Performance Space New York presents "I wanna be with you everywhere," Envisioned by and for Disability Communities
Company:
Performance Space New York
[Three cats peer out, intensely curious, soft, and wise. Black eyes and chiseled features inviting, calling us into their world. Their lavender, bright blue, and white bodies shine against the sky blue background. A bright blue line outlines each cat and one, yes, is that right? Yes, one is upside down. All three kitties live in a heart-shaped window with a chunk sliced off the right lobe.]
With Performances by:
People Who Stutter Create (Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels,
JJJJJerome Ellis, Conor Foran, Kristel Kubart)
and
Crip Movement Lab (Kayla Hamilton with Elisabeth Motley)
Emceed by Dickie Hearts + Special Guest
with online hosts Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha + Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Johanna Hedva + NEVE, and Chella Man + Oliver Stabbe
Organized by Amalle Dublon, Jerron Herman, Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Alice Sheppard, and Constantina Zavitsanos
I wanna be with you everywhere, an everywhere gathering envisioned by and for disability communities, returns to Performance Space New York for another summer solstice hang -- simultaneously virtual and in-person, June 21, from 4–8pm. Interweaving the IRL and URL so we can all hang out together, I wanna be with you everywhere hosts a solstice afternoon of togetherness, ease, and performance that unfolds simultaneously in the Performance Space courtyard (150 4th Avenue) and online. Organized by a steering group including Amalle Dublon, Jerron Herman, Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Alice Sheppard, and Constantina Zavitsanos, this distance-collapsing occasion, centering care and conviviality, makes hanging out the main event.
Steering group member Jerron Herman says, “This year we wanted to focus on not doing too much: what does it actually mean to just curate a hang for us? Coming together doesn’t need justification: it can be restful and intentional and chill.”
With this solstice gathering, I wanna be with you everywhere launches K/Crip School —a political education pilot project bringing together lush access and intergenerational exchanges between disabled theorists and artists. K/Crip School emerges from our collective daydreams and longing during experiences of exclusion, restriction, and marginalization at school. Engaging a decolonial pedagogical framework, K/Crip School explores disabled experiments in art and collectivity, hoping to leave participants and ourselves with tools to resist isolation and excitement about our relationships to disability — our own and others’.
Steering group member Park McArthur says, “We want to establish intergenerational connections between different siloed artistic disciplines, ages, and geographies. The main praxis of getting together and hanging out, being together and being in study, that we do for these solstice events connects to what this potential K/Crip School pilot could be.”
For this summer solstice, IWBWYE asks artists to consider “study” in relation to gathering. Performers include JJJJJerome Ellis—the “experimental musician [who] takes his own stutter as the starting point for…a theoretical investigation of speech dysfluency and … resistance art” (Pitchfork)— who will offer a saxophonic invocation interwoven with a hybrid URL/IRL performance by People Who Stutter Create (Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels, JJJJJerome Ellis, Conor Foran, and Kristel Kubart), participants in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Kayla Hamilton and Elisabeth Motley — co-founders of Crip Movement Lab, an improvisation-based movement workshop for disabled people and their non-disabled accomplices — will engage attendees with an instructional performance.
Beyond performances, this cross-disability hangout is bolstered by abundant access, including creative CART and Audio Description and both conversational and performance ASL for two-way communication; haptic sonic platforms; a travel fund for attendees; vividly sensory and nourishingly quiet/stim spaces both at PSNY and on zoom; and top-tier production value video connecting in-person and online audiences. A free food truck will serve Palestinian food to in-person attendees.
On the solstice, I wanna be with you everywhere celebrates disabled activist, author, writer, editor, and community organizer, Alice Wong, for all the ways Wong has spread the wealth of k/crip love, knowledge, and resistance. Disability Visibility Project, the media platform Wong founded, is “an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.” IWBWYE honors Alice Wong for her writing on Palestinian liberation as an urgent disability justice issue. Wong’s new anthology, Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, is available now.
