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mmm, devynn emory

April 17, 2020

On February 29th as a part of Platform 2020: Utterances From The Chorus, the Kin & Care Research Group shared both collective and independent research with the public in the Sanctuary of St. Mark’s Church, home to Danspace Project.

As a part of the full schedule of presentations and events on February 29th, research fellow and dance artist, healer, and hospice nurse, devynn emory, presented mmm, a performance lecture that included projected video of “movement meditation memorials” and devynn’s reading of “embodied eulogies.” mmm was followed by a conversation and Q&A facilitated by Danspace Project Assistant Curator, Public Engagement, Seta Morton.

This event occurred in February 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic escalated in New York City. devynn’s insight and wisdom around healing, nursing, and the labors of care that are persistent for healthcare workers was paramount to this discussion.

devynn emory is also a Spring 2020 commissioned artist at Danspace Project. Their new work, deadbird was meant to premiere at Danspace Project today, Thursday April 23. This work, along with the many other events in our Spring season, has been cancelled due to the pandemic.

As a frontline essential worker, a NYC nurse, an artist in our community, and one of our kin, we are honored to share a video recording of the last work devynn generously offered in our space, work that holds a discourse that is exceedingly important to the current moment.

Thank you, devynn.

Please consider supporting any of the following efforts suggested by devynn emory:

New York City Trauma Recovery Network

Seeding Sovereignty Pandemic Rapid Response Fund

UndocuTrans Stimulus Fund

Emergency Release Fund/COVID Bailout NYC

Supporting restaurants / Feed Covid Frontliners

Please consider becoming a REBEL ANGEL this year:

Donate to Danspace Project to help us raise $100,000 by June 30 and help us continue to support new work and to connect artists with audiences. We can’t do it without you!

devynn emory is a choreographer and dance artist living in NYC. emory’s company devynnemory/beastproductions sources from multiple in-between states of being both in their body as a mixed-race indigenous and transgender person, and within the liminality of their work as a healer and hospice Nurse. emory was institutionally trained in rigorous classical lineages of line and exactitude through a predominantly white aesthetic lens, legitimizing many traditions of subjugation within their own body. They have thus committed to formalism as a tool for structural reclamation, investigation and decolonization of pattern making. In doing so they use formalism as an organizing system and ideology to observe and hold space for queer and other’d bodies. As such, pattern making then becomes a survival skill to locate self and other in conversation with historic and contemporary systems. Elaborate mathematical and mapped scores are designed to support bodies bleeding human truths, opening peep holes and revelations for collective performers and audiences. As a dancer they’ve most recently worked with a canary torsi, Tere O’Connor, Roseanne Spradlin, Gerard & Kelly and Kim Brandt.

Seta Morton is the Danspace Project Assistant Curator, Public Engagement. She facilitated the Platform 2020 Research Group process and presentations.

Kin & Care Research Group was Initiated by Danspace Executive Director and Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor in Spring 2019 and with facilitation from Danspace Project’s Assistant Curator, Seta Morton, The Kin & Care Research Fellows: devynn emory, iele paloumpis, Angie Pittman, Jaime Shearn Coan and Maura Nguyen Donohue met over the course of nine months, following individual threads that gathered along the lines of blood and time. The group circulated questions and writings about what it is to be kith, kin and/or comrades, as well as the sustainability of care as a practice. [Read more here]

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