Check our website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for daily updates on Jodi Melnick’s residency schedule!

Danspace Project has been invited by artist and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship recipient, Josiah McElheny, to participate in Madison Square Park Conservancy’s thirty-fourth exhibition, Prismatic Park. Danspace Executive Director & Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor, has invited four dance artists to “inhabit” the Park to realize new commissions throughout the exhibition. The project features three large sculptures of painted wood and prismatic glass on view in Madison Square Park from June 13, 2017 through October 8, 2017. The resident artists will create ambitious new work that summons the potential for imagination, creativity, and performance inspired by spontaneous audiences and chance encounters.

Choreographer Jodi Melnick will inhabit Prismatic Park from Tuesday, September 12 through Sunday, September 24, 2017.

New York City-based Melnick is a choreographer, dancer, performer, and teacher. Her work engages with the continuous act of creating, driven by her physical expressiveness and investigation with movement and the body. For this residency, she explains, “the body continues to be my aesthetic material…During my two-week occupancy [at Madison Square Park] I will be working and looking at past, present, and developing new work with an array of bodies.”

“I am inviting other performers that I have recently worked with, artists that I have admired from near and afar, and collaborators. I will be generating new movement, destroying older material, waiting, waiting, waiting, running, walking, watching, interacting, listening, listening, listening. The green public space, the people in the park, sounds of the city, smell of Shake Shack, and Josiah McElheny’s Prismatic Park installation are my set designers and will provide the collaborative nature of this occupancy.”

Invited artists include: Jared Angle, Kyle Bukhari, Yoshiko Chuma, Shirley Dai, Kareem Alexande​r Hewitt, Natalie Jonas, Joseph Lennon, Pareena Lim, Sara Mearns, Sara Rudner, Vicky Shick, Gretchen Smith, Maya Lee-Parritz, Rochelle Wilbun, and Isadora Vandergaw Scott.

The schedule for week one is as follows. Danspace Project will update the schedule daily here on the website, and will post updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Week 1
Tuesday, September 12
10-11am: Jodi Melnick/Sara Rudner
3:30-6pm: Jodi Melnick/Kareem Alexander Hewitt/Maya Lee-Parritz/Rochelle Wilbun
6-6:30pm: Jodi Melnick

Wednesday, September 13
1:30-4:30pm: Jodi Melnick/Maya Lee-Parritz/Rochelle Wilbun/Kareem Alexander Hewitt

Thursday, September 14
2-4pm: Jodi Melnick/Maya Lee-Parritz /Clara Chapin Hess/Cauveri Suresh
4-5pm: Jodi Melnick

Friday, September 15
3:30-4:30pm: Jodi Melnick/Kareem Alexander Hewitt
4:30-6pm: Jodi Melnick/Maya Lee-Parritz/Isadora Vandergaw Scott
6-6:30pm: Jodi Melnick/Maya Lee-Parritz
6:15-6:45: Jodi Melnick/Joseph Lennon

Saturday, September 16
2-4pm: Jodi Melnick/Pareena Lim/Maya Lee-Parritz/Kareem Alexander Hewitt/Rochelle Wilbun
4-6pm: Yoshiko Chuma with guest artists

Sunday, September 17
2-4pm: Jodi Melnick/Kareem Alexander Hewitt/Pareena Lim
4:30-6pm: Yoshiko Chuma with guest artists Megumi Eda, Vicky Shick, Kathy Ray, Christine Bonansea Saulut, Emily Coates, Marilyn Maywald Yahel

Week 2

Tuesday, September 19
10-11am: Jodi Melnick/Sara Rudner/Vicky Shick
3-5pm: Jodi Melnick/Colleen Thomas/Asli Bulbul/Maya Lee-Parritz/Kareem Alexander Hewitt
5-6:30pm:  Jodi Melnick in collaboration with Jon Kinzel (Headdress by Jon Kinzel)

Wednesday, September 20
1-3pm: Jodi Melnick/Maya Lee-Parritz/Asli Bulbul
2-4pm: Jodi Melnick/Rochelle Wilbun/Isadora Vandergaw Scott/Juli Brandano

Thursday, September 21
12:45-1:30pm:  Jodi Melnick/Emily Coates
2-3pm: Jodi Melnick/Rochelle Wilbun/Colleen Thomas
4:45-5:30pm: Jodi Melnick/Asli Bulbul/Nicky Paraiso/Iréne Hultman

Friday, September 22
5-6pm:  Jodi Melnick/Rashaun Mitchell
5:45-6:30pm: Jodi Melnick/Nicky Paraiso
6:30-7:15pm: Jodi Melnick in collaboration with Jon Kinzel (Headdress by Jon Kinzel)

Saturday, September 23
2-5pm: Jodi Melnick/Juli Brandano/Shirley Dai/Nathalie Jonas/Pareena Lim/Maya Lee-Parritz/Kareem Alexander Hewitt/Isadora Vandergaw Scott/Rochelle Wilbun

Sunday, September 24
4:30-5:15pm: Jodi Melnick/Sara Mearns/Jared Angle
5:15-6pm: Jodi Melnick/Maya Lee-Parritz/Kareem Alexander Hewitt/Asli Bulbul/Isadora Scott/Rochelle Wilbun/Nathalie Jonas/Shirley Dai/Juli Brandano/Cauveri Suresh
6-6:45pm: Jodi Melnick in collaboration with Jon Kinzel (Headdress by Jon Kinzel)

More information: https://www.madisonsquarepark.org/mad-sq-art/mad-sq-art-josiah-mcelheny