Shows | Page 32 of 48 | Performance Space New York Spring Gala

Untitled, The Black Act

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.

Credits

(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.

Slipping Into Darkness

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.

Credits

Commissioned by Performance Space New York.

A Famine of Hearing

Zapata invites you to enter and linger in her large-scale textile installation—handwoven, hand-tufted, and sewn into shapes and textures that are a bit misshapen, and refreshingly different from familiar everyday objects. Zapata’s objects can hold our fantasies. They form a landscape in which we can spend time and experience ourselves with other bodies. Through the excess of labor put into this work, Zapata conveys an amorphous sense of time, honoring tradition with untraditional aspects of existence and queerness. This approach also mirrors Zapata’s complex identity: a Texan living in Brooklyn, a lesbian raised as evangelical Christian, a first-generation American of Latin American descent, whose work is inspired by ancient indigenous traditions and ritual.

Sarah Zapata will also organize an event for Octopus on November 2 at 4pm.

Credits

Commissioned by Performance Space New York.

Photo courtesy of Deli Gallery.

to spiral seems to be the only option

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.

Credits

Commissioned by Performance Space New York. This project is supported in part by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.

AIR

In AIR, Valencia creates a performance where she pays homage to the work of artists of Mexican descent, such as the Los Angeles based collective ASCO, and Mexican television and film characters like Don Ramon, El Chavo, Cantinflas or Maria Felix. She acknowledges that exposure to these figures has informed her work as much as New York’s experimental downtown dance history. It is a nod to generations of mestiza and Latinx artists who grew up in the United States existing in a hybridity of cultures, positioned in-between, learning how to belong and not belong to the one or the other.

In AIR, Valencia draws commonalities and kinships to this diaspora as they synthesize within her body of work and research as a Latina artist. Valencia shows us we are all listening through osmosis. This is all in her air, so to speak.

*ASL will be available on January 11. If you have any questions please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.

Credits

Commissioned by Performance Space New York. AIR is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.