New York Live Arts Presents 7th Annual Live Arts PRIDE: THE HOUSE PARTY - A CELEBRATION OF CHOSEN FAMILY

New York Live Arts has announced the 7th annual Live Arts Pride 2024: THE HOUSE PARTY, celebrating the resilient and creative power of LGBTQIA chosen family and artistic collectives.

Organized by Tyler Ashley, The Dauphine, the celebration transforms 219 West 19th Street into an all day extravaganza, June 30th from 2-7pm, including: A commissioned Ford Foundation Live Gallery lobby installation on-view now through August 2024; a queer marketplace featuring visionary artisans and live DJ sets in the Live Arts open air lobby with grassroots double dutch workshops and presentations, all free and open to the public; three nightlife artist collectives created from chosen families or “houses” who will present individually curated performance and DJ concerts activating the Live Arts theater. For a dazzling seventh year, The House Party brings together NYC's queer nightlife and art scene to serve up the city's most colorful and fierce performance, music, drag, double dutch and more. Limited $25-$40 Presale tickets available now; $50 at door. Please visit NewYorkLiveArts.org. 

Multimedia performance artist MX Oops' ECSTATIC AESTHETICS interactive installation was created in tandem with their newest performance work that had its world premiere at Live Arts in April. The exhibition features Oops and collaborators, Dominican-American actor, dancer, and Pose star, Jason A. Rodriguez; augmented virtual reality artist Eva Davidova; music, animation and performer, Tr!ggered; and vocal artist stefa marin alarcón. Custom neon signs, as well as films, portraits and augmented reality video shot during the creation period for the performance adorn the lobby, creating a vibrant container for the marketplace. Research and collaboration in Ghana, Trinidad, Hawaii, and the Dominican Republic, are audio-visual meditations on how positive deviance can support personal and collective liberation. The installation is on view free and open to the public daily 10am-6pm through August 2024. 

Live Arts warmly welcomes back the special collectives Legends of Drag, Body Hack, and Yas Mama. Infusing the Live Arts theater-turned-club, these thoughtful, galvanizing families will express their distinct voices in back-to-back sets featuring a mix of founding resident DJs, performers, visual and multidisciplinary artists, activists, and more. Returning to rove the theater and streetfront, Double Dutch Dreamz is an intergenerational program committed to preserving time honored traditions of jumping ropes. Participants can show off their skills and/or learn double dutch by signing up for workshops in person on the day of the event.

Body Hack is a mutual care resource and international fundraising collective for and by trans and queer people of color. Their set will feature sets from resident DJs and organizers Cisne, ARCHANGEL, and NanaXOXO, and more. Legends of Drag will feature NYC-based legacy drag queens Stella D'Oro, Simone, and Barbara Herr, joined by Legends of Drag book authors and organizers Harry James Hanson aka DJ Skirtsuit on music and Devin Antheus as Emcee. Yas Mama is Brooklyn's queerest LatinX party featuring multidisciplinary artists focused on bringing latin sounds to the forefront. It will be represented by DJ sets from Jenn D'Role and Ickarus, with shows from house mother Horrorchata, Brooklyn drag legend Lady Quesa, and The Boulet Brothers' Dragula Season 4 star La Zavaleta. Malika Lee Whitney is Artistic Director of Pickney Productions, a Harlem based collective of intergenerational multi-discipline performing artists. She is Founder and Coach of Double Dutch Dreamz established to revive and incentivize health, wellness and fitness.

From 2-6pm, the Live Arts Lobby will transform into a queer marketplace featuring two of NYC's most musically adventurous and captivating divas, DJs Dinah Fire and Charlene Incarnate. Artisans will feature fashions, jewelry and eyewear, custom wearable artwork, and more. Vendors include:  Valentine Amartey, BoiPKG, A World of Hurt by Jos Hurt, Triple T-Shirts by Beau McCall, Made by AO, MX Oops, Trans Equity Consulting. The marketplace does not require tickets and is free and open to the public, maintaining the accessibility of Live Arts' lobby bathrooms and water fountains to all attending or passing by. 

Live Arts' 2023-2024 season presents artists and thought leaders who participate courageously in the world of ideas and ask difficult questions. Forwarding a vision to be a conduit for engagement through the arts and body-based investigation, Live Arts prioritizes creating communities, confluences, and platforms for the exchange of ideas. Live Arts Pride is dedicated to and in honor of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company Co-founder, Arnie Zane. Donations can be made to New York Live Arts in Zane's name. All tickets include complimentary cocktails by sponsor Tito's Handmade Vodka. Come early for complimentary small bites presented by innovative food artisans BITE NY, and additional delicious offerings from sponsors Brooklyn Brewery, Captain Lawrence Brewing Company, Boxed Water, and BKE Kombucha. 

ABOUT

Arnie Zane (1948-1988), co-founder Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, was a native New Yorker born in the Bronx and educated at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton. In 1971, Arnie Zane and Bill T. Jones began their long collaboration in choreography and in 1973 formed the American Dance Asylum in Binghamton with Lois Welk. Mr. Zane's first recognition in the arts came as a photographer when he received a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Fellowship in 1973.  Mr. Zane was the recipient of a second CAPS Fellowship in 1981 for choreography, as well as two Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1983 and 1984).  In 1980, Mr. Zane was co-recipient, with Bill T. Jones, of the German Critics Award for his work, Blauvelt Mountain. Rotary Action, a duet with Mr. Jones, was filmed for television, co-produced by WGBH-TV Boston and Channel 4 in London.

