Events – Danspace Project
Emily Johnson. Courtesy the artist.

Emily Johnson / Catalyst: Danspace Project & New York State DanceForce Residency

In-residence October–December

This residency will support body-based artist Emily Johnson / Catalyst’s extended time in-residence in what is currently known as the Catskills. With her company, Catalyst, Emily will gather artists, scholars, activists and artsworkers to spend days in creative dialogue and collaborative visioning for Johnson’s newest land-based project, Build And Reworld Now.

Build And Reworld Now
 is focused on physical reclamation of land/space for Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and other artists/activists/land defenders of color, alongside restoration of Indigenous land and land stewardship. Guided by Indigenous land-defenders and arts workers, the project will become 36 acres of protected forest and 6 acres rematriated from 35 years as a cow pasture to Native forest, pollinator, medicine and food gardens. This work is celebrated through gatherings and performances, as Build And Reworld Now actuates the intersections of art, activism, Indigenous knowledge and care systems, food, and climate justice. Situated on Haudenosaunee lands, Build And Reworld Now works to grow relations and collaborate with diasporic and local Indigenous artists, organizers, and food justice warriors.Residencies are not open to the public.

EMILY JOHNSON is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. Emily is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and United States Artists Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is based in Lenapehoking / New York City. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment — interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral part of our connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.

Her choreography and gatherings have been presented across what is currently called the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night outdoor performance gathering taking place amongst 84 community-hand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017, and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. She choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars in 2018. Her new work Being Future Being, premiered on Tongva Land in Los Angeles in 2022.

Emily’s writing has been published and commissioned by The Open Society University Network’s Center for Human Rights and the Arts, ArtsLink Australia, unMagazine, Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press); SFMOMA; Transmotion Journal, University of Kent; Movement Research Journal; Pew Center for Arts and Heritage; and the compilation Imagined Theaters (Routledge), edited by Daniel Sack.

Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018-2020, and a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues. She was a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding, was a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, and serves as a co-lead consortium member for First Nations Performing Arts.

Niall Jones: JohnsonJaxxxonJefferson

Thursday, October 10 | 7:30PM
Friday, October 11 | 7:30PM
Saturday, October 12 | 7:30PM

Open Dress Rehearsal*
Tuesday, October 8 | 7:30PM

A new work by artist Niall Jones ! JohnsonJaxxxonJefferson, a new performance work by Niall Jones, is a site breach, a collapsing of memories, sensations, and bodily coordinates — a dance and its noises, moving from one place to another operating, in parts, as a system of continuous retrieval.  LET ME HELP YOU  SHOW ME  ANOTHER WAY  TO BE                       A      disarrangement               of hallucinatory             maternal presences            indeterminacy          &dissonant structures crashed.symbols (failed)(flailed) images chatter         repetition but what about the choir sound [ing] was mainly our dreaming knowingly and unknowingly caressing loss as a conceit while specters haunt the church’s architecture.  The Church Sexton: • Sits, stands, bends, reaches and moves intermittently during work. • Is subject to frequent interruptions. • Works beyond normal hours for planned functions of the church and emergencies. • Communicates with supervisor and other church staff, volunteers, members and guests. • Is exposed to slippery conditions, odors, outside weather conditions, etc. • Keeps whistling. Improvisation is key****


Jones engaged in research for this new work as a 2023-24 Danspace Project Research Artist-in-Residence. Renewal Residencies emphasize recuperative time to renew connections to creative process, collaboration, and community. 

 

*About Open Dress Rehearsal: Tuesday evening’s dress rehearsal will be free with RSVP and open to the public at limited-capacity. Open dress rehearsals are a mask-required, community-minded program prioritizing our immunocompromised and low-income audiences. Staff and audiences will be required to wear masks (N95 or KN95) and performing artists (if unmasked) will be  required to test for COVID-19 (rapid tests provided by Danspace Project).


Tickets
support Danspace’s 50th anniversary year!

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


Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Niall Jones is an artist, performer and teacher based in New York City. Niall works within a constellation of curiosities, obsessions and practices that move across dance, performance, sound, text, photography and video. Niall constructs immersive, liminal sites that attend to the sensual, collective registers of fiction, dis/order, dis/placement, and in/completeness. Recent performance works by Niall include: Sis Minor, in Fall (2018) at Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY; Fantasies in Low Fade (2019) at the Chocolate Factory, New York, NY; A Work for Others (2021) at The Kitchen @ Queenslab, New York, NY; Open Studio (2021) at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; In the Efforts of Time (2022) at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart, DE; dark de luxe: a mess for body, shadow, and other rogue im/materials (2022) at Jack Art Center, Brooklyn, NY; a n   u n   r e a l  (2022) at The Shed, New York, NY; C O M P R E S S I O N (2022) at Performance Space New York, NY; and Hahaha (2023) as part of the School for Temporary Liveness, Vol. 3, in Philadelphia.

