New Dance Alliance Announces The 37th Annual PERFORMANCE MIX FESTIVAL, June 8-11

The 37th annual Performance Mix Festival brings together 30 experimental dance and film artists with deeply personal and expansive approaches to art-making.

This season's highlights include Once I Saw a Hummingbird by Bessie Award-winning choreographer Raúl Tamez, acclaimed freestyle street/club dance and live music artists LayeRhythm, film selections in collaboration with Cinédanse (Québec), and resident artists from New Dance Alliance's Black Artists Space to Create and LiftOff programs. New Dance Alliance (NDA) also brings back the Breakfast Mix, a convivial gathering and discussion with the International Artists that will feature a special screening of Gravel (re)Works by Jean-Christophe Yacono (yako).

Produced by New Dance Alliance Founder and Executive Director Karen Bernard, Performance Mix is the longest-running woman-led experimental dance festival in New York City. It has been described as a "performance festival whose work feels necessary, not only for an audience but also for the development of the presenting artists" (Noah Witke Mele, Eye on Dance).

The 2023 festival is curated by Karen Bernard and artist panel Mawu Ama Ma'at Gora, Bob Eisen, Blaze Ferrer, Glenn Potter-Takata, Hortense Gerardo, and x. In addition, films were selected in collaboration with Cinédanse.

Performances will take place Thursday, June 8 through Sunday, June 11, at Abrons Arts Center, 446 Grand Street, in the Experimental Theater. Performance times vary. Tickets for the 37th annual Performance Mix Festival range from $15 to $20 and can be purchased online at https://ci.ovationtix.com/209/production/1155289.

Breakfast Mix will be held on Friday, June 9, from 10:00 to 11:30am, at New Dance Alliance Studio, 182 Duane Street, in Tribeca. The event is free. Space is limited. Reservations are suggested and can be made by emailing admin@newdancealliance.org.

Link to promotional video: https://vimeo.com/804381107

Performance Mix 37 Schedule of Performances and Events

All performances will be live unless otherwise noted.

Thursday, June 8

7:00pm: Béatriz Mediavilla, Juli Brandano, Morgan Amirah Burns, Juan Jesús Guiraldi/UNA Constante

Béatriz Mediavilla, According to movement, a story in ten chapters (chapter 2) (Cinédanse film) Multidisciplinary artist Béatriz Mediavilla merges dance movement and film movement so that the audience can feel with their own bodies the gravity and motion as if they were dancing in a film too. Chapter 2 of her award-winning documentary, According to movement, will open the festival.

Juli Brandano, Some Other Material

Brooklyn-based choreographer Juli Brandano investigates the body as both material and dramatic subject in Some Other Material. A collaborative and research-based process, the work utilizes repetition, minimal music, and continual movement to forge a continuity between dancing bodies and the natural world. Initial inspiration was developed on Rockaway Beach, where the dancers studied and embodied the movement of tides and coastal erosion.

Morgan Amirah Burns, Black Girls Who Don't Like Watermelon Unite

In Black Girls Who Don't Like Watermelon Unite, Morgan Amirah Burns explores the nature of seeing people as trees. An exploration in acceptance, she shape-shifts, responding to her 2019 work A Tree Named Kevin, utilizing text, movement, and video art to merge her faith and feeling as she situates herself in a forest. Burns is a 2022-23 LiftOff Resident Artist.

Juan Jesús Guiraldi/UNA Constante, Clarity

Clarity is a movement essay about the physical experience of performing. "Delicate, subtle, vulnerable, and simple," writes Juan Jesús Guiraldi. "The continuum, a life which is born, death immediately after, and rebirth. The clear feeling of eternity which remains just a feeling." Guiraldi is a 2022-23 LiftOff Resident Artist.

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8:30pm: Kaveh Nabatian, Rafael V. Cañals Pérez, Ayan Felix, Raúl Tamez

Kaveh Nabatian, Prison of the Sun (Cinédanse film)

Award-winning Iranian-Canadian director and musician Kaveh Nabatian presents Prison of the Sun, a reaction to the pandemic and social unrest, as told through the street dance of "waacking", by world renowned dancer Axelle Munezero.

