Levi Gonzalez Comes to the Chocolate Factory Theatre

The Chocolate Factory Theater will continue its Fall 2024 season with the premiere of Hoary, a new dance performance by Levi Gonzalez. Tickets may be purchased in advance at chocolatefactorytheater.org.

In Hoary - the first major New York performance by Levi Gonzalez since 2016 - fairy tales become portals into queerness, performing an act of resistance against the numbing effects of normativity while reclaiming the body as a site of agency and (perhaps forbidden) desires.

Through a structured improvisational practice incorporating language, written materials, and found objects, three accomplished dancers in their 40’s - Gonzalez, Kayvon Pourazar, and Rebecca Serrell Cyr - build upon their extensive history of collaboration to conjure a deeply intimate response to The Chocolate Factory as a site; creating semi-fictional histories and explored sonic resonances, and employing language, sound and vocal utterance as vibratory tools that give animacy and agency to place. 

Hoary activates the audience’s potential for a multi-sensory and imaginative attunement to their environment, creating new possibilities for shared perception and behavior. Decentering empirical human concepts of knowledge, the work explores the animal and the queer, often through the use of objects and materials such as raw wool pelts and large everyday objects that are transformed into sound-making instruments. This sensitive repurposing of materials disrupts our enculturated nervous system responses and moves beyond the shortcomings of late capitalist embodied experience by embracing ambiguity, fluidity, and the beauty of the not yet known; embracing the practice of not knowing something but making something anyway.

Performers: Levi Gonzalez, Kayvon Pourazar, Rebecca Serrell Cyr. Performer/Composer: Senem Pirler. Costume Design/Consultant: James Kidd. Lighting Designer: Madeline Best.

Levi Gonzalez last appeared at The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2014.