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DANCE NEWS: Danspace Project Announces Spring 2022 Programming, Featuring Platform 2022: "The Dream of the Audience" (Part II)
Platform Artists Include mayfield brooks, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, iele paloumpis, and Ogemdi Ude
Clockwise from top left: iele paloumpis. Photo: courtesy the artist; Ogemdi Ude. Photo: Sophie Schwartz; Silas Riener + Rashaun Mitchell. Photo: Rashaun Mitchell; mayfield brooks. Photo: Maria Baranova.
Danspace Project announces performance and event dates for Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II) with new premieres by mayfield brooks, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, iele paloumpis, and Ogemdi Ude. Platform performances will take place in the sanctuary at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Tickets for Platform 2022 are now on sale to the public.
Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II), curated by Danspace Project Executive Director & Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor, runs April through June 2022, and follows its 2021 predecessor, building on impossible questions as we continue to navigate precarious times. Like Part I, Platform 2022 takes inspiration from a 1977 poem by the late artist and writer, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), wherein she addresses the audience “as a distant relative.” Platform 2022 delves into ancestral explorations, connections, and disconnections, as well as accessibility, and disability aesthetics, sustainable relationships to land, site, and water, and how these connections find their way into the artists' choreographic work. Dance artists mayfield brooks, Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener, iele paloumpis, and Ogemdi Ude have each noted different considerations of time amidst the ongoing Pandemic. Considering the intersections between life and dancing, how do life practices — building, birthing, weaving, planting, surviving — feed into dancemaking?
mayfield brooks, a movement-based artist, vocalist, urban farmer, and writer will look at the unspeakable injustices and losses revealed during the pandemic, and explore Black grief through in-depth research into the sonic life of whales with Sensoria: An Opera Strange (June 9-11). iele paloumpis, an end-of-life doula and visually-impaired artist making dance accessible for visually impaired and blind audiences, will investigate transgenerational resilience, finding ways to connect amidst ongoing isolation and systemic catastrophe with In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky (May 26 & 28). Collaborators Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener are choreographers, dancers, educators, carpenters and gardeners who moved to upstate New York several years prior to the pandemic to build a sustainable artistic life. Their current project, RETROFIT: a new age (April 28-30) combines everyday objects, improvised actions, and virtuosic dancing into a multi-faceted performance practice. Ogemdi Ude, a dance artist, educator, and birth & postpartum doula, will present an evening-length work, I know exactly what you mean (May 12-14), that playfully explores how storytelling and lying recovers cultural memories.
In addition to artists’ fees, Danspace is providing multiple weeks of rehearsal and residency time as well as accessibility and racial equity stipends. These new stipends were developed in direct response to artists’ feedback over the last 20 months and serve as a catalyst for a wide range of conversations with artists about disability and racial equity practices that reflect Danspace’s values.
Platform 2022 is Danspace Project’s 15th Platform. Platform 2021 (featuring Eiko Otake, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Reggie Wilson, and Okwui Okpokwasili, in Spring 2021) was designed to allow artists to work safely during a pandemic and reflect upon the current moment through new film commissions. Since the series’ inception in 2010, the Platforms have resulted in multifaceted performances, public programs, and publications that provide rich context for audiences. Recent programs have considered the importance of collective gathering, alternative kinship and care practices, land and site acknowledgements, accessibility, and voice/body practices. Platform 2022 is rooted in this history and with the curatorial team, Hussie-Taylor, Benjamin Akio Kimitch and Seta Morton, artists have been invited to experiment with and expand disability histories and aesthetics and accessibility practices.
The Platform artists will be joined by a unique cadre of guests for two Platform-centric Conversations Without Walls.
Danspace Writer-in-Residence Maura Donohue. Source: hunter.cuny.edu/dance/people/maura-donohue
Danspace will publish a print catalogue to accompany the Platform. The catalogue will both reflect on The Dream of The Audience Part I and anticipate The Dream of The Audience Part II with written contributions from the artists, writer-in-residence, and more.
Maura Nguyen Donohue returns as Writer-in-Residence for the second year of The Dream of The Audience. Donohue’s work will be published in the catalogue and in the Danspace Project Online Journal.
Issue #14 of Danspace’s Online Journal (danspaceproject.org/journal) will also focus on Platform lines of inquiry, artists research and writing, and catalogue excerpts.
*Danspace intends for Platform 2022 performances and events to be live contingent upon the state of Covid in Spring 2022.
**Individual and specific performances can be found under The Dance Enthusiast's Performances & Event Listings. Remember to search by the correct dates.
