Works & Process At Lincoln Center Presents World Premiere Video Performances On Sundays In April

Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts have announced three newly commissioned video performances developed during Works & Process bubble residencies at Bethany Arts Community, Catskill Mountain Foundation, and Mount Tremper Arts that were sequenced directly into filming on location at The New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, facilitated by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

April 4 - L'Orient by Kamala Sankaram and Preeti Vasudevan

April 11 - Ladies of Hip-Hop: Black Dancing Bodies Project × Intergenerational

April 18 - A Chronicle of a Pivot at a Point in Time by Jamar Roberts and David Watson

The video performances, which premiere on Sundays in April at 7:30pm ET, are part of the series Works & Process at Lincoln Center, which began in November 2020.

Each work will premiere digitally at LincolnCenter.org and Lincoln Center's Facebook and YouTube as well as on Works & Process at the Guggenheim's Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Series Details:

L'Orient

Libretto by Catherine Filloux

Music by Kamala Sankaram

Choreography by Preeti Vasudevan

Filmed by Dancing Camera

L'Orient is a multidisciplinary production produced by Thresh, a New York-based performing arts collaborative. The production recontextualizes the Orientalist gaze and its representation of women and people of color in the classical arts. The project envisions Lakmé, the lead character in the eponymous 1883 opera by Léo Delibes, as a twenty-first-century woman situated in the chaotic environment of reality television. Today's Lakmé represents the voice of a modern woman questioning her constrained role in a patriarchal society. This provocative work features choreography based on the principles of ballet and the Indian dance tradition Bharatanatyam, in dialogue with a score of Carnatic songs (South Indian classical music), operatic vocals, percussion, electronics (including amplified pointe), and a libretto that includes texts in French, Indian Telugu, and English.

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The Works & Process bubble residency at Mount Tremper Arts provided an opportunity for the creative team to continue to redefine opera as an intersectional landscape for Eastern and Western artistic disciplines. During the course of the residency, select vignettes of L'Orient were developed that challenge the cultural displacement of exoticized subjects and characters in Western opera. Featured perfomers include Sangeetha Santhebennur, Justine Aronson, Ramona Kelley, Jolina Javier, Dorothea Garland, Weston Krukow, Ted Keener, and Samantha Figgins (not present in the video).

Ladies of Hip-Hop: Black Dancing Bodies Project × Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer

Filmed by Loreto Jamling

Led by Ladies of Hip-Hop Executive Director Michele Byrd-McPhee and Trustee Chair LaTasha Barnes, this intersectional project captures the knowledge, beauty, and power of Black female street dancers. It seeks to look beyond the traditional lens of exposure for Black bodies in dance, which has overwhelmingly focused on Eurocentric dance aesthetics, including modern, contemporary, and ballet. The Black Dancing Bodies Project is an ongoing documentary effort to represent Black women in street and club dance culture (including street and club dance, hip-hop, house dance, Waacking, and Lite Feet) through a series of sessions that include photography and interviews. This Works & Process bubble residency at Bethany Arts Community was a rare opportunity to gather major practitioners in support of this effort and facilitated the direly needed exchange of inspiration and transference of knowledge between dance elders (ages 50-60), innovators (ages 33-49), and young celebrants (ages 18-32). This video performance is just a sliver of the work generated in the residency which will be further manifested in books, performances, and docuseries spotlighting and preserving the beauty, strength, and lived experiences of Black women in street dance. Since hip-hop and house dance culture are themselves approximately forty or fifty years in development, the creators and elders within the community are fortunately still alive to share their knowledge and the traditions. This video featuring Michele Byrd-McPhee, Ebony Nichols, Tomoe Carr, Nadine Sylvestre, Tatiana Desardouin, Lenaya Straker, Oluwatoyin Sogunro, Reyna Nunez, Miyabi Wright, LaTasha Barnes, Deborah Conton was filmed by Loreto Jamling on the very last day of their bubble residency.

A Chronicle of a Pivot at a Point in Time by Jamar Roberts and David Watson

Filmed by Dancing Camera

"Commonly, when a choreographer tries to express a state of emergency though dance, the results are obvious, didactic, or maudlin. An ability to avoid those traps seems to be part of Mr. Roberts's gift." -The New York Times

In March 2020, just as the pandemic hit, Works & Process invited Jamar Roberts, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's first resident choreographer, to develop a piece for Works & Process Artists (WPA) Virtual Commissions. Roberts created Cooped, with music by David Watson, which was described by the New York Times as "one of the most powerful artistic responses yet to the COVID-19 crisis." In this Works & Process bubble residency, Roberts continued to choreograph a new work that was first developed in a summer 2020 Works & Process bubble residency. Dancers include Patrick Coker, Ghrai DeVore-Stokes, Jacquelin Harris, Courtney Celeste Spears, and Brandon Michael Woolridge, with commissioned music by Watson. The work will premiere in the 2021-2022. To go into the bubble residency watch Works & Process at the Catskill Mountain Foundation's presentation of A Chronicle of a Pivot at a Point in Time, where Roberts discusses his creative process.

Since the pandemic began, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts has driven efforts to bring the power of the arts to New Yorkers outdoors and digitally-from Love From Lincoln Center concerts for individual essential workers to works of art that elevate the voices and lived experiences of people of color in America, such as Carrie Mae Weems' installation Resist COVID/Take 6!, Davóne Tines' Vigil, and digital commissions like The Baptism by Carl Hancock Rux. Future international collaborations with the Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center in Athens (SNFCC) will bring new approaches to cultural engagement in both cities. These are just the beginning of a reorientation towards prioritizing openness, access, and inclusive excellence - elevating talent from every corner of the globe and fostering a sense of radical welcome on the campus.