ABIGAIL LEVINE - REDACTIONS Announced At The Chocolate Factory Theater

The Chocolate Factory Theater presents the world premiere of Redactions, a new evening-length performance and publication by Abigail Levine. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance at (866) 811-4111 or www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.

Sculptural, intimate, and emotionally evocative, Redactions is a work for five dancers - Martita Abril, Anna Azrieli, Julian Barnett, Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal, and Levine - with a live electronic score created and performed by composer Paula Matthusen. Redactions began as a series of text drawings that follow formal constraints for their creation, similar to those Levine uses while choreographing dances.

Alongside the Redactions, she created the Utterances, phrases of language-like movement. They are brought together as spoken text and movement in performance. The movement and text are contained in an architecture of object-based actions-pushing bricks, gathering bottles, upturning chairs-set into the particulars of the Chocolate Factory's new performance space. Like a house of cards that is dismantled and rebuilt again and again, these actions reveal the work's seams, the dancers' actual labor in creating its images and metaphors.

In Levine's words, "Redactions is an ambivalent autobiography, a chorus of psyches, a year-long look out the window. It has holes for other voices. Redactions wants to listen to the music of the world but keeps getting interrupted by sirens." Layered on the work's gestural movement language are bits of narrative about sex in an airplane bathroom, Fred Moten's take on abstraction, live-streamed uprisings and insurrections, hand washing, and the evening stars converging in winter.

A text written in early 2021 reads: "You are sitting alone in your room and the images begin and you think, oh yes, this was not going to go easy. You hear the roar in the way the words come out, more feeling than sense. Then surging. Why aren't they beating on these heads? Why aren't they forgetting that these backs are breakable backs? ...Life is not where your body is. It is this far away event that you are not at. It's fiction, but it's done." Redactions features costume and installation design by Austin-based artist Magdalena Jarkowiec and lighting by Madeline Best. A print portfolio of the watercolor and ink text drawings that are the work's source (featuring graphic design by Michael Reardon) accompanies the performance. The portfolio is published by The Chocolate Factory with support from Fridman Gallery and includes an essay by writer Claudia LaRocco.

The creation of Redactions was supported by residencies at MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida State University School of Fine Arts/ FAR Space, Human Resources LA, a bridge grant from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and developed in partnership with Los Angeles Performance Practice and Fridman Gallery. Redactions have been published in Imagined Theatres and La Vague Journal. Abigail Levine is an artist working between New York and Los Angeles.

Rooted in dance but moving across media-performance, text, drawing, sound-Levine focuses on the poetics of the body's work, how we record and value it. Levine's multi-year projects, Redactions and Restagings, have been supported by MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New Music USA project grants, and the Center for Performance Research. Levine collaborated recently with pioneering electronics composer Alvin Lucier on a staging of his Orpheus Variations at ISSUE Project Room and performed with both Marina Abramovic and Yvonne Rainer in their retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art.

Levine's critical writing has been published in Documents in Contemporary Art, Art21, Performance Art Journal (PAJ), and her creative works in Interim Poetics, Women & Performance, and Imagined Theatres. Levine has taught in the Dance Departments at Wesleyan University and Florida State University. She is a contributing editor to the Movement Research Performance Journal.

The Chocolate Factory Theater exists to encourage and support artists in their process of inquiry. We engage specifically with a community of artists who challenge themselves and, in doing so, challenge us. We believe that by supporting the labor of these artists, we contribute to elevating New York City as a thriving wellspring of ideas. The Chocolate Factory embraces artistic practice as an integral part of the artist's whole life, an essential component of the life of our community and a key element of a larger national and international artistic dialog.

As such, we host artists as our equal partners with shared autonomy, trust and appreciation. While we seek to make big ideas and extended relationships possible, we commit to working at a small, intimate and personal scale, with few artistic compromises or boundaries. We achieve all of this by creating a vessel for artistic experimentation through a residency package serving the whole artist - salary, space, responsive and flexible support for the development of new work from inspiration to presentation.

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