New York Live Arts Presents Expanded Live Artery Festival Featuring Commissioned Residency Artists, Curated Guests, And More

New York Live Arts proudly presents a greatly expanded Live Artery festival for the program's 12th year, January 9-20, 2024. In direct response to the greater performing arts ecosystem's loss of festivals, residencies and funding, Live Artery 2024 will present 18 events over the course of 12 days featuring 26 lead artists.

For the first time the festival will include co-presentations with partner Under the Radar, and off-site performances at The Chocolate Factory, Gibney, and The Collapsable Hole. A dynamic platform featuring new and recent works by Live Arts resident commissioned artists and curated guests, 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.

Live Artery will be presented at New York Live Arts (219 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011) and beyond, Tuesday, January 9th - Saturday, January 20th. General admission tickets start at $15/$25 and can be purchased at NewYorkLiveArts.org or 212-691-6500, on sale now. Presenter rates available.

Onsite full length productions include artists Faye Driscoll, Dynasty Handbag, Albert Ibokwe Khoza, and Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith, with offsite co-presentations from Lisa Fagan & Lena Engelstein, Roderick George I kNonAme Artist, and Juliana F. May. Onsite excerpts and/or work-in-progress showings 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.  A salon will gather presenters with artists Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born I Sweat Variant, Beth Gill, Benjamin Akio Kimitch, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Derek Lee McPhatter. 

Full length productions (Jan 9-20): 

• Faye Driscoll's Weathering, “an enthralling, epically adventurous work” as called by the New York Times, returns to the Live Arts theater January 9-13 after an extended sold out run last season. A multi-sensory flesh and breath sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects, ten performers enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen and cleave, in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges.

• The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu is an immersive, live offering by 2023 New York Dance & Performance “Bessie” Award winner Albert Ibokwe Khoza in collaboration with African Entertainers. It exposes the violent and shameful legacy of ethnological expositions (such as human zoos and exhibitions) that were popular in Western society between the 1870s and 1960s. Khoza investigates the effect of the imperial and colonial gaze on Black bodies, and how it sits within Black bodies today. Examining the ongoing pain of historical and persistent racism, Khoza creates a space for collective healing and an opportunity for dignity to be reclaimed. Presented in partnership with Under the Radar, this North American premiere will take place in the Live Arts Studio January 11-13. 

• Roderick George | kNoname Artist's Venom, co-presented offsite at Gibney January 11-13, is a new work inspired by the lasting impact of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic on the LGBTQIA+ community. Venom exposes how the queer community faced silencing, isolation, being forced into hiding, and death through fear, media, family dynamics, and 'God's reckoning.' As a queer Black man from Houston, Texas, George recognizes that his existence lies on the backs of these individuals and pays homage to his community in its ability to uplift each other using the underground nightlife as a sanctuary. Venom is co-presented by Gibney DoublePlus and shares the program with Dual Rivet.

• Co-presented offsite at The Chocolate Factory January 11-14, Family Happiness continues Juliana May's decade-long investigation into body control and the complicated system of victimhood and perpetration. Pitting Post-Modern and Modernist choreographic strategies such as task and symbolism against pop cultural references of the 80s and 90s, this dance-text-song triptych delivers a space for culpability and catharsis.

• Deepe Darknesse (pronounced dee-pee dark-ness-ay) is a dance-heavy, physical theater performance work by choreographers/experimental theater makers Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein and will be co-presented offsite at The Collapsable Hole, January 12-15. In a transmogrification regiment of their own design, the performers push past their physical limits and press the edges of the playing space in a frenetic, oddball, unrelentingly theatrical Rube Goldberg machine of “curiositas improspera” or unhappy curiosity. 

• Taking place in the Live Arts studio January 13, Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith's Zero Station works out shame, citing a felt understanding as part of the experience of abjection. Confronting hypersexualization as the limp white feminine byproduct of capitalism, their movements are derived from pregnancy, lactation, mental illness, physical illness, surgery, and aging, and then segment, otherize, and disappear these forms in trash. Through trauma we are greatly affected, and our capacity to be affected and understand how we may affect one another, is heightened. Within this gained fluidity is potential to think beyond themselves.

