Fresh Tracks New Works

This season’s Fresh Tracks artists present their new work in a shared evening in the theater. Fresh Tracks Residency & Performance program is a season-long residency for emerging movement-based artists in support of new work creation and professional development. This season marks the 60th year of Fresh Tracks, which was a signature program of Dance Theater workshop to bring new choreographic artistry to the forefront.

ABOUT THE WORKS

Maxi Hawkeye Canion | flesh-talker

Maxi Hawkeye Canion (they/she) is a Brooklyn based Performance Artist. Through their lens as a Black Queer artist, they distill their life experiences through performance, sculpture, sound, and garment. Their work illustrates the nuances of intimacy, failure, the grotesque, and ephemerality, centering on non-linear, autobiographical narratives that focus on intricate personas that serve as metaphorical embodiments of my socio-political stances. With an emphasis on improvisation, they create low-stakes, high-integrity containers that prioritize research, play and spontaneity. With a large influence in film composition, aesthetically they find their work referencing nostalgic 00’s anime, low-poly and immersive gaming, YouTube video essays, the Black avant garde, punk, nihilistic memes, deconstructed fashion and drag, and ambient horror.

Kashia Kancey | I’m in the Middle of the Ocean, and I Can’t See You

This work is a ghostly trip to the center of the ocean, a longing tale of solitude and sacrifice

I’m in the Middle of the Ocean, and I Can’t See You is a series of vignettes delving into themes of mortality and rebirth, the passage of time and its toll, the complexities of grief and familial bonds, the intensity of passion, and the pursuit of freedom. It prompts self reflection on the lengths one is willing to go for their own liberation. At its core this work is an investigation of self and the many versions we carry, the ones we know and have yet to discover. This work is a response to the story told in The Awakening by Kate Chopin, a 19th century novella about a woman’s struggle to find peace inside a stifling society.

Jade Manns | Control

Control is a dense amalgam of disparate, overlapping worlds and vocabularies, enacted by four dancers with varying levels of environmental/self-awareness. Two dancers (Kalliope Piersol and Noa Rui-Piin Weiss) move in parallel, isolated from one another, through a series of compulsive repetitions. Both animal and human, their forms constantly mutate, unravel, and reconfigure. An autonomous duet (Chelsea Hecht and Cove Barton) moves in and out of the space entangled with one another; sculpted and controlled, they are one body pulling apart into two, two bodies coming together into one. Featuring sound design by Derek Baron and costume design by Willa Schwabsky, Control explores the porous boundaries between self, environment, and other.

Ayo ohs | to: dance

A love letter. A farewell. A solo reckoning. A dancer, adept and agile, endeavors to express and confess, caught in constrictions of obsession, codependency, and unrequited love through a lifetime of performance. A body, aging and unreliable, attempts to move, but too layered with meaning and commentary, revolts. A voice, attempting autonomy and agency, loops, harmonizes, and repeats, building momentum with only itself. Together in various states of injury and decay – creation and liberation – the trio create a shadow of dance, a staccato form of failed gestures and punctuated phrases, an attempt, asking “what will carry us through?”