BILL'S BLOG

Fresh Tracks is celebrating its 50^th birthday this year. Like anything (or anyone) five decades old, it’s gone through its share of transitions and name changes. The program, created to support the work of emerging choreographers, dates from the very beginning of Dance Theater Workshop (DTW), which was formed in 1965 by a collective of young choreographers and dancers. That same year, they began holding a series of informal performances at co-founder Jeff Duncan’s loft on 215 West 20^th Street. (more…)

Fresh Tracks is New York Live Arts’ signature program for identifying and supporting new voices in contemporary dance and performance.  The program’s considerable legacy extends back to the very formation of Dance Theater Workshop itself in 1965, and it became the organization’s longest running program, migrating through a number of monikers — Studio Series, Choreographers’ Showcase, finally landing on “Fresh Tracks” in 1984. The fundamental core of the program’s mission, however, has remained the same throughout; to respond to the needs of artists and the field itself. With New York Live Arts’ support and commitment, it has continued its evolution from being primarily a performance showcase for many years into the year-long comprehensive performance and residency program that it is today, with New York Live Arts as its home.  As a result, Fresh Tracks continues as a leading program that seeds the field with the next generation of promising new voices.

The program’s current architecture is based on the direct needs and feedback from the young artists themselves and from our audition panelists over recent years.  Following this weekend of fully produced performances, each artist receives 50 hours of creative residency space in our studios in the spring and one-on-one sessions with an Artistic Advisor, Levi Gonzalez.  Additionally, the artists together participate in professional development workshops and “Dialogue Sessions,” moderated by Levi, fostering an exchange of ideas about artistic process and challenges encountered in the field.

The Fresh Tracks program indeed provides key pragmatic tools to these young artists that directly relate to building a life as an artist. Moreover, the program gives these younger artists an important boost in a wider environment that often delivers such support sparingly, if at all. The program also gives a fundamental aspect of creative work, the idea of curiosity, a home, allowing other artists and audiences a peek into the early ideas that may well inform the next generation of makers and the form itself. And finally, the program keeps us as staff and institution connected to young, emerging ideas as they are forming within our current cultural terrain; it helps our efforts to stay nimble and open-minded in identifying what and who might deserve the important support our institution, New York Live Arts, can provide.

We are so pleased to welcome this year’s Fresh Tracks artists, Martita Abril, Maximilian Balduzzi, Ben Grinberg & Nick Gillette, Daniel Holt, Leslie Parker and Gabrielle Revlock.  This year’s group represents a range of contemporary investigations by makers early in their careers that look at personal histories, spoken language, a range of codified dance forms and a look at the cultures that inform those respective forms.  Like all the artists before them, these artists come with an insistent need to be heard. We are thrilled to give this new generation of voices an important and visible platform and, in turn, build a circular partnership where we too can learn from each of them.

Dance, like any artistic form, always counts on fresh and provocative ideas to catalyze and propel the form forward. We look forward with great interest to what these young makers do and accomplish as they carve out their artistic journeys, and we welcome them, and you, our audiences, into our home for this season!

— Carla Peterson (Artistic Director) and Benjamin Kimitch (Producing Associate and Assistant to the Artistic Director)

Fresh Tracks
Featuring Martita Abril, Maximilian Balduzzi, Ben Grinberg & Nick Gillette, Daniel Holt, Leslie Parker and Gabrielle Revlock.
Tickets and Info 

About Daniel Holt
Daniel Holt hails from Central Valley California. He received his B.F.A. in Dance from The Ohio State University in Spring 2011. Holt now resides in Brooklyn, New York where he teaches dance and runs his dance company, Dirt, as well as his video company, Scarecrow. He has performed at Joyce SoHo, Jacob’s Pillow’s Inside/Out stage and The New York International Fringe Festival, among others. He has presented work under Dirt all over NYC, and in 2013 was invited to present in Chiasso, Switzerland as part of the Ticino in Danza Festival. Dirt works to create dance that truly encompasses the styles of contemporary, popping, krump, modern, hip hop and house. This type of mix and match approach, put together with a straight up sense of humor, raw theatrics and a steady ear to the current musical scene, are the types of fuel that guide Dirt. Holt also teaches across the tri-state area, including at Broadway Dance Center.

