Brooklyn Arts Exchange Spotlights Emerging Artists at 2017 UPSTART FESTIVAL

Curated by former BAX Artists In Residence Jillian Peña (2011-13) and Fernando Maneca (2004-06), the 2017 Upstart Festival ushers in fresh talent with an intriguing festival of performances and roundtable discussions. This festival gives creators of dance, theater and performance works, who have no more than three years of experience showing their work in New York City, an opportunity to show work and to facilitate networking opportunities that pave the way for fruitful artistic careers.

BAX will present these selected works as part of a two-day showcase in the BAX theater. This year's participants include:

Friday, February 10, 2017 at 8:00pm:
Chris DeVita georgia*jonathan HAM Elena Rose Light The Brown Dance Project Ashley R.T. Yergens

Saturday, February 11, 2017 at 8:00pm:

TALL GIRLS DANCING Anastasia Eckerson Felicia Henry/Behind the Walls, Between the Lines Manny Church of the Millennials Nia and Ness Bianca Roman ARTIST BIOS
TALL GIRLS DANCING is a performance duo founded in 2014 by Sara Gibbons and Doug LeCours. Dedicated to an ongoing process of working together, TALL GIRLS DANCING crafts set and improvised movement-based systems that explore identity politics and the millennial experience. Guided by a commitment to be adamantly contemporary, Gibbons and LeCours work within their youthful perspective to create a space where angst, dark humor, togetherness, and idiocy in performance inspire actual transformation. They have presented their work nationally and internationally at venues including Triskelion Arts, Colby College (ME), the Denmark Arts Center (ME), and ImPulsTanz (Vienna) through the ATLAS program for emerging choreographers.

Anastasia Eckerson is a queer brown femme performer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. They grew up in a multiracial family in a small town in Connecticut. As a young person, Eckerson played sports until the age of 16 when they fell in love with dance and began training in modern dance and classical ballet. They graduated from Skidmore College with a degree in Dance and a minor in Gender Studies. After a back injury coincided with exposure to the practice of performance art, Eckerson's focus shifted from contemporary dance performance to performance art and movement based performance making. Much of their current work pulls from their childhood memories and experiences moving through the world as a brown queer femme. They were a part of BAX's NEEDING IT! workshop in 2016 and are currently working with choreographer Stormy Budwig.

Georgia Gavran, a Wisconsin native, and Jonathan Doherty, a Western Massachusetts native, both graduated from The University of the Arts receiving their BFA in Dance Performance under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield. Originally introduced at school, they later found each other in Brooklyn, NY, where the friendship blossomed into collaborators. Georgia, animated and sarcastic, and Jonathan, quirky and mercurial, found themselves generating complex and interwoven movements. Utilizing their abstract pairing, they exist in a whimsical and erratic realm. Georgia and Jonathan have shown work together around the New York area at venues such as Triskelion Arts, JACK, and The Tank.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Felicia A. Henry has always had a commanding presence; whether the stage is at home or abroad, she is graced to compel people to listen to her, and she uses it to speak truth to power for those who can't. Felicia's platform is poetry, and her skill is evolving with every stroke of the pen. She thrives behind the mic, and captivates her audience with the intensity of her lyrics while maintaining a mild demeanor. Felicia is a lover of Christ. Social Worker. Visionary. 20-something trying to figure out the meaning of life. A Temple University alumna, Felicia received her Masters of Social Work degree from the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Felicia currently resides back in her hometown and works as a Restorative Justice Social Worker with justice-involved youth in Brownsville, BK.

