Cathy Weis Projects Announces The Spring 2019 Season Of SUNDAYS ON BROADWAY

Cathy Weis Projects announces the lineup for the spring 2019 season of Sundays on Broadway, an ongoing series of performances, film screenings, readings, and discussions on Sunday evenings at WeisAcres. The spring season is curated by Cathy Weis and guest curators Emily Climer, Jon Kinzel, Melanie Maar, and Vicky Shick. All events begin at 6pm. $10 suggested donation at the door. WeisAcres is located at 537 Broadway, #3 (between Prince and Spring Streets), in Manhattan.

Choreographer and video artist Cathy Weis launched Sundays on Broadway in May 2014. These one-night-only events bring luminaries and newcomers of downtown dance together to perform and discuss their work and processes with audiences in the intimate setting of Weis's SoHo loft. Since its inception, the series has presented the work of dozens of choreographers, filmmakers, performers, and visual artists.

The spring 2019 season will feature new and in-progress works by more than 20 artists, including Vicky Shick and Eva Karczag, and Cathy Weis (April 28), Allegra Fuller Snyder, Laurel Atwell (May 5), Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada, Kota Yamazaki, and Doug LeCours (May 12), Andrea Kleine, Leslie Satin with David Botana, and Bessie McDonough-Thayer (May 19), Simone Forti and Cathy Weis (May 26), Edie Nightcrawler, Blaze Ferrer, and Nikima Jagudajev (June 2), Jeremy Nelson and Luis Lara Malvacías, Walter Dundervill, and Shorties-a flurry of micro-dances by ten surprise performers (June 9).

Spring 2019 Schedule

Sunday, April 28

Curated by Cathy Weis

Shared evening: Vicky Shick and Eva Karczag, Cathy Weis

An evening with a solo that feels like a duet and a duet that feels like a solo.

Performers Eva Karczag and Vicky Shick return to Sundays on Broadway to present a reworking of their duet, your blue is my purple. Karczag and Shick are longtime colleagues dating back to the 1980s in the Trisha Brown Company. To this day, they are often mistaken for each other on the street and even on stage. In this duet, they continue to investigate their curiosities, similarities, and differences.

Cathy Weis performs Jury Duty. As she moves onstage, Weis tells stories about being called for jury duty and describes what it's like for her to move through the world. A live image of Weis is projected behind her, adding a new layer of meaning to her musings.

Sunday, May 5

Curated by Jon Kinzel

Shared evening: Allegra Fuller Snyder, Laurel Atwell

Dance ethnologist Allegra Fuller Snyder, professor emerita of dance and former director of the pioneering graduate program in dance ethnology at UCLA, will share dance on film featuring in-depth perspectives and a cultural scope of her chosen subjects, ranging from ancient to modern forms of dance. Her firm commitment to the important and unique relationship that exists between film and dance, and now other visual media, was crystallized through her work with the International Film Foundation in New York City (1949-1951). She was one of the few people in the field of dance to recognize the critical importance of film to all aspects of dance. Her research merges history, politics, and aesthetics. The disciplined, complex, and expressive embodied practice of dancing is brought into focus through the medium of film.

Laurel Atwell will share part of her latest work. Using exercises developed for astral projection and communicating with ESP, the performance is an attempt to understand what it means to measure.

Sunday, May 12

Curated by Cathy Weis and Emily Climer

Shared evening: Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada, Kota Yamazaki, Doug LeCours

Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada will present a work based on their research of sensing as conversation: the voice of imagination living in the body. Conjuring forces circulating through the time, place, and circumstances of the performance event, transformed and channeled. A communication. The performance is itself a movement practice based on the same techniques they practice walking on the roads around their house and in their regular visits to the studio.

Kota Yamazki will present a solo-a reflection and echo of his latest work Darkness Odyssey Part 3: Non-Opera, Becoming. The work deals with the schizophrenic and slippery nature of man's identity and constant emergence of the "other-selves," while being engaged in the act of "becoming" without becoming anything.

Fraying Tether is a duet choreographed by Doug LeCours and performed with Anna Witenberg. The work engages systems of energetic counterpoint in which bodies posture and preen, orbiting one another until they ultimately collide. Beneath the dance runs a network of sensorial communication, a subtextual tethering that produces a restless, shifting dance between attraction and repulsion.

