Cathy Weis Projects Slates SUNDAYS ON BROADWAY Fall 2017 Season

Cathy Weis Projects announces the fall 2017 season of Sundays on Broadway, an ongoing series of performances, film screenings, and discussions on Sunday evenings at WeisAcres.

The fall season is co-curated by Jon Kinzel and Vicky Shick, close colleagues of Cathy Weis who have presented their work at Sundays on Broadway on several occasions.

All events begin at 6pm and are free and open to the public. WeisAcres is located at 537 Broadway, #3, between Prince and Spring Streets in Manhattan.

Drawing inspiration from the history of the 537 Broadway building and the impact of artists on the SoHo community, choreographer and video artist Cathy Weis launched Sundays on Broadway in May 2014. This one-of-a-kind series serves as a gathering place for artists to perform and discuss their work and processes with audiences in the intimate setting of WeisAcres, Weis' SoHo loft. Since its inception, the series has presented the works of dozens of choreographers, filmmakers, performers, and visual artists.

Jon Kinzel and Vicky Shick, who have worked together in several capacities over the years, including performing at Sundays on Broadway, commented, "We are very happy to have been invited to be a part of Cathy Weis' ongoing efforts to program free events within the context of her historically significant live/work loft space-a fitting, beautiful, and unique environment in which to experience dance, music, theater, performance, visual art, and presentations alike."

The fall 2017 season will feature new and in-progress works by 20 artists, including Lisa Nelson, Jennifer Monson/Zeena Parkins, and Seline Baumgartner (October 22), Dean Moss, Fast Forward, and Ishmael Houston-Jones (October 29), Neil Goldberg (November 5), Neil Greenberg, John Jasperse, and Moe Satt (November 12), John Jesurun and David Thomson (November 19), Mina Nishimura, Miriam Parker, and Marilyn Maywald Yahel (December 3), and Paul Singh, Juliette Mapp, Diane Madden, and Ami Yamasaki (December 10).

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Fall 2017 Schedule:

October 22

Shared evening: Lisa Nelson, Jennifer Monson/Zeena Parkins, Seline Baumgartner

Dance artist and videographer Lisa Nelson brings a first public performance of a new video-game-in-progress that re-reverse-engineers her long-excavated practice of Tuning Scores-a real-time editing of movement, sound, and touch. Joined by colleague Jennifer Monson, Nelson proposes to expose each of their singular approaches to improvisational performance through playing together in the formats of video games and live dancing.

Choreographer Jennifer Monson and composer/multi-instrumentalist Zeena Parkins will perform material that is being developed for bend the even, a new work to be presented at The Chocolate Factory in February 2018. The material is developed from the minutia of transitions experienced in tonal shifts in vibration and frequency.

Seline Baumgartner will share some of her recent video works in which she collaborates with New York dancers Sally Gross, Meg Harper, Jon Kinzel, Keith Sabado, Vicky Shick, and Robert Swinston in exploring how age and experience deepen artistry.

October 29

Shared evening: Dean Moss, Fast Forward, Ishmael Houston-Jones

Dean Moss will present a short excerpt from his new work Petra, a masochistic autobiographical melodrama concerning desire, featuring five women, and inspired by Fassbiner's film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The excerpt will be performed by Samita Sinha and Paz Tanjuaquio, and includes a video interview between the title character played by Kaneza Schaal and BAX director Marya Warshaw. The complete work will premiere at PS 122 in January 2018.

New York composer and musician Fast Forward, who has worked with Merce Cunningham, Robert Ashley, Takehisa Kosugi, Pauline Oliveros, David Behrman, and countless others, will perform compositions for solo steel pan; special guest guitarist Chris Cochrane.

Ishmael Houston-Jones will share his research on racial/gender pseudo binaries through a mashup of Edouard Manet, Jean Genet, Nina Simone, Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, The Jeffersons, The Help, Gone with the Wind, Imitation of Life, and others.