Rafael V. Cañals Pérez, Autonomía de lo soñado/Autonomy of the dreamt (Working Title) Rafael V. Cañals Pérez's latest work is an organized series of improvisatory states of being in a movement journey of self-realization. A figure in space taking control of its own weight, surrendering to gravity in a balancing dance that always goes and never arrives. Pérez was a 2021-22 LiftOff Resident Artist.

Ayan Felix, the queen has died... (excerpt)

North Carolina-based choreographer Ayan Felix brings their latest work, the queen has died... to the festival. The work is an apparatus to achieve distinct flavors of Black queer joy. Backed by a mix of

Southern classics, it is a collaborative effort between three dancers and a DJ to stay afloat and avoid the news. Felix is a 2023 Black Artist Space to Create Resident Artist.

Raúl Tamez, Once I Saw a Hummingbird

Once I Saw a Hummingbird by Bessie Award-winning choreographer Raúl Tamez has been described as a ritual of ancestral souls. The work is the liminal space where two spirits embrace in another dimension. A sublimation of death. A clamor of magic.

Friday, June 9

10:00am: Breakfast Mix

Breakfast and convivial gathering to meet this year's International Artists held at the NDA Studio. 10:00-10:30am: Breakfast

10:30-11:00am: A discussion facilitated by Karen Bernard that includes Sylvain Bleau, Director of Cinédanse, filmmakers Jean-Christophe Yacono (yako), Jil Guyon, and Mistaya Hemingway, and choreographer Raúl Tamez.

11:00am-12:00pm: Screening of Frédérick Gravel and Jean-Christophe Yacono's Gravel (re)Works

With images as medium, an album as format, and music and dance as disciplines, the new project co created by artists Frédérick Gravel and Jean-Christophe Yacono draws on the choreographic material of Gravel's previous works. The result is a work that engages in an intimate relationship between the camera and the dancing body. Gravel (re)Works consists of five short films in the form of musical and choreographic moments.The pieces are available separately or in their assembled 42-minute format.

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8:00pm: Mistaya Hemingway, Katerina & Jay, Maho Ogawa, evan ray suzuki

Mistaya Hemingway, Naïade (Cinédanse film)

Naïade is a reflection on the ways image and self-perception have changed in this post #MeToo era. What do we keep and what do we shed? Using water as a feedback loop and the haunting music of Beatrice Deer and Jace Lasek, Naïade dives into the depths of consciousness.

Katerina & Jay, angel mode

angel mode, by artist duo Katrina & Jay, synthesizes movement, media projection, objects, and costume design to play with abstractions of human and nonhuman forms. The work will be performed with live music accompaniment.

Maho Ogawa, silence

Maho Ogawa presents a work for three dancers enacting gestures of the Japanese tea ceremony as choreography. Inspired by John Cage's "silence", the gestures are composed with sets of "pauses", inquiring about what you see when dancers don't move, providing a meditative spiritual experience for both audiences and performers.

evan ray suzuki, I'm listening, i'm just nervous

I'm listening, i'm just nervous enacts a butoh-ish gestural choreographic landscape ranging from disjointed order to organized chaos. Taking inspiration from Juzo Itami's idea of the "ramen western," the work offers an abstracted yet unflinching look at the wild west of the internet culture machine. evan ray suzuki is a 2022-23 LiftOff Resident Artist.

Saturday, June 10

7:00pm: Jean-Christophe Yacono (yako), LayeRhythm

Jean-Christophe Yacono (yako), FEAR IN MOTION and WIDOW'S WALK (Cinédanse film) The images of Jean-Christophe Yacono (yako) are blurred, they always have been. He has always been attracted to images in which one perceives time, a scenery that scrolls, the feverishness of a body that moves or a hand that apprehends. As if what attracts him is what he cannot completely grasp. To perceive the time which passes rather than to look at the stop on an image, constrained, posed, unrealistic. Like color, sharpness seems trivial and devoid of added meaning.

