Events – Danspace Project
Photo: Darial Sneed

Community ACCESS: The Kathak Ensemble & Friends

Community ACCESS provides subsidized off-season rental opportunities for Danspace Project community members.

WE SINFUL WOMEN is a new work by Janaki Patrik, Founder & Artistic Director of The Kathak Ensemble & Friends. Patrik seeks to give voice, through melody and movement, to the words of the female Urdu poets Ishrat Aafreen, Kishwar Naheed, and Fahmida Riaz.

Protesting the suffocating repression in their physical and emotional lives, these poets courageously wrote with both confrontational anger and ecstatic lyricism. First published in 1990 in Lahore, Pakistan, and in 1991 in London, the ground-breaking collection of poetry, WE SINFUL WOMEN (edited by Rukhsana Ahmad), gave a glimpse of the situation in which women had few rights, and their dance and poetry were considered blasphemous.

This production embodies the outrage and tenderness encapsulated in the concentrated language of poetry and dance.

The performance on Friday, March 3 will be followed by a Q&A with the artists.

Choreographer: Janaki Patrik with the Dancers
Composer: Kiran Ahluwalia
Female Vocal: Kiran Ahluwalia
Male Vocal: Samarth Nagarkar
Sarangi: Pt. Ramesh Misra
Tabla: Nitin Mitta
Bansuri flute, clarinet & saxophone: Steve Gorn
Rubab: Quraishi Roya
Frame drum: Rich Stein
English recitation of poems: Manoshi Chitra Neogy
Dancers: Aditi Dhruv, Kanushree Jain, Megha Kalia, Romanee Kalicharran, Bharathi Penneswaran, Saloni Somani
Consultants in Urdu Language & Literature: Professor Tahira Naqvi, Professor Frances Pritchett
Lighting designer: Kathy Kaufmann
Costume designer: Anna-Alisa Belous
Assistant in sourcing materials from India: Rani Khanam

Photo: Nicholas Burnham.

The Bang Group: A Mouthful of Shoes

Post-performance discussions
Thursday, March 9: The Bang Group and choreographer Hilary Easton
Friday, March 10: The Bang Group and choreographer Michelle Dorrance

The Bang Group was founded in 1995 by choreographers David Parker and Jeffrey Kazin. They return for their third Danspace Project season with A Mouthful of Shoes. This new work continues choreographer Parker’s adventurous exploration of the sonic potential of the dancing body in a varied, interlocking suite of percussive dances. Working with a wide-ranging movement vocabulary drawing from classical and contemporary forms as well as tap dance, Parker has taken a set of musical scores both contemporary and traditional, re-created them as choreographic systems, and embodied them with dancers. Thus, they can be “played” entirely by feet and bodies. Musician Pauline Kim Harris will play violin for an original composition by Dean Rosenthal. In addition, the group will perform a version of Stravinsky’s famous experimental jazz composition, Piano Rag Music.

Writes Parker, “I’m passionate about the social aspects of rhythm: the way we use rhythm to connect, argue, seduce, negotiate and contradict…This work is playful and gritty about its exacting musical tasks but its beating heart lies in the pungent mingling of rhythm and psychology.”

Dancers: Chelsea Ainsworth, Dylan Baker, Rebecca Hadley, Jeffrey Kazin, Alison Manning, David Parker, Nic Petry, Tommy Seibold, Caleb Teicher, and Amber Sloan.
Musicians: Pauline Kim Harris, violinist; others to be announced.
Composers: Dean Rosenthal, Morton Feldman, W.A. Mozart, Steve Reich, Igor Stravinsky
Costumes: Pei Chi-Su
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Photo: Ian Douglas

Emily Coates: Incarnations

Performed in-progress as part of Danspace Project’s Platform 2015: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, Incarnations is made up of a series of etudes on dancing with science. Based on Emily Coates’ collaboration with particle physicist Sarah Demers, the piece moves between lecture and performance, interweaving divergent sources, from Balanchine’s Apollo and postmodernist dance aesthetics to the elusive body of Sir Isaac Newton and the breakthrough discovery of the Higgs boson.

The piece illuminates humorous gaps and surprising insights as each discipline struggles to imagine the other. The moments in which the interdisciplinary dialogue must out of necessity break down also yield some of the most effective poetics. Playful and serious, Incarnations celebrates physics and dance as equal partners in our profound effort to understand our existence.

Physicists can explain four percent of the universe. Ninety-six percent remains unknown. Incarnations lingers on both the known and the unknowable, and returns knowledge to human form—casting, in essence, who gets to play god.

The performance on Thursday, March 16 will be followed by a discussion moderated by Douglas Crimp.

Performers: Emily Coates, Sarah Demers, Lacina Coulibaly, Iréne Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Will Orzo; special appearance by Yvonne Rainer
Lighting by: Carol Mullins
Music direction by: Will Orzo

Photo: Judy Hussie-Taylor

Food for Thought: curated by Heidi Latsky, Donna Uchizono, and Nami Yamamoto

Food for Thought is three nights of performance selected by a different guest artist curator each night. Canned goods collected through Food for Thought are donated to St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery food distribution programs.

Curators for this second edition of Winter 2017 Food for Thoughts are on Danspace Project’s Artists Advisory Board: Heidi Latsky (Thursday), Donna Uchizono (Friday), and Nami Yamamoto (Saturday).

Thursday, March 23
At the Crossroads
curated by Heidi Latsky

with:
Jerron Herman
Toby MacNutt
Mark Travis Rivera
Alice Sheppard

Friday, March 24
Deadline to Apply
curated by Donna Uchizono

with:
Jodi Melnick with Beth Gill and Donna Uchizono
Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith
Angie Pittman

Saturday, March 25
growing, blooming, aging, decaying and going back to the earth, then where are we going now…
curated by Nami Yamamoto

with:
Alex Escalante
Erin Ellen Kelly
Margaret Sunghe Paek

Danspace Project performances at St. Mark’s Church are wheelchair accessible by ramp. For more information about accessibility, please contact us at (212) 674-8112 / info@danspaceproject.org.

Food for Thought is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and City Council Member Rosie Mendez.

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