Cathy Weis Projects Unveils Fall 2023 Sundays On Broadway Season

Cathy Weis Projects will present four Sundays on Broadway events this fall. The evenings will feature new and in-progress works by 15 artists. 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. For more information about Sundays on Broadway, visit www.cathyweis.org.

Cathy Weis launched Sundays on Broadway in May 2014. This one-of-a-kind series brings together both luminaries and newcomers of downtown performance, creating a space for artists to perform and discuss their work with audiences in the intimate setting of Weis's SoHo studio. This season, Weis builds on the intergenerational nature of the series by collaborating with Jade Mann, a younger choreographer, on the curation of the four evenings. Weis and Mann desire for the series to create opportunities for young artists to work alongside more experienced artists, as well as for the experienced artists to gain inspiration from a younger generation. The two hope this approach to curation will also be engaging for audience members, who will get the chance to see artists at very different points in their careers.

Sunday, November 12

Jennifer Monson will present move thing, solo (surfacing layer 1), the result of a monthlong research residency in New Mexico, in sites around uranium mines, the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb test site, and post-industrial urban spaces.

Zeena Parkins, a pioneer of contemporary harp practice, will perform an improvised duet with her decades-long collaborator, Jennifer Monson. Parkins will perform a short solo following their duet.

Isa Spector will present a duet that explores the relationship between gesture and form, object and feeling, and the ineffable amount of time it takes for an image to load.

Cathy Weis will show a short video she made in 1998 called The Pupa, in which Jennifer Monson performed. Following the video, the two will join each other on stage for an improvised duet.

Sunday, November 19

Paul Botelho will perform an improvised vocal response to a constructed environment composed of multilevel sound transformations of an acoustic space.

Deborah Hay will present a 15-minute dance titled fifteen minutes kinda.

Scott Heron will perform excerpts from a new solo work-in-progress.

Cherrie Yu will present Daily Diversion, a performance series that uses the basic movements of table tennis as the building block for choreography. The dance unfolds around a table/prop built by artist Matt Shalzi, and involves a small cast of dancers and Chinatown elders.

Sunday, December 10

Works by Jim Neu will feature an excerpt of the video Dark Pocket. Following the video, musicians Deborah Auer and Harry Mann will perform Neu's You Can Say What You Want About Sound.

Jennifer Miller will premiere two new pieces of choreography performed by dancers David Guzman and Zo Williams and a short improvised duet.

Owen Prum will present a new work-in-progress.

Cathy Weis will show a video titled 1985 in which all the footage was recorded that year in the studios and streets of New York City.

Sunday, December 17

Jacob Burckhardt will show a program of short films: wordless sound-visual poetic documentaries and Dada comedies.

Vicky Shick will present a simple look at the geometry of two bodies locating themselves inside a shared, gently intimate architecture in time and space. Shick will perform with Marilyn Maywald Yahel.

EDGE is an ongoing collaboration between Reason Wade and Aminah Ibrahim, a movement performance that plays with suspension and levity to explore the line between solid ground and open air—and the emotions that arise when one is on the precipice.

Cathy Weis will show an excerpt of archival footage she shot in 1983 from a performance by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland.

Images are available here.

About the Artists

Deborah Auer is a jazz singer who often presents Jim Neu's songs and monologues during her Jazz evenings at Pangea and other clubs. She has also appeared in several of Neu's plays.

Paul J. Botelho is an Azorean American composer and performer. His work includes acoustic and electro-acoustic music, multimedia installation pieces, visual artworks, vocal improvisation, and several one-act operas. Botelho received a BFA in contemporary music performance and composition from the College of Santa Fe, an AM in electro-acoustic music from Dartmouth College, and an MFA and PhD in music composition from Princeton University.

Jacob Burckhardt is an audio engineer whose work in sound ranges from recording audio around the world to mixing soundtracks for independent films at a midtown studio. He now teaches in the film/video department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After making two feature movies in the 1980s, he went back to making shorts in 16mm film and video, media in which it is possible to preserve a direct relationship between the film and the filmmaker.

Deborah Hay was born in Brooklyn, then moved to New York City, then moved to the country. Now she resides in Austin, TX, and has manufactured the means to continue dancing ever since Brooklyn.  

Scott Heron has been making dances for almost 40 years. He is a founding member of Circus Amok and has worked extensively with Deborah Hay, Cathy Weis, Lisa Nelson, HIJACK, and many others. 

Aminah Ibrahim is a Black American, Kuwaiti, and Indonesian artist and producer of performance. Their work finds ways to expand the body, connecting somatic movement, sound, and visual documentation. Through meditative modes of improvisation, and an intimate relationship with ritual garb and adornment, Ibrahim explores the geographies of identity, body politics, and mysticism. Ibrahim received an MA in sound art from London College of Communication.

Harry Mann has often composed music for Jim Neu's plays. He has continued to play and compose for Ralph Lee, the Talking Band, Eva Dean Dance, and others.

Jennifer Miller is the director and founder of Circus Amok, a one-ring, no animal, queer, free circus extravaganza that has been touring the parks of New York annually since 1994. Besides touring solo shows internationally, she works with a myriad of choreographers and performance artists including Jennifer Monson and Vaginal Crème Davis. She is the recipient of an Obie,  Bessie, and Ethyl Eichelberger awards. She had a 10-year stint at Coney Island Sideshow by the Seashore and is a professor of performance at Pratt Institute.

Jennifer Monson uses choreographic practice as a means to discover connections between environmental, philosophical, and aesthetic approaches to knowledge and understandings of our surroundings. She creates large-scale dance projects informed and inspired by phenomena of the natural and the built environment. Monson is on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the dance department.

Jim Neu combined his love of wordplay, the American language and music with an ironic take on American culture in plays presented all over New York, especially at La MaMa, as well as in Chicago, Napa Valley, Dallas, TX, London, and Ljubljana, Slovenia. His subjects included the West, spies, big business, game shows, history, media, and more.

Owen Prum is a New York-based dancer, choreographer, and co-founder of the artist-run dance and performance space PAGEANT. He holds a BFA in dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Vicky Shick has been a part of the New York dance community for four decades, performing, teaching, and making pieces. She is extremely fortunate to have collaborated with many incredible dancers, choreographers, artists, and designers. She has shown her own work in venues in the U.S. and abroad. Shick was a Movement Research Artist in Residence and Bessie recipient (twice each), a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Isa Spector is a director, writer, and choreographer based in New York. Their work embodies the absurd and intimate landscape of digital culture via dance, theater, and film.

Reason Wade is an artist and writer critically thinking about decolonization, fashion, architecture and spirituality. They also spend time curating art happenings, producing and mixing music, styling, and knitting. Wade is interested in all possible relationships bodies can have with garments and how aesthetic principles reflect our society and culture. Wade received a degree in creative writing and is now pursuing studies in criticism and design.

Cathy Weis is a dancer, choreographer, videographer, and founder of Sundays on Broadway. She has been a soloist in the Louisville Ballet, played in a cello quartet in Europe, tap-danced on the streets of San Francisco, and did a stint as a disco queen. She moved to New York City in 1983 and has been the recipient of many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in dance and a Bessie Award for creativity.

Cherrie Yu is an artist born in Xi'an, China who lives in the United States. Her works are ontological inquiries in the form of film, performance, and choreography. In the past five years she has produced dance films, lecture performances, and documentaries that rewrite movement archives alongside various collaborators from a wide range of professions and expertise. Her work has been shown at Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, ME, and Judson Church and Pageant Space in New York.

The 2023–24 season of Sundays on Broadway is made possible in part by a grant from IndieSpace's The Little Venue That Could program.