Cathy Weis Projects Announces Two Sundays on Broadway Events, December 4 and 11, 2022

Cathy Weis Projects will present two Sundays on Broadway events in December. The evenings will feature new and in-progress works by choreographers Scott Heron, Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada, Jodi Melnick with Maya Lee-Parritz, Anat Shamgar, and Cathy Weis. Both events begin at 6pm. $10 suggested donation at the door. WeisAcres is located at 537 Broadway, #3 (between Prince and Spring Streets), in Manhattan. For more information about Sundays on Broadway, including WeisAcres' COVID-19 policies, visit www.cathyweis.org.

Choreographer and video artist Cathy Weis launched Sundays on Broadway in May 2014. This one-of-a-kind series of performances, film screenings, readings, and discussions serves as a gathering place for artists 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 more than 130 choreographers, filmmakers, performers, and visual artists.

Sunday, December 4

Scott Heron will present his current work Study for a Clown Show. He writes, "Everything supports me even if I don't know how or why. Flummox you into innocence. Try doing everything just a little longer."

Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada will present Body of Work: Closer to Home. Since the pandemic began, the artists have stopped traveling and teaching and have been dancing in their living room, in their house, in a forest, at the end of Old County Road in West Halifax, VT. They have been meeting on Zoom with friends from Detroit, Northampton, and Argentina, twice a week for two years. They spend two hours in their dance studio every Wednesday and Friday. They write, "Our work has not changed. We are always playing, learning, and researching the presence of the imagination in the body, the body's reflexes, the ongoing spontaneous dialogue with the environment. What is new is that it has all moved closer to home."

In 2014, Julie Martin was the first artist to present work Nine Evenings as part of Sundays on Broadway. Nine years later, hundreds of artists have presented their work at WeisAcres. Cathy Weis contributes her own work to this vibrant downtown scene with her newest creation, Props from Poughkeepsie: Hunger and Restraint, the first in a series of works that brings to life props by Jim Fawcett. Performers: Emily Climer, David Guzman, and Martita Abril.

Sunday, December 11

Jodi Melnick and Maya Lee-Parritz present the start to their first collaborative duet, Agua Viva, mid-stream. Dedicated to a movement practice, the daily dancing body, this movement study aims to capture the present, the poisoned, the intricate, meditative, mystical, spontaneous, and broken.

SOLO, by Anat Shamgar, is part of a recent body of works called Plateau Stories, created in collaboration with sound artist, musician, and performer Tom Soloveitzik. In all of these works, Shamgar deals with time as space, movement as thought, and sound as material. The artists share a passion for silence, the aesthetics of reduction, and the practice of attentiveness. The separation between sound and image serves as a starting point for one's aim to create a state of separate being and attuned cohabitation, a multilayered space for the ways we color echoes or vibrate in one another's presence, becomes partners to a "one" journey.

Cathy Weis will present Props from Poughkeepsie: Vials of Remorse performed with Scott Heron. Heron and Weis will spend a week together in the WeisAcres studio and then show what they have made. Vials of Remorse is a later chapter in the Props from Poughkeepsie series, which brings to life props created by Jim Fawcett.

Scott Heron stumbled into Deborah Hay in 1983 in Austin and has been moving ever since as a performer, collaborator and creator. He worked in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, lived in a queer commune in Tennessee for several years after that, and now calls New Orleans home.

Daniel Lepkoff has been moving for 72 years. In 1970 he started calling this dance.

Jodi Melnick spends time with movement everyday, if not in a studio, in an elevator, hallway, or any available space. At present, she continues to be in dancing conversations, in and out of the studio with Sara Rudner, Vicky Shick, Jon Kinzel, David Neumann, Charlie Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Reiner, Paul Kaiser, Liz Roche, and currently, collaborating with Maya Lee-Parritz.

Anat Shamgar is a dancer and a dance-maker based in Jerusalem. She is an active performer of solo works and collaborations. Collaborations with sound and other artists invite an opportunity for experiencing the "other", for merging languages and finding the coexistence of differences. Shamgar has performed at the Montpelier Dance Festival, Podevil Festival in Berlin, New York Improvisation Festival, the Israel Festival, Room Dance Festival, and numerous other festivals and venues. She has been a faculty member of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance since 1991 and heads the Choreography Program and Movement Department.

Sakura Shimada lives in West Halifax, VT, with Daniel Lepkoff. She has been enjoying researching the functions of the body and human life from country living such as gardening, walking, swimming, skiing, dancing, meditating, seeing animals, doing Feldenkrais lessons. She is a Feldenkrais practitioner.

Tom Soloveitzik is a musician and sound artist based in Tel Aviv. He co-directs the Holon Scratch Orchestra and was, for the past decade, a co-artistic director of Ensemble Musica Nova for experimental music.

Cathy Weis is a dancer, choreographer, videographer, and artistic director of Cathy Weis Projects. In high school, Weis was a soloist in the Louisville Ballet. After graduating from college, she played in a cello quartet in Europe, tap-danced on the streets of San Francisco, and did a stint as a disco queen. Moving to NYC in 1983, Weis developed a signature blend of live performance with video. In 1996 she received a Bessie Award for creative work, and in 2002 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to her art practice she conducts Sundays on Broadway, a showcase for choreographers and performance artists.