Elena Rose Light is a dance artist indebted in ways large and small to Dolores Velia Rains, Irène Giguere, Kirsten Oakley, Corinne McKean, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Iréne Holtman-Monti, Maria F. Scaroni, Ursula Eagly, Lucy Sexton, and Angela Rose Light. She read canonical texts in Yale's art history department and has since been schooling herself through the danceWEB 2016 scholarship program, the 2016-17 LANDING program with Miguel Gutierrez, various artistic processes/practices, and coffee dates. She is interested in the application of queer intersectional feminism to choreography, viewing performance-making as an empathetic mode to create discourse around past and present social conditions.
Manny is a nonbinary trans faerie who aspires to create art under the guise of their inner teenager. The Brooklyn-based theatre artist and Sound Designer is a recent alum of The City College of New York and member of the all queer performance art collective; A Beautiful Desperation. .Their work is largely autobiographical and enjoys playing in the playgrounds of their personal history. Credits include; Almost Maine (Sound Design, Aaron Davis Hall), SUBMERGE: will you? (Stage Manager, BAX), The Taming of Cats (Sound Design, The Brick), H.O.M.E. (Playwright, The New Ohio Theatre), Blu (Asst.Director/Sound Design, Aaron Davis Hall).
Church of the Millennials is a Brooklyn-based theatre company comprised of seven theatrical workers dedicated to the cultivation and conservation of artistic service. Church creates original work that incorporates plays, dances, lectures, videos, puppet-shows, happenings, and memes. As a company, they have presented original work at the Wild Project, Porterspace, and the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Church has performed at Residency 108 and its members are currently Creative Production Associates on Geoff Sobelle's upcoming piece "HOME" at Brooklyn Academy Of Music. Founded at Bard College, Church is operated by Abby Adler, Antonio Irizarry, Kedian Keohan, Reeves Morris-Stan, Ethan Rogers, Daisy Rosato, and Dana Savage. www.churchofthemillennials.org

HAM (high art moment) is a new collaboration between Amélie Gaulier-Brody, Dages Juvelier Keates, Rain Saukas and Alexis Steeves. We have been presented by Art Helix (Permission Slip), Dixon Place (Crossing Boundaries and Under Exposed), Triskelion Arts (CollabFest) and Parsons/The New School (City and City). We have partnered with visual and sound artists Marion Bizet, Joshua Dumas, Shani Ha, and Elizabeth Tubergen in our post-humanist, post-dance inquiry. HAM was recently awarded a residency at The Stable in Montreal, Quebec.

Nia Shand and Ness White are a dancer/poet performance art duo based in the NYC Metropolitan area. They met in Philadelphia three years ago while attending Temple University and immediately began a collaborative art process, as well an intimate relationship. Along with the couple's work together, Nia is a proud BFA dance graduate from Temple. Immediately after graduation she began dancing in Germany and France with DAGADA Dance Company as part of her developing dance career; and Ness, a Journalism graduate of SUNY Plattsburgh, freelances as a writer and editor for the Vi?t Tide as well as several other news outlets.

The Brown Dance Project (The BDP) is dedicated to making connections with art, performance and advocacy. A creative research lab largely focused on sharing public health information with dance composition, the lab celebrated its 10 year anniversary in 2016. Comprising a fluid roster of professional dancer artists and other performers, The BDP has the unique ability to operate as many or 1, traveling as its Artistic Director creates work.

Bianca Roman is a queer, interdisciplinary performance artist and late-night diner enthusiast approaching her thirties. Her work questions the magical and destructive nature of expectation, identity, communication, attachment, escapism, childhood trauma and the RE-parenting of the self. Bianca received her MFA in Dance at Sarah Lawrence College and her BA in Theatre from Bucknell University. She is also a Licensed Massage Therapist, mixed-media visual artist, and the Founder and Creative Director of the lamp post . chapter one, a DIY performance venue and gallery space in Wilkes-Barre, PA.

Ashley R.T. Yergens made their debut with Is this more ladylike? at the Walker Art Center's 2014 Choreographers' Evening. Ashley is a byproduct of growing up on tater tots and WWE SmackDown, being queer in small town USA, and bonding with blue collars. Their choreography has been presented at venues such as the Wild Project Theater, Dixon Place, Center for Performance Research, Annoyance Theatre, and the WOW Café Theatre. Recently, they received a 2016 boo-koo Space Grant from Gibney Dance, and they are a 2016-17 Fresh Tracks Artist at New York Live Arts. Additionally, you can catch them Yackez-ing with Larissa and Jon Velez-Jackson. www.artyergens.com

Founded in 1991, BAX |Brooklyn Arts Exchange, is a community based performing arts center dedicated to developing artists of all ages, from children to professionals. The organization offers community access to arts and culture, supporting the creation of new work by emerging artists, engaging diverse audiences and providing arts education to youth and families. BAX has intentionally constructed an environment where children study and professional artists create under the same roof. Students are mentored by professional directors and choreographers. The organization's distinct focus on developmental process makes it a nurturing incubator for experimental dance and theater artists and is an important advocate for under-represented voices in the New York City performing arts community.

For more information about BAX and its programs please call 718-832-0018, email press@bax.org or visit us on the web at www.bax.org.