Stefanie Nelson Dancegroup + David Shenk present Moving Memory Project 2023: Sense Memory (FREE with RSVP)
Company:
Various
The Moving Memory Project, a multidisciplinary festival focused on memory and forgetting, created and produced by choreographer Stefanie Nelson and bestselling writer David Shenk (The Forgetting), returns in 2023 for an in-person presentation of works by NYC-based dance artists, presented under the title Sense Memory. The event will feature opening remarks by Meredith Wong, director of Caring Kind’s connect2culture® program, and performances of three dance works: Bunker + Vault by Rebecca Margolick; Choir by Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts; and excerpts from Paradox in Translation by Mignolo Dance.
Admission is free, with the suggested pay-what-you-can donation; RSVP is required.
Launched in 2019, The Moving Memory Project embodies its founders’ vision of bringing together artists, caregivers, and seniors to create a community of care surrounding issues connected to memory loss and destigmatizing the diagnosis of dementia, with the ultimate goal of raising awareness to increase funding until a cure is found. “Works like this can help the world think and talk about Alzheimer's in important new ways,” says co-producer David Shenk whose writings on Alzheimer's and dementia garnered him international acclaim as an authority on the subject. Stefanie Nelson, the creator and choreographer of A MY NAME IS…, which was a centerpiece of the inaugural edition of the festival, adds: “We are excited to present works by a diverse group of groundbreaking, NYC-based artists who turn their attention to the ways our bodies retain brief impressions from a constant barrage of sensory information. Such memories are vital for our ability to comprehend and manage the world around us. These three artists were chosen for the intimacy and depth each brings to the work; these powerful solos truly embody the isolation and loneliness of this disease.”
PROGRAM DETAILS
Rebecca Margolick
Bunker + Vault
This solo dance is about how memory is experienced through the body and generations. It was influenced by archival research on the women who resided at the 92nd Y Residence and The Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls from 1899-1950. Rebecca’s practice grew from this research, embodying and visualizing memories of these women, as well as her own, approaching the time in a non-linear fashion, reflecting the parallels, struggles, and shared history through generations of working-class women. This relentless solo plays with rigor and rhythm as a grounding force in a chaotic mind.
The work won the Jury Prize for “best indoor choreographic work” at the 2019 Festival Quartiers Danses in Montreal Canada. It has been presented in NYC and internationally.
Kayla Farrish/ Decent Structures Arts
Choir
“Choir is a solo on shedding. It is the quiet, the loss, the lost, the build-up and confrontations in Blackness when you’re too tired, the desire for change, and a score for liberation. It is going back in time in personal memory and connecting to spaces of history to recall home, feeling, and all these voices in the community I’m connected to. And over time, we decide to shed and to shift, and possibly eventually find joy, fear, spirit and praise, and at least release. It is the choir that floods through me finally.” – Kayla Farrish
This performance was created through the curation of Kenyon Adams in connection with Carrie Mae Weems's exhibit The Shape of Things at the Park Avenue Armory; it was a part of The Land of Broken Dreams, a larger convening of artists and scholars sharing research and work in. The soundtrack was mixed by Kayla Farrish and includes recordings by artists who inspired the work: Walter Hawkins, Julius Eastman, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Kendrick Lamar, Big Joe Turner, Ella Fitzgerald, SHXCXCHCXSH, Aaron Dilloway and Lucrecia Dalt, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, and 7038634357.
Mignolo Dance
Excerpts from Paradox in Translation
Paradox in Translation embodies two poems, creating a vocabulary that exactly maps to the spoken/sung text. This is complemented by more disjointed translations, culminating in a dreamscape that explores the contradictions inherent in memory, love, and loss. Choreographed by Charly Santagado, with text by Matthew Menchaca and Charly Santagado and music by Emory Campbell and Steve Reich (Alex Smoke Remix), the piece is performed by Charly Santagado and Eriel Santagado.
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