New York Live Arts Announces 2016-17 Season

The fall season at New York Live Arts, home of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and under the artistic leadership of MacArthur Genius Award and National Medal of the Arts recipient Bill T. Jones and Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong, presents a dynamic roster of new works including five world and four New York City premieres, eight Live Arts commissions and an engaging schedule of humanities events.

"While art cannot save the world, we at New York Live Arts believe it creates community, confluences and platforms," states Bill T. Jones, Artistic Director. "In defining our vision for New York Live Arts we say we are a cultural organization among many, in a country with immense resources and power. With these resources and power come responsibilities. We believe that all ideas, like all people, deserve a hearing. At New York Live Arts, we offer a safe platform for the expression of ideas."

Featuring an unprecedented commitment to the development of new work, New York Live Arts will present five new commissions by Live Feed artists; conduct ambitious Open Spectrum community dialogues that focus on President Obama's legacy; and showcase the Live Ideas festival, which examines the idea of a world without binaries and is curated by trans-genre artist Mx Justin VivIan Bond.

"Every artist we commission to create a new work becomes a partner. Every educational and cultural institution we engage with becomes our partner. Every artist or institution that utilizes our space, adding to its history and imprimatur, is also a much valued partner as we move forward," states Jones. "Though our era has deep wounds - some of them grave - we are optimistic about the future. History has shown that the 'thinking class' of which artists are an important component, has always been a leader in healing."

The Live Arts season opens with the collaboration among three of today's must-see innovators, Lars Jan, Geoff Sobelle and Nichole Canuso entitled Pandæmonium. Creating a new work together for the first time following years of mutual support across the Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles performance scenes, dancer/choreographer Nichole Canuso (Midway Avenue, HERE, 2015) and theater artists Geoff Sobelle (The Object Lesson, BAM Next Wave 2015, New York Theater Workshop 2017) and Lars Jan (TIMe: The Institute of Memory, Under the Radar 2016) will premiere Pandæmonium at New York Live Arts, September 28-October 1, 7:30 PM. Pandæmonium bridges dance, theater, rock concert and real-time cinema, exploring themes of interconnectedness and isolation in our digitally enhanced world through the creation of a cinematic space where infinite worlds collide.

The New York City premiere of parts one and two of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's new dance theatre work, the Analogy Trilogy, will be presented at the Joyce Theater, October 25 through November 6, 2016.Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist, a tragic yet humorous journey through the sex trade, drug use and excess during the 1980s, is part two of the trilogy, a work based on oral histories and inspired by W.G. Sebald's award-winning novel The Emigrants. Part one, Analogy/Dora: Tramontane, recounts the story of 95-year-old Dora Amelan, a French Jewish nurse, social worker and World War II survivor. For more information on the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's touring, see attached schedule.

Complementing The Joyce Theater performances, Bill T. Jones will be in conversation with renowned artists. Jones will speak on October 29 with multi-media artist Carrie Mae Weems and on November 5 with directorMoisés Kaufman. Both conversations will be moderated by Mary Marshall Clark, Director of Columbia Center for Oral History Research. Pretty Ball, a closing night dance party featuring DJTonyMonkey and special guests, will rock the house on November 6. All three events will take place at New York Live Arts starting at 6PM.

Mr. Jones will also speak in New York on October 6 at the Future of Story Telling Summit and on October 13 at Danspace Project in Conversations w/Bill T. Jones, Ishmael Houston-Jones and Will Rawls.

Framing New York Live Arts' humanities and visual art programming during a contentious election is "Obama Out" with the Open Spectrum Critical Community Dialogues focusing on the final days of the first black presidency and President Obama's legacy. Opening September 19, 2016, and continuing through November 2016 is Say It Loud!, a participatory installation in the Ford Foundation Live Gallery, featuring For Freedoms (Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, Eric Gottesman, Wyatt Gallery, Albert James Ignacio, Hank Willis Thomas and Michelle Woo), an installation that invites the public to participate with their thoughts and hopes about freedom, the election and democracy.

