New York Live Arts Presents LIVE ARTERY FESTIVAL

New York Live Arts will present the organization's largest festival in its history, Live Artery 2025, January 8-18, 2025. After last year's successful expansion, the festival will once again host events in Live Arts' lobby, studio, and theater, as well as co-present productions offsite.

The annual start to the spring season encourages commissions, tours and the building of long-term artist/presenter relationships, supporting 22 lead artists and their works. Live Artery will be presented at New York Live Arts (219 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011) and beyond, Wednesday, January 8th - Saturday, January 18th. General admission tickets start at $15/$30 with Pay What You Wish options available. Tickets can be purchased at NewYorkLiveArts.org or 212-691-6500, on sale now. Presenter tickets available.

Live Artery will boast fully produced productions onsite at Live Arts and co-presentations with partner Under the Radar, as well as off-site performances with Triskelion Arts, Danspace Project, CPR – Center for Performance Research, and Kelly Strayhorn Theater. It will also offer 9 showings of new works-in-progress or excerpts of complete works, and an artist salon. 

Onsite full-length productions:

• Jan 8-11: Faustin Linyekula's My Body My Archive, presented in partnership with Under the Radar, is an immersive, live offering by Studios Kabako; a refuge for artists from the Congo and beyond which offers long-term support from training to production and touring. In My Body, My Archive, Congolese dancer and choreographer Faustin Linyekula unearths the histories of the women in his family lineage as an assertion that archives of the body cannot be experienced alone. Companions, dancers, actors and musicians accompany him in this journey, helping him to tell stories, reactivate collective and personal memories and carry immaterial archives. 
• Jan 10-12: Milka Djordjevich's Bob is a manic whirlwind of methodical rapid-fire movements, dictated, performed and self-enforced by Milka Djordjevich.  Set to throbbing music composed by Djordjevich, Bob eroticizes the labor of the dancing body–the repetition, the discipline, and the fallout. Djordjevich confronts demands to optimize her female body and the market's expectation to enhance her performance over time. A reflection rivaling the self, Bob is on a rampage with and against self-consciousness in order to bask in reverie, delusion, desire and rage. 
• Jan 11-13: I want it to rain inside is a physical voyage through Symara Sarai's paternal and maternal lineage, a complex and tender cascade. Paying homage to her late father and longing to understand him better, she embodies his complex personhood through family lore and American cultural fantasy from the wild West and deep South. Equipped with her lasso, the work is juxtaposed next to that which she does know; the matriarchal. She performs a series of scores that center autonomy and liberation, energetically emboldening the black feminine to charge boundlessly through space and time.
• Jan 12-18: New York Live Arts 2023-2024 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA) Miguel Gutierrez's world premiere of Super Nothing that presents four dancers whose actions and choreographic relationships are analogues for how people support each other to survive. Interdependence takes multiple forms, as the performers move through representations of the past to create a blueprint for a new future. This piece extends Gutierrez's interest over the past few years in creating “choreography for the end of the world.” Performed by Jay Carlon, Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez, Justin Faircloth, and Wendell Gray II.

Onsite Public Studio Showings (Jan 11-13):

• Ogemdi Ude's Major is a dance theater project exploring the history and physicality of majorette dance, with a team of Southern Black femmes embodying the movement of their girlhood to answer the questions of their present. 
• Riffing on Ryuichi's music, interdisciplinary collaborations and environmental and anti-war commitments, composer-musician Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky and choreographer-dancer Michael Sakamoto present a music/dance/multimedia concert engaging a variety of cultural and global themes, and an intimate and personal dance theater work. 
• zoe | juniper and punk band, Xiu Xiu, present untitled, a dance and live music performance inspired by being falsely accused of sexual misconduct while simultaneously being a survivor of sexual assault. 
• Presented in partnership with Under the Radar Festival, Cynthia Oliver's COCo Dance Theater's, Turn. Turning.TURNT is a tryptic of movement experiments exploring themes of AfroFuturism, exhaustion, and rebirth. 
• Musician, writer, and experimental trickster Joseph Keckler shares selections from his latest work-in-progress that weaves together original compositions built on rhythmic vocal soundscapes and fragments of classical works that conspire to form uncanny grooves, all set alongside a narrative portrait of a late friend and a meditation on what it means to be “classic.” Presented in partnership with Under the Radar.
• kNoname Artist | Roderick George presents The Missing Fruit (Part I), which explores how the manifestation of racial and public health violence affects Black Americans and other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities through an interdisciplinary artistic production rooted in contemporary dance.