MX Oops is a multimedia performance artist and educator whose work centers hybridity, encouraging ecstatic disobedience as a path toward embodied wellness. Their vision is of a world where we can each be held in the fullness of our complexity. The party is the point of departure, a queer site of transnational Afro-diasporic imagining. Their creative practice links urban arts [breaking, house, vogue femme, rap, dj, vj, fashion], somatic studies [yoga, thai yoga massage, energy healing, sound baths], media studies, and gender studies. Through this transdisciplinary approach, their work questions whether consciousness itself is the primary medium. These mediums come together to welcome party people into a lush world of queer becoming.

Their work has been supported by the Jerome Foundation, National Performance Network, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Dixon Place Dance Commission, Research Foundation CUNY. Residencies include: Dance Theater Workshop Studio Series, CultureHub NYC Resident Artist, Ammerman Center for Art and Technology, Henan Normal University, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Barnard College, University of Florida, and Old Dominion University. Their work has been presented at Abrons Art Center, The Box, American Realness, Witte de Witte Contemporary Art Center, Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art Gala, Socrates Sculpture Park Benefit, and the GoDown Center in Nairobi Kenya, as a Cultural Envoy of the US State Department.

A certified yoga instructor (500hr RYT) and practitioner of Thai Yoga Massage, trained in various forms of energy healing, they completed a BA in dance and religion at the George Washington University and completed an Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Dance, Multimedia Performance, and Somatic Studies in the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre, and Dance at Lehman College, City University of New York, USA. 

Legends of Drag, a new photography book by Harry James Hanson and Devin Antheus, celebrates these queer elders who have long been cultural and spiritual leaders within their communities. Since 2018, we have photographed 81 drag legends in 16 cities, each styled with a custom floral arrangement. The book includes forewords by fashion icon Miss J Alexander and drag superstar Sasha Velour. The work has been published in the New York Times, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue (twice). The 2022 Legends tour produced sold out all-star drag shows in nightclubs and ballrooms across the country, and yielded two solo museum shows at the Museum of Wisconsin Art (Milwaukee, WI) and the Tenderloin Museum (San Francisco, CA). Legends of Drag is an essential contribution to the queer archive, and the first photo book of its kind. You can keep up with the work on Instagram.

Yas Mama is an Experience! Brooklyn's queer latinx party features multidisciplinary artists in drag, art, and music focusing on bringing latin sounds to the main stage.

BODY HACK is a mutual care resource and international fundraising collective for and by trans and queer people of color. We host a happy hour and afterparty for trans, non-binary cuties, and the squirrels that love us. 

DOUBLE DUTCH DREAMZ GET YOUR JUMP ON! is an intergenerational program committed to preserving time honored traditions of jumping ropes. A creative arc spins at the hands of turners as jumpers enter with syncopated feet hitting a surface displaying basic and intricate moves. Rope rhymes are chanted in call and response fashion keeping the action all the way live. Everyone is invited to participate in judgment free zones so whether new to the experience or already have street cred you can be down. Double Dutch Dreamz Get Your Jump On! activations for youth and adults serve schools, recreation centers, museums, city-wide parks, music festivals, as well as dance and theater platforms. A short list of venues includes, Lincoln Center, SummerStage, The High Line, Governor's Island, Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art and Storytelling, Children's Museum of Manhattan, National Dance Institute, Caribbean Cultural Center, Black Girls Rock, Pop Ups at New York Live Arts, Made In America Music Festival, and Afro Punk. Highlights placement appear in print and broadcast media including the New York Times, Allure Magazine, NBC TV Today Show, WABC TV program Here and Now and National Public Radio.

DJ Dinah Fire is a Brooklyn-based producer/DJ bridging elements of electronica, house and alternative to create a transgressive open format experience, with NYC residencies at Ace Hotel, Metropolitan, The Rosemont, and Happyfun Hideaway. She is also a writer with pieces published in Club Curran and Playthey Magazine U.K.

For more than ten years, Charlene Incarnate has produced and performed across the city's most prestigious drag stages (including Bushwig, Wigstock 2.0, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Public Theater) to ritual rites of gay worship in sanctuaries, the underground, and at home. Charlene is a reigning institution and a seminal piece of the ethos of Brooklyn Drag, can be seen on film in Netflix's Glamorous and A24's Problemista, and most recently joined the downtown cabaret vanguard with her Sondheim adaptation “Cuntpany” at the Parkside Lounge. HEr sound is a retrospective of her decade in New York nightlife with an emphasis on high drama, lyrics and jazz horns, and the joie de vive of this gay life.  

Tyler Ashley is Director of Communications at New York Live Arts and Curatorial Organizer of Live Arts Pride. Outside of the office, Ashley is a choreographer and performer based in Brooklyn, NY and has performed in the work of Elizabeth Streb, Walter Dundervill, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Yackez, Katy Pyle, Biba Bell, and Charles Atlas among others. Ashley's own performances have been presented by Performa, Friends of the High Line, Times Square Alliance, NADA Art Fair, BOFFO, and seen at Art Basel, The Knockdown Center, The Chocolate Factory, Movement Research, Danspace Project and more.

Ashley is also known as The Dauphine - a nightlife personality, performer, and promoter. The Dauphine started the party called BABY TEA, which has raised over $30k for LGBTQAI youth advocacy and queer art programs over the course of seven fundraisers. The Dauphine has performed and/or promoted at The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, NADA Art Fair, BUSHWIG '14 - ‘17, Club Cumming, The Austin International Drag Festival, BOFFO, The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, Jacob's Pillow, MANA Contemporary and more.

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS

New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative performance and humanities programming, offering audiences access to art and ideas by creatives notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the sociopolitical and cultural currents of our times. Led by world-renowned artist Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts supports artists at all stages of their careers through our residencies, commissions, and artist services. It also serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, which has been creating groundbreaking work for over forty years. New York Live Arts acknowledges and offers deep gratitude to Lenapehoking, where the theater sits-the land, and waters of the Lenape homeland.