Saturday Afternoon Conversation #2: Kin & Care
Saturday, February 29, 12-4pm
RSVP
devynn emory, iele paloumpis, Angie Pittman, Jaime Shearn Coan, and Maura Nguyen Donohue.
Facilitation by Seta Morton
Audio Description by Alejandra Ospina
Grounding exercises and Mental Health Resource, Jasmine Cohen (LCAT, R -DMT)
Cupping Practice, Kristin Cheng (LMT, L.Ac.)
Sound Bath, GraceElaine F. Osborne
This series of long form conversations unfolds over four Saturday afternoons during PLATFORM 2020: Utterances from the Chorus. They will allow for different ways to gather, talk, and share practice. Curators, artists, audience, writers, scholars, friends and family will take this slow time to process the lines of inquiry guiding the Platform to come together, across disciplines.
In 2016, Danspace Project’s Lost & Found Platform revealed the persistent connections between artists and legacies of care. Dance is a vital vehicle for this heightened attending that we call care, and during that (11th) Platform, curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Will Rawls to focus on the impacts and echoes of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, time became elastic, history reshaped itself, and tenacious bonds formed among kindred spirits.
Initiated by Danspace Executive Director and Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor in Spring 2019 and with facilitation from Danspace Project’s Assistant Curator, Seta Morton, The Kin and Care Research Fellows: devynn emory, iele paloumpis, Angie Pittman, Jaime Shearn Coan and Maura Nguyen Donohue have been following individual threads that have gathered along the lines of blood and time. The group has circulated questions and writings about what it is to be kith, kin and/or comrades, as well as the sustainability of care as a practice.
Plans for the culminating event grow out of conversations about time as it relates to trauma, death and dying, queer time, “crip-time.” It has turned towards the bodies that disrupt linear time, including vampiric and sci-fi entities navigating blackness, isolation, white supremacy and the violence inherent in late-stage capitalism. The group has investigated the complex symbolism and rich materiality of blood in relation to ancestry, indigeneity, seropositivity, and Eastern and Western medicine, and healing.
We will gather in the Sanctuary of the St. Marks church. The day will end with a shared meal in the Parish Hall of St. Mark’s church.
SCHEDULE (Please note: all times are approximate.)
Throughout the day, guests are invited to come in and out of the collective programming while also invited to independently explore the space where stations, resources, and accommodations will be available to be activated.
11:30am: Sound Bath, GraceElaine F. Osborne
12pm: Land Acknowledgement, devynn emory and Angie Pittman
12:10pm: Welcome, Seta Morton
12:15pm: Listening to “How to Catalogue a Crisis: An Afterward to Lost and Found: Dance, HIV/AIDS, New York, Then and Now (2016)”, iele paloumpis, Jaime Shearn Coan, and Samantha the robot screen reader
12:35pm: mmm, devynn emory (with post-performance/lecture conversation facilitated by Seta Morton)
1:15pm: Collective Vibrational Tuning, led by iele paloumpis
1:30pm: Open Space Exploration
2pm: Kin & Care Research Group Panel Conversation, devynn emory, Angie Pittman, iele paloumpis, Jaime Shearn Coan, and Maura Nguyen Donohue. Moderated by Jaime Shearn Coan.
2:45pm: Collective Land Acknowledgment
3pm: A Shared Meal in the Parish Hall
Guests may sign up for 20-minute cupping sessions with Kristin Cheng anytime between 1-4pm.
Accessibility: Danspace Project’s main entrance is wheelchair accessible via a ramp. The Parish Hall is accessible through the 11th street doors via one (8 inch high) step or a (28.5 inch wide) temporary ramp with assistance from our staff. Please request the use of the temporary ramp, ahead of the event date. All gender bathrooms are accessible via a stairway (24 steps that are all 7.5 inches high). A same-level, one stall restroom is available near Danspace Project’s main performance space in the church Sanctuary. The doorway of that bathroom is 33 inches wide. There is a small corridor to pass through when moving between the Sanctuary and Parish Hall, the narrowest corner of this corridor is 29 inches wide.