In the courtyard of Performance Space, online at home in bed, on beaches, and in transit, I wanna be with you everywhere is an ongoing and accessible celebration of nonlocality. First emerging in 2019 through collaborations with friends at Arika, a political arts organization, IWBWYE is rooted in access intimacy, conviviality, and crip time. While the 2019 festival centered on the importance of crip physical togetherness, 2023’s edition was generated within a time when considerations of nonlocality had necessarily opened new, more accessible visions of what togetherness in celebration and in grief could feel like. This year’s Solstice continues to experiment with and conceive much needed sociality, care, and interdimensional ‘being with.’
I wanna be with you everywhere website text:
I wanna be with you everywhere returns to your bedroom, hospital bed, backyard, kitchen table, living room, back room, no room, Zoom room, and Performance Space New York’s outdoor courtyard on Friday, June 21 from 4PM–8PM EST. The hang features Kayla Hamilton and Elisabeth Motley (Crip Movement Lab), Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels, JJJJJerome Ellis, Conor Foran, and Kristel Kubart of People Who Stutter Create. This hybrid-online pop-up solstice gathering is the third iteration of IWBWYE and this third time’s a real charm: we’re conjuring up an even chiller vibe than before.
ASL interpretation (on stage and floating for conversation), CART captioning, Audio Description (AD), Image Description (ID), and creative sound description are all in our hybrid access ecologies in-person and online; Zoom hosts and Access Doulas will keep us together.
Planning to join in person at Performance Space New York? Many of us will be wearing masks with the understanding that not everyone can mask. Free food truck out front. ADA all gender bathrooms, an indoor Low Stim-Room (masks highly encouraged and provided), and a haptic platform (This is d/Deaf Priority seating but all are welcome).
Traveling to Performance Space from within NYC? Please fill out this form by June 19 for a free Lyft/Uber voucher or reimbursement from our travel fund made to bring you here. Or see you online where we have talk show vibes and cameo crushes, a lively monitored chat that we break to read out, and break out rooms for smaller hangs and quiet space.
Attendance online and in person is free with RSVP. Please RSVP here.
IWBWYE is a celebration of nonlocality, roaming, peripatetic (traveling) passions. It’s a stranded, stuck, slowed, stop-time love scene. 2024’s Summer Solstice launches our upcoming K/Crip School pilot with deepened invocations from kin and collectives. Our study is the get together. There won’t really be an end as this is actually just the beginning (again), third round around, encore before—in continual rehearsal.
Programming Descriptions:
4:00pm EST Open Meet-up time (IRL + URL) On Zoom, a shifting cycle of online Hosts begins: Cyrée Jarelle Johnson and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Johanna Hedva and NEVE, Chella Man and Oliver Stabbe, and Courtyard Emcees Dickie Hearts and Special Guest.
4:15pm EST Land acknowledgement and welcoming invocation
4:30pm EST Break / Open Meet-up time For hanging out with old and new friends while crossing the digital, access, and geographic divides that often separate us.
Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART
5:00pm EST Invocation by People Who Stutter Create: Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels, JJJJJerome Ellis, Conor Foran, Kristel Kubart
JJJJJerome Ellis Following last year’s Performance in the spirit and celebration of Aster of Ceremonies, Ellis returns to Performance Space’s courtyard with People Who Stutter Create. Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels, JJJJJerome Ellis, Conor Foran, Kristel Kubart (People Who Stutter Create) welcome us into their practice of “creating time.” They wish to acknowledge the work of other people who stutter and organizations that have greatly inspired their collective. At the Solstice, PWSC shares a postcard and PDF born of this fellowship of creativity and stuttering. Across town, PWSC’s billboard is up at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets through August 11 as part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART
5:30pm EST Break / Open Meet-up time For hanging out with old and new friends while crossing the digital, access, and geographic divides that often separate us.
Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART
6:30pm EST Kayla Hamilton and Elisabeth Motley (Crip Movement Lab) bring us to the studio, guiding us through their methodologies and desires for dance education to center disability as a framework for creativity. Crip Movement Lab is an accessible movement practice co-created by Kayla Hamilton and Elisabeth Motley (2021) for all disabled people and their non-disabled accomplices. If you’re feeling it (and we hope you will), join us!
Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART
7:00pm EST Break / Open Meet-up time For hanging out with old and new friends while crossing the digital, access, and geographic divides that often separate us.
Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART
8:00pm Close. Access teams end both IRL and URL.
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