Sunday, May 19

Curated by Vicky Shick

Shared evening: Andrea Kleine, Leslie Satin with David Botana, Bessie McDonough-Thayer

Andrea Kleine will present an excerpt from a work-in-progress. Showing works-in-progress causes her a great deal of anxiety, but she does it anyway. Describing the process, Kleine has said that she always says she is making a solo and then she hires six other performers instead. Her work explores cruelty and violence, but she flinches at violent scenes in movies and they sometimes make her feel sick. In her previous two works she impersonated famous people and in this work she is impersonating herself. This piece is about mimicry and hypocrisy.

Leslie Satin's duet Picking Up Where We Left Off is a return to a series of works begun ten years ago for Satin and dance partner David Botana. This piece, like the others in the series, emerges from overlapping choreographic approaches, generating movement through both compositional and spatial scores and more experientially derived improvisation. Drawing from the dancers' collaboration, it creates episodic portraits of a relationship at once actual, imagined, and devised in the process of rehearsal and performance, joining formal properties and affect: the "things hanging in the air."

Bessie McDonough-Thayer's work is based on a solo improvisational practice in which the articulation of the body manifests in precise layering of awkward and composed vocabulary. The how becomes the impetus, offering a sense of immediacy without putting herself or the viewer on the spot-a precision chill way of moving and relating to space. In this relationship between anti-spectacle and spectacle, there's room for the audience to have a relaxed experience, often leading to unexpected riffs that can't be planned.

Sundays, May 26

Curated by Cathy Weis

An evening with Simone Forti and Cathy Weis

An evening of experiments by Simone Forti and Cathy Weis on their second Maiden Voyage as collaborators in a space that is so familiar to them both. Forti lived and worked at 537 Broadway for decades. Weis now resides and creates there. They will share some of the discoveries made during one week of moving together in the studio.

Sunday, June 2

Curated by Melanie Maar

Shared evening: Edie Nightcrawler, Blaze Ferrer, Nikima Jagudajev

Daring to walk a line of comfort and surprise, Edie Nightcrawler is always in a relationship, a love relationship, with the audience. The flimsiest reference can magically transcend when imbued with an honest intention and a rigorous execution. Her efforts, she says, "can be offered in service yet harness the power of my own pleasure. Naively, I still believe that a theater is a place for shamanism; and I have had the opportunity to enter this context at many different and ridiculous levels-from dive bars to Caesars Palace. I aim to serve, and not just myself."

Blaze Ferrer presents PB, a solo performance generating desire paths as a means to abstract and erode queer fabulist totems. Through head-banging choreographic recursions, the performer grapples with contemporary embodiment by shifting through recognizable figures, and incorporating burlesque strategies into acts of wandering. The work traverses through soundscapes of drum duets and crystal castles in order to manifest a saccharine purgatory both real and imagined.

Nikima Jagudajev's Crown Shy (June 2, 2019 18:00:00 EST) is a proposal for alchemy, dissolving the distinction between inside and out. In the basement shadows we mess around with test tubes, turning lead into gold. At that moment we wake up to the universe. No differentiation between consciousness and action; between our affect and us. We enter a union of opposites, a third place, Crown Shy.

Sunday, June 9

Curated by Cathy Weis and Emily Climer

Shared evening: Jeremy Nelson and Luis Lara Malvacías, Walter Dundervill, Shorties

In I (as in imprint and as in print), through written, spoken, and embodied language, Jeremy Nelson and Luis Lara Malvacías delve into memories of past, present, and future using the stage as a large surface or open canvas to be transformed. I is the seventh work in a series of highly structured improvisational duets: From A to Z. Taking each piece's title from a different letter of the alphabet, the project focuses on many aspects of time, and uses signposts and issues connected with life and aging as a framework for these explorations.

Walter Dundervill will present an excerpt of new work with video artist Iki Nakagawa. Their collaboration explores different ways in which the creation of live performance and the documentation of live performance can work together to produce an independent work of art. In the midst of making a dance film, they found their interest shifting from the creation of a cinematic product to one in which the process itself is the performance.

In fall 2018, when there was a last-minute cancellation, Cathy Weis and other curators desperately called on friends to perform in a group improvisational structure. It was such a roaring success that they decided to close out the spring season by doing it again. Shorties is a flurry of micro-dances-one- to-two minute improvisations-performed in quick succession by ten surprise performers. Who says we can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear?

Sundays on Broadway Spring 2019 is made possible, in part, with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

For more information about Sundays on Broadway, visit www.cathyweis.org.