Open Spectrum will continue with Superunknown!, October 5, 7PM, a discussion with cultural leaders who have made lasting differences to our city's cultural identity. Panelists are Karen Brooks Hopkins, Senior Fellow in Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; President Emerita, BAM, Holly Hotchner, President, Hotchner Consulting; Founding Director, the Museum of Arts and Design, Ruby Lerner, Founding President and Executive Director, Creative Capital Foundation, Danny Simmons, Co-Founder and Vice Chair, Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation. The discussion will be moderated by Kavitha Mediratta, Chief Strategy Advisor for Equity Initiatives and Human Capital Development at The Atlantic Philanthropies. Mic Drop, October 24, 7PM, with MC/Poet Baba Israel, features some of New York City's most dynamic political and musical voices; and What Will be Different?, December 5, 2016, 7PM, is a discussion on women's lives after the 2016 election. Open Spectrum is presented with partner MAPP International Productions.

Through its Live Feed creative residency program, Live Arts supports and nurtures the creation of new work with developmental residencies and commissions over two years. Informal public showings offer a sneak peek into resident artists' processes before they hit the Live Arts stage. Second-year Live Feed artists Gillian Walsh, Sonya Tayeh, Andrea Kleine, YACKEZ and Adrienne Truscott will present full-length productions of work developed during their Live Feed residencies.

Finding formalism in an infinite abyss, Gillian Walsh's new work dance demon by formaldehyde 9 xgzdiiiiiicdiirrwjfffffffff (pronounced grief), presented November 16-19, 2016, 8PM, continues in the vein of uncompromising choreographic investigation that takes dance as its subject but does not create dance. Deceptively simple, but designed to cultivate a different kind of attention in its audience, Walsh's new work intends to circulate outside of traditional theatrical contexts. She continues to work with longtime collaborators Maggie Cloud and Mickey Mahar, among others.

Obie and Lucille Lortel Award winner and Drama Desk- and Emmy Award-nominated choreographer Sonya Tayeh's emotionally charged dance-symphony you'll still call me by name, presented Dec 9-11 and 14-17, 2016, 7:30PM, explores the mystifying, complex and sometimes jagged relationship between mother and daughter. Live music by indie-folk duo
The Bengsons.

Andrea Kleine's new project, My Dinner with Andrea: the piece formerly known as Torture Playlist, will be shown February 9-11, 2017, 7:30PM. Kleine began making a dance about the music deployed in the CIA's torture program. Utterly depressed, she abandoned that idea and channeled theater shaman Andre Gregory from his 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, creating a new version of the famed dinner conversation as she seeks answers on how to make a dance about torture, or how to make anything at all. The piece emerges as an amalgam of fragments from the reclusive artist whose work is "wry, poignant" (New York Times) and "something like genius" (ArtVoice).

Give it to You Stage by YACKEZ (Larissa and Jon Velez-Jackson), presented March 29-April 1, 2017, 7:30PM, culminates a body of underground performances into a large-scale dance musical in two acts. Performed with their Queer pro-wrestling dance ensemble, the piece addresses pop celebrities in the vein of the cult comedic film This Is Spinal Tap.

Adrienne Truscott's Wild Bore, shown April 5-8, 2017, 7:30PM, features three of the international cabaret circuit's most notorious artists: Adrienne Truscott, Zoe Coombs Marr and UrsulA Martinez. Using reviews and critical writing about live performance, Wild Bore looks at what it is to walk the tightrope between elitist and accessible, fidelity and translation, audacity and restraint.

New York Live Arts is very proud to announce the 2016-17 Live Feed In Process artists who will present workshop showings of new work in the 2016-17 season followed by 2017-18 commissioned season premieres. These artists include Walter Dundervill, December 16-17, 2016, Carlos Soto, February 3-4, 2017, Jack Ferver, March 3-4, 2017, DANCENOISE, April 13-14, 2017, Joanne Kotze, May 12-13, 2017, and Paloma McGregor, June 16-17, 2017. All Live Feed in Process showings start at 6PM. The Live Feed program continues its support of new work development in partnership with several institutions, including American Dance Institute (ADI), Queens College CUNY Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance, Barnard College and more.

The Canales Project, presented December 4, 2016 and May 21, 2017, explores diverse artistic traditions to understand a common past as well as a shared future. Created by Carla Dirlikov Canales, the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Bulgarian father, the project, part of Live Arts Plus, will give voice to issues of identity and cultures through the arts and conversation.

