92NY Harkness Dance Center Presents Maurya Kerr World Premiere 'black calls to dark calls to deep underneath'

The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center's 2022/23 Mainstage Series continues with Maurya Kerr; Bay Area-based choreographer, poet, performer, educator, and the artistic director of tinypistol, bringing the world premiere of her work black calls to dark calls to deep underneath to the Kaufmann Concert Hall stage. black calls to dark calls to deep underneath - which Kerr describes as "a work focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian" and a progression of her artistic exploration - consists of three linking duets performed by Styles Alexander, Tatiana Barber, Alex Carrington, Alexander Diaz, Audrey Johnson, and Chelsea Reichert, with a commissioned, recorded score by Joel St. Julien.

In Person: Thursday, March 9, 7:30 pm ET. Online: Friday, March 10, 12 pm ET - Monday, March 13, 12 pm ET. Tickets from $20 / $10 student at https://www.92ny.org/event/maurya-kerr.

A mainstay on the Northern California dance scene, Kerr's film Saint Leroi had its New York premiere at this year's Dance on Camera festival, where it was a highlight for Village Voice critic Elizabeth Zimmer, who hailed it as "a surreal meditation on Black history, violence, and American decay and a powerful indictment of racism."

black calls to dark calls to deep underneath

World Premiere

Choreographer - Maurya Kerr

Performed by Styles Alexander, Tatiana Barber, Alex Carrington, Alexander Diaz, Audrey Johnson and Chelsea Reichert

Maurya Kerr - Artistic Statement

My artistic practices-across the disciplines of movement, language, and film-focus on racialized peoples reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. My work centralizes black and brown lives, challenges essentialist assumptions, and engages with the politics of blackness. My practices create space for emotions and states of being-joy, quietude, tenderness, and rage-systematically denied racialized communities. I use movement less for the sake of choreography and more as a vehicle in service to justice and representation. I believe in the body as a site of liberation-bodies in motion have the potential to offer us all, both mover and witness, alternate futurities and ways of being within our own bodies, and in community.

My work is rooted in my lived experience as a black, mixed-race woman. I am influenced by other racialized artists across a spectrum of disciplines whose work demonstrates a vast range of experience that transcends monolithic assumptions of what 'Black Art' is and does. My choreographic work invests in simplicity, sensation, and the rigor of presence. My recent dance film works have engaged more deeply with suspended temporality, within and outside the body, as a reclamation of stolen time and stolen joy. I am increasingly invested in how the afterlives of slavery exist through my ancestors and how my creative praxis can exist as a form of reparation, to those both past and present.

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