Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II)
Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II) features new premieres by mayfield brooks, Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener, iele paloumpis, and Ogemdi Ude! Platform performances will take place live in the sanctuary at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.
Platform 2022, curated by Danspace Project Executive Director & Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor, follows its 2021 predecessor, building on impossible questions as we continue to navigate precarious times. Like Part I, Platform 2022 takes inspiration from a 1977 poem by the late artist and writer, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), wherein she addresses the audience “as a distant relative.” Platform 2022 delves into ancestral explorations, connections, and disconnections, as well as accessibility, and disability aesthetics, sustainable relationships to land, site, and water, and how these connections find their way into the artists’ choreographic work. Dance artists mayfield brooks, Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener, iele paloumpis, and Ogemdi Ude have each noted different considerations of time amidst the ongoing Pandemic. Considering the intersections between life and dancing, how do life practices — building, birthing, weaving, planting, surviving — feed into dancemaking?
Platform 2021 (featuring Eiko Otake, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Reggie Wilson, and Okwui Okpokwasili, in Spring 2021) was designed to allow artists to work safely during a pandemic and reflect upon the current moment through new film commissions. Since the series’ inception in 2010, the Platforms have resulted in multifaceted performances, public programs, and publications that provide rich context for audiences. Recent programs have considered the importance of collective gathering, alternative kinship and care practices, land and site acknowledgements, accessibility, and voice/body practices. Platform 2022 is rooted in this history and with the curatorial team, Hussie-Taylor, Benjamin Akio Kimitch and Seta Morton, artists have been invited to experiment with and expand disability histories and aesthetics and accessibility practices.
The Platform artists will be joined by a unique cadre of guests for two Platform-centric Conversations Without Walls: The Dream of the Artist & The Dream of the Audience.
Danspace will publish a print catalogue to accompany the Platform. The catalogue will both reflect on The Dream of The Audience Part I and anticipate The Dream of The Audience Part II with written contributions from the artists, writer-in-residence, and more.
Maura Nguyen Donohue returns as Writer-in-Residence for the second year of The Dream of The Audience. Donohue’s work will be published in the catalogue and in the Danspace Project Online Journal.
Issue #14 of Danspace’s Online Journal (danspaceproject.org/journal) will also focus on Platform lines of inquiry, artists research and writing, and catalogue excerpts.