Shows | Page 16 of 52 | Performance Space New York

Open Movement

 
In its third season, Open Movement is continuing its open format of carving out space for free shared studio time and Artist led movement workshops every Sunday in Performance Space New York’s theaters. This season’s Open Movement exists in 3 parts:
 
First, come move your body however you like at Open Movement Studio. There will be music playing, lights will be contributing to the atmosphere and you can come and go as you please. This is a shared studio where people stretch, draw, write, lay on the floor, noodle, dance and rehearse with others and by themselves. Bring friends and family, make friends and family. This is an opportunity to be grounded in your body and just feel. Many participants refer to this as “church”.
 
In the second part of Sunday at 4pm, participate in movement concept WORKSHOPS led by artists and practitioners. These workshops have something different to offer every week as each artist or practitioner shares a two hour participatory practice, exploration or sequence of actions. Some lend themselves to performance ethos of shared practices as others ground in wellness ontologies while others are experiments in the human condition. All are of the body and within community.
 
This year, sprinkled in is a call for experimentation and poetic sentiment around the body’s relationship to science as it merges with the mystical or spiritual. Open to broad interpretation, the Open Movement ethos is expansive and can go beyond the typical practices of “dance”. Check the schedule and Instagram every week for specific details.
 
The third part of Open Movement is the new, WIP FEEDBACK FRONT. This is a showcasing of artist works in progress. Throughout the year we will have five events where 2 artists or artist groups will show us what they are working on. This is a performance event with wine and drinks served in a casual atmosphere. Built within the event is an opportunity to write feedback for the artists anonymously if you choose. WIP FEEDBACK FRONT is an opportunity for New York artists and audience members to witness and experiment with the living experience of performance in its broadest form.
 
All of this is meant for all people, “non-dancers” welcome. A major component of the ethos is to utilize empty space for people to reconnect, ground and expand within themselves and with others, wherever we are at the moment.
 

Free with RSVP

 
THERE’S A CRACK IN MY VESSEL methodology emphasizes a soothing focus on the
entire body, uncovering fluid and dynamic pathways to understand and challenge our
potential. In this 3 day workshop, we will identify, unlock, crack and explore focal points in our vessel as well as our environment, delving into our own performative alchemy. Through guided meditation and continuous motion exercises, we allow light and matter to travel dimensions, gaining insights into our personal history and future desires. In the durational practice of intuitive improvisation we construct ideas of dimensional movement cartography as well as lucid cinematography, creating an empathetic centrifuge experience between ourselves and the present moment.

Free with RSVP

 
GARBAGE TEXTS is a workshop about words and what we do with them. Engaging in intuitive writing exercises, we’ll dip below the surface of meaning and dig into our individual undergrounds. We will then exchange words with each other, listening to our inside voices made outside. As we let go of legibility and punctuation, our words will slip in and out of coherence and into and out of pure acoustical presence. From there, we will trawl the formless space between sound and movement and make some shapes. Everyone of all abilities and experience is encouraged to attend.

Free with RSVP

 
This workshop explores the relationship between the mind and body, emotions and
movements, by applying sense memory practice in method acting as a tool to create
movement. The practice aims to approach movement through basic acting practice, exploring and experimenting with how feelings and imagination can stimulate and trigger movement. The workshop includes activities that expand sensations and emotions through memories, creating movement from within, ultimately “dancing” from the inside out.
With the physical and emotional awareness that the sense memory practice brings to the
participants, the practice can be applied to contact improvisation, expanding the exploration from self to others. Participants are required to prepare an object in mind that has a certain memory linked to it for
the workshop.

Free with RSVP

 
Fame, Center Stage, Step Up (1 & 2 only), Honey, You Got Served, Save the last dance, black swan and more! Dress in your most cliche dance rehearsal outfit (open to interpretation) and prepare to sweat while being incandescently happy!

Free with RSVP

 
This workshop will explore what we carry, and how we are carried. The body is a carrier and we are a carrier of the body, of time and in time, together. Through our physical bodies we will gather information around the sensation of carrying and being carried. How can I carry you? How can I let myself be carried? Carrying is knowledge, with/in.

Free with RSVP

 
(BLACK) childhood experiments is an open framework centering Black improvisation performance to excavate childhood memories within the body. Using somatic practices, popular Black music / text from childhood and otherwise possibility to imagine space outside of everything complexed.

Free with RSVP

 
In this movement workshop we will focus on the body in relation to time.

 
Beatriz Cortez and Candice Lin is an exhibition of works by two artists, who have long been in conversation with one another, both challenging viewers to see non-human objects through the lens of performance and to consider objects as beings with agency. The works in this exhibition engage matter loaded with histories of colonialism and migration; matter whose significance reverberates across time and space. “The performance of matter, and the experiences of simultaneity that it brings with it, is something beyond the human,” says Cortez. Relatedly, Lin asserts, “…the work becomes centered on the bodily relationships we have towards material and the things it makes us do.”
 
Cortez’s two works, The Time Machine and The Fortune Teller, are interactive, and visitors are invited to engage with them. Cortez’s works create portals that evoke immigrant experiences of yearning and simultaneity: living in one place but inhabiting the reality of an origin city — the constant overlap of disparate times and locations in a person’s life.
 
