A shared evening of work by Jasmine Hearn & Tatyana Tenenbaum

Part of collective terrain/s — a collective research process organized by Lydia Bell, Jasmine Hearn & Tatyana Tenenbaum. More info on collective terrain/s

Thursday’s performance will be followed by a discussion with Charmaine Warren
Friday’s performance will be followed by a discussion with Okwui Okpokwasili

Bessie Award-winning performer and choreographer Jasmine Hearn uses dance and sound as materials to make, teach, and perform around the world. you think you fancy is a performance project using sound and movement from family, community, and elders. It is a mash-up of the pedestrian, the virtuosic, and the practical, with a focus on tension and vulnerability.

Paired with a sound-scape, this is a dance score for black femmes to follow their pleasure and to connect using languages that bring them most comfort. Writes Hearn, “using dance, poetry, song, text, and sound, we are grieving. And we are celebrating…It’s about them and her and my sister and our moving bodies with the ever-changing horizon.”

Performers include Maria Bauman, Solana Hoffman Carter, Aye Eckerson, Dominica Greene, Jasmine Hearn, Kadie Henderson, Catherine Kirk, Jennifer Payan, Angie Pittman, Jo Stewart, and Rochelle Jamila Wilbun with costumes designed by Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency and lighting design by Kathy Kaufmann.

Choreographer and composer Tatyana Tenenbaum’s work explores the phenomenal space of the singing body and its capacity to hold and shape American narratives. Tenenbaum and co-performers/co-creators Marisa Clementi, Pareena Lim, Rebeca Medina, Emily Moore, Jules Skloot, and Saúl Ulerio have been putting into action a relational practice that grows from conversation, trust, togetherness, disagreement, and dissent – a practice of being together through body and voice.

Tidal is a collision of our future bodies with song. “I have written music that traces points in my lineage, some recent and some distant or barely imagined. These are the bones that hold our landscape together, crooning, clamoring polyphony, swelling and disintegrating all at once,” writes Tenenbaum.

Music and Direction: Tatyana Tenenbaum, Cartography: Rebeca Medina, Lighting Design: Kathy Kaufmann

Gala 2019: Rebel Angels: Honoring Simone Forti & Okwui Okpokwasili

Tuesday, May 7 at 6pm

Danspace’s 2019 Gala honors visionary artists Simone Forti and Okwui Okpokwasili, whose embodied grace and radical generosity inspire across generations.

Questions? Contact: Peggy Cheng at peggy@danspaceproject.org or (212) 674-3838

Forti, Paxton, Rainer Read Their Writings

*Tickets are limited — buy yours now!*

In fall 2017, almost six decades after attending Robert Dunn’s workshop together at the Merce Cunningham studio, esteemed artists Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer came together at Danspace Project for Tea for Three, an evening of improvisation and interaction – their first New York collaboration as a trio.

In the spirit of experimentation, and in celebration of new publications from Forti and Paxton, the trio reconvenes for two evenings of performative readings.

DraftWork: mayfield brooks / Malcolm-x Betts

Curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones, the DraftWork series hosts informal Saturday afternoon performances that offer choreographers an opportunity to show their work in various stages of development.

Performances are followed by discussion and a reception with the artists.

Food for Thought: After Mentorship curated by Queer|Art

Danspace Project’s Food for Thought series presents two unique evenings of performance selected by a different guest artist curator each night. Admission each night is just $5 + 2 cans of food or $10. Canned goods are donated to the Momentum Project, which provides support to any person in need in NYC, especially those living with HIV/AIDS or other chronic illness.

Queer|Art, NYC’s home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, presents two evenings of performances and performance-for-camera by two pairs of artists who have worked together previously as part of the organization’s celebrated Queer|Art|Mentorship program.

Each evening is organized to highlight the unique relationships—creative, professional, personal, and otherwise—that have developed between Neil Goldberg & David Antonio Cruz (May 23) and Angela Dufresne & Kerry Downey (May 24) through their participation in the program, with a short conversation to explore the value and potential of mentorship within LGBTQ+ creative communities.

Thursday, May 23 at 8pm
After Mentorship with Neil Goldberg & David Antonio Cruz

Neil Goldberg mentored David Antonio Cruz during the 2017-2018 Queer|Art|Mentorship cycle. With Neil’s support, David expanded a drawing series and an operatic performance based on the ethnographic photographs and ‘Black Diaries’ of British consul and Irish Nationalist Roger Casement, in which Casement wrote of his affairs with young men of color during his travels to the Congo and Brazil. Tonight, David presents “Thecasementboys,” a new performance addressing the complexities of attraction, of being desired and consumed, from the point of view of the unnamed young men in Casement’s writings.

Neil Goldberg has been engaged in a near-daily practice of jotting down his most uninhibited thoughts and observations about the world around him onto index cards. Numbering in the thousands, these cards have provided Neil with the raw material for spontaneous performances, public lectures, and interactive sculptures, including tonight’s performance. Often using the cards as a jumping off point for conversation and free association, Neil’s “Inhibited Bites” index card performances are guided by simple and accessible systems that playfully cut through chatter to establish unexpected social bonds between himself and others who are present.

“Queer|Art|Mentorship provided the one on one mentoring that I was seeking,” David writes of his time in the program. “I held back at the beginning. I believe Neil saw that and created a safe environment for me to open up and be honest about my artistic insecurities to help guide me.”

Friday, May 24 at 8pm
After Mentorship with Angela Dufresne & Kerry Downey

Angela Dufresne mentored Kerry Downey during the 2012-2013 Queer|Art|Mentorship cycle. They have continued to collaborate and show work together ever since. In spring 2015, Angela took Kerry on a fishing trip upstate. Kerry’s subsequent project, “Fishing with Angela,” both a video and performance recreated for tonight’s program, uses an overhead projector to mimetically recreate their mentor’s gestures. This work explores the relationship between fishing and painting, mentor and mentee, wetness and flow.

“Fishing with Angela” is presented tonight as part of a shared evening entitled Catch and Release, in which Kerry and Angela enter into the ambivalence of certain traditions—portraiture, Bro-downs, fishing trips, side-by-side pissing, father and son relationships, among others—actively generating interchanges of social ritual, of song, of painting, of mimesis. In the artists’ own words: “In this queer ritual we say to each other: we are here now, together and separate. Entangled and distinct, un-mired if coded by these traditions.” There may be fly fishing in the church. With special guest Caroline Wells Chandler.

Hadar Ahuvia: The Dances are For Us

Friday evening’s performance will be followed by a conversation with scholar, Shirly Bahar.

The Dances are For Us continues choreographer, performer, and educator Hadar Ahuvia’s examination into the construction of Israeli folk dance. Working with a group of dancers with various relationships to Zionism, Israeli folk dance, and other classical and folk traditions, The Dances are For Us investigates the instrumentalization of dance in the birth of nation-states.

“Through the work, we strive to model accountability to our own heritage, histories, and to each other,” writes Ahuvia.