BARYSHNIKOV ARTS JOURNAL
Kelly Ashton Todd
Endangered Species
Set in the near future where today’s most recognizable and plentiful creatures are now sharing ecosystems and fighting for financial aid to protect their kind, an extravagant competition is created by a host who is trying to stay relevant while she gives the community (i.e. the audience) the power to make life-altering decisions. "Endangered Species" will tell the story of three threatened species: a Rambouillet Sheep, North American Raven and a Pilot Whale.
SAXYN Dance Works
SEOLH
The piece I am developing entitled “seolh” is based on the myth of the "selkies", mythic sea creatures, half woman, half seal, that I believe embody the human quest for freedom. The work investigates the ties that bind us both natural and constructed and the often painful journey of discovery that brings to light our true identity, full of resilience and freedom. Further inspired by the seductive power of the songs associated with folklore creatures, the piece will include live and recorded music, composed and sung by Bre Short. Half of the piece is completed.
Tushrik Fredericks + Rebecca Margolick
to begin with no end
Using spirituality as a vessel of connection and the common denominator between two different yet similar religions, empathy, trust and intimacy is shared withinside the multitudes of relationships that we embody with each other. To release into the complexities gives us access to be with each other and to see from the other side.
Constance Jaquay Strickland
Medea Refracted
A Meditation
A Mental health investigation
A Physical Play on Women’s Mental Health
A Healing experiment using the Black Woman’s body as the primary vehicle.
Esmé Boyce Dance
THE HUMBLING OR CHAPTER OF MAMA: PART 1
During the BAC residency I am beginning a rambunctious, meticulously choreographed dance for four dancers including myself, that coexists in the same stage as my toddler and husband. If my son runs across the space, the dance will stop or swerve. If he needs me, I will carry him and continue the dance to the best of my ability. If he needs his diaper changed, that too will be part of the dance. The mundane tasks of parenthood will be enveloped into the work.
CHILD
1-800-3592-113592
1-800-359-2183592 is an experimental, interdisciplinary performance work by 14-member performance group CHILD. Tired of empty manufacturers' promises of value and authenticity, S (spelled $ without the line), who works at her family-owned jewelry franchise DiFrederico’s at the Willow Grove Mall, decides to get out and find something more….um…. but the local news station reporting on the event confuses it with an incident of “exposing oneself to the sun.” A nearby herd of Zebras are ripping on guitars and as the shredding intensifies (earplugs provided) the jewelry store is dug out from inside a cake, offering sticky, ruined product to the audience to try and buy their brand loyalty.
Eric Marlin + Ilana Khanin
Shot List
A mother publishes a harrowing wartime memoir. Her daughter tries to reconcile the recollections. A stranger enters their lives. And somewhere else, two actors make a movie. A new play about adapting humanity’s most horrific stories.
denisa musilova
BAC Story by Jacquelyn Claire
“I think they’re creepy,” said Vivienne Pankratova (aged 11), “I never played with Barbies – I had a baby doll called Sestra (sister in Russian) and a soft toy dog.” She’s standing in her David Bowie T-shirt, contemplating my question, “What do you think is the collective noun for Barbies?” She answered immediately, “an army of Barbie.”
binbinFactory
BAC Story by Nicholas Visseli
The Dance
Two moving as one.Connection through each other.The dance has begun.
It is difficult to express the wonder and indescribable joy one experiences when sitting in on new work that is being created by the two artists who comprise binbinFactory: Satoshi Haga and Rie Fukuzawa. At first glance, their rehearsal process appears paradoxical, combining extreme focus, repetitive movement and discipline with improvisation and wild abandon. But ultimately, as their collaboration of ideas and forms begin to settle and phrases of movement start to emerge, a deeper, richer swirl of emotion and meaning reveals itself to us. It is almost as if the dance evolves accidentally on purpose, or – more precisely – it arrives effortlessly through the artists all on its own.
daniel evan kersh
BAC Story by Elena Hecht
It starts in movement, in struggle. Weighted, the forces pull, downward, backward, into the ground, tugging, they groan, inaudibly they strain, pulling. JM grapples, he is contained, he attempts to break free.
Quietly.
Zbigniew Bzymek + Kuba Falk
BAC Story by Domenick Ammirati
Zbigniew Bzymek and Kuba Falk’s Gombrowicz: Interhuman + Interform starts with a critique of the inflexibility of science and ends with an attack on the pomposity of humanism. Its ratty intelligence and roving quality is fitting for the peripatetic, scathing intellect of Witold Gombrowicz, whose definition of being a person seems to have been to recognize that one is absurd.
Claude Johnson
BAC Story by Elanor Bock
It was 3pm in late March. Inside a window-wrapped dance studio at Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), a performance was about to begin. Except for faint slivers of light peeking through drawn shades, and the glow from an amorphous pile of white fabric placed in the middle of the space, the studio was dark. As people found their seats, a piano player in the corner played a soft duet with a recorded track—the sound bouncing off the high ceilings.
Degenerate Art Ensemble
BAC Story by Shin Yu Pai
I wrote the poem “Vernix” in response to Degenerate Art Ensemble’s (DAE) work-in-progress Anima Mundi, which they developed in part while in residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center. I’d observed the idea of reincarnation and intergenerational memory as a concern in DAE’s earlier work, including most recently their performance Skeleton Flower. With Anima Mundi, I felt the centering of somatic memories around the birth experience coming forward in this performance.
Welcome to Campfire
BAC Story by Leah Ableson
Tony Bordonaro and Ingrid Kapteyn have always made work by themselves, serving as both the sole choreographers and performers of their sci-fi danceplays, crafted together under the name Welcome to Campfire. Their collaborations teem with an intimacy forged only through a deep knowing of each other, and the organic nature of choreographing for oneself. Since the beginning, their bodies have been the only keepers of their stories.
Until now.
monica bill barnes + Company
BAC Story by Robbie Saenz de Viteri
We started the same way every day, at the barre. Not for stretches, not for squats, not for rond de jambes, and not to offend, but that's not who we are. The ballet barre is where we hung our coats, stared out the window, and caught up on one of the things that took up some constant corner of our minds every day in the Rudolf Nureyev studio at the Baryshnikov Arts Center–the progress of the water towers.