Conversations Without Walls: devynn emory & Angie Pittman
This conversation will take place on YouTube. A link to view the conversation will be sent to registrants via email 30 minutes prior to the stream. RSVP is required for access to the stream!
In Fall 2020, Danspace Project invited six Artist Research Fellows, devynn emory, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, iele paloumpis, Angie Pittman, and Alice Sheppard to gather virtually with Danspace’s curatorial team. They responded to Danspace’s digital programming, the shifting landscape of dance, making and presenting, pedagogy, and programming. These sprawling and intimate conversations led to critical reflection, dreaming, and deep connection. Each of the Artist Research Fellows will return in our Winter 2021 digital Conversations Without Walls (CWW) series
In this CWW, dance artist, dance educator, and choreographer, Angie Pittman, and dance artist, choreographer, bodyworker, and acute care and hospice nurse, devynn emory, continue a conversation on acknowledging land and site. This conversation was first sparked by research emory and Pittman conducted as 2019-2020 Kin & Care Research Group Fellows that continued during their Fall 2020 Research Group Fellowship. Their crystallized research titled “Acknowledging Grief and Rage Through Land and Site” was read during the Platform 2020 Kin & Care event and will be published in the forthcoming Volume II of Danspace Project Platform 2020: Utterance From The Chorus catalogue.
Pittman (Black, African American) and emory (mixed race, Lenape/Blackfoot) center and invite Black and Indigenous healing. They are friends acknowledging land and site through storytelling, ritual, and ancestral connections through time and space. These artists ask us all to consider how we take responsibility for the spaces we occupy? Where have we come from and where are we going?
The CWW digital series are pre-recorded and will be streamed on YouTube and archived on Danspace Project’s online Journal at danspaceproject.org/journal.
More about the Conversations Without Walls series
Accessibility: This program will be captioned.
devynn emory is a mixed Lenape/Blackfoot transgender choreographer, dance artist, bodyworker, ceremonial guide, acute care and hospice nurse currently working as a COVID-19 nurse in NYC. emory’s performance company devynnemory/beastproductions draws from their multiple in-between states of being, holding space for liminal bodies bridging multiple planes of transition. Their formal dance training pulls on mathematical and mapped scores to support bodies decolonizing and bleeding human truths, opening peep holes and revelations for collective performers and audiences. They are currently working on a trilogy centering medical mannequins processing transitional mediumship. “deadbird” with it’s touring public altar can anyone help me hold this body will be first. Cindy Sessions and “boiling-rain” are to follow which are interactive storytelling projects with an elder mannequin holding a collection of grandmother wisdom. As a healer they have dual licenses in “western” and “eastern” bodywork and run a private practice sage-massage that offers end of life consultation, channeled counseling and hands on care modalities in conversation with thresholds. You can find their work at devynnemory.com and sage-massage.
Angie Pittman is a New York based Bessie award-winning dance artist. Her choreographic 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, The Invisible Dog, and Danspace Project. Angie has had the pleasure of dancing in work by MBDance, Ralph Lemon, Tere O’Connor, Cynthia Oliver, Anna Sperber, Donna Uchizono Company, Jennifer Monson, Kim Brandt, Tess Dworman, Antonio Ramos and many others. Angie has also had the joy of being able to create collaboratively with Jasmine Hearn, Jonathan Gonzalez, Athena Kokoronis, and Anita Mullin. She holds a MFA in Dance and Choreography with a graduate minor in African American Studies, and is a M’Singha Wuti certified teacher of the Umfundalai technique. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how the body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power.