Compagnie Nacera Belaza

Thursday, October 4, 8pm: Sur Le Fil (runtime: 45 minutes)
Friday, October 5, 8pm: Sur Le Fil (runtime: 45 minutes)
Saturday, October 6, 8pm: Sur Le Fil, La Nuit, La Traversée (runtime: 80 minutes)

Co-presented by Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) as part of the Crossing The Line Festival.

*Please arrive on time! There is no late seating for these performances!*

Algerian-born dancer and choreographer Nacera Belaza presents three of her acclaimed works. Belaza’s feminist, minimalist choreography emerges from an awareness of the body, of space, and of interior emptiness.

Sur le Fil encompasses all humanity, from a teenager’s bedroom to death row. Belaza applies a rigorous set of rules to both the body and mind of three dancers, who achieve an ecstatic-like state on stage. In doing so they verge on the threshold of escape or transcendence for both performer and the viewer.

On Saturday, October 6, Belaza offers a potent triptych of Sur le Fil, alongside La Nuit, a solo danced by Belaza that delves into both the intimately personal and the infinitely universal, and La Traversée, in which the progression and memory of gestures and movements are passed along through ritual and inheritance.

Choreography, Sound & Light Design: Nacera Belaza
Performers:
Sur le fil: Nacera Belaza, Aurélie Berland, Dalila Belaza
La Nuit: Nacera Belaza
La traversée: Dalila Belaza, Aurélie Berland
Technician: Christophe Renaud

Eleanor Bauer: A lot of moving parts

Choreographer Eleanor Bauer works with the frictions, collisions, translations, love affairs, and gaps between dance and language. Bauer presents the U.S. premiere of A lot of moving parts, her first solo work since the acclaimed (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS), created in 2009 and last performed in New York in 2012. This will be the first time she has performed at Danspace Project since 2005, when she made a splash with her solo ELEANOR!

With A lot of moving parts Bauer questions the place of writing within a bodily practice often derived from oral transmissions. She has assembled years of dance practices, scores, and writings into what she calls “a long-exposure portrait” of how dance thinks through her and how she thinks through dance.

Writes Bauer, “In Swedish, to feel and to know are the same verb: coincidence, or poetic justice? A lot of moving parts dwells in the untranslatable, absorbent, inclusive, non-hierarchical, protean, mercurial, and expansive nature of embodied thought in movement, by getting intimate with uncertainty, making the invisible visible, knitting sense with the senses, attending to the minor and peripheral intuitions, and knowing by feeling.”

Concept, choreography, text, and performance: Eleanor Bauer

Music: WATT
Costumes: Sofie Durnez

Lighting: Carol Mullins
Production: GoodMove vzw

This performance runs approximately 75 minutes

DraftWork: Millie Kapp & Matt Shalzi / Jess Pretty

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 and curator.

Sacha Yanow: Cherie Dre

NYC-based performance artist and actor Sacha Yanow’s new solo performance is a meditation on desire, belonging, and matrilineal legacy. A fraught romance between showgirl Cherie Dre and Yanow’s grandmother, Shirley, unfolds alongside the rise and fall of the legendary Concord Resort Hotel in Upstate New York.

Through movement, text, and music, Yanow creates an intimate history of the Jewish Borscht Belt, mental illness, cultural assimilation, political repression, and gender trouble, from the Bronx to the Catskills.

Written and performed by Sacha Yanow
Director: Caitlin Sullivan
Choreographer: Faye Driscoll
Voice and Sound: Holland Andrews
Video: Sasha Wortzel
Set: Cate McCrea
Costumes: Ásta Hostetter
Lighting: Alejandro Fajardo
Outside Eyes: Morgan Bassichis
Creative Producer: Melissa Levin