LIVE ARTERY CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: JAN 10

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS features Live Arts commissioned artists and curated guests inside INTERSPACE, a dynamic 3D environment for screening and networking. Presenters and Producers are invited to attend excerpt showings happening over three days during LIVE ARTERY: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Migguel Anggelo – ENGLISH WITH AN ACCENT (EWAA)
ENGLISH WITH AN ACCENT (EWAA) is a new production in development by multidisciplinary performance artist Migguel Anggelo. The work will be released as both a concept album of original music and a video album of musical narrative shorts for virtual presentation. EWAA puts movement and dance-theater front and center, and is narrated by a storytelling song-cycle backed by a company of six dancers and singers. English With an Accent is centered around a newly emigrated insect in New York City, exploring the promises of the American dream: freedom, safety, and democracy. Allegory, abstraction, and movement poetically narrate a production inspired by Anggelo’s own story as a Venezuelan immigrant.

Holly Bass – The Venus Suite
The Venus Suite by Holly Bass comprises two of her performances, Moneymaker and Pay Purview—both with distinct references to Sarah Baartman, the South African woman who became world-famous as the Venus Hottentot. Part political commentary and part celebration of social dance, Moneymaker interweaves a lineage of Black artistry with a satirical critique of the history of exploitation, commodification, and objectification of Black women. The New York premiere of the epic 12-hour version of Moneymaker, was publicly presented in person by New York Live Arts from behind the venue’s street-facing building windows in October 2020. Pay Purview references pay-per-view, video on demand and highlights the intersection of commerce and female sexuality across multiple eras. After collecting money from the audience, Pay Purview challenges the complicity inherent to paying to see “the spectacle behind the curtain.” As a whole, The Venus Suite addresses issues of supporting women artists, the labor of glamour, and performativity of sexuality through a Black lens.

Milka Djordjevich – CORPS
CORPS by Milka Djordjevich examines labor and gender through the lens of regimented movement, and reveals similarities across traditional, militaristic, ritual, athletic, and folk movement forms. The work is a continuation of Djordjevich’s ongoing questioning of contemporary dance’s preoccupation with neutrality, anonymity and the hyper-objectification of the female body. CORPS aims to unravel the history of patriarchal white supremacist militaristic conditioning of regimented movement and reclaim its manipulation and control.

Raja Feather Kelly – WEDNESDAY
WEDNESDAY is a queer-fantasia where music, movement, and speech are inseparable. In this dance-theatre speculative documentary, Raja Feather Kelly and the feath3r theory search for the true motivations behind an infamous Brooklyn bank robbery; the centerpiece of the 1975 cinematic-drama Dog Day Afternoon. The piece re-centers the story of Kelly’s relationship to American Trans-woman Liz Eden, for whom the character Leon in the film is loosely based—and the reason why real-life bank robber, John Wojtowicz, conspires to rob the bank: to fund Eden’s gender confirmation surgery.

Christopher Williams – Narcissus
Narcissus is an evening-length contemporary ballet set to Nikolai Tcherepnin’s score “Narcisse et Echo”, composed in 1911 for the Ballets Russes. Williams’ Narcissus reappropriates themes of the eponymous Greek myth on which it is based to re-envision the original ballet through his own contemporary queer lens. The world premiere of Narcissus will premiere at New York Live Arts next season.

*Kimberly Bartosik / daela will join for the networking portion of the Jan 10 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS event. Please RSVP for this day if you’d like to attend and chat with the cast and collaborators of through the mirror of their eyes.

Image Credits: Left to Right, Top to Bottom: 1) Ryan Muir 2) Ray Llanos 3) Chris Camerson 4) Maria Baranova 5) Mark Kwiatek 6) Maria Daraova