evolution, or its undoing?
Gutierrez says, “The most real and profound boundaries are those we impose upon ourselves.” Eve, this creature in captivity may be commenting on Gutierrez’s self-perceived otherness, but it also exposes the audience to their own insecurities and prejudices.
Commissioned by Performance Space New York. This project is supported in part by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.
Kia LaBeija’s first large scale performance work engages with Oskar Schlemmer’s early Bauhaus ballet piece Das triadische Ballett, a dance in three acts. LaBeija reinterprets the final, so called Black Act which relates to fantasy, mysticism, and the infinite void of the black stage. LaBeija proposes a contemporary interpretation, inserting herself as an artist working with numerous disciplines—including dance, portraiture, and performance—to investigate space, memory and personal history. Schlemmer’s extravagant costumes deliberately limited the dancers’ freedom of movement. Bodies became walking architectural structures unable to move with autonomous ease. Now, LaBeija responds and repositions Schlemmer’s critique by expanding his stage, searching for being, belonging, freedom, and wholeness.
Contemporary costumes designed in collaboration with Kyle Luu, with live music score by Kenn Michael featuring Warren Benbow.
Disclaimer:
The Estate of Oskar Schlemmer has not approved or licensed Untitled, The Black Act.
(Untitled) The Black Act is co-commissioned with Performa and Performance Space New York and co-produced with The Josie Club – Mickalene Thomas, Racquel Chevremont, Jet Toomer and Nina Chanel Abney. Additional support provided by Abigail Pucker, Victoria Rogers, Jane Wesman and the Performa Commissioning Fund. This project is supported in part by a grant from the Jerome Foundation. Special thanks to Swarovski.
Assistant Movement Director and Creative Producer, Taína Larot. Featuring Daniella Agosto, Selena Ettienne, Khristina Cayetano, Terry Lovette, and Taína Larot.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
As a week-long performance-installation, Tolentino’s new durational work, Slipping Into Darkness, plays out in both the Day and the Night. In the daylight of the winter sun, movers breathe, labor, and shift while sheathed under the cover of a thick “horizon” made from leather, scented oils, reflective surfaces, and dense sound. In the evening, participants join in an intimate one-to-one exchange immersed in a dark pool of mineral water. Working with and below these evocative opaque surfaces, Tolentino reaches for the sensual, the subjective excess of each encounter. Loss tenders refuge. Space and time open to the accounts of Others—the imprecisely labeled, unseen, or overlooked—and the inspiring visionaries who thrive as not-of-this-world future-makers. Tolentino tunes us into spaces that generously blur yet ignite our shadowy interiors and fugitive poetics with time’s future-past to float with that which falls in and out of grasp.
This project will be accompanied by .bury.me.fiercely.—a 35-minute special late night performance on Dec 12th at 10pm by Julie Tolentino and Stosh Fila.
Commissioned by Performance Space New York.
In to spiral seems to be the only option, ferreira immerses her own body and person within the histories of the spirited many who leapt, sometimes together, from the slave-ships that were heading to Northern America and the Caribbean, and the underwater communities they formed. There is a parallel history between the archipelagos that hold New York City and the Dominican Republic, embodied in ferreira, too. One thinks of Marsha P. Johnson’s dead body that was found floating in the Hudson—the unknowns of her death, how she’d made a pact with Sylvia Rivera to “cross the River Jordan” together—or Mami Wata, Yemallá, and sister oceanic beings. to spiral seems to be the only option engages histories, mythologies, and the confluence of both across space and time, disrupting said spacetimematterings, opening our minds to the potential of para-knowability. Through ferreira’s work, we piece together new worlds by giving in to the fact that not everything makes sense—some is felt.
*ASL will be available on December 21. If you have any questions please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.
Commissioned by Performance Space New York. This project is supported in part by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.