Danspace Project’s Food for Thought series presents two unique evenings of performance selected by a different guest artist curator each night. Admission each night is just $5 + 2 cans of food or $10. Canned goods are donated to the Momentum Project, which provides support to any person in need in NYC, especially those living with HIV/AIDS or other chronic illness.

Queer|Art, NYC’s home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, presents two evenings of performances and performance-for-camera by two pairs of artists who have worked together previously as part of the organization’s celebrated Queer|Art|Mentorship program.

Each evening is organized to highlight the unique relationships—creative, professional, personal, and otherwise—that have developed between Neil Goldberg & David Antonio Cruz (May 23) and Angela Dufresne & Kerry Downey (May 24) through their participation in the program, with a short conversation to explore the value and potential of mentorship within LGBTQ+ creative communities.

Thursday, May 23 at 8pm
After Mentorship with Neil Goldberg & David Antonio Cruz

Neil Goldberg mentored David Antonio Cruz during the 2017-2018 Queer|Art|Mentorship cycle. With Neil’s support, David expanded a drawing series and an operatic performance based on the ethnographic photographs and ‘Black Diaries’ of British consul and Irish Nationalist Roger Casement, in which Casement wrote of his affairs with young men of color during his travels to the Congo and Brazil. Tonight, David presents “Thecasementboys,” a new performance addressing the complexities of attraction, of being desired and consumed, from the point of view of the unnamed young men in Casement’s writings.

Neil Goldberg has been engaged in a near-daily practice of jotting down his most uninhibited thoughts and observations about the world around him onto index cards. Numbering in the thousands, these cards have provided Neil with the raw material for spontaneous performances, public lectures, and interactive sculptures, including tonight’s performance. Often using the cards as a jumping off point for conversation and free association, Neil’s “Inhibited Bites” index card performances are guided by simple and accessible systems that playfully cut through chatter to establish unexpected social bonds between himself and others who are present.

“Queer|Art|Mentorship provided the one on one mentoring that I was seeking,” David writes of his time in the program. “I held back at the beginning. I believe Neil saw that and created a safe environment for me to open up and be honest about my artistic insecurities to help guide me.”

Friday, May 24 at 8pm
After Mentorship with Angela Dufresne & Kerry Downey

Angela Dufresne mentored Kerry Downey during the 2012-2013 Queer|Art|Mentorship cycle. They have continued to collaborate and show work together ever since. In spring 2015, Angela took Kerry on a fishing trip upstate. Kerry’s subsequent project, “Fishing with Angela,” both a video and performance recreated for tonight’s program, uses an overhead projector to mimetically recreate their mentor’s gestures. This work explores the relationship between fishing and painting, mentor and mentee, wetness and flow.

“Fishing with Angela” is presented tonight as part of a shared evening entitled Catch and Release, in which Kerry and Angela enter into the ambivalence of certain traditions—portraiture, Bro-downs, fishing trips, side-by-side pissing, father and son relationships, among others—actively generating interchanges of social ritual, of song, of painting, of mimesis. In the artists’ own words: “In this queer ritual we say to each other: we are here now, together and separate. Entangled and distinct, un-mired if coded by these traditions.” There may be fly fishing in the church. With special guest Caroline Wells Chandler.