Mount Tremper Arts Presents Mayfield Brooks, Curated By Marya Wethers

Mount Tremper Arts concludes its Watershed Lab 2019 season with mayfield brooks on October 26 at 8pm. Based on danced and written love notes to the gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson, Letters to Marsha explores the weight of bodies and history, and the artist's own evolution as a Black, non-binary queer artist.

Curatorial Team member Marýa Wethers describes brooks' as: "a singular artist creating rich, experiential performance landscapes through their deep explorations of blackness, queerness, memory, text, sound, and the residue of the history of enslavement. Incorporating African Diasporic spiritual traditions such as speaking in tongues, laying of hands, and funeral processions, their work is rooted in socio-cultural practices from the Black American experience. mayfield continues this research in Letters to Marsha, paying homage to black queer ancestors and offering a meditation on love that calls on the dead to remind us how to live."

This preview is presented in partnership with JACK in Brooklyn, NY, where Letters to Marsha will premiere in 2020.

mayfield brooks improvises while black, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. mayfield a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They studied contemporary dance at the School for New Dance (SNDO) in Amsterdam, Moving On Center in Oakland, CA, and holds an MTA in interdisciplinary performance from UC Davis and a Masters in performance studies from Northwestern University. mayfield has farmed in urban & local settings, and teaches & performs dance and vocal improvisation nationally and internationally.

Marýa Wethers is an Independent Creative Producer, Curator, and dancer. She conceived and created the three-week performance series "Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing)" at Gibney Dance (2018) and curated for the Queer NY International Arts Festival (2016 & 2015) and Out of Space @ BRIC Studio for Danspace Project (2003-2007). Marýa received a 2017 NY Dance & Performance ("Bessie") Award for Outstanding Performance with the Skeleton Architecture collective.

Tickets for general admission ($15) can be purchased online at MountTremperArts.org, by phone at 845-688-9893, or at the box office one hour before events.

Nestled in the Catskill Mountains, Mount Tremper Arts (MTA) is an artist-founded laboratory space dedicated to supporting artists in the creation and presentation of new works of contemporary art. Founded in 2008 by visual artist Mathew Pokoik and choreographer Aynsley Vandenbroucke, MTA cultivates generative artistic communities while making experimental contemporary art accessible to its diverse local community. As the New York Times recently wrote: "[MTA] has become a quietly thriving offshoot of the city's contemporary performance world: a magnet for adventurous urban artists and a devoted local audience."

MTA has hosted more than 300 residencies for performing art companies, 145 public events, and supported a broad range of artists working in dance, theater, music, poetry, opera, criticism, the visual arts, and ranging from emerging to internationally renowned. Notable artists have included 600 HIGHWAYMEN, Robert Ashley, Nayland Blake, Anne Carson, Nora Chipaumire, David Lang, Young Jean Lee, Tere O'Connor, Pam Tanowitz, and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).

The Watershed Lab locates MTA's work as incubator, residency center, and rural presenter upstream of New York City, where its surging energy sustains a creative symbiosis between rural and urban New York. Its primary streams consist of partnerships with a range of presenters, in which MTA serves as the headwaters-the incubator site supporting the creation of new artworks.

Just as the Catskills' mountains, streams, and reservoirs send water downstream to the city, MTA's rural setting generates original works-and relationships-that travel downstream to NYC and beyond.