Events – Danspace Project
Photo courtesy of Leslie Parker.

Leslie Parker Dance Project’s Divination Tools: imagine home

Thursday, October 5 | 7:30PM
Friday, October 6 | 7:30PM
Saturday, October 7 | 7:30PM

 

Divination Tools: imagine home is the latest iteration of NYC & Twin Cities-based artist Leslie Parker’s multi-year project, Call to Remember. Divination Tools: imagine home brings together a powerful collective of Black visual artists, musicians, and femme dance artists to explore improvisation through storytelling, music, film, movement, visual art, Black divinity/lineage, and contemporary experience. The collective work cultivates space for conjuring and building community through remembrance. Performers include Parker, Tenisha George, and Paloma McGregor as well as musicians Nioka Workman, Dameun Strange, and Michael Wimberly.

Parker researched and developed this work, in part, at Danspace Project during a Creative Residency in 2022. Parker’s time at Danspace Project included an exploration of the organization and its relationship to Black Dance Improvisation – through the archives, artist and Church community networks, and its physical location over the decades. 

*On Friday, October 6, at 7PM, Leslie Parker and Black Gotham Experience will host a pre-show procession (approximately 20 minutes of walking) that will take place near Danspace Project’s location. Ticket-buyers for this evening will receive information on the meeting place a day in advance. Participation in the procession is optional.

 

Divination Tools: imagine home is co-commissioned by Walker Art Center (MN), Pillsbury House Theatre (MN), Pangea World Theater (MN), Danspace Project (NYC), and Counterpulse (SF). 


BUY TICKETS HERE


Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Leslie Parker is a dance artist, director, improviser, and performer born in the traditional homeland of the Dakhóta, Anishinaabe people also known as Twin Cities, MN. Her upbringing in the neighborhood known as the Rondo community led to cultivating multiple home art bases in Brooklyn, NY and St. Paul, MN while holding a BFA from Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance, and a MFA in Dance from Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, The Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and The Dresden Frankfurt Company in Frankfurt, Germany. As a dance creative, she highlights unique individual contributions, digs into collective memory to engage with the world more imaginatively and embodies an aesthetic that encompasses an organic physical/movement hybrid influenced by the Black and African Diaspora: Traditional W. African, Black/African American vernacular/social dance, Improvisation, and Contemporary/Modern technique derived from and exchanged across multiple continents. She has received a 2017 Bessie award for Outstanding performer as part of Skeleton Architecture, a  2022 McKnight Fellowship for Choreographers, and is a Jerome Artist Fellow 2019 – 2021. Parker initiated Leslie Parker Dance Project, LLC as a means to experience dance art more intuitively. As an educator, she led and facilitated classes as a guest assistant professor at Carleton College, a lecturer at University of Minnesota and as a guest artist instructor at various institutions in the US. Her most recent multi-year work, Call to Remember, is rooted, researched, and performed through residencies, stage performances and workshops across the US, including, Minneapolis, MN, at Walker Art Center, Pillsbury House Theatre, and Pangea World Theatre, San Francisco, CA, at CounterPulse, New York, New York at Danspace Project, Tallahassee, FL, at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and Philadelphia, PA, at BOOM. Call to Remember and latest iteration, Divination Tools: imagine home is funded by National Dance Project/nefa, National Performance Network Creation Fund, National Performance Development Fund and National Performance Network Community Engagement Fund, Minnesota Regional Arts Council and Minnesota State Arts Board.

For more detailed information, go to www.leslieparkerdance.com.

Image courtesy of Gillian Walsh.

Gillian Walsh: Wilderness

Thursday, October 19 | 6PM
Friday, October 20 | 6PM
Saturday, October 21 | 6PM


I was led into the wilderness. I was alone but longing and celestial love stayed. I waited.
After a long period of stillness movement emerged from the groundswell. God spoke through my body.

 

Wilderness is co-produced by New York City Players.


BUY TICKETS HERE


Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Gillian Walsh is a choreographer and performer from NY. Her work has been presented by Gropius Bau, The Watermill Center, Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, Performa and others.

A double exposed photo of Wendell jumping in two different positions. A woman in motion holds her arms overhead and has a large sheet of paper stuffed into her mouth.
Wendell Gray II. Photo: Malcolm-x Betts; Anna Sperber. Photo: Whitney Browne.

DraftWork: Wendell Gray II + Anna Sperber

Saturday, October 28 | 3PM

Danspace Project’s DraftWork series hosts free, informal showings of new works in varying stages of development.

