In The Works (Jan 6, 2019)

Letters to Marsha is a performance project conceived and performed by mayfield brooks, is based on danced and written love notes to queer ancestor Marsha 'Pay It No Mind' Johnson with whom mayfield had a "missed connection" in 1992 when mayfield was 21 and Marsha 46. This project explores the weight of history, of Marsha's drowned body found floating in the Hudson River, and mayfield’s own evolution as a Black, non-binary queer. These narratives connect contemporary specters of Black queer death to histories of enslavement through movement, voice, video projection, sound, humor and pathos, creating a temporal back and forth through time and place, a meditation on love, and an array of colors and tones that call back the dead to remind us how to live.

BamBam will present “Like a prayer” witch is a project in process and grew out of a residency program at Movement Research center during summer 2018. She has invited dancer Lydia Östberg Diakité to perform with her.

Samlingen will in their presentation give a brief overview of their herstory, current practices, how and why they
work together. Focusing on the expanded, ungraspable landscapes that this feminist collective is a part of and that to a
large extent shapes how and why they do what they do.

Wealth From The Salt Seas explores the embodiment of assertion and agency through visceral somatic experience. Vocalist and composer Gelsey Bell joins Anna Sperber in performance to collaboratively mine the physical space of the theater for its poetic and emotional vibrations. The female body emerges as a resonant, echoing force within a visual landscape conceived in collaboration with scenographer Sara C. Walsh and lighting designer Elliott Cennetoglu.

"This year I’ve been reading and rereading a dear friend's poem's, Shivanee Ramlochan’s Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting. Shivanee's poems have been resonating deeply with me and are eerily connected to the world of BBB, a world that has been unscrambling itself since a pair of orange gloves found me in March 2017.

BBB is shaping up to be many things: a bloody bloody bay, a brave bitter birth, a beautiful bellowing beast. I am working in collaboration with musician and dramaturge Lydia Moore, blending underbelly tempos of the Caribbean with rhythm & blues, and conjuring a fantastic world of desire with remnants of a brutal colonial history. With stillness and mania, BBB is morphing into a new word for revenge. BBB might be my new formula for power."

In scape, Laurie Berg overlays a landscape of information over live performance via 3-D glasses, exploring Times Square as not just a place of spectacle and traffic but of visual messaging.

DELIRIOUS Dances / Edisa Weeks is showing an excerpt from THREE RITES: Liberty, which explores how liberty is protected, promoted, and manifests in the body. Connected like a puppet to objects that have informed the Black experience in America (bible, black dildo, blonde wig, light bulb, gun, watermelon), Edisa Weeks alternates between white face, black face, visceral ritual dance and storytelling to examine how the ideals of liberty are upheld in America.

THREE RITES received a 2018 Creation & Development Fund Award from National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network, co-commissioned by 651 ARTS in partnership with Restoration ART and Mount Tremper Arts. The full work will premiere in Brooklyn, NY in June 2020.

Presented by Culturehub:

Archive: This Was The End is at once an artifact and experience — the afterlife of a performance as interactive sculpture. Here, you are the actor, and a wall — salvaged from the old PS 122 community center — is the physical manifestation of a memory of a play, which your presence activates and disrupts. Sound and video portraits embedded and mapped onto the wall produce a reverse relief. What is far seems near and near, far. The past hypnotizes the present, denying its erasure, to remind us of a life before that continues.

Directed and created by Mallory Catlett/Restless NYC, Archive: This Was The End features video and programming by Keith Skretch, sound and video manipulation by G Lucas Crane and performances on video by G Lucas Crane, Black-Eyed Susan, Jim Himelsbach, Rea C Wright, and Paul Zimet. It was developed with production support and residency provided by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Archive: This Was The End will be free and open to the public during gallery hours listed below. The installation will run on a continuous loop and audience is welcome to drop in at any time. RSVP is available but not required.

1/5/19 12pm–6pm
1/6/19 11am–5pm
1/7/19 10am–2pm