Returning Feb 2-4, 2017 is Ellen Robbins' Dances by Very Young Choreographers. This showcase of young talent has become one of New York Live Arts' most beloved community programs, inspiring children by introducing them to live performances created and performed by their peers. The work is often humorous, dramatic, lyrical, sometimes abstract and always entertaining.

A special highlight of the 2016-2017 season is New York Live Arts' annual interdisciplinary series Live Ideas. For the 2017 festival, March 14-19, 2017, trans-genre artist Mx Justin VivIan Bond will curate a series examining the idea of a world without binaries entitled Mx'd Messages. The festival arrives at a critical moment in which the very idea of binaries-across gender, politics, theology, sensory perception and race-are under question. A series of performances, keynote lectures and exhibitions will explore the hierarchies and assumptions resulting from a culturally dominant mode of binary thinking.

Kicking off the Live Ideas festival is Richard Move's highly anticipated world premiere collaboration with acclaimed theater artist Alba Clemente and visual artist Paolo Canevari entitled XXYY, a poetic, multi-sensorial and otherworldly theatrical event exploring the multiplicity of chromosomal combinations that genetically encode and produce gender identity, revealing the spectrum of gender and de/reconstructing the conventional binaries of male and female. Synthesizing visual art, dance and performance, XXYY offers a provocative, alternative vision of the world as it steadily builds toward an ecstatic state. The piece will be presented March 8-11, 2017.

Bessie Award winner and New York Live Arts' 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned ArtistOkwui Okpokwasili presents the New York City premiere of Poor People's TV Room, April 19-22 and 26-29, 2017, 7:30PM, created as part of her two-year residency at Live Arts. The piece is informed by two historic incidents in Nigeria: the Women's War of 1929, a resistance movement against British colonial powers, and the Boko Haram kidnappings of more than 300 girls that launched the Bring Back Our Girls movement. Created in collaboration with director/visual designer Peter Born, a multi-generational ensemble will perform the piece, featuring movement, song and text influenced by dystopian folklore, speculative fiction, Igbo cosmology and the futures and commodities markets.

Live Arts' legendary Fresh Tracks Performance and Residency program continues its 52-year commitment to bringing new voices to the fore. Aimed at providing career and residency support for five emerging artists, the program begins with a series of career-oriented professional development workshops leading up to a debut showcase of previously created works on Jan 13-14, 2017, 7:30PM, and culminates in a workshop presentation of new works developed throughout the residency on June 14-15, 2017, 7:30PM. Through Fresh Tracks, New York Live Arts provides a singular opportunity for new artistic voices to gain professional development, experience and recognition.

The 2016-2017 touring season for New York Live Arts' resident company, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, starts with a world premiere of Jones' latest work Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC, and continues with a national tour of Analogy/Dora: Tramontane; a highly anticipated return of the company to the Singapore International Festival of Arts, which includes a one night only talking solo choreographed and performed by Bill T. Jones and three performances ofA Letter/Singapore, a site-specific work with twenty-three local dancers; a two-week season at New York's The Joyce alternating performances of Analogy/Dora and Analogy/Lance, both New York City premieres; and a US premiere of A Letter to My Nephew at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA. (For a detailed touring schedule, see season calendar below.)

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
Located in the heart of Chelsea in New York City, New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the social, political and cultural currents of our time.

At the center of its identity is Artistic Director Bill T. Jones, world-renowned choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and is its sole producer, providing support and the environment to originate innovative and challenging new work for the Company and the NYC creative community. New York Live Arts produces and presents dance, music and theater performances in its 20,000 square-foot home, which includes a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square-foot studios that can be combined into one large studio. New York Live Arts offers an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people and supports the continuing professional development of artists and commissions.

The creation of new work by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company is made possible by the company's Partners in Creation: Anne Delaney, Zoe Eskin, Eleanor Friedman and Carol Tolan.

Support is provided by Con Edison, Creative Capital, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, the Ford Foundation, Goethe-Institut, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Violet Jabara Charitable Trust, the Jerome Foundation, the Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the National Performance Network, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the O'Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Shubert Foundation and Theatre Development Fund.

New York Live Arts is supported by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council with special thanks to Council Member Corey Johnson and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.