92NY Harkness Dance Center Presents MAURYA KERR This March

The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center's 2022/23 Mainstage Series continues with Maurya Kerr, Bay Area-based choreographer, poet, performer, educator, and the artistic director of tinypistol, bringing the world premiere of her work black calls to dark calls to deep underneath to the Kaufmann Concert Hall stage.

black calls to dark calls to deep underneath - which Kerr describes as "a work focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian" and a progression of her artistic exploration - consists of three linking duets performed by Styles Alexander, Tatiana Barber, Alex Carrington, Alexander Diaz, Audrey Johnson, and Chelsea Reichert, with a commissioned, recorded score by Joel St. Julien.

A mainstay on the Northern California dance scene, Kerr's film Saint Leroi had its New York premiere at this year's Dance on Camera festival, where it was a highlight for Village Voice critic Elizabeth Zimmer, who hailed it as "a surreal meditation on Black history, violence, and American decay and a powerful indictment of racism."

Maurya Kerr - Artistic Statement
My artistic practices-across the disciplines of movement, language, and film-focus on racialized peoples reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. My work centralizes black and brown lives, challenges essentialist assumptions, and engages with the politics of blackness. My practices create space for emotions and states of being-joy, quietude, tenderness, and rage-systematically denied racialized communities. I use movement less for the sake of choreography and more as a vehicle in service to justice and representation. I believe in the body as a site of liberation-bodies in motion have the potential to offer us all, both mover and witness, alternate futurities and ways of being within our own bodies, and in community.

My work is rooted in my lived experience as a black, mixed-race woman. I am influenced by other racialized artists across a spectrum of disciplines whose work demonstrates a vast range of experience that transcends monolithic assumptions of what 'Black Art' is and does. My choreographic work invests in simplicity, sensation, and the rigor of presence. My recent dance film works have engaged more deeply with suspended temporality, within and outside the body, as a reclamation of stolen time and stolen joy. I am increasingly invested in how the afterlives of slavery exist through my ancestors and how my creative praxis can exist as a form of reparation, to those both past and present.

The Mainstage Series continues

FLOCK & ARTISTS
Somewhere Between
New York Premiere
In Person - Thu, Apr 20, 7:30 pm, from $30 / $10 student
Online - noon Fri, Apr 21 - noon Mon, Apr 24, from $20
Somewhere Between features FLOCK's signature partnering, rich and complex movement, and heartfelt storytelling. This new show explores myths and childhood stories, unpacking how memory and imagination play into our reality and our definitions of self. Co-choreographers Alice Klock and Florian Lochner are joined by a stunning group of guest artists in a program that offers a vibrantly physical and multilayered look at the possibilities within human connection.

Cast: Florian Lochner, Alice Klock, Liane Aung, Kevin Shannon, Robert Rubama, Emily Krenik

*Rescheduled date*

PETER CHU
In Person - Sun, May 14, 7:30 pm, from $30 / $10 student
Online - noon Mon, May 15 - noon Thu, May 18, from $20
Performing artist, educator and choreographer Peter Chu brings the world premieres of two works to 92NY - Conscious Shift and take-off. Chu performs with Roger Van der Poel, a member of his company, Chuthis.

Maleek Washington
In Person - Thu, Jun 8, 7:30 pm, from $30 / $10 student
Online - noon Fri, Jun 9 - noon Mon, Jun 12, from $20
Maleek Washington, a 2021 New York Live Arts Fresh Track grantee, who was also nominated for a Bessie as an "Outstanding Breakout Choreographer" in the same year will be closing out our Mainstage Season by bringing his compelling creative voice to the 92nd Street Y, New York stage for the first time.

Visit 92NY.org/Dance for details on all 2022/23 Harkness Mainstage Series events in Kaufmann Concert Hall, and spring 2023 Harkness Studio Series events in our newly renovated Buttenwieser Hall.