THE DOOR'S UNLOCKED Comes to Foley Gallery

For 7 days, Katie Workum Dance will present Anna, Darrin, David, Eleanor, jess, Katie, Leslie & Weena: The Door's Unlocked, an immersive, multi-platformed, week-long event with daily rotating performances, hybrid viewing-doing sessions, and other activated public engagements housed in Foley Gallery at 59 Orchard Street in New York, NY. The dances, the dancers, the actions, the contents of their work will shift day and night, and they invite you inside to warm up and unfold with them.

Let's be clear:

This is not a dance piece.

This is a conjuring inside a temporariness.

This is connecting the dancers with the dance.

This is a negotiation of our togetherness.

This is entering the unknown without demanding to know.

The Door's Unlocked came about from a desire by Workum and the collective, which includes the veteran performers and creators Leslie Cuyjet (Bessie award winner, Will Rawls, Jane Comfort), Weena Pauly (STREB, Brian Brooks), jess pretty (Will Rawls), Eleanor Smith (Bessie award nominee, Ivy Baldwin), David Thomson (Bessie award winner, Trisha Brown, Raph Lemon) Anna Witenberg (Sarah Michelson), Darrin Wright (Jane Comfort, Susan Marshall), to allow for expanded entry points for both observers and movers to engage with the year long "house" they have created. This house is a melding of the ritualized practice of Authentic Movement (an expressive improvisational movement practice that allows a group of participants a type of free association of the body,) improvisational dances, and the cultivation of a new culture in which today's contemporary dance artists can thrive. The Door's Unlocked daily activations include self portraits featuring solo investigations of each company member, open public conversations, self guided public practice offerings, and evenings to witness open Authentic Movement sessions and improvised performances. By designing a format of multiplicity in engagement, the intention and purpose shifts. The work then challenges traditional hierarchies of placing the highest value upon a cumulative product and instead offers testimony to both the inescapable-ness of change itself and dance's greatest value: the dancers themselves. Here are 8 artists with vast skill, performance histories and knowledge, capable of endless creation given a real supportive space for risk and trust. Workum proclaims the form of dance is a human form, where the artists are the art.

The Door's Unlocked is the public testimony to this multi-year, ritualized gathering of moving, practicing, conversing, and making improvised dances again and again and again. The company practices their freedoms and reflects their jointed worlds to cultivate meaning and to create new pathways for moving and living in this chaotic world today. With improvisation, they create through kaleidoscoping lenses of personal and collective history, identity, geography, psyche, choice and form, always beholden to what can be harnessed within the present moment.

The Door's Unlocked was developed during creative residencies at Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, New York and The Marble House Project in Dorset, Vermont and in creative collaboration with Remi Harris

Reserve tickets at tickets@katieworkum.org