New York Theatre Ballet: Legends & Visionaries

This performance is presented as part of the Community ACCESS series, which provides subsidized off-season rental opportunities for Danspace Project community members.

New York Theatre Ballet, voted “Best Company of the Year” in Dance Europe, returns to Danspace Project with Legends & Visionaries, NYTB’s classic series of revivals by legendary choreographers and a first look at creations by emerging choreographers.

This thrilling new Legends & Visionaries program will feature a premiere by American Ballet Theatre’s Gemma Bond, her fourth ballet for NYTB, as well as a NYTB premiere of David Gordon’s BEETHOVEN/1999, originally choreographed for his company, Pick Up Performance Company. The evening also welcomes the return of Richard Alston’s A Rugged Flourish, created on NYTB in 2011, and José Limón’s La Malinche, the first piece Limón created on his own company in 1949.

This evening runs approximately 70 minutes with no intermission.

Yvonne Meier

These performances are co-presented by Danspace Project and Invisible Dog Art Center. All 4 performances take place at Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, NY.

Multiple Bessie-Award winning artist Yvonne Meier shares two pieces: Durch Dick und Duenn, an all new work for multiple soloists, and Durch Nacht und Nebel, a short solo for Meier. In Durch Dick und Duenn (Through Thick and Thin) performers Lorene Bouboushian, Lisa Kusanagi, and Meier move through a rapid-fire sequence of eccentric action and shape-shifting characters as they navigate a volatile landscape of murky depths, brittle and explosive walls, and a few surprises. This new work draws on Meier’s 30+ year practice of improvisational Releasing and Authentic Movement techniques. In Durch Nacht und Nebel (which translates to By Night and Fog), seen at last year’s American Realness Festival, Meier transforms herself with provocative costumes.

“Fearlessly morphing from one creature to the next — one transformation involved an orange bodysuit affixed with the plastic babies, and in another, she was coated in black paint — she exposed her aging body with aplomb. Is there nothing she’s afraid of?” wrote Gia Kourlas (New York Times).

Durch Nacht und Nebel
Choreographed and Performed by Yvonne Meier
Music by: Chris Laye

Durch Dick und Duenn
Choreographed by Yvonne Meier
Performed by Yvonne Meier, Lorene Bouboushian, and Lisa Kusanagi
Set Design by: Yvonne Meier
Lighting Designer: Michael Stiller
Dramaturges: Aki Sasamoto, Anne Iobst, and Ishmael Houston-Jones
Music by: Chris Cochrane, Chris Laye, and Kevin Bud Jones

Gillian Walsh: Moon Fate Sin

Moon Fate Sin is a book, a dance, and a tape.

In times of global crisis, we see a turn toward mysticism. New York based choreographer Gillian Walsh presents Moon Fate Sin, her latest work developed in collaboration with Emily Hoffman. The performance ponders the pursuit of dance as a suicidal tendency – where do the death drive and the transcendence drive meet in dance?

In Moon Fate Sin, conceived as “ A Liturgical Dance for St. Mark’s Church, a cosmological dance demonology.” Walsh and collaborators/performers Maggie Cloud, Justin Hyacinth, Emily Hoffman, and Mickey Mahar encounter the intangible and immaterial and reckon with embodied doom and escapism. With dancing that ranges from slow and sculptural to modernist formal abstraction, Walsh delves into early psychoanalytic theory, occultist beliefs and premonitions on the onset of world war.

Costumes by earth_trauma
Lighting by Carol Mullins

Please note, a fog machine is used as part of this performance. 

Moon Fate Sin is co-presented by Danspace Project and Performa 17 (performa-arts.org)

DraftWork: Meredith Glisson / Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal

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.

Movement Research Festival Fall 2017: invisible material

Movement Research, one of the world’s leading laboratories for the investigation of dance and movement-based forms, returns to Danspace Project with its annual Fall Festival.

Artist-curators Jonathan Gonzalez, Zavé Martohardjono, and EmmaGrace Skove-Epes approach Movement Research’s Fall Festival by considering collective practices and the workings of collectivity amidst economies of individualism in this current moment. Comprised of performances, workshops, and gatherings led by collectives, invisible material ponders interventions of unfolding in the fold, meandering and mess-making, and coordinating in the in-between. Read the full curatorial statement here.

THURSDAY, November 30, 8pm
The Commons Choir
mayday heyday parfait

mayday heyday parfait is a choral, choreographed, fiscal epic performed by The Commons Choir. The backstory is The Age of Discovery da Gama and Columbus sailing in opposite directions in search of the same spice (nutmeg) setting into motion a global interchange of peoples, plants and communicable diseases under the most exploitive terms imaginable; although this ongoing momentum is coextensive with our extinction, we still haven’t put in place a counteractive Age of Undiscovery. For MR Festival Fall 2017: invisible material we’ll open our process to the public, asking questions such as: Is divisive speech ever free speech? How could something or someone possibly be out of place? Is peopling of the planet potentially out of place? Is identifying with identity the problem? What happens when words aren’t more than what words can say? If 70% of domestic terrorist attacks are committed by individuals-acting-alone, isn’t our greatest threat singularity? I’m more different from my group than yours. Shall we all meet all over again, free of arrogation?

FRIDAY, December 1, 8pm
Feminist Art Group + Collective States
temporal translations

Building and dismantling structures. Translating across linguistic barriers. When artists are labourers, viewers become audience. When artists are foreigners, allies default to translators. Feminist Art Group and Collective States will offer performances, each interactive in their own way.

SATURDAY, December 2, 8pm
Wildcat! + Social Health Performance Club
solo precarity

Collectives, Wildcat! and Social Health Performance Club share an evening of performances.

Please visit www.movementresearch.org/festival for info on other invisible material events taking place at Danspace Project and various locations Monday November 27 – Sunday December 3.