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

Wendell Gray II is a dance artist, choreographer, and educator currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been presented at Coffey Street Studios, Kinosaito Arts Center, Gibney, University of the Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, Chez Bushwick, and Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. Most recently, he presented “The People Show” as a part of Sighlines Dance Festival in late Spring 2023. Additionally, he was a STUFFED Artist in Residence in 2021 at Judson Church as well as a Work Up 6.0 Artist in 2020 at Gibney. Wendell has also set work on companies such as Michiyaya Dance, Pennsylvania Ballet II + Philadanco II, and Periapsis Music and Dance. As a performer, Wendell has worked with choreographers such as Tere O’Connor, Joanna Kotze, Pavel Zustiak, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Maria Bauman, Jonah Bokaer, I-Ling Liu, Christal Brown, Esther Baker- Tarpaga, Janeill Cooper, and J Bouey. He is a BFA graduate of the University of the Arts (15’) under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield was raised in Atlanta, GA. More info at wenings.com

Anna Sperber is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer. Her work has been described by The New York Times as “immediately compelling” and “wonderfully strange” with “moments of theatrical magic.” Sperber received a 2022 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award for Outstanding Choreographer / Creator for Bow Echo (2021). Her work has been presented and commissioned by The Kitchen, The Joyce Theater UNLEASHED, The Chocolate Factory, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Roulette, Gibney Dance, and Dance Theater Workshop in New York City, as well as by the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC. Sperber has received fellowships and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco Foundation in Bogliasco Italy, the Marble House Project, as a Schonberg Fellow at Dance The Yard, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance DiP (Dance in Process), Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governors Island, and Movement Research. Her interdisciplinary collaborations with esteemed experimental composers and live musicians as well as visual designers are crucial to the integration of visual and sonic landscapes with the moving body in her work. Sperber was a co-founder of classclassclass, designed to nurture new dance teachers while offering reduced class rates, and was a co-curator of the 2008 Movement Research Spring Festival. She has taught as a guest artist at American Dance Festival, Movement Research, Gibney Dance, Hunter College, George Washington University, and Wayne State University. Sperber founded and ran BRAZIL, a studio and intimate performance space in Bushwick, Brooklyn from 2004 to 2014 and Sunset Space from 2019-2020.

Samita Sinha. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography.

Samita Sinha: Tremor

Thursday, November 9 | 7:30PM
Friday, November 10 | 7:30PM
Saturday, November 11 | 7:30PM

 

Artist and composer Samita Sinha brings Tremor to Danspace Project for its NYC premiere. In Tremor, Sinha voices in relationship to a live, sonic environment conjured by composer Ash Fure, within a space designed by architect Sunil Bald, and is joined by performer Okwui Okpokwasili.

Committed to the emergent, Tremor is the practice and performance of attuning to the raw material of vibration, and unfolding possibilities that arise through encounter—with other beings, and with the material of sound itself. Sinha explains, “Tremor opens a sentience that is neither western in origin, nor limited by dogmas of tradition.” The profound materiality of the work comes from Sinha’s practice of decomposing, distilling, and transforming Indian vocal traditions through the body to emerge elemental sonic material—and a kind of language—”that contains potentials to reconfigure the ground of being and relation, challenge what knowledge is, and open new forms of embodiment and collaboration.”

Tremor is co-commissioned by Western Front and Danspace Project.


BUY TICKETS HERE


Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Artist and composer Samita Sinha works with vibration, voice, body, and sound. She lives and works in New York City.

Niall is standing in front of a microphone (very likely speaking or singing) on a makeshift stage and theater tech console in the basement of the Chocolate Factory at its former location on 49th Avenue performing in his 2019 work Fantasies in Low Fade. This photograph was taken by Paula Lobo.
Niall Jones. Photo: Paula Lobo.

Research Artist-in-Residence: Niall Jones

Danspace Project continues to support the creative process and artistic research, welcoming dance artists Leslie Cuyjet and Niall Jones as 2023-24 Research Artists-in-Residence. 

Learn more about our residency programs

Residencies are not open to the public.

Niall Jones is an artist based in New York City. Recent performance works by Niall include: Sis Minor, in Fall at Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY (2018); Fantasies in Low Fade at the Chocolate Factory, New York, NY (2019); A Work for Others at The Kitchen @ Queenslab, New York, NY (2021); Open Studio at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2021); In the Efforts of Time at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart, DE (2022); dark de luxe: a mess for body, shadow, and other rogue im/materials at Jack Art Center, Brooklyn, NY (2022); a n   u n   r e a l at The Shed, New York, NY (2022); and C O M P R E S S I O N at Performance Space New York, NY (2022).

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