Harlem Stage to Present Choreographer nia love's UNDERCURRENTS in May

Harlem Stage will present Bessie- and Herb Alpert Award-winning choreographer, dancer, and Harlem Stage WaterWorks Established Artist nia love's UNDERcurrents, May 4-6. The production is a multimedia performance and research platform that asks: "What remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect?"

In UNDERcurrents, love and her collaborators explore this question through the themes of water and doors, as the point of departure for captive Africans into the Middle Passage is often described as "the door of no return." Conjuring the continual resonance of this world-making and world-breaking threshold, UNDERcurrents is a participatory audience experience with an immersive installation that is activated by performance.

Watch the trailer below!

love explains, "Our aim is an experience of immersion that is, most crucially, felt-where the audience participates in a speculative process in which the submerged gestural and elemental traces of transatlantic slavery are made palpable. This is the core of the new departure of UNDERcurrents: we want to bring the audience fully into this world, we want to reduce the distance between the audience and the performance, taking the audience out to sea, or bringing the sea forth, and from this altered perspective we shift our embodied habits of sensing these foundational conditions of our lived environments and histories."

To create UNDERcurrents, love is working with the dancers Cyan Hunter, Diana Uribe, j. bouey, Jesse Phillips-Fein, Jessica Ziegler, Lela Aisha Jones, Makeda Lily Love-Roney, and Marco Farroni; and with the composer-musicians Antoine Roney, Emanuel Ruffler, Jeremiah Ka'lab, and Kojo Roney, who perform live.

Ahead of the presentation of UNDERcurrents at the Gatehouse, Harlem Stage presents the Dive Deeper event Kitchen Conversations: Medicinally together. Traditionally one. Conversations on the art of healing and teamwork, a roundtable conversation about ancient medicines that live deep in the body and can be accessed through an active and ongoing mediation of art and science. How can we build artist and doctor relationships that promote health in black and brown communities? The free virtual event-April 25 at 7pm-features nia love with author Christina Sharpe, architect Jerome Haferd, artist and somatic practitioner Makeda Lily Love-Roney, choreographer/director and poet Nzingha Tyehemba, and physician and rheumatologist Dr. Shante Hinson. It aims to address the divide among art, science, and healing.

WaterWorks serves as the umbrella for all Harlem Stage commissioned and produced work, which is then premiered at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. The program gives visionary artists critical support to create new, innovative, socially significant work and engage the Harlem Stage community through residency, humanities, and educational activities over a 1-3 year period. Through WaterWorks, the institution provides a creative home to artists and serves as a catalyst, conduit, and incubator of ideas and works that are relevant locally, nationally, and internationally. Artists commissioned through WaterWorks include Bill T. Jones, Tania Leon, Roger Guenveur Smith, Sekou Sundiata, Vijay Iyer, Mike Ladd, Kyle Abraham, Robert Glasper, Stew, Meshell Ndegeocello, Tamar-kali, Xian aTunde Adjuah, Imani Uzuri, and Jason Diakité.

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Performances of UNDERcurrents take place at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse (150 Convent Avenue):

Thursday, May 4, at 7:30pm

Friday, May 5, at 7:30pm

Saturday, May 6, at 7:30pm

Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at harlemstage.org.

Dive Deeper: nia love Kitchen Conversations: Medicinally together. Traditionally one. Conversations on the art of healing and teamwork takes place virtually on Tuesday, April 25 at 7:00pm.

About nia love

nia love (she/her) is a choreographer and somatic practitioner driven by the social force and weight of blackness. Aiming to breach the propriety of "dance," she redresses it as gesture - the memory of movement, geographies, and scales and ruptures of time held in our flesh. As a teenager, love apprenticed with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in Havana, Cuba. She is a Graduate of Howard University (BA) and Florida State University (MFA), and she is a Fulbright Fellow for research in Ghana, Mali and Togo, Urban Bush Women Choreographic Initiative 2.0 Fellow, and an Embodying Anti-Racism Fellow at Wesleyan University. She has received two Bessie's Awards for performance and music composition, and is a recipient of the the Herb Alpert Award and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award. Her work has been funded by NYLA's Suitcase Fund, the MAP Fund, and NEFA's National Dance Project Production Grant, and she has received LMCC's Workspace Residency, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) Residency, the Movement Research Rosin Fund Residency. In addition to her own work, she has toured internationally with Butoh master Min Tinaka's Poe Project and nationally with Liz Lerman's Wicked Bodies. Love has taught across the U.S. and abroad, and currently she is an adjunct professor at Queens College and the New School, and the artistic advisor to NYLA's Fresh Tracks program, and BAX's Artist-in-Residence program.