Live Artery Showings 2025

Live Artery provides a space for artists to network and share their work with the general public and presenters from around the world alike, which leads to commissions, tours and the building of long- term relationships. Artists to show works-in-progress or excerpts of complete works include Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Ogemdi Ude, Michael Sakamoto and Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky, kNoname Artist | Roderick George, zoe | juniper, Cynthia Oliver/ COCo Dance Theatre, Joseph Keckler, and Shamel Pitts | TRIBE.

Cynthia Oliver/COCo Dance Theatre and Joseph Keckler Presented in partnership with Under the Radar

SHOWINGS SCHEDULE

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January 11, 3pm
Ogemdi Ude I Major
Major is a dance theater project exploring the history and physicality of majorette dance, with a team of Southern Black femmes embodying the movement of their girlhood to answer the questions of their present. Major preserves, transforms, and continues majorette legacy by integrating majorette movement, documentary theater, a live marching band, and an online interview-based archive. Through investigations of physical memory, sexuality, and sensuality, Major preserves and proliferates the creative practices and stories of the folks who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.

January 11, 6pm
Michael Sakamoto and Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky I time/life/beauty

Fusing butoh dance theater, hip-hop mixology, new music and multimedia, and inspired by the legacy of famed composer-musician and activist Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023), “time/ life/beauty” looks at the past, present, and future of acute cultural, social, and ecological themes in our historical moment.

Mining the variety and mystery of Ryuichi’s music, interdisciplinary collaborations and environmental and anti-war commitments, composer-musician Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky and choreographer-dancer Michael Sakamoto transform his art and ideas into two original performances, available individually or as a combined presentation:

“Gods and Monsters” (working title) combines Miller’s and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s compositions, Michael Sakamoto’s dance, and multimedia into a reflection on butoh and hip-hop as revolutionary art forms, the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and life in the high-tech age of the anthropocene.With electronic, classical, and hip hop music, dance vernaculars from butoh to street dance and beyond, and immersive media visuals from history, science and beyond, Gods and Monsters is a kaleidescope of sound, movement, imagery, and text.

“asymm” (working title) is an intimate, semi-autobiographical dance theater work written and performed by Sakamoto with music by Miller, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and others, a lively performance meditation crossing artistic, social, and imagined borders and inspired by Ryuichi’s “neo geo” (new geographies) intercultural worldview and lifelong search for meaning through the experience of everyday life.

As internationally active authors and educators, Miller and Sakamoto are also available for master classes, lectures, panels, or possible inclusion of local performers in the work as a manifestation of the project’s communal themes (subject to artist approval).

January 12, 1pm
kNoname Artist | Roderick George
The Missing Fruit (Part I)

The Missing Fruit explores how the manifestation of racial and public health violence affects Black Americans and other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)communities through an interdisciplinary artistic production rooted in contemporary dance. First conceptualized during the most recent #BLM protests, The Missing Fruit examines the experiences of BIPOC communities, particularly addressing their struggles to combat oppression and death, financial insecurity, and health vulnerabilities while making space for Black joy to thrive.

January 12, 3pm
Shamel Pitts | TRIBE I Marks of RED (excerpts)  

Marks of RED (working title), a work of magical realism, will research the nuanced multiplicity within the interior and exterior chasms of primordial self expressionism & shared human experiences, specially narrated by, and featuring the viewpoints of, 6 femme presenting/identifying people of color. Marks of RED (working title) is an Afro-futuristic meditation on the “womb space.” Pitts and his collaborators at TRIBE are exploring metaphorical spaces of regeneration, enfoldment, implosion, rupture & potential.

January 12, 6pm
zoe | juniper I UNTITLED

This work is a collaboration between zoe | juniper and punk band  Xiu Xiu, a dance and live music performance created with dramaturge Mikhaela Mahony, choreography by Zoe Scofield, set by Sara Brown, text by Dahlak Brathwaite, video projection design by Juniper Shuey, puppets by Joe Seely and four stellar dancers. This piece is inspired by being falsely accused of sexual misconduct while simultaneously being a survivor of sexual assault. The injustice of being wrongfully accused of sexual harassment sits in stark contrast to the lack of prosecution of sexual perpetrators and the justice that is often not received. The paradox of asking to be believed while asking for someone making similar yet false accusations to not be believed is jarring and difficult to reconcile.

zj and Xiu Xiu examine the Crucible, the reversal of Roe vs Wade, the backlash against the MeToo movement, the insidiousness of patriarchy, and Jordan Peele’s horror films, performed live by XX and dancers on a sculptural set. Peele’s film and T.V. work turns racism into physical horror and like a monster in a horror film, the patriarchy mutates to survive. It co-opts the language of feminism and resistance while stripping away our rights. Each time we lose more agency over our lives and our bodies, this project becomes more relevant.

January 13, 1pm
A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham I Excerpts of 6 Lost Labors Choreographed by Paul Singh, 2×4 Choreographed by Kyle Abraham, and Cassette Vol. 1 Choreographed by Kyle Abraham

Description for ‘6 Lost Labors’ Choreographed by Paul Singh  

“A new work for 6 dancers inhabiting the 6 current labors of humanity: family, friends, work, war, the planet, and the self. Narrated through the bodies of A.I.M’s dancers, this highly physical dance work exemplifies the relational qualities we humans have with each other as we repeat our histories and strive to better ourselves by producing different outcomes.

