LIVE ARTERY CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: JAN 11

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
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company – Afterwardsness
In the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, afterwardsness is “a mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events… “ Jettisoning the sexual component and emphasizing the notion of “trauma”, this awkward though evocative term comes very close to describing Jones’ state of mind when offered a commission to create a socially distanced work at this particular moment of our collective lives. In some ways, the title parodies Jones (and many others) desire to have reached an end point to our twin pandemics: The COVID 19 pandemic and the calling out of systemic racism in the wake of high profile abuses by the police. The piece has been constructed quickly and within the constraints and uncertainty of social distancing. There is a retrospective dimension to Afterwardsness as much of its choreography comes out of assignments given to the dancers during their isolation requiring them to learn from archival videos phrase materials no longer in the repertory stretching back 40 years.

Charlotte Brathwaite – Forgotten Paradise: Gazettes Sun
How does one speak of invisible narratives? Where does one begin to search the sea for their history? How does one celebrate the legacy of a family lineage when it’s hidden in the dark history of the African Diaspora — blurred but shining like mercury beneath water?

Forgotten Paradise: Gazettes Sun is a series of ritual performances and community gatherings centered around a non-fiction film that documents a journey across the Atlantic, and charts the ancestral lineage of its Director, Charlotte Brathwaite. It began when Brathwaite, an only child from birth united for the first time with her half-brother in 2015. Their immediate kinship inspired her to look for meaning in the silenced parts of her past – and give them voice. 

Faye Driscoll – Current Projects
Faye Driscoll — New York Live Arts’ 2021-2022 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist — shares updates on her current and future projects, including an ongoing series of audio works titled Guided Choreography for the Living and the Dead. Conjuring states of longing and seizing desire, the works have been presented to live audiences in theaters, as part of a museum exhibition, and streamed online. Each work features Driscoll’s guiding voice offering a series of prompts, akin to a guided meditation, that takes listener-participants on a journey that reflects upon power and presence, yearning and absence. Also in the works: a covid-era reimagining of Thank You For Coming: Space, and her New York Live Arts-commissioned new work scheduled to premiere in fall 2022.

Ari Melenciano – Baïlaurâ
Baïlaurâ by Ari Melenciano considers frequency in four dimensions: sound, auratic energy, kinetic energy, and the quantization of the subconscious. Designed with computer vision, machine learning, and modular synthesis, bodily movements engage with the algorithms to explore new forms of electronic ritual and divination, and the relationship between sound and dance. In its simplest essence, movement in response to the synthesized soundscapes is converted into data and interpreted into a visual language for the viewer to decipher.

Shamel Pitts | TRIBE – BLACK HOLE
Shamel Pitts’ BLACK HOLE is a kaleidoscopic performance art experience using movement, original sound, light projection, and visual art. BLACK HOLE researches and shares an odyssey where three Black performers create a trinity of vigor, afrofuturism, and embrace. The project marks the third performance installment of choreographer Shamel Pitts’ and TRIBE artist’s triptych known as the “BLACK series.”

Colleen Thomas – Light and Desire
With a feminist collective, Colleen Thomas examines the many moments of transition and asks how women hold onto, embody, and express power in Light and Desire. Thomas and five women artists from Venezuela (Carla Forte), Hungary/Germany (Ildiko Toth), Poland (Joanna Lesnierowska), Albania/ Greece (Ermira Goro), and North America (Rosalynde LeBlanc), take a personal and universal look at how women artists cope under oppressive and manipulative power structures. The world premiere of Light and Desire presented by New York Live Arts has been postponed to 2021.

Image Credits Left to Right, Top to Bottom: 1) Nayaa Opong of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company photo by Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times 2) film stills from Forgotten Paradise: Grazettes Sun courtesy of the artist 3) Faye Driscoll in Space, photo by Maria Baranova 4) Image Courtesy of Ari Melenciano 5) Photo by Alex Apt 6) Image by Miguel Anaya