Events – Danspace Project
Photo by Elyssa Goodman

Stacy Matthew Spence: I am, here; Here with us; Where we find ourselves

Friday, January 10 | 7:30PM
Saturday, January 11 | 4PM
Saturday, January 11 | 7:30PM


Co-presented with Live Artery | New York Live Arts

Stacy Matthew Spence’s new dance in triptych form, I am, here (a solo for Spence), Here with us (a duet), Where we find ourselves (a quartet) explores ideas of self, impulse, and sharing. I am, here; Here with us; Where we find ourselves is created in collaboration with dance artists Tim Bendernagel, Joanna Kotze, Hsiao-jou Tang, singer/musician Charlotte Jacobs, percussionist Raf Vertessen, and costumer Athena Kokoronis.

A longtime member of Trisha Brown Dance Company (1997-2006), an educator, and performer, Stacy Matthew Spence’s dance work often explores the exchange between person and environment. This involves playful interactions and movement generated in response to the places he finds himself – studio, home, and in public spaces.

Presently, he brings his attention to the internal space of “me”– as a personal environment to be outwardly created, expressed, occupied, and shared.

For this work, “I asked my collaborators to take a journey from their internal finding, to the external expression and wondered how we would bump up against, allow for and possibly join/accommodate/revel in each other’s individual selves,” Spence explains. “How do we find ourselves? How do we find our place? How do we find each other?”

A forthcoming film version of Spence’s solo I am, here, a collaboration with videographer Iki Nakagawa, has been made in tandem with the live work. “The filmed solo, placed in different locations around New York City, is a conversation between myself and my history, the place and its history and the physicality of being in the present.”

“How do we find ourselves? How do we find our place? How do we find each other?”


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Before you visit:

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New York Live Arts, guided by the leadership of visionary artist Bill T. Jones, collaborates with boundary pushing artists, advocates for their vision, and fortifies a creative future. The annual Live Artery Festival provides a space for artists to network and share their work with the general public and presenters from around the world alike, which leads to commissions, tours and the building of long-term relationships.

Stacy Matthew Spence is a New York City based choreographer, dancer, and teacher. He was born in Lake Charles, LA. and received an M.F.A. from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Stacy’s choreography has been commissioned by The High Line, Vega as North Star (El Norte es Sur) 2019 collaborating with visual artist Ronny Quevedo; The New School, This is how we got here 2017; Danspace Project, This home is us 2017, and Eden as we recall 2012; Tisch School of the Arts, among the scapes and fields 2009; Edge at London Contemporary Dance School, I just wanted to be close to you 2006; The University of New Mexico, Adjusted Space 2007; and the OtherShore Dance Company, small earthquakes along the way 2008. His work has been included in Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Platform 2012: Parallels for Danspace Project, and in co/motion directed by Margeret Peak as part of Jason Moran’s Whitney Biennial: Bleed. As well Stacy has performed with Joanna Kotze’s BIG BEATS 2021, at The Museum of Modern Art, NY in Deborah Hay’s Blues, as part of Ralph Lemon’s Some Sweet Day 2012; and in Polly Motley and Molly Davies’ Critical State at The Helen Day Arts Center, VT. His most recent work I am, here; Here with us; Where we find ourselves, premiered at Danspace in March 2024.

Stacy has received grants and residencies that include Gibney Dance in Process Residency (DIP) 2022-23, Movement Research Artist Parent Residency; Workspace Artist-in-Residence, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council NY; Manhattan Community Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY; New York Live Arts Studio Series Residency; Artist Residency at Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, France; Movement Research Artist-in-Residence.

Stacy danced with The Trisha Brown Dance Company from 1997-2006, was Education Director 2018-2021 and he continues to be involved with the company through teaching and the re-staging of Trisha’s work. He has also taught nationally and internationally at institutions such as The New School, Juilliard, Barnard College, Tisch School of the Arts, Manhattan Marymount College, London Contemporary Dance School, Centre National de Danse Contemporaine, and Movement Research. Stacy is currently an instructor at The New School in New York City.

