New York Live Arts Presents US Premieres of Works by Arkadi Zaides and Quator Leonis, Now thru 10/12

New York Live Arts will present the U.S. premieres of Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides and musical quartet Quator Leonis' A response to Dig Deep, tonight, October 10 at 7:30pm and French artist Jeanne Mordoj's La Poème October 11 & 12 at 7:30pm. Co-presented with Villa Gillet's Walls and Bridges Festival, Live Arts continues its partnership with the Franco-American arts and ideas series.

NYC based composer Julia Wolfe's Dig Deep is a composition that is distinguished by an intense physicality and relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. Symbolic of an intense sonic movement inwards, Zaides' physical response to Wolfe's original composition, performed here by French quartet Quator Leonis, focuses on a state of ongoing oscillation, examining the tension between restlessness and stability in his body. Silently reacting to the reverberations of the music that he continues to hear and feel long after the musicians have left the stage, Zaides A response to Dig Deep explores a somatic response to his personal experience of immigration, homelessness and in-betweenness, offering the audience a kinesthetic, non-narrative practice that challenges both the physical and conceptual identity of the work. A Response to Dig Deep will be preceded by a series of short talks entitled Under the Influence of Music: From the Marx Brothers to the Modern Mind, featuring American writer and filmmaker Elena Mannes and French philosopher Peter Szendy. These introductions will focus on the connections between music and the body, and explore the effect noise has on human nature and the mind. The evening will be completed by a Q&A with the artists and composer Julia Wolfe.

Jeanne Mordoj's La Poème is a short piece joyfully surrounding the female body, notable in particular for Mordoj's creative use of eggs and her "breast juggling" routine. Using nouveau cirque-based-movement to explore a definition of femininity that embraces animalism, La Poème is a multi-disciplinary, comical work that features movement and singing, blending prowess with weirdness. Mordoj reconnects with her origins and addresses new modes of expression. In addition to the performance, each program also includes solo presentations by International Artists and thinkers dealing with gender identity and the representation of women, including Bruno Perreau, Elizabeth Povinelli and Beatriz Preciado (October 11); and a post-performance Q&A and discussion featuring Mordoj along with thinkers and writers Avital Ronell and A.M. Homes (October 12), hosted by Damien Bright and Quentin Girard.

Performances will take place in New York Live Arts' Theater. Tickets are $10 (suggested donation). Tickets may be purchased online at newyorklivearts.secure.force.com/ticket/, by phone at 212-924-0077 and in person at the box office. Box Office hours are Monday to Friday from 1 to 9pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 12 to 8pm.

Arkadi Zaides and Quator Leonis
A response to Dig Deep

Oct 10 at 7:30pm

Preceded by Under the Influence of Music: From the Marx Brothers to the Modern Mind with Elena Mannes and Peter Szendy

Jeanne Mordoj

La Poème

Oct 11 at 7:30pm

Preceded by solo presentations by Bruno Perreau; Elizabeth Povinelli; and Beatriz Preciado

Oct 12 at 7:30pm

Post-performance Q&A and discussion with: Jeanne Mordoj, A.M. Homes and Avital Ronell

New York Live Arts Theater, New York Live Arts

Tickets: $10 (suggested donation)

T: 212-924-0077 | www.newyorklivearts.org

219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

Box Office hours:

Monday-Friday 1 - 9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12 - 8pm

About the artists:

Born in Byelorussia, Arkadi Zaides immigrated to Israel in 1990 and currently lives and creates in Tel Aviv. He is in the process of completing his studies in the Amsterdam Master Of Choreography program at the Theater School (The Netherlands).

Zaides has been working as an independent choreographer since 2004. His works have been shown at numerous international festivals in Israel, Switzerland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Holland, India, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Romania, Germany, China, Taiwan, USA, Canada, Chile, Brazil and Japan, amongst others. Zaides was awarded a prize by the Emile Zola Chair for Human Rights in 2013. He was awarded the prestigious Landau Award from the Isreal National Lottery Foundation in 2012. Zaides was awarded Israel's Ministry of Culture and Sport Prize in the Young Artist of the Year category in the field of dance in 2008, 2009 and 2011. He was awarded the prestigious Rosenblum Award in 2010, which is awarded annually by the city of Tel Aviv. Zaides' Solo Colores was awarded with the prestigious Kurt Jooss award in 2010.

Embedded in Zaides' work is a belief that the role of art is to challenge and inspire viewers while simultaneously reaching out and bringing together different communities and different sectors of society. Zaides is increasingly working in diverse communities, focusing primarily on the Arab sector in Israel. Zaides has been devoted to developing different platforms to encourage contemporary discourse and performance making in Israel. Moves Without Borders, developed recently by Zaides in close collaboration with Goethe Institute Israel, invites some of the most influential avant-garde choreographers in the world today to series of performances and workshops in Israel.

Created in 2004, the Quatuor Leonis is composed of four graduates of Lyon Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique who have an eclectic repertoire ranging from Mozart to Bartók via Schubert and Ravel. The Quatuor has won prestigious international competitions and is frequently invited to play at festivals and in concert halls both in France and abroad. They are expanding their activities towards other disciplines, in particular drama and dance, and have been in residence since 2008 at the Théâtre National de l'Odéon. The Quatuor worked with the choreographer Arkadi Zaides this year for the Aire de Jeu Festival at Les Subsistances.

Elena Mannes is a multi-award-winning independent documentary director/writer/ producer as well as an author. Her work has appeared on both public and commercial television. Mannes' honors include six national Emmys, a George Foster Peabody Award, two Directors Guild of America Awards and nine Cine Golden Eagles.

