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 Netta Yerushalmy will inhabit Prismatic Park from Tuesday, August 1 through Sunday, August 13.

Based in New York City since 2000, Yerushalmy’s award-winning choreographic work aims to engage with audiences by imparting the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known, and to challenge how meaning is attributed and constructed. Yerushalmy’s two-week Prismatic Park residency continues research for her ongoing series Paramodernities, which is a meditation on different tracks of modernism within and beyond the purview of dance. Yerushalmy will use her residency in two tracks.

The first track: beginning work on Paramodernities #5, devoted to the Bob Fosse-choreographed and directed Sweet Charity. A diverse and multi-generational group of dancers, including Megan Williams, Michael Blake, Hsiao-Jou Tang, J’nae Simmons, and Joyce Edwards, will be studying and interpreting the movement from the 1969 film. Yerushalmy will use the park’s expansive lawn as a work space.

The second track is an experiment: composing a group dance, the vocabularies of which will be drawn exclusively from the research of the project thus far (Vaslav Nijinsky, Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham). Dancers are: Emily Rose Cannon, Marc Crousillat, Brittany Engel-Adams, Stanley Gambucci, and Maddie Schimmel. Explains Yerushalmy, “for this track, I am choosing to inhabit the park in a way that is perhaps more attuned to the modernist gestures of Josiah’s sculptures and to the park as architecture, than to the organic matter there. I’ll be thinking of the determined shape of the lawn as the container for a layered dance-object filled with traces of legacy, gesture, culture.”

Schedule:

Tuesday, August 1, 3-6pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse & 5-7:30pm: Paramodernities/experiments
Wednesday, August 2, 10am-1pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse & 4:30-7pm: Paramodernities/experiments
Thursday, August 3, 2:30-5:30pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse & 5-7:30pm: Paramodernities/experiments
Friday, August 4, 3-6pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse & 5:30-8pm: Paramodernities/experiments
Saturday, August 5, 12-3pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse
Sunday, August 6, 5-8pm: Paramodernities/experiments

Tuesday, August 8, 2:30-6pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse & 5-7:30pm: Paramodernities/experiments
Wednesday, August 9, 3-6pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse & 6-8pm: Paramodernities/experiments
Thursday, August 10, 10am-2pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse & 6-8pm: Paramodernities/experiments
Friday, August 11, 2:30-5pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse & 5-7pm: Paramodernities/experiments PERFORMANCE!
Saturday, August 12, 2:30-5:30pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse & 6-7:30pm: How Many Modernities Are There? discussion with Judy Hussie-Taylor (Executive Director/Chief Curator, Danspace Project), Josiah McElheny (Prismatic Park artist), Thomas F. DeFrantz (Chair of African and African American Studies, Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality studies, and Professor of Dance|Theater Studies, Duke University), Carol Ockman (Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Williams College), Julia Foulkes (Professor of History, the New School), David Kishik (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Institute For Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College), and Netta Yerushalmy
Sunday, August 13, 10am-2pm: Paramodernities #5/Fosse

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