Live Artery: New Work for the Desert

New York Live Arts Theater
Presenters RSVP Here.

New Work for the Desert (2014) is choreographer Beth Gill’s “beautiful” (ArtsJournal) follow up to her New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award winning work Electric Midwife. The impressionistic evening length sextet is a distillation of duration and hue, abstracted within the quietude of memory. Inspired by the natural landscape of the American Southwest, recollections of Trisha Brown’s Newark and the color and light explorations of artist James Turrell, Gill creates an original aesthetic world of perceptive experience with collaborators Thomas Dunn (visual design) and Jon Moniaci (“Bessie” Award winner for Sound Design, Electric Midwife). Time, color, sound and tension shift imperceptibly or dramatically, sifted through saturated optic fields reminiscent of the desert’s striking transformations, as each dancer struggles with the rigidity of the body and its forms. Remounted in full for a one-night-only performance during Live Artery, the work “alters your sense of time…But the greatest wonders emerge from Ms. Gill’s choreography and her six dancers” (The New York Times).