• More so a live multimedia event than solely performance, Titanic Depression by Dynasty Handbag, combines animation, video, soundscapes and improvisation into a story about how a ship advertised as unsinkable strikes an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sinks; fitted with too few lifeboats, Titanic's poor, third class passengers were largely left behind as the vessel's wealthier occupants were rushed to safety. The disaster became a potent symbol of the haves versus the have nots. After a sold-out premier at Pioneer Works as part of Live Arts' 2023 Live Ideas festival, the work will return to New York on the Live Arts stage on January 14-15 and 18-20, presented in partnership with Under the Radar.

Public Studio Showings (Jan 13-15): 

• Troy Anthony | The Fire Ensemble will present The Revival: It Is Our Duty, 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 30-100 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.”

• bLUr is a highly physical performance by Kimberly Bartosik/daela, a 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 explores time warping and blurring when life is pumped back into a body that has drained out. bLUr engages interventions, tender and brutal rescues, howling hunger, and the blurry line between them.

• Wally Cardona shows 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 arching up, then down. Like a pagoda. Or a dance.

• Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr is a migrating performance and archive by Jasmine Hearn that preserves and celebrates the living memories of eight Black matriarchs of the North and South sides of Houston, TX. The shared stories will be the source for original sound scores, choreographies, and garments that will be experienced as a site-specific performance, album, feast, online archive, anthological catalog, and a mercurial system of somatic, embodied sound and dance practice.

• 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. Wanjiru Kamuyu | WKcollective offers a bitingly satirical and critical eye on the notions of center and periphery prevalent in today's global political discourse. Through her dance, a migratory map of encounters, her body is an ever constantly shifting map. An Immigrant's Story blends these physical encounters with song and text. At the crossroads of emotional stories shared, Kamuyu's very own serves as the work's central axis.

• Raja Feather Kelly | the feath3r theory will show The Absolute Future, an evening-length performance of Devised-Danced-The-atre, and Media that appropriates found material from documentary, film, television, and social media that deals with death, fear, and loneliness. The Absolute Future will be a thrilling and theatrical multiverse where these taboo topics can be exploited, examined, and entertained. The Absolute Future can be described as a black comedy style, energetic, and surreal exhibition of people being people, dealing with the things we fear most: Death and Loneliness. 

Invite Only Studio Showings (Jan 13 & 14):

• The legendary Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company will present the beginnings of the new work Curriculum III: Places and Things (Working Title), which explores the states of migration and movement across borders both real and invisible. The Company will also perform excerpts from both recently premiered and revived works, as part of a reconstruction project featuring the company's 40+ year history that has helped shape American contemporary dance and performance.

• A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, considered “one of the most consistently excellent troupes working today” (The New York Times), provides multifaceted performances, educational programming, and community-based workshops across the globe. Led by acclaimed Choreographer and Artistic Director Kyle Abraham, A.I.M will present the new duet MotorRover, both abstract and tender, created in conversation with Merce Cunningham's 1972 ensemble work, Landrover. The company will also show If We Were a Love Song, a series of poetic vignettes set to some of Nina Simone's most intimate songs. Melding Abraham's movements' intricate qualities and musicality with Simone's seminal silky voice creates the atmosphere for this work.

• The Artist Salon on January 14 will include short presentations from Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born I Sweat Variant, Beth Gill, Benjamin Akio Kimitch, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Derek Lee McPhatter.

• Shamel Pitts | TRIBE will show a new duet of two men that takes place inside of a contemporary ring. Having premiered on the Live Arts stage last season, Touch of RED (excerpt) and its research will deal with the allowance of black men to soften, the power in vulnerability; and the meeting point of two individuals within a boxed space that references a futuristic and voyeuristic gladiator entertainment site. A heat path between the two performers builds not out of aggression or combat, but within an enhanced electrifying effeminacy that heals. 

• New York Live Arts 2023-2024 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA) Miguel Gutierrez will show the piece he currently is creating, engaging performers from New York and Los Angeles - Ajani Brannum (LA), Justin Faircloth (NYC), Wendell Gray (NYC), and Evelyn Sanchez (LA). 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 ideas about place/home, time, history, and the strength and failings of “community.” The RCA award artist receives two years of full-time salary, healthcare benefits, full-time access to dedicated office space during the entire residency period, creative funds, a technical theater residency and fully-produced production, with lead support from the Mellon Foundation.

New York Live Arts I Live Artery is a partner of JanArtsNYC, the annual convergence of world-class public festivals and innovative industry gatherings taking place throughout the month of January at various NYC venues, supported by the NYC Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment.

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