NEW YORK LIVE ARTS' Live Artery Kicks Off Today

New York Live Arts has announced the schedule for Live Artery 2015, a four-day event at New York Live Arts connecting dance and body-based artists with curators, presenters and the public. Presented during the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference, Live Artery 2015 will feature two full theater remounts; excerpts from two recently premiered works and an excerpt from one forthcoming premiere work by 2014-15 New York Live Arts commissioned artists; and a work-in-progress showing by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (New York Live Arts' Resident Dance Company).

Now in its fourth season, Live Artery fuels a vibrant, nationwide network in support of compelling artists and ideas, providing Live Artery artists an invaluable opportunity to have their work seen by national and international presenters and the public. The annual showcase has presented 29 works thus far (including twelve original New York Live Arts commissions), and has included more than 60 artists in its programming.

The 2015 Live Artery lineup includes the following artists and works:

New Work for the Desert (2014) is choreographer Beth Gill's "beautiful" (ArtsJournal) follow-up to her New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award winning work Electric Midwife. The impressionistic evening length sextet is a distillation of duration and hue, abstracted within the quietude of memory. Inspired by the natural landscape of the American Southwest, recollections of Trisha Brown's Newark and the color and light explorations of artist James Turrell, Gill creates an original aesthetic world of perceptive experience with collaborators Thomas Dunn (visual design) and Jon Moniaci ("Bessie" Award winner for Sound Design, Electric Midwife). Time, color, sound and tension shift imperceptibly or dramatically, sifted through saturated optic fields reminiscent of the desert's striking transformations, as each dancer struggles with the rigidity of the body and its forms. Remounted in full for a one-night-only performance during Live Artery, the work "alters your sense of time...But the greatest wonders emerge from Ms. Gill's choreography and her six dancers" (The New York Times).

John Jasperse's Within between (2014) closed New York Live Arts' 2013-14 season to critical acclaim that described it as a "delightfully dizzying piece" with "skeins of carefree, virtuosic dancing" (The New York Times). The work, which returns to Live Arts remounted in full for a one-night-only performance during Live Artery, received two 2014 New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awards, for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Performer (Stuart Singer). Jasperse, a 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, is a choreographer often referred to with adjectives that include brainy, formal and austere. In Within between, Jasperse sought to simultaneously embrace and resist the habits of his own history, creating a catalytic mating of sensibilities that traverses what are often seen as aesthetic boundaries between mutually distinct terrains within the broader cultural landscape. Within between features dancers Maggie Cloud, Simon Courchel, Burr Johnson and Stuart Singer; lighting design by Lenore Doxsee; an original, commissioned score by composer Jonathan Bepler; and dramaturgical assistance by Ariel Osterweis.

Light Years (working title) (excerpt, premieres April 2015) is the "supremely talented" (The New York Times) Rashaun Mitchell's newest work. Performed by Hiroki Ichinose, Cori Kresge, Silas Riener and Melissa Toogood, the work features sound by Michael Beharie and Corwin Lamm, lighting design by Davison Scandrett and costumes by Mitchell and Riener. Before my eyes are memories of evolution, consciousness, magic. Seen from great speeds. From outer space, out of past-present-future. We are lost in the in-between time. What is origin? We pass through. Inexplicable illusions. Other people. We do not know what is real. We emerge. Portals open. The suns converge, a shifting landscape. The drums can still be heard. The body holds so many generations, so many genetic mutations, and the world is too much with us. We travel so far, so long. We walk off the face of the earth. The body must become space, claim everything, continue to (r)evolve. We must give. How far reaching is the self to make the bridge? To make and unmake.

Cynthia Oliver's BOOM! (excerpt, 2014), is a "shattering [and] universal" (The New Yorker) duet that features Oliver and Leslie Cuyjet as individuals, friends, strangers, family and younger/older versions of themselves, negotiating relations that are persistently in flux. Building upon a non-linear sequence of narratives around a life and a relationship-of a woman to herself, her history, her present and her future-BOOM! is a choreography of shifting realities. It is a looping, fractured unfolding, examining notions of destiny, when life happens and when "fairness" and cause and effect do not necessarily align.

RoseAnne Spradlin's "extravagantly enigmatic" g-h-o-s-t c-r-o-w-n (working title) (excerpt, 2014) is a highly physical work that "push[es] her dancers and her audience into some higher state" (The New York Times). Led by dancers Natalie Green and Rebecca Warner with devynn emory, Athena Malloy and Saúl Ulerio, the work features design elements by Glen Fogel, who previously collaborated with Spradlin on the 2006 Survive Cycle. Evolved from within the creative process, Jeffrey Young's original musical score for instruments and electronics was developed through improvisation during rehearsals with the dancers, and includes samples of the dancers' voices.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Analogy: A Trilogy (work-in-progress, premieres June 2015) is the Company's newest creation. Bill T. Jones, Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong and his company are developing three new evening length works. This trilogy brings into light the different types of war we fight, and in particular, the war within ourselves. Analogy: A Trilogy searches for the connection between three varying stories, focusing on memory and the effect of powerful events on the actions of individuals and, more importantly, on their often unexpressed inner life. Jones continues his exploration of how text, storytelling and movement pull and push against each other and how another experience can be had through the combination and recombination of these elements. Part One: Dora Tramontane will premiere at Montclair State University in June 2015.