Fresh Tracks
Featuring Martita Abril, Maximilian Balduzzi, Ben Grinberg & Nick Gillette, Daniel Holt, Leslie Parker and Gabrielle Revlock.
Tickets and Info 

About Maximilian Balduzzi 
Maximilian Balduzzi was born in a small village in the Dolomites. He holds a degree in Modern and Contemporary Theater from the University of Bologna and has worked both in Italy and internationally as a performer, teacher and director. For the past fifteen years he has dedicated himself to the practice of physical and vocal training for performers. Balduzzi moved to New York City in 2008 and soon began working with Ben Spatz. He has been a Movement Research AIR (2010-11) and CAVE Black Studio AIR (2010-13). Currently he is working on several projects in collaboration with artists Helga Davis, Daria Fain, Samita Sinha and Arturo Vidich. Balduzzi teaches workshops to performers and non-performers around the idea of “restless presence.”

Fresh Tracks
Featuring Martita Abril, Maximilian Balduzzi, Ben Grinberg & Nick Gillette, Daniel Holt, Leslie Parker and Gabrielle Revlock.
Tickets and Info 

About Leslie Parker
Leslie Parker is a Brooklyn based contemporary dance artist. Her work has recently been seen at the BAAD ASS! Women’s Festival as well as EMoves 13 at HarlemStage Gatehouse, WOW Café Theater, Movement Research at Judson Church, Tribeca Performing Arts Center and Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center’s PEEKS. She is an Instructor and choreographer for the Activist Artist program at Penumbra Theatre and has led “Dance for Social Change” residencies for Bailey’s Café and the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute. She has also taught workshops and classes for Zenon Dance Company and School, University of Minnesota, Carlton College, and for at-risk youth throughout the United States.

Fresh Tracks
Featuring Martita Abril, Maximilian Balduzzi, Ben Grinberg & Nick Gillette, Daniel Holt, Leslie Parker and Gabrielle Revlock.
Tickets and Info 

About Ben Grinberg & Nick Gillette
Ben Grinberg and Nick Gillette are Philadelphia-based physical theatre and movement artists. After meeting as members of the founding class of the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training, they have been working together for over two years on a variety of projects from vaudeville-esque physical comedy to clown to “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” a durational dance piece about end-of-life care, currently in-progress. Their work has been presented by Circus Now!, Mascher Space Co-Op, Pig Iron Theatre Company and by the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts, where they have trained in hand-to-hand acrobatics.

Fresh Tracks
Featuring Martita Abril, Maximilian Balduzzi, Ben Grinberg & Nick Gillette, Daniel Holt, Leslie Parker and Gabrielle Revlock.
Tickets and Info 

About Gabrielle
Philadelphia-based dance/choreographer Gabrielle Revlock has an “inventive arsenal of quirky, disquieting movement, articulated with arresting panache” (thINKingDance, 2011). She is the recipient of a 2013 grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage for her duet with Nicole Bindler, “The Dance Apocalypse.” From 2010-12 she was a Resident Artist with the Susan Hess Choreographers Project and from 2012-13 a LAB Fellow through FringeArts (formerly the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival). Her work has been shown across the U.S. by presenters including ODC, The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Joyce SoHo, Dance Place, Philadelphia Dance Projects, Velocity Dance Center, Abrons Arts Center, Danspace Project and the Korzo Theater in The Hague, Netherlands. In 2010 she received a Rocky [Philadelphia Dance Award] for her signature piece Indivisibility performed with a hula hoop and her collaboration with Nicole Bindler, I made this for you, won a finalist prize in the 2011 A.W.A.R.D. Show! Her work has been supported by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, nEW Festival, New Edge Mix, SCUBA National Touring Network for Dance and via numerous professional development grants from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Her most recent video-dance, turn out, turn up was commissioned by Dances Made to Order and shown in Philadelphia, New York and Seattle as part of Kinetic Kino and on WHYY tv. As a dancer, she was a company member of Jeanne Ruddy Dance for nine years, performing the works of Suzanne Linke, Mark Dendy, Peter Sparling, Jane Comfort, Robert Battle and Jeanne Ruddy. As a freelance dancer she has performed for many local and international choreographers including Lucinda Childs, Isabelle Chaffaud and Jérôme Meyer, Willi Dorner, Katsura Kan, Meg Foley, Susan Rethorst, Christopher Williams, Sylvain Émard, Jumatatu Poe, Lisa Kraus, Myra Bazell, Leah Stein and Matthew Neenan for the Opera Company of Philadelphia.

