Fresh Tracks 2016

This year’s Fresh Tracks features works by Melanie Greene, Sarah Lifson, Eli Tamondong, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes and Jonathan Gonzalez, and Georgia Wall and Itamar Segev.
Melanie Greene’s Performing Okay conjures a curious contradiction of meaning, quality, and intention as one word sits simultaneously within competing body and language narratives. It sparks questions surrounding repetition, physicality, and language.

Sarah Lifson’s i eat pancakes for dinner is freedom, free will, and free verse. It concerns itself with consumption, and the active vs. passive infiltration of information into our cells.

Melding dance and spoken word, Eli Tamondong’s Feast or Famine struggles with American masculinity and love through a queer Filipino boy’s eyes. Tinikling, a traditional Philippine dance, and ballet collide over golf commentary and gay sex, coming-of-age in a world of fetishization and colonized bodies. Entangled by white love, how does this boy find value in all colors?

Mining collaborative as well as personal movement histories, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes and Jonathan Gonzalez’s yet-to-be-titled work investigates the disparities and similarities that lie between our bodies culturally, socially, and artistically. Harmony and dissonance continually emerge in their identity markers as a queer identified white woman and a queer identified brown man. While experimenting with the physical aspects of disorientation, duration, momentum, and intimacy, the manifold aspects of their identities, creative visions, and creative histories also become physical realities at play.

In Pose for Prom Prayer, Georgia Wall and Itamar Segev are topless, wearing only baggy white cotton briefs which resemble diapers or modern day loincloths. They merge and disperse, searching and subverting trying, to burst open lust and prayer. Georgia loves to alter her body. Itamar can make her cry when he sings.

New York Live Arts’ signature Fresh Tracks Program is New York City’s leading, season-long residency and performance opportunity for artists exploring hybrid and movement-based work at the early stages of their careers. Created in 1965 by Dance Theater Workshop, Fresh Tracks continues as a signature program in New York Live Arts’ newly minted “New Work Development Program.” Designed as a springboard for intensive choreographic, administrative and creative development, Fresh Tracks is a pioneer opportunity in the field, positioning early career artists at a unique vantage point within Live Arts’ annual programming. 

Unfolding over the course of Live Arts’ regular presenting season, the Fresh Tracks Program provides five artists with a 50-hour studio residency, a professionally-produced shared evening bill in the New York Live Arts theater, an artistic fee, one-on-one dialogue sessions with the program’s Artistic Adviser, professional development workshops led by renowned professionals from the field and exclusive access to Live Arts’ Marketing, Production and Programming staff support. 

If you are interested in applying for Fresh Tracks click here.