Peter Szendy (born 1966 in Paris) is a French philosopher and musicologist. He teaches at the Universite de Paris X Nanterre and is a consultant to IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), an organization that has been a pioneer in electroacoustic innovation and a mecca for contemporary music. He has written Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles (Listen, A History of Our Ears), Sur écoute: Esthétique de l'espionnage (2007), Membres fantômes : des corps musiciens(2002) and Prophecies of Leviathan. Szendy's latest books translated into English are Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox (2012) and Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions (2013).

Born in Paris in 1970, Jeanne Mordoj spent her childhood in the country with sculptor-parents who also raised goats. She has always had a very particular relationship with objects, one that involves strange attachments and rituals, owning a rock collection carefully sorted into labeled bags, small sculptures, and a strong tie with paint, lines and words. She discovered the circus when she was 13, at the Saltimbanques school in Chenôve. It immediately became a passion, nurtured by four years of amateur practice in acrobatics, contortionism and juggling. At 17, she started school in Chalons en Champagne, but was kicked out after a difficult year. So started her on-the-job training in various roles: bit parts in movies, opera and theater. She met people who would be important in the long term, like Lan N'Guyen, a teacher then teaching at the Cirque Plume school, who taught her contortionism through games and creativity; and Jérôme Thomas, who influenced her work and encouraged her in her projects. Then came formative internships, with Marc Michel Georges, Yoshi Oida and Guy Alloucherie for theater, drawing practice and BMC (Body Mind Centering) , with Lula Chourlin and Janet Amato, and more recently the Transmettre (Pass On) training with Bénédicte Pavelak.

Bruno Perreau is an Assistant Professor of French Studies at MIT. He received his MA in European Studies from Loughborough University and a PhD in Political Science from Paris I Panthéon- Sorbonne University. He was awarded fellowships in gender studies from the European University Institute (Florence), the European Commission and Paris VIII Saint Denis University (VEIL research program). Perreau was a member in the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) in 2007-2008. He is currently a Newton Fellow in sociology at Cambridge University, where he is also a Research Associate at Jesus College. Perreau is Faculty Affiliate at the Center for European Studies, Harvard. Prior to joining MIT, Perreau taught constitutional law at Paris XII Val De Marne University and political science?as well as gender and queer studies at Sciences Po Paris, where he was also an academic advisor for international students.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She is the author of numerous books and essays as well as a former editor of the academic journal Public Culture. She also co-directed the short film, Karrabing, Low Tide Turning, which was selected for the 2012 Berlinale International Film Festival, Shorts Competition. Povinelli was the recipient of the German Transatlantic Program Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2011.

Beatriz Preciado has become one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexuality, and is a professor of Political History of the Body, Gender Theory and History of Performance at Paris VIII. She is also the author of Manifiesto contrasexual, which has become a queer theory classic, and Pornotopía: Architecture and Sexuality in Playboy During the Cold War, which has been named a finalist for the Anagrama Essay Prize. She received her PhD in the Theory of Architecture at Princeton and her masters in contemporary philosophy and gender theory at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her latest book translated into English isTesto Junkie (The Feminist Press).

Avital Ronell PhD was born in Prague. Her parents were Israeli diplomats who returned to Israel before going to New York. She studied at the Hermeneutics Institute in Berlin with Jacob Taubes, earned her doctorate at Princeton University, and then worked with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. She was professor of comparative literature and theory at the University of California at Berkeley for several years before eventually returning to New York, where she currently is chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and teaches German and comparative literature and theory - in addition to her yearly Fall semester seminar about Derrida - and where she continues to churn out a breathtaking range of deconstructive rereadings of everything from technology, the Gulf War and AIDS, to opera, addiction and stupidity.

A.M. Homes' work has been translated into twenty-two languages and appears frequently in ARTFORUM, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The New York Times and Zoetrope. She is a Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair, Bomb and Blind Spot. She is the author of several novels including Jack and The Safety of Objects which were adapted for film. Several times a year she collaborates on book projects with artists-among them Eric Fischl, Rachel Whiteread, Cecily Brown, Bill Owens, Julie Speed, Michal Chelbin, Petah Coyne, Carroll Dunham, Catherine Opie and Todd Hido. Homes has received numerous awards including Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYFA and The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, among others. She has been active on the Boards of Directors of Yaddo, The Fine Arts?Work Center In Provincetown, The Writers Room, and PEN-where she chairs both the membership committee and the Writers Fund. She also serves on the Presidents Council for Poets and Writers.

ABOUT VILLA GILLET'S WALLS AND BRIDGES FESTIVAL

Walls and Bridges is the Franco-American arts and ideas series that has brought over 70 cultural events to New York since its first season in 2011. The current, fifth season (October 9-20) of Walls and Bridges presents of 15 events across Manhattan and Brooklyn, featuring performance art, dance, music, fine art, film, philosophy, theater, history, literature, live storytelling and even crash courses in foreign languages.

Curated by Villa Gillet (Director: Guy Walter) and supported by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, Walls and Bridges is proud to present its dance and performance events in partnership with Les Subsistances and various American partners, such as New York Live Arts.

ABOUT NEW YORK LIVE ARTS

New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the social, political and cultural currents of our times. At the center of this identity is Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, a world-renowned choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer.

We commission, produce and present performances in our 20,000 square foot home, which includes a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square foot studios that can be combined into one large studio. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, provides an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people and supports the continuing professional development of artists. Our influence extends beyond NYC through our international cultural exchange program that currently places artists in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Photo Credit: Romain Etienne