Live Artery Studio Showings

As the annual start to the spring season, Live Artery will proudly present 18 events over the course of 12 days, supporting 26 lead artists and their works, January 9-20. Work-in-progress studio showings and excerpts include artists Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Troy Anthony | The Fire Ensemble, Kimberly Bartosik/daela, Wally Cardona, Miguel Gutierrez, Jasmine Hearn, Wanjiru Kamuyu | WKcollective, Raja Feather Kelly | the feath3r theory and Shamel Pitts I TRIBE.

STUDIO SHOWINGS SCHEDULE

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January 13 at 12pm
A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham
MotorRover is a new duet, both abstract and tender, created by Kyle Abraham in conversation with Merce Cunningham’s 1972 ensemble work, Landrover. Cunningham said his original idea for Landrover was to capture “the sense that we move in our country–across varied spaces–with varied backgrounds.”

If We Were a Love Song is a series of poetic vignettes created by Kyle Abraham in collaboration with A.I.M and set to some of Nina Simone’s most intimate songs. Abraham’s movements’ intricate qualities and musicality with Simone’s seminal silky voice creates the atmosphere for this work.

January 13 at 2pm
Shamel Pitts | TRIBE
Touch of RED is a multidisciplinary performance duet inspired from the rapid-fire footwork of boxing, the African-American jazz dance style Lindy-Hop, Gaga movement language and Nightlife culture. Set in a stylized ring, designed by the MacArthur Fellow Mimi Lien, this dance duet performed by Tushrik Fredericks & Shamel Pitts examines the way Black men are perceived and perceive themselves in contemporary society and how masculinity and vulnerability can be reconsidered and reconciled in a non-combatitive, compassionate, and healing way.
Bold. Boiled. Blood.

January 14 at 1pm
Jasmine Hearn
Memory Fleet is a performance and archive that begins in Houston preserving the living memories of 8 Black matriarchs of the North and South sides of the Texas city. It then travels North to map and name the living memories of those who have mothered Jasmine Hearn throughout their trajectory in the dance field.

January 14 at 3pm
Miguel Gutierrez
(Untitled) engages performers from New York and Los Angeles – Ajani Brannum (LA), Justin Faircloth (NYC), Wendell Gray (NYC), and Evelyn Sanchez (LA). How do the dynamics of an art-making process reflect or deny the dynamics of life outside the studio? When world-building is part of your artistic project, what material makes it into that world? Whose story gets told and whose story gets put aside? bell hooks writes that, “Moving, we confront the realities of choice and location.” Thinking about movement in both the dance and geographic sense of the word, this piece engages with our ideas about place/home, time, history, and the strength and failings of “community.

January 14 at 6pm
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
Our resident Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company is at the beginning stages of creating their next work! The piece explores the states of migration and movement across borders-both real and invisible.

January 14 at 9pm
Raja Feather Kelly | the feath3r theory
7 friends set out to witness The Great American Eclipse and miss it. How? In the style of a mock documentary, The Absolute Future intersects astrology, astronomy, and pop- culture phenomena with dance and theatre to better understand how to come together in a world that might be literally falling apart.

January 15 at 12pm
Wally Cardona
A plump single-color bulb, appearing in the morning, seeming to be fully formed by early evening. It is multi-tiered, efficiently breaking open into a complex construction, hard and soft. In the center, the long style, tipped by a dotted stigma, plunges into the weight of gravity. The single style, surrounded by too-delicate-looking versions of itself; multiple filaments with an anther at each tip. The delicate filaments poke out from the corolla, its many petals – usually most-noticed – now playing a supporting role. The corolla cluster, protected by the sepal, formerly closed, now separated into four distinct curvy panels arcing up, then down. Like a pagoda. Or a dance.

January 15 at 2pm
Troy Anthony | The Fire Ensemble
The Revival: It Is Our Duty is a ritualized concert inspired by traditions found inside of Black-American church revivals. Led by 6 core singers and a 5-piece gospel band, this fit-to-scale production features a 30 to 100-person choir made up of local singing communities. Composed and officiated by celebrated Creative Director, Troy Anthony, the revival is meant to lift people out of their sorrow using songs and rituals that center collective liberation. As they say in the Black church, audiences “won’t leave the way they came.”

January 15 at 5pm
Wanjiru Kamuyu | WKcollective
A solo exploration of the experience of displacement, “An Immigrant’s Story” draws inspiration from Kenyan-born, France-based choreographer Wanjiru Kamuyu‘s experiences in Africa, North America, and Europe. The work offers a bitingly satirical and critical eye on the notions of center and periphery prevalent in today’s global political discourse. “An Immigrant’s Story” blends dance with song and text. At the crossroads of emotional stories shared, Kamuyu’s very own serves as the work’s central axis.

January 15 at 7pm
Kimberly Bartosik/daela
bLUr is a highly physical performance project that pulls from Bartosik’s recent experience of witnessing a body that’s overdosing, and the layers of convulsing chaos and wild illogic surging through someone straddling the fragile line between life and death. Built in cycles that break and reform, bLUr is about the violent clash of internal cravings with the force necessary to resist them. It is about time warping and blurring when life is pumped back into a body that has drained out. bLUr is about interventions, tender and brutal rescues, howling hunger, and the blurry line between them.