Performance Space New York to Present YOUNG BOY DANCING GROUP This Month

Performance Space New York will present Young Boy Dancing Group 2024, the latest work from Young Boy Dancing Group, co-presented with OCDChinatown April 11–13 at 7pm. The experimental collective ignites intimate communal catharsis with mercurial and modular movement. Through chaotically structured improvisation, bodies and the spaces they occupy become vulnerable to and submerged in one another — as well as in sound, light, and, often, water, wax, and other fluid matter.
 
Interview Magazine once described Young Boy Dancing Group’s introduction to the world in 2014: in a “packed and sweaty Club Silencio, pulsing with techno edits of Enya” in which “its founding performers inserted lime green lasers into their anuses and swiveled around the room. Since then, the performance troupe has traveled the world, perfecting and amplifying its routine.”
 
Young Boy Dancing Group describes, “We are a band that doesn’t make music, but the songs are our scenes. And over 10 years we’ve developed hits, pieces where the sonic, visual, and atmospheric merge together with great intention. At each show we play our hits, while also trying out a new scene, or, so to speak, a new track. Sometimes we remix our own things and play it back. It doesn’t work like, ‘this year we’re going to do a performance about this topic’ — it’s like a band that always plays its music alongside new songs in constant evolution.”
 
They add, emphasizing their work’s evasion of description, “What is this? You cannot categorize it. It’s not sexual, it’s intimacy. Is it BDSM? No, it's not BDSM. Is it contemporary dance? No, it's not contemporary dance. Is it punk? No, it's not punk. We’re perfecting the undefined and absurd.”
 
At Performance Space New York, French harpist Ange Halliwell, whose work often scores their performances, will make a rare live performance with the group. Other performers/collaborators include Manu Anima, Caleb Kruzel, Maria Metsalu, Nica Roses, and Nuur Salam.
 
YBDG’s live performances revel in a collective intimacy and celebration of the chaos bodies can build together. Communities of performers form in a matter of days, with the “group” coalescing with new members in each city, forging a new relationality in a brief, intensive rehearsal process that shapes a given work. Each new scene, locale, and collaboration injects vitality into the perpetually evolving group.
 
Though typically wary of institutions—and defying formal boundaries that comfortably fit within standard institutional presenting models—Young Boy Dancing Group connected with Performance Space through Monica Mirabile, who runs the organization’s free weekly movement improvisation and artist-led workshop program Open Movement, as well as her own DIY space, otion front studio, co-founded with Sigrid Lauren. Young Boy Dancing Group, who have also worked in video, photography, fashion, sculpture, and installation, recognized at Performance Space an interest in and openness to artistic spontaneity and resistance to classification.
 

About Young Boy Dancing Group