Three shared evenings of new commissions layers three generations of dance artists to consider the effect of loss on queer art-making in the present.

The work of DANCENOISE (Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton), who emerged in East Village nightclubs in the 1980s-90s, was shaped by their responses as women to the many storms raging during the early years of their collaboration, including the plague of AIDS. Their new work for this evening will respond to the work of John Bernd, who they cared for and danced with.

Antonio Ramos has been involved in the New York experimental dance scene since the early 2000s. With his group, The Gangbangers, he questions the role of the body in personal and political spaces, taking artistic inspiration from multiple dance forms, pop music, and queer identities.

Orlando Zane Hunter and Ricarrdo Valentine formed Brother(hood) Dance! in 2014 with a mission to bring attention to socio-political and environmental injustices from a global perspective, and to bring clarity to the same-gender-loving African-American experience in the 21st century. On this evening, they’ll present how to survive a plague, a meditation on the artistic generational gap between those lost to AIDS, which investigates who survives and whose stories are told during and after life, and seeks to venerate the Black African bodies that were exiled from the urgency of care and shunned by their communities and government during the AIDS epidemic.

Part of PLATFORM 2016: Lost and Found
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