Offsite Co-Presentations:

• Jan 10 & 11: Stacy Matthew Spence's new dance in triptych form, I am, here (a solo for Spence), Here with us (a duet), Where we find ourselves (a quartet) delves into the internal space of “me” to explore ideas of self, impulse, and sharing. A longtime member of Trisha Brown Dance Company (1997-2006), an educator, and performer, Stacy Matthew Spence's dance work often explores the exchange between person and environment. This involves playful interactions and movement generated in response to the places he finds himself – studio, home, and in public spaces. I am, here; Here with us; Where we find ourselves is created in collaboration with dance artists Tim Bendernagel, Joanna Kotze, Hsiao-jou Tang, singer/musician Charlotte Jacobs, percussionist Raf Vertessen, and costumer Athena Kokoronis. Co-presented offsite at Danspace Project.. 
• Jan 10-12: Co-presented offsite at Triskelion Arts, Julia Antinozzi's THE SUITE is a postmodern ballet set in a dream sequence defined by an architecture of light. THE SUITE centers two overlapping duets that are inspired by the character and style of romantic and neoclassical ballet. While the movement is paramount and the plot is deemphasized, THE SUITE suggests a liminal romance. The Poet (Kim) is first introduced alone in unknown darkness, and encounters The Sleepwalker (Saulnier), crepuscular and sensitive. A reverence of sweet meetings and inevitable retreats unfolds, becoming progressively romantic. They are guided and anchored by The Divertissement pair (Blaw and Meneses), who stride with bravura through continuous unison and partnering, developing the pressure of the action.This iteration will mark the premiere of THE SUITE in its totality, which links moments from its predecessors: THE SUITE was first developed through the Trisk Fellowship at Triskelion Arts. THIRD VARIATION, the continuation, was originally presented by the Fresh Tracks program at New York Live Arts.  
• Jan 10-13: Dancing across gender, time, and bodily differences, The Marthaodyssey is a solo evening-length speculative fantasy through which dance artist Jesse Factor animates “the high priestess of modern dance” to the sonic landscape of “the queen of pop.” The work siphons the rich physicality of Martha Graham's archive, reinterpreting and recontextualizing classic works as they are set to excerpts of Madonna's 1990 Blonde Ambition World Tour setlist with deep reverence and playful humor. This special NYC premiere presentation coincides with GRAHAM 100, an initiative of Martha Graham Dance Company celebrating its hundredth year. Part dance concert, part pop concert, part drag show, The Marthodyssey's aesthetic presentation moves Graham's tradition of lights and tights into pop spectacle and genderfuck lip sync. This work is Co-Presented by Kelly Strayhorn Theater, offsite at Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater in association with Martha Graham Dance Company.
• Jan 11 & 12: Co-presented offsite at CPR – Center for Performance Research, Leslie Cuyjet's For All Your Life is a performance event and social experiment that investigates the value of black life and black death. Centered around an ambitious serio-comical short film, For All Your Life is staged as a seminar, guided by an insurance sales woman, played by choreographer and artist Leslie Cuyjet. Part screening, part sales pitch, this solo performance offers a primer on the life insurance industry and its direct connection to slavery; unpacking the ways in which human beings grapple with the inevitable prospect of death and, more importantly, the ways in which lives—especially those of people of color—are monetized. The short film, shot in 2023 with award-winning Brooklyn director Daniele Sarti, serves as a primer on life insurance. The “pitch,” offers a unique investment opportunity—exclusive to audiences—while commenting on professional standards required to achieve legibility for black women within the setting of corporate theater. For All Your Life, the presentation and performance, delivers insight, humor, and drives its mission directly to audiences to choose life.

Onsite Invitation/Presenter Only Showings & Artist Salon (Jan 11-13):

• Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's People, Places & Things began as an exploration of stateless people drifting in the seas, a rumination on willful displacement and searching; recognizing the dichotomy between desperation and the commitment to one's own freedom. 
• Shamel Pitts | TRIBE presents excerpts from Marks of RED, an Afro-futuristic meditation on the “womb space.” Pitts and his collaborators at TRIBE explore metaphorical spaces of regeneration, enfoldment, implosion, rupture & potential.
• Kyle Abraham's A.I.M, present 6 Lost Labors, a new work by Paul Singh that reinterprets the 12 Labors of Hercules; excerpts from a new work by Abraham; and excerpts from Cassette Vol. 1, one of the company's most recent works choreographed by Abraham.
• The Artist Salon in an informal gathering to share new or recently premiered works with short presentations, conversations and light refreshments. This year features Janani Balasubramanian, Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, Kayla Farrish, Heather Kravas, and Tere O'Connor.

Live Artery I New York Live Arts is part of JanArtsNYC, celebrating 12 years of partnership in 2025. Every January in New York City, more than 45,000 performing arts leaders, artists, and enthusiasts from across the globe converge for JanArtsNYC. A partnership among independent multidisciplinary festivals, indispensable industry convenings, and international marketplaces, JanArtsNYC is one of the largest and most influential gatherings of its kind. Promotional support provided by the New York City Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment.

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