November 5

Neil Goldberg - Inhibited Bites

Inhibited Bites is a solo performance about the strangeness of being alive in a body, especially our need to eat. Artist and performer Neil Goldberg uses his visual art such as the photo series "The Gay Couples of Whole Foods" or the Audubon-style drawings "Wild Animals Eat My Family and Me," as backdrops for personal narratives, cultural reflections, and scientific speculations that examine our complicated relationships to being flesh and blood. Whether discussing the connections between internalized homophobia and aggressive hygiene, or our shifting identification with predator and prey animals, Goldberg reveals the absurdity, mystery, sublimity, and horror underlying everyday bodily experience.

November 12

Shared evening: Neil Greenberg, John Jasperse, Moe Satt

Choreographer Neil Greenberg will perform a solo study for a new work, continuing his quixotic search for an experience of the performance moment in and of itself. With music by James Lo.

John Jasperse will share some material from current work in the studio. He writes, "Over the years, I have repeatedly questioned why, given all the madness of the world that we inhabit, I find myself again and again, in an empty room, moving my cells around, trying to place something so fleeting as a dance into the void of the room and the world. Is it the force of habit, hubris, solipsism, or trust that drives this quest? Perhaps the challenges of the current moment have intensified the imperative to understand some answer to these and other questions that have been lingering in the air of late, lurking in the recesses of my mind and the studio."

In F n' F, performance artist Moe Satt explores formal relationships between the face and fingers, achieving 108 combinations: hands that cover the face like a mask, gestures that represent blossoms (a memory from his childhood), a gun sign that plays with differences in meaning when the fingers are pointed to his head and outwards. In Asian cosmology, the sacred number 108 signifies, among many things 108 sensorial feelings, 108 earthly temptations, 108 Ayurvedic pressure points, and 108 bell chimes to usher in the new year.

November 19

Shared evening: John Jesurun and David Thomson

Playwright/director John Jesurun will present a section from a new short-form piece. He will also revisit his 1990 play Everything That Rises Must Converge.

David Thomson will present an excerpt from a larger work, he his own mythical beast, a series of performance installations reflecting on various questions of identity and perception.

December 3

Shared evening: Mina Nishimura, Miriam Parker, Marilyn Maywald Yahel

Mina Nishimura will show a short segment of material that is part of her new evening-length work Bladder Inn (and X, Y, Z, W), which will premiere at Danspace Project in February 2018. The work is a quest for supposedly long-lost form of a body. The slippery journey is contained and held by a specific architecture of a performance venue.

Miriam Parker's piece looks at movement and life as relating to a pendulum: a body suspended from a fixed point, as it moves to and fro with gravity and acquired momentum. She investigates how things move from one position, condition, etc., to the opposite extreme and then back again.

Marilyn Maywald Yahel has created one self-performed solo each year since 2010, and with this project she ventures into the territory of collaboration and translation. She will be joined by performers Jennifer Lafferty and Melanie Maar to generate a dance where steps are constructed by the deconstruction of impulse.

December 10

Shared evening: Paul Singh, Juliette Mapp, Diane Madden, Ami Yamasaki

Paul Singh will present a technical movement study concerned with unraveling the constant architectures that keep people alike, even amidst the current events that literally tear us apart. This short duet lets the bodies do the talking while the words both succeed and fail us.

Dancer/choreographer Juliette Mapp will show a solo work-in-progress tentatively titled Half Life.

Diane Madden is looking forward to discovering and sharing what is interesting to her now as a soloist. Making phrase material? Improvising? Both? Silence? Sound? All to be determined.

Vocalist and cross-media artist Ami Yamasaki will present Voice, Boundary, Gravity. Using the simplest definition of "voice," she references it as a physical phenomenon that exists externally from our bodies and is a vibration that shakes the air. Even though her voice is a sound that she produces, once it is uttered it exists independently, with its own body and embodiment. In this piece she explores the relationship between sound, boundary, and gravity in the context of voice.