I’m aiming to re-adapt the 12 Labors of Hercules into the current 6 Lost labors of Humanity. I want to ask these dancers to create, through dance,  the myths of today that will be studied centuries from now. Combing the timeless writings of Octavia Butler, the forward dreaming of television series Lovecraft Country, the stark paintings of Kent Monkman, and abstracted worlds of Neil Gaiman, I aim to step into a type of futurism that is beyond the realm of logical understanding and instead buried in the depth of kinesthetic feeling.”

Description for ‘2×4’ Choreographed by Kyle Abraham

“Centered around a charged experimental classical score composed and performed by Shelley Washington for two baritone saxophone musicians and choreographed for 2 dancers, 2×4 (working title) is a new dance work that is as much a conversation as it is a confrontation of differences and likenesses.It’s choreographic score echos and harmonizes with Washington’s dynamic composition through several fast-paced curvilinear weaving patterns and various contrasting angular shape-based sequences to further articulate the interplay between opposing vocabularies.I was initially drawn to Washington’s 2018 composition, Big Talk because of the way it made me feel as a dancer and choreographer.

I felt charged. The music sent me into a choreographic space where I felt like I instantly knew I wanted to create a conversational duet.

But it wasn’t until talking to Washington around her intentions and inspiration for the work, that I understood how I wanted to approach our new collaboration.I wanted to make a work that asks questions for the dancers, musicians, audience and of composer and choreographer alike.

How can we show up as ourselves, celebrate ourselves, and still make space to see and celebrate our differences?Can we create a work rooted in conflict with the hope of change? Can the conflicts we experience in life converge towards a place of resolution and camaraderie.Additional collaborators include long-time Lighting and Scenic Design collaborator, Dan Scully”

Description for ‘Cassette Vol.1’ Choreographed by Kyle Abraham

“Is nostalgia just the mental sweater that coats the memories that dance through our brains?

Over the years, I’ve made works that reference the intersection of classical music and the birth of hip hop in my life, but the voices of 80’s and 90’s pop and New Wave were braided all through my interests and experiences. With the birth of music video culture in the early 1980s, an awakening of fantasy, street culture,  and a popular hybridization of form seemed like the way of the future.

That hybridization speaks to the intentional fusing of movement vocabularies including ballet technique and heavy influence of released-based articulation for this new work, entitled Cassette. Those movement vocabularies utilized are meant to honor the lineage of movement influences that might not be as obvious to some, while highlighting the non-monolithic Black experience and intake within American culture.

Cassette is equal parts camp and critique. At its core, it aims to make space for the ridiculous and the referential.There is space to laugh at the extremes, and cry from the subtle humanity of memories lost.”

January 13, 2pm
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
People, Places & Things

People, Places & Things was created against the backdrop of a memory of freedom, and with that memory comes a taste for self determination:  living where one wants to live; loving who one wants to love, celebrating that youthful desire to be free and discover the world and oneself within it. 
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company began this work as an exploration of stateless people drifting in the seas, a rumination on willful displacement and searching;  recognizing the dichotomy between desperation and the commitment to one’s own freedom. Where everything from the environment to authoritarianism and political upheaval seem to be like the ocean itself, unknown and full of darkness and anxiety. The work is both violent and elegiac as people break off.
Through this work, Jones is trying to understand the world we live in right now through the mechanism of recalling, reinventing and imagining, using the Company to draw a portrait of this moment, set to the soundtrack of his youth.

January 13, 6pm
Cynthia Oliver/COCo Dance Theatre (UTR Partner Presentation)
Turn. Turning.TURNT

“TURNT” is a tryptic built of three experiments I explored before, during, and “after” (if there is one) the global pandemic. In 2019, I made an AfroFuturistic experiment. That work was called “Tether” a meditation on black girls’ creativity, drawn from double dutch practices as life skill training. Divided by two distinct sections – the first uses boasting and playful songs as dancers cycle through demanding yet playful physical material. In the second, each dancer commands 6ft long elastic straps that both offer the possibility of tying them together or keeping them apart. “Fallow,” created in 2021, was a direct response to where we collectively were – run ragged by ever changing threats, pivoting quickly and persistently, determined yet to slow, to stop. Still somehow unable to do so until in an instant everything changed yet again. We did as the earth does to replenish itself – we went (or tried to go) fallow. In the last of the trilogy, “Summon. Sow. Reap.” imagined that after the long and fallow period, spirits are summoned, seeds are sown, and our just rewards are reaped. We reflect and return, more fiercely, to moving, remembering, hoping, and recovering ourselves for a world anew. PRESS RELEASE: Cynthia Oliver’s Turn.Turning.TURNT. is a trilogy of tumultuous dance works negotiating the discord between time, play, and an uncertain future.

January 13, 8pm
Joseph Keckler (UTR Partner Presentation) I A Good Night in the Trauma Garden

Above and Joseph Keckler is a musician, writer and multifaceted artist. Operating in a mode of his own, somewhere between art, opera, and rock and roll, Keckler has been praised by TheNew York Times as a “major vocal talent with a trickster’s dark wit… who shatters conventional boundaries.” He has been presented by NPR Tiny Desk series, Lincoln Center, and many other venues. His previous performance pieces include the critically-acclaimed Train With No Midnight. His debut essay and story collection Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World was published by Turtle Point Press. He is working on new recordings, writings, and films. Upcoming performances include the Big Ears Festival and an Australian tour.