WIDOW'S WALK is a film of New York artist Jil Guyon's live performance of Widow Walk at Musée d'Art de Rouyn-Noranda, festival Cinédanse, Québec, 2022. The performance finds Guyon, Béatriz Mediavilla, and Mistaya Hemingway executing a suspenseful walk in radically slow time. This short film is a digital point of view of that event.

LayeRhythm

LayeRhythm, the acclaimed freestyle street/club dance and live music performance design, joins Performance Mix Festival for the first time. Improvised sets based on ideas from the audience, typical of an evening with LayeRhythm, will take the audience on a journey through interactive creativity, community-building, and artistic play.

The Saturday evening program will be followed by a reception.

Sunday, June 11

1:00pm: Jil Guyon, Alexander Diaz, Ayano Elson, Alison Kopit

Jil Guyon, Rouyn Noranda (Cinédanse film)

Rouyn Noranda features a lone woman drifting through a bleak industrial wasteland. The desolation of her interior world is both reflected in and witnessed by the toxic environmental terrain she is compelled to traverse. Eschewing traditional narrative progression, the film follows the protagonist's actions through a series of languorous panoramas, fixed shots, and close-ups-evoking a world equally beautiful and terrifying.

Alexander Diaz, in due time

in due time aims to explore the inner voice, how it is formed, and how it then shapes our intentions, and desires, in turn molding our individual natures both internally and externally. Alexander Diaz writes: "I've created "in due time" to better understand patterns I've adopted as well as belief systems I've inherently used as scaffolding to protect myself from myself." Diaz is a 2023 Black Artist Space to Create Resident Artist.

Ayano Elson, Good Boy

In translation, trust and treachery coexist; sharing may become subterfuge. A dark, dreamlike flow of stark, disparate images and collapsing shapes, Ayano Elson's Good Boy reveals the distinct vocabularies and systems of choreography encountered in translation.

Alison Kopit, Reverberations

Alison Kopit's Reverberations explores the tension between the care we can build through intimacy across distance and the simultaneous depth of queercrip longing in the absence of in-person

connection. Reverberations is a slippery experiment with ephemerality, a flirtation with space/time travel, and a way of reaching for connection across a fractured social landscape. Kopit is a 2022-23 LiftOff Creative Resident Artist.

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2:30pm: Marlene Millar/Sandy Silva/Migration Dance Film Project, Alex Romania, Psychic Wormhole/Stacy Lynn Smith

Marlene Millar/Sandy Silva/Migration Dance Film Project, Navigation (Cinédanse film) Set in the spectacular west coast of Ireland with a cast of 10 dancers and 40 singers, Navigation uses the landscape, vocals, and rhythm to explore how we navigate through unknown terrain.

Alex Romania, New You Start Now

Existential molecules query at profound mourning as the room sings, bodies vibrate in transcendent dissolution. As we are somehow here and nowhere, we embrace a proposition for performance where, with everything we've gone through, we need to do little more than be.

Psychic Wormhole/Stacy Lynn Smith, GURU (Working Title)

Stacy Lynn Smith's new work unpacks the gross prevalence of abuse by those who are idolized.

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4:00pm: Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo, K.J. Holmes, mignolo dance, Nora Sharp

Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo, Smudge (Cinédanse film)

Smudge [definition] "A practice used by many Indigenous people involving the burning of medicine plants and immersing oneself in the smoke. It is used to cleanse, bring good energy, dispel the negative, connect with ancestors and the Earth." Two generations-the past and future. The strength of tradition, the isolation of the contemporary world. Joined by blood, joined by Earth. The film asks: Can this connection overcome the emptiness?

K.J. Holmes, 900 Bees are Humming

K.J. Holmes will perform an excerpt of her dance/theater/installation entitled 900 Bees are Humming. The work was researched when she was an NDA Resident Artist in spring 2022. It is a work that enters an interior of the body as a landscape within, surrounded by an ecology of time, weight, and space. Holmes was a 2021-22 LiftOff Resident Artist.

mignolo dance, Subjective Time

Subjective Time is an exploration of the mysterious ways that time expands and contracts based on the internal intricacies of individual and collective experiences. Using movement phrases inspired by distinct memories and life events, the performers weave a technicolor temporal tapestry of dance.

