Mina Nishimura: Bladder Inn (and X, Y, Z, W)

Please arrive on time! There is no late seating for this performance.

Mina Nishimura’s Bladder Inn (and X, Y, Z, W) was created in conversation with an original text of the same title, developed by Nishimura with the intention of finding language evocative of internal landscapes.

Blurring the boundaries between inner and outer space, visible and invisible presences, and images and abstract forms, Bladder Inn (and X, Y, Z, W) hosts what Nishimura calls “a slippery journey and fleeting fantasy of wandering bodies.”

The work invites both audiences and performers to consider peripheral spaces of architecture, perception, and sound specific to the architecture of St. Mark’s Church.

Performed by Mina Nishimura with Martita Abril, Jonathan Burkland, Lydia Chrisman, Samuel Hanson, Maho Ogawa, Ilana Stuelpner, and Niko Tsocanos

Music Composed by Masahiro Sugaya

Lighting Design by Kathy Kaufmann

Costumes by Kota Yamazaki

DraftWork: Lauren Bakst / Kensaku Shinohara

There is no late seating for this DraftWork. Please arrive on time!

Curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones, the DraftWork series hosts informal, free Saturday afternoon performances that offer choreographers an opportunity to show their work in various stages of development. Performances are followed by discussion and a reception with the artists and curator.

Tatyana Tenenbaum: Untitled Work for Voice

*There is no late seating for this performance. Please arrive on time!*

Choreographer and composer Tatyana Tenenbaum explores the phenomenal space of the singing body. Untitled Work for Voice is a backstage musical; a show about a show whose production is never seen in completion. Five performers breathe sound and form into space, causing histories and narratives to appear and rupture. Singing bodies give way to vibration, unraveling the tightly choreographed music of American desire.

Tenenbaum asks: “If we are the inheritors of white America–with our interwoven histories of coercion, direct compliance, and passive complicity– then are we capable of embodying a narrative, which acknowledges genocide, enslavement, dominance and appropriation as a basis for everything we know? What would this feel and sound like? How can we implicate our cultural patterns of yearning, catharsis, and individualism in order to forge an illicit future? This multifaceted ‘theater of the singing body’ searches for a new expressive landscape for body and voice.”

Created and performed by Marisa Clementi, Pareena Lim, Emily Moore, Jules Skloot and Tatyana Tenenbaum
Costume Design by Claire Fleury
Lighting Design by Kathy Kaufmann

Platform 2018 Opening Event

Co-presented by Danspace Project and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

All are invited to the public opening of Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018)! This opening event will take place in the historic Great Hall at The Cooper Union—the same auditorium where Abraham Lincoln made his famous speech against the expansion of slavery.

On this occasion Danspace celebrates the release of its 12th Platform catalogue with words, movement, and song featuring Platform 2018 curator, choreographer Reggie Wilson, Judy Hussie-Taylor (Danspace Project Executive Director & Chief Curator), Nell Gibson (longtime St. Mark’s Church parishioner, author, and civil rights activist), Raja Feather Kelly (Platform 2018 catalogue designer, choreographer, and performer with Fist & Heel Performance Group), Radhika Subramaniam (Asst Prof of Visual Culture, Parsons School of Design/The New School), and Fist & Heel Performance Group dancers.

In the accompanying catalogue for Platform 2018, historical research, personal testimony, original artwork, interviews, and historic photographs uncover the intersecting ways places of worship have shaped religious, African Diasporic, and postmodern dance practices over past centuries. Contributors include Lauren Bakst, Lydia Bell, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Stephen Facey, Keely Garfield, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Darrell Jones, Prathibha Kanakamedala, Kelly Kivland, Cynthia Oliver, Susan Osberg, Carl Paris, Same As Sister (Hilary Brown and Briana Brown-Tipley), Radhika Subramaniam, Kamau Ware, Ni’Ja Whitson, Tara Aisha Willis, and Reggie Wilson.

The catalogue, designed by Raja Feather Kelly, and edited by Lydia Bell, Kristin Juarez, and Reggie Wilson, echoes Wilson’s choreographic logic and research methodology that reflect the complexity of time, space, and movement across the African Diaspora.

The event is free and open to the public.

Walking Tour #1: East Village with Cynthia Copeland (Platform 2018)

*This event is currently sold out. Please email Kristin Juarez at kristin@danspaceproject.org if you would like to be added to the waitlist. There will be no walk-up sales.*

Platform 2018 considers the cultural, dance, and architectural histories of the many peoples who’ve inhabited downtown NYC and beyond. Each week the Platform will feature a commissioned walking tour led by an artist or scholar.

Cynthia Copeland is a public historian and interpretive specialist focused on Afro-American, American, urban, and museum studies. She is president of the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History. This tour will focus on Copeland’s perspective as an historian, East Village resident, and a parishioner of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.

Danspace Project will confirm exact meeting location for the tour approximately one week in advance.