Photo of Glenn Potter-Takata by Rachel Keane | Photo of Jade Manns by Miles Pflanz

Jade Manns + Glenn Potter-Takata

A shared evening

Thursday, December 12 | 7:30PM
Friday, December 13 | 7:30PM
Saturday, December 14 | 7:30PM

A shared evening of work by choreographers Glenn Potter-Takata and Jade Manns, who, like Ayano Elson and Wendell Gray II, have both recently shown work-in-development through Danspace’s DraftWork series.

Glenn Potter-Takata is a Japanese-American performance artist utilizing butoh, score-based movement, improvisation, video, and appropriated media to create performances around the body as a historical site in post-Internment America. “I’m really interested in emptiness & nothingness, emphasizing materiality or material quality, and the non-self,” the artist explains. A continuation of the in-process work he showed at DraftWork, Immaterial Supreme is a duet performed with Kimiko Tanabe that expounds on notions of the self, Buddhist concepts of emptiness, and the material. Using contact microphones and butoh, the Potter-Takata juxtaposes synthetic materials with the natural or organic to create a sonic and visual landscape that pursues a dissolution of the permanent self.

A co-founder of the artist-run performance space PAGEANT, Jade Manns has performed in the work of choreographers and artists including Ayano Elson, Alexa West, and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd. In this new work, a dense panorama of images and sounds rapidly shift and rearrange. “Through the carefully constructed sequencing and layering of visual and sonic material, the dance examines the role of the image in the movement of history, its interaction with worldview and its relationships with political force and spirituality. The work engages with an archive ranging from the first recorded human works of art in the animal-centric prehistoric Chauvet cave paintings, to modern day advertising, political propaganda and viral imagery.” The dance is driven by Spinoza’s 17th-century Ethics, which understands God as a material thing—the world and everything within it—a sharp break from prevailing conceptions of God as a paternal, governing figure. Manns engages the idea of a material divinity through the medium of the image, “whose simultaneous power and banality in our hyper-visual culture is ever-increasing.”

Tickets
support Danspace’s 50th anniversary!

$10 Members
$20 Regular Price
$30 A little extra
$40 A little more!
$50 Celebrating 50 years!
$100 Here’s to the next 50!

PURCHASE TICKETS

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Glenn Potter-Takata (he/him) is a Japanese-American artist, dance maker, and media designer based in the Bronx. He creates works of art around the body as a historical site, and investigates themes related to Buddhist concepts of reality and consumerism in post-industrial America. Originally from Los Angeles, Glenn relocated to NYC to study multimedia performance at Sarah Lawrence College, earning his MFA and where he is currently a teacher of sound and projection design for live performance. Glenn’s performance works have been seen at Mabou Mines, PAGEANT, Grace Exhibition Space, Movement Research at Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix, DraftWork at Danspace Project, Amanda + James Summer Happenings Series, and with Pioneers Go East. He is a recipient of the 2024 & 2022 Bronx Dance Fund Award, 2023 Bronx Cultural Visions Award, 2022 MAP Fund Award, and has been awarded residencies through Movement Research, Rogers Art Loft, Gibney Dance Center, and CUNY Dance Initiative/Lehman College. His first solo gallery exhibition opened in January of 2023 at Rogers Studio Gallery in Las Vegas.

Jade Manns is a dancer, choreographer and co-founder of the artist-run performance space PAGEANT in New York. Her work has been shown at Draftwork at Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Sundays on Broadway at Weis Acres, New Dance Alliance Performance Mix Festival and PAGEANT among others. She has received support from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, NYU Artist Development Program for Dance and Kino Saito Arts Center.

The first-ever performance at Danspace Project. Carmen Beuchat (front) and Barbara Lloyd Dilley (background), The Natural History of American Dancer, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 1974. Photo: Cosmos. Published in Danspace Project’s 25th Anniversary publication, 1999.

Celebrating Danspace’s 50th Anniversary

Monday, December 16

Celebrating Danspace’s 50th Anniversary

The Natural History of the American Dancer collective has been largely forgotten, but this improvisational ensemble of women, founded in 1971 by Barbara (Lloyd) Dilley and others, were the first performers at Danspace Project in 1974. Poet Larry Fagin told The New Yorker in 1999 that their performance birthed St. Mark’s Danspace Project in 1974. On the 50th anniversary of Danspace Project, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts celebrates the seminal and iconic dance presenting organization with a discussion on archival footage featuring Danspace’s co-founders: Barbara Dilley and Mary Overlie, plus the other four members of the Natural History of the American Dancer—Cynthia Hedstrom, Carmen Beuchat, Judy Padow, and Suzanne Harris. This panel will feature Cynthia Hedstrom, Wendy Perron, Judy Hussie-Taylor, and Ishmael Houston-Jones.

More info to be announced.

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Photo of Symara Sarai by Elyse Mertz | Photo of Anh Vo by Keshis Eugene

DraftWork: Symara Sarai + Anh Vo

Saturday, December 21 | 3PM

Danspace Project’s DraftWork series hosts free, informal showings of new works in varying stages of development. This afternoon features performances by two NYC-based artists: Symara Sarai and Anh Vo.

Showings are followed by a reception, conversation, and Q&A between the artists and DraftWork curator, Ishmael Houston-Jones.

RSVP HERE

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Symara Sarai, a Portland, Oregon native currently residing in Brooklyn, has immersed herself in interdisciplinary and choreographic studies globally. A 2023 Bessie Winner for Breakout Choreographer, Symara is also a recipient of the Dai Ailian Foundation Scholarship based in Trinidad and Tobago. The scholarship led her to Beijing, China where she spent two years gaining an associate degree in modern choreography at the renowned Beijing Dance Academy. Symara is a 2019 graduate of SUNY Purchase’s Conservatory of Dance Program. She was a resident artist for Bearnstow, Gibney 6.2 Work Up, Gallim’s 2022 Moving Artist’s Residency, BAX’s Fall 2022 Space Grant Program, Center for Performance Research’s 2022 AIR Program, New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist 23/24 as well as a 23/24 Women in Motion Commissioned artist. They are currently a Abrons Arts Center Performance AIRspace Resident. Their work as a performer and maker has been reviewed and featured in the NY Times, Dance Enthusiast, Fjord, as well as promoted through Forbes. She has had multiple film works commissioned by Berlin-based choreographer Christoph Winkler. They have presented work at New York Live Arts, The Clarice at UMD, The LGBT Center in NY, Judson Church, BAAD, Kestrels, and other venues throughout the United States, China, and Germany. She is currently an Urban Bush Women company member. She has also notably worked with Jasmine Hearn, Ogemdi Ude, Pioneers Go East Collective, Kevin Wynn, Joanna Kotze, Nattie Trogdon+Hollis Bartlett, and Slowdanger, among others. For more visit symarasarai.com

Anh Vo (They/He) is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working primarily in New York City, with a second base in Hanoi. Their practice fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental dance, queer and feminist performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA).

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