Abigail Levine Premieres SIX QUIET DOGS at Target Margin Theater

Six Quiet Dogs is an evening of dancing, synth-infused song, and intimate entanglements with unspectacular household items that happen to make spectacular sounds.

Responding to the birth of her daughter and the death of her mentor, composer Alvin Lucier, Levine gave herself a two-year assignment to pay attention to her world through sound-sirens and pauses in conversation, clanging radiators and stalled cars, spoons in wet mouths, artillery shells on apartment buildings. Levine shapes these observations into a record of the intimate, overlapping experiences of a birth and death through attention to sound. The performance will be accompanied by Words Begin as Sound, a chapbook of texts written during the work's development, edited by Andrea Kleine and designed by Michael Reardon.

Levine writes of the development of this work:

When I gave birth to my daughter, Andaluz, I found myself worried that as she acquired language she might lose the intensity of her direct, embodied experience. I decided to track her development of language in writing as a way to accompany her and to challenge my own assumptions. Then, only weeks after her birth, I lost a cherished mentor, pioneering electronics composer, Alvin Lucier. Alvin used language as musical material, often dissolving words back into sound. This return trip from language back towards the experience of our senses felt like a balm to my worries about Andaluz. Two years after these momentous experiences, I suddenly lost all hearing in my right ear. Some has returned, but my hearing remains severely impaired in that ear. The months since have been a process of learning a new way to take in my world.

This new work is a companion piece to Redactions (Chocolate Factory Theater, 2022) and continues Levine's long-standing preoccupation with the push and pull between bodies and language. The work also continues Levine's probing the cultural legacy of minimal and conceptual art from 1960s and 70s New York City. Some artists from this era have become collaborators and mentors-performance artist Marina Abramovic, choreographer Yvonne Rainer, and Lucier. Her ongoing Restagings series created works in direct dialogue with visual artists of the same generation, including Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris. Levine approaches these artists' work with both reverence and critique, aiming to expand the cultural conversation they began.

Six Quiet Dogs was developed with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, Interlude Artist Support Grant, Pioneer Works, Fridman Gallery, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Rehearsal Week, The Floor AIR program, Target Margin Theater, and the generous support of individual donors.

Abigail Levine is a choreographer and writer working in New York City. Her work is rooted in dance, but moves across media-performance, text, drawing, sound. Her multi-year commissions, Redactions (Chocolate Factory Theater, 2022) and Restagings (Fridman Gallery, 2017-2019) have been supported by fellowships and residencies at MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Performance Practice, Target Margin Theater, and Center for Performance Research, and project and emergency grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and New Music USA. Abigail collaborated with pioneering electronics composer Alvin Lucier on a staging of his Orpheus Variations (ISSUE Project Room, 2020) and performed with both Marina Abramovic and Yvonne Rainer in their retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art. Abigail's critical writing has been published in Documents in Contemporary Art, Art21, Women & Performance, Performance Art Journal (PAJ), Movement Research Performance Journal, and her creative works in Interim Poetics, Peripheries, La Vague Journal, and Imagined Theatres. She is a founder and performance curator at New Ear, Inc at Fridman Gallery. Abigail has taught in the Dance Departments at Wesleyan University and Florida State University and is currently on faculty at The New School and University of Texas at Austin's UTNY program.