Video still from Vespers (1982), with Linda Gibbs and Bebe Miller

Bebe Miller Company in-residence

In-residence November 2024

Danspace Project hosts the renowned Bebe Miller Company for a NYC residency focusing on Miller’s 1982 Vespers. The piece premiered at Danspace Project as part of the seminal Parallels, a series curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and later revisited at Danspace Project in 2012. A new generation of performing artists will rehearse with Miller for a reimagined performance of Vespers, along with an open rehearsal and public conversation on the piece’s creation and recollection. In addition, Miller will facilitate Experimentation to Execution: An Archive of Practice, a NCCAkron-supported convening of invited practitioners.

Residencies are not open to the public.

Bebe Miller’s vision of dance and performance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience and sheer beauty.  She has collaborated with artists, composers, writers, and designers, along with the dancers who share her studio practice and from whom she’s learned what dancing can reveal. A native New Yorker, she formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985. Since then, the Company has been commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music’s NEXT WAVE Festival, The Joyce Theater, Wexner Center for the Arts, On The Boards, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Theater Artaud, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts and Danspace Project, and has performed worldwide. The Company’s work encompasses choreography, writing and film, along with digital archive products that share their creative practice. Bebe is aProfessor Emerita at Ohio State University, and though her home is in Columbus, OH she is spending a year in a forest on Vashon Island, WA.

Photo of Elliot Reed by Annie Forrest | Photo of Amelia Heintzelman by Maria Baranova

DraftWork: Elliot Reed + Amelia Heintzelman w/ Dorothy Carlos

Saturday, October 26 | 3PM

Curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones, 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: Elliot Reed and Amelia Heintzelman (with Dorothy Carlos).

Showings are followed by a reception, conversation, and Q&A between the artists.


RSVP HERE


Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Elliot Reed (he/they) is an artist working in performance, sculpture, and video. Their art starts from the body, making a choreographic language through objects, installation, and sound. Elliot is a 2023/4 participant in The Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2019 danceWEB scholar, and 2019–20 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and part of the museum’s permanent collection. Reed was also the recipient of the 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent performances and exhibitions include Brown University (2024), Performance Space New York (2024), Anonymous Gallery (2023), Lucerne Festival with JACK Quartet (2022), Kunsthaus Glarus (2021), Metro Pictures (2021), MoMA PS1 (2020/21), OCD Chinatown (2021), The Getty Center (2018), Hammer Museum (2016), Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (2018), The Broad (2017), including performances in Tokyo, Osaka, London, Mexico City, Zürich, Vienna, and Hamburg. His text manifesto “Performance Art Is…” was printed in The Drama Review Vol. 64, Issue 4 (248) published by MIT Press.

Amelia Heintzelman is a performer, choreographer, and teacher. Her work has been shown at Pageant, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Snug Harbor, Lubov Gallery, and University Settlement in NYC. Most recently, she has performed for Alexa West, Jesi Cook, Ayano Elson, and Deborah Hay. She teaches at Pageant and Movement Research. www.ameliakh.com

Dorothy Carlos is an experimental cellist and electronic musician working in improvised performance and multi-channel sound in New York City and Chicago. Her work utilizes randomized electronics and extended techniques to explore fragility and imaginaries.

Photo of Muna Tseng by Steven Sigoloff | Photo of Rashaun Mitchell by Amitava Sarkar | Photo of Jordan Lloyd by Whitney Browne | Photo of Douglas Dunn by Beatriz Schiller

50 Forward: “The Future Is…” Gathering

Saturday, November 2 | 3–7PM

50 Forward: “The Future Is…” Gathering

Free and open to the public with RSVP

Over the course of Danspace’s 50th year, we will be celebrating the community, artworkers, and artists that have made these 50 years so fabulous. Danspace has invited 50+ artists with special connections to Danspace to create short films in response to the prompt “The Future Is….”  Artists representing all five decades, from the 1970s to the present, were invited to record a 50-second dance or performance to be featured over the course of the year at danspaceproject.org. The short films will be screened with celebratory activities around St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, including live offerings by special guests mayfield brooks, Silas Riener, Angie Pittman, and a DJ set by Ali Rosa-Salas and Nazuk Kochhar.

Video artists are: Suzanne Bocanegra, Jonah Bokaer Choreography, Andros Zins-Browne, Wally Cardona, Peggy Cheng, Barbara Dilley, maura nguyen donohue, David Dorfman, DD Dorvillier, Douglas Dunn, Ursula Eagly, Hilary Easton, devynn emory, Ain Gordon, Miguel Gutierrez, Trajal Harrell, Deborah Hay, Jasmine Hearn, Cynthia Hedstrom, Abby Harris Holmes, John Jasperse, Benjamin Akio Kimitch, jaamil olawale kosoko, Tendayi Kuumba, Iréne Hultman Monti, Heidi Latsky, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Juliette Mapp, Bebe Miller, Rashaun Mitchell, Carol Mullins, Benedict Nguyen, Mina Nishimura, Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez, Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born, Eiko Otake, David Parker, Angie Pittman, Yvonne Rainer, Melinda Ring, Alice Sheppard, Sarah Skaggs, Tatyana Tenenbaum, David Thomson, Nora Raine Thompson, Muna Tseng, Niko Tsocanos, Donna Uchizono, Ogemdi Ude, Larissa Velez- Jackson, Asiya Wadud, Christopher Williams, Reggie Wilson, Nami Yamamoto, and more!


Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Photo of Ayano Elson by Kayhl Cooper

Ayano Elson + Wendell Gray II

A shared evening

Thursday, November 21 | 7:30PM
Friday, November 22 | 7:30PM
Saturday, November 23 | 7:30PM

Open Dress Rehearsal*
Tuesday, November 19 | 7:30PM

A shared evening of new work by two NYC-based dancers, choreographers, and educators, Ayano Elson and Wendell Gray II. Both artists have recently shown work-in-development in Danspace’s DraftWork series. 

Ayano Elson fuses elements like kumi odori (a pre-colonial dance form from the Ryukyu Islands in what is now Japan) with 20th-century techniques, such as those of Cunningham and Graham, aiming to blur the lines between sound and movement, artistic and ancestral inheritances. Part Song/Immortal Life draws on the community-centered participatory design text A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa 1977). “I am dancing in the tension between public site and individual desire,” Elson writes. Performers Elson, Amelia Heintzelman, Jade Manns, and evan ray suzuki and musicians Leo Chang, Matt Evans, and Zosha Wapeha treat the space as a site of surveillance—disappearing, disguising, revealing, and tracking the body within the architecture of the church and processing sensations of seduction, communion, speculation, and violence. 

Wendell Gray II has performed at Danspace in the Bessie-nominated work of Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Tere O’Connor, and with choreographers in the contemporary experimental canon such as Miguel Gutierrez, Joanna Kotze, and Kevin Beasley. His new work in the port’s mouth is comprised of a solo assisted by a duet, performed by Gray and Jamal K. White. Gray looks to externally express interior streams of consciousness inside a black experience. “Time happens all at once where the past invades the present to make the future…At once I am many and I’m never alone,” he explains.

 

*About Open Dress Rehearsal: Tuesday evening’s dress rehearsal will be free with RSVP and open to the public at limited-capacity. Open dress rehearsals are a mask-required, community-minded program prioritizing our immunocompromised and low-income audiences. Staff and audiences will be required to wear masks (N95 or KN95) and performing artists (if unmasked) will be  required to test for COVID-19 (rapid tests provided by Danspace Project).


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!


Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Ayano Elson is an Okinawan-American dancer and choreographer based in New York City. She was born in Okinawa, a small island colonized by Japan in 1879 and occupied by the United States from 1945–1972. She works with improvisation, archival materials, and interdisciplinary collaboration to make dance performances. Her choreographic practice critically investigates power and interpretation as embedded in contemporary Western dance.

Her performances have been presented by Abrons Arts Center, AUNTS, 411 Kent, CPR – Center for Performance Research, The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, Gibney Dance, ISSUE Project Room, Knockdown Center, Movement Research, PAGEANT, and Roulette, among others. She has held artist residencies at Center for Performance Research and Abrons Arts Center (2022), Lower Manhattan Cultural Center and ArtCake (2021), and Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow (2018) and Gibney Dance (2015). She has received funding support from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Mertz Gilmore Foundation. She has performed in works by Laurie Berg, Kim Brandt, Jesi Cook, Milka Djordjevich, Simone Forti, Niall Jones, and Alexa West at museums, galleries, and theaters in Chicago, Los Angeles, and NYC. ayanoelson.com

Wendell Gray II is a dance artist, choreographer, and educator currently based in Brooklyn, NY, situated on Lenapehoking land. Wendell’s artistic journey has led him to perform with choreographers and artists including Miguel Gutierrez, Tere O’Connor, Joanna Kotze, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Pavel Zustiak, Christal Brown, J. Bouey, and Kevin Beasley, among many others. Wendell’s original choreographic works have been shown at venues such as PAGEANT, Draftwork at Dancespace, 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. Wendell is a 2024-2025 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. He has additionally been supported by residency programs, including Sighlines Dance Festival (2023), STUFFED Artist in Residence at Judson Church (2021), Work Up 6.0 Artist at Gibney (2020), and Chez Bushwick (2017). He is also currently an adjunct professor of Dance at Sarah Lawrence College and additionally been a guest teacher at New York University, University of the Arts, and Dancewave among others. Wendell is an alumnus of the University of the Arts, where he graduated with a BFA in Dance under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield. Originally hailing from Atlanta, GA, his artistic journey has been enriched by his upbringing in the performing arts. For more, visit wenings.com

Skip to content