Fresh Tracks
Featuring Martita Abril, Maximilian Balduzzi, Ben Grinberg & Nick Gillette, Daniel Holt, Leslie Parker and Gabrielle Revlock.
Tickets and Info 

About Martita
Martita Abril is a performer, choreographer and teaching artist from Tijuana, México. She earned her B.F.A. in Dance in 2009 from San Diego State University. She has worked with dance artists and companies throughout México, the U.S. and Ecuador, including a number of projects and performances with Lux Boreal Danza Contemporánea, Allyson Green Dance and Khosro Adibi. She was a lead organizer for the Fronteras México project that focused on teaching through the arts at orphanages and marginalized areas of Tijuana, México. She was named a 2010-2011 “Young Creator” PECDA Scholar by the State of Baja California, México with her project “Union Artistica Sin Fronteras” that explored transcendence of the physical and cultural boundary between Tijuana and San Diego through artistic exchange. Abril was recently selected for the national fellowship from FONCA 2012-2013, a year-long fellowship given by the Government of México to pursue scholarship abroad. In addition, she was selected for the 2013 New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program and is currently a staff member at the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Abril was selected as an Alumna to Watch in 2013 by San Diego State University.

Fresh Tracks
Featuring Martita Abril, Maximilian Balduzzi, Ben Grinberg & Nick Gillette, Daniel Holt, Leslie Parker and Gabrielle Revlock.
Tickets and Info

On December 13, 2012 New York Live Arts hosted a Come Early Conversation with: niv Acosta, Lorene Bouboushian, and Saul Ulerio, members of the 2011-2012 Fresh Tracks cohort to share stories, insight and inspiration from their time as Fresh Tracks resident artists.  The conversation was moderated by Levi Gonzalez, Artistic Advisor Fresh Tracks Performance & Residency Program.
Check this out on Chirbit

 

 

Michal Samama is a New York based choreographer and performance artist. During the last ten years Samama has created works in dance, theater and performance art and she is now focusing on the research and creation of movement based solo performances, involving video, photography and site-specific practices. Samama is a ‘Movement Research’ 2011-2013 Artist-in-Residence. She recently gained a ‘LiftOff residency’ at New Dance Alliance and has been a ‘The Field’ Artist-in-Residence (Fall 2010). Since arriving to NYC in 2010, her work has been presented at Dixon Place, Movement Research at Judson Church, Joyce Soho, Chez Bushwich, Priska C. Juschka Gallery, First Street Green at First Park, Vaudeville Park (in a work by Yoni Niv) and the 92nd Street Y, where she also curated an interdisciplinary art event in January 2012. In Berlin she created two solo works as part of ‘Extension’ PAStudies and performed there at the Home Sweet Home Festival, Werkstatt der Kulturen and the Grimmuseum. In Israel her work has been shown at Suzanne Dellal Center, Tmuna Theater, Tzavta Theater and more. Her play which she wrote and performed in was presented at ‘Act 2 Festival’ (Haifa, 2009). Samama studied dance and choreography at ‘Ha-kibbutzim’ Teachers College and then theater, writing and performance art at ‘Search Engine’, an Interdisciplinary Art Program, founded by Yasmeen Godder and Itzik Giuli. She has taught choreography in various schools in Israel and she is now teaching dance at the 92nd Street Y.

 

At Fresh Tracks Samama will be presenting, The Chicken Memorial which explores the ability to commemorate something so forgettable and unremarkable as a chicken.

 

 

Video Reel: http://vimeo.com/43856860

Artist Statement: 
In my solo works I seek the space where opposites overlap. I explore how weakness, at its most extreme, utter vulnerability, uncovers a peculiar, uncanny power. I do that by creating obstacles for myself, actions to perform on stage of which I could never achieve full mastery, and keep me exposed to the possibility of failure. This structure produces images that are at the same time humorous and disturbing and evoke a sense of insecurity rather than comfort and ease.

I am interested in the mechanism of performance as an art form but also as an instrument of a social-cultural ‘game’ in the patterns of ordinary life, daily routine and rituals. My work explores the automatic ways in which we do things, exemplified by the automatic ways in which we respond as audience to a performance, and the potential for performatively interrupting this automatism.

My aim is to trigger, in my most intimate, private, almost idiosyncratic images, the texture of the scars the collective leaves on the individual body, in my very flesh. It is there at my most intimate that I find the traces of collective memory, the hidden choreography of our life, for which there is no author.

Much of my research is devoted to the tension between the ephemeral and the eternal; performance art and visual arts; I test the power but also the risk and uncertainty of live-presence with its ephemeral, passing quality against the static quality and the possibility of perpetuation in the visual arts.

While as a solo artist, my body and the way I experience the world are my lab, the foundation for many of my works is a demanding, on-going dialog with material, which has just as much say as I do, if not more, in the artistic process. The material can sometimes be very concrete, such as stones or potatoes, and sometimes more elusive, such as the voice. With all of these materials, however, I try to uncover the strange and ambiguous at the very core of their everyday materiality as a meditation on beliefs and traditions, power structures and norms, cliches and fantasies.