CART (Communication access real-time captioning) will be provided.
Audio Description will be Provided for devynn emory’s mmm performance lecture
If you have food sensitivities or allergies please proceed with caution. If you have airborne allergies please let us know, seta@danspaceproject.org. Thank you.
Part of PLATFORM 2020: Utterances from the Chorus
Accessibility Danspace Project’s main entrance is fully wheelchair accessible via ramp. A same-level restroom is available near Danspace Project’s main performance space in the church sanctuary.
Angie Pittman is a New York based Bessie award-winning dance artist, dance maker, and dance educator. Her work has been performed at The Kitchen, Gibney Dance, BAAD!, Movement Research at Judson Church, Triskelion Arts, STooPS, The Domestic Performance Agency, The KnockDown Center(Sunday Service), The Invisible Dog(Catch 73), and Danspace Project. Angie is currently working as a collaborator and dance artist with Adam Linder, devynn emory/beastproductions, Anna Sperber, Stephanie Acosta, and Donna Uchizono Company. Angie has had the pleasure of dancing in work by Ralph Lemon, Tere O’Connor, Jennifer Monson, Kim Brandt, Tess Dworman, Antonio Ramos, Jasmine Hearn, Jonathan Gonzalez, and many others. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how the body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power. Angiepittman.com
iele paloumpis is a dance artist, death doula and intuitive space-holder. their work is rooted in kinesthetic awareness and ancestral healing practices – all within a trauma-informed framework that centers social justice.Choreographic works have been shown through the Chocolate Factory Theater, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, New York Live Arts, Dixon Place, the Flea Theater, Movement Research, Painted Bride Art Center, and Franklin Street Works, among others. iele is excited to premiere their newest evening length work, “In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky” at Danspace Project this coming May 21st, 22nd and 23rd, 2020. iele received a BA from Hollins University in 2006 and was awarded end of life doula certifications from Mount Sinai, Valley Hospice, and the Quality of Life Care, LLC Accompanying the Dying Program between 2014-16. As a disabled, queer, trans survivor from a working class background, iele empathizes across multiple axes of oppression and brings this awareness to their work a dance artist and death doula.
Jaime Shearn Coan is a writer, editor, and PhD Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is completing a dissertation titled Metamorphosis Theater: Performance at the Intersection of HIV/AIDS, Race, and Sexuality. A current 2019-2020 CUNY/Schomburg Center Archival Dissertation Year Fellow, Jaime previously served as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow at The Center for the Humanities, CUNY and has taught literature, composition, and creative writing at City College, Hunter College, and Queens College, CUNY. Jaime’s writing has appeared in publications including TDR: The Drama Review, Critical Correspondence, Drain Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2, Movement Research Performance Journal, Gulf Coast, On Curating, Women & Performance, and Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Movement. Jaime is a co-editor of the Danspace Project 2016 Platform catalogue: Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now and author of the chapbook Turn it Over, published by Argos Books.
devynn emory is a mixed Lenape/Blackfoot choreographer and dance artist living in Lenapehoking. emory’s company devynnemory/beastproductions sources from multiple in-between states of being both in their body as a transgender person, and in their work in multiple realms of liminality as a healer/bodyworker and emergency/hospice Nurse. emory was institutionally trained in rigorous classical lineages of line and exactitude. They have thus committed to formalism as a tool for structural reclamation, investigation and decolonization of pattern making. In addition to making choreographic work they lead ceremony, movement and writing workshops, and engage in somatic practices releasing grief concerning trauma and death and dying.
Maura Nguyen Donohue appreciates the kinship of two teen sons and many other sibling spirits. She is Associate Professor of Dance and Faculty Associate for Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. She has been making, writing about and curating performance works in NYC since 1994. She has served on The Bessies, as well as the Boards of Movement Research, the Congress on Research in Dance and Dance Theater Workshop. She has a BA in Anthropology and Dance (‘92) and an MFA in Dance (‘08) from Smith College.