Nora Sharp, The F____, the Fawn, and the Boss

Three characters arrive on a stage: One lets you know there's a bad smell in the room, another begins a speech defending their boss, and the third is trying to dance with their crush at a party. The F____, the Fawn, and the Boss triangulates the pathways of three relationships to gendered power struggle. Holding power, yearning after it, and just trying to have a good time.

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5:00pm: Thomas Corriveau, Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Rebecca Patek and Connor Voss

Thomas Corriveau, They Dance With Their Heads (Cinédanse film)

The severed head of a choreographer is held captive by an eagle on a desert island. With a dazzling mastery of drawing and painting, this animated short unexpectedly takes us into the sensitive world of an artist madly in love with dance. The film was developed from a series of workshops with dancers in Montréal. Describing the process, Thomas Corriveau said that he wanted the energy of the colored lines to fully participate in the emergence of a strong and sensitive bodily presence for the interpretations.

Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Whatever happened to ____?

About their new work, Maxi Hawkeye Canion writes: "Finally, see me at my worst, as bubblegum chewed for too long...a gorgeous color. I vehemently wonder how the body can be a safe house, a home, and simultaneously the cruelest extension of hope. Sometimes shit is just bleak." Canion is a 2022-23 LiftOff Resident Artist.

Rebecca Patek and Connor Voss, N Site

Rebecca Patek and Connor Voss's performance will explore the meeting point of matter and spirit within the human mind/body. They write: "Dance as the most useless and therefore highest form of all the arts is uniquely positioned to be the medium for discovery."

For more information about the festival, visit https://newdancealliance.org/performance-mix-festival/.

The @Abrons Series program is a subsidized theater rental program that provides access to its spaces as well as production services at subsidized rates. While @Abrons is not curated, priority is given to shows and events that align with Abrons' mission and that are committed to anti-oppression. For shows, events or artistic projects working to build community projects that are socially or civically inclusive - yet have very small budgets - there is an application for an extra-subsidized rate.

Cinédanse's mission is to stimulate the creation of all generations, and to present to the public dance works by living artists from Québec, Canada, and elsewhere. Cinédanse presents a variety of artistic mediums, including performances, art films, documentaries, installations, and all kinds of works that link dance to several other disciplines revolving around it: cinema, visual arts, and digital arts. Between two editions of the Cinédanse festival, La Caravane travels to stimulate communities, professionals and artists alike. After being presented in Montréal, Québec City, Ottawa, and Rouyn-Noranda, the fifth edition of the festival will be held in Caraquet, New-Brunswick, which will be recognized as the cultural capital of Acadia next summer.

In 1986 New Dance Alliance (NDA) created the Performance Mix series now known as the Performance Mix Festival to advance emerging methods, techniques, and trends of innovative dance.

The festival has grown to include artists from around the globe, including South Africa, Canada, Europe, and South America. Executive Director Karen Bernard has been invited to many festivals across Canada and Europe, forming relationships that have broadened her curatorial process and widened the festival's scope. By bringing her expansive awareness of culture into an intimate setting, Bernard cultivates an important sharing of creativity internationally.

Incorporated in 1989, New Dance Alliance (NDA) is a performing arts nonprofit. Its mission, from the earliest days, has been to support experimental movement-based artists. In recent years, the organization has shifted its focus, making an explicit commitment to equity and inclusion, creating programs centering the work of artists from historically marginalized communities. NDA provides space, residencies, performance, and networking opportunities that help artists cultivate relationships, develop their artistry, and open doors to share their work in the US and internationally. Its main programs are Performance Mix Festival, NDA Studio Programs (Black Artists Space to Create Residency, LiftOff: Residency and Workshop, Satellite Rehearsal Space, Work Sessions), and projects created by interdisciplinary artist and performer Karen Bernard. Collectively, these programs support the work of more than 100 experimental artists and bring in 2,500 audience members each year. www.newdancealliance.org