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GUEST CURATORS:

Jon Kinzel is a choreographer, multimedia artist, and improviser who has presented his work, including numerous commissions and solo shows, at a variety of national and international venues receiving critical praise for his large-scale gallery installation Atlantic Terminus (2016) at The Invisible Dog, Responsible Ballet and What We Need Is a Bench to Put Books On (2010) at The Kitchen, Someone Once Called Me a Sound Man (2013) at The Chocolate Factory, and Responsible Ballet (2009) and Provision Provision (2015) at La MaMa Moves! Festival, among others. He is grateful to have had some previous curatorial experience leading up to Sundays on Broadway, including Double Plus (2014), The Movement Research Fall Festival (2010), and Group Show 2001: Mike Albo, Shelly Mars, and Sarah Michelson. Recently, he served as a movement dramaturg for John Kelly and Patricia Hoffbauer, and as a composer for Elena Demyanenko at EMPAC/Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. He has enjoyed many opportunities to mentor, dance, or collaborate with Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick, Cathy Weis, Jennifer Miller, Simon Courchel, Emily Coates, Philip Connaughton, Jean Butler, Enrico Wey, John Jasperse, Yoshiko Chuma, Sally Silvers, Lance Gries, Seline Baumgartner, Bob Ajar, and Matthew Barney (The Cremaster Cycle), and many others. He is on the faculty of Movement Research and Lincoln Center Education, and has been an adjunct professor and guest artist at Barnard College, New York University's Experimental Theater Wing, Yale University, George Washington University, and the Merce Cunningham Trust, among others. He has received support from foundations, fellowships, and residency programs: most recently from The Yard where he initiated a new work-a second project with sculptor Jarrod Beck-to premiere next year.

Vicky Shick has been involved in The New York dance community for three decades. In addition to dancing with the Trisha Brown Company for six years, she has had numerous long-term relationships with many other performers and choreographers. She has been making dances since the mid-80s, many in collaboration with artist Barbara Kilpatrick and sound designer Elise Kermani. Shick's choreography has been presented in The New York area and internationally in France, Ireland, Switzerland, and in Budapest, her home town. In April 2017, a collaborative piece with Ralph Lemon and Jimena Paz was presented at The Chocolate Factory. Shick has taught, set Trisha Brown's choreography, and made dances on students at many universities, as well as taught for 20 years at Movement Research. Shick is a 2006 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and recently received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts EmergenCy Grant for a piece she made this past June with artist Seline Baumgartner. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a two-time Movement Research Artist in Residence.

ABOUT CATHY WEIS PROJECTS:

Cathy Weis is a dancer, choreographer, and videographer, and the artistic director of Cathy Weis Projects. In 2005, she purchased what was once the Simone Forti studio in one of the last AIR buildings in SoHo, New York City. This became WeisAcres, a meeting and performance space where anything can happen - the kind of place that once flourished in New York.

Weis danced with the Louisville Ballet from 1961 to 1966 before leaving to study at Bennington College. After graduating, Weis 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 1993, she presented A String of Lies, her first New York show. She also began performing with Circus Amok and has been a regular participant throughout the years.

Weis received an MFA from Bennington College in 1996. That same year, she received a Bessie Award for her piece Fractured: Just the Fracts Ma'am. In 2002, Weis received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her choreography, which led to the creation of SmallElectric Haiku and the subsequent Haiku series. She has toured her own work both nationally and internationally.

A videographer for dance and performance artists since the early 80s, Weis has produced an archive that consists of hundreds of hours of footage, documenting the spirit on the streets and stages of New York City. She captured rare performances of artists such as Eric Bogosian, Remy Charlip, Spalding Gray, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Bill Irwin, Bill T. Jones, Blue Lips, Jennifer Miller, Meredith Monk, Jennifer Monson, Mark Morris, Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton, and Elizabeth Streb, among many others. Weis has worked with a number of archivists to preserve and catalogue the holdings of the archive, and to develop ways to share these rare videos with the broader dance and arts community.

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

Pictured: Sundays on Broadway. Photo by Anja Hitzenberger.