The Time Machine is an installation that explores the entwinement of two urban spaces separated by 2,301 miles. Los Angeles and San Salvador have strong connections to one another through labor and culture, with Los Angeles being home to the largest Salvadoran population outside of San Salvador; the two were formally named so-called ‘sister cities’ in 2005.
 
A video projection of Los Angeles in the daylight shines on one of the exterior walls of a large wooden box, while the inner space is dark. The light from the video permeates holes drilled into the wall dividing the installation’s outside and interior—creating in the light-dotted dark space a precarious video projection of a distant view of San Salvador at night. Inside, the viewer can sit on a swing reminiscent of childhood, and sway as the lights blink in playful suspended reflection.
 
The Fortune Teller quotes desires for the future uttered by immigrants and border crossers, which flow out in the form of paper tickets generated by Arduino programming inside the box. With this work, Cortez seeks to enable conversations between people who are not in the same place and time, extending lives through language, and beyond the confines of the human lifespan.
 
Breaking the barriers that separate lives and histories, The Fortune Teller also opens up the possibility for others, who are yet unborn, to enter into conversation with those who have passed away, whose bodies are gone. The material fragments of those lives—like words on paper—remain.
 
Candice Lin’s multi-part installation, On Being Human (The Slow Erosion of a Hard White Body), traces the materialist histories of colonial goods such as indigo, opium, sugar, porcelain, and tea. Lin examines the entangled connections between these products and the racialized language around their dispersal and value.
 
The installation comprises a table tiled with clay tablets as well as a distillation and pumping system that distributes liquid through an arrangement of tubing and buckets, emptying onto a large wooden structure. The clay tablets are inscribed with stamped text that looks like cuneiform but is actually English, displaying a passage from John Searle’s 1980 essay Minds, Brains, and Programs. The essay uses the metaphor of a “Chinese Room” to determine “a human level of consciousness” and is premised on Western misconceptions of the foreignness and inscrutability of the Chinese language. On top of this table, the distillation system boils a dark brown mixture of plants—dried poppies, tobacco, indigo, tea, sugarcane—echoing the global circulation of goods and forced migration of indentured Chinese workers in the 19th century.
 
Imbricated in plantation economies, these plants also served as poisons or medicines for acts of resistance. The concentrated distillate ends its cycle by dripping into a ceramic bucket on top of a wooden structure modeled after a nineteenth-century torture device used in U.S. prisons (which was racialized by the name “Chinese Water Torture”). The unrelenting drops slowly erode a block of unfired porcelain—which is the same weight as the artist—sitting on the wood structure.
 
Using archaic forms of early record-keeping, such as clay tablets, the exhibition expands contemporary notions of research by revisiting these loaded materials and revealing stories that are left out of these early historical records. By setting these materials into circulatory, fluid, seeping, entropic relations with one another, the installation seeks to create new orientations, stories, and ways of being.

Art Workers are Artists Too

Host: Champagne Jerry

Artists: Sarai Frazier, Andy Sowers, Žilvinas Jonuśas, ESSA.A (Electric Sewage Systems and Analysis), Naomi Harrison-Clay and Tal Mor, Noodt, Matthew Deinhart + Sara Vandenheuvel, Ansel Combs, Jimmy Kavetas and Friends, Emily LaRochelle + Sarazina Joy Stein, Sophia Alaniz, Andrew Fox, Robin A. Ediger-Seto, AMARII, MF BUTCH, CULEBRA, Georgina Kritikos, Sophia Alaniz, Alex Vasquez-Dheming, Evangeline Dillard, and Yisel G.

While artists toil to bring their work to life, there are many unsung heroes that often labor behind the scenes, weaving the intricate threads that bring an artist’s vision to the public. “Art Workers are Artists Too” celebrates and shines a spotlight on the inherent artistry embedded within the daily lives of arts workers, inspiring a shift in perspective to foster a greater understanding and recognition of their skills and creativity. Our crew members, hailing from diverse production backgrounds in theatre, dance, and music, bring a unique set of skills honed from their own artistic practices to support the work of their fellow artists. Grounded in an ethos of support, this creative exchange forms the foundation for a vibrant collaborative environment.

The night honors the vital contributions of those working behind the scenes but also encourages a broader acknowledgment of the artistry, extending beyond the spotlight to encompass the unseen labor wrapped into the creative process.

All of the proceeds raised from this event will support our Derek Lloyd Production Fellowship.

Photo Credit: Rachel Papo

Celebrating the First Family of American Letters: The Greenidge Sisters

 
One of the great advantages of living in New York City is that we can hear new ideas as they are being created, instead of having to wait years for those books to appear on bookstore shelves. First Mondays allows us to share accomplished writers’ processes as they are happening and gives us an intimate insight into their new work in-progress, long before publication or performances. Join us every first Monday at Performance Space New York for a special opportunity to hear the future.

Highly Anticipated New Books!

 
One of the great advantages of living in New York City is that we can hear new ideas as they are being created, instead of having to wait years for those books to appear on bookstore shelves. First Mondays allows us to share accomplished writers’ processes as they are happening and gives us an intimate insight into their new work in-progress, long before publication or performances. Join us every first Monday at Performance Space New York for a special opportunity to hear the future.

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