Maya Ciarrocchi to Premiere SITE: YIZKOR/KING MANOR at King Manor Museum in Queens

Interdisciplinary artist Maya Ciarrocchi is set to premiere Site: Yizkor/King Manor at the King Manor Museum (150-03 Jamaica Avenue, Jamaica, NY) on Friday, May 19, 2023, at 8pm.

Site: Yizkor/King Manor examines individual and collective experiences of displacement and loss through the lens of Yizkor, a Jewish memorial prayer service for the dead. This framework, while inherently Jewish, is not limited to the Jewish experience. Site: Yizkor/King Manor is responsive to the performance site, and research on the King Manor Museum, its architecture, land, and people are essential. The project's source material includes architectural renderings of demolished buildings, maps of vanished places, and prose remembrances gathered during participatory writing workshops. Site: Yizkor/King Manor is created by Ciarrocchi with music direction by Andrew Conklin. The event is free with registration at www.eventbrite.com/e/580733448377.

Musicians, dancers, and readers will perform Site: Yizkor/King Manor on the grounds and interiors of the King Manor Museum with video projections created by Ciarrocchi. Audiences will view the performance from the Museum lawn. The musical score will be directed by Conklin and will be performed by Conklin (vocals, guitar, electronics), Marques Hollie (voice), Sam Kulik (trombone), and Matt Nelson (saxophone). The movement score will be performed by New York-based dance artists Anna Azrieli, maura nguyễn donohue, Darvejon Jones, and Alethea Pace.

"Like the cities and towns of Eastern Europe, New York City is a place of ghosts," says Ciarrocchi. "We live in apartments that housed countless generations of individuals and families, new buildings rise on top of the foundations of what came before, and neighborhoods disappear in the name of progress. We see the traces of these former places threaded through the city and may remember them from our lifetimes. Every long-time New York resident has said aloud, 'what used to be there?'. The narratives shared during Site: Yizkor/King Manor may be personal, but the themes of loss and displacement are universal. The world is rocked by war, political upheaval, and disease as a climate catastrophe is unfolding. While Site: Yizkor is a project about memory, it is also a vehicle for envisioning the future. What kind of fantastical spaces can we build from the residue of loss?"

Yizkor writing workshops are integral to the project, creating an embodied experience for performers and area residents. On April 27, 2023, Ciarrocchi will offer a writing session at King Manor where participants will generate Yizkor pages to commemorate vanished places and visualize their dreams of the future. During workshops, participants are prompted to respond to the following questions, "describe a vanished place of personal importance" and "describe your dreams of the future." Participants are invited to share their reflections with the workshop group and as part of the May performance as an audio recording, image, or live reading.

Site: Yizkor is an interdisciplinary project created collaboratively by Ciarrocchi and Conklin that documents individual and collective manifestations of loss through text, video, and music. Development of the project began in 2018 with presentations at the 14th Street Y in New York, Center for New Music in San Francisco, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In June 2022, Ciarrocchi and Conklin, along with a team of American and European musicians, performed the work at the Sichów Educational Foundation, an education and research center in Sichów Duży, Poland, followed by the Róża Centre for International and Interdisciplinary Art and Cooperation in Ruszcza, Poland where they were joined by movement-based artists. Both locations are historical sites once belonging to aristocratic Polish families. The properties fell into ruin in the aftermath of WWII, and their restoration is ongoing.

Registration for Site: Yizkor/King Manor is free and available via Eventbrite and by contacting education@kingmanor.org. The rain date is Saturday, May 20 at 8pm

Please visit www.kingmanor.org/calendar/site-yizkorking-manor for more information.

Site: Yizkor/King Manor is funded in part by the Howard Gilman Foundation via Bronx Council on the Arts Cultural Visions Fund.

About the Artists

Maya Ciarrocchi (b. 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist working in mixed media, installation, video, and performance. She began her early life in dance and had a decade-long career as a dancer/choreographer. The digital art movement of the late 1990s and her training with Merce Cunningham influenced her early choreographic works and subsequent career as an award-winning projection designer for dance and theater. These experiences continue to inform her current multi-disciplinary studio practice.

Ciarrocchi has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell, Millay Arts, UCross, and Wave Hill. She has received grants and awards from the Bronx Council on the Arts, Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation, MAP Fund, Mertz Gilmore, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Recent projects include the Poland tour of her multi-media performance installation Site: Yizkor, and a solo exhibition at Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY. Ciarrocchi earned an MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, and a BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase, Purchase, NY.
www.mayaciarrocchi.com

Andrew Conklin (b. 1984) makes music that engages with American vernacular idioms and contemporary classical practices. His work has received recognition from the Bronx Museum of Art, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, Pitchfork.com, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lake George Music Festival, and the Florida State University Biennial New Music Festival. A Grammy-nominated performer, Andrew has toured throughout the United States and Europe as a guitarist and bassist with indie rock bands, bluegrass groups, and improvising ensembles. Andrew's music can be heard on New Focus Recordings and Bot Cave Records, and he currently serves as Program Director and Assistant Professor of Composition and Music Theory at University of the Pacific. www.andrewconklin.net

About King Manor Museum

Rufus King (1755-1827) bought this house and property in 1805 as a country estate, where he led a conventional family life in Jamaica, Queens (then Long Island) with his wife Mary Alsop King, their five children and hired help. After moving in full time, they enlarged the house in 1810 and expanded the property to 150 acres. A devoted scholar of agricultural science, Rufus focused on improving the land and experimenting with crops, turning it into a successful working farm.

King was a passionate advocate for the early anti-slavery movement in America and used his platforms as our first New York Senator, Ambassador to Great Britain, and signer and framer of the U.S. Constitution to fight slavery in the United States until the end of his life. After his death in 1827, Rufus' eldest son John Alsop King (1788 - 1867) bought the house and farm from his father's estate. Like his father, John made his career in politics, serving in the New York State Assembly, U.S. Congress, and as Governor of New York from 1857 - 1859. John carried on his father's legacy of anti-slavery advocacy and fought for the arrest of men who kidnapped free Black New Yorkers and sold them into slavery.

John's daughter Cornelia King (1824 - 1896) was the last King family member to live at King Manor. After she passed, the house was purchased by the City of New York and preserved by a group of women who formed the King Manor Association of Long Island, Inc in 1900.

Today King Manor Museum is the second longest-running historic house museum in New York City, and our mission is to interpret founding father Rufus King's political legacy and antislavery history to teach critical thinking for a healthier democracy. www.kingmanor.org