Photo of Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton by Gil Grossi

Steve Paxton – a video amble

Friday, February 14 | 6:30PM

 

Organized and hosted by Lisa Nelson and Cathy Weis

This special evening marks the opening of Danspace 50th festival celebration and includes video and remembrances of the groundbreaking artist Steve Paxton (Jan 21, 1939 – Feb 20, 2024). Paxton was a singular, iconic dance artist who graced the sanctuary over many decades and whose influence spans five generations. 

Choreographer, performer, and videographer Lisa Nelson, Paxton’s oft-collaborator and life companion, joins with choreographer and video artist Cathy Weis to share a selection of excerpts of rarely seen performance documents and video snapshots from his life at the Farm in Vermont. Interspersed with conversation, this viewing will give but a glimpse of the breadth of how, in Steve’s words, “dance is the art of taking place.”

Lisa writes “Prolific to a fare-thee-well, Steve’s thinking with the body’ left us a multiplex of paths to ponder. It would be hard to say which traces of his lifetime of giving dance will be most enduring—his writing, correspondence, talking, performing on and off stages, improvising, collaborating, composting, gardening, teaching, learning, playing, and hanging out. We are deeply grateful that video technology came of age close to the beginning of Steve’s adventure and we’ve had 50+ years to learn how to see through it.”

Paxton’s enormous influence on the dance field and on interdisciplinary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ralph Lemon, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson and other luminaries in movement and  art, is impossible to quantify. Ralph Lemon has written: “I didn’t know Steve until late in his life…but I had been in his audiences most of my art life, from his utterly wild, collectively exploratory Grand Union group days (Walker Art Center, 1975), the year I took my first dance class in Minneapolis and had no idea what I was looking at (I’m not even sure I was there, maybe I just heard about it); to his magnificent Goldberg Variations (Jacob’s Pillow, 1988), dancing that completely changed my dance thinking as the music in his body rivaled Gould and Bach; to Ash (Danspace Project, 1999)…to his longtime work with his longtime partner, Lisa Nelson, and their extraordinary intimacy.” –October Journal, 2024


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Photo of Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland by Pamela Moore

OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century)

Thursday, February 27 | 7:30PM
Friday, February 28 | 7:30PM
Saturday, March 1 | 7:30PM

 

As part of recognizing Danspace Project’s 50th anniversary, Ishmael Houston-Jones will present OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century), performed by AJ Wilmore, Stephanie Hewett, and Kris Lee.

Houston-Jones writes: “In 1983 at the Danspace Project festival Contact at 10th and 2nd which celebrated the 11th year that Steve Paxton named the form Contact Improvisation, Fred Holland and I were invited to perform a duet on the Partners Program along with Steve and Nancy Stark Smith and others. Fred and I, who considered ourselves to be the Black Punks of Contact, decided to do our C.I. duet by doing everything wrong. We rehearsed in East Village bars like the Pyramid Club on Avenue A after midnight and were given a cassette tape of sound loops from Kung Fu movies compiled by composer Mark Larson. But it was Fred who named the first ‘wrong’ item in our unpublished score when he said, ‘We are Black.’ We were one of very few people of color included in the festival or inhabiting the C.I. milieu at all. The videos of the two performances of OO-GA-LA by Cathy Weis and Lisa Nelson were largely unseen after the festival until found by Karen Nelson in the early 2000s. I’ve chosen to give the Wrong Contact Score to three AFAB dancers of color who are extraordinary performers, highly skilled improvisors, and innovative DJs to Queer this duet from 40 years and bring it to a new generation.”


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Before you visit:

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Ishmael Houston-Jones is an award winning choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd presented by Danspace Project. In 2020 he received a fourth “Bessie” for Service to the Field of Dance. Houston-Jones is the DraftWork curator for works-in progress at Danspace Project in New York. He has curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now both at Danspace Project. As an author Houston-Jones’ essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies and in numerous journals and magazines. His FAT and Other Stories: Some Writing About Sex was published in June 2018 by Yonkers International Press.

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